Finding Moon

The guard stepped forward. “No touch,” he said.

His expression said he was embarrassed by this rudeness. He looked at Moon, his eyes asking forgiveness.

“I’m glad to meet you,” Moon said. “Ricky told me a lot about you too. I guess you were his right-hand man.” A small white lie, but harmless as it was, Moon regretted it, just as he regretted the small ones he told Debbie. All Moon remembered hearing about Rice was a couple of anecdotes about his escapades.

“Don’t believe all you hear,” Rice said, gri

“It would be nice if we could,” Osa said. “But we-”

Rice interrupted her. He turned to the guard. “This is my friend Mr. Preda. Mr. Preda, these are my good old friends, Mrs. van Winjgaarden and Mr. Moon Mathias. Good people. Good friends of President Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda.”

“How do you do,” Moon said. Osa said something that sounded like it might be in Tagalog, and Mr. Preda smiled shyly and nodded.

“Mr. Preda speaks English,” Rice said. “But when it comes to La lengua of Shakespeare, to the multiple-syllable latinate vocabulary, then it’s a different ball game. You two will understand without any explanation from me the advantage this linguistic situation will have for us.” He looked back at Preda, who smiled and nodded.

Rice smiled back.

“I understand,” Moon said glumly.

“You don’t have to be a Houdini for the first step,” Rice said. “I guess you noticed that coming in. A low hurdler could do the palm log. This isn’t Sing Sing. That’s not the problem. The problem is getting a drawbridge across the moat.”

“The Sulu Sea,” Moon said. He wasn’t happy about the direction this conversation was taking.

“Exactly,” Rice said. “Or, in our case, it would be the South China Sea.”

“Mr. Rice,” Osa said, “to tell the truth, we don’t have any way to build bridges over moats. We are trying to find the baby. Eleth’s baby. And Ricky’s. She was supposed to be brought out to Manila, but she didn’t get there. And we want to get my brother out of his mission too. Mr. Brock told us that you might-”

“Little Lila didn’t get to Manila?” Rice said, frowning. “Well, now, she should have.”

“And I would also like you to tell me some way I can reach my brother.”

“Oh,” Rice said. He leaned his elbows on the table, hands folded, lip caught between his teeth, thinking. He looked at Moon, blue eyes bright under bushy white eyebrows. And then at Osa. And then down at his hands.

Young Mr. Preda took a small step backward, leaned against the wall, looked out the window, exhaled a great sigh. Moon became conscious of the perspiration ru

“Where would she be?” Rice asked himself. He glanced up at Moon. “I take it you’re telling me they didn’t get her onto the flight to Manila,” he said.

“Apparently not,” Moon said.

Rice sighed. “The way it was supposed to work, we’d handle it at the Nam end and that lawyer- Castenada, I think his name is, the one that Ricky retained for R. M. Air-was supposed to meet the plane and get the kid sent along to the grandmother in the States.” Rice paused, lip between teeth again, remembering.

“I flew her up to Saigon,” Rice said. “Lo Tho Dem was there at the airport. He had his wife with him. They took the little girl. Dem said he thought everything was going to be okay but he might need a little more cash”-he glanced up at Moon as he rubbed his fingers together, making sure he understood such things-“because things were getting tense in Saigon already. The rich folks wanting out. People standing in line at the embassy for papers and visas. There was already a big run on the airlines for tickets. But Dem-”

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.”