Hillerman, Tony (29 page)

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.”

Moon waited, but that seemed to be all she had to say.

“So I just don’t understand you. Which Moon are you?”

“I don’t know,” Moon said. But even as he said it, he knew that whatever the reason, he simply wasn’t willing to stop now. It had to be done. No use arguing about it.

“How are you going? In that little tank?”

“I put enough extra gasoline in those GI cans to get me there and back. Or close to it.”

She took a deep breath and released it. “You’ll just need enough for one way. They’ll kill you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Be reasonable. The Vietcong, maybe not.

Maybe they would just lock you up. But the Khmer Rouge? You represent everything they hate.”

How could he explain this? It would sound like dialogue out of a bad movie. But it was true, so he said it.

“There’s something worse than being killed sometimes. It’s living with too much failure. I’ve got a long list of screwups behind me. Finally you decide you can’t stand another one.”

She stared at him, waiting for him to explain. He didn’t.

She produced a wry smile. “Sometime I think you will tell me what happened to you to make you like this. If you live long enough.”

Moon returned the smile, feeling better. “Maybe so. But it’s a long story and dull. We don’t have time for it now.”

“I think we have what’s left of three days,” she said.

“No,” Moon said. “I want to get started tonight. Get out of here in the wee hours of morning. When all the bad guys are getting their sleep.”

Osa said nothing to that for a long time. She looked down at her hands, then up at him. She was facing the west, toward where the remnants of broken clouds still reflected a little of the twilight. Beyond her in the clearing skies over the skeletons of the murdered trees along the creek, the moon was rising. Almost full. The moonlight touched her hair and the twilight her face, and Moon realized for the first time just how much he liked to look at this woman. Unless he was very, very lucky, this would be the last time he’d see her.

BANGKOK
, Thailand, April 29 (Agence France-Presse)—An estimated 80 South Vietnamese aircraft streamed into U Taphao airport today carrying at least 2,000 refugees fleeing their country. As night fell the landings continued.
    A Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman said no permission had been granted for the landings. He said the refugees would be “deported” and that the aircraft—all provided to South Vietnam by the United States—would be “turned over to the new government of South Vietnam.”

BY THE TIME MOON HAD LOST THE BIG argument, gotten the APC in gear, and rolled it out of the gate of the Nung enclave, he had sorted out what he needed to worry about in chronological order.

Concentrate on the worries. Forget the argument. It had been lost, actually, when Mr. Lee had insisted, adamantly, that he must go along because only he could identify the ancestral bones with any certainty. The territory along the Vietnam-Cambodian border was populated with various Taoist sects. Ancestral shrines were everywhere. With the current Khmer Rouge upheaval and with the destruction of such shrines an important part of Pol Pot’s Zero Year program, bone urns might be found anywhere. Enshrining the wrong ones for his own family would cause dangers and misfortunes beyond comprehension.

This ancestral reverence and its importance to family fortunes was beyond Moon’s comprehension, but it was clear enough that Lum Lee was going along unless hell froze over or Moon prevented it by force. Which wasn’t Moon’s style.

How about Nguyen Nung, for whom Moon found himself illogically feeling responsible? After Lee had explained the situation to him, Nguyen knew he absolutely did not want to be left behind. He was certain the Vietcong would come before the time came to meet
Glory of the Sea.
Wherever the Americans went, Nguyen was going.

That left Osa. True, Osa had insisted she could run the river patrol boat out to the South China Sea with no help from anyone. Moon didn’t believe it. And now that she wanted to go along, she had decided she would certainly get lost. Which meant there was no way to leave Osa, even if Osa was willing to be left, which she emphatically wasn’t.

“I am going with you,” Osa had said grimly. “if you won’t take me with you, then I go alone. I walk. I came this far to get my brother. I don’t stop now.” Osa was glaring at him as she finished this statement, a trace of angry tears in her eyes. No use reminding her that just an hour ago she was assuring him that her brother certainly was already dead. No use thinking about it either. Think about the next problem, not the last one.

First came the Vietcong. They would be controlling the territory he had to cross on the first part of this journey, if they spotted a stray APC, what would they think of it? Would they assume it had been abandoned by the Yellow Tiger Battalion and was now in the friendly custody of some of their own? Possibly. if they didn’t and had only small arms, it was no problem. The APC had a top speed of twenty-eight miles per hour and could outrun them. But if the VC had rocket launchers, the game was over. The hardened aluminum of the APC would stop bullets and deflect shrapnel. The bigger stuff would punch right through it.

Moon had attempted to improve their odds by attaching one of Mr. Lee’s two Vietcong flags to one of the APC’s two radio antennas. Mr. Lee had discovered several of the flags with an assortment of other abandoned souvenirs in the closet of one of the bedrooms. He’d loaded them in, along with conical straw hats and assorted peasant attire, all far too small for Moon himself.

Moon had also gone hunting through the office and Ricky’s bedroom. The only useful thing he’d found was a drawer full of maps. Among them were U.S. Army artillery charts of Vietnam’s various military districts and just about everywhere else that the military felt might need attention. He extracted ones covering the delta provinces of Vietnam and the south end of Cambodia. Like the APC itself, such maps were familiar territory for ex-Sergeant Moon Mathias. They gave him a feeling of knowing what the hell he was doing. An illusion, he realized, but comforting.

When (and if) they neared Can Tho, worry number two kicked in. It became the Army of the Republic of Vietnam as well as the VC. if the sound of battle, or anything else, suggested that the Yellow Tiger Battalion still held the town or its crucial bridge, then the flag would be tucked away. Moon intended to skirt far east of Can Tho toward the coast of the Gulf of Siam. But if the Tigers were winning, which seemed unlikely, AR\TN soldiers might well be patrolling in that direction. On the other hand, if the regiment had been smashed, the territory would be aswarm with ARVN deserters. Would they be dangerous? From the radio reports they’d been picking up from transmitters in Thailand, Laos, and God knew where else, deserters from the collapsing divisions around Saigon had been causing bloody chaos. One report said panicking Vietnamese marines had seized a ship in Saigon’s harbor, forced civilian passengers off, and sailed away. Another relayed U.S. Navy reports of commandeered helicopters crashing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. In Saigon and the few other cities still under government control, there was widespread panic, looting, and shooting.

The third and worst worry would come with the Cambodian border: the Khmer Rouge.