Finding Moon Part 3

"And I will keep you informed," Castenada said. "If I learn anything." His tone suggested he didn't expect that to happen. "Good-bye."

Mr. Lee's eyes were open again, his consciousness returned to this hotel room by some triumph of will.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "We have intruded on your privacy. A family matter."

Moon dismissed that with a gesture. "We were talking about records of your transaction."

"Yes," Mr. Lee said. "I was about to ask if you could allow me to look through your brother's letters. I hope that will help me determine the place where my family's little urn was left."

"That might be possible," Moon said. "I will get them from my mother and look through them and get in touch with you."

"You don't have them?" Lee no longer looked sleepy. His eyes shifted to the luggage beside Moon's dresser-a woman's matching blue suitcases, an expensive-looking leatherbound case, and Moon's grubby hanging bag.

Moon's distaste for deception warred with his fatigue and lost. He was tired. He yearned for solitude to consider what Castenada had told him. To decide what he must do about it. Besides, the sympathy he felt for Mr. Lee was overlaid with skepticism. None of this seemed real.

"I will have to get them," Moon said. "Where can I call you?"

Mr. Lee made a faint sound that probably would have become the first word in an argument. But he cut it off and rose shakily to his feet. He extracted a card from his wallet, a pen from his coat, and wrote.

"Here is where I am staying." He handed Moon the card and walked stiffly to the door, trailed by his grandson. There he turned back and looked at Moon. "This urn is very important to my family," he said. "I intend to offer a reward of ten thousand dollars for a.s.sistance that leads to its recovery."

"I'm not eligible for a reward," Moon said. "If my brother misplaced your urn, I feel responsible. I'll do all I can to help you recover it."

Mr. Lee made a movement that was something between a bow and a nod.

"Mr. Mathias," he said, "your brother talked of you often. From what he told me of you, I place a high value on that promise. And if I can help you locate your niece, I hope you will allow me to do so."

"Thank you," Moon said. "But first I have to decide what to do."

But he had a sick feeling. He knew what he'd have to do. He'd have to go find Ricky's kid.

BANGKOK, Thailand, April 15 (Agence France-Presse)-Two refugee South Vietnamese military officers said today that embittered ARVN troops used their tank gun to destroy the ancestral tombs of President Nguyen Van Thieu before they withdrew from Phan Rang, the home of the president's family.

The two, with seven other refugees, arrived at Bangkok airport yesterday in a military helicopter. They said their ranger battalion had been cut off and destroyed by Communist troops south of Phan Rang.

FROM THE LOS ANGELES International Airport to Honolulu, Moon Mathias alternated sleeping the sleep of the exhausted and reading through the papers he'd extracted from his mother's luggage. He'd been through them hurriedly in his hotel room, having called the number Lum Lee had given him and summoned Mr. Lee to join him.

The night before, when Lee and his grandson had finally left, Moon had decided to see no more of the two. The whole business seemed unreal, if not downright sinister. Lee, if that was his name, was probably involved in something illegal, and the so-called grandson was his bodyguard. But with the normal light of day, sanity had returned. Lee no longer seemed to be some renegade Chinese Nationalist general running opium out of the Burma poppy fields. He was just a tired old man on family business. Whatever he was, it was no skin off Moon's twice-broken nose. If he was engaged in something nefarious with Ricky, Moon wanted no part of it. He didn't even want to know about it.

And so he had called Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee had come, promptly and alone. He'd politely taken a chair across the corner of the bed and explained that his grandson was at work. Moon had hoisted his mother's heavy business case onto the bed, undone the straps, dumped out the bundles of papers, and sorted rapidly through the pile. Lee had leaned forward in his chair and watched, all senses alert, no sleepiness now. These papers are my brother's, Moon had thought, but they mean a lot to this old stranger and nothing at all to me. I am the outsider here, not Mr. Lee.

He worked grimly through the pile, looking for anything that might be painfully personal, or criminal, or which fell into some nameless, unthinkable category which would not be fit for the eyes of this crumpled little stranger. Looking for what? For something that would somehow relate to him, the brother, the other son of Victoria Mathias. And when he realized what he was doing, he had stopped looking and pushed the entire pile over to Mr. Lee.

To h.e.l.l with it. His mother seemed to have been sent whatever had been found in Ricky's office by whoever had cleaned it out. "See if you can find anything useful," Moon said. "Help yourself. Take a look."

Mr. Lee had expressed grat.i.tude and had taken a look, eagerly and efficiently. He made occasional notes, using a slim little pen that seemed to be genuine gold, and a slim little pad in a worn leather case. He seemed to be recording only names and addresses: a hotel in Bangkok; a shop in Pleiku; a village somewhere on the Thailand-Cambodia border; the name of someone who worked for Air America, which Moon recalled was supposed to be the ill-concealed cover airline of the CIA. Otherwise, names and places and numbers meaningless to Moon. And all the while Mr. Lee was jotting his notes he was explaining in his soft voice why the information might somehow lead him to the urn full of ancestral bones-his family's kam taap. kam taap.

When Moon had called room service for coffee and sandwiches, Mr. Lee had added tea and fruit to the order and insisted on paying. He had done so with a hundred-dollar bill for which the bellman had insufficient change. Finally Mr. Lee had left, taking his notes.

"Did you find what you needed?" Moon asked. "Do you know where to find the urn?"

"Ah, no," Mr. Lee said. "But I have names now of people to call. Perhaps one of them can help. Perhaps not. Perhaps I will have to impose upon your time again." He removed his gla.s.ses and bowed to Moon.

"You have been kind to a stranger," he said. "The Lord Buddha taught that the deeds of a kind man follow him like his shadow all of his days."

Moon had gone for a walk then, out amid the roar of jets rising from the LAX runways and the whine of the freeway traffic. He walked twenty-seven blocks in what seemed to be the smog-diffused light of the dying day approximately north by northwest. Then he walked the twenty-seven blocks back again. He'd hoped the exercise would carry him back to some sense of reality-and it helped. He could think again of J.D's diesel engine waiting in his garage to be rea.s.sembled, of Debbie's disappointment at the missed birthday, and of how the paper-chronically shorthanded-would be handling his absence. He had even decided what to do about Victoria Mathias.

The next morning he handled most of it in an hour on the phone: having a dozen roses delivered for Debbie, leaving a message for J.D. that all he needed to do now was put in a new set of glow plugs and rea.s.semble the engine, and trying to give Hubbell some ideas for filling up the Press-Register's Press-Register's annual nightmare-the vacation edition. annual nightmare-the vacation edition.

Rescuing Victoria Mathias from the jerk with the California suntan took two calls. The man he knew back home in the Durance General Hospital emergency room gave him the name and number of a heart specialist on staff named Blick.

"Good to talk to you," Blick said. "You'll be glad to hear that Sandra is doing just fine at Pepperdine. Nothing but A's."

Sandra? Sandra Blick? Oh, yes. They'd run a feature about her, with a picture. She'd won some sort of scholarship at the Colorado Science Fair. "I'm not surprised to hear that," Moon had said, and told him what had happened to Victoria.

"Where is she?" Blick had asked. "In West General in L.A.? I'll get you a good man on it. Somebody you can trust."

Within an hour, Blick had called him back.

"I reached the cardiologist you need," Blick said. "A woman named Serna. Great reputation. She wants to get your mother moved to Cedars-Sinai."

"I've heard of that one," Moon said.

"You should have," Dr. Buck said. "It's one of the four or five best hospitals in the country. Now, let me give you the telephone numbers you'll need. And I'll tell you how to make the transfer."

At West General, Moon found that Dr. Jerrigan was not at the hospital and the doctor who had checked Victoria in was otherwise occupied. His mother was barely awake. He signed the required forms certifying that he was checking her out "against medical advice." He scheduled the ambulance, collected her medical file, and signed financial forms. At Cedars-Sinai he checked her in and surrendered the file to a nurse at the desk in the cardiac ward. Then he waited thirty-seven minutes. Almost thirty-eight. A chubby woman with short gray hair and a round, serene face appeared, carrying the file he had delivered. She introduced herself as Emily Serna, sat down next to him on the waiting room sofa, and gave him the bad news.

All indications were that his mother had barely survived a severe heart attack. The circ.u.mstances suggested she might soon have another one. If she did, the odds were heavily against her living through it. A catheterization test was needed, an angiogram to determine the extent of arterial blockage and the damage already done to the heart muscle. "There's some risk with an angioplasty," Dr. Serna said. "Heavier because of your mother's condition."

"Angioplasty," Moon said. "That's running the fiber optic gadget up the artery to find the blockage?"

Dr. Serna nodded.

"How much risk?"

"Well, I'd say there's a ninety-five percent chance she'll have another heart attack-and soon-if we don't do anything. And I don't think she'd survive it. We need the angiogram to tell us what to do. Even in her condition the risk of the test being fatal is much, much smaller. If bypa.s.s surgery is indicated, then the risk might go as high as fifteen or twenty percent."

Moon considered. Dr. Serna waited, face sympathetic. She looked to him to be extremely competent.

"Okay," Moon said. "Is there a form I need to sign?"

"I have it," Dr. Serna said.

Moon signed it.

"Now I have a question for you," Dr. Serna said. "We had a call from Miami Beach transferred over from West General." She checked her notes. "It was from a Dr. Albert Levison. He said he was the physician attending Tom Morick. That's your stepfather?

He asked to be provided a complete account of your mother's health. Does that sound reasonable?"

"It does. My mother is married to Tom Morick," Moon said, aware that his voice sounded stiff. "Morick has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He's pretty much paralyzed. In fact he's in an iron lung, dying fast. He'll want to know everything."

"We'll send Dr. Levison all the details, then. He can explain them to Mr. Morick. And your mother is more awake now, if you want to see her."

Victoria Mathias managed a smile, but just barely. Yes, she was feeling better. Less pain in her chest, but maybe that was the morphine. But what had he found out about the baby? Moon said nothing really definite, and that caused Victoria Mathias to give him a long, silent look.

"Malcolm," she said, "I'm a big girl. That means the baby hasn't arrived in Manila, doesn't it? Does it also mean that Mr. Castenada doesn't know where she is?"

"That's what it seems to mean."

"And that must mean she's still in Vietnam," she said.

"Or still en route," Moon said. "Castenada seemed to believe whoever was supposed to send her off in Saigon was having trouble getting her on a flight."

His mother studied him. "What did you think of Castenada?"

Moon shrugged. "Hard to tell over the telephone."

"He doesn't instill much confidence, I'm afraid."

"No. He doesn't."

She made a feeble effort to move her hand across the sheet toward him. Let it fall. Moon reached out and took it.

"Malcolm," she said, "I'm afraid you're going to have to go to Manila and take care of this."

"I will," Moon said. "But first we have to get you well."

"I don't think there's time for that. I was watching the television news out at the airport before this happened. Things seem to be going to h.e.l.l in that part of the world." - "I can't just go off and leave you."

"Son," she said, "there's nothing you can do for me here. It's up to the doctor. You just have to go and get our granddaughter."

And so Moon went.

SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 16 (AP)- Communist rockets last night detonated an ammunition dump at Bien Hoa thirty miles north of here. The blast shook the capital and reinforced reports that the Bien Hoa air base, largest in Vietnam, had come under artillery fire.

THE JET DESCENDED THROUGH RAIN to the Manila airport. Out the water-streaked window beside his seat, Moon could see nothing but the bleak inside of solid cloud cover, then a lush green landscape blurred by the falling water, then puddled runways lined with weeds. His impression of the terminal was of roaring, clamorous confusion. A prematurely old building with flaking paint, cracks in too many floor tiles, and too much dirt. The air conditioner worked too well, making the humid air unpleasantly sticky.

Moon felt smothered, exhausted, uneasy. His mother's purse with eighty hundred-dollar bills in it was in his suitcase. What was the rule about bringing cash into the Philippines? Moon had a vague recollection of currency restrictions, but that probably concerned taking money out, not bringing it in.

The immigration agent was a skinny middle-aged man wearing what looked like a military uniform. He glanced at Moon's pa.s.sport and at Moon and said, "How long in the Philippines?" in oddly accented English.

"Just a couple of days," Moon said, "maybe less." But the agent was already looking past him at the pretty girl next in line.

Customs was equally cursory. Moon handed over the declaration sheet he'd filled out on the plane and stood, shoulders slumping, while the agent read it.

"Nothing to declare?" the agent asked, without looking up.

"Just clothing," Moon said.

He opened Moon's dented old American Tourister, glanced in, closed it. Then he patted Victoria Mathias's briefcase.

"This?"

"Business papers," Moon said. "Letters, personal correspondence, things like that."

"Urn," the clerk said. He motioned Moon to pick up his luggage and move along.

The door marked exit to public transportation was guarded by two teenagers in dark gla.s.ses, with the khaki uniforms and caps that Moon a.s.sumed were Philippine Army uniforms. Soldiers, surely, because they both held the same model M16 automatic rifles that Moon had trained with at Fort Benning. They lounged against the wall looking sinister in their gla.s.ses. He carried his bags past them, wondering if they were watching him. They didn't seem to be watching anyone.

Victoria Mathias's travel agent had made reservations for her at the Hotel Maynila, a shiny edifice of tropical-modern architecture. Moon explained to the desk clerk why Malcolm Mathias was claiming a room reserved for Victoria Morick. The clerk looked bored, said, "Ah, yes," expressed sympathy, and handed Moon the key.

It hit Moon, finally, as he stood waiting for the elevator. Jet lag, he guessed. Too many hours without untroubled sleep. He leaned against the wall, eyes closed, surprised by the sound of the elevator doors sliding open. At the door of his eleventh-floor room he had trouble making the key work. He slumped on the bed while trying to dial Castenada's office and screwed up the number twice before getting a busy signal. When he lay back on the pillow waiting to try again, sleep overwhelmed him.

He came awake slowly, conscious at first of the strangeness of the pillow against his face. Then he was jarringly aware of being on an alien bed. With his clothes on, even his shoes tied. Aware he was in a strange room, with no notion of where he was, or when it was, or why he was here. For Moon it was all too familiar, a skip back into the past of his last year in college and his time in the army. Drinking had become his hobby. Awakening in the wrong bed in a strange room with his head buzzing with hungover confusion had been a regular Sunday morning experience. But that had ended years ago. The last time he had suffered such an awakening had been the worst of all-a nightmare that had ended boozing for him forever.

He'd been aware at first of the bandages, of the pain in his head, of the tubes connecting his arm to something, that his left wrist and hand were encased in a cast. Hearing the breathing of the man asleep in an adjoining bed, the sound of a telephone ringing somewhere: hospital paraphernalia. And then a nurse was there. How did he feel? Was he well enough to talk to the policeman? The woman left while he searched for an answer. The Military Police captain replacing her beside his bed told him he had a right to call a lawyer if he wanted one.

Moon didn't want to be remembering that. He rolled off the bed. In the bathroom he washed his face and glanced at his wrist.w.a.tch. But it told him only the Los Angeles time. Here it seemed to be morning. The digital clock beside his bed said nine twenty-two, but not whether it was A.M. A.M. or or P.M. P.M. The sunlight filtering through high thin clouds over Manila Bay seemed to be morning light, and the traffic on the boulevard below-cars headed mostly toward downtown Manila-must be going-to-work traffic. The sunlight filtering through high thin clouds over Manila Bay seemed to be morning light, and the traffic on the boulevard below-cars headed mostly toward downtown Manila-must be going-to-work traffic.

This morning the telephone in the office of Castenada, Blake and a.s.sociates rang only once. A woman's voice said, "Law offices"; the same words in the same tone one heard in Durance or Denver or-most likely-Karachi. But then Castenada's voice, with its exotic accent.

"Mi," Castenada said. "Mr. Mathias. Am I correct that you are in Manila?"

"Yes," Moon said. "As I told you. I came to pick up Ricky's child."

"Yes," Castenada said. Hesitation. "Can you come down to the office?"

"Of course," Moon said, puzzled by the tone of this. Of course he would have to come to the office. There would be papers to be signed, fees to be paid, expenses to be covered, arrangements to be explained. "The child," he said. "She has arrived safely?"

"Mi," Castenada said. "Not yet. You are at the Hotel Maynila, I think? Where your mother had made reservations. That is about fifteen minutes from here by taxi. Would it be convenient for you to come now?"

The cabbie looked surprised when Moon told him the address, and Moon was surprised at the direction it led them. They turned away from the bay and the towering buildings he'd seen from his hotel window and into narrow old streets where ramshackle apartment buildings were crowded between auto repair shops, mattress factories, even a chicken processing plant. People everywhere, children everywhere, a swarm of street vendors pushing their carts. Dirt, music from upstairs windows, a ragged man begging, color, vitality, the fetid smell of the drainage ditch running beside a broken sidewalk.

Something like a gloriously magnified version of the trumpet vine that had grown on the porch of his childhood grew here from the wall of a shuttered bar. Moon tried to compare it with Mexico, his only out-of-country experience. But Debbie had made their reservations at the Acapulco Pyramid.

They'd seen nothing like this, not even on the drive through the barrio from the airport.