Hillerman, Tony by Finding Moon (v4) [html] Read Free Book Online

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.
The Fourth Day
April 15, 1975
    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