1993 - The Blue Afternoon (17 page)

“I’m not surprised,” Sieverance nodded appreciatively. “When I think of Wieland’s surgery. The filth, the primitiveness—”

“We got to talk about Wieland, Colonel,” Bobby said. “Seriously.”

Carriscant approached the body while they conversed briefly in low voices. Braun had been a stocky man, in his late thirties, with a sizeable paunch. His chest and belly were covered in a thick growth of springy grey hair. Carriscant selected a thin probe from his tray of instruments and inserted it into the wide wound in the chest.

“The heart has gone,” he said.

“What?” both men answered simultaneously and strode to the table. “The heart—and the right hand, obviously. Removed competently but with no great skill.”

Sieverance turned away, paling, his fingerbacks to his lips. “That make any sense? Is there some sort of native cult out here? Sacrificial cult or something?”

“Not that I know of,” Carriscant said.

“And what about this L-shape?” Bobby said. “Are the other organs there?”

Carriscant duly opened up the wound. There was some displacement of the intestines, as he had expected, but otherwise everything else seemed to be as normal as possible.

“And the last one was stitched up,” he said, “but the heart was there. This time the heart is removed and the wound left open. It makes no sense to me—I can’t see any reason behind it.”

“But it can’t be a coincidence,” Bobby said. “We know that it must be the same murderer. Or murderers.”

“Where was he last seen?”

“He went out the back of a Sampaloc cathouse to take a leak. Nobody noticed he never returned. Figured he was upstairs.”

“What’s in the back of these places?” Sieverance asked.

Carriscant coughed and cleared his throat, they both looked at him expectantly but he raised his spread palms in apology. Bobby shrugged.

“Some yards, few shacks, vegetable plots, open country,” he said. “Anyone can get in or out.”

Carriscant and Bobby left Governor Taft’s office in the Malacanan Palace and walked down the wide corridor in silence to the central stairway. Taft, a vast genial man, sweating copiously in a white suit, had been suitably grateful for Carriscant’s help and, in confidence, had asked him for his professional opinion of Dr Wieland. “An incompetent and diehard quack,” was Carriscant’s candid verdict. On their leaving Taft had asked for his compliments to be presented to Mrs Carriscant, a request that had taken Carriscant somewhat by surprise until he remembered Annaliese’s social connections with the Governor’s wife.

Standing beneath the lofty porte-cochere waiting for their carriages Bobby said, “You know, Corporal Braun used to be in Sieverance’s regiment as well.”

“Odd. He didn’t say anything.”

“I guess
Brown
sounds a common name. Can’t tell how it was spelled. Didn’t realise.”

“Didn’t recognise, either.”

“I wouldn’t recognise you with your head split to your bottom teeth,” Bobby said with sardonic levity. “Got to shake him up some, though, when he finds out.”

Carriscant thought. “You think it was someone who was in the unit? Some grudge?”

“That’s one explanation.” Bobby smoothed his wide moustache with his thumb and forefinger. “And here’s another thing, your colleague, Dr Quiroga—”

“What’s he got to do with this?”

“One of his uncles is General Elpidio. Esteban Elpidio. The one who led us such a merry dance in Tabayan this spring.”

“What are you saying? You captured Elpidio.”

“No, it was something you said about the organs in Ward’s body. The disturbances. Now a heart’s missing—
competently removed
you said—maybe a professional’s hand was—”

“Just stop now, Bobby. This is ridiculous. If you’re going to start suspecting any Filipino related to an insurrecto you’re going to—”

“I’ll suspect anyone I fucking want, Carriscant, anyone.” Bobby looked at him fiercely, irritated by his tone, then his shoulders slumped and he smiled, apologetically.

“Sorry, sorry…” Bobby said, laying a hand gently on his sleeve for a moment. “I don’t know, my head’s just spinning with this one. Spinning.”

Y
ou have no right, no right at all to address me this way,” Carriscant said, trying to keep the tremble of fury out of his voice. There was an air of hostile self-assurance in the room, an unpleasant, potent complacency in the atmosphere. These two men, Carriscant thought—promising himself that he would remain absolutely calm no matter how he was provoked—these two men think they hold the balance of power, feel sure the dealt cards favour them. What did they know, he wondered? What could explain this smug and threatening confidence?

Dr Isidro Cruz and Dr Saul Wieland sat stiffly like magistrates in chairs in Cruz’s office. Cruz had just come from an operation: there was an exclamation mark of bright blood on his stiff collar, like a brooch, and his clothes carried with him an odour of something frowsty and corrupt. Wieland, cold, blank-faced, scrutinised the cuticles on the nails of his right hand, then his left, affecting disinterest. Carriscant had refused a seat—he did not intend to linger—and stood in the centre of the silk rug in the middle of Cruz’s office, a gloomy place with dark polished floors and heavy, over-elaborate furniture. Only the privileged knowledge that those few leather-bound books in the glass fronted bookcases were medical texts would have alerted you to the fact that you were in the consulting rooms of a once eminent surgeon.

Carriscant began again, moderating his voice, trying to sound as reasonable as possible. “None of this is at my instigation. Chief Bobby has only called me out whenever Dr Wieland has been, ah, unavailable.”

“But you accepted the invitation to the Governor’s palace,” Cruz said, unable to keep the note of sneering triumph out of his voice.

“Exactly,” Wieland echoed.

“For heaven’s sake, what else was I meant to do? The Governor himself asked—”

“You should have come directly to me. As medical director of the San Jeronimo it is my responsibility. You are on my staff. I speak for the board, for the institution.”

“These killings have nothing to do with the hospital.”

“The American corpses are being kept in my hospital and I am the last to know. It’s intolerable!” He banged his fist petulantly down on the arm of his chair. “And what is more,” he went on, acidly, “Dr Wieland, a close friend and colleague, has been officially reprimanded by Governor Taft as a result of testimony you provided.”

Wieland rose to his feet, the studied neutrality all gone. His eyes were heavy with resentment and distaste. “I demand to know what you said to the Governor.”

“And I order you to tell him,” Cruz added.

Carriscant felt his jaw muscles knot and his shoulders bunch. He deliberately waited a few seconds before replying, adding a drone of bureaucratic indifference to his voice now, the better to goad them. They had just handed him the advantage with their hectoring pomposity; they no longer unsettled him.

“That must remain a confidential matter between me and the Governor. The Governor requested that our discussion of Dr Wieland’s merits, or otherwise, be conducted under such conditions. I regret—”

This was too much for Wieland, clearly. He stepped towards him. “Listen to me, you nigger bastard—”

“What did you call me? I warn you, I—”

Carriscant’s swinging fist caught Wieland too high, on the left ear, and it caused his knuckles to ring with pain, but the force was sufficient to send Wieland down and a moment later Carriscant was astride him, fingers round the plump and pleated throat, his thumbs searching for his windpipe. Cruz threw himself bodily at him, charging him with his shoulder like a man trying to break down a door, and sent him flying into his desk, his head connecting with one of the mighty turned legs. For a second or two all three men were sprawling on the floor, Manila’s medical elite in professional dispute. Wieland was the first to his feet, coughing, massaging his throat, and helped Cruz up, shakily. Carriscant, somewhat dazed, rubbed his face with his hands, both excited and shocked at the violence which had risen in him. He rose to his feet slowly, his head was aching and his body was trembling.

“I’ll get you, Carriscant!” Wieland shouted at him, hoarsely. He spat on Cruz’s polished floor. Twice. Two silver dollars.

Cruz seemed not to notice, or care. “I’m reporting you to the board,” he bellowed also. “You’ll be dismissed!” His chest was heaving, his grey hair spikily awry.

Carriscant said nothing. With one hand held out, fingertips brushing the wall, he walked round the room to the door. There, he paused and turned to face them.

“If you ever insult me again, Wieland,” he said in a low, quavering voice, “I’ll kill you.”

“I heard that,” Cruz yelled. “I am a witness to that threat!”

He turned to Cruz. “And as for you, I’m going to ask the board for your removal as medical director. You are a disgrace to the profession.”

He left the room, heedless of their furious shouts.

“My God,” Pantaleon said, with an enthusiastic smile. “It’s war.”

“It had to happen sooner or later,” Carriscant said. They were walking from Pantaleon’s apartments towards the nipa barn. “But I have a feeling everything will go quiet.” He smiled with some bitterness. “Cruz knows full well that you and I are the source of the hospital’s real prosperity. And I have Bobby—even Taft—on my side. Cruz is washed up. Wieland’s a fraud and a hopeless drunk. You and I could move to San Lazaro tomorrow—they’d take us with open arms.” They pushed through the gap in the plumbago hedge. “No, I’m expecting something more underhand, something more insidiously worthy of the two of them.”

He saw that the barn doors were open wide and that the sounds of delicate hammering came from within, small hammers on fine tacks.

“By the way,” Carriscant went on, “you know that storeroom, just off the corridor to the theatre? I’ve had it cleaned out.”

“Really? Why?”

“It’s our new morgue. I’m having some of Cruz’s freezing boxes put in there. Big locks on the door, make sure Braun stays safe. I’ll see if I can get Ward back from the other place.” He shrugged. “It should make a difference. Keep Cruz and Wieland out of our hair.” He turned towards the barn. “What’re you up to now?”

“Wait here,” Pantaleon said. “I’ll show you.”

Carriscant waited while Pantaleon entered the barn and the sound of hammering ceased. He exhaled and closed his eyes, feeling his aches, feeling the tension in his limbs groan and tighten. His life was complicated enough, confused and disturbed enough, at the moment, he knew, without violent animosity breaking out between him and Cruz, but the uneasy neutrality that had existed since the war had ended in July was bound to founder eventually. Perhaps it was better this way, he tried to tell himself, it would at least take his mind off this impossible, obsessive infatuation he had developed…Put Cruz out to pasture with his dogs and monkeys, run the hospital in his way, according to his principles and advanced scientific method, sweep out the dead wood—

“Salvador, look.”

He opened his eyes. Pantaleon’s flying machine was being wheeled out of the shed by a quartet of local carpenters. The thin tapered body rested on a carriage of four bicycle wheels, with a fifth, a smaller one, further back to provide stability. The Aero-mobile, as he remembered it was called, had two wings, one above the other, a dense network of slim bamboo struts and tensed wires between the two. Thrusting up from the rounded nose was a third shorter wing held out and aloft by cradling wooden arms. At the rear was the horizontal semicircular tail, and he noticed that both this and the small panel wing at the front were attached to wire pulley devices that led back to simple wooden levers mounted above the four–wheel carriage. Most of the body and wings were covered with near-transparent panels of silk. He reached out and touched the end of a wing: the material was hard and varnished, it reverberated beneath the tap of his fingernail like a drum.

“Extraordinary,” he said, genuinely amazed. “And you’re sure this thing will fly?”

“In theory. Far enough to win the prize, certainly.”

It looked, to his eyes, very frail and very ugly. Like a giant botched model of a dragonfly, crudely conceived, as if by someone who has only had a dragonfly described to him, rather than seen it with his own eyes, and been told to construct a simulacrum from basket weave, matchwood and paper. It looked front-heavy and impractical…And yet there was something touching and ethereal about its cackhandedness, its very inelegance. Like certain insects, certain ephemera, which look as if they were never designed by God to fly and yet somehow take to the wing to everyone’s surprise. Perhaps Pantaleon’s machine would be the same.

“What’s missing are the propellers, two of them,” Pantaleon said, indicating a wooden mounting on the lower, leading wing. “Screw propellers, based on the marine model but larger. The engine will be here in the nose, and we’ll run chains out here to drive the propellers.”

Carriscant wandered around to the rear of the machine. He really had to congratulate Pantaleon: this idealistic dedication, this single-minded pursuit of a dream was rare in anyone, and now it produced a Pantaleon he hardly recognised. He felt sudden tears of emotion in his eyes and his gaze blurred with salty water. Tears of pride and admiration, tears of love for this lanky young friend of his.

Pantaleon was wiggling the large semicircular tail. It was mounted on a block that could turn, allowing the tail to rotate partially on its axis: one tip dropping two feet while the other rose, and vice versa.

“This is the crucial control,” Pantaleon was saying. “It took me a year to develop, and long observation of gliding birds—hawks, buzzards. It’s this ability to twist their tails—” he demonstrated with his spread fingers, waggling left and right, “—that controls rolling in flight.” He smiled at Carriscant. “Pitch, yaw and roll,” he said, “that is what the aero-mobilist really has to conquer. Once we control these three devils then the air will become our new domain…”

He walked over to Carriscant and put his arm round his shoulders. “Please, Salvador, don’t cry, there’s no need.” Carriscant, wordless, moved, turned away and blew his nose into his handkerchief.