lizard, and the odd high-note low-note call they were hearing now was from the gecko, another climbing lizard, and the huffing came from water buffaloes resting after a day’s work in the rice paddies.
“And how about that sweet smell?” Moon asked. “Sort of like vanilla?”
Mrs. van Winjgaarden gave him the name of the vine that produced that aroma. It was a Dutch word. As he repeated it after her, Moon became aware that he no longer felt quite so lonely.
PARIS , April 22 (Agence France-Presse)- The French government today urgently appealed for speedy resumption of negotiations to carry out the 1973 Paris agreement on Vietnam and for an immediate cease- fire.
Still the Seventh Day
THE SOUND OF RAIN POUNDING against his window had awakened Moon during the night. But by midmorning it had blown out over the South China Sea. The sky over Palawan Island wasn’t the dark deep blue that Moon had learned to expect in the Colorado high country, but it was as blue as it gets in the tropics. And the sun was bright enough to raise Moon’s spirits. It also produced a barely visible haze of steam from the potholes, rice paddies, and roadside ditches and sent the humidity up to steambath levels.
“I still don’t think they’re going to let you in,” he told Osa van Winjgaarden, who was jolting along. beside him in the back seat of their converted jeep taxi. “Prisons aren’t going to let strangers in without any sort of credentials or passes.”
“If they don’t, then they don’t,” Osa said. “Then I will just follow your plan. I’ll take the taxi back to the hotel and get out and send it back to pick you up.”
The tone was complacent, however. Moon glanced at her. Clearly Osa van Winjgaarden didn’t expect she would be taking the taxi back to the hotel.
Neither did the cabdriver, a tiny middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. Moon, who was trying to develop a better eye for things Asiatic, thought he might be part Chinese. Or perhaps, this far south, it was a Malay look. His cab, however, was distinctly Filipino. It was painted with pink, purple, and white stripes, with the name COCK SLAYER superimposed on both sides in a psychedelic yellow. Plastic statues of two fighting cocks facing each other in attack positions were mounted on the hood, a location that forced the cabbie to tilt his head to see past them when he rounded a curve. The cabbie had quickly lost patience with the argument in the back seat over Osa’s admissibility to the prison.
“They let her in,” he said, waving a hand impatiently. “No question. We all go in. I park at the office in there. I write down the time I wait for you. All right?”
The gate to the Palawan Island Federal Security Unit proved to be a large palm log blocking the narrow road. The log was overlooked by a palmthatched bamboo hut, which rose on bamboo stilts from the roadside ditch. A neatly printed sign above its door read IWAHIG PRISON AND PENAL FARM.
The cab stopped. Two men wearing blue coveralls emerged from the hut. If either of them was armed, Moon saw no evidence of it.
Cabbie and guards exchanged pleasantries and information in a language that wasn’t English and didn’t sound like the Tagalog Moon had been hearing in Manila. The older of the security men tipped his cap to Osa, gave Moon a curious stare, and held out his hand.
“He wants to see your pass,” the cabbie said.
Moon handed him the letter.
The guard examined it, stared at Moon again, returned the letter, and said something to the cabbie. All three laughed, and the older guard, still grinning, waved them through.
“Like I told you,” the cabbie said. “No trouble about the lady.”
Moon could see no sign that the inside of the Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm differed in any way from the outside. The potholed road still ran between rice paddies; hills rose a mile or two distant on either side of the road. The hills were covered by the deep green of the jungle, and at the margin of the jungle, bamboo shacks were scattered. Just ahead, two men were walking up the road, shovels over their shoulders. They stepped off into the grass, grinning, and made the universal hitchhiker’s signal.
“We’re inside the prison now?” Moon asked.
“Inside now,” the cabbie said. He laughed. “Don’t try to get away.” He slowed the jeepney to walking speed. The shovel bearers climbed onto the back.
“But who lives in the houses? Out beyond the rice paddies.”
“The colonists,” the cabbie said, gesturing toward his newly acquired passengers. “These guys.” He laughed. “They call ’ em colonists. After they’ve been here awhile, not done anything wrong for a while, they can bring their women in and build a house and get some land to raise their crop.”
“Really?” Moon said. He was remembering the cabbie laughing with the guards. Clearly this cabdriver liked his little jokes at the expense of tourists. The hitchhikers were actually prison employees, of course.
“And the prison keeps some buffaloes. So the prisoners can rent them when they need to plow. And then they turn in part of their rice, and the warden sells it and keeps part of the money to pay for the seed and the fertilizer and the rent.” The cabbie laughed again and held up his hand-rubbing his fingers together in all of suffering humanity’s symbol of extortion. “And a little something for the warden, I think. And a little something to buy Imelda a present too.”
“They used a system a lot like that in Java too,” Osa said. “When it was Dutch.” She turned and said something to one of the hitchhikers. The man grinned a gap-toothed laugh and produced a lengthy answer.
“He said you have to serve a fifth of your sentence before you can bring your wife,” Osa explained. “For him that was four years. And now he’s growing vegetables.”
“Not everybody wants to be a farmer, though,” the cabbie said. “Some of them work in the shop. Carve things. Make antique canes, chairs. Nets to fish with. Blowguns. Things to sell in the market.”
“What were you telling the guards back there at the gate?” Moon asked.
“I told them the lady was a lawyer the government sent down from Manila to investigate something. I told them you were her bodyguard.”
This time Moon laughed. “You’ll have trouble getting me to believe that story,” he said. “They looked at the letter.”
Now Osa chuckled. “I’ll bet they don’t read,” she said. “Is that right?”
“That right,” the cabbie said. “I had to tell them what it said. And I don’t read either.”
The man who came down the steps when the cab stopped at the administration building certainly could read. “I am Lieutenant Elte Creso,” he said, and took Moon’s letter. He glanced at it. “You are Malcolm Mathias,” he said, and looked at Osa. “It says nothing about a woman. Do you have a pass for the woman?”
“This is Mrs. van Winjgaarden,” Moon said. “My secretary. In Manila they said the letter would suffice for both of us. They said the authorities here would understand that one would be accompanied by one’s secretary.”
The lieutenant looked surprised. He considered this, looked at the letter again, sighed, shook his head, and motioned them up the steps.
The building reminded Moon of buildings he had seen in coastal Louisiana. It was a two-story concrete structure, whitewashed but stained by whatever those organisms are that grow on buildings in the tropics. It was raised some five feet off the earth on posts in tropical fashion and surrounded on both levels and all sides by broad verandas. Moon guessed it had been built early in the century, and not as part of a prison. Perhaps it was a hospital once, or a school. It dominated a broad, grassy plaza, the other three sides of which were lined by one- story buildings. They looked like barracks, Moon thought, but probably were quarters for the nonfarming inmates. He paused in the shade of the portal and looked back. Nothing stirred in the noonday heat.
It was very little cooler in the whitewashed room where they sat waiting for George Rice to be delivered to them. High ceiling, high windows, and a brass plaque beside the door declaring that Iwahig Prison was built in 1905 by the United States Philippine Commission. Overhead the blades of an ornate ceiling fan made their leisurely
