Herman the German sat in the front seat—because he was too fat to fit in the back—and gave directions: Mukyo-dong, the high-rent boutique and nightclub district in downtown Seoul. Herman was bruised and battered from the beating the Mongol thugs had given him last night in the Temple of the Dream Buddha. But he stared stolidly ahead into the rain. Unmoving. The time limit until the full moon had been gnawing at me all day. The almanac we kept on the bookshelf in the CID office told me how long we had: five days. Five more days and four more nights until the full face of the moon rotated once again toward the earth. As I thumbed through the slick pages of celestial calculations I remembered the carved stone calendars of the ancient Mexicans. When I was a child in East LA, I'd seen pictures of these calendars in books and read about their amazing accuracy. I asked my schoolteacher about these wonders, but my questions irritated her. Their accuracy wasn't proven, she told me, and it would be better if I stuck to my textbooks instead of reading about ancient calendars and UFOs and the like.
