Moon interrupted. “You know his name? The old man?”
“Lum Lee,” Brock said. “We’d done some hauling for him before. Antiques, so he said.” He smiled. “I think Mr. Lee is one of those fellows who catches big fish in troubled waters. You know, a temple gets looted, or a museum, or some maggot’s house, and all of a sudden there’s valuable stuff for sale at a bargain.”
“Maggots?” Moon said.
“Rich moneylenders,” Brock said. “Bankers. I think it’s a Chinese word. Maybe Vietnamese. And I guess you’re supposed to pronounce it mah-go. Anyway, Mr. Lee was in a hell of a hurry. He’d just heard that the Cambodian army was pulling out of a district up in the north, and he had some stuff he wanted to retrieve before Pol Pot’s little savages got there.” Brock grinned. “He said it was ancestral bones.”
“Ancestral bones?”
Brock laughed. “Yeah. That’s what he claimed.”
He studied Moon, nodded. “Your brother said you were good at figuring things out.”
“Not really. Mr. Lee contacted me too. I thought it might really be ancestral bones he was after.”
“Anything’s possible out here. Maybe so,” Brock said, grinning. “We were shorthanded, so Ricky flew a chopper up there himself. Then he radioed in and said to tell Mr. Lum Lee he had the cargo and he was going to stop at Vin Ba and then come on in.”
“Vin Ba?”
“It’s a little rice village up on the edge of the hill country. Next to the Nam border. It’s where Eleth’s family lives. They’re in the charcoal-making business. She was visiting up there, and he was going to stop and pick her up.”
Brock paused, thinking about it. No happiness in his face now. -
“I guess he did,” he said, and paused while the gusting wind blew rain against the windows. “Her body was in the wreckage with his. Eleth and Ricky.”
For the very first time as Brock described this, it became real to Moon that his brother was dead. It was no longer an abstraction in which Ricky dead was merely a phrase that meant no more than Ricky away. For much of Moon’s adult life Ricky had been away. Now Moon was conscious of a void that would never be filled. He closed his eyes.
But Brock was talking again, about the site of the crash, near the Vietnam-Cambodia border. About an ARYN patrol finding the wreckage after some farmer reported a fire. About flying over the place, looking down on the site, finding a place to put down, and walking up into the hills to see about the bodies.
“I called your mother about that. The soldiers had buried them right there by the wreckage. She said just leave them be. Let him rest in peace,” Brock said. “That sounded like what he would have wanted anyway. You think?”
“Yes,” Moon said. “Ricky wouldn’t have wanted to be messed around with.” He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, opened them. “You talked to our mother about the little girl?”
“I didn’t think about it,” Brock said. “I guess she was in shock, hearing Ricky was dead. I guess she didn’t think of it either.”
His mother would have thought of it, no doubt about that. It meant she didn’t know about the child. Ricky hadn’t just kept the secret from him.
Brock had seated himself on the chair beside the kitchen door. “Coffee’s steaming,” he said. But he did nothing about it.
“It was an accident,” Moon said. “That’s what the embassy people told my mother.”
“I guess so. Or maybe some of Pol Pot’s Khmers were up that way and shot it just for fun. What’s the difference?” Brock got up, disappeared into the kitchen. “Black or cream or what?”
“Everything,” Moon said. “If it’s handy.”
“That Chinaman wanted to know about his cargo. I told him the copter was all burned up. Nothing in it. He wanted me to fly him up there to make sure. I said no way. if the Khmer Rouge had shot one copter they’d shoot another. But when I was away he talked Rice into flying him up. Rice’ll do absolutely anything. Doesn’t give a shit.”
“I guess they didn’t find it,” Moon said. “Mr. Lee is still looking.”
“Rice thinks he’s immortal,” Brock said. “Kismet. Fate awaits. That’s the George Rice slogan.” He emerged from the kitchen with two cups, gave one to Moon, reseated himself. “But I was surprised Ricky flew up there. What for? What was he doing? Nothing up in those ridges but three or four little villages. Hill tribes. But the Vietcong hide out up there, and nowadays I guess the Khmer Rouge too.”
“I heard Rice was in Bilibad Prison,” Moon said. “I was going to see if I can get in there and talk to him tomorrow to find out if he knows what happened to Ricky’s daughter. But they say he’s not there. And I need to know what you know-”
Brock’s expression went blank. He held up his hand. “What are you saying? You saying Lila’s not here?”
Brock’s wife was standing in the bedroom doorway, “Oh, God!” she said. “What happened to her?”
“What happened?” Brock repeated. “You telling me Castenada doesn’t have her?”
“I don’t know what the hell happened,” Moon said. “Castenada said someone was making arrangements to bring her out, and Victoria-that’s our mother-was flying out to Manila to pick her up. But she had a heart attack, and Castenada doesn’t seem to have any idea what happened to the child.”
“Son of a bitch,” Brock said. “I guess Rice must have-”
“Screwed up? I guess he did,” Moon said. “I heard he might have got distracted into another line of business. I heard he was arrested and stuck in Bilibad. But they say-”
“He’s not in Bilibad,” Brock said. “President Marcos and Imelda have Bilibad ifiled up with politicals. They sent Rice down to Palawan Island. To the prison down there.”
“Oh,” Moon said, not knowing how to react to this.
“You’re looking for little Lila, then,” Brock said. “They didn’t get her on a flight to Manila? I thought that was all set up.”
“By you?”
“By Rice,” Brock said. “Well, sort of by me. After Ricky and his lady were killed, we were moving things down to Long Phu. We were sort of expecting you to show up and take over, but we figured you’d have made the move anyway. Too risky where we were and things beginning to go to hell at Saigon. And then one day the Vinh. woman showed up. Eleth’s mother. She said they were trying to get moved out to Thailand but they weren’t having any luck because everything was blocked off, either by the army or the Khmer Rouge. She said Ricky and Eleth had planned to move to the States someday. They’d told her if anything should happen to them she should send Lila to her American grandmother. The old lady believed that with the Khmer Rouge coming they couldn’t keep the baby anyway because Pol Pot’s people were killing all the foreigners, and the baby looked American. So I called Castenada and talked to him about it and then I called this fella we work with in Saigon. I told him to get an airline ticket for the girl and fix up the documents she’d need and call me when everything was ready. Then the plan was for Rice to fly Lila up there and send her along to Castenada.” Brock paused. “Now you’re telling me Rice didn’t get it done? Is that right?”
“Castenada says the child didn’t arrive. So whatever you set up didn’t work,” Moon said. “Where’s the girl now, do you think?”
Brock heard the anger as well as the questions. He sat staring at Moon.
“Well, it ain’t as simple as I made it sound,” he said, finally. “We couldn’t get the goddamn papers. We couldn’t get an airplane seat. The wise guys in Saigon were hearing things that scared them, so the line in front of the U.S. Embassy was about a mile long and not moving. And the fat cats and generals’ wives were filling up the outgoing traffic.”
“And so you let it go,” Moon said. “Just dropped it.”
“I thought we’d get it fixed up. I had to come here to take care of problems. I told Rice to bypass the embassy and work on the CIA people. They owed Ricky a lot of favors. I said, Call in the IOUs, and I figured he would do it. I figured it was all taken care of.”