Ghosts of Manila (20 page)

At some point in the night she emerged from sleep like a diver surfacing, found herself beached in a room dappled by moonlight filtered through leaves and broken cloud. Not far off the sea was mulling things over with small sighs. A lizard rattled the glottal prelude to its familiar series of croaking brays. In the silence which followed she heard it echoed, far away and muffled as if beneath blankets, by inarticulate howls. Then a thudding silence fell again from which she finally relaxed back into sleep.

In the morning she found the family breakfasting on fish, rice and
bibingka,
a flat and flabby round cake of rice flour and coconut.

‘Eat, eat,’ cried Ben brightly, in Jewish mother mode at the head of the table. ‘Try a
bibingka.
They’re imported.’

‘From?’

‘From the other side,’ he said in delight. ‘Freshly made this morning. An essential ingredient in a true provincial start to the day. You taste one. They don’t use baking powder and all those chemicals. They put
tuba
in instead, our palm toddy, which is full of natural yeasts.’

After breakfast she found it was still only seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. During her early swim a memory returned to her. She found Ben on the terrace reading a folder, an open attaché case beside him.

‘I thought I heard a strange noise in the night. Like yowling.’

He put down the folder. ‘I’m sorry you were woken. I hope you weren’t frightened? It was only Herman. He sometimes has fits at night. A specialist says they’re triggered by nightmares, but to tell you the truth we’ve rather lost confidence in specialists. We’ve listened to dozens of explanations in dozens of clinics. It was always an ordeal because he hates travelling. He really is only happy here.’ He looked through Ysabella with a little frown obviously intended for another place and other company. ‘If you make a digest of everything the experts say, if you roll together all their conflicting theories of cretinism and hyperthyroidism and Down’s syndrome and autism and epilepsy and schizophrenia and I don’t know what, we’re left with a diagnosis which is really no more useful than that of our psychic healers who say he was possessed by a devil in infancy. We have indeed been through exorcism with him.’ Again he glanced at her, this time very much in the present as if to catch an incredulous smile.

‘I’m sure anyone would have done the same,’ she said. ‘I know I would. When sufficiently at one’s wits’ end one will try anything.’

‘That was it,’ he agreed. ‘Herman was our firstborn. He was like that from the beginning. But I was poor in those days. My God, we were poor. We had
nothing.
Maybe… He’s twenty-eight, did you know that?’

This seemed to have a significance she couldn’t grasp, one which went beyond pointing out the obvious fact that his son looked like a boy half his age. ‘It was years before Liezel and I had the confidence to try again. Imagine our joy when Danny was normal. And not just
normal but bright. Woops, too, who may turn out even brighter than Danny.’

Slowly, she worked it out. Nothing perverse, after all; nothing sinister. Just an ordinary – though in the circumstances extraordinary – kindness.

‘My father gave you money. To get treatment for him.’

‘Yes,’ said the senator gratefully, and picked up the folder.

It was the first time she had caught a flash of vulnerability. She left him with it and went swimming again. She was losing track of time, as she had lost the horizon the previous night. She now remembered that someone at the air force base – Ben? Liezel? – had warned her they wouldn’t be returning until Monday and was that all right with her? Something about it being a government holiday or National Heroes’ Day or similar caper. One of those Thirdy-Worldy affairs. She had never had the sort of job which needed to take notice of such things. Now, why had she never learned the trick of clearing her eustachian tubes? There were all sorts of things she wanted to examine underwater but her ears hurt if she went more than a couple of feet below the surface. Maybe she would do a PADI course for divers on the quiet. It would be fun to wave a certificate under Hugh’s nose. This view of fish among corals was genuinely timeless. In archaeology one looked at fragments of the recent past and had to suppose almost everything. Here, one was surely seeing the identical sight of five million years ago. Such a perspective did strange things to the present. True, her father had been rich. Yet the impropriety of personal gifts of money from an ambassador to his driver was most peculiar. She lay looking wistfully through her mask at a mazy cloud of tiny blue fish hanging about a head of coral below her. They blazed in the water like fragments of congealed electricity. She didn’t want to know any more about her family. It was all too long ago and had no real connection with her. Just ghosts. What was one finally to suppose, then? That the underpaid, recently married
provinciano
Benigno Vicente hadn’t after all spent this majestic windfall on his damaged infant? Had instead used most of it to lay down the beginnings of his fortune, just as Sharon’s friend Crispa’s family had her silence-money? Turning misfortune to advantage? That the price was the hulk who now collected shells, vaguely supervised in what was described as a happy idyll in a private sanctuary?

The day passed gently, interspersed with campfire cuisine. Ysabella dipped into a paperback, into the sea, into the edge of the tangled forest beyond the generator hut before being repulsed by thorns and fear of snakes. The evening meal was lit by flashes of silent lightning which intermittently revealed outlines of sea and land and clouds slightly to one side of where they had last been. She calculated that in London people would just be leaving midday offices under a sky whose exact weather she would never know but most likely grey, sifting down a penetrating moisture. She thought of Hugh with his earnest, Buddhist fancies and family title. He seemed to belong with England in a land of fable, a land of the past which she might one day (should the whimsy of her career persist) excavate like Ur or Silbury.

That night, too, she was woken, but not by howling. This time it was a soft, stylised weeping sound, the boo-hoo of English nurseries, the
hu-hu-bu
of women in Filipino comics. For all its quietness it seemed close. Ysabella knew that whoever it was, it was none of her business. House guests, despite being told to treat the place as their own, enjoyed the luxury of being able to choose not to. But as the noise persisted and no sound of slippered feet and voices came to intervene she also knew she would never sleep for the contagion of this unknown distress. She clicked the light switch uselessly, remembered the generator, found the torch, opened her door as silently as she could. It came from downstairs, from the billiard room below. Without turning on the torch she glided halfway down the curving stairs and squatted. From between the ornate banisters she could see down into the room, which was lit by moonlight filtered through yet another layer of the trees which hemmed the rear of the house. The effect was an unearthly monochrome as of a chamber found on the bed of a forgotten sea, a cell for ever hidden from colour and sunlight. On the black baize of the table lay a large unmoving mass, face down, two paws clasped over the edge.

Ysabella had imagined that Herman was safely confined to his miniature beach house at night, which would have explained how distant his previous howling had sounded. It had somehow never occurred to her that he might have the run of the place after dark. Why not, of course. He was evidently a part of this family in ways she couldn’t guess. Still, she hadn’t thought it. As she watched with a voyeur’s fear of discovery and greed to know, she was invaded by the
scene’s utter despair and felt her own eyes fill involuntarily. This was no child’s crying, for all its stylisation. Its very quietness showed how far removed it was from infantile complaint or demand. She didn’t believe this wordless statement of profound unhappiness was meant to be overheard. She assumed he had forgotten her temporary presence in the bedroom upstairs. An urge seized her to stand up, turn on the torch, go downstairs and put a consoling arm about those huge quaking shoulders, raise the moonface with its drool of snot from the baize, make soft verbal gestures to the top of his head. But she overcame it; a failure of heart when confronted by the impossibly complex. I am not my father, she said back in her room. Leave it be. How can a stranger intervene in misery like that, in an unknowable mind whose damage might make well-meaning itself damaging? She now thought that after all Herman had been saying something, repeating over and over again, each syllable a sob, his own nickname ‘Boyboy’. She covered her head with the pillow as an empty space within her echoed, but after a long spell of no-time the heat drove her back to the surface where all was silent once again.

‘I’m sorry to say we had a death last night,’ said Liezel to her after breakfast, as if to explain a meal which was subdued in comparison with the previous morning’s. A dreadful guilt of
complicity froze Ysabella until her hostess went on: ‘Our old dog. You may have seen her when we arrived on Saturday? She was terribly old. But Woopsy’s a bit upset, you know how children are. I suppose we were all attached to her.’

‘What about poor Herman?’

‘I’m afraid Boyboy doesn’t notice things like that.’ She was back in her Imelda travelling outfit, except for the trainers. There was a glint of something unfathomable in her eyes and voice down there among sharp corals, dark holes and fish like chips of costume jewellery. As far as Ysabella was concerned the long weekend finished on that enigmatic note. Glancing back at Bantol as the boat took them away she was reduced to banal reflections on the small mysteries and major private griefs which haunt pleasure domes no less than parliaments. Yet the weekend itself was not quite over. The province’s hayseed Governor, who had returned in the gubernatorial van to fetch brother Ben and guest, carried on a conversation with the senator in rapid Tagalog so that her attention wandered, still haunted by the dark heap
on the billiard table, though at one point she heard the phrase ‘Philippine Heritage Museum’. Woopsy sat in the back with an electronic Bricks Game which warbled and squeaked. She seemed wholly engrossed. Once in the air, her father turned to Ysabella and said:

‘My brother was telling me about the Museum’s plans to open a branch there in Magubat. About time, too.’

‘I’m afraid I know nothing about this province’s archaeology.’

‘It’s the coastal waters that are interesting. The main Spanish galleon route from Mexico passed around its tip. Just off Bantol itself, as a matter of fact. I’m certain all the reefs of that southern part are littered with wrecks. There must be a mass of stuff out there. The odd Chinese trader or pirate junk, too, one would imagine. But it’s the same old story. Such richness of heritage here and such poverty in the official agencies charged with its protection. Doy and I are doing our best to make sure Magubat gets onto the agenda before unscrupulous rogues start muscling in.’

‘That sounds a good idea,’ she said in the way that people say things who would rather not talk, especially not above twin engines. Then, thinking she wasn’t making enough effort towards a host who had been generous and nearly charming, added: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise your interest in archaeology was so active. I was thinking of you more as a private collector. It’s good to know someone in your position cares about what happens to this country’s treasures. Sometimes in the Museum it’s like working near the mouth of a huge funnel. We can’t see it but we can feel the current as it sucks stuff in which disappears and then turns up again in auction houses in London and Paris and Rome and New York.’

‘I know. It’s happening everywhere. All over Indochina, especially Cambodia. Russia, too, and the former Russian republics. South America. It’s global rape. Global rape,’ he repeated as though it were a phrase he had already used in a speech. ‘And many of these countries are signatories to the 1970 UNESCO Convention. I know.’

Ysabella allowed herself to be reassured by this. At least somebody knew. But later, having dumped her overnight bag and showered in the oil-scented Roxas apartment she remembered his own collection in the beach house on Bantol. There had been nothing among his ‘little things picked up here and there’ later than the Fifteenth century,
nothing which would have been out of place in a Ming or even Sung Dynasty trading junk. Or, for that matter, a pre-Colonial burial site. She wondered how he’d come by them. One of the oddities of that UNESCO Convention was how few of the signatory countries had ever asked the US – the major art-importing country – to impose an import ban. Why mightn’t they? Then she thought about who would be responsible for making the request for such a ban. This left her naively blazing with a sudden conviction that nothing in this country was ever quite free of stain.

F
OR A VARIETY
of reasons, a few of them as purely technical as bad phones, communication between branches of the police force was often haphazard, which was why most officers of any rank bought several newspapers daily. It was one way of keeping up with the crime scene, and by no means the least reliable. Newspapers have to be read, however; and when Rio Dingca picked up a copy of the
National
Chronicle
’s
evening edition he merely glanced at the headline ‘Queen of Shabu Nabbed’ and thought ‘Which one?’ before folding and stuffing it up behind the jeep’s visor. He tugged pistol and holster from his waistband, checked the load, cocked it and put the safety on before laying it within easy reach in its customary place by the gearshift. Only then did he start the engine and swing the unplated vehicle out of Station 14’s compound and into rush hour.

The long drag south. Smoke boiled at traffic lights as the queue panted like a gored bull, collecting strength for its charge towards the next red. As he waited he remembered the newspaper and took it down, but only had time to register that the lead article was one of Vic Agusan’s. Dingca had never met the journalist but he had read dozens of the man’s pieces and rated him as about the best; definitely above the level of the pack who clearly felt they had
carte
blanche
to write any sort of lies and slander about the police. Neither did he launch egotistical crusades in his column to have police arrested on the spot for driving vehicles without number plates, complete with homilies about how lawlessness began in small things and the men in uniform
needed to learn at the outset that they themselves were not above the law, yakety-yak. The grapevine had it that Agusan was okay, that he’d been blooded, that his sympathies were firmly with the old INP cops. He certainly seemed to have few good things to say about the military in police clothing who were now calling most of the shots. Then the bull gave another snort and wearily charged again for the lights a few hundred yards ahead and Dingca had to tuck the paper away.

It was dusk when he reached San Pedro, dark by the time he let himself through the creepered palisades of wrought iron which made of the house an airy safe. Divina was doing her piano practice on the cigarette-scorched Baldwin he’d picked up from a military neighbour who had liberated it from an officers’ mess. Eunice was in her room; Teresita was cooking. Thank God for the sanity of family life. He showered, changed into shorts and slippers, found a beer in the fridge and kissed the back of Sita’s neck.

‘Eunice wants to be a dentist.’

‘So?’

‘I just thought you ought to know. It’s not going to be cheap, Rio. And it takes years and years. Tuition fees, equipment. Clothes, accommodation.’ Sita worked in the local Department of Health offices. Her salary was barely enough to keep them in food each month. Nevertheless she was glad of the work even though it still bothered her to come back to an empty house in the late afternoon. In her home province there was always someone around. For much of the day here one could find entire blocks of nothing but empty homes, each with its patrolling dog. It didn’t feel right. Sometimes in the office she would find herself thinking of this house, locked up by day, its waxed floors silent except for the occasional clicking of Butch’s nails as he wandered into the kitchen for a drink of water, the girls’ rooms empty with the white grins of movie pinups above the bed, the lounge walls gleaming dully with Rio’s laminated citations. And now Eunice would be going away for months at a stretch. Well, it was going to happen sooner or later.

‘I thought she wanted to be a teacher?’

‘Oh Dad, that was
years
ago.’ Eunice had come up behind her father. ‘Anyway, you probably wanted to be a fireman once. Most boys do.’

‘Yes, but a
dentist
.’

‘The money’s terrific.’

‘When you’ve qualified.’

‘Of course when you’ve qualified.’

‘But doesn’t it take six years?’

‘There’s lots to learn, Dad. But after that…’

‘Go on?’

‘Er, well, I’ll be able to afford to pay you back. Easily.’

‘Great. And just when you’ve finished getting me sprung from a bankrupt’s cell, up will pop Divina wanting to be a brain surgeon and back I’ll go.’

‘You do
exaggerate,
Dad. What’s for supper?’

‘Fried chicken,’ Sita told her, ‘in special batter. You’ll be doing the batter.’

‘Can’t, Mum, I’m right in the middle of a dentistry book.’ From her open bedroom door in the distance the sound of her radio competed with her sister’s pianistic stumblings.

‘You haven’t actually enrolled yet?’ her father asked in alarm.

‘Not quite. But I’ve decided to get a head start.’

Dingca knew that even as Sita and he were raising objections based on money neither of them really meant money. Everything nowadays cost a fortune; one simply took for granted that one couldn’t actually afford it before going right ahead and juggling around later with the payments. Things sort of got paid, somehow. No, it wasn’t the money. It was the thought of Eunice having to live in Manila in order to attend dentistry school. Why couldn’t she commute with him? For heaven’s sake, Dad, college students don’t live with their
fathers
. They share digs, dorms, whatever. They have lectures at night. They have to meet professors and so on. They aren’t
prisoners
, are they? They’re adults with their own social lives.

But Rio’s head was full of the scumbags who terrorised girls’ dormitories, of what happened to tired students waiting for buses to get home after lectures, of the thousand varieties of perdition which thronged the city’s streets, eyes bloodshot and fingers shaking with drugs. He didn’t want to talk about it tonight, okay? Not
tonight,
Eunice. It needed thought. Goddam it, he’d only been home ten minutes before they’d sprung it on him out of the blue. A conspiracy of women, all trying to trick him into saying Yes…

Not until this was all said and the fridge door had closed with a
muffled sigh of finality was Rio able to take a second cold beer out to the yard. Whatever you did, whichever way you turned, they’d got you by the short and curlies – whoever ‘they’ currently happened to be. He retrieved the evening paper from behind the jeep’s visor, moved the folding chair closer to the light and, with Butch lying at his feet, finally read Vic Agusan’s ‘Queen of Shabu Nabbed’ story.

Some Narc boys from South CapCom had arrested her in a buy-bust operation while passing a consignment of drugs to an officer posing as a buyer. ‘Posing,’ said Rio out loud. ‘That’s a laugh.’ He took a mouthful of beer and then forgot to swallow as he saw the woman’s name. Lettie Tan. Agusan described her as ‘the owner of several businesses including night clubs in Cavite and Ermita and a string of foreign concessions, among them Japanese and Taiwanese engineering companies. Her Ermita club, ‘The Topless Pit’, has long been known as an alleged safe haven for certain notorious drug dealers, which argues weighty protection somewhere up the line.’ The man and his paper took risks, Dingca thought approvingly, at last swallowing the warm, flat mouthful. Lettie Tan, eh? That woman again.

He sat there slowly finishing his beer, no longer hearing the familiar sounds of cooking and TV voices in the house behind him, the sudden gushes of waste water. He had been joined in his yard by Babs’s ghost who materialised with a rustle in the mango tree as he stared across at it. ‘Was that it?’ he asked his murdered asset silently. ‘Was that what you were going to tell me, only…?’ Only what, though? Had the child-kidnapping been just a sideline, or was it after all a complete red herring with no connection to Babs’s employer? But suppose Babs had known about her being a drug boss. Several possibilities followed, one being that he might have preferred not to risk talking about it. This wasn’t a little light toddler-snatching. This was big time, as Dingca would have known. And as Agusan implied, it was impossible to run any sort of drugs empire without reliable and senior protection in the judiciary and the police. The trouble was – and the recollection of his own dismissiveness now caused him a jab of conscience – he had never made a secret to Babs of the fact that of all forms of criminality, drugs bored him most. There was something about the whole scene which left Rio cold, even impatiently to feel that if a lot of bored cretins wanted to stuff their veins and noses with fancy chemicals which further addled their brains, that was fine by him. Much better spend
one’s time going after the real scalawags who were robbing the country blind, ruining the innocent and coming up squeaky clean time after time. Besides, he couldn’t really understand why anyone wouldn’t prefer a decent bottle of imported Black Label.

It was ironic. Two years ago when he’d still been in Station 5 with South CapCom Dingca had barely heard of Lettie Tan. Suddenly, now that he’d been posted to North CapCom and her fetid club was no longer his problem, she was assuming the proportions of a major criminal who, thanks to poor Babs, he felt was still very much his business. It was doubly irritating that under the PNP reshuffle his old team had been broken up and there were few men left in Station 5 with whom he would choose to share confidences about Lettie Tan. Two years was a long time. New alliances formed, injudicious questions could be life threatening. Now that the Narcs had their claws in her, too, there was little to be done. He dropped the newspaper and drained his glass. He actually debated ringing up this Agusan fellow to suggest that drugs would be only one of many skeletons hidden away in Lettie’s cupboard and as a journalist he would have the facilities to do some digging around her other business activities. ‘A string of foreign concessions’ was impossible to acquire without heavywork somewhere along the line. There had been an example only last year not five miles down the road from this very yard, when a businesswoman effectively tricked 294 Laguna farmers into selling 114 hectares of agricultural land and managed to get extreme pressure applied to the Secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform to have the land’s designation converted to ‘industrial and commercial use’ in order to set up an industrial park. This move was strictly illegal under the terms of land reform law, as Dingca had taken the trouble to verify. No-one at the time offered any prizes for guessing where the pressure had come from which was senior enough to make the Secretary of the DAR openly flout his own laws. That had become a scandal mainly because it forced Cory Aquino, by then ex-president, to deny that Malacañang had had any knowledge of the case. This denial was somewhat weakened when a personal letter to her from the businesswoman was read out at the inquiry, expressly asking her presidential help in the matter. Defrauding illiterate peasants had been the easy part, of course. Dingca now wondered what equivalent mischief Lettie Tan might be involved in, never for a moment doubting it was there
somewhere, probably not even very carefully hidden, so contemptuous of the law were people like her. It was not that he carried a particular flag for illiterate peasants, but this sort of thing was happening more and more often in Laguna as land prices soared in Metro Manila and the city sent its tentacles ever further into the surrounding provinces. He hadn’t moved here to the country seventeen years ago to find himself surrounded in his retirement by illegally-acquired industrial parks full of noise and trucks, with gigantic neon signs making the night sky pink and mauve as they blazed forth the rival empires of Toshiba and Samsung.

After supper he walked one block over to the Bowl-o-Rama on Ylang-ylang. He felt in need of familiar faces. The reassuring rumble and clatter greeted him as he went in and several gloved hands were raised in greeting. He strolled from lane to lane, watching and chatting, until a voice a little behind him said ‘Inspector Dingca, sir?’ He turned and couldn’t immediately place her, beautiful and young, until a gear engaged and the months rewound themselves and he was back at the High Scool Graduation, looking at lines of good-as-gold boys and girls. Especially girls.
Big
Girls.

‘Patti Gonzales, isn’t it?’

She gave an oddly wry smile. ‘You remember me, then?’

‘We police have a photographic memory for faces. I thought everyone knew that.’

This obviously disconcerted her. ‘Surely only for criminals, sir?’

‘I’m afraid we make no distinction, since Nature doesn’t. I must say you do look a little different out of school uniform.’ As if worried lest she should read disappointment in his tone he added quickly, ‘So how did you finally decide?’

‘On what, sir?’

‘Between the Civil Service and dentistry. I think that was to be your choice, wasn’t it?’

It was true, she did look different. It was only reasonable that once no longer in school uniform she would look older, but that was to reckon without other changes both subtle and less so. Subtle was the way she was holding herself. The senior demurcness beside which he had felt like a Sixth Grader was now transmuted into a different sort of self-confidence. She no longer stood with her calves together, just touching, or held her hand in front of
her perfect teeth when she
smiled. Less subtly (though it was hard to tell in the Bowl-o-Rama’s lighting) she seemed to be wearing a suggestion of make-up. Oh no, Patti, he thought, foreseeing the Hostess Look which surely awaited her unless she was scrupulously careful. He had long noticed it was nearly impossible for his countrywomen to use make-up without looking like whores. It was unfortunate but true. The least attempt to paint an unnatural red on naturally brown cheeks, for instance, at once produced a bar girl straight from Ermita or Olongapo of the sort who might totter on high heels beside a towering foreigner with a bunch of crimson claws digging into his waist or dipping into his hip pocket.

‘Oh, that,’ she was saying. ‘I gave up that idea ages ago. I mean, who wants to stare into people’s mouths all day long? And imagine, six years before you earn a
sentimo.
You’d have to be a complete Brenda. Only plodders go in for dentistry.’