Tony Hillerman - Finding Moon

“ Hawaii is just three or four little insignificant islands, and not many people, and most of them are Japanese.” In describing his adventures as a Philippine Scout, Mr. Docoso had already made it clear that he considered the Japanese savages. “We cannot understand why you made those people a state and not us. You tell me so I can know that.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Moon said.

“I know lots and lots of Americans,” Mr. Docoso said. “Nice people. Like you. I deal with them in my business. They bring their old worn-out ships in here, and run them ashore or set them on fire, so the insurance companies will pay them something, and then I buy the scrap metal. Good for everybody. Good people. But why did they do that to us? Why did you turn us away like dogs, and give us gangsters for our government, and then have the CIA teach the government how to torture people so we can’t get rid of them? I wish somebody could tell me why that is.”

“What would you think if I told you I was an agent of the CIA?” Moon asked.

That seemed to work. Mr. Docoso lapsed into silence. Moon edged a cramped foot from under the seat ahead of him and flexed it. He thought about how to deal with Mrs. van Winjgaarden, who, unfortunately, was occupying a seat three rows ahead of him.

“But I know Mr. Rice,” she’d said. “Of course I should go along. I know that part of Cambodia, that part along the border just above the Mekong Delta. I’ve been there visiting my brother. I will know what to ask Mr. Rice.”

And he had said no deal. He’d handle this alone. She couldn’t go. She couldn’t get into the prison even if she did go. And she had said they would probably let her in if she was with him. They would think she was his secretary, or something like that, and he had said, Maybe, if I would be stupid enough to lie to authorities of a foreign prison.

But anyway, there she was three rows up the aisle, head bent slightly forward. Asleep, apparently.

Mr. Docoso poked him with an elbow, grinning up at him. “You are joking me,” he said. “You are never with the CIA.”

“No?” Moon said. “Why not?”

Mr. Docoso clutched his throat. “No necktie,” he said. “CIA they wear nice clothes. Clean. Pressed. Expensive suits, vests, shined shoes.” He pointed to a man who Moon had thought to be a Japanese businessman in the aisle seat two rows up. “Like that one. Or the other kind of CIA, they wear sports shirts and leather jackets. Two kinds of CIA but neither kind is like you.” Mr. Docoso was grinning broadly at this, shaking his head in affirmation of his wisdom.

And so Moon flew across the Sulu Sea listening to Mr. Docoso’s vision of the state of the Filipino nation circa April 1975. He learned that Fernando Marcos’s father hadn’t been a poor Filipino as his press releases and biographers insisted but the son of a wealthy Chinese loan shark, and how Imelda had the airport at Puerto Princesa enlarged because one of her cousins was building a tourist resort on the beach up at Babuyan, and a great many other things about the presidential couple’s kith and kin and their nefarious dealings.

Finally, the blue water below them converted itself into the deep green of tropic jungle.

“Puerto Princesa,” said Mr. Docoso, pointing downward. And below there appeared a cluster of wharves, barnlike warehouses roofed with red tin, a docked ship that looked to Moon like some sort of navy auxiliary vessel, a very small and very dirty freighter, and a hodgepodge of anchored small craft, among them a pencil-slim two-masted sailing ship, which seemed from high above so white, so clean, so tidy that Moon thought of a swan in a yardful of dirty ducks.

The town itself reinforced that impression. One- and two-story buildings, some thatch-roofed, some bamboo, some of more or less standard concrete-block construction, clustered along narrow dirt streets. It was a very small town with trees everywhere, a small open square where a public market seemed to operate, a dilapidated church with a cross atop each of its double spires. Moon could see no sign of anything that looked formidable enough to be a government building.

“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.”

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.