And Moon had said, Well, she’d had to call her mother to tell her about Damon.
Instead of commenting on that, Mr. Lee had told him another of his Buddhist parables. A bird with two heads lived in a desert where it often had to go without water. Thus each of the heads became proud of its ability to endure thirst. The rains came. A pool formed below the bird’s nesting place, but each of the heads was too proud to take the first drink and so it died of thirst.
“Think of the wisdom in that teaching,” Mr. Lee said.
It had been a strange conversation from a strange man. Moon had thought about the teaching. Then he’d picked up the telephone and called Osa at her hotel. She sounded subdued, tired. But she said yes, she could have dinner with him. She wanted to hear how the baby was doing and they should tell each other good-bye. She would meet him at the Maynila.
He sat in the lobby, twenty minutes early, freshly shaven, cleaned and pressed, and with a new Manila haircut that looked an awful lot like the government-issue cuts they’d seen on the crewmen of the aircraft carrier.
The carrier had been quite an experience-a ferryboat for a motley collection of refugees. Its flight deck bad resembled a floating flea market when the U.S.S. Pillsbury had delivered them, and it had become more and more crowded as other frigates arrived to dump off the desperate people they were fishing from the South China Sea. The crowding became their good fortune. Somebody ordered helicopters to shuttle the surplus over to the Subic Bay Naval Base outside Manila. Their little party had made it onto the second flight.
Osa was walking across the carpet toward him, smiling.
Moon caught his breath. An almost-white skirt, a blouse with just a touch of blue in it here and there, her dark hair soft around her face.
Moon stood. “Wow,” he said.
She rewarded that with a wider smile. “Wow to you too. Isn’t it good to feel clean again? And have something done with your hair?”
“Or something done to it,” Moon said, rubbing his hand across what was left of his.
She laughed. “I think you found Nguyen’s barber,” she said, and sat in the chair across from him.
“Someone told me that time cures bad haircuts. Probably it was Mr. Lee.”
“Not tattoos, though,” she said. “I worry about that. What will Nguyen do about that awful tattoo when he has to go back to Vietnam?”
“Nguyen will be all right,” Moon said. “The navy takes care of its own.” Nguyen had been lucky. In fact, they’d all been lucky. Their only really tense moment had come at the Cambodian border checkpoint. The tanks were still there, and now so were the Khmer Rouge. But they had expected no trouble from their rear. He’d kept the APC in normal speed and rolled it right down the trail with Khmer Rouge troopers staring and Nguyen waving happily. He’d held his breath until they were past the tanks. He’d doubted Pol Pot’s citizen soldiers would know how to operate them, and he’d drained their fuel tanks onto the ground, but just seeing them there made him nervous.
Needless nerves. By the time the Khmers realized they weren’t stopping and the shouting and shooting began, they were out of range of anything that could dent the APC. The rest of it was travel through a public celebration. The only armed men they saw were Vietcong jubilantly returning Nguyen’s flag-waving. The only explosions they heard were fireworks.
The PBR had made it down the Mekong, mingling with such a swarm of refugee boats that the country’s new rulers had not a hope of stopping the flood even if they’d wanted to. They made it out past the brown water and into the choppy blue of the Gulf of Siam, hoping the Glory of the Sea might have arrived a day early. Instead they’d seen the little frigate Pillsbury, patrolling the river mouth for lives to save. The red-haired lieutenant peering down into their boat had shouted, “Hey, Gwen. You too damn mean to die?” And Nguyen had shouted something which included “son-a-bitch” and provoked some more yelling and laughter.
The lieutenant’s name was Eldon, and Nguyen had been his gunner when Eldon was an ensign running a Swift Boat up the Mekong back in 1969. And before the Pillsbury had turned them over to the carrier, Eldon had written a letter on official navy stationery expounding Nguyen’s daring deeds and his claims for special treatment as a political refugee. “I doubt if he’ll go back,” Moon said. “He has no family left.”
“But how about a job?” she said. “I taught him some more English on the ship and he learned fast. But still-”
“Don’t worry about it,” Moon said. “He’ll have a job.”
He told her about the office Ricky had opened at Caloocan City, and about the potential business. “I talked to Tom Brock this morning. We already have two copters in the hangar there. The general Ricky was dealing with told him to mark them off as unrepairable and keep them instead of paying the repair bills.”
Osa had no comment.
“Does that sound sort of dishonest to you?”
“It sounds like Asia. How about you?” Osa said. “Did your embassy get all the paperwork done for Lila?”
“Yeah,” Moon said. “Less hassle than I expected.”
“Good,” Osa said.
“There’ll be more of it when I get her back to the States, though. All kinds of forms to fill out. Getting a birth certificate. So forth.”
“I can imagine,” Osa said. “Where’s Lila now?”
“This hotel has a nursery service, complete with nannies,” he said. “She’s probably being taught how to speak Tagalog. And how about your documents? You all right?”
“Fine,” Osa said.
“You have dual citizenship, don’t you? Didn’t you tell me you had a Dutch passport as well as the Federation of Malaysia?”
Osa looked surprised. “Yes,” she said. “Why are you asking?”
“There are too many important things I don’t know,” Moon said. “Like whether you enjoy walking.”
“I do,” Osa said.
“Then I think we should take a walk.”
“In the dark?” Osa asked. But she got up.
“The moon will be up,” Moon said. “And I will take you on the only walk I know in Manila-down past the yacht basin and along the waterfront. And if we keep walking long enough there’s a restaurant I passed called My Father’s Mustache. We could have dinner.”
The moon was indeed up, but barely and far from full.
“Did you call your mother again? Is she-”
“She was asleep. But the nurse said everything was fine. Her leg is sore where they took the vein for the bypass surgery, but that’s usually the worst of it. They said they could discharge her tomorrow, but I asked them to wait until I can be there to take her back to Florida.”
“She’ll be so happy to see you,” Osa said.
“Funny thing,” Moon said. “When I told her we’d found Ricky’s daughter, I told her I hadn’t been calling because we had to go all the way into Cambodia to get the baby. I told her why it took so long. About the trouble we had in the Philippines. And getting to Cambodia. But it was just like she’d taken it for granted. No surprise at all.”
“What did she say?”
“She said something like, ‘Well, you already told me the baby didn’t get to Manila and you thought maybe she’d still be in Vietnam.’ So she had known it would take me a little longer.” He shrugged, made a wry face. “Can you believe that? ‘Take me a little longer!’”
He waited for Osa’s surprised response, but Osa was walking along beside him. He glanced at her. She looked amused.
Moon shrugged again. He didn’t seem to understand anyone anymore.
“What else did she say?”
“Oh, was I all right? And all about the baby. Is she healthy? Does she look like Ricky? How old is she? What does she weigh? How many words can she say?”