"We found a man named George Rice. He worked closely with my brother. Rice told us that the day Ricky was killed he called in on his radio and said he had picked up the urn someplace up north in Cambodia. He said he was leaving it off at the home of Eleth Vinh's parents. The name is Vin Ba and it's a tiny little village in Cambodia near the Vietnam border."

"Ah," Lum Lee said. "Mr. Mathias, this is very kind of you. Very generous. It is difficult for a Westerner- for anyone who is not a Buddhist-to understand how important these bones are for our family."

"I've read about it," Moon said. "But I'm afraid this information will be too late. I hear the Khmer Rouge are taking over everything. We may not be able to get there. And it may be gone if we do."

"But this is most generous of you, this kindness to a stranger."

"It is a family responsibility," Moon said. "You contracted with my brother-"

Mr. Lee gave him a moment, decided the sentence wouldn't be finished, said, "But that was an accident," cleared his throat, and went on. "I myself was not able to reach Mr. Rice. I was informed he was in prison. In the south."

"He's in the Federal Correction Unit on Palawan Island," Moon said. "Our emba.s.sy arranged for me to talk to him."

"Of course," said Mr. Lee, and Moon heard a wry chuckle. "I think the Taiwan emba.s.sy would not know me, and the mainland China emba.s.sy would not find favor in the present Philippine foreign office. You are there now? On Palawan?"

"At Puerto Princesa," Moon said. "At the Puerto Princesa Filipina hotel."

"And from there you are going over to Vietnam? Or you come back to Manila?"

"I don't know," Moon said. "I have no plans made. But if I can find the urn I will bring it to you. Where? At your hotel in Manila?"

"Yes," Lee said. "They know me here. And where will you be?"

Probably in prison, but no use getting into all those details. "I'll be here for a day or two." Or however many years it takes to serve out a criminal conspiracy term.

And that had been more or less that. A few more expressions of grat.i.tude on Mr. Lee's part, and disclaimers by Moon.

The next call had been to the cardiac ward in Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. He'd asked the nurse who answered how his mother was doing.

"Morick," the nurse said. "Oh, yes. Dr. Serna has been trying to reach you in Manila. Just a moment while I page her."

Moon waited, uneasy. Dr. Serna calling him in Manila couldn't be good. It wasn't.

"Ah, Mr. Mathias," she said. "I haven't been able to reach you. The hotel number you gave us in Manila-"

"Is she worse?"

"We couldn't wait," Dr. Serna said. "We tried an angioplasty. Usually they're effective. This one wasn't. So we-"

"Is she dead?"

"She's alive. Her condition is stabilizing. But we must do bypa.s.s surgery right away. How soon can you get to Los Angeles?"

"Ah," Moon said. "I don't know. I'm at Puerto Princesa. Little place way down at the wrong end of the Philippines. I'll have to find a way to get back to Manila and then-"

He stopped, thinking of George Rice in the jungle, of the police surely watching the airport. He'd never get to Manila. And if he did, the police there would grab him the minute he showed his pa.s.sport.

"Look," he said. "I'll get there as soon as I can. Do the surgery. You have my permission. Do whatever you have to do to save her life."

"We can declare it a medical emergency," Dr. Serna said. "Because it is."

"Can I talk to her?"

"She's sedated."

"Would you tell her for me that I love her. And tell her I'm going to find her granddaughter if I can."

Osa and he had decided that they couldn't risk Rice's simply walking up to the hotel and asking for them. They'd split the night watch into shifts, one prowling the grounds while the other slept, hoping to spot him the moment he arrived. Moon had insisted that Osa take the early watch. Being nervous, he'd shared much of it with her. Now it was almost dawn. He'd memorized the night sky of spring ten degrees north of the equator, identifying the familiar constellations and trying to guess the names of those new to him. He'd sorted out the night sounds, lizards, birds, frogs, mammals. He noticed how the mating symphonies and the hunting calls fell almost silent when the moon went down and rose again just before the eastern horizon lightened. But he neither saw nor heard any trace of escaped convict George Rice. Not on the potholed road. Not on the fringes of jungle beyond the hotel grounds. Not anywhere.

Above and behind him a sudden flash of light: the window of Osa's room. A few moments later, it went off. Bathroom call, he thought. He needed one himself and strolled across the gra.s.s to a nearby bush. It was flowering, surrounding him with blossoms the size of baseb.a.l.l.s, the aroma overpowering the thousand smells of the night.

When he emerged from the bush, Osa was sitting on the ledge under the hotel wall, looking toward the jungle.

She'll say, Have you seen him? Or she'll say, I couldn't sleep.

She patted the ledge beside her, inviting him to sit, and said, "What are we going to do?"

Moon sat, thought about how to answer.

She rephrased the question. "What are you going to do?"

"If Rice doesn't show up?"

"Yes. Or if he does get here. Either way."

"I don't know," Moon said. "I know I have to figure out some way to get to L.A. But it looks impossible. How about you?"

"I'll keep trying," she said. "I don't know exactly how to do it, but there must be a way." She touched his arm. "Anyway, there's nothing you could do there but pace the floor and wait. You said you had found a good doctor and a good hospital. All you can do is wait."

Moon found himself thinking that he'd liked What are What are we we going to do? going to do? better than better than What are What are you you going to do? going to do? But he thought of no way to express that thought. So he said, "if Rice is coming, it should be about now. When it's just light enough so he can see what he's getting into. See if we're out here waiting for him." But he thought of no way to express that thought. So he said, "if Rice is coming, it should be about now. When it's just light enough so he can see what he's getting into. See if we're out here waiting for him."

"He'd come out of the jungle, you think? Not down the road?"

"I would," Moon said. "I'd be scared to death. But I'd be more scared of getting caught than of getting snake-bit."

"I don't think so," Osa said.

"Don't think what? That I'm not scared of snakes?"

"Not scared of anything," she said. "Anyway, not scared to death. Ricky told us you didn't seem ever to be very frightened."

"Well, now you know better," Moon said.

"Know better? That means like I know more strongly?"

"No. It means you know you were wrong about me. I'm easy to scare. I'm scared about the trouble I got us into here. I'm scared about going to Cambodia."

She sighed. "As you said to me last night, I don't blame you. I'm scared too."

"But you would go?"

The pause was so long Moon thought she would ignore the question. But she said. "Yes. Sure. So would you."

Moon didn't answer. She was probably right, and that made his stomach feel uncomfortable.

"Why would I?"

"Because it's the way you are. You think of your mother, sick back there in that hospital. You want to bring a granddaughter for her to see. You think of that little girl. Your brother's daughter. In Asia people are very proud. They don't like those of other races. The Khmers don't like the Laotians, and the Laotians don't like the Thais, and the Vietnamese don't like the Montagnards, and n.o.body likes the people who are mixed."

Moon couldn't think of an answer. He said, "People are people."

In the dimness he could see her shaking her head. "They had it in the papers about how badly the Vietnamese treated the children left behind by your army. Half white or half black. Half Vietnamese."

He had read it. In fact, he had written a headline on an AP story reporting that. He couldn't forget it. That was part of his problem.

"Things get exaggerated," Moon said. "I'm in the news business. I know."

She was silent, staring into the jungle. It was light enough now to make out the shape of trees, shades of color. Somewhere in the night a water buffalo bellowed.

"I was a child in Java when they tried to overthrow the Sukarno government," she said. "There was supposed to be an a.s.sa.s.sination first and then a coup. The Communists were working with the dissidents, and so was part of the army, but something went wrong."

"Were you in danger?" he asked, wondering why she had shifted to another subject. But she hadn't.

"There was probably a betrayal," she said. "Usually there is a betrayal. And there was much fighting, and the Suharto people won and then told the people in Malaysia that the Chinese Communists were behind it all, and then the killing of the Chinese began. People in Asia always find a reason to kill the Chinese. The Chinese work hard and save their money and start their little shops and loan people money, so other people envy them. They blame them for things."

"Like the Europeans do with the Jews," Moon said.

"I think so. Yes. And all through Asia the overseas Chinese have networks. Extended family tongs. Sometimes criminal organizations. I remember as a child I used to collect tong signals. They're supposed to be secret but people get careless. I'd pick them up."

"Like what?" Moon asked.

"Like this," Osa said. She cupped one hand, touched fourth finger to thumb on the other. "Or this," and she turned both hands down with the thumbs swallowed in the fists. "Here in the Philippines they say President Marcos is part Chinese and his tong and the Chinese mafia helped get him elected."

Moon had no comment on this. He'd always a.s.sumed Douglas MacArthur had picked him.

"Our house was on a slope above the river. I remember seeing the bodies floating down," Osa said. She shifted on the shelf, hugged herself. "All sizes of bodies."

"I remember reading about it," Moon said. "Weren't several hundred thousand people killed?"

"I think all the Chinese," she said. "In our town the Chinese shops were all empty afterward, and the places where the Chinese lived were all burned down. And you never saw any Chinese anymore anywhere in Java or Sumatra."

"You don't have to remind me," Moon said. "I just hope the little girl, my niece, looks exactly like her mother."

"Maybe she will," Osa said. "Do you have a picture?"

"Yes. But I can't tell much from that."

From somewhere far behind them a rooster crowed, touching off a response from other roosters, arousing a dog and another dog and another.

"Tell me about your mother," Osa said. "And about Ricky. And what happened to your father. Everything"

"You first," Moon said.

She'd been born at Serang, not far from Jakarta. Her father worked for Royal Dutch Petroleum and was killed when the j.a.panese captured Java in 1942, before she was born. After the war, her mother married van Winjgaarden, who owned a warehouse at Jakarta and operated an export-import business. They had moved there, and she went to private school. Her mother spoke English and her foster father spoke German. The housekeeper who took care of her spoke Chinese, and the people around her spoke Malay and Chinese and a local dialect, and she fell in love with languages but wasn't very good at anything else. But that talent had been very useful. When she finished school, she had gone to work for her foster father, scouting the craft markets for handicrafts to export.

"My foster father always seemed like a real father to me. And he loved me like I was his own child," Osa said. "But he seemed to love dangerous things more than people. Always on flights in little planes in bad weather. Always on little boats when the typhoon was coming. Always in places where there was killing going on over politics. And one time-it was the first time I came here to buy things-he said he was going over to Borneo to buy some jade and teak things. And I said, Don't go. The rebels were fighting the government and it was dangerous. But he hugged me and said good-bye."

Silence. End of the story? Moon guessed the end.

"He didn't come back?"

"Never," Osa said. "Neither he nor the pilot."

"He was Damon's father?"

"Yes. And Damon is just like him. I thought Damon would come home then and keep the company going. But he wanted to be a saint. So our mother had to be the boss. I kept being the buyer."

And that was how she had met Ricky: buying in Laos and Cambodia and needing a way to get in and out.

"Your brother, he was a nice man. He wanted you to come and help him. I wondered why you didn't."

Moon let that hang.

"Now it's your turn. Tell me something about Mr. Mathias."

So he told her something. He planned to tell her just a little. Perhaps it was the darkness, as in Father Julian's confessional, or the sympathy he'd felt from her. Whatever it was, he told her a lot. And then he felt intensely embarra.s.sed.

"They put you out of the army? Just because of an accident?"

"I was drunk," Moon said. "I was using an army vehicle without authorization. Rules were violated."

"But still-"

"I don't want to talk about it anymore. If you keep asking, I'll ask you why you never got married. And personal things like that."

"Do you think Mr. Rice is coming?" Osa said.

"I doubt it," Moon said.

And Mr. Rice didn't. But Mr. Lee did.

WASHINGTON, April 22 (CNS)-A Pentagon official just back from Vietnam says he believes the worst threat to Americans remaining in Vietnam may be deserting ARVN combat troops who feel they have been betrayed.

"They're likely to go berserk in their bitterness and attack anyone they feel responsible for their defeat," the general said.