Above and behind him a sudden flash of light:
the window of Osa’s room. A few moments later, it went off. Bathroom call, he thought. He needed one himself and strolled across the grass to a nearby bush. It was flowering, surrounding him with blossoms the size of baseballs, the aroma overpowering the thousand smells of the night.
When he emerged from the bush, Osa was sitting on the ledge under the hotel wall, looking toward the jungle.
She’ll say, Have you seen him? Or she’ll say, I couldn’t sleep.
She patted the ledge beside her, inviting him to sit, and said, “What are we going to do?”
Moon sat, thought about how to answer.
She rephrased the question. “What are you going to do?”
“If Rice doesn’t show up?”
“Yes. Or if he does get here. Either way.”
“I don’t know,” Moon said. “I know I have to figure out some way to get to L.A. But it looks impossible. How about you?”
“I’ll keep trying,” she said. “I don’t know exactly how to do it, but there must be a way.” She touched his arm. “Anyway, there’s nothing you could do there but pace the floor and wait. You said you had found a good doctor and a good hospital. All you can do is wait.”
Moon found himself thinking that he’d liked What are we going to do? better than What are you going to do? But he thought of no way to express that thought. So he said, “if Rice is coming, it should be about now. When it’s just light enough so he can see what he’s getting into. See if we’re out here waiting for him.”
“He’d come out of the jungle, you think? Not down the road?”
“I would,” Moon said. “I’d be scared to death. But I’d be more scared of getting caught than of getting snake-bit.”
“I don’t think so,” Osa said.
“Don’t think what? That I’m not scared of snakes?”
“Not scared of anything,” she said. “Anyway, not scared to death. Ricky told us you didn’t seem ever to be very frightened.”
“Well, now you know better,” Moon said.
“Know better? That means like I know more strongly?”
“No. It means you know you were wrong about me. I’m easy to scare. I’m scared about the trouble I got us into here. I’m scared about going to Cambodia.”
She sighed. “As you said to me last night, I don’t blame you. I’m scared too.”
“But you would go?”
The pause was so long Moon thought she would ignore the question. But she said. “Yes. Sure. So would you.”
Moon didn’t answer. She was probably right, and that made his stomach feel uncomfortable.
“Why would I?”
“Because it’s the way you are. You think of your mother, sick back there in that hospital. You want to bring a granddaughter for her to see. You think of that little girl. Your brother’s daughter. In Asia people are very proud. They don’t like those of other races. The Khmers don’t like the Laotians, and the Laotians don’t like the Thais, and the Vietnamese don’t like the Montagnards, and nobody likes the people who are mixed.”
Moon couldn’t think of an answer. He said, “People are people.”
In the dimness he could see her shaking her head. “They had it in the papers about how badly the Vietnamese treated the children left behind by your army. Half white or half black. Half Vietnamese.”
He had read it. In fact, he had written a headline on an AP story reporting that. He couldn’t forget it. That was part of his problem.
“Things get exaggerated,” Moon said. “I’m in the news business. I know.”
She was silent, staring into the jungle. It was light enough now to make out the shape of trees, shades of color. Somewhere in the night a water buffalo bellowed.
“I was a child in Java when they tried to overthrow the Sukarno government,” she said. “There was supposed to be an assassination first and then a coup. The Communists were working with the dissidents, and so was part of the army, but something went wrong.”
“Were you in danger?” he asked, wondering why she had shifted to another subject. But she hadn’t.
“There was probably a betrayal,” she said. “Usually there is a betrayal. And there was much fighting, and the Suharto people won and then told the people in Malaysia that the Chinese Communists were behind it all, and then the killing of the Chinese began. People in Asia always find a reason to kill the Chinese. The Chinese work hard and save their money and start their little shops and loan people money, so other people envy them. They blame them for things.”
“Like the Europeans do with the Jews,” Moon said.
“I think so. Yes. And all through Asia the overseas Chinese have networks. Extended family tongs. Sometimes criminal organizations. I remember as a child I used to collect tong signals. They’re supposed to be secret but people get careless. I’d pick them up.”
“Like what?” Moon asked.
“Like this,” Osa said. She cupped one hand, touched fourth finger to thumb on the other. “Or this,” and she turned both hands down with the thumbs swallowed in the fists. “Here in the Philippines they say President Marcos is part Chinese and his tong and the Chinese mafia helped get him elected.”
Moon had no comment on this. He’d always assumed Douglas MacArthur had picked him.
“Our house was on a slope above the river. I remember seeing the bodies floating down,” Osa said. She shifted on the shelf, hugged herself. “All sizes of bodies.”
“I remember reading about it,” Moon said. “Weren’t several hundred thousand people killed?”
“I think all the Chinese,” she said. “In our town the Chinese shops were all empty afterward, and
the places where the Chinese lived were all burned down. And you never saw any Chinese anymore anywhere in Java or Sumatra.”
“You don’t have to remind me,” Moon said. “I just hope the little girl, my niece, looks exactly like her mother.”
“Maybe she will,” Osa said. “Do you have a picture?”
“Yes. But I can’t tell much from that.”
From somewhere far behind them a rooster crowed, touching off a response from other roosters, arousing a dog and another dog and another.
“Tell me about your mother,” Osa said. “And about Ricky. And what happened to your father. Everything”
“You first,” Moon said.
She’d been born at Serang, not far from Jakarta. Her father worked for Royal Dutch Petroleum and was killed when the Japanese captured Java in 1942, before she was born. After the war, her mother married van Winjgaarden, who owned a warehouse at Jakarta and operated an export-import business. They had moved there, and she went to private school. Her mother spoke English and her foster father spoke German. The housekeeper who took care of her spoke Chinese, and the people around her spoke Malay and Chinese and a local dialect, and she fell in love with languages but wasn’t very good at anything else. But that talent had been very useful. When she finished school, she had gone to work for her foster father, scouting the craft markets for handicrafts to export.
“My foster father always seemed like a real father to me. And he loved me like I was his own child,” Osa said. “But he seemed to love dangerous things more than people. Always on flights in little planes in bad weather. Always on little boats when the typhoon was coming. Always in places where there was killing going on over politics. And one time-it was the first time I came here to buy things-he said he was going over to Borneo to buy some jade and teak things. And I said, Don’t go. The rebels were fighting the government and it was dangerous. But he hugged me and said good-bye.”