Finding Moon

Still the Seventh Day

IN THE SHOP OF THE HOTEL Maynila, Moon bought copies of the two English-language Manila evening papers with the least flamboyant typography. He sat in the lobby reading, watching the dinner-hour traffic pass in tuxes, cocktail gowns, and the formal wear of various desert sheikdoms. If getting Tino’s multiple flats fixed hadn’t made them so late he would have been tempted to ask Mrs. van Winjgaarden to join him for dinner. Not that he would have done it. Partly because he couldn’t dress for anything more chic than a greasy spoon coffee shop but mostly because she would have pressed him to help her, probably in some fairly subtle way. Besides, she was several degrees out of his class and wouldn’t be dining with him unless she wanted something. Even so, eating alone in a dining room surrounded by couples and foursomes had been a dreary affair. Equally dreary was the prospect that now confronted him: spending the evening watching the rain splash against the windows of his room.

The biological clock operating behind Moon’s forehead had not yet compensated for Los Angeles -to- Manila jet lag. He’d been sleepy about noon. Not now. In fact, he doubted if he’d be sleepy until about Manila sunrise. He skipped through the papers again. Nothing he found in either made the prospects of flying off to the Republic of Vietnam or the former Kingdom of Cambodia seem promising. The South Viets’ strategy, if they had one, seemed to be defending Saigon and the Mekong Delta, letting Uncle Ho have the rest of it, and hoping for the best. Floods of refugees were pouring out of the highlands. Floods of refugees were also pouring into Thailand from Cambodia, carrying terrible tales of Pol Pot’s “Zero Year” campaign. The stories of slaughter and atrocities sounded to Moon exaggerated by a factor of about a hundred. But even when you discounted it, the news made any notion of joining Mrs. van Winjgaarden on her journey to extract her suicidal brother from the Cambodian hills seem stupid.

He refolded the papers and put them on the chair beside him. Not sleepy but tired. He’d tried Brock’s Manila number as soon as he got back to the hotel, with no answer. He’d try it again tomorrow morning. The Associated Press day manager had left a message as promised. It was short and clear: “Bilibad says it has no George Rice. Media man at embassy (Del Fletcher) says he will check other possibilities tomorrow.” Another thing to deal with in the morning.

Moon felt a stirring of hope. George Rice would have jumped bond and vanished from the planet. Brock would answer his telephone and report that he knew absolutely nothing about the whereabouts of Ricky’s kid. Whereupon Moon would arrange his return flight to Los Angeles, express his regrets to the Dutch lady, and get the hell out of there. Or, better yet, Brock would say he had the child here in Manila and would Moon please drop by and pick her up? Then he’d go get the child and the two of them would fly home.

But what if Brock answered the phone and said the child was somewhere in Vietnam or Cambodia? What would he do then? He’d think about that only if he had to think about it. No need to think about it tonight. Instead he probed around for any other possibilities. Any loose ends he’d overlooked. Should he go back and cross-examine Castenada? Nothing to be gained from that. He imagined a recuperating Victoria Mathias sitting across a table from him, full of questions, looking for a reason to go over there and find the kid herself. Were there any loose ends he’d overlooked?

One. Ricky’s Manila apartment. He’d have to find it and take a look. He dreaded doing that. Dreaded it. But something there might be useful. Probably would be. Old letters. Old notes with names of people, names of friends of a pretty young woman named Vinh who had borne Ricky’s child, perhaps people who would take in this orphaned child.

From his pocket, Moon extracted the key Castenada had given him and checked the address on the tag attached to it. Then he walked out into the warm darkness and signaled a cab.

The address was Unit 27, 6062 San Cabo, Pasay City, less than three miles from his hotel. The building was a two-storied M-shaped structure surrounded by palm trees. Unit 27 was on the end of the upper floor. Moon climbed an external stairway and walked down the porch, checking numbers, hearing music through door panels, hearing laughter through opened windows, seeing the warmth of reading lamps through blowing curtains. Unit 23 was dark and silent. So were Unit 25 and Unit 27.

The key didn’t seem to fit. Moon inspected it, listened to the rain pattering against the roof tiles overhead, turned the key over, and slid it in. The lock clicked. Moon turned the knob and stepped into the darkness. He inhaled, testing for the stale, musty air of a room closed too long, feeling on the wall for a light switch, finally finding it.

The air, which should have had the mustiness of a long-unused apartment, was not musty at all. He was inhaling the aroma of onions, of burnt toast, of coffee, of talcum powder, of human perspiration. He was hearing someone breathing.

Moon pushed the light switch. Across the tiny living room in the doorway to a bedroom a man was facing him. Naked. He was a thin man, with thinning red hair and drooping mustache. In his right hand he held a large black pistol pointed at Moon’s chest.

“Hands on top of your head,” the man said. “And turn around.”

“Who the hell are you?” Moon asked. What are you doing here?”

The pistol looked like one of those old army-issue.45-caliber semiautomatics, exactly like one Moon once carried in his own army-issue holster. The naked man clicked back the hammer. “Turn around, you son of a bitch. Kneel and get yourself facedown on the floor.”

Moon turned around and knelt, hands atop his head. The carpet beneath him was grimy. Moon’s anger offset his fear. To hell with this.

“If this is Unit Twenty-seven,” he said, “then this is my brother’s apartment, and what the hell are you doing in it? If it’s not, I made a mistake. And I apologize.”

From somewhere behind him Moon heard a woman’s voice. “Who is it, Tommy? Do I call the police?”

“Your brother?” the naked man said. Brief silence. Then: “What’s your brother’s name?”

“Ricky Mathias.”

“Well, shit,” the man said. “I’ll be damned. Are you Moon Mathias? You look like you’re big enough.”

Moon stood up and turned around. “I’m Moon Mathias, and who the hell are you?”

“Tommy Brock.” He shifted the pistol to his left hand and held out his right.

Moon shook it.

“Nina,” Brock said. “if you’re decent, get out here and meet the famous Moon Mathias, Ricky’s brother. You’ve heard Ricky tell about him.”

Nina emerged from the bedroom in a short white nightgown. She was small and dark with long tousled hair. She examined Moon with frightened eyes, nodded, said “Hello,” and slipped back through the doorway into the darkness.

Moon found himself breathing normally again. Almost normally. Anger had replaced the fright.

“You’re sort of trespassing, aren’t you?” Moon said. “How the hell did you get in here? I want you to get your clothes on and get your asses out.”

Tommy Brock was disappearing into the bedroom. From the waist upward he was brown, waist downward virginal white-the two-tone coloration of one who works shirtless in the sun.

“I mean right now,” Moon said. “Out.” But even as he said it, he realized he had questions to ask this man.

“Well, now,” Brock said from somewhere out of sight in the bedroom, “what’s the goddamn rush? Get down to it, maybe you’re the one trespassing. This place is on lease to R. M. Air. Or M. R. Air as we’re calling it now. I’ve got the key. Everybody with the company picks up the key when they come to Manila.”

With that Brock emerged, looking amused, khaki pants on now and buttoning a short-sleeved shirt. The pistol seemed to have been left behind. He padded barefoot past Moon into the kitchen. “Have a seat,” he said. “I’ll put on some coffee. Or do you want something stronger? Ricky said you swore off drinking, but maybe you’d make an exception after somebody points a forty-five pistol at you.”

Embarrassment replaced Moon’s anger. He cleared his throat, thought of nothing to say, seated himself on the edge of the sofa. The light had gone on in me Kitchen. A clattering of utensils. How about I heat up what we had left over? It’s still sort of warm. Not really stale. We just got in from seeing a movie and were going to bed when you-when you got here.”

“Warmed up’s fine,” Moon said.

Brock was leaning against the kitchen doorway, looking happy, good-natured, and amused. “You sure favor that picture Ricky had of you,” he said. “You going to take over the outfit?” His expression turned wry. “Lordy, there’d be enough irony in that for anyone. Ricky always wanted to get you out here. Said we’d be the Air Express of this whole corner of the world. We wouldn’t need the ARVN connection.” He shook his head. “Now you get here and it’s too damned late. Too late, anyway, for Ricky. Maybe not too late for the company, though. We’ve got several things working.”

“How did it happen?” Moon asked. “With Ricky, I mean. We never knew much except it was a copter crash.”

Brock frowned. “Nobody told you anything?”

“Just the official word from the embassy,” Moon said. “No details.”

“Well, then,” Brock said, looking somber, “I think I’d better start at the beginning. Skip back enough so you’ll know -why things weren’t quite normal.”

Brock said Ricky had concluded that they must move the R. M. Air repair base out of Can Tho. Can Tho was right beside the Hau Giang arm of the Mekong. The Vietnam navy had been slacking off its Mekong patrols and the Vietcong were raiding just upstream. That was in February. Ricky flew to

Saigon and met with the ARVN general they’d been doing business with. The general and Ricky had agreed that R. M. Air would move its operations down to a building the general owned in Long Phu. An ARVN ranger battalion was based there, and it was practically on the coast of the South China Sea. A comparatively safe place and easy to evacuate when everything went to hell. So they started moving stuff. Their two regular pilots were flying Hueys loaded with spare parts and office equipment down to Long Phu when an old Chinese man came in and wanted a hurry-up flight into Cambodia to pick up a cargo.

Moon interrupted. “You know his name? The old man?”

“Lum Lee,” Brock said. “We’d done some hauling for him before. Antiques, so he said.” He smiled. “I think Mr. Lee is one of those fellows who catches big fish in troubled waters. You know, a temple gets looted, or a museum, or some maggot’s house, and all of a sudden there’s valuable stuff for sale at a bargain.”

“Maggots?” Moon said.

“Rich moneylenders,” Brock said. “Bankers. I think it’s a Chinese word. Maybe Vietnamese. And I guess you’re supposed to pronounce it mah-go. Anyway, Mr. Lee was in a hell of a hurry. He’d just heard that the Cambodian army was pulling out of a district up in the north, and he had some stuff he wanted to retrieve before Pol Pot’s little savages got there.” Brock grinned. “He said it was ancestral bones.”

“Ancestral bones?”

Brock laughed. “Yeah. That’s what he claimed.”

He studied Moon, nodded. “Your brother said you were good at figuring things out.”

“Not really. Mr. Lee contacted me too. I thought it might really be ancestral bones he was after.”

“Anything’s possible out here. Maybe so,” Brock said, grinning. “We were shorthanded, so Ricky flew a chopper up there himself. Then he radioed in and said to tell Mr. Lum Lee he had the cargo and he was going to stop at Vin Ba and then come on in.”

“Vin Ba?”

“It’s a little rice village up on the edge of the hill country. Next to the Nam border. It’s where Eleth’s family lives. They’re in the charcoal-making business. She was visiting up there, and he was going to stop and pick her up.”

Brock paused, thinking about it. No happiness in his face now. -

“I guess he did,” he said, and paused while the gusting wind blew rain against the windows. “Her body was in the wreckage with his. Eleth and Ricky.”

For the very first time as Brock described this, it became real to Moon that his brother was dead. It was no longer an abstraction in which Ricky dead was merely a phrase that meant no more than Ricky away. For much of Moon’s adult life Ricky had been away. Now Moon was conscious of a void that would never be filled. He closed his eyes.

But Brock was talking again, about the site of the crash, near the Vietnam-Cambodia border. About an ARYN patrol finding the wreckage after some farmer reported a fire. About flying over the place, looking down on the site, finding a place to put down, and walking up into the hills to see about the bodies.

“I called your mother about that. The soldiers had buried them right there by the wreckage. She said just leave them be. Let him rest in peace,” Brock said. “That sounded like what he would have wanted anyway. You think?”

“Yes,” Moon said. “Ricky wouldn’t have wanted to be messed around with.” He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, opened them. “You talked to our mother about the little girl?”

“I didn’t think about it,” Brock said. “I guess she was in shock, hearing Ricky was dead. I guess she didn’t think of it either.”

His mother would have thought of it, no doubt about that. It meant she didn’t know about the child. Ricky hadn’t just kept the secret from him.

Brock had seated himself on the chair beside the kitchen door. “Coffee’s steaming,” he said. But he did nothing about it.

“It was an accident,” Moon said. “That’s what the embassy people told my mother.”

“I guess so. Or maybe some of Pol Pot’s Khmers were up that way and shot it just for fun. What’s the difference?” Brock got up, disappeared into the kitchen. “Black or cream or what?”

“Everything,” Moon said. “If it’s handy.”

“That Chinaman wanted to know about his cargo. I told him the copter was all burned up. Nothing in it. He wanted me to fly him up there to make sure. I said no way. if the Khmer Rouge had shot one copter they’d shoot another. But when I was away he talked Rice into flying him up. Rice’ll do absolutely anything. Doesn’t give a shit.”

“I guess they didn’t find it,” Moon said. “Mr. Lee is still looking.”

“Rice thinks he’s immortal,” Brock said. “Kismet. Fate awaits. That’s the George Rice slogan.” He emerged from the kitchen with two cups, gave one to Moon, reseated himself. “But I was surprised Ricky flew up there. What for? What was he doing? Nothing up in those ridges but three or four little villages. Hill tribes. But the Vietcong hide out up there, and nowadays I guess the Khmer Rouge too.”

“I heard Rice was in Bilibad Prison,” Moon said. “I was going to see if I can get in there and talk to him tomorrow to find out if he knows what happened to Ricky’s daughter. But they say he’s not there. And I need to know what you know-”

Brock’s expression went blank. He held up his hand. “What are you saying? You saying Lila’s not here?”

Brock’s wife was standing in the bedroom doorway, “Oh, God!” she said. “What happened to her?”

“What happened?” Brock repeated. “You telling me Castenada doesn’t have her?”

“I don’t know what the hell happened,” Moon said. “Castenada said someone was making arrangements to bring her out, and Victoria-that’s our mother-was flying out to Manila to pick her up. But she had a heart attack, and Castenada doesn’t seem to have any idea what happened to the child.”

“Son of a bitch,” Brock said. “I guess Rice must have-”

“Screwed up? I guess he did,” Moon said. “I heard he might have got distracted into another line of business. I heard he was arrested and stuck in Bilibad. But they say-”

“He’s not in Bilibad,” Brock said. “President Marcos and Imelda have Bilibad ifiled up with politicals. They sent Rice down to Palawan Island. To the prison down there.”

“Oh,” Moon said, not knowing how to react to this.

“You’re looking for little Lila, then,” Brock said. “They didn’t get her on a flight to Manila? I thought that was all set up.”

“By you?”

“By Rice,” Brock said. “Well, sort of by me. After Ricky and his lady were killed, we were moving things down to Long Phu. We were sort of expecting you to show up and take over, but we figured you’d have made the move anyway. Too risky where we were and things beginning to go to hell at Saigon. And then one day the Vinh. woman showed up. Eleth’s mother. She said they were trying to get moved out to Thailand but they weren’t having any luck because everything was blocked off, either by the army or the Khmer Rouge. She said Ricky and Eleth had planned to move to the States someday. They’d told her if anything should happen to them she should send Lila to her American grandmother. The old lady believed that with the Khmer Rouge coming they couldn’t keep the baby anyway because Pol Pot’s people were killing all the foreigners, and the baby looked American. So I called Castenada and talked to him about it and then I called this fella we work with in Saigon. I told him to get an airline ticket for the girl and fix up the documents she’d need and call me when everything was ready. Then the plan was for Rice to fly Lila up there and send her along to Castenada.” Brock paused. “Now you’re telling me Rice didn’t get it done? Is that right?”

“Castenada says the child didn’t arrive. So whatever you set up didn’t work,” Moon said. “Where’s the girl now, do you think?”

Brock heard the anger as well as the questions. He sat staring at Moon.

“Well, it ain’t as simple as I made it sound,” he said, finally. “We couldn’t get the goddamn papers. We couldn’t get an airplane seat. The wise guys in Saigon were hearing things that scared them, so the line in front of the U.S. Embassy was about a mile long and not moving. And the fat cats and generals’ wives were filling up the outgoing traffic.”

“And so you let it go,” Moon said. “Just dropped it.”

“I thought we’d get it fixed up. I had to come here to take care of problems. I told Rice to bypass the embassy and work on the CIA people. They owed Ricky a lot of favors. I said, Call in the IOUs, and I figured he would do it. I figured it was all taken care of.”

“From what I hear, your Mr. Rice managed to get a load of heroin flown out to Manila,” Moon said. “Why couldn’t he leave a little of that behind and crowd the kid on?”

Brock took a sip of his coffee, eyeing Moon over the brim. From the bedroom came the sounds of the woman getting dressed. Brock put down the cup.

“You want to hear about this or you want to fight about it?”

“All right,” Moon said. “Go ahead. Let’s hear it.”

“George must have thought he had it handled. I know for sure he took the girl up to Saigon with her grandma. Then he came back to Long Phu. There was a load of things there waiting that a customer wanted out. So George flew it down to Singapore. We had an old DC-Three we’d bought down there, getting it fixed. George picked it up and flew it over to Manila to pick up a spare engine and some spare parts we’d located there. And some Filipino customs people nailed him.”

Brock sipped his coffee.

“And seized our DC-Three, of course. That’s one of the reasons I’m still here in Manila: trying to get the damned thing released so I can fly it back. And working with this shyster lawyer trying to get George sprung out of prison. And trying to finalize a contract Ricky had started negotiating last winter.”

“So the little girl, she’s still there in Saigon, you think? With her other grandmother?”

“I don’t know. Maybe so. Maybe not. The old lady’s Cambodian. She doesn’t have any connections in Saigon.”

“Okay, then. Where the hell else would she be?”

“I guess you’re going to have to talk to George,” Brock said.

SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 19 (Agence France-Presse)-A spokesman for U.S. Ambassador William Martin told a Vietnamese television interviewer last night that the ambassador and his wife are still in Saigon “and have not packed any belongings.”