Finding Moon

Evening, The Fourteenth Day

THE PLACE WHERE MR. LEE had arranged to hide them proved to be a ramshackle two-story house on a potholed street of ramshackle two-story houses near the port that gave Puerto Princesa its name. The house was built partly of concrete blocks, partly of planking, and partly of bamboo logs, roofed partly with tile and partly with palm thatching-pretty much in keeping with the low-income urban architecture Moon had been noticing in the Philippines. What was less common, or so Moon presumed, was the section of flooring in the back hall. Mr. Tung, who Moon now presumed was the homeowner as well as their cabdriver, slid away the hallway rug, lifted this section, exposed a steep stairway, and led them down it into a large room with a concrete floor. Three of the walls and about four-fifths of the remaining one were also of concrete.

The remaining fraction of a wall opened into a screen of bamboo poles. Mr. Tung pulled this back and peered out into what look to Moon like a bamboo forest. Mr. Tung nodded and refastened the cord that held the screen closed. He said, “I hope there will be comfort here,” bowed deeply over tented hands, and hurried up the stairway, where, Moon presumed, Mr. Lee was awaiting him.

“I think we have been put in cold storage for a while,” Moon said, inspecting the furnishings. They included three small beds, two folding cots, a worn plastic sofa, a fairly new overstuffed chair, and a round wooden table with four wooden chairs. Around the three concrete walls pallets were stacked, the sort on which heavy materials are shipped. Behind the pallets up to about three feet above the floor, the walls were discolored with water stains.

Moon sat on the sofa, feeling dizzy from lost sleep. And maybe a little bit feverish and headachy besides. He decided not to think about this. He was caught up in the tides of fate. He would discontinue thinking until he had something positive and productive to think about. Maybe he’d get some sleep. The last two nights there’d been damned little of that.

Osa had untied the cord, pulled back the bamboo an inch or two, and peered out.

“How clever,” she said.

Moon yawned. Clever? He’d look later. But it had been clever the way Mr. Lee had gotten them here unseen. Lee had told them to appear at the side entrance of the hotel with whatever they had to take with them. He told them exactly when to be there. And just as they got to the door, the jeepney cab had pulled up with its rain curtains down. They’d slid into the back seat and left. It was the jeepney with the fighting cocks on the hood, but this time the driver was an older fellow wearing a flowered necktie and a seersucker jacket. His hair was short-cropped and gray. Mr. Lee had introduced him as Mr. Tung. Moon guessed he was a Malay, but Tung and Lum Lee were communicating in something that sounded like Chinese.

“Pretty soon we will get to a house where you will stay for a while,” Mr. Lee had said without turning. “Mr. Tung will park his cab beside the side porch. He and I will get out and go into the house, and all the luggage will be carried in. But you will stay for some time in the cab.”

“Until all the neighbors get their curiosity satisfied and stop looking out their windows,” Moon said.

Mr. Lee had laughed. “Most astute,” he said. “I think you must live in a small town.”

Now Osa was still fiddling with the bamboo screen.

“You should see this,” she said. “It works like what we Dutch would call a water gate.” She laughed. “I think maybe our good hosts here do some smuggling.”

“Great,” said Moon, and dozed off.

He awoke sometime later, aware that Osa was rearranging his foot, which seemed to have fallen off the sofa.

“Uncomfortable,” he heard her say. “There’s the bed right over there. Not three yards away. Men are so stubborn. Why not sleep on the bed?” And then some muttering in Dutch, or German, or Tagalog, and Moon was asleep again.

Someone was shaking him. Moon came out of his sleep slowly this time, partly involved in a dream in which Gene Halsey and he were in a bar involved in some sort of disagreement with a military policeman and partly aware that Lum Lee was pushing on his shoulder.

“What?” Moon said.

“Sorry,” Mr. Lee said. “Very sorry. But now we must do some business.”

“Business,” Moon said. Halsey, bar, and MP were gone now. He swung his legs around, sat up, and rubbed his face, trying to stifle a yawn. Osa was standing there watching him. Beside her two men were standing. One was their host, Mr. Tung, the cab owner. The other was George Rice.

Moon became wide awake. “Well!” he said. “Mr. Rice. Welcome to Puerto Princesa.”

“Happy to be here,” Rice said, grinning his bright blue-eyed grin. “Comparatively speaking, of course.”

Rice was still in the striped prison garb, now wet and smeared with mud. A dark brown bruise began near the center of his forehead and ended in his right eyebrow. Below that, a small bandage had been taped over the cheekbone.

“You all right?” Moon asked.

“Fine,” Rice said. “Relatively speaking. Getting to the moat wasn’t as easy as it sounded.”

“Do you know how to reach your pal Gregory? His telephone-”

Mr. Lee interrupted. “Excuse me, please. We

have covered all this. Mr. Gregory is not in the picture. We must agree on another solution.”

“I don’t know of any,” Moon said. “Not a clue.” “Mr. Lee thinks we can sail across,” Osa said. “Sail across? Across the Sulu Sea?” “The South China Sea,” Mr. Lee said, Moon didn’t want to think about that. Across the South China Sea lay Vietnam. And Cambodia. And Pol Pot’s terrible teenage warriors beating people to death. He’d think about that later. Not for a minute or two. Now he had a headache and his stomach felt queasy.

“How did you get here?” he asked Rice.

Rice produced a self-deprecatory expression and nodded toward Mr. Tung. “I got a little confused out there. Got turned around. This gentleman had sent out some of his friends looking for me, and they found me.”

Mr. Tung was smiling. “He had gotten down almost to the beach. My boys found him and then we sent a boat.”

Mr. Lee wanted to stick to the point. “I think it would take perhaps three days. No more than four.”

“To where?” Moon asked.

“To the mouth of the Mekong and then up to Ricky’s repair hangars.”

“Sailing on what?”

“The Glory of the Sea,” Mr. Lee said. “A twomaster. A schooner.”

“A sailboat?” Moon’s headache was right there behind his forehead, just over the eyes, pounding away. Surely they didn’t intend to try to cross the Pacific Ocean in a sailboat. And this still was the Pacific, wasn’t it? No matter what they called it.

“Two masts,” Mr. Lee said. “But also diesel power.”

“Oh,” Moon said.

“Yes,” Mr. Tung said. “It is docked here now to get the diesel running better.”

“It won’t work? It’s broken down?”

“Oh, yes. It works,” Mr. Tung said. “But not so very good. Not so very fast.” He made a slow putt-putt-putting sound with his lips.

In his drinking days Moon had become an authority on headaches. He was thinking that if he had a double shot of bourbon with two aspirins dissolved in it, his headache would go away. But he would never, ever drink again.

Mr. Lee was staring at him, waiting.

“When will this Glory of the Sea have its diesel fixed? Do you know?”

Mr. Lee looked at Mr. Tung. Mr. Tung shrugged. “In Puerto Princesa things sometimes go slowly,” he said. “Once we had a man here who fixed such things very well. But he moved his shop over to Leyte, where there is more business.”

Moon looked at Osa. She must have told them he was a mechanic, told them about what he did in the army, about J.D’s pickup engine awaiting his return in Durance, Colorado. Cold, clean, safe, restful Durance, Colorado.

“I believe you were a mechanic in your military career,” Mr. Lee said. “Somewhat like your brother, but working on the engines of tanks and big vehicles.”

Moon nodded. But not really like his brother. Moon was the grease monkey. Ricky was the boss. “But this will be a marine diesel. Probably much bigger. Much different.” Which was probably baloney. A diesel was a diesel, much alike and all knuckle-busters to work on.

“Do you think you could make it run well again?” Mr. Lee asked.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

“Captain Teele will be able to tell you,” Mr. Lee said. “He is waiting upstairs.”

Upstairs, for the first time in quite a while, Moon found himself the second largest man in the room. Forced to guess, Moon would have named Teele a Samoan pro football lineman. Certainly not the captain of a schooner named Glory of the Sea. He was dressed in a well-worn pinstriped business suit that had probably fit him well enough when he’d bought it but now bulged where he had added muscle. His hair was long and streaked with gray, and his dark face was marred by scarring and weathered by too many years of strong sun and salty winds.

He bowed to Osa and smiled. To Moon and George Rice he offered a large square hand and said something in a language that was new to Moon. By the sound of it, the statement seemed to end with a question.

“He wishes you well,” Mr. Lee said, “and he asks if you can fix his engine so it will run better.”

“Tell him I need to know what is wrong with it,” Moon said. And thereby began one of those three-sided translated conversations that left Captain Teele looking doubtful and Moon wondering if Teele had even the vaguest notion of what caused ignition inside a diesel engine.

“Tell him I have to go see it,” Moon said.

“Ah,” Mr. Lee said. “Then I think you believe you can fix this problem?”

“Who knows?” Moon said. But as a matter of fact, Moon did think he could fix it. From the captain’s admittedly hazy descriptions, it had the sound of a fuel-injection problem. In the glossary of things that can go wrong with engines that depend on pressure-induced heat to ignite vapors, those were the problems Moon preferred.

“We will go to the ship then,” Mr. Lee said. “But we will wait awhile first. We will give the police time to go to bed.”

Osa, Rice, and Moon waited in the room under the floor. Captain Teele and Lum Lee had bowed them out with smiles and good wishes, and they had climbed back down the stairway, with Mr. Tung lighting their way with a carbide lamp. He left it behind for them.

The lamp hissed and buzzed and added its peculiar chemical odor to the various perfumes the room already offered. But it was better than waiting in the dark. Moon resumed his position on the sofa, sighed, and relaxed. Rice was relating his misadventures in the jungle. Osa was listening. They would wake him when they needed him.

“Why not one of the beds?” Osa asked. “You would be more comfortable.”

“I really don’t know,” Moon said. “I know you’re right. I think it’s because I have the idea that the lady should get the bed and the man should sleep on the sofa. Or because I’m stubborn. Or maybe I just enjoy having these cramps in my leg muscles.” He thought of another theory that had something to do with his headache. But Osa had lost patience with him. She was talking to George Rice.

“Did you see how they keep the water out of this room? When the high tide comes, these boards pull down into these slots and-see how tightly they fit.”

Moon didn’t hear the rest of it. He was asleep again.

Special to the New York Times

SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 24-Panic is clearly visible in Saigon now as thousands of Vietnamese try desperately to find ways to flee their country.

Few exits are left and most involve knowing Americans. U.S. Air Force C-141 transports took off all day and night from Tan Son Nhut air base with lucky passengers en route to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines.