1993 - The Blue Afternoon (11 page)

“I thought you said this murder business had detained you?”

“Well, it did. But then Pantaleon asked me to see this contraption he’s building. A flying machine—can you believe it?”

“He’s such a child, Pantaleon.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

This was the disagreement they had been waiting for and they had a short and vicious argument about whether it was childish to build a flying machine or inspirational. The barely covert venom in their exchange seemed, paradoxically, to reduce the tension in the air. The animosities had been freed, loosed momentarily; as with a lanced abcess the flow of purulence relieved the pain for a while. Carriscant’s coffee was served and he sipped it slowly, studying his wife’s face over the rim of the cup, watching her read. She wore small oval spectacles which had the effect of ageing her somewhat, especially as her hair was pulled tight around her head, tucked behind her ears. She had never looked beautiful, he considered, but neither could she be described as plain. There was no feature of her face that could be listed as objectionable, but there was nothing particularly attractive either. He asked himself, as he often did in the aftermath of one of their arguments, what on earth had made him want to marry her.

Annaliese Leys was the youngest daughter of a German tobacco wholesaler, Gerhardt Leys, who with his brother, Udo, had a small but thriving business in Manila exporting cigars to Europe. Carriscant had met Annaliese at an open air concert on the Luneta, shortly after his return from his medical studies in Scotland in 1897. She had seemed to him petite and lively and intelligent, and—more relevantly—she reminded him acutely of a girl he had met and silently yearned for in Edinburgh one summer, where he had spent a damp and lonely vacation wandering the wide beaches at Musselburgh and trying vainly to master the secrets of the game of golf. He and Annaliese had been married within a year but shortly after that her mother died and her father, whose health had been affected by the tragedy, sold up and returned with the rest of his family to Bremen. It was then that their marriage began to run into difficulties, perhaps because she was on her own for the first time in her life, perhaps because she was grieving, but there had been, Carriscant reckoned, a perceptible hardening in her personality from that date on. The warmth began to ebb from her.

They had made no private acknowledgement of this distancing, and to the outside world all was well. Annaliese worked part time for the Bishop of Manila, assisting with the accounts of the cathedral school (she had a good head for figures) and generally participating in diocesan matters where it was felt an enthusiastic member of the laity would be more use. The Americans arrived in 1898 but as the war with the Filipino insurgents began and then continued and as it became apparent that their life in Manila was on the verge of irreversible change so too did they finally admit that it was time to drop the pretence and privately confirm that the happy marriage of Salvador and Annaliese Carriscant had become a convenient sham. They had wealth and reputation, they were prominent and respected figures in the foreign community in Manila, which was rapidly enlarging as the process of American colonisation remorselessly consolidated itself—Annaliese was even on cordial terms with the Governor’s wife—but whatever affection, whatever love that had existed between them, was gone.

The prime indication of this state of affairs was that, for over a year now, there had been no sexual relations between them. It had begun most curiously with Annaliese asking him what operations he had performed at the hospital that day. If he had done any amputations she refused to let him share her bed. This animus, directed more at his profession than at his person, had grown. Some evenings she would taunt him cruelly: “How many legs did you cut off today?” Usually he ignored her, until one night, goaded too far, he had replied, “Two, actually, plus an arm and an eyeball,” and she had fled weeping from the room. She complained also of the smell off his clothes, a sweet stench that clung to him, which he claimed he could not detect, but which he knew was the smell of putrefaction, of pus. All this dismayed him: he felt impotent and clueless. What was he meant to do, find a new job? Troubled by this bizarre collapse of his marriage and exhausted from his work at San Jeronimo, he had taken to sleeping on the divan in his study, a temporary arrangement, he had told himself, to avoid disturbing her when he came in late, but it was a circumstance that had inevitably become permanent.

He looked at his wife now, objectively, a little sad, and tried to conjure up an image of her naked body, some detail or special character that he used to cherish—the wide-slung shape of her breasts, the fine downy hair on the areolae of her nipples, her surprisingly deep navel—that would stimulate the old feelings, cause old memories to flare up, like a hot coal breathed upon, but nothing stirred. His thoughts turned instead to a view and an idea he had had that afternoon as he stood in Pantaleon’s meadow and looked over at the tin roofs of Sampaloc. Sampaloc and its notorious Gardenia Street, with its bright bars and brothels…What did they call the girls there? “Low flying doves.” It was not natural this restraint, this forced celibacy. A man of his age masturbating on his divan in the dark like an adolescent. Perhaps a low flying dove on Gardenia Street was what he required?

D
r Carriscant paced slowly down the aisle between the beds in the post-operative ward. He had just examined the Chinese boy and had discovered that although the tongue appeared to be healing well he was now running a temperature, some three days now since the operation, which was a little worrying. He looked up: Pantaleon was signalling to him from the far end of the ward, trying not to attract the attention of the nurses.

Carriscant walked over. “Pantaleon, what’s—”

“The body has gone.”

“What body?”

“The American soldier. It was taken yesterday.”

“By who? Bobby?”

“No. I think it was taken by Dr Cruz.”

Paton Bobby, with Salvador Carriscant by his side, drove his carriage into the small village of Flores. It was midday and the stallholders in the plaza had already packed away their goods. Only a man selling salted fish seemed reluctant to leave; sitting on a low stool, waving away the flies with a palm frond whisk, he stared curiously at the Americanos, as their fine carriage with its two glossy Abra ponies clattered by.

Carriscant directed Bobby to turn right at the adobe church and they passed between two crumbling brick gateposts and drove up a potholed dirt track, lined with rozal bushes, towards Dr Isidro Cruz’s imposing house.

“I still can’t understand the man,” Bobby repeated. “How could he just go in there and take it? Who does he fucking think he is? The Lord Mayor of the Universe? I ask you.”

“Typical Cruz. Remember he’s a peninsularo. He’ll never change.”

“What do you mean, peninsularo? He’s a Spaniard, isn’t he?”

Carriscant explained about the various class divisions that existed in the Philippines during the Spanish period. At the top of the tree were the settlers and officials who had been born in Spain, the peninsulares. They looked down on the insulares, Spaniards who had been born in the islands, whom they regarded as coarse and unrefined, rejects from Spanish society who could only find a niche in a distant colony. The insulares in turn disdained the mestizos, half castes, Spaniards or Chinese who had intermarried with the locals. Everyone looked down on this last category, the indios, even those educated indios—the illustrados—who had studied abroad. And the indios themselves? They made no distinction: everybody white was a kastila—a Castilian—and their enemy.

“Until you Americans came,” Carriscant said cheerfully. “Now they have a new white man to dislike.”

“So you’re a mestizo?” Bobby asked.

“Yes, but not of the family, if you know what I mean. My father was British, my mother’s people insulates. Very complicated. But Cruz is old school: he hates everybody, except perhaps Alfonso.”

“Who’s he?”

“The king of Spain.”

Bobby was not impressed. He was a straightforward man, he told Carriscant, whose working maxim in life was ‘fair play’.

“And I mean fair play for all. Not just for peninsulars or insulars or whatever the Sam Hill they’re called. Fair play for one and all, that’s my motto. But I don’t mind playing unfair once in a while to bring it about.”

Carriscant said he could understand the skewed logic of that position.

“This Cruz’d better not mess with me,” Bobby said. “I lived for a year once off nothing but birds’ eggs and rainwater. He’d be well advised to step real cautiously.”

Cruz’s house was a substantial stone building with a tiled roof, hairy with weeds, and a saffron lime wash on the walls which was flaking and dirty. Two big busi palms grew on either side of the wide balustraded staircase which ran up to the front door. Behind the house, screened by a grove of guava and balete trees, were a range of wooden outbuildings with steeply pitched roofs thatched with grass. Beyond the gardens were a few scrubby acres planted with beans and tobacco.

A manservant informed them that Dr Cruz was in his workroom and they were led around the house to the buildings at the rear. There was a large bamboo pen containing half a dozen mangy-looking mongrel dogs and, in an iron cage hanging from the rafters of an empty stable, two sad-looking gibbons groomed each other listlessly. The manservant rapped on the door of the largest hut and stepped back apprehensively as, after a pause, it was hurled open.

Dr Isidro Cruz was wearing a black alpaca suit with the cuffs unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled back to the elbows, his hands were dripping with blood and his waistcoat and jacket front were shiny with some other dark viscous fluid. He was a tall man, in his sixties, with a big powerful head, a grey pointed goatee and wiry hair brushed straight back from his brow. He started to swear venomously at his servant in Tagalog.

“Listen, you cunt of an ancient whore, don’t you know—”

He saw Carriscant and beside him the solid uniformed figure of Bobby and halted abruptly. He gestured to his manservant to turn round and wiped his hands on his back.

“What do you want, Carriscant?” he said, changing to Spanish, his hauteur impeccable.

Carriscant introduced Bobby and explained who he was.

“We’re looking for the body of Ephraim Ward,” Bobby started.

“Tell him I don’t speak English,” Cruz said.

Carriscant knew that in fact Cruz spoke English passably well but he agreed, in the interests of maintaining some decorum, to translate. He patiently repeated Bobby’s statement and then added a comment of his own in a lower voice.

“You had no right moving that body.”

“I had every right in the world,” Cruz said confidently. “I am medical director, I would remind you, and on top of that I resent the tone of voice you employ.”

“It was the Chief of Constabulary himself who asked for—”

“It was Dr Wieland himself who asked me to do whatever I thought necessary to protect the evidence.”

“Dr Wieland has no authority in this case. Chief Bobby—”

“Where is it?” Bobby interrupted their argument, impatiently. Cruz looked at him, face blank.

“Where is it?” Carriscant translated with a sigh.

“Here. And quite safe.”

After more terse exchanges Cruz agreed to let the two men into his laboratory. The room was lit with carbide lamps which cast an unnatural bleached glare. Long spiralled tapes of speckled flypaper dangled from the ceiling and there was a strong reek of putrefying meat in the air that made Carriscant’s gorge rise. On a wide dissecting table were the spatchcocked bodies of two dogs. Bobby recoiled violently at the stench and lurched outside where Carriscant heard him raking his throat and spitting. With a piteous shake of the head Cruz picked up a tin pump-action carbolic spray and vigorously wielded it until the smell of disinfectant overlay the more feculent odours, not quite concealing, but helping, like a pomade on a sweating labourer. Carriscant held a handkerchief to his nose and looked about him. On another table were two further dogs, one with its chest cavity open and rubber tubes running from it and into the body of the other dog, which he could see was still shallowly breathing, its stretched ribcage rising and falling erratically. By the dog’s head was a chloroform bottle and a wad of gauze.

“I kept these two dogs alive, on one heart, for five minutes,” Cruz declared proudly. “In case you were wondering.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Your tiresome scepticism doesn’t affect me, Carriscant.” He tapped a blood-smudged ledger. “It’s all there, witnessed too.”

“Witnessed by your servants, no doubt. Most reliable.”

“Those two dogs were alive for five minutes!” Cruz shouted, his big face red, suddenly enraged.

“Physically impossible. Unless you’re Jesus Christ!”

“I won’t listen to your filthy blasphemy!”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Bobby re-entered, calming them. “Where is Ephraim Ward?”

Muttering to himself, Cruz led them through to a back room. Here in the centre of the floor were two large wooden chests, eight feet long and four high. As Cruz effortfully lifted the lid of the first one Carriscant saw that there was another chest inside, made of lead, the gap between the two stuffed tightly with straw. The second lid was raised and there lay Ephraim Ward’s naked etiolated corpse, packed on ice like a side of beef. Carriscant frowned, and reached forward into the chest and scooped away some ice granules beside the shoulder.

A woman’s face was revealed, gaunt and bloodless. An india.

“For Christ’s sake,” Bobby said, hoarsely. “How many more have you got in there?”

“Three and some organs. What’s it got to do with you?” Cruz said, in Spanish, forgetting he was not meant to understand English.

“There is no room at the hospital morgue,” Carriscant explained. “Most surgeons have to store cadavers in their own premises.”

“But why?” Bobby said. “Why not bury them?”

“For the advancement of medical science,” Carriscant said reasonably. “How else do you think we are able to do so much? To cure, to heal?”