A Moment in the Sun (120 page)

WELCOME, PRESIDENT McKINLEY

—announce the sparkling silver letters below the portrait—

CHIEF OF OUR NATION AND OUR EMPIRE!

The Assassin sits drinking beer in Pascek’s saloon on Broadway, thinking about the stacking game. There are amusements of the cheaper sort just outside the Exposition grounds and he lingered at one after leaving today, watching to see if he was being followed. The sharper had built an elaborate house of tiles on his little table, balancing one upon the other till the structure was almost up to his chin. A spectator bet him a quarter against a five-dollar bill that he couldn’t place another without the toppling the whole edifice, and this he did. The next bet had to be fifty cents—only fair, as it was now an even more impossible feat—and then seventy-five cents and then a silver dollar to see another tile balanced, the structure beginning to wobble slightly even when he wasn’t touching it. The circle of spectators grew as the amount of the wagers rose, till one gent in a checked suit stepped forward and plunked down two dollars and fifty cents to beat the master architect. The sharper put on a long face, then, holding a tile with the very tips of the fingers of his two hands, lowered it gingerly toward the top of his mansion.

This is my bullet
, thought the Assassin,
this is my gift to the world
.

And yes, that was the last straw, the tile that brought it all crashing down, spectators yowling with a mix of disappointment and glee depending on the direction of their side bets. It was a sign. Yes, the system had not fallen after the Habsburg Empress was eliminated, or the French President or even King Umberto. But the weight of each killing upset the balance of the edifice, undermined its foundations. One more, the right one, and there will be blessed release. If not, he will have done his duty, bringing the inevitable day that much closer.

The working men at the end of the bar begin to curse each other in Polish. “You filthy pig,” shouts one, “you filthy lying pig!” Stools are toppled. Only a moment ago they were quietly drinking themselves unconscious. “I’ll kill you!” cries the other man, the shorter one. The Assassin stands and backs away from the working men. The shorter one draws a knife and suddenly he is stabbing the other, again and again in the head and neck, shrieking all the while “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!” The bartender leaps over the counter and tries to pull him away, the taller man sliding silently to the floor, blood spurting from him like an obscene fountain.

“Get help!” yells the bartender to the Assassin in English. “Go get help!”

The Assassin runs out onto Broadway, turning to hurry back to his hotel. Two beefy patrolmen sprint past him, heading for Pascek’s. He slips his hand into his pocket to make sure the pistol doesn’t swing as he picks up his pace. It will be quick and clean, not like the hapless Berkman’s botched
attentat
on Henry Clay Frick, no, quick and clean and irreversible. The Assassin hears fireworks above, but keeps his gaze fixed straight ahead.

LADY IN THE FOREST

Nobody can drink that much
vino
and not have to urinate. Crouching hidden on the slope above the town, Diosdado has watched the fiesta of Ina Poon Bato, watched the headmen celebrating noisily afterward at the table set up in the plaza, banners of Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje still hanging overhead. It was not hard to follow the movements of the
alcalde
, the best-dressed of all in his
barong
with the crimson embroidery, the one with the braying laugh and the surprisingly beautiful tenor voice when they sang. He is a
fanfarrón
, this mayor, Ignacio Yambao by name, bragging of his good
amigos
the
yanquis
and all they have offered for his cooperation, bragging of his disregard for whatever deluded bandits may still be hiding in the mountains. Which is why Colonel San Miguel has ordered Diosdado to cause his disappearance
.

Other men have staggered out of their houses, a few only pausing to irrigate from the rear platforms, most making the trip to the
letrina
on the other side of the bamboo stockade. One fellow veered far enough off the path that he was unable to find the gate and decided to
orinar
through the fence slats into a cassava patch. But so far no Ignacio Yambao, who, though
alcalde
of Taugtod, surely has no modern receptacle within his house of nipa and bamboo. It will be light soon, cocks already voicing their impatience with the night, and Diosdado has to wiggle his bare toes to keep his feet from falling asleep. He is dressed in the simple, soiled cotton of the
kasama
, his story if discovered that he has fled his mountain town because a band of
insurrectos
have taken it over. The
yanquis
are easier to fool than Zambal villagers, of course, having no local knowledge, and more than one of his boys when spotted has strolled grinningly up to the foreigners, rifle held useless at arm’s length, and thanked
el Dios en el Cielo
that the Americans are finally here to accept his surrender. Most have returned within the month, with many a story to tell and occasionally a better weapon than the one they turned in.

“
The
yanquis
recognize only two kinds of Filipinos
,” Bayani is fond of saying. “
The living and the dead
.”

Bayani offered to do tonight’s business, naturally, insisted on it, but Diosdado is the
teniente
still, despite having left his uniform under a rock on a hillside near Bacolor, and it is not something he will order another man to bloody his hands with.

“Who have you ever killed?” demanded the sargento.

“I shoot when the rest shoot,” Diosdado answered. “Sometimes an enemy falls.”

“But close, close enough so you can look into his eyes?”

Diosdado did not ask if Bayani had killed men in this way.

“If I don’t come back in two days,” he told the sargento, “move the band to the
escondite
north of Iba.”

He has always been suspicious that it was the friars who made up the story of the Ina Poon Bato. A negrito man, years before the arrival of the first Spaniard, meets a beautiful, glowing lady in the forest. “Take me home with you,” she says. He protests that he already has a wife, and a jealous one at that, so she gives him a carved image of herself, a small wooden statue. As he walks back to his village he hears her voice, over and over, saying “You must take me home with you.” When he arrives his wife is immediately suspicious of the statue, and when he is not looking she hurls it into the fire. Their entire hut is immediately engulfed in flames, the couple barely escaping. But when they sift through the ashes later, the one thing that has not even been charred is that wooden statue, now stone, the Ina Poon Bato. It becomes a sacred object of their tribe, carried from place to place as they migrate through the mountains, bringing them peace and good fortune in their travels. But somehow the statue is lost, and food grows scarce, diseases strike their children, their enemies grow in power. The story of the lost statue remains in their minds, though, and so when the men with beards wearing long robes arrive from across the sea carrying their statue of the same beautiful lady, their Virgin Mary, it is cause for celebration, for the renewal of hope.

A fabricated legend maybe, but an enormously popular one in these mountains, and Diosdado has tried to use it to explain the war to the Zambals. “This fight will cause great destruction,” he tells them, “but at the end when we sift through the ashes, something will remain untouched, something pure and miraculous and as permanent as stone—a Filipino Republic.”

It is perhaps too distant a metaphor. In Nacolcol the consensus was that the problems all sprang from that ancient negrito’s wife, who should have known better than to throw enchanted statues into a fire.

There is a dog, rat-tailed and underfed, making its way up the slope with its nose up, alert, and Diosdado notes that the air has shifted, a cold wind rolling down off the
monte
behind him. The dog slows a few meters away and sniffs at the edge of the
copita
bushes, stepping cautiously now, till it sees him. The cur’s head goes down, ears back, and a warning growl vibrates its scrawny chest. Diosdado tightens his grip on the bolo but does not move. The dog investigates, body stiff, bumping its wet muzzle twice against Diosdado’s face before stepping aside to lift its leg on a
macaranda
and trot back down to the village.

Only the
alcalde
has not yet taken a piss.

He lost a few men, deserters, when the news came that the silver-voiced Bryan had not won his election, that the Americans would be staying. And then they caught the
supremo
on the day before his birthday. Funston of Kansas and a handful of his junior officers marched as prisoners through the wilderness by Macabebes disguised as rebels, stumbling half-dead into Aguinaldo’s mountain retreat, and after being revived by the food and water and the respect due to captured warriors, able to pounce on the General in an unguarded moment. And the General, delivered back aboard the great ship of the White Admiral like a penitent schoolboy, called immediately for his followers to join him in compliance. Now even people like Scipio Castellano have become
americanistas
, declaring that anyone still in the field is no more than a bandit.

“This is not an insurrection,” Diosdado lectured his men, “it is not a revolution. It is all of us,
patriotas humildes de las Filipinas
, defending our homelands, our families. If the General is in their hands, so be it. Until the last man lays down his rifle, our cause is alive.”

It has been nearly three years since he took the head of Colón off with a blacksmith’s hammer. “Columbus” as the
yanquis
call him, the first European to claim their continent, another mercenary for the Spanish crown. When the Assimilation decree was posted, before the shooting war began, Diosdado was the one chosen to go to Cavite and wait until night and desecrate the Americans’ favorite statue. He felt more like a student on a prank than the avenging arm of the revolution.

The ground and the buildings have begun to take on color by the time Ignacio Yambao steps down the ladder from the platform of his house, walking in a surprisingly steady line toward the path to the
letrina
. He is singing very softly to himself, a
kundiman
from the party, in his beautiful tenor. Diosdado rises slowly from his crouch, legs burning with the sudden rush of blood, and angles down the slope with the bolo swinging loose from the thong around his wrist. If the
alcalde
turns to see him he will smile and keep coming and tell his story.

But no story comes to Diosdado as his bare feet, still tender, suffer over the jagged ground.
Señor mio, Padre y Redento
, he thinks,
me pesa de todo corazón haberte ofendido porque me puedes castigarme con las penas del Infierno—

The Act of Contrition must come after the sin. The
alcalde
, Ignacio Yambao, is squatting with his pants around his ankles when Diosdado steps up behind him. The smell is awful.

He has practiced the stroke on the way to the village, a chopping backhand through green saplings and thick poles of bamboo, careful to resharpen the blade with his whetstone afterward, and knows he needs to use both hands.
I studied anatomy with the Jesuits
he thinks as he fixes on the back of the squatting man’s neck and raises the heavy
itak
to strike.

There is light now, enough to see details of the slaughter, but it will be a full hour before the sun peeks over the tip of the
monte
. Diosdado strides away from the trench, first carefully wiping the bolo clean on the man’s
barong
, leaving a dark stain behind.

Halfway up he comes upon a negrito man, naked but for a loincloth of pounded bark and a curved knife stuck in the drawstring, walking down. They always make him nervous, even the ones when he was a boy who lived in the
rancherías
and obeyed the priest. The man’s eyes are yellowish, as if he may be suffering from one of their mountain diseases, and he has patterns scarred onto his arms and chest.
Un cortacabeza verdadero
, as his father used to say, a real headhunter.

The men nod silently to each other, and go their separate ways.

They are moving again, marching out from Las Ciegas as part of a flying column, the sky behind them filled with smoke. Royal is sick, sick like at the end of Cuba, a little less fever in the hot spells and a little less bone-aching chill in the cold. The doctor in Long Island had said it might catch up with him, that there might be rough spells, and the men reporting queasy or fevered this morning have been told they have to march with the rest, that there will be no treatment or conveyance back to Manila till they reach Subig.

Right now he is burning, walking at the rear of the company with everything too bright and loud and even with the others warned not to talk there is the sound of them creaking, jiggling, breathing, the stampede of their footsteps on the hard-baked road, the sloshing of water in the canteens. Nobody noticed till it was too late, they said, but all the villagers, all the
muy, muy amigos
, disappeared from Las Ciegas just before the attack. Not a word, not a warning, just gone. They have not returned, and orders were to burn the village and move out to garrison another area the rebels are supposed to be operating in. At first he thought it was the flames making him burn but then the chills started in the middle of it, Royal in a cold sweat torching the off-kilter little hut where Nilda had been staying, where she must have gotten word and left with the others without warning them. Before starting the blaze the lieutenant had them round up what animals were left, the pigs herded screaming into the thorn-branch corral and butchered. The pigs were out on the Filipino dead the night after the attack and Royal wanted to shoot them then but the lieutenant said no more firing.