Hillerman, Tony (5 page)

“But look,” Moon said, “It doesn’t bother me. Go ahead and smoke.”

Mr. Lee extracted the case, and from it a cigar, snipped off the end with a little silver tool designed for the purpose, gave Moon a grateful smile, and lit it with a tiny silver lighter that seemed to be built into the end of his fountain pen. He looked relieved. For the first time in months, Moon found himself yearning for a cigarette.

“Give me a telephone number where I can contact you,” Moon said. “Or an address. I’ll need that.”

“That is most kind of you,” Mr. Lee said, savoring the taste of the cigar smoke. “Unfortunately, I think it would not be practical.” He turned his face away from Moon and exhaled a thin blue cloud. When he turned back he exposed an apologetic smile. “You see,” he said, “I know something of your brother’s business procedures. He was most careful. Not just in where he kept records but in what he wrote, when something had to be written.”

Mr. Lee’s smile apologized in advance again. “Not that this transaction was in any way illegal, you understand. But in Asia these days things are not normal. These days one does not encourage authorities to cause trouble.”

“Because of the way he was using government copters?”

“Well, yes. There is that,” Mr. Lee said.

“So why keep records at all?”

Through the blue haze which now shrouded him, Mr. Lee looked incredibly old. When he allowed the smile to fade away, his small round face sagged. “I do not know,” he said, “but he did. I suppose it was necessary because other people worked for him. And with him. In various businesses. He would need to keep them informed. He wrote letters. He wrote in a way that would be really understood only by those who needed to understand. If I could see such letters, I would recognize any references to—”

The telephone by Moon’s elbow rang.

Moon glanced at Mr. Lee, said, “Excuse me,” and picked it up.

“Mathias,” he said.

A moment of silence. Then a cough. Then, “Yes. Hello. Yes.”

“This is Malcolm Mathias,” Moon said. “Is this Mr. Castenada?”

“Yes,” the voice said. “Roberto Castenada. How can I be of service?”

“I’m the brother of Richard Mathias,” Moon said. “Your client.” He hesitated, thinking he should correct that. Former client. Former brother. “I believe my mother made arrangements with you to bring Richard’s daughter to the United States.”

“Ah,” Castenada said. “To Manila.”

“Manila, then,” Moon said. “Is she there?”

“Ah,” Castenada said. “There are. . .” The telephone was silent except for the sound of breathing. Moon was tired. Here he was in a Los Angeles hotel room, hearing a man exhaling in Manila.

“Complexities,” Castenada said. “Confusions. Many confusions. The child has not yet arrived in Manila. Or if she did arrive, I have not been informed and the child has not been delivered to the Sisters. I just called them and they said no. They have heard nothing.”

“Then where is she?”

Mr. Lee had let his fatigue overcome him and sat with eyes closed, head tilted forward. The tone of Moon’s question jerked him awake. He sat up, reached for his hat, and stood, signaling his intention to leave. Moon motioned him to sit.

“I do not know what happened,” Castenada was saying. He spoke in precise English about the disorders in Laos, advances of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a flood of refugees reaching Saigon, disruptions of communications, cancellations of airline schedules, unusual troubles with visas. “Perhaps they arrived in Manila but are staying with friends. Perhaps they are still in Saigon, having difficulties with exit papers and aircraft reservations. Perhaps. I have tried to make calls, to make inquiries, no one picked up the telephone, and since then I have not been able to get a call through.”

“I see,” Moon said.

“One cannot do anything,” Castenada said, and, in his precise, prissy voice, explained why. Nothing was working in Saigon anymore without bribery. Planes that were scheduled to fly sat on the runways. Planes that were scheduled to arrive didn’t arrive. Airports were closed. Borders were closed. Castenada droned on, describing chaos replacing civilization. Across the room Mr. Lee was slumping again, fighting off sleep, being overpowered by some terrible accumulation of fatigue. He sagged in the chair, face bloodless. Through the thick, distorting lenses his eyes seemed to waver out of focus. Moon glanced at Lee’s grandson. The big man was watching his grandfather, looking concerned.

“What are you doing now?” Moon asked. “What steps are you taking to find that child?”

Silence while Castenada considered this. Lee sighed, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes.

“Everything that can sensibly be done,” Castenada said, finally. “We are waiting for information. When the child arrives at the school, the Sisters will—”

“Can’t you do more than wait?”

“Mrs. Mathias arrives today. I will help her make contacts. There seems to be a need to trace this situation backward.”

“My mother won’t be there today,” Moon said. “She’s in. the hospital. I think she had a heart attack.”

Castenada expressed shock. He expressed sympathy and regrets. He would do what he could, but Moon must understand that might be very little. More was beyond his power. He could determine if the child had arrived in Manila. If she had, he would attempt to trace her. If she had been delayed en route, he would attempt to find where this had happened. But it was not likely that he, Castenada, would have the power to effect the outcome of this affair if the Asian mainland was involved. Perhaps someone would have to go. Sometimes the personal touch was needed. But he could not travel. He could serve only as adviser.

“Thank you,” Moon said. “I will call you when I decide what to do.”

“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 assistance 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 hell 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 gratitude 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.

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 glasses 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 reassembled, 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 reassemble the engine, and trying to give Hubbell some ideas for filling up the
Press-Register’s
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.”