Tony Hillerman - Finding Moon

“I wish I could help you,” he said. It’s just-”

“But first you must find Ricky’s friends here. To learn about the child. Yes. I understand.”

And so they went to find Ricky’s friends

BANGKOK, Thailand, April 17 (Agence France-Presse)-A blackout of customary news channels wrapped developments in Cambodia in uncertainty today amid rumors that the new government had ordered an evacuation of the capital and reports that some government army units were still resisting in the south.

FINDING THE ADDRESS CASTENADA had given him for George Rice proved relatively simple by Manila standards. The taxi driver repeated the street number doubtfully and asked, “In Pasay City?” Moon had simply shrugged. But Mrs. van Winjgaarden said, “Yes. Pasay City. It’s off Taft Avenue. Close to the Manila Sanatorium.”

Which proved to be correct and left Moon wondering how a woman who lived in Kuala Lumpur, wherever that was, was so familiar with this address. She took his surprise as a question and extracted a little book from her purse.

“I buy street guides,” she said. “I keep them~ I think I must have twenty by now.”

The apartment with the Rice number on it was on the second floor of a ramshackle cement-block building smothered with tropical vegetation. Its two windows facing the porch were open and so was the door. Moon’s tap on the screen brought forth a small young woman clad in a loose pink house-dress.

She stood behind the screen wordlessly inspecting them.

“My name is Mathias,” Moon said, “and this is Mrs. van Winjgaarden. We are looking for George Rice.”

Her neutral expression became a scowl. She shook her head.

“We were given this as his address,” Moon said.

“Not now,” she said. “No more.”

“Do you know where we could find him?”

The expression changed. She knows, Moon thought, and she thinks it’s funny.

“It is very important,” Mrs. van Winjgaarden said. “It concerns the welfare of a child.”

“I don’t know,” the woman said. She shut the door, and as they were walking away down the porch they heard her shutting the windows.

“Well,” Moon said, “I guess we can check off Mr. Rice.”

“The neighbors will know something,” Mrs. van Winjgaarden said. “We will try some of the other apartments. I think someone will tell us something.”

Someone did. But he wanted to start at the beginning. This man, he said, didn’t actually live in the apartment. He came now and then, always driving a rental car, and then he would be gone for a long time, and then he would come again and stay a few days and then be gone again.

“This time, I think he will be gone a long, long, long time.” He extended two skinny arms all the way, suggesting something like infinity. He waited for the question.

Moon asked it. “What happened?”

“It was about a month ago,” the man said. “Maybe a little bit less. I work at night, at the sanatorium, and I was just going to bed when I saw him pull in over there and park. I was looking out and wondering where he had been, getting in just about dawn, you know. And they were waiting for him. Grabbed him just as he got out of his car.”

The man telling them this was standing barefoot in the doorway of the apartment just below the one Rice had occupied. He was a very skinny fellow in walking shorts and short-sleeved shirt. It seemed to Moon that he was enjoying the telling of his story. He stopped now and looked from Moon to Mrs. van Winjgaarden, waiting for another question.

“Who grabbed him?” Moon asked.

“Police,” the man said. “I counted five of them. Two in uniforms, and three of them looked like Marcos’s men. Suits on. Neckties. They took him upstairs, and I could hear them thumping around up there. Moving furniture.” The remembered excitement provoked a smile. “I thought it was political,” he said, “but it was just dope.”

“Just dope,” Moon said.

“Well, maybe it was politics; the Express said it was heroin. But with the Express, it’s whatever Imelda tells it to say. I think she owns it.”

“Is he in Bilibad?” Mrs. van Winjgaarden asked.

“I guess so,” the man said. “The paper said he got twenty-five years.”

Back in the taxi, Moon gave the driver the address of Robert Yager, a hotel in Quezon City. “He probably won’t be there,” he told Mrs. van Winjgaarden. “Castenada said he lives in Phnom Penh mostly. But that’s where he stays when he’s here.”

“Do you know how to go about talking to Rice in Bilibad?” she asked him.

“I’m not even sure I know what it is. A prison?”

“It’s the hard-time prison here in Manila,” she said. “I think they have another one way down south somewhere. They need a lot of prison space for all the political enemies Marcos is rounding up.”

“I guess I can call the Associated Press and ask them to find out if he’s in there,” Moon said. “And they’d know what the rules are for talking to prisoners.” And whether the charge was heroin smuggling. Heroin. How much heroin would fit in one of the Huey copters Ricky was repairing?

“I think you might try your embassy,” Mrs. van Winjgaarden said. “The U.S. government and the Marcos people are very friendly. Very close. Unless they think this George Rice is a Communist, they could get you in.” She laughed. “Heroin would not be as serious as politics. Unless maybe Mr. Rice forgot to pay whichever of Imelda’s cousins has the cumshaw concession for heroin.”

Heroin. It should be easy enough to tell heroin from ancestral bones if you looked into the urn Mr. Lum Lee was hunting.

Moon did not want to go to Bilibad and talk to George Rice. He wanted to go to Colorado. Tonight, if possible.

“Do you know this Rice? What did he do for Ricky?”

“I met him two or three times. He was a pilot for Ricky, and I think they were good friends too. I think he and Ricky were going to buy an airplane together. A little one. I think they both liked to fly around. Like a hobby.”

“Not heroin?” Moon asked, and wished instantly he could swallow the question.

She looked at him. “You know your brother. What do you think?”

“I think not,” Moon said.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Not heroin. Not Ricky. Cambodia is full of it. And Laos too. And Nam. They bring it down out of Burma, the little Chinese armies that control the mountains. They say Ricky worked with your Central Intelligence Agency, and the CIA is tied up with the opium armies. But I think Ricky didn’t like drugs. He saw too much in Nam. In the army. He talked about how it ruined his crews. And he said once he hated working with the CIA because they worked with the drug traffickers. I think he hated heroin.”

“Yes,” Moon said. “I think he would have.” And when he spoke again it was to comment on the rain, which had started again. It pounded against the roof of the cab. They sat in silence, watching the windshield wipers work and the streetlights come on as darkness closed in on Manila.

The desk clerk at the Quezon Towers confirmed that Robert Yager kept an apartment on the twelfth floor. But Robert Yager was not now in residence there. Nor was he expected. He had sublet the suite through the end of April. But Yager might be reached, the clerk said, at the R. M. Air offices in Can Tho, Vietnam. That, the clerk said, was “Mr. Yager’s usual place of occupancy.” He had no other address.

That sent them back into the cab, down the glistening rain-wet streets to find the address of Thomas Brock on Cuenco Street in Makati. While they hunted that, they agreed that Yager could be checked off as impossible. Thomas Brock soon joined him.