Save your places in any Libertary books.
Just Log in or register - it's free and easy!

Sugarland

by Phillip Finch (more about this book and author)

Part 2: Chapters 6-10
56

· 6 ·

     Vangie stood framed in the light of a tropical afternoon. It flared through her hair and wept a glow along her bare arms.

     Nobody can tell you about sunlight in the tropics. You can read about it, hear people rave about it, but no words are true enough to the hotness of that light, the heavy way it sits on your shoulders, the dazzling liquid whiteness. At that moment it flowed over Vangie and fired the edges of her dress: a red dress, vague as the one in the photo.

     She was alone in a classroom, by a long window that dropped almost from the ceiling to a knee-high bookcase. She held up a hooked pole and deftly snagged the eye of the window's topmost section, tilted inward for ventilation. It snapped shut when she gave the pole an effortless push.

     “Miss Flores?” I said. In the principal's office I had learned her full name. “Evangeline Flores?”
57

     She turned a perfect quarter turn to look at me. I couldn't see much detail, back-lit as she was in the brilliance.

     “Vangie,” she said.

     I walked across the room. My path took me gradually out of the glare until I was standing beside her.

     “My name is Jack Hart.”

     “You are an American.”

     “Through and through.”

     I tried to grasp all that the snapshot had missed. The clear depth of her skin. The slight, elusive folds of eyes that could have been Chinese or Malay or Polynesian, depending on the way she moved. Her absolute composure.

     “Can I help you?” she said. She seemed to gently rock the words. That lilt, and an almost imperceptible heightening of some vowels, was all she had of an accent.

     I gave her a business card.

     “I'm investigating your cousin's case.”

     “Sir, I have many cousins,” she said, but not at all in a snotty way. She read the card as if she had never heard of the company and had no idea why it would want to talk to her. She didn't seem threatened.

     “I mean Lito Sanchez. Your cousin Preciosa filed a claim for benefits under a fairly substantial life policy that he just recently purchased. We think there's reason to question the claim.”

     “I don't understand.”

     “Lito's alive,” I said, and waited.

     She peered at me as if my head had sprouted clover. I would remember it days later, after I had discovered her gift for parrying and deflection, her bedrock reserve. After maddening hours of trying to meet her eyes for more than a flicker, I would recall that moment in the classroom when she had stared at me so openly, and the memory would amaze me.

     That's how it is with the madonnas of the Philippines.
58
Like Filipino guerrillas, they show themselves when and how they choose.

     She peered, she peered, and I felt myself squirm.

     But her mouth was forming a smile. The smile broadened and she put up her free hand to hide a giggle, laughing not just at the folly but at the fool who had proposed it. Even so, I didn't mind. It was a lovely laugh, and I knew I'd do almost anything to hear it again, to see her hand go up once more in that uncontrived way.

     The laugh wasn't all gone when she lowered the hand and said, “I'm sorry. I wish it were true. I loved my cousin very much.”

     “You think he's dead?”

     “I know he is dead.”

     “How can you be so sure?”

     She frowned as if the question deserved some thought, abruptly seemed to remember the window pole in her hand, turned and carried it to the nearest corner of the room. She walked with a slow sway that tossed the skirt of her dress. It would have been provocative if it had been conscious: but I could believe that she had never once considered how she walked.

     She leaned the pole into the corner and turned back to me.

     “What can I tell you? Lito is dead. Everyone knows it. I cried all night when I heard of it. I went to his funeral. I light a candle for him in the cathedral every Tuesday and Friday. He is dead.”

     The way she said it, I could see the funeral. A sleepless night of tears—I could hear that in her voice. I wondered if it was possible.

     I walked up to her again.

     “You saw him in the coffin?”

     “Yes—no! No, of course I didn't. He was burned. The coffin was closed.”

     She was tentative now, maybe a little hurt, thinking that I had tried to trap her. I had.
59

     “The reason I ask, he's done this before. At least twice that we know of, taken out policies and collected on false evidence of death.”

     “Oh Lito.” Fond chiding.

     “He walked off on thousands of dollars in debts. He lied and cheated.”

     “He did that to you?” she said.

     “I never met the man.”

     “That's too bad. You would have liked him. Lito was warm and affectionate, and he made people laugh.”

     “His creditors aren't amused.”

     The room was hot, growing hotter with the windows shut. A bead of sweat had formed below her left ear, and now slid along her jawline to her chin. She brushed it perfectly with the back of her fingers.

     “I think Precy is here now,” I said. I looked at the spot where the sweat had been.

     “Yes. She is with her parents in Hermosa.”

     “In the barrio.”

     “No, the town proper. They bought a small house with money from Lito and Precy. Mostly Lito. He was a good son. He was generous to all, especially his family.” Her tone told me that I should pay attention. “Lito took care of the people who depended on him. He provided. I don't know about America. But here, that is the highest compliment for a man. He provided. Nobody who knew Lito well would betray him. He had earned that kind of loyalty. If he were alive, you would never find him.”

     “Then he might be alive.”

     “Oh no. Lito is dead. But if he were alive, you would never find him.”

     Even if none of it was true, I didn't care. She could tell me what she wanted. I was tired of badgering someone I wanted to kiss.

     “I might like to look in on Precy,” I said.

     “You knew her in the States?”

     “We met a couple of times. I'd need her address.”
60

     She gave a why-not shrug and went over to her desk.

     “Hermosa is about fifty kilometers from here,” she said as she began to write. “An hour by jeepney, a little less by car. Do you know Negros?”

     “This is my first day.”

     “Welcome.” The ballpoint traced a careful diagram. “You came here just because of Lito?”

     I said yes. She shook her head at the notion.

     “Do you have a car? Or will you hire a driver?”

     “I don't know yet,” I said. Truth was, I had no plans to see Precy. She wasn't likely to tell me anything else. But I wanted to filch some more seconds here.

     I stepped closer when she was finished. She held the paper to show me.

     “Six kilometers south of the city proper, along the coastal road,” she said, “you will pass the entrance for Pahanocoy beach. Another four kilometers, a bridge across the river, into the town of Bago. The road to Hermosa is the first left intersection in Bago. There is no sign.”

     It was all there in neat strokes and compact handwriting. She reached briskly to point with the tip of the pen. I could feel the heat of her arm. I caught a lavender scent, too faint for perfume. Maybe soap—I imagined her that morning, lathering her skin, languid and unguarded.

     “Pass through the sitio of Cagbungalon and the town of Palo. Continue into Hermosa, around the square. One block more, you will see a statue of Our Lady. As it happens, her right hand points to the corner of Bonifacio Street. The house of my auntie and uncle is the fourth on the right.”

     She caught me studying her instead of the paper. In a businesslike tone she said, “Travel during the day. It is safer. The road is narrow, and the situation … travel during the day.”

     I said, “Lanao. Where Lito was supposed to have died. Where is that?”
61

     She looked back to the paper. The pen made a faint, diffident extension of the road that she had drawn.

     “In the mountains,” she said. “A few kilometers beyond Hermosa.”

     She handed the paper to me. I took it without looking. I was watching her.

     She said, “Is something wrong?”

     “Nothing. I was just wondering if I'd see you again.”

     “I don't know what else I can do for you.”

     “We could talk,” I said. “Get to know each other a little better.”

     It came out glib, the way I said it. I didn't mean it that way. My mouth was dry and I might as easily have stammered. But somehow I sounded glib.

     “For what reason?” she said. She folded her arms and seemed to withdraw behind them, created a few more inches of space between us.

     “I think you're an impressive young woman. I'd like to spend some time with you.”

     “Thank you. That is not possible.” Her look was stolid, and then she denied me even that, dropping her eyes. Watching her, I became a voyeur.

     “I'm not such a bad guy,” I said. “I won't bite.”

     Her head moved side to side.

     “Dinner. That's all. I can be a gentleman.”

     “No,” she said. She sounded firm, not at all regretful.

     “You don't wear a wedding ring. But maybe it's a fiancé. A boyfriend. If you're committed just say so.”

     “I am not committed,” she said, “but I am not available for casual engagements.”

     I wanted to tell her it felt anything but casual.

     “I'm not married, if that's what's bothering you.”

     “Please go.”

     “Sorry if I upset you.”

     “I'm not upset. But you should go.”

     She wouldn't look at me, but she sounded firm.

     I said, “Thanks for your help.”
62

     My card was on her desk, where she had put it. The dress had no pockets. I went over and wrote the address and telephone of Bembo's sister.

     “This is where I'm staying,” I said. “If you need to reach me for any reason.”

     I'd have done the same at the end of any interview. I suppose I was already trying to convince myself that's what it had been, just another contact.

     Her head bobbed without coming up.

     “I'm glad I had a chance to meet you,” I said, “brief as it was.”

     “Good luck in Negros,” she said. Her eyes rose, gave me a quick knock, and dropped again.

     I left the room, hurried down the corridor, stung and flustered. Several children sat on the front steps, eight or nine years old, the girls wearing plaid jumpers, boys in white shirts and pants of navy blue. They watched me go by.

     Hot sun was in my face as I started down the walkway. Unreal, I told myself, the past few minutes. Unreal, the way she had affected me: she was attractive enough, all right, but I thought that I must have needed to find her beautiful—that I had wanted to be stunned, therefore she had been stunning. Unreal, too, the way she'd rebuffed me. Women turned me down often enough, but never so hard, with so little to cushion the fall.

     Naive and unexposed, I thought, literally a provincial. She had been unready for me, I too-ready for her. That sounded right. It was neat, it fit, and I had it all boxed in by the time I approached the end of the walk, where it met a gap in the stone wall of the photo. A few more steps and I'd be gone, when a boy's voice behind me yelled, “Hey Joe.” The phrase called up a newsreel memory of G.I.’s marching through a bombed-out town, kids running up to touch the soldiers.

     Hey Joe, he yelled again, and this time I knew he meant me. I turned, the boy waved, I waved back.
63

     That's when I glanced to the window, her classroom. The sun broke bright off the glass, but I saw her through the glare. She was standing there, watching me go, lovely beyond my imagination.

     I expected her to move away, but she didn't, not at first. We took each other in. She seemed wistful. I couldn't believe that my leaving had touched her, but she seemed wistful all the same, and forlorn and very much alone.

     Only later did I understand that she must have seen the same in me.

     We watched each other for a long moment that ended too soon. She backed away and was gone, and I was left with the empty window, its splashy reflection of the sun.

 

     From the Daily Star:

VILLAGERS ESCAPE

Reports have reached Bacolod of the mass exodus by residents of a remote settlement in central Negros. Carmen Villanueva, of Sitio Dagad in rural Himamaylan, claims that she and ninety other refugees fled their mountain homes after the village was attacked one night last week, purportedly by an anti-communist vigilante company, the Sacramentong Dugo, led by a certain Baldomero Capas.

     She said the villagers reached Himamaylan Town after an exodus of four days, during which they traveled only in darkness, out of fear for their lives. Six residents of Dagad are said to have been killed in the midnight raid. Mrs. Villanueva says that she and her neighbors despair for the future,

64

as their homes were burned in the raid and they have lost most of their possessions and livestock.

 

     “We have a garrison army,” said Bembo's brother-in-law, whose name was Rogelio Herrera. He was a thin man with a hawkish look, hair slicked back close to his skull. He owned a hardware store.

     “It sits behind walls and waits. Behind walls it is always ready to fight. But the Nice People do not pay house calls at garrisons.”

     He saw that I didn't understand.

     “That's what a lot of folk call them, the NPA. Nice People Around. With No Permanent Address.”

     It was evening. He had taken me around the corner to meet his friend Nanding. At a table on the sidewalk we drank beer and ate skewered chicken livers from a charcoal grill. Young boys dribbled a tennis ball under a clothes-hanger hoop. The only traffic was three-wheel pedicabs that teenage drivers whirred around cracks and potholes.

     “Our soldiers are bodyguards for the generals,” said Nanding. “Every brigade commander has five hundred bodyguards.”

     “There are some fighting officers,” Rogelio said. “They patrol, they're ready to pursue. But when they're in the countryside, it's the guerrillas who more or less choose when the fight will be. If they don't like the odds, they don't fight. If the situation is favorable—”

     “Bap!” said Nanding, pounding the table so hard that the bottles wobbled and the chicken livers jumped.

     “You can't blame them for being reluctant to expose themselves,” Rogelio said.

     “The communists are based up there,” said Nanding. He pointed his chin at the mountains east of the city.

     “At the beginning of this year,” Nanding said, “the
65
army tried a big offensive in the mountains down south. They got pinned down the first day, and it took them three days to get unstuck. They hauled bodies out on carts because helicopters were being shot down. The NPA own the mountains.”

     The mountains were the spine of the island, a long unbroken series of steep humps. You could see them from almost anywhere in Bacolod, looming in the east. I could see them now, vaulting above the roofs and the power lines. Their thick foliage gave them the color and texture of a ripe avocado's skin.

     “Really,” said Rogelio, “nobody cares about the mountains. If it was just the mountains, the NPA could have them. But from there they influence the rest of the countryside. Many settlements are under communist control. I'm not saying they fly the hammer-and-sickle. But day to day the NPA are the authority. The army might come through on a patrol, and any guerrillas that happen to be around will disappear for a time. But the army cannot stay, you see, because if they do, the NPA will gather to attack.”

     “To kick their ass,” Nanding said into the bottle raised at his lips.

     “So the army moves on and the NPA is free to return. Most of them are local boys. Who is in control? The army that shows up once in a while and then rushes back to the garrisons? Or local boys with guns who come and go as they please?”

     Nanding said, “That's where the vigilantes figure in. They are local boys, too. They live in the hills just the same as the NPA. There are many groups with many names. Alsa Masa—Masses Arise. El Tigre. The Tadtad, it means chop-chop, they hack their victims with bolo knives. The S.D., Sacramentong Dugo, holy blood. They're choppers too.”

     “The vigilantes kill communists?” I said.

     “They think they do,” said Rogelio.
66

     “Oh yes, they have methods,” said Nanding. “They hardly ever make a mistake.”

     “The NPA isn't just guerrillas,” Rogelio said. “In their consolidated areas, the barrios and towns they control, they have a structure of leaders and supporters. That's who the vigilantes go after. Some are known but many others aren't.”

     “Yes,” said Nanding. “But that doesn't bother the vigilantes. As I say, they have their methods for detecting communists. They are guided by God.”

     “Most vigilante bands start as cults,” Rogelio said. He stopped. He looked unhappy.

     “Tell him,” said Nanding.

     “These are religious cults,” Rogelio said. “Very superstitious. They use amulets and incantations to make themselves invisible during battle.”

     “And for finding communists,” said Nanding.

     “They carry vials of holy oil,” said Rogelio. “Some of them believe in knee bones—in Mindanao there's a big problem with desecration of graves, vigilantes stealing knee bones to wear on necklaces. They make bracelets from the shells of one-eyed coconuts. They believe, when they get near a communist, the bracelets get tight. The bones jump, the vials boil.”

     “What did I tell you?” said Nanding. “Infallible!”

     A Jeep with some soldiers turned the corner a block away and began trundling in our direction, picking a course around potholes. The boys stopped playing. As the Jeep got closer, Nanding picked studiously at his chicken livers while Rogelio made patterns in the wet circles that the beer bottles had left on the tabletop.

     I was the only one who watched the Jeep. There were five soldiers and the driver. They had M-16 rifles across their laps or propped up on butt stocks. The Jeep went down the street, and when it was gone, the boys began dribbling their ball again.

     “Country folk are not sophisticated,” Rogelio said. “If
67

someone tells them that God wants them to kill communists, they believe it. If the NPA get to them first, they turn into communists. They don't know anything about communism, but now they're communists. Country people kill country people, local boys kill local boys, poor folk kill poor folk. Their lives are cheap. We don't know a tenth of what goes on up there.”

     He took a long self-conscious pull at his beer, as if he didn't often give speeches. We all drank, and I watched the mountaintops become coppery in the falling light. Lanao and the hacienda were up there somewhere, at the end of the thin line of road that Vangie had drawn. I imagined ragged bands moving cautiously under the canopy of the high trees, nasty bloodlettings, the sounds of battle and of dying that the distance smothered.

     Rogelio and his wife, Bertina, lived on the south side of Bacolod, in the home that had belonged to Bembo's parents. It was a two-story house with bars across the windows and a six-foot fence that heavy vines overwhelmed.

     They lived alone, six kids married, and rented out the top floor. It needed paint outside. The furniture was simple and sparse: in our room the mattresses were foam pads, and the decoration was a paint company's photo calendar—scenes of Yellowstone—and an old wedding portrait. You flushed the toilet with a pail, filled the pail from a tap in the shower stall.

     But the place was clean, Bertie cooked a good meal, and it wasn't the fault of the mattress that I was still awake in the darkness when Bembo came in.

     I knew it was late. He made indefinite shuffling noises, bumped my bed once, rustled his clothes. The room was small enough, I could smell the stale bloom of rum.

     A match flamed. He was sitting at the edge of his bed, in boxer shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, a stick figure under loose skin.
68

     “You are awake,” he said. “You should be sleeping. Don't tell me you waited for me.”

     “I was thinking.”

     “You think too much.” He put a cigarette in his mouth and slowly, intently, brought the flame to the tip of the cigarette. When it was lit he blew out the match.

     “What about the driver?”

     “I did not speak with the driver,” he said.

     “Let's keep at it. We need him.”

     “I know what we need.” The end of the cigarette glowed hot as he inhaled. He held the smoke. So long, I thought he had swallowed it. “This is my place, you know. Bacolod is the city of my birth.”

     “You told me.”

     “I have many many friends here in Bacolod. Tonight I was given a homecoming celebration. My evening was superlative.”

     “I can tell.”

     “Oh, are you jealous?”

     “Just tired.”

     “No wonder. I noticed you didn't sleep worth a damn last night.”

     I didn't say anything.

     “How did it go with the teacher?” he said.

     “She told me Lito is dead. She said she went to his funeral. Is that possible?”

     “Anything is possible. That's not what I meant. How did it go with the teacher?”

     “It went all right,” I said.

     “It went all right. What passion. I don't know how your girlfriends can get enough of it. It went all right.”

     He stretched out on the bed; I could tell by the red glow when he brought the cigarette to his mouth again.

     “Is she beautiful? Or just all right?”

     “She's beautiful. I felt like I was thirteen years old. She's beautiful and smart. She has a world of class. She was born with class—I can tell.”
69

     “That's better.”

     “She also told me to go to hell.”

     “Whatever for?”

     “I asked her for a date.”

     “You asked her for a date? You think you can just meet this girl and ask her for a date? Oh my God. This is a province-bred girl, a true Filipina, you think she is going on a date with some stranger, some American, whom she does not even know? I suppose you expected that after you bought her dinner and a couple of cocktails, she would just lay down for you.”

     “No. Not her. It does happen, though, you know.”

     He laughed a fierce low laugh.

     “If that girl was still living in the barrio, and you wanted to talk to her—just talk—you know what you would do? You would go to the home of her parents. Every day you would fill their water jar and cut cooking wood for her mother. If her brothers liked cigarettes, you would buy them cigarettes. If you were very diligent, after about a month, she might sit with you for a few minutes. In the presence of a chaperone, naturally.”

     “It doesn't matter. She wasn't interested.”

     “How can you know that?”

     “She wouldn't even discuss it.”

     “Of course she wouldn't discuss it. Of course you are expected to pursue her. Of course you are expected to go to extraordinary lengths.” He dragged on the cigarette with a rattling noise. “The proper approach is for you to call on her at her residence. I will obtain her address tomorrow. That is what friends are for.”

     “We're supposed to be finding Lito Sanchez.”

     “Lito Sanchez,” he said. “Yes. I did not speak with the driver, but I did interview his wife. His name is Nemesio Puyat. He got some Japanese tourists who wanted to go to Negros Oriental. He is with them there and isn't expected back for two days. As to Collins. One of my companions tonight was a police lieutenant attached to Precinct Six,
70
the station that was said to have investigated when his body was found. Do you know what he told me? He said that the police were never called. The P.C. came directly to the scene. Don't you find that curious? Oh, and I learned that Lanao is part of a large sugar plantation, Hacienda Paz. We will need permission to go there. I assume you want to inspect the site of the fire. You see, I was not an idle drunkard tonight.”

     He took a last puff and mashed the butt out in an ashtray on the night table.

     “A drunkard,” he said, “but not an idle drunkard.”

     “The barrio's on the hacienda,” I said, “the owner of the hacienda owns the barrio? The whole place?”

     Vangie hadn't mentioned that.

     “A large hacienda will have several barrios and sitios, maybe twenty to two hundred families each. They provide the farm labor. The hacendero allows them to build their huts on his property, without deeds or leases, of course. They have no means to exist except by working on the farm. If they leave the job, they must relinquish their home also.”

     “That's a pretty good system, you own the town, you just about own the labor, too.”

     “The Correon family is very powerful,” he said. “Luis Correon owns Hacienda Paz, that alone is thousands of hectares, and they have others besides. Luis gave his son a large hacienda on his twenty-first birthday. If you include cousins and relations by marriage, the clan owns much of what is worth having in this province.”

     “I know that name,” I said.

     I got my wallet and fumbled through it in the darkness. Bembo sat up and fired another match. It showed me the slip of paper stuck between credit cards, the paper that Dalzell had given me in the taxi.

     It said “Luis Correon,” followed by a five-digit phone number.
71

     Bembo took the paper and held the match in front of it. I told him how I'd gotten it.

     I said, “So Lito must have worked for Correon.”

     “One of thousands. I wouldn't make much of it.”

     But he kept looking at the slip. Trying to see something more than ink on paper, I thought. He looked until the match burned down to his fingertips, and he blew it out with a breathy curse.

 

SARGE SLAIN

Two unknown assailants, thought to be members of an NPA assassination team, shot P.C. S/Sgt. Ramon Padilla to death before dozens of onlookers yesterday afternoon at Bacolod City Plaza. According to witnesses, the sergeant was approached from the rear by two young men, who brandished automatic pistols and shot him point-blank in the head. The assassins removed his sidearm and briefly shouted revolutionary slogans before running away, north up Lacson Street. Police recovered .45 and 9mm cartridge hulls at the scene.

· 7 ·

The scion of the Correon clan hated surprises. I saw it when I met him. I approached him from behind. He didn't notice me until I was almost close enough to touch him, and then he twisted suddenly in the chair. For an instant his face showed a feral displeasure, like a big cat startled,
72
and I thought he might do anything—might even shoot me with the pistol in his hand.

     The morning started with Bembo up before I was. He showered and came to breakfast looking fresh. Between tidy bites of fried egg and rice he said he was going to visit the squatters out on the Granada Road. He also wanted to follow up on what the lieutenant had told him.

     That left Correon. Bembo didn't want to visit Correon, though he never said so. Once I knew Luis, I understood Bembo's reluctance: the lambs of this world have little to gain from venturing into a lion's den.

     We had to see Lanao. I got up from breakfast, went to the telephone and dialed the number Dalzell had given me. The line crackled. I got first one woman and then another who didn't know English—maids, I guessed. I asked Bertie to help. She took the phone and spoke for a few seconds, and then gave her number and hung up. They will call back, she said. A few minutes later they did. She answered the ring, gave the receiver to me, and on the other end a man said perfectly, “This is Nonoy Paloma. Mr. Correon wishes you to be his guest for lunch, if you're available.”

     “It just so happens.”

     He asked the address and told me to expect a car at eleven-thirty. I told Bembo about it when I was back at the table.

     “I never saw an hacienda before,” I said.

     “That wasn't the hacienda,” he said. “That was a local number. The hacienda is in the countryside, an hour away. All the hacenderos have come to Bacolod, to keep from being killed by communists. Correon has a villa here in the city—I'm told it's beautiful.”

     “Well, a villa. I never saw one of those, either.”

     A black Mercedes 500 with blacked-tinted windows pulled up exactly at eleven-thirty. Out in the street kids gaped at the car but didn't glance twice at the Uzi carbine
73
that the bodyguard carried when he got out and opened a back door.

     I slid in and found myself beside a Filipino about thirty, his face round and open. He wore a cotton version of the blousy Filipino dress shirt called a barong, worn outside the pants. His slacks were pressed and his loafers were polished. Nonoy Paloma, he told me; assistant to Mr. Correon. The way he said it left no doubt that the car and its glory belonged to someone else.

     Another bodyguard, this one with a Streetsweeper shotgun, sat on the other side of him. A two-way radio in the front console made the sound of gravel shaken in a pan. Someone was talking about platoons and companies. A military frequency.

     Rogelio and Bertie lived south of downtown; the Mercedes headed north. Nonoy wanted to talk about San Francisco. He said he'd been there with Correon a few years before, San Francisco, Carmel, L.A., Las Vegas, a three-week swing.

     “The greatest three weeks of my life,” he said. “Bar none.”

     “Your English is terrific,” I said. And it was.

     “English is taught in the schools from first grade on.” A self-dismissing shrug. “Anyone who finishes college will have had sixteen years of it.”

     “You got a degree?”

     “Yes. Mr. Correon paid for my education. It would have been out of the question otherwise—my parents were workers on his hacienda.” A wry wrinkle of the lips. “Farmworkers' kids do not aspire to higher education. If it weren't for him, I'd be cutting cane at this moment.”

     He moved his hands when he talked, earnest little gestures, as if he wanted to leave me none of the effort of communication. He was trying hard. He struck me as a careful man who probably tried hard all the time.

     “What does an assistant to a sugar planter do?” I said.

     “My job is to help things come out right.”
74

     The car was solid and silent, air-conditioning cold, windows very dark. It made the city remote as we pushed through downtown. That didn't take long. Bacolod was maybe three miles across, and downtown was just a few blocks anchored by the town plaza, a cathedral, and the countless stalls of the central market. It was decaying and crowded, with that look of being overdrawn on every account, a town where too many people have brought too little money.

     After a couple of minutes we turned off a main road and down a rutted back street where the pavement was reduced to islands of broken concrete. To the left was a long row of what I had begun to recognize as standard Bacolod shacks: graying wood, rusting corrugated roofs, small weedy patches between the front door and the street where barefoot children scrabbled in the dirt. To the right, shards of glass topped a high blank concrete wall. Then we were at a steel gate in the wall. Two men with shotguns stood there. They opened the gate, we drove in—and suddenly, barefoot kids and broken pavement seemed as distant as stars.

     The lawn hit me first. Lush, neat as a country club fairway but much more expansive, punctuated by thriving trees and disciplined stands of shrubs in bloom. The wall enclosed it as far as I could see, enough acreage to make a respectable cornfield in Iowa. The road was unblemished tarmac. It crested a swell in the ground, and down on the other side we began to pass buildings. A chapel, two cottages, a six-bay garage, all low and stocky, ochre tile roofs over white stucco with black wrought-iron trim.

     The road ended in front of a big house that might have spawned the outbuildings. I followed Nonoy through mahogany doors. He took me down a long hall with a floor of polished hardwood, past a row of old straight-backed chairs the color of slaughterhouse walls. At the end of the hall an archway opened up on a patio shaded by an overhead arbor and hemmed in by bougainvillea. We slid
75
open a glass door; and the moment we stepped out into the mottled light, a gunshot barked close off to our left.

     It was the throaty blast of a big pistol, the first shot I'd heard since the one that almost took me out. My heart tumbled, but Nonoy only picked up his head at the sound and said, “Oh. This way.”

     Shots rolled in about a second apart as we went along a brick walkway, around to one side of the house. A firing range stretched back there, hidden from the drive by a tall hedge. One shooter was on the line. He was a big man, pear-shaped and flabby. The seat of his pants bulged as he crouched with an automatic pistol at the end of two beefy arms.

     A second man sat at a table with boxes of ammunition and several pistols spread in front of him. I could see just his shoulders and the back of his head. The firing masked our footsteps, and we were almost to the table before it ended and he heard us.

     That's when Luis Correon twisted around in his chair and I saw the scowl of surprise and the pistol he'd been loading.

     But the scowl vanished in a blink. He put the gun down and he was up to shake my hand, a man about in his mid-fifties, with thinning hair and a discreet pouch of fat at his waistline. His movements were easy and direct, like someone whose path is never cluttered. He said, “Welcome to Bacolod, welcome to my home.”

     He was a white man.

     Nothing would have pleased him more, I'm sure, than to have me note it so baldly. But it was startling, after nearly a week of Filipinos whose skin ran butternut to bronze. His was pink as a newborn mouse, and not just by accident. Later that day I would see five pale generations of Correons in a wall of photos. They had come here with their Castilian blood unsullied, and I could imagine that they had gone to a lot of trouble to keep it that way.

     “Do you shoot?” he said.
76

     “Not if I can avoid it.”

     The one at the line had pulled off his ear protectors, and as he walked to the table he said too loudly, “You're wrong, shooting isn't a chore. It's one of life's pleasures.”

     He was young, though at least ten years past the age when adolescent fat might yet turn to muscle. His face, too, was pink and soft. He had a hog's jowls.

     “My son Baby,” Correon said. “If Baby had to rank guns and screwing, he'd have a hard time figuring which is second to whiskey.”

     “No,” Baby said. “Whiskey is third. A drink is a drink. I put shooting ahead of pussy, because a good gun is harder to find than a good piece of ass.”

     “You want a beer?” Correon said. “Some finger food? We won't eat for a while.”

     “Iced tea, if you've got it.”

     “Yes, you're an American, iced tea. Plenty of ice.”

     He looked past me. A maid had followed us out of the house. He said a few words to her in what I supposed was Ilonggo, smooth and rhythmic.

     “You want to go up to Paz,” Correon said to me, “it's no problem.”

     “I appreciate it.”

     “You worked with the American who was killed. He wanted to go up to the hacienda, too. He had it arranged. The night he was killed, he was supposed to go the next day. But I don't want to hex you.”

     “You met him.”

     “He sat there in that same chair. He shot with us. He couldn't shoot worth a damn.”

     “What did he tell you?”

     “He was looking for the same Carlito Sanchez. That's all. I tried to tell him he was wasting his time. Lito Sanchez is dead.”

     “You knew Lito?”

     “I know the family. It so happens, I knew Lito in particular. He was a bright kid. I took him out of the fields, and
77
he did some work for us in the office. But I know the entire family.”

     “I understood,” I said, “that there are hundreds of families on your property. You keep up with them all?”

     “That's right. What do you think, a family lives on my land, works my land for fifty years, I don't know who they are?” He was not a large man, but there was a largeness about him. His voice wasn't loud, but it did command. “These are my people. Shit, they're my children. I feed them when they're hungry. I bring the doctor when they're sick. When they get married I give them money to make a house, and when they die I buy their coffin.”

     “You bought Lito's coffin?”

     “Lito was home from the States. He had money. I sent flowers, though. Nonoy represented me at the funeral.”

     Nonoy nodded on cue.

     “Did you see him when he came back?”

     “No,” he said. “The ungrateful little bastard. I didn't know he was here until he was killed.”

     “I'd still like to see where he died.”

     “It's up to you, you want to waste your time.”

     “I'm getting paid for it.”

     “Okay, no problem. We'll arrange it after a while, huh? But first we shoot. Come on, take one.”

     He waved an arm at the little arsenal on the table: three revolvers, an Ingram machine pistol, a Smith & Wesson .45.

     Baby said, “Have a look at this one.”

     Two black leather clutch bags, like big shaving kits, sat on the table. Baby unzipped one of them and pulled a semiautomatic pistol from it.

     “This looks like quality,” I said.

     “You have an eye. That's the nicest one of the lot. That's a Detonics Combat Master. Not many of those in the country.”

     “Beveled magazine well,” I said, “polished feed ramp.”

     “It'll feed anything,” Baby said. “Hardball, hollow
78
point, you name it. Most people go for Colts when they want a .45, but even a modified Colt isn't as nice as this one.”

     “Adjustable sights. It must be the Mark Four.”

     “You know your guns.” He turned to his father. “The American knows his guns.”

     “You find a little sweetheart like this in the local gun shops?”

     “Local gun shops, there is no such thing,” Baby said.

     “Go ahead, shoot,” Luis said.

     “Is that right? How do you come by all this?”

     “Anything can be had,” Baby said confidentially.

     “Shoot,” Luis said.

     I picked up ear protectors and took the pistol to the line. Baby followed me up and stood at my elbow as I bumped in a magazine. He was closer than I liked.

     “You were a friend of the murdered American,” he said quietly. As if it was between us two.

     “Just a colleague. I'll bet it's almost a year since I capped off a round.”

     “Nobody forgets how to shoot—it's like forgetting how to piss. It wasn't in the newspaper, you know, or the radio. But we heard. We have contacts. The P.C. thinks it was Sparrows.”

     “That's what they say.”

     “You have reason to doubt them?” His bulk made me feel crowded.

     “I'm a stranger in this place,” I said. I put the plastic muffs over my ears and lifted the pistol and sighted it down the alley. “I'm the last person to know.”

     They were using silhouette targets—human silhouettes. We sometimes used to shoot silhouettes on the police range. I always thought it was silly. Punching holes in two-legged paper images as if that will help you one day when you must draw down on human flesh.

     I thumbed off the safety.

     Baby wasn't exactly right; a few months will erode a
79

shooting touch, if you have one. But the basics do stay with you. I knew the basics. Grip the pistol firmly but don't choke it. Pull in a breath, look through the notch of the rear sight, lay the bead of the front sight where you want to hit, steady, meld bead and target, steady, hold, squeeze.

     It was a light gun, short-barreled. It roared and jumped. I brought it down and stayed focused on the target—a circle over the silhouette's left breast, about four inches across, tiny at twenty-five yards—and though it didn't feel quite right, I squeezed again.

     Baby was even closer now, leaning in toward my shoulder. I wanted to tell him to back off, but I stayed on the circle. His breath puffed on my cheek. I squeezed and fired. The shot was far wide, I could tell.

     “Oof,” Baby said.

     Good shooting is a glissade. This felt like falling down a long flight of stairs. I fired, exhaling at the wrong time, I fired, yanking the trigger too hard, I fired, as the muzzle wavered.

     I lowered the gun to get a better view of the six holes of daylight that showed through the paper. Two were in the circle, barely, three more were scattered outside, a sixth was completely off the black figure.

     “One more,” Baby said. “Seven-round magazine.”

     His pudgy arm pressed at my elbow. I could have moved, I considered slapping it away, but instead I brought the gun up and found my spot fast and fired the last round. It made a hole in the upper center of the head, about where the bridge of the nose would be, and I turned to Baby and said, “That's how it's done here, I remember now,” swallowing a fury I couldn't fully account.

     Correon had lied to me—that was part of it.

     We sat for lunch in a dining room where big roof timbers angled upward from clerestory walls. Luis's wife,
80
Ofelia, was there. Her talc-colored skin was taut over high cheekbones. It seemed to have been stretched by the knot of black hair behind her head, so tight it must have hurt.

     Maids carted in trays of baked chicken and tiger prawns, and egg rolls they called lumpia, and steamed rice, and a sour fish broth. Correon passed on gossip about an ambush in the south which overnight had turned into a full-blown battle; heavy casualties. Ofelia announced plans for a shopping trip to Manila. Baby bragged about molasses earnings from his farm's latest mill report.

     Nonoy sipped his soup without a word. When we were finished, Correon got up and said come with me, and Nonoy followed us both to a room down one wing of the house.

     It was Correon's office. He sat behind a desk and told me I could visit the hacienda whenever I wished. He wrote a note on his personal letterhead. Please render all possible assistance to the bearer, my dear friend Mr. John Hart of the United States of America. He would arrange a checkpoint pass with some contacts in the military. A bungalow on the farm was available for my use. I was welcome to borrow a pistol. I could have Nonoy as an escort whenever I wanted. Or not, as I wished.

     “I don't want you to think I'm interfering. So if you want to go up on your own, you have the paper.”

     Open as a poker player who has just turned over his hand.

     But I knew: he had lied.

     The pistol could only have come from Lito. Yet Correon had told me he hadn't seen Lito. He had no reason to suspect that I knew about the pistol, so it must have seemed a lie without risk, the cheapest kind.

     “ 'Noy,” he said, “make sure our guest gets whatever he needs.”

     “Yes boss,” Nonoy said.

     Worth telling, though, all the same.
81

* * *

     “The hacienda should be quiet,” Nonoy said. We were in the Mercedes, near downtown. “Luis accommodates the NPA.”

     I told him it sounded like bed-and-breakfast. But the joke didn't reach, or Nonoy had reason not to laugh.

     “He pays them. They demand what they call revolutionary taxes from the landholders. Some pay, others don't. Luis pays.”

     He glanced over the driver's shoulder, toward the road ahead. He did it often, a brood hen's watchfulness, the tic of someone who worried for a living.

     “If you don't pay?”

     “You must be ready to fight. They burn trucks and equipment, they try to destroy the crop. Some planters bribe the military to defend their farms, but the military has its limitations. To do it right you must have your own troops. I know planters with a platoon of their own infantry. It may not sound like much. But if a hacendero has just thirty or forty well-trained men with military weapons … that's power.”

     “Warlords.” I remembered Collins using the word, how exotic it had seemed.

     “We have them. It's not a profitable undertaking, though. The overhead is high. Even more than the money, a warlord is automatically a target for assassination by the communists. Mr. Correon would rather pay for his peace of mind.”

     “Why the guards,” I said, “the guns, if he's not worried?”

     “A show of force. It's expected of him, a man in his position, to flex his muscles. People would be disappointed if he didn't. Noblesse oblige.”

     “Somebody told me, the communists have chased all the hacenderos down into Bacolod.”

     “That's true in many cases. Not of Mr. Correon. He
82
lives in Bacolod here because he wants to live here.” A whiff of testiness wafted into his voice. “It is a shame that landlords don't live on their farms anymore. There's a great distance—the farm is another world—but you'll see that when you go up there.”

     He picked invisible pieces of lint off his dark trousers.

     “Every Saturday, when he isn't traveling, Mr. Correon spends the night at his bungalow on the farm. Every Saturday night without fail. He tries to stay close. Sometimes I think that's what he sees in me. I'm a link to the farm, the people.” His fingers ground the lint and released it into the air. He looked straight at me.

     “He is not afraid. You must believe that. Mr. Correon fears nothing from no one.”

     Beyond downtown we waited to cross the coastal road from the south. Busy as it was, the intersection had no signal light. We waited for motorcycles, for swaying cane trucks piled top-heavy with sheaves of brown stalks, for jeepneys that had brave boys standing on the bumper, pigs and rice sacks lashed to the roof.

     Down the inbound lane I saw black smoke and a blocky green shape. It got bigger fast, swung out to pass a motor tricycle, and loomed up on the intersection: a truck, a diesel six-by-six, devouring pavement with a turbocharger whine. As it passed I caught the army's white-stencilled markings.

     The truck flew through and was gone so fast I had only a couple of seconds to see the cargo under a canvas canopy. It was men in camouflage fatigues. Some were sitting or standing with rifles, with weary postures and distant stares. Others were down and splayed out in the impossible repose of those who will never get up again. How many, I couldn't tell. They were in a heap.

     “From the south,” Nonoy said.

     The driver got a break in the traffic. He hustled the Mercedes through, but not so fast that I didn't see the droplets that must have dripped through the bed of the
83

truck, making splashes that were deep red deepening to black.

 

· 8 ·

In the afternoon two soldiers in olive drab came up the front walk to deliver my papers. One said SAFE CONDUCT PASS and OFFICE OF THE COMMANDER, TASK FORCE SUGARLAND. The other was authorization to carry a firearm. Both were signed by someone with “Brig. Gen.” at the end of his name.

     Evening came and went. Bembo didn't appear. We ate dinner, and I was thinking about sleep when a man came to the door. Bertie gave him a hug. Her cousin Franklin, she said. He was moon-faced, with the flattest nose I could remember, and he wore a T-shirt with a fading portrait of Ferdinand Marcos.

     “Sir,” he said to me, “with your permission, sir, my cousin Virgilio has retained me as your driver. Yours and his, as circumstances warrant.”

     “Bir-hil-i-o” was how he said it, and I didn't catch on at first.

     “For the daily fee of five hundred pesos, sir, plus expenses. My automobile is a Ford Cortina, most reliable.”

     “Do you know where he is?”

     “He is conducting an investigation, sir, he asks you to come along with me.”

     He dipped his head in what might have been an absurd little bow, and sent a whiff of booze my way.

     “Should you be driving?” I said.

     “I am an experience driver. I am driving thirty years already.”

     “But you're drunk.”
84

     “Hardly a little. That arrangement is satisfactory, sir? Five hundred a day, plus expenses?”

     “Maybe. I don't know. Where is Bembo?”

     “Four fifty.”

     “Take me to Bembo. We'll talk about it later.”

     The Cortina had rumpled sheet metal at two corners, an old chintz bedspread on the backseat, and a small plastic fan on the dash that blew directly into Franklin's face. On the front dash, constructed of foil and blue cellophane and twinkling Christmas lights, was a small grotto where a statuette of the Virgin stood.

     We drove first to the central market, and he asked me for two hundred pesos. Instructions from Virgilio, he said. He got out and went inside and came back with three liter-size bottles of Añejo rum and a plastic bag that contained about a dozen fish the size of brook trout. He put it all on the seat between us.

     He turned east, down a street I hadn't traveled yet. The streetlamps came farther apart, then not at all. We were on the outskirts of Bacolod. In the fringes of our headlights scruffy shrubs and walls of tall cane stood up to the side of the road.

     He drove. The headlights pointed up a white kiosk beside the road, two men inside. I recognized P.C. khaki. Checkpoint, Franklin said, and I took the general's envelope from my shirt pocket. I had brought it, with my passport.

     Franklin slowed. The two soldiers waved us through without leaving the shed or glancing at the papers.

     “The last outpost before the countryside,” he said. “Past here is no-man's land. They are very nervous. They are not armed.”

     “That would make me nervous, too.”

     “But it is safer. If they were armed, the NPA would kill them for their guns.”

     Franklin drove another two or three more minutes
85
before he parked in a bare patch beside the road. He got the fish and the rum.

     “He is here,” he said. I could see almost nothing. I never knew night like those tropical nights, the air viscous and murky, nights dark as day was brilliant.

     A path poked into a grove of low trees. As I followed him through it I heard a man singing against the ring of a guitar. It was an old rhythm-and-blues ballad—the Platters, I think.

     His voice was high and steady. It slid and bounced and caught in all the right places, and it got louder as we came out of the trees to the edge of a ravine. It was at least fifty feet deep and at least twice as wide. The music came from a clump of twenty or thirty shacks on the other side. Men were gathered around a table in an open space between huts, lamplit. One of them was strumming and singing.

     I stopped. Franklin didn't. He climbed onto a swinging footbridge and began to walk across. It was a ridiculous contrivance, a B-movie bridge of narrow planks suspended by fraying hemp. Franklin strode over and waved me on.

     The light looked good on the other side. I stepped on. I had to bend some at the knees, to grab the low ropes that served as handholds. It creaked under my weight. A stream ran below, throwing back moonlight, and I could see more shacks stubbed into the sheer side of the ravine. Then I didn't look down again until I reached the other side.

     The guitarist rang off a last chord as we got to the little table. About ten men sat there, filling up all the space around it. Bembo was one of them. I expected at least a hello, but I got a cocked-head wolfish leer I'd never seen from him before. It contorted his features. Except for the fedora, I might not have known him.

     “The 'Cano favors us with his company,” he said.

     One of them stood to give me his seat. He pointed to the empty spot with the exaggerated gestures of someone
86
who doesn't have the words. With my own gestures I told him, No it's yours, I'll stand.

     Bembo said, “He's trying to be your host. Granted he's not a Correon, but you can at least sit on his bench, surely you can give him that much.”

     I wedged myself in and said hello.

     “Hey Joe,” said two or three of them around the table.

     Most of the men were young, twenties and thirties. One, beside Bembo, had to be at least seventy. All wore T-shirts, gym shorts or baggy trousers, and rubber sandals. Their faces and shirts were wet with sweat. Mine were, too; but their discomfort seemed perpetual.

     The huts were scrap wood and bamboo and woven grass panels. Through almost every window I could see women or children. A sewage smell crawled through the torpid air. The night pressed down hard on the lamplight.

     “Unless you are unwilling to sit with your little brown brothers,” Bembo said.

     I said, “I can't stand peevish drunks. They remind me of my mother-in-law.”

     Bembo ratcheted his face. A couple of them laughed, one put it into Ilonggo, then the others laughed. A woman came out and took the fish from Franklin. He put the bottles on the table.

     “You are married?” said the man with the guitar.

     “Divorced.”

     “Ah. In de P'ilippines we have no divorce.”

     There was a single drinking glass on the table. Somebody splashed a couple of fingers of rum into it and put it in front of me. Bembo watched me and seemed ready to snarl again; he relaxed a little when I took the glass and drained it, put some more rum in and handed it to the man beside me.

     “The American is in love with an Ilongga,” Bembo said. “Raised in the hinterlands, now a schoolteacher in Bacolod.”
87

     That got loud exclamations of delight, in the original and a few seconds later in whispered translation.

     “Deh Ilongga is loving, but very hard to get,” one of them said.

     “I just met her,” I said. “It's not like I'm going to marry her.”

     “She is a probince girl, what else you goin' to do wit' her?”

     “He wanted to take her out,” Bembo said. “The first time he met her, he asked her to go out to dinner.”

     “Oh.”

     “Oh no.”

     “Oh my God no.”

     The little man, I wanted to throttle him.

     “You cannot do det. Deh girl from deh countryside is very hard to get.”

     “I'm just a visitor, see, I thought she was nice, attractive, I wanted to know her better.”

     “She is beautiful?”

     “Yes,” I said.

     “Beautiful,” Bembo said. He looked at me sidelong from under the straw fedora. “Intelligent also. She speaks English like a native.”

     I hadn't told him that.

     “I saw her,” he said when he saw it dawn. “I have been very busy in your behalf.”

     He said this as the glass arrived in front of him. He lifted it carefully and drained it in a long and steady sip.

     “You get any busier,” I said, “I'll have to carry you home.”

     He set the glass down as if he hadn't heard, filled it and passed it on.

     “You have no fucking respect,” he said. He seemed to be addressing the bottle. “Not that I expect much from an American. But even so. How can you have gotten this far in life without knowing whom to treat well?”

     The others must have noticed, but they made a show of
88
not noticing. The one with the guitar fingered a chord and slid into a slow croon. It took me a few bars to recognize it. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” I hadn't heard it in years.

     “Do you know where you are?” Bembo said. He opened his hands slightly to show that he meant right now, this place. His voice was husky, as if there were still some emotion behind it. The acid was gone, though.

     It came to me.

     “A squatter's camp,” I said. “Where Collins was killed.”

     “Among the invisible,” he said. “Squatters have no voice or substance. But they have eyes.”

     “You found out something?”

     “If you hear it now you will have no reason to stay. And if you leave quickly you will insult these good people.”

     “I'll wait.”

     “Good. Tell me about Correon.”

     I went over the pistol and the lie. I told him what Correon had said about Lito: the flowers, the funeral. I described the scene in the office.

     The singer reached for a sweet high note behind me as I handed Bembo the letterhead note and the military papers. He went through them quickly, a sardonic rumple on his face.

     “With this you could get away with murder,” he said. “You could carry the gun, you could escape through the checkpoints, and that note from Don Luis would get you out of custody if you happened to get caught.”

     The glass came around to me again. Somebody else began to sing an old rock ballad called “Donna.” I could remember slow-dancing to it when I was a teenager. Now a kid with a livid wen on his neck was stroking the song, pure and perfect, as if nothing mattered more at this moment than getting it right.

     He knew all the words, all the notes. Everybody seemed to know all the words and the melodies, must have sung them dozens of times on nights like this. I drank and put
89
the glass down and thought about poor men sitting under the sky, giving life to soulful old songs that the rest of us had forgotten.

     The glass went 'round and 'round. They sang more songs. A woman brought some fish, charcoaled whole. In the shacks the kids ate, too, tearing through crispy black skin for white flesh underneath.

     They sang, we drank. My bladder started to ache; I went to the edge of the ravine and launched into darkness. I felt free and unknown.

     When I came back to the table, Bembo had an arm around the old man beside him. His drawn face and sunken cheeks showed his age, but his back was still straight and his calves were knotty muscle. He smiled a lot but had said almost nothing.

     “This is my friend Galicano,” Bembo said to me.

     His hand was tough as stone when I took it.

     “Galicano used to work on a plantation up in rural Talisay, but because of the troubles, the owner doesn't plant it anymore, and now Galic is down here living with his grandson. I met him when I came here this afternoon trying to find someone who had heard the shot.

     “Almost everyone had, it seems. But when I asked for Pert Eval, Modesto Echevarria, and Arnulfo Militante—from the report, remember?—nobody knew them.

     “I must have been making a pest of myself, because one kind lady finally told me that I should speak to her husband's grandfather. That was how I found Galic.”

     The two of them beamed together.

     “Galic keeps a little garden over on the other side. Sometimes, if he has trouble sleeping, he goes there to tend it when the moon is out. He was there the night—tell him, Galic.”

     “Very poor, my English,” Galicano said.

     “It's fine,” I said.

     “Four men,” he said. “One automobile. White, nice.”

     Bembo said a couple of words in Ilonggo, Galicano
90
answered him, and Bembo said, “They had clean clothes. They wore leather shoes. He admired their shoes.”

     “Four men,” I said, “one of them was an American.”

     “Yes. Very big man. His hands behind his back.” He kept his voice low. “They make him go down, like to pray. One man have a gun. He shoot the big man in the behind of the head.”

     “The face,” I said, but Galicano tapped the upper back of his skull. Entrance at parietal, exit at maxilla, the report should have said.

     “They argue,” Galic said. “Not suppose to shoot him back there. Suppose to be the face. They remove the rope from his arms. They return to the car. They go.”

     “Did you tell that to the police?”

     “Police do not come. P.C., next morning, they stay a short time only.”

     “Nobody here called the police?”

     “Nobody see, me only.” He showed a few yellow teeth, set in his gums like stumps. “Nobody here will help police.”

     “What time did it happen?” I said.

     The two men traded scraps of Ilonggo, and then Bembo said, “About three hours before first light. Maybe two-thirty.”

     “At least they got that right,” I said. I was thinking about the report.

     “Yes, very disturbing,” Bembo said. “I was not aroused when they created three witnesses. I thought, maybe they were just too lazy to find out exactly when the crime occurred. But now we see, they had the time right. They knew it without asking.”

     He waited for me to catch up. The rum, the sultry darkness, the image of Collins being shot as he kneeled: I was trying to wade through it all.

     “The P.C. killed Collins?” I said.

     “P.C. or army or police, their allies, their friends, their sponsors, friends and allies of their sponsors—”
91

     He might have gone on if I hadn't stopped him.

     “Sponsors,” I said. “The military and the police have sponsors?”

     “In a manner of speaking. The salary of a P.C. captain is perhaps fifteen hundred pesos a month. You pay him fifteen hundred a month, he owes you as much as he owes Madame President.”

     “This is some place you have here,” I said, before I could censor it.

     His face got hard again.

     “In America,” he said, “nobody pays police officers? Or is it the price that bothers you, that we come so cheap?”

     The wolfish look came and went. He was more hurt, I guessed, than angry.

     I didn't say any more, but looked across the ravine and thought of Collins, now at the elevator making lewd gestures, now kneeling with a cop's gun at the back of his head, his flip confidence dying in the dust with all the rest of him.

     The bottles and the women's indulgence gave out around the same time. Wives with crying babies in arms scolded husbands from doorways and windows. Goodbyes were lengthy and effusive. I crossed the bridge with laborious caution, Bembo behind me murmuring no problem no problem no problem.

     I got in the front seat beside Franklin. Bembo sat upright in the back. The road was empty. So was the white kiosk.

     “Lito Sanchez may be dead,” Bembo said. “I want you to consider the possibility.”

     “I've thought about it. But it looked like a scam for sure.” The crystalline view from the thirtieth floor.

     “They had a funeral. They buried a coffin. The death certificate is registered—I checked. Granted, they could have buried an empty coffin. He could have paid someone
92
in the registrar's office. But Vangie is certain that he is dead. She isn't acting, she believes it. She would never believe it if the rest of the family did not.”

     “He's pulled it before,” I said.

     “Not this way. If he is alive, he has cut himself off from his friends and loved ones. That I cannot accept. It would mean trading his family's love for money. No. A Filipino would never do it.”

     His head shook with a quick shiver.

     “Not for money,” he said.

     “For what?”

     “I cannot imagine. My God, think of what he'd be giving up. Vangie, I saw how she loved him. The light in her when she talked about him, that's priceless. If I ever found that he had traded on that, I swear to God, I myself would put a bullet in the son of a bitch.”

     “You saw the girl,” I said.

     “You can say her name out loud. You're among friends.”

     “Vangie. Quite a lady.”

     “Hunh! She is a treasure!”

     The car dropped hard and thumped. Franklin was working hard to keep it straight, and sometimes he'd drive it straight into a pothole.

     “Her home is in the barrio, Lanao,” Bembo said, “but during the school term she lives in Bacolod, at a boarding-house on Gonzaga Street, two doors down from the southwest corner of Cadagat Road.”

     “How do you know that?”

     “I asked her, naturally.”

     “Did she know you work with me?”

     “I made a point of it. ‘Miss, it is my great pleasure to be associated with the American whom you met yesterday. He is an upstanding young man of unimpeachable character.’ Tomorrow is a Saturday, she will be there. Most weekends she returns to Lanao to stay with her mother,
93
but tomorrow she will be there, I believe. She will expect you.”

     “You told her I was coming.”

     “Don't be foolish. She never would have given me her address if I had told her that it was for you.”

     “Then she's not expecting me.”

     He blew a derisive snort.

     “Americans know nothing about courtship,” he said.

     We were back in the realm of streetlamps again, passing shuttered shops and apartments. Still there was almost no traffic. Franklin clipped through three red lights without slowing.

     “If Lito is dead I'll probably be going home soon,” I said.

     “It might be for the best.”

     “I'd still have to go to Lanao, look around.”

     “If you want.” The car jolted us again, and he said, “What about Collins?”

     “Collins, I've been thinking about the people who sent me out here, let me tell you. They'd like to find out what happened to Collins, but they're not burning to find out. If Lito's dead, we're out of easy answers, and that's the only kind they really want to hear.”

     “That bothers you.”

     “It pisses me off, that somebody did it and is going to get away with it.”

     “He was your friend?” Franklin said.

     “I barely knew him,” I said. “That's not the point.”

     “Jack is afflicted with the need to know,” Bembo said. “He lusts after the truth. Am I right, Jack?”

     I said, “Not bad for a stab in the dark.”

     “Furthermore, he has an acute sense of right and wrong.” His voice had a tinge of amusement. “He is offended that he might have to leave here without seeing the killers of Collins brought to justice.”

     Franklin looked across the seat at me, incredulous.

     “This is true?” he said.
94

     “True enough.”

     “Oh my God. There is no justice.”

     “There is no justice,” Bembo said.

     We rattled through the south side of Bacolod, past the Green Fields, a four-story island of light and life in the dead night. The entrance was wide plate-glass, the lobby big and bright behind it. I saw a clerk behind the desk, three bellmen in front of it, several gents lounging on banquettes, laughing with man-about-town insouciance. Two young women wore dresses like candy ices, peach and raspberry, and when they opened a set of doors near the back, I got a strobe-lit flash of a crowded dance floor. Several expensive sedans were parked in the drive out front, and men in short sleeves held rifles and shotguns as they struck poses against the fenders.

     “You will still see Vangie?” Bembo said.

     “I might as well. Drop in, say hello. Is that it—you stop by the house, you sit down and have a little chat?”

     “Exactly.”

     “You don't call ahead or anything?”

     “If you told her you were coming, she would be obliged to leave.”

     “I see,” I said, though I didn't.

     “A favor for me,” he said. He looked and sounded grave. “Do not take advantage of her.”

     “Don't worry. She isn't buying anything I have to sell.”

     “Say it.”

     “Okay. I won't take advantage of her.”

     “Do you mean it?”

     “I told you. Anyway, it doesn't matter. If I had ten years I might not be able to wear that one down. A few days, I guarantee I'm not getting anywhere.”

     “Don't be surprised,” he said.


     The Philippines might have more loud, ugly dogs than any other place on earth. I think several dozen of them
95
roamed the block where Bertie and Rogelio lived, and they all woke up when I slammed the door of Franklin's Cortina.

     Their yapping crescendoed as Bembo and I came up the front walk. I went straight to the bedroom. Bembo came in a few minutes later.

     He gave me an envelope, sealed. My name was written on the front in plain block letters.

     I opened it and saw a single sheet inside, folded once. I didn't take it out. Bembo hadn't moved. He had something to say.

     “Is something wrong?” I said.

     “My sister is worried. Guns, soldiers at her home.”

     “I don't blame her.”

     “They are ordinary people. They do not make trouble and they do not want to be recognized as troublemakers. They would rather not be recognized at all.”

     “Of course not,” I said.

     “That is one of the tragedies of this conflict, the way motives and allegiances are called into question.”

     At last I understood.

     “You think it would be better if I didn't stay here.”

     “I am ashamed to ask—”

     “I don't mind,” I said. “I hate imposing anyway. I can go to the Green Fields, right? They must have space.”

     “I am exceedingly regretful.”

     “You shouldn't be. We were just trying to buy a couple of days anyway. It's not like the company can't pop for a hotel room.”

     “Thank you.”

     “First thing in the morning.”

     “No hurry. But thank you.”

     I took the paper out. It was a page torn from a spiral notebook. The lettering was the same as on the envelope, a hand that could have been masculine or feminine, young or old.

     I said, “I wonder who knows I'm here?”
96

     He said, “By now, anyone who cares to know.”

     I showed it to him. It said:

PERSIST

 

· 9 ·

Rooms at the Green Fields ran from four hundred to six hundred a night. They took plastic, so I registered for the best. A bellman named Eddie bustled my bags to the room and pointed out hot water from an electrified shower head, a telephone that looked roughly forty years old, a black-and-white TV nearly as decrepit, a fourth-floor view of corrugated roofs that threw off ripples of mid-morning heat.

     He left the door open behind him.

     “I drove past the hotel around midnight last night,” I said. “Everything else was dead, but this place was still wide awake.”

     The planters' social center, Bembo had called the hotel. Where they drink and scheme and screw. One of the few places in Bacolod where they feel safe at any hour.

     A chiffon rustle outside snagged my attention, and I looked past Eddie to the door. In the hall I glimpsed tottering peach and raspberry.

     Eddie saw them too, their slurred makeup, tangled hair, gave them a glance, came back to me with a flat look and said: “Yes, this is a very lively place, sir.”

     I walked up the steps of the boardinghouse on Gonzaga Street, two doors down from the corner of Cadagat Road. Where I was expected because she hadn't been told I'd be
97
coming. I held one box of a dozen roses and another with a big chocolate cake.

     Bring her flowers, Bembo had told me, and for the others in the house something good to eat. He approved the cake but howled when I left the florist's with a bunch of chrysanthemums. It has to be roses, he said. To a Filipina nothing else is a flower.

     I balanced the boxes and knocked. It had a hand-lettered sign, LADY BEDSPACERS WANTED. Bembo and Franklin hadn't driven away yet. I was aware of them behind me, watching.

     I felt silly but I knew there was no other way.

     The door opened. A woman in her thirties, wearing a housedress, pushed her hair back to see me better.

     “Hi, I'm Jack Hart,” I said, “I'm looking for Vangie Flores.”

     “I know,” she said.

     Her name was Mrs. Guanzon. She sat me in the sagging middle of a sofa in the front room, what Filipinos call the sala. She took the cake and left me the flowers, and shouted upstairs for Vangie. Young women began to appear, and Mrs. Guanzon introduced them. Rose and Tessie, Len-Len and Fe and Wilma and Christine and Guia.

     They lived three or four to a room, Vangie told me later. Meals and a cot for four hundred pesos a month.

     Vangie was shouted for again. Marivic and Chona and Divina came in. The cake was lavishly admired. Len-Len was dispatched for Vangie.

     “And how do you find the Philippines?” Rose asked.

     At that moment Vangie came down.

     “Everyone has been friendly,” I said. She wore a cotton duster, a floral print. You can buy them anywhere in the Philippines for fifty or sixty pesos, but Vangie made it seem rare. Her hair was long and straight, and it shone.

     I stood. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. I expected her to act surprised, maybe a little miffed, and I was ready to give her that. But she didn't even try, just
98
showed a smile so slight it betrayed nothing, and said, “You found me.”

     She owned the moment the way she owned herself.

     I held the box out for her. She came and took it, opened it and made a sweet little cluck when she saw the flowers. She cradled them for a moment, the way a mother holds an infant, then gave them up to Mrs. Guanzon.

     She took a chair across the room. I shared the sofa with Guia and Tessie. It wasn't a large room, and we filled it up, the women and I and Mrs. Guanzon's two-year-old, Wilfred. I enjoyed it. Any man who likes women would have enjoyed it. They asked me polite questions about life in the States, paid attention when I answered, even laughed at my jokes: everyone but Vangie, who wasn't going to let me have anything so dear as a laugh so easily.

     Wilfred sat on the floor, wrapped his arms around Rose's legs, and glared at me with the spite of a displaced lap dog.

     Mrs. Guanzon brought out the cake, and it was much admired again, and we ate. When they were finished they carried out their plates, one after another, and they didn't come back. We were alone before I knew what had happened.

     It felt golden, being with her again. She held her hands in her lap. Her back was straight, head poised.

     “Well, you're here,” she said.

     “I hope you don't mind.”

     “It's up to you—”

     “I wanted to see you again—”

     “—although I don't know why.”

     I said, “Come on, I thought we covered this last time.”

     “You seem to be a nice man,” she said. “I don't want you to waste your time.”

     “Everybody is worried about that. It's my time.”

     “And mine.”

     “Tell you what. I'll do my best to see it's not a waste for either one of us.”
99

     She tightened the hands she was holding in her lap. I reminded myself, she must detest glibness.

     “You're a visitor,” she said. “How long will you be in Negros? A few days? Maybe a week or two?”

     “It could be more.”

     “You would still be a visitor. You must see it from my point of view.”

     “You're thinking, what, I'm going to give you the big rush and dump you? You're afraid as soon as you start to like me I'm going to get on a plane, is that it?”

     She didn't speak. I knew she'd never admit that she might be vulnerable to me. Or maybe it was implicit.

     I went to her, stood over her for a moment, sat in a chair beside her.

     “I don't know about days and weeks,” I said. I hadn't thought about this—it was just coming out. “I want to be with you while I can. I have no expectations. I only want to watch you and listen to your voice, really pay attention, so when I can't be around you anymore at least I'll have that to keep, I'll be able to remember you for a long time.”

     “Oh,” she said, a surprised little yip, the involuntary sound you might make when someone touches you unexpectedly in an unexpected place.

     “The way it feels,” I said, “I'm the one taking the risk. I need you, not the other way around. But if I ever think it's not just me, it's in you, too, and something was happening between us, God, I'd never let us be apart. I promise you that.”

     She turned a few degrees away from me, breaking contact. It was how she composed herself. When she came back to me she would be all straight lines and solidness again.

     “Nothing is going to happen between us,” she said. “You have to know that. It's a good thing you have no expectations, because nothing is going to happen. I'm telling you now, so that if you're hurt, I'm not responsible.”

     She will turn you down a hundred times, Bembo had
100

said. Maybe a thousand. She will do her best to sound discouraging, but you must never be discouraged, because the next time can always be yes.

     But he hadn't said how convincing she would be.

     “I'm a big boy,” I said. “I'll take my chances.”

     I won't try to catalogue her evasions, the demurrals and denials and conversational dodges by which she made me understand that she was granting me nothing but her presence, and only on loan.

     We could be friends, she told me, and she was genial, even warm, as long as we stuck to the script. But that day and for days afterward she stepped aside when I pushed, backed away when I reached, wriggled free when I tried to grasp.

     Understand, this had nothing at all to do with putting a hand on her.

     I might have resented her rigidity if I'd thought she was playing at it. But she was no coquette. She seemed to need the distance for good reasons of her own. I understood that she did whatever had to be done, that she asked and took what she required—exactly and no more—and that through it all she stayed truer to herself than anyone I ever knew.

     “I'm going to Lanao,” I said. Tomorrow or the next day, I started to say. But then I knew where I would be tomorrow.

     “Monday morning,” I said.

     She seemed to cringe at the idea.

     We had been alone for more than an hour. Now the others had begun to drift in and out of the room, and I knew I was supposed to go soon.

     “We are quite poor in the barrio,” she said.

     “It's nothing to be ashamed of.”
101

     She nodded but didn't look convinced.

     “Most of your family is still there,” I said.

     “My mother. Most of my aunts and uncles and cousins, too, except on Lito's side.” Her father had been dead for almost ten years; Vangie was his only child.

     “This'll be my first time on a hacienda.”

     “Believe me, it isn't nearly as grand as it might sound.” Her mouth turned down and her eyes got that hidden look I knew from the snapshot. She said, “You ought to get permission before you go up. It's private, you know.”

     “The Correons,” I said. If her face showed anything, I didn't catch it. She seemed subdued. But on her it seemed natural. “I met them yesterday.”

     “You met Luis.”

     “The whole bunch.”

     “Nonoy must have been there.”

     “Nonoy Paloma—he was there the whole time.”

     “I grew up with Nonoy,” she said. The memory seemed to lift her. “He was a few years older. He was best friends with Lito. There were four of them, really. Lito and Nonoy and Remy Ortiz and Geri Martinez.”

     It went right past me. “Geri” was what she said, but “Harry” was what I heard.

     She said, “Four bright boys. They were in trouble all the time. Full of mischief. I suppose Lito never gave it up.”

     “Nonoy sure grew out of it,” I said.

     “And Remy—you think Lito was bad, do you know what Remy is up to now?”

     I didn't. She was about to say it, I think, but changed her mind.

     She said, “Tell me what Lito did. I want to know.”

     I told her some. I tried to keep it short because it sounded tawdry, out loud that way. She kept asking questions, though.

     “Filipinos do this often?” she said when I told her about the Death Kit.
102

     “Not just Filipinos, believe me.”

     “Lito too?”

     “Twice that we know of.”

     “He stole thousands. Thousands and thousands.”

     “It isn't like he mugged some widow for her pension check. Corporations in the States make that kind of thing so easy, it's like picking cherries.”

     Her expression was solemn.

     “It was wrong,” she said. “He was a good man. Poverty, the things people do—but it's no excuse. You must think we're irredeemable.” Not at all, I started to say, but before I could get it out, she said, “You may be right. You may be right.”

 

REBEL RAID IN LA CARLOTA

An NPA party numbering about thirty overran an outpost of private security forces at Hacienda Clara, in rural La Carlota, in the early hours of yesterday morning. Two hacienda guards were killed and two others wounded. The guerrillas seized five Armalite rifles and some six hundred rounds of ammunition.

They proceeded to burn three trucks and two storage sheds belonging to the hacienda, wreaking about P1.5 million in damage. Elements of the 119th Infantry Brigade arrived around dawn, but their pursuit of the brigands was fruitless.

Purportedly the raiders were led by Remigio Ortiz, a.k.a. Kumander Rocky, whose guerrilla contingent is one of the most active in central Negros.

103

· 10 ·

That afternoon, we sat and watched people walk in and out of the hotel. Or I watched; Bembo burrowed into the Daily Star. At one end of the lobby the Negros Sugar Producers Association met behind closed doors in the Azucar Room; at the other end, in the Planters' Ballroom, the reception for the Lopez-Lizares nuptials was hitting full throttle with ice carvings, roast pigs, a ten-piece orchestra, and an Everest of gift packages.

     We were waiting for Nemesio Puyat, who was supposed to be bringing his customers back to the Green Fields. When he arrived, he was easy to spot: he was the unhappy man who stalked two Japanese couples past the front desk, complaining that he didn't know what to do with travelers' checks in yen.

     The men were brush-cut and dour, and built like Greco-Roman wrestlers, seventy-kilo class. One had tattoos swirling up his arms. Their ladies were miniskirted lollipops with glazed lips and huge sunglasses and pink Euro-trash plastic sandals over lacy white anklets.

     They all just walked away from Nemesio Puyat, left him standing in the lobby, looking mad at the world.

     My first patrol partner used to say: Never expect much cooperation from a man whose dog has just pissed on his morning newspaper.

     Puyat looked even more upset than that. But Bembo went up to him, spoke to him in commiserating Ilonggo, had an arm around his shoulders as they spoke to a clerk at the front desk. Yes, the clerk said, he could cash the yen; Puyat bleated at the rate only for form's sake. He got his money, Bembo took him aside, and after a short conference they both came up to me.
104

     “We have time to visit Palo, I think,” Bembo said.

     Franklin had left; the Cortina had carburetor trouble. We went with Puyat in his Isuzu sedan, a smoking diesel. We took the two-lane highway south. The asphalt was littered with crushed cane stalks. Past the entrance to Pahanocoy beach, another four kilometers to the bridge. We turned eastward, toward the mountains.

     “I pick him up at deh airport,” Puyat said, “he ask me if I know where to find girls, I say yes, he hire me six hun'red a day.”

     “I thought it was a thousand,” I said.

     “No, he tell me to write t'ree t'ousand for t'ree days, but he give me one eight only. I say okay, no problem, he pay in advance.”

     We were beyond city air now, and the mountains looked sharper, punching up into blue skyline. Cane fields grew up on both sides of the road, making a thick, high wall. Small settlements interrupted them, brown burps in the green where gleanings of rice and coffee lay spread to dry on the edges of the pavement.

     “I take him to the Green Fiel's. It's deh afternoon, he don' need me no more. Nex' day, we drive to Hermosa, he go into deh town hall, he come out talking to some man, I don't know who. Dey say good-bye. He want to drive to a house in Hermosa, he got direction. We drive by deh house two time.”

     “Bonifacio Street,” I said.

     “I t'ink you're right.”

     “The parents' place,” I told Bembo.

     “Now he want to go back to Palo. Okay, we go back. He got more direction, somet'ing, we drive around, try to find deh place.”

     “What place?”

     “He don't say.”

     “Did Collins have a contact in Hermosa?” Bembo said.

     “No way. He must have gone to check the death register.”
105

     “When he was there,” Bembo said, “he met someone who knew about Lito. Someone who told him how to find the parents' home and … something else.”

     To Puyat I said, “Did he tell you what he was doing?”

     “No. He jus' want to talk about what great pussy he been having las' night.”

     “Wait a minute, you didn't take him out, how did he get a girl?”

     Puyat shot me a look of disbelief, and Bembo said, “It is not necessary to leave the Green Fields for that.”

     “No problem,” Puyat said.

     “All right. He had directions.”

     “Yes. Come to fine out, it's by deh church. Deh back of deh church in Palo.”

     “What is?”

     “I don' know. Across deh street from deh back of deh church is some stores, some buildings, he make me drive pas' t'ree or four time, he looking at somet'ing on dat side of deh road.”

     “But you don't know what it was.”

     “I don' know exac'ly.”

     “He didn't stop at any of those shops or buildings?”

     “He stop at deh church.” Puyat accelerated to pass a motor tricycle that carried seven people and a goat. “He go into deh church, he come out, he go to deh little house beside deh church, you know, where deh pries' live. He knock on deh door, deh pries' let him in, dey talk for a while, he come out and we leave. He tell me, Tomorrow in deh afternoon, you gonna bring me back here. Den we go back to deh Green Fiel's. Dat's all for dat day.”

     “What day is that?” Bembo said.

     Puyat paused just long enough to tap out a cigarette from a pack. He offered them around, and Bembo took one.

     “T'ursday,” he said, “one week back. Dat's my novena night, T'ursday.”
106

     “Thursday the tenth,” said Bembo. “He was killed early on the twelfth.”

     “He saw Correon at some point.”

     “Deh nex' day,” Puyat said.

     “Friday the eleventh,” Bembo said.

     “I am suppose to pick up him after breakfas'. But I go to deh desk, he lef' a message, be back at four. Deh lady at deh desk say he go to Correon.”

     “You met him at four?”

     “Oh yes, right on time. We go to Palo, deh church. He tell me to leave him dere, meet him around six or seven, nex' morning.”

     “He went into the church again?”

     “Deh little house beside.”

     “You never saw him again.”

     “I go back deh nex' morning, I wait. I don' see him. I go into deh church. I go to deh little house.”

     “But no one was there,” Bembo said.

     “Dat's right,” Puyat said.

     “Morning of the twelfth,” Bembo said. “Nobody at all was there.”

     “Dat's right.”

     The mountains were much larger when we got to Palo. It was a somnolent town that seemed to molder in the deep afternoon sun, flaking outward from a plaza rimmed by coco palms, with a dry fountain at one end and a chipped figure of the revolutionary, Jose Rizal, at the other.

     The church was out of the old center of town, five or six blocks from the plaza, about as far as it could get without drifting into the clumps of grass-and-scrap huts that puddled around the outskirts. Cinder block showed in the cracks of its pebbled facade. The rectory sat close by, whitewashed concrete block, no more than two rooms.

     “Dis deh place,” Puyat said, and he steered around a corner, down an alleyway. On our right side was the church lot, on the other a cramped row of homes and
107
small businesses. A furniture maker with bamboo tables and rattan chairs stacked outside. A bakery with a front window that was more duct tape than glass. Then—as the back of the rectory crept by on the opposite side—a tire repair shop.

     Geraldo Martinez Vulcanizing.

     I said, “Shit, that's the guy from Collins's file, Geraldo.”

     I still might not have made all the connections if Bembo, with a Filipino's bent for the amiable demolition of formality, hadn't said, “Our friend Geri.”

     I heard “Harry” again, but this time I knew what it meant, and I said, “Shit, that's Lito's friend from way back.”

     Puyat slowed even more. Bembo said, “Drive, drive.” Through an oversize door we could see a man about thirty years old, swabbing the inside of a tire carcass. Channels of sweat ran through the black dust that coated his face and arms. He looked up, and when he saw we weren't bringing business, he went back to work.

     Puyat drove around and stopped at the front of the church. Bembo got out with me and we went down the open space between church and rectory. We stopped near the back of the lot. We could see directly across the alley to the Martinez place. It was in a two-story building with the shop downstairs and rooms up.

     We walked a few steps to the back of the rectory. Through a window, I could see a wooden desk, a single chair, a cot, a crucifix on the wall.

     I looked back to where Martinez was rolling the tire to the back of the shop. The floor above, a woman stood at a stove. A smell of frying fish vaulted across the alley.

     “Lito knew Martinez well?” Bembo said.

     “Best friends when they were teenagers, according to Vangie.”

     “Collins went to the town hall in Hermosa to check the death certificate,” he said. “By chance he met someone
108

who knew Lito. Probably someone in the office who heard him say the name. A few questions, he found out the parents' address and also about his friendship with this Martinez. He drove past both places but he did not disturb anyone because that would have alerted Lito.”

     I picked it up: “He doesn't want to spook Lito. He assumes the guy is out and about, just waiting to collect on the policy, having a good time. He figures, sit in the right spot for a little while, Lito will come around, that's the ball game. He'd want to stake out the parents' place, but maybe it didn't look right. He drives by here, though, he sees this, this is perfect.”

     Bembo said, “Most priests would cooperate once the situation was explained.”

     I said, “He goes to the padre, tells him what's up, the father lets him hole up in his room and watch Geri's place. And then sometime in the middle of the night, what? Lito spots him and sends three assholes to come and get him, kill him? What the fuck is this? Or the priest is a friend of Lito's, the priest turns in Collins? To who? I tell you what, the goddamn priest ought to be able to answer some questions.”

     The bedroom looked empty, but the front door of the church had been open. I started to go there. Bembo took my arm.

     “You did not see today's newspaper,” he said.

     “Not yet.”

     “The priest cannot help us,” he said.

PRIEST CONFIRMED DEAD

A decapitated corpse discovered earlier this week near Cagbungalon, Bago, has been identified as that of Father Diosdado Cortez, pastor of Holy Name Church in Palo. Family members, who arrived lately

109

from Dumaguete City, made the identification from birthmarks upon the back of the victim.

Father Cortez was last seen alive the evening of the eleventh this month, when he left rural Palo after administering last rites to a dying lady. However, his automobile was found parked as usual near the church. He was reported gone the next afternoon.

Since his disappearance, unsigned leaflets have been posted around Bacolod, claiming that the cleric was a secret member of the NPA and the Communist Party of the Philippines. They describe him as a “traitor to his Savior, his religion, and his nation, fully deserving of a traitor's end.”

In the past two years, three other priests in the diocese have been abducted and murdered by radical anticommunist elements. The mutilations of the body of Father Cortez were characteristic of anticommunist salvage squads.

A statement from the diocesan office condemned the killing and denied that any priest under its jurisdiction is associated with the insurgents.

“We most vehemently condemn the continued violence against servants of the Lord,” the statement said. “Indeed we decry all instances of political violence.”

The body of Father Cortez will be removed to Dumaguete.

 

     The rectory was locked. The church was dark and almost empty. Two wizened gray women knelt along a side aisle, buzzing prayers at one of the Stations of the Cross.
110

     I was ready to leave. Then a black curtain moved at the confessional, and another woman, also gray and shriveled, came out and walked to the altar rail.

     Bembo went in where she had been. The two worshipers in the aisle stopped buzzing and scuttled on their knees to the next station. The black curtain moved again. So did the wooden door beside it. It was a priest, a tall one with red hair and a florid nose. Bembo followed him to me, and he introduced us.

     Father Brendan, Bembo called him.

     “You want help. I don't believe I can give you much in the way of that,” he said. He was Irish, and he had the Irish way of making every word seem specially weighed and custom-rolled.

     It was a good voice, but strained. And not just the voice but the way he stood, too, a tightness.

     “This is not my parish,” he said. “I'm here as a temporary replacement. I did know Father Dado. We worked together in Bacolod until just last February. I cared about him. I'm sure I have two questions for every one of your own.”

     “I'm hoping to find out who might have come into the rectory on the night of the eleventh.”

     “That's at the top of my list, too. Already chasing our tails now, aren't we?”

     He didn't like me.

     “Somebody else was in there when it went down,” I said. “An American. He was killed too.”

     “He told me.” With a nod to Bembo. “If so, you know more than I do. Maybe you should be the subject of this interrogation.”

     “I'm just trying to understand,” I said. “The way it looks, some people were after the father, they came in, my associate happened to be there, he and the father both ended up getting killed.”

     “I've seen the posters,” the priest said. “Diosdado Cortez was no communist. More to the point, nobody
111
would believe that he was. He hated politics. Activism made him nervous. To the oligarchs and their goons, anyone who gives a bowl of rice to a starving man must belong to the NPA. But not even they would have mistaken Dado for a communist.”

     “Did you tell that to the police?”

     “Nobody cares! Why should they? People are murdered here all the time. Dado will be forgotten soon. I'll have other friends to grieve, and problems of my own to worry about.”

     He brightened.

     “Have you considered,” he said, “that Dado might have been a casual victim? Maybe it was your compatriot they wanted, and Dado only happened to be there.”

     I realized then, it wasn't me that he disliked, so much as Big Blue in my shirt pocket, with the gold eagle on the front cover.

     “And if they wanted him, they may want you, too,” he said. “Wouldn't that be poignant?”

     “I've had people hate my guts,” I said, “and some of them had pretty good reason, but just because I'm an American, that's a new one.”

     “You must not have traveled much,” he said.

     “I don't see that it has anything to do with me.”

     “Americans have been leaving their dirty fingerprints on the Philippines for ninety years.”

     His anger baffled me. I thought, I just got here.

     He said, “You made this place. The way a pusher makes an addict, you made this place. You convinced them that they wanted what you had. How they crave it now. They'll do anything for it. They'll do anything to please you. Don't you know? People are dying here so America can have dead communists.”

     “I don't know anything about it,” I said.

     “Not only is ignorance no excuse, it compounds the crime.”

     I turned to go.
112

     “Wouldn't that be poignant, though?” he said. “Wouldn't it be just poetic?”

About Booktrope | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | FAQ © 2010 Booktrope