“From what I hear, your Mr. Rice managed to get a load of heroin flown out to Manila,” Moon said. “Why couldn’t he leave a little of that behind and crowd the kid on?”
Brock took a sip of his coffee, eyeing Moon over the brim. From the bedroom came the sounds of the woman getting dressed. Brock put down the cup.
“You want to hear about this or you want to fight about it?”
“All right,” Moon said. “Go ahead. Let’s hear it.”
“George must have thought he had it handled. I know for sure he took the girl up to Saigon with her grandma. Then he came back to Long Phu. There was a load of things there waiting that a customer wanted out. So George flew it down to Singapore. We had an old DC-Three we’d bought down there, getting it fixed. George picked it up and flew it over to Manila to pick up a spare engine and some spare parts we’d located there. And some Filipino customs people nailed him.”
Brock sipped his coffee.
“And seized our DC-Three, of course. That’s one of the reasons I’m still here in Manila: trying to get the damned thing released so I can fly it back. And working with this shyster lawyer trying to get George sprung out of prison. And trying to finalize a contract Ricky had started negotiating last winter.”
“So the little girl, she’s still there in Saigon, you think? With her other grandmother?”
“I don’t know. Maybe so. Maybe not. The old lady’s Cambodian. She doesn’t have any connections in Saigon.”
“Okay, then. Where the hell else would she be?”
“I guess you’re going to have to talk to George,” Brock said.
SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 19 (Agence France-Presse)-A spokesman for U.S. Ambassador William Martin told a Vietnamese television interviewer last night that the ambassador and his wife are still in Saigon “and have not packed any belongings.”
The Seventh Day
GETTING INTO THE PRISON ON Palawan Island and arranging a conversation with George Rice would be what the woman at the U.S. Consulate called “relatively simple.”
“The Marcos government keeps the important criminals up here at Bilibad to keep an eye on them,” she told Moon, looking up at him over her bifocals. “The Communists, the Huks, the wrong kind of politicians, old family types who have bad ideologies but good connections-they’re kept up here in Manila. They use Palawan for the regular criminals: robbers, burglars, murderers, car thieves, smugglers, rapists, so forth. The ones the government doesn’t have to worry about.”
The consulate clerk paused with that, rubbed her plump and dimpled chin, and considered what she might add to make sure Moon had received her message. Thinking of nothing, she looked up at him again and nodded.
“I think we can get you in, under the circumstances,” she said. “It seems to be a good cause. Finding a missing relative, I mean. And there doesn’t seem to be anything political about this Rice fellow.”
Then she suffered an awful second thought.
“There isn’t, is there?”
Looking into her determined stare, it seemed to Moon that this was another of those rare times when fudging a little on truth was ethical.
“I think he’s a Republican,” Moon said, and restored the clerk’s helpful attitude. She smiled at him.
“I don’t think they’d keep anyone there they considered dangerous,” she said. “I mean politically dangerous. I understand it doesn’t have any walls. Just sort of a big rice plantation surrounded by the jungle.”
“What keeps the prisoners from escaping?” asked Moon. The unexpected good news had stimulated his natural urge to be friendly.
The consulate clerk felt no such urge. “I have no idea,” she said. “Leave me your number and you’ll be informed when we get clearance.” While she was saying it she closed the folder in which she’d placed the request Moon had typed out, a copy of the relevant page from his passport, and the rest of the paperwork, and opened another folder and pushed the button that would send the next problem into her office to be dealt with.
“How long do you think it will take to get clearance?” Moon asked. “Any idea?”
“Probably two days if you’re lucky,” she said. “But don’t count on being lucky.” And she dismissed him with her official consulate clerk’s smile.
Moon had retreated to the Hotel Maynila to wait. He collected his laundry. He bought more socks and underwear. With the help of a vastly overweight cabdriver he solved the problem that large Americans have in Asian countries. The owner, either in ignorance or whimsy, called the shop L’Obèse Boutique, and in it Moon found two shirts, a water-repellent jacket, and jeans big enough to fit him. Then he got on the telephone to L.A. He talked to the nurse in the Intensive Care Unit and learned that Victoria Morick was still not ready for transfer to the Cardiac Care Unit but was “doing as well as can be expected.”
He left word for her doctor to call him at the Maynila. He called his own number in Durance and reached Debbie. Debbie reported that J.D. hadn’t been able to find anyone to put his engine back together, and what could he do about that? Shirley’s dog was no longer on the premises, and no, she didn’t know what had happened to it. She’d had his car washed. And don’t forget he’d been gone for her birthday. Also, she missed him terribly.
“I miss you too,” Moon said. “I dreamed about you last night.” True. And, of course, it had been an erotic dream. After he hung up, he sat awhile on the edge of the bed, glumly thinking about that. Why did he kid himself about the Debbie relationship? Why? Because for some reason he had never been able to fathom, he always needed to think of himself as the guy in the white hat. Moon, the good guy hanging around to save the poor maiden when J.D. and the other predators dumped her. Never Moon the going-to-seed lecher kidding himself about his motives with this sexy youngster.
Enough of that. He called the newsroom and learned from Hubbell that Rooney was threatening to quit, that their Sunday editorial about the ski basin had produced indignant telephone calls, that the Ford dealer on the school board was threatening to pull his advertising if the sports editor didn’t lay off the football coach, that nothing much was happening on the vacation edition, and that they’d had an electrical fire in the darkroom and were farming out their photo printing until the rewiring was done. That was playing hell with the newsroom budget.
Those duties done, Moon considered what was left. He should call Mrs. van Winjgaarden and tell her about Rice. He should return the three calls he’d had from old Lum Lee. Instead, he walked to the window and looked out at the evening. Lights coming on along Roxas Boulevard and Manila Bay. Clouds blowing out to sea. Stars appearing.
He picked up the telephone. What would he say to Mrs. van W.? Now that it seemed likely he could find Rice and talk to him, he didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to go to Palawan Island and visit this jerk in his jail cell, and she would certainly expect him to go. He didn’t want to go to collapsing Vietnam. Or bloody Cambodia. He wanted to go home.
Failing that, he’d go for a walk.
He walked faster than his army regulation pace at first because he was tense and he needed to burn off nervous energy. But the mild air got to him quickly. April is April, even in a climate where winter hardly makes itself noticed, and yesterday’s rain seemed to have provoked a sort of renewal. The perfume of flowers overpowered the aroma of decay. He could hear songs of frogs in the ditches, insect sounds, some sort of night bird he couldn’t identify, other noises strange to him. And on a night like this, Manila slept with its windows open. Somewhere someone was playing a violin. He heard laughter. A radio far off to his right broadcast Bob Dylan exhorting Mr. Tambourine Man to play a song for him. He meet three boys on bicycles. He met a couple hand in hand, the man grinning, the woman giggling. He met an old man carrying a cat. He thought about the priest in the confessional.