“That’s Puerto Princesa?” Moon asked. “It’s the capital for the island?”
“It’s a very long island,” Docoso explained, “but it is also very thin.” He demonstrated thinness with his hands. “And nobody lives here but mostly Malays.”
The airport was also thin, a single runway closely bordered by palms, bamboo thickets, and assorted tropical vegetation strange to Moon. He wondered how it must have looked before Imelda ordered it enlarged.
“The hotel here at the airport is the best,” Mr. Docoso said as they crowded down the exit stairway. “Very modern. Toilets and bathtubs in the rooms and every room is equipped with refrigerated air-conditioning.” Docoso seemed to feel that this recitation of assets might seem incredible. He shrugged. “Imelda owns it,” he explained.
SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 21 (Agence France-Presse)-President Nguyen Van Thieu resigned tonight after ten years in office. He appointed Vice President Tran Van Huong to replace him and denounced the United States as “unworthy of trust.”
Evening the Tenth Day
THE ROOMS OF IMELDA’S HOTEL on the road between Puerto Princesa and its airport were indeed equipped with refrigerated air-conditioning. Exhaust vents for this frigid air had been installed above the bed and in the bathroom. Unfortunately nothing came out of them. Moon called down to the friendly young man behind the front desk to report this deficiency and received the information that the “machinery was temporarily inoperative” and that “repairs were currently under way.” It sounded to Moon as if the young man had either memorized this report or was reading it from a card. Not a good omen.
He forced open his windows and stood beside them, breathing in the hot, humid air.
The last glow was dying from the sky along the western horizon, and the jungle was producing the tropical sounds of twilight. Moon stood listening. He could identify the mating song of frogs, which seemed to be universal. The little chirps would be bats patrolling for mosquitoes, just as they did on summer evenings in Oklahoma and Colorado. But most of the sounds were strange to him: a sequence of whistles (perhaps a lizard of some sort), odd grunting sounds, a sequence of rapid clicks, repeated, and repeated, and repeated. They were sounds that might be from another planet, or a science fiction fantasy, and they gave Moon Mathias a sudden overwhelming sense of being absolutely alone.
He turned away from the window. His suitcase was where he’d tossed it on the bed, waiting for him to finish unpacking. The doorless closet space contained only a cluster of coat hangers waiting to be used. The room, even the door to the bathroom, had been painted a color Moon couldn’t identify- what a mortician would think of as flesh tone.
Moon hurried out into the hallway, down the stairs, and into the lobby. Mr. Docoso was sitting there with a middle-aged Japanese couple and a man who looked Arabic. They were watching something on the television set in the corner. The set produced the sound of laughter. Mr. Docoso motioned Moon to join him on the lobby sofa.
“I’m going out for a walk,” Moon said. “I have to get some exercise.”
He took it slowly in this darkness at first, going carefully down the front steps and across the gravel pathway to the parking spaces. But there was still a faint glow of twilight. A first-quarter moon hung halfway up the eastern sky, and Moon’s eyes adjusted quickly. By the time he’d reached the road leading toward town he was walking his standard U.S. Army pace.
The road surface seemed to be a mixture of clay and gravel, packed hard and pocked with deep potholes. The roadside ditches produced frog sounds that his passage affected-loud ahead of him, silent beside him, and rising again to full cry behind him. This phenomenon reminded Moon that he was an intruder in this world of South Asian frogs and South Asian cultures. It reminded him of what he had come here to do.
A roadside palm had fallen there. Someone had sawed off the part that intruded into the roadway, but the remainder still spanned the ditch. Moon sat on it and reviewed his plans.
They were simple. His letter from the consulate had included a note from Assistant Warden Elogio Osoor. Warden Osoor said visiting hours were from one P.M. until two P.M. in the visiting room in the administration building. Convict Rice would be available for an interview. A guard would be present in the room at all times. No weapons or other contraband should be brought into the prison. This note should be shown to the guards at the perimeter.
Fair enough. He would ask Mr. Rice if he knew what the devil had happened to Ricky’s daughter. if he had any idea how to find her. And if Moon was lucky, Rice would say. he didn’t have the slightest idea and he knew of no one else who had an idea, and that the child was probably safe with her Cambodian grandmother somewhere in Thailand by now, and one of these days, when all this trouble was over and Southeast Asia returned to normal, Victoria Mathias would probably be receiving a letter from the Cambodian granny soliciting money for the child’s upbringing.
Whereupon Moon would be free to fly back to Los Angeles, make sure Victoria Mathias was getting proper care, and resume his life as a third-rate managing editor on a third-rate newspaper, sleeping with Miss Southern Rockies when she decided it was a good idea to have sex and trying to persuade her to marry him.
“Aaah!”
The cry came from the darkness down the road and was accompanied by a clatter and then an exclamation, which, while Moon couldn’t understand the language, was clearly an expression of anger and frustration.
He waited. Now the faint sound of footsteps coming toward him. The figure taking shape was tall, slender, female. Carrying a suitcase and a small handbag. Osa van Winjgaarden.
Moon didn’t want to startle her. He said, “Good evening, Mrs. van Winjgaarden.”
She produced what would have been a startled shriek, had she not instantly suppressed it, and said, “Who?”
“It’s just Ricky’s brother,” Moon said, getting to his feet. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” And put down the bag.
What was she doing out here carrying a suitcase? When they’d left the airport she’d said she was going to check into a hotel in Puerto Princesa. She hadn’t said why.
“Have a seat,” Moon said. He gestured to the palm trunk. “It’s comfortable.”
“Thank you,” she said. She left the bag on the road and sat. Even in the dim moonlight, he could see she was trembling.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She laughed. “It wasn’t your fault I’m so spooky.
What could you do? Just sit there and hope I didn’t -notice you when I walked past? That would have scared me to death.”
“An, well,” Moon said. “Anyway, it’s a nice night for a walk.”
“If you don’t break your ankle. I stepped in a hole back there.”
“I heard you,” Moon said.
Brief silence. Then she laughed. “I hope you don’t understand Dutch. Or the Indonesian Dutch we speak out here. You would have been shocked at my language.”
“I translated it to mean something like ‘Oh, shoot!’ in English.”
A chuckle. “That was kind of you,” she said. “And close enough, I guess.”
Moon had exhausted his small talk. He wanted to ask her what she was doing out here. Walking from her hotel in the town to Imelda’s hotel, apparently. Surely not all the way to the airport. But why not take a cab? Was she out of money? If the rates here were as cheap as Manila, it would have been less than half an American dollar. Moon’s lack of response didn’t seem to bother her. She sat motionless, looking at the night sky.
“You’re Dutch, then?”
“Van Winjgaarden,” she said. “That’s as Dutch as windmills and tulip fields.”
“It’s your husband’s name, though,” Moon- said. “Your maiden name might be French, or Italian, or Spanish,
