FROM THE LOS ANGELES International Airport to Honolulu, Moon Mathias alternated sleeping the sleep of the exhausted and reading through the papers he’d extracted from his mother’s luggage. He’d been through them hurriedly in his hotel room, having called the number Lum Lee had given him and summoned Mr. Lee to join him.
The night before, when Lee and his grandson had finally left, Moon had decided to see no more of the two. The whole business seemed unreal, if not downright sinister. Lee, if that was his name, was probably involved in something illegal, and the so-called grandson was his bodyguard. But with the normal light of day, sanity had returned. Lee no longer seemed to be some renegade Chinese Nationalist general running opium out of the Burma poppy fields. He was just a tired old man on family business. Whatever he was, it was no skin off Moon’s twice- broken nose. If he was engaged in something nefarious with Ricky, Moon wanted no part of it. He didn’t even want to know about it.
And so he had called Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee had come, promptly and alone. He’d politely taken a chair across the corner of the bed and explained that his grandson was at work. Moon had hoisted his mother’s heavy business case onto the bed, undone the straps, dumped out the bundles of papers, and sorted rapidly through the pile. Lee had leaned forward in his chair and watched, all senses alert, no sleepiness now. These papers are my brother’s, Moon had thought, but they mean a lot to this old stranger and nothing at all to me. I am the outsider here, not Mr. Lee.
He worked grimly through the pile, looking for anything that might be painfully personal, or criminal, or which fell into some nameless, unthinkable category which would not be fit for the eyes of this crumpled little stranger. Looking for what? For something that would somehow relate to him, the brother, the other son of Victoria Mathias. And when he realized what he was doing, he had stopped looking and pushed the entire pile over to Mr. Lee.
To hell with it. His mother seemed to have been sent whatever had been found in Ricky’s office by whoever had cleaned it out. “See if you can find anything useful,” Moon said. “Help yourself. Take a look.”
Mr. Lee had expressed gratitude and had taken a look, eagerly and efficiently. He made occasional notes, using a slim little pen that seemed to be genuine gold, and a slim little pad in a worn leather case. He seemed to be recording only names and addresses: a hotel in Bangkok; a shop in Pleiku; a village somewhere on the Thailand-Cambodia border; the name of someone who worked for Air America, which Moon recalled was supposed to be the ill-concealed cover airline of the CIA. Otherwise, names and places and numbers meaningless to Moon. And all the while Mr. Lee was jotting his notes he was explaining in his soft voice why the information might somehow lead him to the urn full of ancestral bones-his family’s
When Moon had called room service for coffee and sandwiches, Mr. Lee had added tea and fruit to the order and insisted on paying. He had done so with a hundred-dollar bill for which the bellman had insufficient change. Finally Mr. Lee had left, taking his notes.
“Did you find what you needed?” Moon asked. “Do you know where to find the urn?”
“Ah, no,” Mr. Lee said. “But I have names now of people to call. Perhaps one of them can help. Perhaps not. Perhaps I will have to impose upon your time again.” He removed his glasses and bowed to Moon.
“You have been kind to a stranger,” he said. “The Lord Buddha taught that the deeds of a kind man follow him like his shadow all of his days.”
Moon had gone for a walk then, out amid the roar of jets rising from the LAX runways and the whine of the freeway traffic. He walked twenty-seven blocks in what seemed to be the smog-diffused light of the dying day approximately north by northwest. Then he walked the twenty-seven blocks back again. He’d hoped the exercise would carry him back to some sense of reality-and it helped. He could think again of J.D’s diesel engine waiting in his garage to be reassembled, of Debbie’s disappointment at the missed birthday, and of how the paper- chronically shorthanded-would be handling his absence. He had even decided what to do about Victoria Mathias.
The next morning he handled most of it in an hour on the phone: having a dozen roses delivered for Debbie, leaving a message for J.D. that all he needed to do now was put in a new set of glow plugs and reassemble the engine, and trying to give Hubbell some ideas for filling up the
Rescuing Victoria Mathias from the jerk with the California suntan took two calls. The man he knew back home in the Durance General Hospital emergency room gave him the name and number of a heart specialist on staff named Blick.
“Good to talk to you,” Blick said. “You’ll be glad to hear that Sandra is doing just fine at Pepperdine. Nothing but A’s.”
Sandra? Sandra Blick? Oh, yes. They’d run a feature about her, with a picture. She’d won some sort of scholarship at the Colorado Science Fair. “I’m not surprised to hear that,” Moon had said, and told him what had happened to Victoria.
“Where is she?” Blick had asked. “In West General in L.A.? I’ll get you a good man on it. Somebody you can trust.”
Within an hour, Blick had called him back.
“I reached the cardiologist you need,” Blick said. “A woman named Serna. Great reputation. She wants to get your mother moved to Cedars-Sinai.”
“I’ve heard of that one,” Moon said.
“You should have,” Dr. Buck said. “It’s one of the four or five best hospitals in the country. Now, let me give you the telephone numbers you’ll need. And I’ll tell you how to make the transfer.”
At West General, Moon found that Dr. Jerrigan was not at the hospital and the doctor who had checked Victoria in was otherwise occupied. His mother was barely awake. He signed the required forms certifying that he was checking her out “against medical advice.” He scheduled the ambulance, collected her medical file, and signed financial forms. At Cedars-Sinai he checked her in and surrendered the file to a nurse at the desk in the cardiac ward. Then he waited thirty-seven minutes. Almost thirty-eight. A chubby woman with short gray hair and a round, serene face appeared, carrying the file he had delivered. She introduced herself as Emily Serna, sat down next to him on the waiting room sofa, and gave him the bad news.
All indications were that his mother had barely survived a severe heart attack. The circumstances suggested she might soon have another one. If she did, the odds were heavily against her living through it. A catheterization test was needed, an angiogram to determine the extent of arterial blockage and the damage already done to the heart muscle. “There’s some risk with an angioplasty,” Dr. Serna said. “Heavier because of your mother’s condition.”
“Angioplasty,” Moon said. “That’s running the fiber optic gadget up the artery to find the blockage?”
Dr. Serna nodded.
“How much risk?”
“Well, I’d say there’s a ninety-five percent chance she’ll have another heart attack-and soon-if we don’t do anything. And I don’t think she’d survive it. We need the angiogram to tell us what to do. Even in her condition the risk of the test being fatal is much, much smaller. If bypass surgery is indicated, then the risk might go as high as fifteen or twenty percent.”
Moon considered. Dr. Serna waited, face sympathetic. She looked to him to be extremely competent.
“Okay,” Moon said. “Is there a form I need to sign?”
“I have it,” Dr. Serna said.
Moon signed it.
“Now I have a question for you,” Dr. Serna said. “We had a call from Miami Beach transferred over from West General.” She checked her notes. “It was from a Dr. Albert Levison. He said he was the physician attending Tom Morick. That’s your stepfather?
He asked to be provided a complete account of your mother’s health. Does that sound reasonable?”
“It does. My mother is married to Tom Morick,” Moon said, aware that his voice sounded stiff. “Morick has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He’s pretty much paralyzed. In fact he’s in an iron lung, dying fast. He’ll want to know everything.”
“We’ll send Dr. Levison all the details, then. He can explain them to Mr. Morick. And your mother is more awake now, if you want to see her.”
