Rembrandt's Ghost (9 page)

“Definitely not Kansas,” muttered Finn. She could hear echoing footsteps coming from the passage behind them.

“What do we do?” said Billy.

“Get on the train.”

They joined the crowd surging onto the train and found themselves pushed through the open doorway. There was a pause and then the doors slid closed and they began to move.

“This is insane,” whispered Billy. Directly in front of them, hanging on to a strap, was a man wearing the soft cap and gray uniform of a sergeant in the Nazi Landspoliezei, the regular police. He had a copy of
Signal
, the German version of
Life
magazine, under his arm. Above him was an advertisement for Dr. Carrot, guaranteed to bring you good health if you ate a lot of him. The Landspoliezei sergeant had a holstered Luger pistol on his hip. He looked bored.

“Did they get on?” asked Finn.

“I didn’t see.”

“Do you know where this train goes?”

“No, except that wasn’t bloody Piccadilly back there.” The German cop was definitely staring at them now, a worried expression on his face. He started to say something, then turned away. “This is giving me the collywobbles,” Billy muttered. He looked away from the cop. There was another poster beside the Dr. Carrot advertisment. It was a stern black-and-white illustration of a strong man with shirtsleeves rolled up, a cap on his head, and a serious expression on his face. There was a massive sledgehammer over his shoulder. He had muscles like a stevedore’s. The message said something about helping the soldier on the front lines, which didn’t make much sense because a man with muscles like that would have been on the front lines himself, unless he had some kind of heart condition, in which case he wouldn’t have the sledgehammer over his shoulder.… He stopped himself; he was on the edge of losing it. Finn squeezed his hand. The train began to slow.

“We’re not going far,” said Finn.

“We’re in trouble,” Billy answered, nudging her. There was a crash as the door opened at the far end of the coach. The two Asians, minus their umbrellas, had turned into three. One of them was limping, pushing his way through the crowd of people. He looked extremely angry.

“Crap,” said Finn. She threw herself forward into the arms of the Nazi sergeant, reaching for his holstered Luger and pushing him out of the way in a single motion. The gun was far too light. It wasn’t the real thing. She waved it in the general direction of their pursuers anyway and instinctively half the people in the car screamed and everyone ducked, including the three Asians. The train pulled into a brightly lit station. The sign said: LEICESTER SQUARE.

“No, it’s not!” said Billy.

Finn threw the Luger down the length of the car as the doors slid open. She turned, put both hands on Billy’s back, and pushed him out onto the platform.

“What the hell!” A man wearing headphones jumped back, barely avoiding being run down. “Who let you on! Wardrobe! Shit! They’ve ruined the shot! Sean! Who the bloody hell… ?”

Finn still pushing Billy from behind, they skirted the camera setup, jumped over a set of narrow rails waiting for a dolly shot, and battered their way through a regulation swarm of camera people, lighting crew, grips, first, second, and third ADs, sound men, set dec, props, and assorted need-to-bes, want-to-bes, and think-they-already-ares that make up a location shoot for a major motion picture. Predictably someone shouted out the classic angry comment heard by anyone who has ever interfered with the making of a film, even if only for a moment, destroying their expensive and very fragile illusion.

“Hey! Can’t you see we’re making a movie here?” As though creating cinematic fantasy was more important than any possible reality that might stand in its silly way.

Billy knocked over a light stand and there was a sharp bang as a hot bulb exploded. Finn caught a glimpse of a placard announcing that they were on the set of the DreamWorks production of Len Deighton’s novel
SSGB
, and then they were gone, sidestepping through a wide-open set of doors leading onto the actual Holborn Station platform and reaching the escalator. They took the moving steps two at a time, pushing past people riding to the surface, and finally found their way up to High Holborn. They were almost back to Tulkinghorn’s and the British Museum. The rain had stopped. There was no sign of the men behind them. Without a pause Billy stepped off the curb and waved. A black cab came to a jarring halt. They climbed in and Finn slammed the door. As the cab moved off into traffic she looked back and saw their limping enemy and his friends come out of the station entrance. A moment longer and it would have been too late.

“Where we going, if you don’t mind me askin’?” said the cabbie without turning around.

“Canvey Island,” said Billy, settling back in the wide, comfortable seat.

“That’s in bleeding Essex, mate!” the driver said, startled.

“I’ll pay.”

“Too right you’ll pay,” said the taxi driver. “Quite the distance. At least twenty miles.”

“More like thirty,” said Billy, sighing. The cabbie shrugged and slid the big car back into the stream of traffic. Ten minutes later they were on their way out of London, heading East along the Thames, making for the Channel.

“What was that before you started saying dirty things in Latin?”

“Something rude in Cornish as I recall,” Billy said. “Something to do with goats and his mother’s sexual habits.”

“What’s on Canvey Island?” Finn asked.

“Home,” answered Billy. “The
Busted Flush
.”

Ask the average person in Wichita Falls where Mariveles is, and you’ll most likely get nothing but a blank stare, and for good reason: Mariveles has always been either in the middle of nowhere or at the gates of hell, depending on your point of view. The small coastal town lies at the entrance to Manila Bay on the northwestern arm of a jungle peninsula. The harbor is a deep-water anchorage clinging to the base of an immense, forest-covered volcanic cone. This mountain is usually wreathed in flirtatious mists, occasionally giving a glimpse of the summit as it waits patiently for better times to come again, as they had a few years previously for the mountain’s fiery brother, Mount Pinatubo, less than fifty miles away.

Historically Mariveles was once a resting point for ships entering the bay and the famous Chinese pirate Li Ma Hong reportedly stopped there for food and water before attacking Manila in 1575. Under Ferdinand Marcos the town became the center of something called an “economic zone,” and the original fishing town was swept aside to make way for factories, docks, and official-looking government offices, most of which were now empty, and even a nuclear reactor, which they could never get to run. The grain terminal didn’t quite work out and neither did the “plastic city” manufacturing polyethylene sheets. Given Imelda Marcos’s infamous fetish, there was a certain irony in the fact that one of the few surviving factories manufactured Nike knockoffs. At the end of the day, if Mariveles was known for anything, it was as the place where the Bataan Death March began in 1942 and also as the place where the tennis balls for Wimbledon are manufactured. Though it’s supposedly a “first-class” city of seventy-five thousand or so, the real population is almost twice that, mostly unemployed and mostly living in slums on the far western side of the harbor and well outside the boundaries of the “economic zone.” It is a mixed-culture port town of immigrants fleeing even poorer places in the world and a place where hope is a commodity in shorter supply than jobs. The favorite recreation in Mariveles is the consumption of
shabu
, the Philippine version of methamphetamine, cooked up in enormous quantities in illegal, and violently explosive, drug microbreweries all over the hillside squatters’ ghettoes.

From where he sat in the open-air beachside snack bar, Briney Hanson could see the old-fashioned cranes loading the
Batavia Queen
at the old Mariveles docks a little farther along the harbor. With berthing charges being what they were, Manila itself was far too rich for the old
Queen
’s blood and she was lucky to be picking up any cargo at all in Mariveles: banana chips and processed cassava meal for animal feed, which meant the
Queen
was going to stink all the way back down to Singapore.

They’d off-load the banana chips there, pick up a load of electronics stuff, and then make a run up to Rangoon with the cassava meal. The last leg would involve taking the electronics stuff on to Madras, or Chennai as it was now called, for assembly into everything from car radios to talking teddy bears. After that, it was anyone’s guess. But right now Hanson and the
Queen
were still in Bataan.

He took a swallow from his longneck liter bottle of Red Horse beer and swabbed a piece of “chicharon” pork crackling into the hot sauce on his plate. He forked up a mouthful of crunchy squid heads in rice and washed it all down with another hit of the strong, amber pilsner. Mariveles might have had the most corrupt municipal government in the Philippines—and that was saying something—but it had unbelievably good snacks.

Hanson had spent the entire morning with his old friend Dr. Nemesio Zobel-Ayala, the local abortionist, Pratique officer for the docks, brother-in-law of the mayor, and all-round
mordida
man. Without kicking back to Ayala, you could be quarantined for a month, not allowed to off-load or on-load cargo, and even wind up getting beaten to a pulp if you even tried to step onshore.

Hanson had swallowed his disgust and played the Good Buddy game just like always, sitting with the little weasel in his stifling dockside office above the customs warehouse for hours, watching him drinking shots of Napoleon Quince and listening to endless stories about his conquests in La Zona, the local brothel area where women and girls, most of them native and some no more than ten or twelve years old, plied their age-old profession in little blanket-divided cubicles, serving the seagoing trade and foreign workers from the few remaining factories in Mariveles.

Zobel-Ayala had all the bases covered. Not only was he a pimp to half the girls in La Zona, but he was also the public health officer for Mariveles and made a bit extra on the side by selling off government-supplied antibiotics to the highest bidder.

The doctor had big plans, most of which involvedsetting himself up in America one day, but Hanson thought it more likely that the slimy son of a bitch would probably wind up floating upside down under one of the Mariveles piers with his throat cut, either by his rivals in the Kuratong Baleleng or the Pentagon, both of which had big money in
shabu
labs and smuggling all through the islands.

Hanson ate the last of the food on his plate, finished off the Red Horse, and dropped a few crumpled bills onto the counter. He climbed down off the old-fashioned, chrome diner stool, gave a satisfied belch, and headed back along the crushed coral path to the dock road. It was blisteringly hot and he could feel the beer leaching out of him, sweat dripping down the back of his neck from underneath the band of his old captain’s cap and down his sides.

Even though he was wearing sunglasses, the light was enough to make Hanson squint, as it glinted off the small broken waves in the harbor and hammered down like a ringing gong from the cloudless sky. Like everywhere else in this part of the world, he knew it could change into black monsoon within a single tick of time, turning the harbor into a witch’s cauldron and bouncing the
Queen
around like a beach ball at her moorings, but for the moment he was trapped inside a furnace with its thermostat on the blink.

The meal at the snack bar and the few minutes by himself had been a nice break after a morning with the sleazy doctor, but making his way past the tumbledown warehouses and the junk-fronted chandlers’ shops along the quay brought Hanson back to reality with a hard knock; the oppressive heat, the stink of rot and old rope, of tarred pilings and the dead fish along the bilge-filthy waterfront was the stink of his own future, and he knew it. Endless runs through dangerous seas taking things to one place and other things back again. It was no way for anyone to live. If something didn’t change soon…

Hanson could see the jib cranes at the dockside working, swinging over big, two-hundred-pound bags of cassava meal in rope slings. On deck Elisha Santoro, his first mate, was overseeing Kong and a few hired Filipino day-hands. The day-hands were dressed in
bahag
loincloths and Eli wore jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. The closest thing to a uniform on the
Batavia Queen
was the dull strip of gold braid on Hanson’s battered cap.

He frowned, staring down along the pier. The banana chips wouldn’t arrive until the next day, but there was a pile of wooden crates on the dock next to the
Queen
and a four-ton Mitsubishi Fighter Mignon truck parked beside them. Bulk banana chips were shipped in jute bags, like the cassava meal, not wooden crates. Stranger still, Zobel-Ayala hadn’t said a word about any new cargo, and he would have been the first to know since every clearance certificate issued on the docks had to go through him.