THE DINING ROOM OF THE Hotel Maynila was cool in the way refrigerated air cools places in a humid climate. Despite the clammy dampness, Moon luxuriated in it. The last time he recalled being really cool was the morning he’d sat at this very table waiting for Osa to arrive. That was about three weeks ago. Or a lifetime, depending on how you looked at it. Actually, a lifetime minus a few hours, which was how long it would be before he’d have to say good-bye to her unless he tried to do something about it. And maybe even if he did.
He’d already said his good-byes to Lum Lee. Mr. Lee was staying with what he called a “family connection” elsewhere in Manila. But he’d called from the lobby, and Moon had come down to receive his thanks and hear him declare himself in Moon’s perpetual debt. He reported that he’d dealt with the problem of the Glory of the Sea. He’d arranged a radio message to Captain Teele to explain what had prevented them from meeting him. Next he’d asked Moon if he’d seen Osa today. Moon said he hadn’t.
Mr. Lee had remarked that Osa was “feeling very sad.” Moon had said that the death of a brother was a terrible blow. Mr. Lee then said that wasn’t exactly what he meant. He said he’d called Osa to bid her farewell and to tell her of the woman who came to Buddha for help because she could not stop grieving the loss of a loved one. Buddha had told the woman to collect five poppy seeds from homes that had never suffered such a loss. And of course she could find no such home, and that was the lesson. But, Mr. Lee had said, she’d told him she wasn’t grieving for Damon. Then why did she sound so sad? And she had said, Not only death causes sorrow. Did Moon know what she meant by that?
And Moon had said no, he didn’t.
There had been a moment of silence and Mr. Lee had asked if Moon would see Osa today, and he’d said perhaps, but he was extremely busy finishing the paperwork to fly Lila back to the States.
“I, too, have been busy,” Mr. Lee had said. “Even though Lord Buddha taught us that we who busy ourselves picking stones from the path cannot see the gold beside us.”
Moon had said he guessed that was true.
“And Osa too has been busy. She said she wanted to tell you good-bye but there had been much to do.”
And Moon had said, Well, she’d had to call her mother to tell her about Damon.
Instead of commenting on that, Mr. Lee had told him another of his Buddhist parables. A bird with two heads lived in a desert where it often had to go without water. Thus each of the heads became proud of its ability to endure thirst. The rains came. A pool formed below the bird’s nesting place, but each of the heads was too proud to take the first drink and so it died of thirst.
“Think of the wisdom in that teaching,” Mr. Lee said.
It had been a strange conversation from a strange man. Moon had thought about the teaching. Then he’d picked up the telephone and called Osa at her hotel. She sounded subdued, tired. But she said yes, she could have dinner with him. She wanted to hear how the baby was doing and they should tell each other good-bye. She would meet him at the Maynila.
He sat in the lobby, twenty minutes early, freshly shaven, cleaned and pressed, and with a new Manila haircut that looked an awful lot like the government-issue cuts they’d seen on the crewmen of the aircraft carrier.
The carrier had been quite an experience-a ferryboat for a motley collection of refugees. Its flight deck bad resembled a floating flea market when the U.S.S. Pillsbury had delivered them, and it had become more and more crowded as other frigates arrived to dump off the desperate people they were fishing from the South China Sea. The crowding became their good fortune. Somebody ordered helicopters to shuttle the surplus over to the Subic Bay Naval Base outside Manila. Their little party had made it onto the second flight.
Osa was walking across the carpet toward him, smiling.
Moon caught his breath. An almost-white skirt, a blouse with just a touch of blue in it here and there, her dark hair soft around her face.
Moon stood. “Wow,” he said.
She rewarded that with a wider smile. “Wow to you too. Isn’t it good to feel clean again? And have something done with your hair?”
“Or something done to it,” Moon said, rubbing his hand across what was left of his.
She laughed. “I think you found Nguyen’s barber,” she said, and sat in the chair across from him.
“Someone told me that time cures bad haircuts. Probably it was Mr. Lee.”
“Not tattoos, though,” she said. “I worry about that. What will Nguyen do about that awful tattoo when he has to go back to Vietnam?”
“Nguyen will be all right,” Moon said. “The navy takes care of its own.” Nguyen had been lucky. In fact, they’d all been lucky. Their only really tense moment had come at the Cambodian border checkpoint. The tanks were still there, and now so were the Khmer Rouge. But they had expected no trouble from their rear. He’d kept the APC in normal speed and rolled it right down the trail with Khmer Rouge troopers staring and Nguyen waving happily. He’d held his breath until they were past the tanks. He’d doubted Pol Pot’s citizen soldiers would know how to operate them, and he’d drained their fuel tanks onto the ground, but just seeing them there made him nervous.
Needless nerves. By the time the Khmers realized they weren’t stopping and the shouting and shooting began, they were out of range of anything that could dent the APC. The rest of it was travel through a public celebration. The only armed men they saw were Vietcong jubilantly returning Nguyen’s flag-waving. The only explosions they heard were fireworks.
The PBR had made it down the Mekong, mingling with such a swarm of refugee boats that the country’s new rulers had not a hope of stopping the flood even if they’d wanted to. They made it out past the brown water and into the choppy blue of the Gulf of Siam, hoping the Glory of the Sea might have arrived a day early. Instead they’d seen the little frigate Pillsbury, patrolling the river mouth for lives to save. The red-haired lieutenant peering down into their boat had shouted, “Hey, Gwen. You too damn mean to die?” And Nguyen had shouted something which included “son-a-bitch” and provoked some more yelling and laughter.
The lieutenant’s name was Eldon, and Nguyen had been his gunner when Eldon was an ensign running a Swift Boat up the Mekong back in 1969. And before the Pillsbury had turned them over to the carrier, Eldon had written a letter on official navy stationery expounding Nguyen’s daring deeds and his claims for special treatment as a political refugee. “I doubt if he’ll go back,” Moon said. “He has no family left.”
“But how about a job?” she said. “I taught him some more English on the ship and he learned fast. But still-”
“Don’t worry about it,” Moon said. “He’ll have a job.”
He told her about the office Ricky had opened at Caloocan City, and about the potential business. “I talked to Tom Brock this morning. We already have two copters in the hangar there. The general Ricky was dealing with told him to mark them off as unrepairable and keep them instead of paying the repair bills.”
Osa had no comment.
“Does that sound sort of dishonest to you?”
“It sounds like Asia. How about you?” Osa said. “Did your embassy get all the paperwork done for Lila?”
“Yeah,” Moon said. “Less hassle than I expected.”
“Good,” Osa said.
“There’ll be more of it when I get her back to the States, though. All kinds of forms to fill out. Getting a birth certificate. So forth.”
“I can imagine,” Osa said. “Where’s Lila now?”
“This hotel has a nursery service, complete with nannies,” he said. “She’s probably being taught how to speak Tagalog. And how about your documents? You all right?”
“Fine,” Osa said.
“You have dual citizenship, don’t you? Didn’t you tell me you had a Dutch passport as well as the Federation of Malaysia?”
Osa looked surprised. “Yes,” she said. “Why are you asking?”
“There are too many important things I don’t know,” Moon said. “Like whether you enjoy walking.”
“I do,” Osa said.
“Then I think we should take a walk.”
“In the dark?” Osa asked. But she got up.
“The moon will be up,” Moon said. “And I will take you on the only walk I know in Manila-down past the yacht basin and along the waterfront. And if we keep walking long enough there’s a restaurant I passed called My Father’s Mustache. We could have dinner.”
The moon was indeed up, but barely and far from full.
“Did you call your mother again? Is she-”
“She was asleep. But the nurse said everything was fine. Her leg is sore where they took the vein for the bypass surgery, but that’s usually the worst of it. They said they could discharge her tomorrow, but I asked them to wait until I can be there to take her back to Florida.”
“She’ll be so happy to see you,” Osa said.
“Funny thing,” Moon said. “When I told her we’d found Ricky’s daughter, I told her I hadn’t been calling because we had to go all the way into Cambodia to get the baby. I told her why it took so long. About the trouble we had in the Philippines. And getting to Cambodia. But it was just like she’d taken it for granted. No surprise at all.”
“What did she say?”
“She said something like, ‘Well, you already told me the baby didn’t get to Manila and you thought maybe she’d still be in Vietnam.’ So she had known it would take me a little longer.” He shrugged, made a wry face. “Can you believe that? ‘Take me a little longer!’”
He waited for Osa’s surprised response, but Osa was walking along beside him. He glanced at her. She looked amused.
Moon shrugged again. He didn’t seem to understand anyone anymore.
“What else did she say?”
“Oh, was I all right? And all about the baby. Is she healthy? Does she look like Ricky? How old is she? What does she weigh? How many words can she say?”
“What did you expect her to say?”
“I don’t know,” Moon said. “I just thought she’d be-you know, amazed that I actually got the job done.”
Osa put her hand on his hand. “Why? Ricky wouldn’t have been surprised either. Ricky’s friends wouldn’t have been surprised. I had just heard about you from other people, but I wasn’t surprised. Remember, I came to you with my trouble because I had heard about the kind of man you are.”
Moon felt himself flushing. “Oh, sure,” he said. “All that brotherly stuff from Ricky.”
“You think your brother didn’t know you? Your mother certainly knew you.”
“She knows me all too well. That’s why I thought she’d be amazed.”
Osa removed her hand from his hand. “Why do you say that?” she said. “Why do you always have bad things to say about yourself?”
Time to change the subject. “Since we’re getting personal,” Moon said, “I have a question for you. In fact, two questions.”
“Answer mine first. And then I have another one. Does what you told me at the hotel just now about Caloocan City mean you are going to run the business?”
“I’m going to try,” Moon said. “But there’s been too much talking about me already. Listen carefully.
Question one: Mr. Lee told me that when he called you this morning to say good-bye you seemed very sad. He thought it was because of Damon. And you said it was another loss.”
Moon stopped, swallowed. There was no way to say it that wasn’t rude, intrusive, presumptuous. Osa was looking at him, attentive, waiting, lips slightly parted, amusement fading into something very serious. Beautiful. Waiting. For what, the Moon of Durance to chicken out or the super-Moon of Ricky’s legend to demand a solution to this little oddity?
“I remember,” Osa said.
“He asked me if I understood what you meant. I said I didn’t.” He hesitated again. But to hell with it. Otherwise he was losing her anyway. “But I hoped I did understand. I hoped you meant me.”
Osa looked at him, biting her lip. Looked away.
“I have that hope because when we were in the delta you seemed so sure he was dead. You didn’t want to go into Cambodia. When I said I had to go anyway, you insisted you’d go along. But when we got there and found he was actually dead, you were genuinely surprised. Shocked.”
Moon stopped. Osa walked three steps away from him and stood at the streetside railing staring out into the yacht harbor. The mast lights were making their colored patterns on the water.
“I think all along you really believed Damon was alive. Probably getting him out alive was hopeless, but you still believed you should try.”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“So now I’m going to guess at why you didn’t want me to go into Cambodia to bring him out. And if I guess wrong, you have to tell me I’m wrong. Even though it means I’ve made myself look like a damned fool.”
“You don’t have to guess. I’ll tell you.”
“I guess you didn’t want me to get killed. I guess you knew I’d fallen in love with you, and I guess you’d begun caring some about me yourself.”
Moon joined her at the railing. He took her hand.
“Anyway, you didn’t want me to get killed.”
“Oh, Moon,” Osa said. Her eyes were wet but she was smiling. “Do you want me to answer the first question?”
“Only if it’s the right answer. Only if you feel sad because you think you are losing Moon Mathias. But Mathias is not getting lost. As soon as I get little Lila back in the States and settled in, I’m coming back here. I’ll chase you down wherever I can find you and I’ll talk you into marrying me. Or try to. So what’s the answer to that question?”
“The answer is Moon,” she said. And put her cheek against his shoulder, her arms around his waist, and squeezed. “M-O-O-N,” she said. “Moon.”
He took her in his arms then, engulfed her, surprised at how small she seemed, conscious of the perfume of her hair, of her smooth skin beneath the silk, that when he tilted up her chin she was returning his kiss.
“It shouldn’t take me more than eight or ten days,” he said. “Where will you be in eight or ten days?”
“You’re going to fly back with Lila? You’ll try to take care of her on the plane?”
“Why not?” Moon said. “I can change diapers. Feed her. She can say ‘Moon’ now. I’m learning.”
“Not very fast. I watched you on the aircraft carrier. You weren’t designed to be a nanny. And that Baby in Space game you play with her is dreadful. You will break her neck. It scares her.”
“It just scares people who’re watching it. She likes it. Makes her giggle. She knows I won’t drop her.”
Osa was shaking her head. “And feeding her. Keeping her clean and comfortable. Getting her to sleep.”
He hugged her to him. “Can you think of an alternative?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So can I,” Moon said. “With a Dutch passport you don’t need a visa. So I postponed my flight a day and made reservations for Osa van Winjgaarden.”
“No Mrs.?”
“No Mrs.,” Moon said. “Until we can make it legal.”