Tony Hillerman - Finding Moon

“And I will keep you informed,” Castenada said. “If I learn anything.” His tone suggested he didn’t expect that to happen. “Good-bye.”

Mr. Lee’s eyes were open again, his consciousness returned to this hotel room by some triumph of will.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “We have intruded on your privacy. A family matter.”

Moon dismissed that with a gesture. “We were talking about records of your transaction.”

“Yes,” Mr. Lee said. “I was about to ask if you could allow me to look through your brother’s letters. I hope that will help me determine the place where my family’s little urn was left.”

“That might be possible,” Moon said. “I will get them from my mother and look through them and get in touch with you.”

“You don’t have them?” Lee no longer looked sleepy. His eyes shifted to the luggage beside Moon’s dresser-a woman’s matching blue suitcases, an expensive-looking leatherbound case, and Moon’s grubby hanging bag.

Moon’s distaste for deception warred with his fatigue and lost. He was tired. He yearned for solitude to consider what Castenada had told him. To decide what he must do about it. Besides, the sympathy he felt for Mr. Lee was overlaid with skepticism. None of this seemed real.

“I will have to get them,” Moon said. “Where can I call you?”

Mr. Lee made a faint sound that probably would have become the first word in an argument. But he cut it off and rose shakily to his feet. He extracted a card from his wallet, a pen from his coat, and wrote.

“Here is where I am staying.” He handed Moon the card and walked stiffly to the door, trailed by his grandson. There he turned back and looked at Moon. “This urn is very important to my family,” he said. “I intend to offer a reward of ten thousand dollars for assistance that leads to its recovery.”

“I’m not eligible for a reward,” Moon said. “If my brother misplaced your urn, I feel responsible. I’ll do all I can to help you recover it.”

Mr. Lee made a movement that was something between a bow and a nod.

“Mr. Mathias,” he said, “your brother talked of you often. From what he told me of you, I place a high value on that promise. And if I can help you locate your niece, I hope you will allow me to do so.”

“Thank you,” Moon said. “But first I have to decide what to do.”

But he had a sick feeling. He knew what he’d have to do. He’d have to go find Ricky’s kid.

BANGKOK, Thailand, April 15 (Agence France-Presse)-Two refugee South Vietnamese military officers said today that embittered ARVN troops used their tank gun to destroy the ancestral tombs of President Nguyen Van Thieu before they withdrew from Phan Rang, the home of the president’s family.

The two, with seven other refugees, arrived at Bangkok airport yesterday in a military helicopter. They said their ranger battalion had been cut off and destroyed by Communist troops south of Phan Rang.

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 kam taap.

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 Press-Register’s annual nightmare-the vacation edition.

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.