Naked in Saigon by Colin Falconer Page B

it was my final bluff, the one call that might make Connor change his mind. If he stayed in Saigon they would kill him, I was sure of that. What would I do back in New York? Go back to work, I supposed, and wait for the call informing me my husband had disappeared.
    If he came home with me, we could start again, I could be a good wife and a good mother, as I had always planned to be. I would forget about Reyes and keep a promise to myself never to see him again.
    I wasn’t sure which outcome I dreaded the most.
     

     
    I sat on the edge of the bed fretting. It was a quarter of an hour before the midnight curfew and he still wasn’t home. It was as late as he had ever been. Perhaps I’d left it too late to call my bluff.
    Finally, there was a muffled knock on the door. I leaped to my feet. “Who is it?”
    No answer.
    I hesitated, thinking about Angel standing out there in the corridor with his goons. I didn’t think he would come back, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. I heard another faint knock and I made up my mind and threw open the door.
    Connor had been leaning on the door, and as I opened it he fell into the room and lay sprawled in the entrance. I only recognized him from his clothes; his face was a bloody pulp. Dios mio . I took a deep breath to brace myself and knelt down beside him. He was conscious but only just. Every time he breathed, a bloody froth bubbled around his mouth and nose. His eyes were swollen shut.
    There was so much blood at first I thought he’d been shot.
    “Connor? Connor, can you hear me?”
    He grunted and twisted in pain. He reached for me and I gasped in shock. What had they done to his hands? I forced myself to stay calm. “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll get help.”
    I wondered how he had gotten up to our room and why they didn’t stop him down at the desk. Perhaps they were too scared.
    I picked up the telephone and called downstairs and told them to get a doctor.
    Then I fetched a wet cloth from the bathroom and tried to clean him up as best I could. He had rolled onto his back and lay on the carpet, spreadeagled. He groaned every time I touched him. He had lost at least two teeth on his lower jaw and some of the others were loose. His nose was bent out of shape and I guessed his jaw might be broken, because he couldn’t talk. But the worst of it was the fingers of his right hand, they were a mangled and pulpy mess. Angel’s boys had been thorough and pitiless.
    I wondered if he had been there when they had done this. May you rot in hell , I thought.
    I heard the lift doors open and saw the duty manager run down the hall. He gasped and took a step back when he saw Connor. “Doctor come,” he said.
    I put my arms around my husband for comfort and held him in my arms until he got there. I couldn’t think of anything else I could do.
     

     
    It reminded me of other hospitals, other waiting rooms, that smell of antiseptic, the grim, white walls. I’d sat in a corridor just like this one that night in Miami, the night Papi and I escaped from Cuba. They were lonely places when there was no one to hold your hand, no one to share your grief and the fear.
    I just wished Reyes were here.
    The doctor emerged from the emergency room and gave me a grim smile. He was French, he had a thin beard and he was probably not much older than me. “He is badly injure,” he said, in broken English, ‘but he will be okay. He has break to cheek, to nose. Some concuss. No fracture to skull. Worse is the hand. All finger break. I give him something for pain.”
    “Will he be able to use his hand again?”
    A Gallic shrug. “I hope so. We tell better a few day.”
    “Can I see him?”
    “Yes, but not long. Okay?”
    “Okay, thank you.”
    Connor’s face and right hand were swathed in bandages. Someone had smashed his fingers with a blunt instrument, or so the doctor told me at the hotel. It was obvious to me why they had tortured him that way; it was to keep him away from the