Hillerman, Tony (19 page)

Moon interrupted. “Who is Lo Tho Dem?”

Rice laughed. “I never was quite sure who the hell he was,” he said. “Anyway, he was Ricky’s man in Saigon. Your brother had a talent for finding useful people. I’m pretty sure Mr. Dem sometimes did a little work for the CIA. That must have been where Ricky got acquainted with him: when Dem was working on one of those little jobs for the Company.”

“Oh,” Moon said. “And Ricky sometimes did a little work for them too?”

“And that’s why Dem figured he could get the paperwork through in a hurry. And get the airline ticket. All that. From what little I know about it, the Company owed your brother a few favors.”

“You think that was the problem?” Moon asked. “Dem couldn’t get a visa?”

“Well, now,” Rice said, “when you get right down to it I gotta admit the real problem was me being stupid. The problem was, Ricky was dead. To make it worse, the Company knew he was dead. No more favors expected from Ricky Mathias. And the CIA don’t have a reputation for paying off favors to people who can’t do ’em any more good.”

Rice was biting his lip again. He gave Moon an apologetic look and slammed his fist into his palm.

“Son of a bitch! I should have thought of that.”

Mr. Preda shifted his weight against the wall, looked at his watch, sighed.

“So how can we find the child now?” Moon asked. “Did you have some sort of backup plan? Would this Dem guy keep her, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Rice said.

“How can I find Dem, then?”

“He lived in Saigon. Ricky had his address and telephone number in his file.”

“At Can Tho?” Moon asked.

“We were pulling out of there,” Rice said. “I guess Ricky’s files would be downriver at Long Phu.” He shook his head. “That is, if they got all the stuff out of Ricky’s office moved.”

“This Dem had a Saigon telephone,” Moon said. “How’s chances of calling information, getting it that way?”

“From what I’ve been hearing in here about the war the past few days, I say about a snowball’s chance in hell. You can’t get a call through to

Saigon without some sort of special pull. And if you got it through, you couldn’t get the number. And if you got the number, the system wouldn’t be working. Not out to the residences.”

“So what do you recommend?” Moon asked.

Rice leaned back in the chair and rubbed his beard, thinking about it.

He will tell me we will have to just forget it. It’s absolutely impossible, like finding a needle in a haystack. He will tell Osa there’s no way to reach her brother. That the Khmer Rouge have already found him and made a martyr out of him and she should go home and pray for the repose of his soul.

“You have to have a pilot,” Rice said. “Ricky wanted you to come out and help run the place. But he said you didn’t fly.”

“I don’t,” Moon said. “And while you’re thinking, do you have any ideas about an urn Ricky was bringing out of Cambodia for an old Chinese man named Lum Lee?”

“Urn? Oh, yeah. Lee’s ancestral bones, wasn’t it? I’d forgotten about that job.”

“Know where it is?”

“Sure,” Rice said. “Or where it was. Ricky had gone up-country to get it. And he called in to say he had it. And then he stopped at the Vinh place and dropped off the kid to visit Eleth’s mother there. And there wasn’t any sign of an urn in what was left of the helicopter. So I’d say it had to be back in the Vinh village.”

“Just a matter of getting there,” Moon said.

“Yep,” Rice said. “And getting yourself out again. Alive and with all your arms and legs still in place.”

Osa had been sitting silently, hands folded in her lap. She leaned forward. “I think we could do it easily enough in a helicopter,” she said. “Just as we did last summer when you flew me up there. It took less than an hour.”

“I remember, darlin’,” he said. “It was a most pleasant little trip. But that was last summer. Pol Pot’s bloody little bastards, with their tripod-mounted antiaircraft machine guns and little hand-held missile launchers, had not yet come down from the north.”

“Are there any copters left at your hangars? Would any pilots still be there?”

“Copters, I’d say yes. We had eight or nine being fixed when I left, some of them ready to go. And two pilots. That was then. Now I’d say you could subtract two pilots and two copters from that number.”

“No pilots?” Osa said.

“Not if they have any sense. And they were sensible fellows. Smart enough to know the Vietcong wouldn’t like ’em.” He thought about it. “It’s Viet Cong territory—the Mekong Delta is. if the ARVN Yellow Tiger Battalion is still there, maybe. But I doubt it. Why stay? They could fly one of those copters away to Bangkok or get it down to Jakarta or Singapore and get a ton of money for it.”

“Without any proof of ownership?” Moon asked.

Rice grinned at him. “Mr. Mathias,” he said, “we are now in Southeast Asia. I don’t think the Republic of Vietnam is going to be around long enough to file suit.”

Mr. Preda cleared his throat and pushed away from the wall. “It is about used up, all the time you have. You have to go pretty quick now.”

“Back to the subjects of moats and draw-bridges,” Rice said, voice urgent. “Getting across.

“What was the blueprint you had in mind?” “We don’t have any,” Moon said.

“I do,” Rice said. “You good at memorizing?” Moon nodded.

“Eighty-one. Ninety. Twenty-two. You got it?”

“Eighty-one, ninety, twenty-two,” Osa said. “The man’s name is Gregory. He does the same thing a robin does. Or a crow. Or a seagull. Tell him the aviary for the robin will be at the end of the Puerto Princesa runway.” Rice paused. “What day is today?”

“April twenty-third,” Moon said, feeling sick as he said it. “But wait a minute now.”

“April twenty-fifth, then,” Rice said. “In the wee wee hours. The witching hour.”

Moon said, “Hold on now. We—”

Mr. Preda said, “Now we go.” He put his hand on Rice’s shoulder, nodded to Osa. “Have a good day.”

Rice, moving toward the door, turned suddenly. “At Imelda’s?”

Osa said yes.

Rice said, “Until the wee hours.” And to Moon he said, “Across the moat and I can find that little girl for you.”

MANILA
, April 22 (UPI)—The U.S. Navy has assembled a fleet of five aircraft carriers, eleven destroyers, four amphibious landing craft and other vessels off the coast of South Vietnam for a possible evacuation mission, a well-informed source at the Subic Bay Naval Base said today.

IT DEPENDED ON HOW you looked at it. You could call it a coup. A stroke of good fortune. Gregory, whoever he might be, would fly in from wherever. They’d get George Rice aboard undetected. Gregory would transport them across the South China Sea to the R. M. Air repair hangars on the Mekong. There Rice would fire up a copter, they’d fly away to the Vinhs’ village and pick up Mr. Lee’s urn, hop up to the Reverend Damon van Winjgaarden’s mission to collect him, and then out of there. Safely. Then Rice, the old Asia hand, would talk to the right people, -pull the right strings, find where Lila had been dropped off. They’d make another copter flight, snatch up the kid, and away they’d go.

On the other hand, it could be an unmitigated nightmare, which is the way it seemed to be working out, with Osa and he doing about twenty years, plowing rice paddies, for scheming to break a convict out of a Philippine prison. Having had plenty of time to think about it, Moon sat in the dim moonlight behind Imelda’s hotel wondering how he could have been so stupid.

Recognizing the stupidity had been quick enough.

“You know what we’ve done?” he asked Osa as soon as the log gate had been pulled across the road behind them and they were jolting away from the Palawan prison. “We have conspired to commit a felony.”

Osa put a finger to her lips and signified the cabbie with her other hand.

“Okay,” Moon said. “So we don’t need another witness against us. But you know what I mean?”

“Of course I know,” Osa said. “Exactly, I know. But what else could we do?”

Moon had thought of several things they might have done by the time the jeepney dropped them off at the hotel. But instead of doing any of them, he had just sat there like a ninny and let Rice take charge of the conversation.

Now it was almost dawn, a day and half after the conversation, and no sign of George Rice. if Moon had enough optimism left to hope for any luck, he would have been hoping that Rice had fallen fatally down a cliff or become victim to whatever predators Palawan Island’s jungles provided. Probably snakes, at least. But Moon’s optimism was all used up. Rice would appear, probably at the worst possible time, and they’d have to talk him into going right back to the palm-log gate and turning himself in. And what if he wouldn’t?

There was nothing else they could do with him. Except perhaps strangle the bastard and drag his body out into the bushes.

They’d placed the call to Gregory from the telephone in Moon’s room, checking first with the desk to be sure making a connection across the Sulu Sea on a Filipino telephone required no special skill. It didn’t.

The telephone made the expected ringing sounds, then clicked. A woman’s voice said, “What number were you calling?”

Moon told her the number, and waited, trying not to think about how dreadful this was going to be if— “I’m sorry, sir. That number is no longer in service.

“What?” Moon said. “You mean it’s out of order?”

“No, sir. That number has been disconnected.”

“Could you try again? Could you check? Maybe he just left the receiver off the—”

“Of course.”

Moon waited, listening to the sounds telephones make during this sort of operation, thinking there would be no one named Gregory flying in to make George Rice disappear.

“I’m sorry, sir. That number has been disconnected.”

“When?”

“I’m sorry, sir. You will have to check with our business office for that information. Shall I transfer your call?”

“No. Thanks. Just let it go,” Moon said. He put down the phone.

“He wasn’t there,” Osa said.

“The telephone has been disconnected,” Moon said. Osa would say maybe he just wasn’t in. Osa would say maybe he left the telephone off the hook. Osa would ask— Osa raised her eyebrows, made a wry face, said,

“I don’t think Mr. Rice gave us the wrong number. I think Mr. Gregory moved away.” She paused, staring past him, deep in thought. She grimaced. “Now, what to do with Mr. Rice? The prison people, I think they will come looking for him.” She paused. “And looking for us.”

“How about we kill him and bury him?” Moon said.

“He won’t want to go back,” she said. “I don’t think so. He’ll want us to hide him somewhere.” She shook her head, gave Moon a wry smile, tapped her purse. “I can’t fit him in here.”

They sat side by side on Moon’s bed. The sound of the lobby television drifted up through the floor. Canned laughter, then drums, then music, then what seemed to be a life insurance commercial.

Osa put her hand on his knee.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Mathias. You’ve had too much to worry about. Your mother. Your poor little niece. And back home there must be the job you had to leave so quickly. Too much to worry about. Don’t worry about this.”

Surprised, he looked at her. He saw nothing but total sympathy. Her eyes glistened with it. She was ready to cry for him.

Moon wasn’t sure what emotion this provoked in him. Whatever it was, it caused him to give a shout of laughter, thrust his arm around her shoulder, and hug her to him. “Mrs. van Winjgaarden,” he said. “Osa, you are absolutely something else.” He laughed again. “What do you mean, don’t worry about this? We’re standing here on the edge of the cliff, and it’s crumbling under our feet, and Osa van Winjgaarden is advising me not to worry.”

“Ooh,” Osa said. “Too tight. You hug too strongly.”

“We have a magazine in the States,” Moon said. He eased his grip.
“Mad
magazine, with this stupid guy grinning on the cover and saying, ‘What? Me worry?’ It’s the American symbol for craziness.”

Osa was free now. “Well,” she said. “The Italians have a useful phrase.
Che sara sara.
You know it?”

“It’s the same in Spanish,” he said. “And I guess they’re both right.”

And so he had picked up the telephone again and repeated the process with the number Rice had given them. The operator was different but the results were the same: disconnected.

“I think you should be calling me Osa,” she said. “Mrs. van Winjgaarden is too long. And you never get it quite right.”

“And everybody calls me Moon.”

Then he called information and got the number of the Pasag Imperial Hotel in Manila.

Mr. Lum Lee was in.

“Ah, Mr. Lee,” Moon said. “I think I know now the location of your urn of bones.”

He heard the sudden sound of Mr. Lee sucking in his breath.

“We found a man named George Rice. He

worked closely with my brother. Rice told us that the day Ricky was killed he called in on his radio and said he had picked up the urn someplace up north in Cambodia. He said he was leaving it off at the home of Eleth Vinh’s parents. The name is Vin Ba and it’s a tiny little village in Cambodia near the Vietnam border.”

“Ah,” Lum Lee said. “Mr. Mathias, this is very kind of you. Very generous. It is difficult for a Westerner— for anyone who is not a Buddhist—to understand how important these bones are for our family.”

“I’ve read about it,” Moon said. “But I’m afraid this information will be too late. I hear the Khmer Rouge are taking over everything. We may not be able to get there. And it may be gone if we do.”

“But this is most generous of you, this kindness to a stranger.”

“It is a family responsibility,” Moon said. “You contracted with my brother—”

Mr. Lee gave him a moment, decided the sentence wouldn’t be finished, said, “But that was an accident,” cleared his throat, and went on. “I myself was not able to reach Mr. Rice. I was informed he was in prison. In the south.”

“He’s in the Federal Correction Unit on Palawan Island,” Moon said. “Our embassy arranged for me to talk to him.”