“Well,” Moon said, a little irked by this, “if you will just remember when you met me in Manila, you will remember my purpose in coming here was to get Ricky’s daughter and bring her home. There’s nothing unreasonable about that.”
“But it’s not possible now. Mr. Rice flew away in the helicopter. Before that it was possible. Now it’s only being stubborn. You just go in and get killed. How does that help anybody?”
“Nguyen can run the boat. Nguyen and Mr. Lee. You don’t need me.”
Silence. Moon had been looking at Lum Lee when he made that statement. He looked back at Osa. Her face was no longer pale. It was flushed.
“I can run that damned boat myself,” she said. “I was just trying to save your stupid life.”
“Oh,” Moon said.
“Go ahead, then,” Osa said. “Go up there among Pol Pot’s savages and let them beat you to death with their bamboo poles.”
“Look,” Moon said.
“My stubborn brother has to die so he can be a martyr. Why do you want to die?”
“I just-” Moon began, but Osa had stalked out into the courtyard.
Leaving behind a strained silence.
Nguyen Nung was smiling foolishly past his bandages, looking abashed, waiting to learn if he needed a translation of all that.
Mr. Lee had his eyes on Moon Mathias, looking thoughtful.
“Well, hell,” Moon said, finally. “What brought all that on?”
Mr. Lee looked down at the map, concealing most of a smile.
“Fatigue,” Moon said. “Nervous tension. Women. Stress.” He glanced at Nung, seeking confirmation. Nung looked puzzled. Mr. Lee was still studying the map and still seemed to be amused. Something was going on here that Moon didn’t understand.
“I, too, find a flaw in your plan,” Mr. Lee said.
“What?” Moon wasn’t in the mood for any more of this.
“I must go with you,” Lum Lee said.
“Why? You describe the urn for me. It has to be fairly large to hold a man’s bones. I find it and I bring it back. if it turns out you’ve had to leave to meet Glory of the Sea, then I drop the urn off for you at that hotel in Manila. Or you give me another address.”
Lee looked at him.
“You can trust me,” Moon said.
“Of course I can,” Mr. Lee said. “But I confront a task that only one who understands feng shui can perform.”
“Feng shui. So you tell me what to do. Just explain it to me.”
Mr. Lee chuckled. “I believe the best explanation was written by a Taoist scholar in the nineteenth century,” he said. “It runs to fifty-three volumes.”
“Oh,” Moon said.
“Very complicated. Perhaps a thousand years before God inspired men in the Middle East with your Western vision of Genesis, he inspired men in India with the word of the relationship between God and humans, how the world works, and how humans must behave to endure and reach a better life. It spread from India to China and through all of Asia. As the centuries passed, more holy inspiration followed. The Lord Buddha taught us and Confucius and others endowed with spiritual wisdom. But behind it all is feng shui, our understanding of the cosmic supernatural.”
Mr. Lee got out his cigar case, offered it to Moon, extracted one for himself. He shook his head.
“I must simplify this,” he said. “You don’t want a doctoral degree lecture.”
“Just tell me why I can’t do this job for you,” Moon agreed.
“In this cosmos we have the visible world of the natural.” He pointed to Moon. “You and I, the lizards we hear calling out there, the insects, all we see and hear. And then the world of the supernatural. The spirit world. We die. Our soul crosses the bridge. The link is broken. But it can be restored. We feed the spirit of our ancestors through respect. The spirit has power. Mana.”
Mr. Lee paused, thinking. He blew out a great cloud of smoke.
“I will start another way,” he said. “We know that all things are decided by fate. Call it luck, good or bad. But we humans have ways to influence luck. We avoid the evil spirits that cause illness. We please those powers that can bring good. The most important of these is the most powerful of our ancestor spirits. Like you Jews and Christians, we know the power of ritual in dealing with the supernatural. We bury them properly. The place is scientifically chosen, the tomb correctly designed, the depth of the grave measured, the skull faced in the proper direction. All this was done when my most revered forebear was buried in our ancestral place. Then the Khmers captured the village. Before the government troops drove them away, they had killed the monks, burned the temple, and destroyed all things religious-including our family tomb. But the bones were recovered. I hired a geomancer to locate the site of a new tomb where the bones will be safe.”
“And you hired Ricky to go get them.”
“Yes,” Mr. Lee said. “And luck intervened. In itself a bad sign.”
“This ancestor, was he a great man?”
“He had great mana,” Mr. Lee said. “A minister for the great Sun Yat-sen. Great honor. Great power. My family has benefited always with health and luck.”
“We need it now,” Moon said.
Mr. Lee exhaled more smoke. “I’m afraid it is changing already,” he said. “Since his tomb was destroyed, one of my nieces died in an accident. The shop of a grandson in Hong Kong burned. A brother-in-law was arrested by the police in Saigon. These bones must be placed where the feng shui is correct. Where the spirit is again comfortable. Where the mana works for the family and not against it.”
“So you’re going,” Moon said. “I can’t argue.”
Lee gestured toward Nguyen Nung, who had
been leaning against a wall, listening and looking puzzled.
“I should explain the situation to our friend,” Mr. Lee said. “I think he has become part of our partnership. A member of our tour group.”
“Apparently,” Moon said, and followed Osa out into the growing darkness.
She was standing on the floor of the roofless section, looking through the twilight toward the burned-out village.
He stood behind her, organizing what he wanted to say.
“You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” Osa said. “You’ve come to tell me why you can’t go into Cambodia.” She paused, drew in a deep breath. “And let them kill you.”
“I’d like you to understand,” he said. “Remember when we first met in the hotel at Manila? I told you I had come to bring my brother’s child back to her grandmother. Nothing has changed that. I still have to get it done.”
Osa turned and looked at him for a long, thoughtful moment. “Then I still don’t understand you,” she said. “I came looking for you because I had heard all about you. From Ricky. When I heard Ricky was dead, I thought you were coming to take over the company. He’d told me he wanted you to come. Had asked you to come.”
She shook her head, sorting out the memories.
“Then you told me about the child. But you made it seem that you thought finding her was hopeless. You made me think you just wanted to find Ricky’s friends so they would tell you there was no hope and you could go home, having”-she paused again, searching for the best way to say it- “so you could feel you had done your very best.”
“I guess that’s true enough.”
Osa nodded. “You made it seem that way. I didn’t want to believe it, though. That wasn’t the Moon Mathias that Ricky had described to me. I thought if we could get to Ricky’s hangars, you could just get into a helicopter and fly it away and get the child. And my brother.”
“Except I couldn’t fly.”
“But I didn’t know that.”
Moon laughed. “I think Ricky made people think I could fly without an airplane.”
“So I pushed you into this,” Osa said. She threw out her hands. “And now here we are, and the helicopter has gone away with our only hope. And now that it really is absolutely impossible-like I thought you wanted it to be-now you act like it isn’t.”