Moondogs (35 page)

Benicio stood and spoke with a voice slightly deeper than usual. “Yes, I’m Howard Bridgewater’s son.”

“I’m glad to meet you, son.” They shook hands and became enveloped in a sudden and very strange silence. The policeman’s fingers went limp. He stared Benicio in the face and said nothing. “Sorry,” he finally managed, dropping his hand back to his side. “You just look … let’s say familiar. You look like some people I know. No matter.” He wiped his fingers, which had been sweaty, on his jeans. “I’m Reynato Ocampo,” he said. “I’m the guy who’s going to save your father’s life.”

Monique gasped a little and Jeff uncrossed his arms. “Christ, Reynato, what’s wrong with you? Why would you say that?”

He smiled a bit and raised his small palms in the air—a mock surrender. “Hey, you got me. Zealous, as charged. Sometimes I carry myself away. Let me put it like this—Mr. Howard Bridgewater is a valued resident of Metro Manila, and I’ve been directed to spare no expense in securing his safe recovery. I run an elite task force and the resolution of kidnapping cases is one of our most special specialties. My team and I, we are very good at our jobs. Forgive me if that sounds immodest, I’m just trying to be as accurate as possible—we are really
excellent
at them. And as of right now, getting your father back is our only job.”

With that he turned abruptly, crossed the station lobby and disappeared through a saloon-style door. He clearly expected them to
follow, and they rushed to do so. Benicio glanced at Alice’s notes as they walked and saw that beside Ocampo’s name she’d written nothing but a series of deeply inked exclamation points. “What do you think?” he asked.

“He’s strange.” She gestured to a group of officers and secretaries who’d stopped typing as Reynato passed and were peeping up from their desks as though desperate to watch him but afraid of being caught doing so. “But, good strange.”

Benicio looked back at his father’s self-anointed savior, thinking that Charlie Fuentes was an odd pick to play him in the movies. Reynato was duckfooted and had a bobbing, almost boyish stride. He walked not just like he owned the place, but like he’d thought it up. As though the entire collection of walls, ceiling tiles, telephones and the people who spoke on them were gathered there as a special treat for him. Something to play with. “I’m not so sure,” Benicio said.

Reynato brought them to a conference room with maps pasted across the dusty glass walls and invited them all to take a chair. Once they were seated he paced around the table, asking questions as he went. When was the last time Benicio had spoken to his father? Did Benicio know of any enemies his father might have? Did Howard have any outstanding medical conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, peptic ulcers, acid reflux disease, schizophrenia, priapism, bipolar disorder, chronic cough, and if so was he taking any prescription medications to combat the ailment or ailments? How familiar was Howard with the city? With the country? Did Howard speak Tagalog? Did Howard speak Cebuano or Visayan? Did Howard speak Spanish? Did Howard speak anything other than English?

“Mr. Ocampo,” Monique raised her voice over Reynato’s questions. It looked like speaking to him made her nervous, but she went ahead anyway. “Benicio already gave a statement. If you need another we’ll arrange it. But I thought our meeting today was for a progress update. At least that’s how Director Babayon …” she lingered for a moment, “described it in his memo to our embassy.”

Reynato quit circling the table and went to stand beside Monique’s
chair. He got down on one knee, moved his hand over the carpet and stood again. “Excuse me,” he said as he extended his cupped hand toward her. “You dropped this name. Do you need it back?”

She glared at him. “If you’re not taking this seriously, then I’ll request that someone else brief us.”

Reynato was quiet for a while, his hand still extended in mock offering. Then he gingerly pantomimed putting Director Babayon’s name into his pocket. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I take this very seriously. That’s why I ask questions—things just don’t seem real to me until I hear them for myself. But you’re right. I’m sure you’re all exhausted,” he nodded toward Alice, “and very busy, besides.” The room was quiet, and uncomfortable, and he seemed to revel in it for a moment before stabbing his pen at one of the maps of Luzon pasted to the glass wall. “This is the location of the Blue Mosque, some two hours south of Manila, in Cavite province. On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 12, a group of as-yet unidentified persons apparently entered this mosque and engaged the Imam in some discussion regarding Mr. Howard Bridgewater. Since then our detectives, myself among them, have thoroughly interrogated this Imam. Naturally we haven’t ruled him out as a potential suspect, but as of now there’s no credible evidence of his involvement. He’s been very forthcoming, and I try to be open-minded about these things. We can’t pigeonhole an entire people, after all. Frequency does not a rule make.”

Reynato paused a moment, presumably to let them all consider his fair-mindedness, before drawing an
X
on the map at the location of the Blue Mosque. Then he traced a big uneven circle around the city limits of Metro Manila. “Based on materials recovered from the mosque we have good reason to believe that your father is still being held somewhere in Manila, though we’re not sure he’ll be here much longer. The Imam was a little vague on the suspects but we’ve gathered that there were likely three men. Two Filipinos, and some kind of foreigner with a high degree of martial arts training.” He assumed a karate-chop stance to demonstrate. “We’ve had our best sketch artist working with the Imam for the past few days, but as of now we don’t have a realistic likeness of this individual.”

Alice looked up from her notes and blinked a few times, as though trying to clear her eyes of dust. “So, what do they want? I mean, they’re not ransoming Benicio’s dad, right?” She took a long breath. “Are they terrorists?”

“Not exactly.” Reynato flashed his braces. “We don’t believe they have any ideological or religious grudge against the United States. But they realize that there are plenty of people in the world, and plenty of people in this country, I’m sorry to say, that do. It’s to those people that they would like to sell your father.” He paused, only briefly, and the word
sell
filled the room. “The fact that a sight-unseen visit to a mosque was their first try is a good thing. It means that they’re idiots. And they don’t have leads.”

“Have they hurt him?” Alice asked.

The fact that Reynato didn’t answer right away was answer enough. His slick, too-cool-for-school persona dissolved and, for the first time since hearing the news, Benicio really started crying. He wasn’t even embarrassed about it, he just cried. Because this was so fucking awful. Because somebody had hurt his father. They’d probably hurt him badly. And they would maybe kill him. And his father’s best hope for being rescued was this guy, who, let’s face it, was looking more and more like a maniac.

“He’s not in immediate medical danger,” Reynato said. “The kidnappers left a mobile phone at the mosque with a picture of Mr. Bridgewater on it—a proof of life for the Imam. The director told me not to use the word
torture
, but I know it when I see it.” Now it was Alice who started crying. Benicio had moved on to nausea. “I know this is difficult to hear, but you should consider that mobile phone a little Finnish-made blessing. Not only does it leave us with a record of the kidnapper’s contacts and call history, but with any luck we can use it to track down the vendor. If he keeps good receipts he’ll have a record of who bought it.”

Alice wiped her cheeks and wrote this all down in her pad. When Reynato finished talking she asked for a copy of the map he’d marked up. He peeled it right off the wall, rolled it up and handed it over. He shook hands with everybody and walked them to the station door. Outside it had begun to drizzle—a sunshower—and everything was
incongruously beautiful. Reynato stood in the doorway, waving as they made for the shuttle, like a homeowner would with departing guests. Despite the rain, Benicio cracked his window open, sure that he’d be sick. Then, when he wasn’t sick, he felt guilty. Like maybe he still wasn’t sad enough. A good son, a son who loved his father unreservedly, would be vomiting his guts up right now.

IT WAS ALMOST DARK
by the time he and Alice got to the Shangri-La. They ate a quick, quiet meal in the hotel restaurant and took the elevator up to his suite. Edilberto had left Alice’s bag sitting at the foot of the bed and she squatted down to open it. “Where should I put these things?” she asked, holding up a stack of poorly folded blouses.

“Let me.” He took the clothes from her and laid them in the dresser. She sat on the edge of the bed, watching as he slung pants and dresses over dark wooden hangers. He lined her toiletries up beneath the bathroom mirror. He placed her shoes beside the door.

They fucked. She initiated. It was filthy, and good, the way filthy sex is good. He thought about his dive instructor, and about Solita, a little bit. He wondered what Alice was thinking of, because she was going wild. Upon finishing they were rendered messy and embarrassed. The same thing had happened, he remembered, when his mother died. Sex was excellent after his mother was dead. Now, with his father kidnapped, sex was super-excellent. He was a lousy person.

Alice slept and Benicio took a shower. Steam filled the bathroom. It was velvety in his throat and lungs, and when he got out the towels were damp with it. Alice’s toiletries sat where he’d lined them up below the big mirror. He began going through them. He unzipped little pouches, wheedling through face cream, generic painkillers, some cheapo perfumes and foundation a shade darker than she could pull off. It didn’t take long to find—a blue envelope with slots for twenty-eight little pills, most of them custard-yellow but the last seven pure white. He popped each pill out of the packet and dropped them, one by one, into the toilet. Then, using a small pair of scissors, he cut the packet into tiny pieces and dropped those into the toilet as well. This wasn’t
sabotage. It’s not like he wanted children—God, he wanted the opposite of children. He just wanted
—needed
—some space to think. And he couldn’t find that space in the dirty routine they’d settled into; the fucking, the rough play. It was getting corrosive and had to stop. It was a way of moving farther apart, not closer together. And he didn’t want them to move apart. He was so afraid of moving apart that his fingers shook as he flushed her birth control pills.

Back in the bedroom, Alice snored. It was totally dark outside and the moon hung in the top corner of his picture window like the head of a hammered nail. He stood naked in the middle of the room, his body still steaming, his pores drinking the chill of the air-conditioning. He lifted a corner of the heavy blankets and began to slide in. Then he heard a noise, and stopped. Something—a door? a drawer?—opened and slammed closed again. Footsteps smacked with the sound of sandal flapping against heel, and a moment later came the bang of something heavy dropped on something hard. The sounds were coming from his father’s suite. The police had been in there, of course, in the first days after the news broke. But it was supposed to be empty now. Benicio dressed as quickly as he could—no underwear or shoes, just the slacks he’d worn to the meeting that day and an unbuttoned work shirt—and slipped through the door to the adjoining suite.

It looked different than when he’d explored it nearly a week ago. The mess of papers on the desk had been scattered across the study floor, as far as the kitchenette and living area. His father’s sport coats and blazers—big billowing things that Benicio could have wrapped two or three times around his own shoulders—lay with their pockets turned out atop a kindling tent of wooden hangers on the bed. More noises came from the walk-in closet. Solita was in there, squatting with her back to him, turning his father’s folded socks inside out. At least this time she hadn’t brought the kid.

“If you leave right now, I won’t have you arrested,” he said.

Solita jolted up and spun to face him. In one hand she held a purse made of worn denim and in the other dangled a knot of socks. “Your father owes me money,” she said.

“If you have business with my father, come back when he’s home.”

“What if he’s never home? What if he dies?” She saw the change in his face and switched tactics, quick. “June and I can’t wait forever. I need the money for
him
. He needs a good doctor.”

“Yeah? Tell me what he has and you can walk out with whatever you can carry.”

“Cancer,” she said without hesitating.

“What kind of cancer?”

“In his hands.” She looked down at her own hands, and then back up at Benicio. She seemed to know the lie was spoiled. He left her in the closet and dialed the front desk on the bedside telephone. He gave them the suite number and said there was an intruder in his father’s room, speaking loud enough for her to hear.

“I’m not a thief,” she said as she emerged from the closet, heading to the front door at a fast walk.

“You’re stealing,” he said. “You’re a thief.” He caught her by one of the faded straps of her denim purse and she pivoted to punch him in the neck. He brought his forearm up, braced it against her collarbones and pinned her to the wall beside the door. She kept hitting him until he was able to pull the purse away, fling it to the opposite corner of the room and use his free hand to pin her wrist as well. He realized at that moment that he was on the verge of the kind of violence that would change the shape of his life. He was capable of it.

“He’s not even your kid, is he?” Some of his spit spotted her forehead. “What is he, your little brother? And you’re using him to steal from my dad when he’s in trouble.”

“Your little brother,” she said. “Not mine.” Her hips bucked against his and her knee struck out, but missed. The skin of her belly touched the skin of his. She anticipated the change in him, and pressed in close. He let her go.

“Leave now,” he said.

“I need my purse.”

He retrieved the purse from where he’d flung it, upended the contents on the floor and offered it to her.