Finding Moon Read online

  Finding Moon

  Tony Hillerman

  In his quest to unravel the threads left by his brother's death in Cambodia, Thomas Reed travels to the streets of Manila and the jungles of Cambodia, where he gradually pieces together the information that will lead him to his brother's lost child.

  Tony Hillerman

  Finding Moon

  AN APOLOGY, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, DENIAL, AND DEDICATION

  To my fellow desert rats, my apologies for wandering away from our beloved Navajo canyon country. The next book will bring Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn of the Tribal Police back into action.

  I acknowledge the help of Professor Jack M. Potter, University of California anthropologist and author of Wind, Water, Bones and Souls: The Religious World of the Cantonese Peasant, and of Bernard St. Germain and Rick Ambrose, who patrolled the Mekong in the Brown Water Navy. Thanks, too, to Sgt. Chris Hidalgo of the New Mexico National Guard for familiarizing me with a vintage armored personnel carrier. Finally, thanks to my friend and cardiologist, Neal Shadoff, for helping my fictional physicians sound genuine.

  The denial: While former members of C Company, 410 Infantry, will recognize some of the names herein as those of our fellow grunts, I have borrowed only the names of these old friends and not their personalities. All characters herein are fictional.

  This work is dedicated to the men of C Company and to all those who earned the right to wear the Combat Infantry Badge.

  PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, April 12 (Agence France-Presse)-The United States abandoned its embassy here this morning, with six helicopters sweeping into the embassy grounds to evacuate the ambassador and his remaining staff.

  The action came as the last resistance of the Cambodian Army collapsed and Khmer Rouge troops poured into the capital, many of them riding on captured tanks and trucks.

  The First Day

  April 12, 1975

  SHIRLEY WAS GIVING MOON the caller-on-hold signal when he came through the newsroom door. He acknowledged Shirley with the I’ll-call-’em-back signal, threw his hat on the copy desk, sat down, and looked at D. W. Hubbell.

  “Nothing much,” Hubbell said. “AP has an early tornado in Arkansas. Pretty mediocre, but it could get better. Things are still going to hell in Nam, and Ford has a press conference scheduled for eleven Washington time, and Kissinger issued a statement, and General Motors-”

  “What did Henry say?”

  Hubbell did not bother to look up from his duties, which at the moment involved chopping copy from the teletype machine into individual stories and sorting them into trays. The trays were variously labeled PAGE ONE, SPORTS, FEATURES, FUNNY, SOB STUFF, and PIG IRON-the pig iron being what Hubbell considered “seriously dull stuff that the League of Women Voters reads.”

  Hubbell said, “What did Henry say? Let’s see.” He glanced at the top item in the PIG IRON file. “Henry said that Dick Nixon was correct in declaring we had won the war in Southeast Asia. He said the North Viets were just too stubborn to understand that, and the press was playing up the current setbacks to make it look like a disaster, and it was going to be the fault of the Congress for not sending more money, and anyway don’t blame Kissinger. Words to that effect.”

  “What looks good for the play story?” Moon asked, and sorted quickly through the FRONT PAGE tray. The United States seemed to be evacuating the embassy at Phnom Penh. Moon saved that one. The new president of South Vietnam, something-or-other Thieu, was picking a fight-to-the-death bunch for his cabinet. Moon discarded it. A bill to put a price ceiling on domestic oil production was up for a vote in a Senate committee. That was weak but a possibility. The South Viets were claiming a resounding victory at Xuan Loc, wherever that was. He tossed that one too. Senator Humphrey declared that we should establish a separate U.S. Department of Education. There’d be some interest in that. The Durance County Commissioners had moved the road to the ski basin up a notch on the priority list. Most of the 28,000 subscribers the paper claimed would be interested in that one. And then there was a colorful, gruesome feature on the plight of refugees pouring into Saigon from points north.

  It was good human interest stuff, but even as he read it Moon was conscious of how quickly these accounts of tragedy from Vietnam had become merely filler-like the comics and Ann Landers and the crossword puzzle. A few years ago they had been personal. Then he’d searched through the news for references to Ricky’s Air Mobile brigade; for actions using helicopters, for anything involving the Da Nang sector where Ricky’s maintenance company was stationed. But since Ricky resigned his commission in 1968, Ricky had been out of it. And since 1973 the United States of America was also out of it. What was left of the war was a distant abstraction. As Hubbell had described it once, “Just another case of our gooks killing their gooks.” In the press across America, and in the Morning Press-Register of Durance, Colorado, the war was no longer page one.

  But it was still page one sometimes at the Press-Register-until last month. Ricky was still in Nam, a player on the sidelines. That made Moon interested and made him think the Press-Register’s readers would also be. Now Ricky was dead, no longer running R. M. Air and fixing helicopters for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam just as he had fixed them for the U.S. Army. Probably the same copters, in fact. But as Ricky had said in one of his rare letters, he was “getting a hell of a lot more money and a hell of a lot less aggravation from division headquarters.” There was a kickback to ARVN brass, but Ricky considered that “the equivalent of an income tax.”

  Ricky had said more. He had said, Come and join me, big brother. Come and join the team. Join the fun. It would be like old times. He’d said, South Nam is going under, and fast. Soon there’ll be no more fat contracts from ARVN, but there will still be plenty of need for what R. M. Air can offer. Help me get this outfit ready for the change. And he’d said (Moon remembered the exact words), “R. M. Air is no good for slogans. We’ll rename it M. R. Air, for Moon and Rick, and call it Mister Air. I’ll do the business, you keep the engines running. Come on. With all that money she’s married to now, Mom doesn’t need you anymore. But I do.”

  Which was just Ricky buttering him up. Their mother had never needed him. Victoria Mathias wasn’t a woman who needed people. And neither did Ricky. But bullshit or not, Moon had enjoyed thinking about making the move, even while he was wondering why Ricky had invited him. But he had never answered the letter. There hadn’t been time.

  “That Arkansas twister is looking better, Hubbell said, inspecting the copy now emerging from the teletype. “The new lead says they got thirteen dead now.” He waved the paper at Moon, looking mildly pleased with himself.

  “It’s still a long ways to Arkansas,” Moon said. “Doesn’t the city desk have anything better than the ski basin road yarn?”

  Hubbell described the local news menu without enthusiasm. A one-fatality car-truck collision, vandalism at an elementary school, a roundup on candidates in an upcoming city council election. Hubbell yawned and waved away the rest of it.

  Moon picked up his stack of Please Call slips. The top one was from Debbie: Call me right away. It’s an emergency. Debbie’s emergencies tended to such matters as being out of fingernail polish. This one probably had something to do with reminding him of her birthday, which was tomorrow. But he dialed her office number. Her answering machine kicked in, her sweet voice inviting him to leave a message.

  “Debbie, how about-” he began. But Shirley was bearing down on him, and Shirley did not approve of Debbie. “I’m at the paper,” he said. “I’ll call later.”

  Shirley handed him another Please Call note.

  “I think it’s your mother,”

  “I’ll bet it isn’t,” Moon said. Victoria Mathias did not make telephone calls. She communicated by le
tter, written in a neat, precise hand on socially correct stationery. Shirley’s expression said she felt the kindness she’d shown by walking over with this message had been poorly received. “I mean it’s about your mother,” she said.

  Shirley oversaw the telephone system and, unofficially, the office. She was old and tired and would have retired years ago if she didn’t need the money. He felt a faint twinge of guilt at his mild rudeness. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll call right away.”

  But the call-back number on the slip was not the number for Victoria Mathias. The area code was not Miami Beach. And the note read, Pls call Robt. Toland immediately in regards to your mother.

  Moon frowned. What the hell was this? He punched the button for an outside line and dialed.

  “Thank you for calling Philippine Airlines. How may I direct your call?” It was the voice of a young woman pronouncing each word precisely.

  “Philippine Airlines?” Moon asked.

  “Yes, sir. This is Philippine Airlines.” The tone had changed slightly to the one used for drunks, weirdos, and those who dial wrong numbers.

  Moon swallowed his surprise. “Do you have a Mr. Robert Toland? My name is Malcolm Mathias. He left a call for me.”

  “Just a moment.”

  Moon listened to a telephone ringing. “Security office,” a man’s voice said.

  “Robert Toland, please,” Moon said. Why would the security office- “Just a minute.”

  Moon waited. No use thinking about this. No use speculating.

  “Toland. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Malcolm Mathias,” Moon said. “I had a note to call you.”

  There was the sound of paper shuffling. “Mr. Mathias, your mother became ill this morning in the waiting room here. An ambulance was called, and she was taken to West Memorial Hospital.” Mr. Toland, having exhausted what was written on his paper, stopped talking.

  “ Ill?” Moon said. “How ill?”

  “I don’t have that information,” Toland said. “What was she doing in your waiting room?”

  Mathias asked. “Do you know who she was meeting?”

  “She was preparing to board the flight. At least she had luggage checked onto the aircraft. Would you like to have the hospital number?”

  Moon considered what he had been hearing. Victoria Mathias would not become ill in an airport waiting room. Nor would she be boarding an airplane. He laughed. “There’s been some sort of screwup,” he said. “I think you have the wrong person.”

  “We take the next of kin from the passport,” Toland said. “Am I speaking to”-a pause-“are you Malcolm Thomas Mathias, Morning Press-Register, Durance, Colorado?”

  “Yes,” Moon said. “I am.”

  And he was, of course, Malcolm Thomas Mathias, managing editor for the past two years of the Press-Register. And that meant his mother had gotten her passport out of wherever she kept it, and found somebody to look after Morick in their Miami Beach apartment, and had gone out to the Miami International Airport and bought a ticket to fly somewhere on Philippine Airlines. Another thought occurred to Moon.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “Where is this?”

  “What do you mean?” Toland said. “It’s the airline security office.”

  “At Miami International? I didn’t know Philippine Airlines…”

  “LAX,” Toland said, sounding irritated. “ Los Angeles International Airport.”

  For some reason that made it all suddenly real to Moon. “She’s alive? Was it something serious?”

  “All I know is what I already told you,” Toland said.

  “What flight was it?” Moon said. “Where the hell was she going?”

  “The flight goes to Honolulu, Manila, and Hong Kong,” Toland said. “I could go ‘get her ticket and take a look.”

  “Never mind,” Moon said. He knew where his mother would be going. Somewhere toward Southeast Asia. Somewhere toward where her bright and shining younger son had been burned to ashes in a broken helicopter.

  SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 13 (UPI)- President Nguyen Van Thieu announced today that government control of the provisional capital of Xuan Loc had been reestablished in what he called a “resounding defeat of Communist forces.”

  Yesterday Radio Hanoi had announced that Vietcong troops had captured the city, just 35 miles north of Saigon. Refugees pouring into the capital brought stories of bitter fighting between Communist tanks and ARVN paratroopers.

  The Second Day

  April 13, 1975

  HIS MOTHER WAS ASLEEP. No, she was unconscious. Comatose. Or perhaps sedated. She lay in a position which no sleeping person would naturally choose: flat on her back, legs extended straight and parallel under the sheet, arms extended tight to the torso.

  A transparent tube emerged from plugs in her nostrils. Feeding her oxygen, Moon assumed. Four insulated wires from monitoring machines disappeared under Victoria Mathias’s white hospital gown. One terminated under a patch of tape high on his mother’s rib cage. Another tube linked her left arm to a bottle hung above the bed. She looked smaller than Moon Mathias remembered her. Surprisingly small. She had always seemed to him the largest person in whatever space she had occupied. Now she seemed to have shrunken, as if all those tubes had drained away her substance.

  Someone was standing behind him. It was a woman about Moon’s age, black, with a kind round face and a maze of wrinkles around her eyes. A nurse. What does one say under these circumstances? Moon could think of nothing that wouldn’t sound inane. He attempted a smile.

  “You’re her next of kin?” the nurse asked. “Family?”

  “I’m her son.”

  “They think she’s going to be all right,” the nurse said. “It seems to be a problem with her heart. Dr. Jerrigan’s around here someplace. He can tell you about it.”

  “A heart attack,” Moon said.

  The nurse looked down at Victoria Mathias, up at the monitor, then at the bottle, and then at the chart. “Looks like they’re still waiting for test results,” she said. “Things are always slower on weekends. But when they brought her in here we were treating her for severe chest pains. It happened out at the airport, so the paramedics got there in a hurry. That helps.”

  “I guess so,” Moon said. “Has she talked to you? Told you anything about what happened?”

  “Not to me, she hasn’t,” the nurse said. “Maybe to the doctor. But it doesn’t look like she’s felt much like talking.”

  “I don’t have any idea what she’s doing here,” Moon said. “Not the slightest idea. She lives in Miami Beach, three thousand miles away. Her husband’s an invalid. Lou Gehrig’s disease. Paralyzed. Stuck in a machine to help him breathe. She never leaves him alone. And she doesn’t even know anyone in Los Angeles.”

  It occurred to Moon as he said it that he didn’t really know if that was true. He had no idea who his mother’s friends were these days. Or where they were. Or if she actually had any. Once she had had friends, of course, when they lived in Oklahoma. He remembered them from when he and Ricky were teenagers. Mostly they were neighbors, the parents of his own friends, people his mother did business with, people in St. Stephen’s parish at Lawton. But they were older people, of no interest to teenage boys.

  Long, long ago. Before the army. Before Victoria Mathias had given up her business, and Oklahoma, and her independence, to give him, her disappointing elder son, a second chance to do something with his life.

  “All I know is I heard the ambulance brought her in from the airport,” the nurse said. “Have you looked in her purse? Maybe that would tell you. A letter or something.”

  Victoria Mathias’s purse was being held for her at the hospital business office. Moon showed his driver’s license, signed for it, and carried it into the lobby. He stopped there and sat for a moment, holding it in his lap. Some childhood inhibition kept him from breaking the tape that the airline’s security people had used to seal it. One doesn’t pry into one’s mother’s purse.


  “It’s not something our family does,” his mother would have said, not criticizing those nosy people who invade privacy but putting her two sons on a level at which better performance is expected.

  He turned the purse in his hands. It was made of polished pearl-gray leather. Big and expensive-looking. His mother would have been wearing a tailored suit exactly compatible with this color when her heart failed her. Her shoes would have been tasteful and perfectly buffed. He turned the purse in his hands again. A corner was worn. The leather almost imperceptibly frayed. Frayed? Could this be the purse of Victoria Mathias?

  Moon fished his glasses from his shirt pocket and inspected the spot. It had been covered with some sort of transparent varnish. Fingernail polish, perhaps. Neatly and precisely applied, as his mother would have done it. He looked at the purse with new interest. Had it gained some sentimental value in the mind of Victoria Mathias? Was his mother less meticulous than his image of her? Was his mother short of money? He thought of the condo where she had moved with Tom Morick after their marriage. Lavish, with its tenth-floor roof garden and the long balcony looking down on the Atlantic surf. When he’d asked her about the rent she had looked embarrassed and said that Tom owned the building.

  The scuff mark made opening the purse easier for him-as if it belonged to some stranger into whose affairs he had been somehow injected.

  A faint smell came from the purse. Lavender? Lilac? Some flower that had grown in his childhood. They had taken her flowers, he and Ricky. Ricky had found them blooming in a field behind a neighbor’s hay shed and picked them. Just weeds, Moon had thought. But they had found a bottle for the stems, and when Victoria Mathias came home from work she had transferred them to a vase and kept them on the mantel until the petals fell off.

  Moon sorted through the purse. Something in it surely would tell him what had brought his mother across the continent. He extracted a thick plastic folder bearing the name of a Florida bank. He tapped it against the back of his hand, opened it. Hundred-dollar bills. He glanced around the lobby. No one seemed to be watching him. He counted. Eighty of them, mostly new. Eight thousand dollars. Another mystery. He replaced the folder in the purse and removed two envelopes. One had a Manila return address: Castenada, Blake and Associates, Attorneys-at-Law. It would be something to do with Ricky, Moon knew. Perhaps the law firm Ricky’s company used. The other envelope was hand-addressed with no return. The stamp was a white heron in flight against a gaudy sky, canceled in Thailand. Then, he noticed it was not addressed to his mother but to Ricky Mathias at Ricky’s business address in Vietnam.