Finding Moon

The Tenth Day

FOR MOON MATHIAS, THE FLIGHT from Manila to Puerto Princesa was in the aisle seat of one of those twin-engine prop-jet aircraft that short-hop commuter airlines favor. Moon had already learned to avoid such aircraft when possible. The planes were fitted out for small people and intended for short trips. So used, they were barely tolerable for someone of his dimensions. But the flight from Manila on Luzon Island down the Philippine archipelago and then across the Sulu Sea to Puerto Princesa was anything but short.

While waiting for the consulate to call and tell him he had clearance to visit George Rice, Moon had bought a map of the Philippines and a tourist guidebook. And then, on an uneasy hunch, he bought a large-scale map of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He put that map in his bag, hoping never to need it. On the Philippines map, he took a scale of distances he marked off on a sheet of hotel stationery and made some calculations. A direct flight from Manila to Puerto Princesa, the capital of Palawan Island and site of its only airport, was just about four hundred miles. But, of course, there was no direct flight. The only one scheduled from Manila took one first to Iloilo, three hundred miles southeast on Panay Island. From there one flew two hundred and fifty miles southwestward across the Sulu Sea to Puerto Princesa. That made five hundred and fifty miles, broken by an hour sitting in an airport in a tiny town, which, Moon’s guidebook said, “had little to offer the tourist except an open-air market where exotic tropical products may be purchased.”

The guidebook made Palawan itself sound equally unpromising, unless one loved to rough it in the tropics. It called the island “one of the world’s few remaining unspoiled paradises,” Its economy was based on fishing “with some subsistence agriculture.” Its population was described as “light, scattered, and largely Malay in ethnic origin.” Looking at it on the map made Moon wonder why the cartographers and politicians had included it as part of the Philippine cluster. It lay like a line drawn from Borneo to Luzon, almost three hundred miles long, from Bugsuc on the south to the tiny settlement of Taytay on the north and only about fifteen or twenty miles wide. It looked to Moon like Bugsuc was a hell of a lot closer to Borneo than Taytay was to any dry land in the Philippines. He measured it out, and it was. Not that it mattered. What mattered was four and a half hours’ flying time in a small seat designed for someone half his size.

Moon Mathias had quit fitting small seats since he started growing seriously in about the fifth grade. But he had made himself proficient at enduring. He sat, legs cramping, neck hurting, expression bland, and listened to the small Filipino who occupied the window seat.

The small Filipino wore a thin mustache that had turned gray. He said his name was Mr. Adar Docoso. He had been a platoon sergeant in the Philippine Scouts. He had fought the Japanese “until General MacArthur sailed away and abandoned us.” Now he was in the scrap metal business. He was flying out to Puerto Princesa to see about buying a Panama-licensed freighter that had been more or less abandoned there because it wasn’t worth fixing its worn-out diesels. He had four sons, all unusually intelligent, and one remarkably beautiful daughter. This out of the way, he wanted Moon to explain to him why the United States of America had chosen to make Hawaii the fiftieth state instead of the Philippines.

“ Hawaii is just three or four little insignificant islands, and not many people, and most of them are Japanese.” In describing his adventures as a Philippine Scout, Mr. Docoso had already made it clear that he considered the Japanese savages. “We cannot understand why you made those people a state and not us. You tell me so I can know that.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Moon said.

“I know lots and lots of Americans,” Mr. Docoso said. “Nice people. Like you. I deal with them in my business. They bring their old worn-out ships in here, and run them ashore or set them on fire, so the insurance companies will pay them something, and then I buy the scrap metal. Good for everybody. Good people. But why did they do that to us? Why did you turn us away like dogs, and give us gangsters for our government, and then have the CIA teach the government how to torture people so we can’t get rid of them? I wish somebody could tell me why that is.”

“What would you think if I told you I was an agent of the CIA?” Moon asked.

That seemed to work. Mr. Docoso lapsed into silence. Moon edged a cramped foot from under the seat ahead of him and flexed it. He thought about how to deal with Mrs. van Winjgaarden, who, unfortunately, was occupying a seat three rows ahead of him.

“But I know Mr. Rice,” she’d said. “Of course I should go along. I know that part of Cambodia, that part along the border just above the Mekong Delta. I’ve been there visiting my brother. I will know what to ask Mr. Rice.”

And he had said no deal. He’d handle this alone. She couldn’t go. She couldn’t get into the prison even if she did go. And she had said they would probably let her in if she was with him. They would think she was his secretary, or something like that, and he had said, Maybe, if I would be stupid enough to lie to authorities of a foreign prison.

But anyway, there she was three rows up the aisle, head bent slightly forward. Asleep, apparently.

Mr. Docoso poked him with an elbow, grinning up at him. “You are joking me,” he said. “You are never with the CIA.”

“No?” Moon said. “Why not?”

Mr. Docoso clutched his throat. “No necktie,” he said. “CIA they wear nice clothes. Clean. Pressed. Expensive suits, vests, shined shoes.” He pointed to a man who Moon had thought to be a Japanese businessman in the aisle seat two rows up. “Like that one. Or the other kind of CIA, they wear sports shirts and leather jackets. Two kinds of CIA but neither kind is like you.” Mr. Docoso was grinning broadly at this, shaking his head in affirmation of his wisdom.

And so Moon flew across the Sulu Sea listening to Mr. Docoso’s vision of the state of the Filipino nation circa April 1975. He learned that Fernando Marcos’s father hadn’t been a poor Filipino as his press releases and biographers insisted but the son of a wealthy Chinese loan shark, and how Imelda had the airport at Puerto Princesa enlarged because one of her cousins was building a tourist resort on the beach up at Babuyan, and a great many other things about the presidential couple’s kith and kin and their nefarious dealings.

Finally, the blue water below them converted itself into the deep green of tropic jungle.

“Puerto Princesa,” said Mr. Docoso, pointing downward. And below there appeared a cluster of wharves, barnlike warehouses roofed with red tin, a docked ship that looked to Moon like some sort of navy auxiliary vessel, a very small and very dirty freighter, and a hodgepodge of anchored small craft, among them a pencil-slim two-masted sailing ship, which seemed from high above so white, so clean, so tidy that Moon thought of a swan in a yardful of dirty ducks.

The town itself reinforced that impression. One- and two-story buildings, some thatch-roofed, some bamboo, some of more or less standard concrete-block construction, clustered along narrow dirt streets. It was a very small town with trees everywhere, a small open square where a public market seemed to operate, a dilapidated church with a cross atop each of its double spires. Moon could see no sign of anything that looked formidable enough to be a government building.

“That’s Puerto Princesa?” Moon asked. “It’s the capital for the island?”

“It’s a very long island,” Docoso explained, “but it is also very thin.” He demonstrated thinness with his hands. “And nobody lives here but mostly Malays.”

The airport was also thin, a single runway closely bordered by palms, bamboo thickets, and assorted tropical vegetation strange to Moon. He wondered how it must have looked before Imelda ordered it enlarged.

“The hotel here at the airport is the best,” Mr. Docoso said as they crowded down the exit stairway. “Very modern. Toilets and bathtubs in the rooms and every room is equipped with refrigerated air-conditioning.” Docoso seemed to feel that this recitation of assets might seem incredible. He shrugged. “Imelda owns it,” he explained.

SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 21 (Agence France-Presse)-President Nguyen Van Thieu resigned tonight after ten years in office. He appointed Vice President Tran Van Huong to replace him and denounced the United States as “unworthy of trust.”