“Thirteen by then,” Moon said. “Well, we talked about it, the pros and cons. He said it would be better if he did it himself. Asked me to put the pistol in the hand he could move a little. He could hold it down in his lap, but he couldn’t raise it up to his head. Then he said nobody would believe it anyway. How could I explain his getting the pistol? Too many people would know he couldn’t have shot himself. He told me to take the pistol, and I did, and he asked if there was still that box of rat poison on the high shelf down at the plant. I told him that Mother had said it was too dangerous to have around and got rid of it.

“He said then he guessed we’d have to wait a little while, but not long. Dr. Morick had said his liver was failing fast and he wouldn’t live long anyway. Victoria would not have to put up with him much longer. But if I killed him, I would be her burden for the rest of her life. Her heart would break for me.”

“Indeed,” Julian said, “it would have. Your father was a wise man. So you put away the pistol?”

“Mother came in while we were talking. I must have been terribly upset. I didn’t hear the car.”

“And she heard you?”

“I was still holding the pistol. Dad saw her standing there in the doorway. And he said, ‘ Victoria. Malcolm overheard me yelling at you this afternoon and has offered to solve our problem for us. I think I’ve persuaded him it would just make a bad situation worse.’”

Moon took a huge shuddering breath.

“And she came in and took the pistol out of my hand and hugged me and started crying. We were all crying, all three of us.”

“Catharsis,” Julian said. “So you did have a happy ending. Sometimes love can be as effective as faith.”

Moon cleared his throat again. “Ah,” he said. “But that’s not the ending.”

“It couldn’t be,” Julian said. “Your story hasn’t come yet to the great sin you’ve teased me with. Did that involve your father?”

“He died the next year,” Moon said. “When I was fourteen. And my mother mourned for him.”

“And so did you,” Julian said.

“So ‘I had the example. A brave man and a brave woman and some notion of what you give up for love. So I didn’t have any excuse.”

“Excuse for what? Oh, for what you are about to tell me you did?”

“For what I did,” Moon said. “I had killed a man. I was driving drunk and driving an army vehicle off the post without authorization. We did it a lot, but the crime is being caught at it. So I was awaiting trial. Clearly guilty. The charge was homicide committed during the conduct of a felony. Drunk driving being the felony. I was assigned a first lieutenant as defense attorney. He advised me to plead guilty, saving the court time, and plead for leniency. The most I’d get was twenty years. I was terrified.”

“I can see why,” Julian said. “How old were you then, early twenties?”

“I don’t know why I was so frightened. Not for sure, anyway. I think maybe it was because I didn’t know myself very well yet. It seemed that a military prison was not the place I should be spending so much of my life. I felt like I was going to be buried alive.”

“Reasonable,” Julian said.

“My mother was notified, of course, and she came to see me. I told her about the lawyer. What he had said. She said that was intolerable. I said it was also inevitable. And she said surely something could be done. I said no it couldn’t be done, because we had no money for the big law firms and no political clout. I gave her the whole self-pity business. If I couldn’t have freedom, have my life back, at least I could wring some sympathy from my mother. And I did.”

Moon hesitated.

“I even cried,” he added. “I’ll never forget that. I actually cried.”

“Twenty years in prison,” Julian said. “I would have cried too. Who wouldn’t?”

“So my mother went home, and almost right away I got a letter from her. She was marrying Dr. Morick.”

“An,” Julian said.

“I told you Morick was Dad’s doctor. But he also had inherited real estate, and he was smart, and he’d made great investments in California land and in Florida beachfront. And was chairman of the county Democrats and a great friend of a congressman on the House Military Affairs Committee and had all sorts of connections. A lawyer showed up at the stockade, a white-haired man with an assistant carrying his briefcase. He took about fifteen pages of notes on what happened, and who questioned me, and what went on in the military hospital. And-guess what-a little later somebody at a higher level reexamines the charges, and they are reduced to conduct unbecoming a noncommissioned officer, unauthorized use of a military vehicle, and so forth. The penalty becomes loss of rank, loss of six months’ pay, and a general discharge.”

That finished the story for Moon. His confession had been made. He was tired.

Julian considered it. “Someone might say that was a happy ending,” he said. “But it wasn’t. Not for you.”

“She never liked Morick. He was Dad’s doctor and that gave him an excuse to be there a lot, to keep lusting after her. And he was a stuffy, boring, self-important old bachelor more interested in his real estate projects than in practicing medicine. But she wasn’t a very lucky woman, my mother. Her husband gives her a vegetable to care for, and then, when he dies, she has to marry another one to save a weakling son.”

“You don’t think she would have-”

Moon pounded his fist into his thigh. “Never. Never. Never!” Moon said. “She never would have married him. She did it to save her pitiful boy.”

Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, April 21-Defense Department officials concluded today that the situation in South Vietnam was deteriorating so rapidly that the United States must plan an immediate evacuation of all Americans and their dependents.

FOR MOON MATHIAS, THE FLIGHT from Manila to Puerto Princesa was in the aisle seat of one of those twin-engine prop-jet aircraft that short-hop commuter airlines favor. Moon had already learned to avoid such aircraft when possible. The planes were fitted out for small people and intended for short trips. So used, they were barely tolerable for someone of his dimensions. But the flight from Manila on Luzon Island down the Philippine archipelago and then across the Sulu Sea to Puerto Princesa was anything but short.

While waiting for the consulate to call and tell him he had clearance to visit George Rice, Moon had bought a map of the Philippines and a tourist guidebook. And then, on an uneasy hunch, he bought a large-scale map of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He put that map in his bag, hoping never to need it. On the Philippines map, he took a scale of distances he marked off on a sheet of hotel stationery and made some calculations. A direct flight from Manila to Puerto Princesa, the capital of Palawan Island and site of its only airport, was just about four hundred miles. But, of course, there was no direct flight. The only one scheduled from Manila took one first to Iloilo, three hundred miles southeast on Panay Island. From there one flew two hundred and fifty miles southwestward across the Sulu Sea to Puerto Princesa. That made five hundred and fifty miles, broken by an hour sitting in an airport in a tiny town, which, Moon’s guidebook said, “had little to offer the tourist except an open-air market where exotic tropical products may be purchased.”

The guidebook made Palawan itself sound equally unpromising, unless one loved to rough it in the tropics. It called the island “one of the world’s few remaining unspoiled paradises,” Its economy was based on fishing “with some subsistence agriculture.” Its population was described as “light, scattered, and largely Malay in ethnic origin.” Looking at it on the map made Moon wonder why the cartographers and politicians had included it as part of the Philippine cluster. It lay like a line drawn from Borneo to Luzon, almost three hundred miles long, from Bugsuc on the south to the tiny settlement of Taytay on the north and only about fifteen or twenty miles wide. It looked to Moon like Bugsuc was a hell of a lot closer to Borneo than Taytay was to any dry land in the Philippines. He measured it out, and it was. Not that it mattered. What mattered was four and a half hours’ flying time in a small seat designed for someone half his size.