from the kitchen with two cups, gave one to Moon, reseated himself. “But I was surprised Ricky flew up there. What for? What was he doing? Nothing up in those ridges but three or four little villages. Hill tribes. But the Vietcong hide out up there, and nowadays I guess the Khmer Rouge too.”
“I heard Rice was in Bilibad Prison,” Moon said. “I was going to see if I can get in there and talk to him tomorrow to find out if he knows what happened to Ricky’s daughter. But they say he’s not there. And I need to know what you know-”
Brock’s expression went blank. He held up his hand. “What are you saying? You saying Lila’s not here?”
Brock’s wife was standing in the bedroom doorway, “Oh, God!” she said. “What happened to her?”
“What happened?” Brock repeated. “You telling me Castenada doesn’t have her?”
“I don’t know what the hell happened,” Moon said. “Castenada said someone was making arrangements to bring her out, and Victoria-that’s our mother-was flying out to Manila to pick her up. But she had a heart attack, and Castenada doesn’t seem to have any idea what happened to the child.”
“Son of a bitch,” Brock said. “I guess Rice must have-”
“Screwed up? I guess he did,” Moon said. “I heard he might have got distracted into another line of business. I heard he was arrested and stuck in Bilibad. But they say-”
“He’s not in Bilibad,” Brock said. “President Marcos and Imelda have Bilibad ifiled up with politicals. They sent Rice down to Palawan Island. To the prison down there.”
“Oh,” Moon said, not knowing how to react to this.
“You’re looking for little Lila, then,” Brock said. “They didn’t get her on a flight to Manila? I thought that was all set up.”
“By you?”
“By Rice,” Brock said. “Well, sort of by me. After Ricky and his lady were killed, we were moving things down to Long Phu. We were sort of expecting you to show up and take over, but we figured you’d have made the move anyway. Too risky where we were and things beginning to go to hell at Saigon. And then one day the Vinh. woman showed up. Eleth’s mother. She said they were trying to get moved out to Thailand but they weren’t having any luck because everything was blocked off, either by the army or the Khmer Rouge. She said Ricky and Eleth had planned to move to the States someday. They’d told her if anything should happen to them she should send Lila to her American grandmother. The old lady believed that with the Khmer Rouge coming they couldn’t keep the baby anyway because Pol Pot’s people were killing all the foreigners, and the baby looked American. So I called Castenada and talked to him about it and then I called this fella we work with in Saigon. I told him to get an airline ticket for the girl and fix up the documents she’d need and call me when everything was ready. Then the plan was for Rice to fly Lila up there and send her along to Castenada.” Brock paused. “Now you’re telling me Rice didn’t get it done? Is that right?”
“Castenada says the child didn’t arrive. So whatever you set up didn’t work,” Moon said. “Where’s the girl now, do you think?”
Brock heard the anger as well as the questions. He sat staring at Moon.
“Well, it ain’t as simple as I made it sound,” he said, finally. “We couldn’t get the goddamn papers. We couldn’t get an airplane seat. The wise guys in Saigon were hearing things that scared them, so the line in front of the U.S. Embassy was about a mile long and not moving. And the fat cats and generals’ wives were filling up the outgoing traffic.”
“And so you let it go,” Moon said. “Just dropped it.”
“I thought we’d get it fixed up. I had to come here to take care of problems. I told Rice to bypass the embassy and work on the CIA people. They owed Ricky a lot of favors. I said, Call in the IOUs, and I figured he would do it. I figured it was all taken care of.”
“From what I hear, your Mr. Rice managed to get a load of heroin flown out to Manila,” Moon said. “Why couldn’t he leave a little of that behind and crowd the kid on?”
Brock took a sip of his coffee, eyeing Moon over the brim. From the bedroom came the sounds of the woman getting dressed. Brock put down the cup.
“You want to hear about this or you want to fight about it?”
“All right,” Moon said. “Go ahead. Let’s hear it.”
“George must have thought he had it handled. I know for sure he took the girl up to Saigon with her grandma. Then he came back to Long Phu. There was a load of things there waiting that a customer wanted out. So George flew it down to Singapore. We had an old DC-Three we’d bought down there, getting it fixed. George picked it up and flew it over to Manila to pick up a spare engine and some spare parts we’d located there. And some Filipino customs people nailed him.”
Brock sipped his coffee.
“And seized our DC-Three, of course. That’s one of the reasons I’m still here in Manila: trying to get the damned thing released so I can fly it back. And working with this shyster lawyer trying to get George sprung out of prison. And trying to finalize a contract Ricky had started negotiating last winter.”
“So the little girl, she’s still there in Saigon, you think? With her other grandmother?”
“I don’t know. Maybe so. Maybe not. The old lady’s Cambodian. She doesn’t have any connections in Saigon.”
“Okay, then. Where the hell else would she be?”
“I guess you’re going to have to talk to George,” Brock said.
SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 19 (Agence France-Presse)-A spokesman for U.S. Ambassador William Martin told a Vietnamese television interviewer last night that the ambassador and his wife are still in Saigon “and have not packed any belongings.”
The Seventh Day
GETTING INTO THE PRISON ON Palawan Island and arranging a conversation with George Rice would be what the woman at the U.S. Consulate called “relatively simple.”
“The Marcos government keeps the important criminals up here at Bilibad to keep an eye on them,” she told Moon, looking up at him over her bifocals. “The Communists, the Huks, the wrong kind of politicians, old family types who have bad ideologies but good connections-they’re kept up here in Manila. They use Palawan for the regular criminals: robbers, burglars, murderers, car thieves, smugglers, rapists, so forth. The ones the government doesn’t have to worry about.”
The consulate clerk paused with that, rubbed her plump and dimpled chin, and considered what she might add to make sure Moon had received her message. Thinking of nothing, she looked up at him again and nodded.
“I think we can get you in, under the circumstances,” she said. “It seems to be a good cause. Finding a missing relative, I mean. And there doesn’t seem to be anything political about this Rice fellow.”
Then she suffered an awful second thought.
“There isn’t, is there?”
Looking into her determined stare, it seemed to Moon that this was another of those rare times when fudging a little on truth was ethical.
“I think he’s a Republican,” Moon said, and restored the clerk’s helpful attitude. She smiled at him.
“I don’t think they’d keep anyone there they considered dangerous,” she said. “I mean politically dangerous. I understand it doesn’t have any walls. Just sort of a big rice plantation surrounded by the jungle.”
“What keeps the prisoners from escaping?” asked Moon. The unexpected good news had stimulated his natural urge to be friendly.
The consulate clerk felt no such urge. “I have no idea,” she said. “Leave me your number and you’ll be informed when we get clearance.” While she was saying it she closed the folder in which she’d placed the request Moon had typed out, a copy of the relevant page from his passport, and the rest of the paperwork, and opened another folder and pushed the button that would send the next problem into her office to be dealt with.
“How long do you think it will take to get clearance?” Moon asked. “Any idea?”
