Ghosts of Manila (32 page)

Two weeks later that hand was revealed, but by an agency bizarre beyond anyone’s imagining. It was certainly not the result of sleuthing by either Dingca or Agusan, although once again Vic had spent whole days going through company files, running checks, leaning on his sources, calling loans. By the end he knew beyond doubt that the San Clemente project was another part of Lettie Tan’s empire-building but he couldn’t have proved it on paper. Dingca was equally getting nowhere with the murder. He wasn’t surprised. This was definitely one of those cases which broke downwards if at all. Eddie’s killers would be shopped as bargaining chips if ever a big name got its ass in a crack. Certainly nobody in the barrio was talking. San Clemente was sullen, the people closed and resentful. There were already gaps among the houses where families had left, taking with them whatever parts of their shanties were worth salvaging. The little heaps of rusty sheeting and crumbling cement blocks which remained had scarcely been pawed over. Scrap timber was taken for firewood but little else. No-one in San Clemente was in the mood for building.

At Rio’s own urging Nanang Pipa had been one of those to leave. She and the family were squeezing in temporarily with distant relatives in Baclaran. He was both sorry and relieved to see them go and arranged for Benhur Daldal to guard the house while they made several trips to fetch away their possessions, including two sewing machines and many bolts of material which didn’t belong to the co-operative. Boyong and some friends had already begun to dismantle the house as Pipa left it for the last time and stood for a moment outside, looking bleakly around her.

Why was it we never remembered how near at hand endings always were? she wondered yet again. Squatters in particular knew better
than anyone that everything was temporary; yet in settled intervals came these cruel delusions of stability, of an orderly life that might have amounted to something, to a family raised above rathood. Hardly more than a month ago business was going well, Eddie was still Eddie, they were surrounded by friends and neighbours. And now… She looked at the plastic awnings billowing gently in the light breeze, at the strangers digging earnestly away in what had recently been a communal latrine. Well, St Jude, she thought.

Dingca came over and produced a card which he handed her awkwardly. It had the Station’s address on one side and his home address on the other.

‘It’s not much, Pipa,’ he said. ‘But if ever, you know.’

‘You’re a man, Rio Dingca,’ she told him. ‘Which is more than can be said for some of the people in this barrio.’ A tear fell from one lash onto her thumb. She tucked the card away. Both knew she would never use it but they also knew the offer was completely sincere at that moment. Alliances, too, were temporary.

‘Don’t just disappear, Pipa,’ he urged her. ‘We can’t stop you going but there’s a homicide case outstanding. As if you could forget.’ He thought she looked beaten. It was hard to believe that this was the woman who’d so recently held a flourishing sewing business together and on sundry occasions had bossed her husband and his gang of layabouts into making themselves useful. ‘We’ll make somebody pay,’ he said, nodding once.

‘Don’t throw your life away, Rio. It isn’t worth it.’ She walked away with Jinky beside her carrying a little pink suitcase on her head. Behind them came the screech of her son pulling nails.

Late that afternoon a bulldozer ground its way slowly up the cemetery approach road leaving two sets of parallel whitish scars in the tarmac. Its deep engine note faded somewhere up in the cemetery and presently the driver came walking back down, whistling. Bats Lapad, who was losing his terror of the supernatural and had ventured out with Judge and Billy as bodyguards to buy some gin, stopped him. The driver, a cheerful fellow, was from Maypajo, Navotas.

‘Never mind where you live,’ Bats told him sternly. ‘What are you doing with that machine?’

‘Just leaving it,’ said the driver. ‘We’ll be starting work after the weekend. Redace Construction. They’ve got the contract to redevelop
the back of the cemetery. Rough up there, isn’t it? This the famous San Clemente, then? Got me crucifix,’ he said with a grin, hauling a collection of amulets and a cross out of the neck of his T-shirt and jingling them under Bats’s nose. ‘How’re the vampires these days? Still flapping, are they?’

‘You don’t believe in that crap, do you?’ Bats asked him scornfully. ‘Listen, are you sure it’s the cemetery you’re working on?’

‘Course I’m sure. There’s four hectares up there need grading, starting Monday. Why, what else would I be doing?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Bats, and he and the others turned away. ‘Just wondered.’ The gin was to celebrate tonight’s surprise visit from brother Gringo, who had taken an unofficial break in his Melody cab to see Nanang Pipa and was upset to find her already gone, her house partially dismantled.

The cemetery police confirmed the driver’s account. Yet the yellow bulldozer parked innocently up there on the hill radiated a threat which suddenly permeated the barrio. It was as if the Clementeños sniffed on the strengthening breeze its diesel and hydraulic scents, just as an old buffalo trucked into town from the paddies first gets wind of the slaughterer’s yard behind the marketplace. For days now Vic Agusan and Rio Dingca had both felt a rising tension. Small, vicious fights broke out from time to time which could be heard but not witnessed. Raised voices came from somewhere in the warren of huts and there would be fresh blood soaking into a path’s dried, sculpted mud. Both Vic and Rio had called respectively for reinforcements, convinced it would be a professional mistake to leave San Clemente uncovered and neither wishing to spend the whole of every day in such meagre surroundings, still less do overtime there. On this evening of the bulldozer’s arrival they both chanced to be present, having dropped in separately before calling it a day and going home to their families. Just as they were leaving, fire broke out high up in the barrio. It was already nearly dark and the flames could be seen leaping above the rooftops, fanned by the east wind blowing down from the cemetery. Screams and shouts brought people running out of their homes beating saucepan lids. Dingca hurried over the Kapilang to call the fire brigade from one of the shops with a phone. Vic, who had been walking to collect the Hersheymobile, grabbed a camera as he passed it and trotted up into the cemetery and around to the Tan mausoleum to the point nearest the outbreak.

The fire spread with great speed among the closely packed and mainly wooden buildings. The gap in the boundary wall already showed as a ragged V of brilliant orange when he reached it, while the nearest flames were high enough to scorch the fringes of the overhanging trees. As Vic stood, panting, a swag of greenery above him burst into fire with a sound of Chinese crackers and drops of gum began falling around him sputtering tiny blue flames. He retreated, but the rest of the tree seemed reluctant to burn and once the leaves on that side were gone the fire in it went out. San Clemente, by contrast, might have been purposely designed for rapid combustion. From his vantage point he could see dark areas of the upper barrio still untouched by fire, but even as he watched isolated tufts of flame sprang up there as well, as if working their way along zigzag powder trails at ground level.

The leaping glow now lit the underside of a thickening cloud of smoke rolling away above the barrio, carrying with it whirligigs of sparks. The noise was a roar of blazing gases mixed with sharp detonations as metal sheeting warped and sprang from its nails. Now and then came a loud thump as though a bottle of kerosene had exploded and for an instant a tighter crimson bud opened its individual blossom above the general rags and tatters of incandescence. The noise masked the approach of half a dozen men who suddenly appeared near Vic at a staggering trot, carrying between them an assortment of containers slopping water. They were shirtless, and as they approached the gap in the wall to unsling their yokes and hurl their few gallons into the inferno inside, their chests and stomachs glinted with sweat as if oiled for desperate hand-to-hand combat. Then, exhausted by despair as much as by their long uphill run, they dropped their containers and fell back to where Vic stood.

‘It’s gone,’ one said, his eyes glittering with reflected orange.

‘Is everyone out?’

‘Who knows? You just make sure your own family’s out and hope everyone else has done the same.’

‘Time was,’ said another, ‘when there was water right here. We had a standpipe before that
intsik
vampire took it away, curse her.’

Above the noise came the faint sound of a fire truck’s siren. The nearest shanties had begun to collapse, leaning silhouettes which gave a sudden lurch and fell leaving an arbitrary post or two still upright and twirling flame.

‘Anyone know how it started?’

‘Enemy action,’ said a voice. They turned to see a fantastical figure propped like a crazed saint on a tall stick. The firelit face was monstrous, a splitting melon glistening beneath a thatch of string and leaves. ‘It’s always enemy action. Specially when it’s on your own side.’ Vic would have pursued this theory with a reporter’s zeal but at that moment there came from far behind them an unexpected sound. Somewhere up in the black depths of the cemetery a heavy engine had started up. ‘Oy,
pare!
’ said the figure as to himself in much satisfaction. ‘I was just giving a lesson to young Gringo up there. How to hot-wire a bulldozer. There’s nothing useful a Ranger doesn’t know.’

From the sound’s direction lights appeared intermittently in the darkness, the headlamps of a vehicle moving ponderously through trees and behind tombs, shining and vanishing and growing steadily brighter. The engine note had climbed to a screaming roar as though driven to the limit. It drew closer, and it was soon apparent that it was not keeping strictly to the roadway but cutting erratic corners and taking short cuts between the dainty sepulchres, ploughing through undergrowth and clipping plinths as it came.

‘He’ll be fine with a bit of practice,’ observed the melon-headed man as a small tree toppled and smashed a tomb’s coping. There was a distant shower of bricks. ‘Help if he lowered the scoop, though. He could see where he was going.’

As if the bulldozer’s driver had heard him and had at last hit on the right lever to pull, the huge shovel dropped with a crash and the engine snorted as it began to heap a breaker of soil and brushwood which curved up the blade, its crest crumbling and piling. Then the shovel lifted a fraction, the earth fell back, the machine bumped over the wave it had raised and swung to face the watchers. Even now Vic had no idea what its arrival meant. It was only twenty yards away when he made out the driver for the first time. Perched on top of the lumbering tons of metal the wiry figure was tiny and its antics were in strange contrast to the vehicle’s impassive progress. A victim of some demonic possession, maybe, it kept leaping up and taking both hands off the levers to wave them as fists above its head. Even above the bellowing of the twelve massive cylinders the sound reached Vic of wild laughter and shouted words, exultant, wilful, even merry. And thus for a total
of only about thirty seconds Gringo’s path crossed that of Vic Agusan, memorably, lit face-on by the flames of San Clemente’s destruction which the concave steel mirror of the bulldozer’s blade flashed defiantly back. And Vic with a reporter’s instinct shot Gringo
flack-
flack-flack
for a series of pictures destined to immortalise them both. Only when the towering machine had drawn almost level did he at last recognise a cold intention behind this joyride. He saw the standing Gringo utter a great whoop and drop both fists to the right-hand brake for a final course correction. The bulldozer twitched its rump and slewed obediently. Vic believed he caught the shouted words ‘Okay, Eddie-boy! Death to the Chinese!’ as it ran the last few downhill metres and ploughed full-tilt into the ornate façade of the Tan mausoleum.

Beneath the wedding cake stucco there was evidently concrete and steel, for the impact flung the driver forward, hands grasping at the cab stays. The protesting engine was slowed almost to stalling point, an exclamation of black fumes jetting from the exhaust stack, until something in the building gave. In the lurid glow Vic saw the whole tomb shiver and suddenly craze all over before bursting to pieces, a cascade of pale masonry pouring down over the machine’s cage-work and momentarily hiding it from view. An immense cloud of dust puffed out and whirled up among the still-glowing twigs of the tree overhead. From deep inside the ruin there was muffled growling and movement and then the bulldozer came wallowing out on the other side, canted steeply over. It gave a lurch and righted itself, chunks of mortar pouring off its flanks. Somehow Gringo was still on his feet at the controls but had fallen silent. Thick dust covered him from head to foot so that he had turned white. Like a plaster ghost, making no effort to save himself, he rode the machine down the slope, through the cement block wall and on into the blazing heart of San Clemente. The watchers saw him outlined against the fire, a suddenly black figure atop a black machine, heroic and transfigured at the instant of his immolation. Then he writhed briefly and sank. The bulldozer’s shovel fell as the hydraulic pipes burnt through and the machine swerved a little before stalling at last. Soon afterwards the fuel tanks split and gallons of blazing diesel inflated a gorgeous canopy of gold and crimson and silver, a billowing caparison of great splendour which finally settled as a shimmering tapestry spread at the feet of an undecipherable icon.

‘Way to go, Gringo,’ said the figure softly in English from the shadows. ‘Way to go, boy.’

Turning again, Vic saw the man sketch a salute with the stump of his right hand. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked. ‘And who the hell was
that
?’

‘Me?’ said the figure, still in English. ‘God knows. What I am, man, is
short.’

‘Short.’

‘Damn short, now. You a journalist? Yeah, well, if you want a scoop you’ll take an old eavesdropper’s advice and have a good look at that mess there. I’m betting the late Gringo’s left you a present.’ The stump indicated the heap of rubble that had been the Tan family’s pride. ‘You might even find the Queen’s crown jewels.’