Ghosts of Manila (21 page)

‘Eunice has just enrolled,’ said Dingca.

‘Oh.’ This time a hand did fly to her mouth. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean… I only meant for me, sir. Obviously some people are completely suit –’ her voice ran out as her brain finally overtook it.

In the awkward pause he said kindly, ‘You’re right, of course. We can’t all do the same thing. So what have you chosen?’

‘I –’ she began diffidently, ‘I’d like to join the police. It was meeting you. That’s why I wanted to speak to you, sir.’

‘Good God!’ Rio exclaimed involuntarily. ‘But you’re much too beautiful,’ picturing the terrifying collection of slags and tomboys which to his mind characterised the policewomen he knew. ‘What sort of career’s that for a nice girl? The pay’s lousy. Besides, as you must be well aware, the police in this country are going through a crisis at the moment. The reorganisation isn’t quite –. What I mean is, there are things still to iron out. Shakedown period… It’s a total mess,’ he conceded. ‘Honestly, Patti, I wouldn’t recommend your joining at the moment. At the very least not until things are clearer. Perhaps I should have a word with your father. What does he say? He’s never mentioned this to me.’ He glanced about him. Where was Butz?

‘He supports me. Whatever help you could give, sir, I’d be so grateful.’

Was there the faintest stress on the word? She couldn’t surely…? But in spite of himself Dingca felt the beginnings of an erection. An
hour later, when he had talked to her father, he unhappily knew for certain. He had learned – in strictest confidence – that the scholar of the family had unfortunately failed her National College Entrance Examination, which somewhat limited Patti’s chances of a higher education. Indeed, it should have made it quite impossible, dependent on her re-sitting the exam in a year’s time. And for the police nowadays a college education was mandatory, wasn’t it? Dingca had assured her father this was so. But
mandatory’
–
and here the Bowl-o-Rama’s owner made flexuous gestures in the air like someone trying to rid his fingers of dough – there’s mandatory and mandatory, right? We’re men of the world, Rio, you and I. You’re not going to tell me hand on heart that everyone on the force with a certificate of higher education has actually
been
to college? Exactly. I’ve heard a figure of twenty thou. mentioned. It’s only a sheet of paper, after all. A date stamp, a couple of signatures, a mere formality. Old Buddy.

As it happened,
20,000 was the going rate for getting a charge of murder (which couldn’t be bailed) reduced to a charge of homicide (which could). It was also the agreed sum for rich kids to pay when they were arrested with unregistered firearms and didn’t want the hassle of being charged with illegal possession. So he supposed it might buy a short cut to two or three years’ study. All at once he fell prey to the same weariness which had made him invite that bleak renegade Father Herrera for drinks. It was not out of line to ask friends for favours, not according to the way things were. Yet for a strange moment Dingca had experienced it as an unthinkable liberty. It was as if he had stopped being part of an imaginary society where millions forgave their dead president for robbing the country blind because he only did it to help his own family and besides, had they been in his enviable position they would have done exactly the same. Only such a society wasn’t imaginary at all, and he could feel his head nodding dumbly of its own accord to signify the negation and denial and refusal he couldn’t trust himself to voice.

‘The job’s wearing you thin,’ Sita said to him later that night.

‘I know it,’ he agreed. In the morning he knew it still better, for the same newspaper’s early edition, no longer headlining the story, said: ‘Alleged Dealer Released.’ ‘Lack of evidence,’ went on Agusan (who must have been up all night) with a bitterness Dingca himself could taste, ‘is the supposed reason behind the nearly immediate release of
the woman known widely as “The Queen of Shabu”. A more plausible reason, according to my informants, is thought to be the direct intervention of an unnamed police Chief Superintendent and a certain businessman with “connections at court”. Had those persons failed, the so-called “Magnificent Seven” could no doubt have been relied on to come up trumps. They, of course, are the seven judges on the Makati Regional Trial Court circuit who, in the words of the same reliable source, “facilitate the settlement of criminal charges against the members of drug syndicates in return for vast sums of money”. They, and many others like them, are presumably what the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission recently called “hoodlums in robes”. The Filipino people may wearily note that hoodlums in robes are distinct from, but often hand-in-glove with, hoodlums in uniform. (They will also recall the PACC’s description a month or two ago of “hoodlums in medical robes”, which referred to those doctors who form a cadet branch of the old-established Hoodlum family.) All of which means, in short,
The
Queen
walks
.’

On the way to work Dingca pondered the untouchable Lettie Tan with her friends at court, and her late employee Babs. He thought about anonymous Chief Superintendents and businessmen and judges to whom the world’s Babses and Dingcas were so small as to be indistinguishable. He had the fantasy – at first not overtly erotic – of being assigned to take Police Cadet Gonzales from her very first days in uniform and show her exactly where she stood, which was absolutely nowhere. Her entire career could be blighted if fate moved her to flag down the wrong third-rate little birdturd for jumping the lights on Taft. He would mould her until she was sharp enough to see how things were, and hard enough to withstand them. The purity of this pedagogical vision was spoiled as it unaccountably sideslipped into a picture of the rookie, Benhur Daldal, screwing her in the Tan mausoleum. But neither this nor the early sun bouncing off the brightly buffed metalwork of his jeep brought cheer, and an officious blast on his squawk box which sent a sagging taxi swerving for cover produced no smile. Small wonder there were so many horrendous accidents, with head-on collisions between overladen buses and jeepneys ‘losing their brakes’ and ploughing into crowds of schoolchildren. People simply had no idea how to drive, none whatever, which was hardly surprising given how easy it was to get a licence.
Dingca knew people in the Department of Transportation who would issue a driver’s licence to a blind man for a bottle of imported Scotch.

Only the sight of Sgt. Cruz in the Station’s battered Tamaraw turning into the compound ahead of him gave Rio savage satisfaction. At least someone was doing something useful, and for quite modest sums of money. In the back of the Tamaraw a blue drum – empty, obviously, from the way it wobbled – was roped loosely upright. They parked beside each other.

‘I missed a party?’ asked Dingca, climbing out.

‘Ronnie Guzman from Station 2 sends his best. He provided Ninja.’

‘And you provided the drink? God’s own water for punkface and ESQ for the boys.’

‘Gin and Seven Up. I’ve a bit of a head. But Ninja drank the most.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Ninja Boy Magtibay. One of the four who raped that little student up in Greenhills or Cubao or somewhere. Dental nurse, I think. Before Christmas. They pushed a broken bottle up her and left her to bleed to death. We interviewed Ninja quite thoroughly about his friends. They’re booked for the same trip sooner or later.’

‘Which was where, may I ask?’

‘The Chinese piemen back of the airport. I owe you a couple of hundred,’ Cruz said.

We never know about blood money, Rio thought later that morning as he sat in the crime room, looking at the splintery desks and the three candles planted on them in puddles of their own wax. Brownout again. The candlelight lent the large office a quaintly ecclesiastical air despite the twenty-five-year-old city map on the wall. In one corner was a large Santo Niño in a niche made entirely of polished coconut shells. We receive payment for deeds we didn’t commit, for merely being a senior officer whose attitude permits their commission, or at least doesn’t stop it. Had Cruz not been such an enthusiast Station 2 would certainly have provided their own equivalent. Really, blood money was no more than part of our basic wage, truly inseparable from this job, this city, this
now
in this place. We are paid for our participation in the crime which merely living here involves.

The fat desk sergeant with the horn rims came in. ‘Morning, Lieutenant. Missed you earlier.’

‘Must be the brownout, Jun.’ It was the sergeant’s habit to slip out
of the back of the station past the pens to where an enterprising squatter family had set up an impromptu commissary. Here he would slurp bowls of
lugaw
and flirt in a cumbersome way until summoned back to duty by a rookie.

‘Message from the Captain. He wants you to check out a story about vampires in San Clemente.’

‘
Vampires?
Get lost, Sergeant.’

‘No, really. Apparently it’s in
People’s
for the second day running.’

‘Wow. It must be true, then. And where’s the Captain, may I ask?’

‘He’s over on Carmona. Thay had an amok down there last night. Chopped up seven. Four
dedbol
plus the amok.’

‘Anyone we knew?’

‘Don’t think so, Lieutenant. Radio repairer or something. The usual quiet sort.’

‘Mm. And I get vampires, that it?’

‘Only passing on what the Captain said, Lieutenant. You’re the one with the contacts in San Clem.’

This provoked a snigger or two in reference to the ancient joke about Dingca’s having a second wife up there among the cemeteries who made him his clothes in return for regular megaboffing. Since this was none other than the virtuous Nanang Pipa, from whom he bought the girls’ T-shirts at cost, Dingca hadn’t minded the ribbing. It seemed a small price to pay.

‘Okay,’ he said. Any job outside would be preferable to sitting here by candlelight. ‘Anyone got a
People’s
?’

It was headline stuff in two-inch high red capitals, a Mozart P. Narciso special full of interviews with mothers who had found their babies unaccountably drowsy with strange marks on their necks. ‘I can’t wake my baby,’ sobbed one housewife hysterically. ‘He’s been asleep now for seventeen hours. He’s never done it before. To my mind he’s possessed.’ Another resident said that although she had the greatest respect for their parish priest, San Clemente needed the services of a specialist ‘like that priest who did the Cavite dwarves.’ Never one to leave his readers baffled by a reference, Mozzy had taken time out – and a box outlined in heavy black type – to remind everyone of the incident some months ago when an elementary school in Cavite had been closed for days because of a plague of black dwarves which had invaded classrooms and pulled the pupils’ hair. The children
described the dwarves as having black beards and being about as tail as a family-size Coke bottle. A trained exorcist had been summoned and had done a number on them and successfully sent them packing back to their underground kingdom.

On his way out and with heavy humour Dingca laid his bolstered pistol on the desk.

‘Shan’t be needing this, Jun. But can you issue me a bottle of holy water, please?’

‘Yeah, look, I’m sorry, Lieutenant. It’s nothing to do with me. Captain said it’s not going to look good if it’s up there in the headlines and not a cop in sight. You know how these stories can attract trouble.’

‘We’re
service-
oriented…’

‘… not
mission
-oriented. You’ve got it.’

But Rio Dingca picked up his gun again after all and tucked it into his waistband as he trotted down the station steps into blessed sunlight.

A
S THE
National
Chronicle
’s chief crime reporter Vic Agusan rated a car and a driver, as distinct from the limo and chauffeur enjoyed by the paper’s editors. For some jobs – lurking with macro-zoom lenses as cops dumped their victims, for instance – he preferred to use his own Toyota, and it was in this that he called for Prideaux on the way to San Clemente. He referred to it fondly as ‘The Hersheymobile.’ Years of scalding sun and atmospheric pollutants had etched its once-glossy brown cellulose to a matt bloom. Together with the odd wisps of silver trim which still adhered, the crumpled wings and dented roof, this gave the vehicle a considerable resemblance to a block of chocolate on which somebody had stepped.

Somewhere up José Abad Santos he glanced at a map and saw that one didn’t after all drive to the area in which San Clemente must lie, there being no road, so he parked the Hersheymobile in the approach to the Chinese Cemetery. Thus it was that he and Prideaux, having consulted the guard at the barrier, walked up and along past the new Tan mausoleum (‘God, look at that’), cut sharply down to a hole in the hollow-block perimeter wall and squeezed through into the village. Vic thought it pretty much what he’d expected but could see his British companion apprehensively taking in a detailed inventory of slimy pathways and the shanties’ patchwork sides which came practically up to the wall.

‘Hooches,’ Vic heard him murmur, ‘It’s a ville. As in “Let’s waste this ville”.’

It was not hard to find Eddie Tugos. With the exception of their vampire he and Bats Lapad had temporarily become San Clemente’s most famous inhabitants. The visitors were led along meandering passageways strung with washing, here and there negotiable on tiptoe across swampy tracts sown with pieces of wood, a cylindrical length of palm trunk and the bashed honeycomb of a car radiator. Curious eyes and surprised giggles followed Prideaux. Hands which might or might not have been friendly clutched at his forearms. Cries of
‘Kano!’
and the running feet of children could be heard spreading through the warren of alleys. Finally they reached a tiny clearing. There, beneath a single palm tree with a basketball hoop nailed to its trunk, was a low rickety table made of packing-case slats and covered in bottles and glasses. At this, holding court, sat Eddie and Bats surrounded by assorted drunks, cronies and children.

‘I have to tell you,’ said Eddie with becoming frankness once introductions had been made and he had overcome his initial disappointment at finding his foreign visitor was not a member of the international press, ‘that you’re not the first today. No, no. Never mind, eh? Come one, come all. Do you know Mozart? What do you think of him?’

‘A first-rate investigative reporter,’ Vic said promptly. ‘It was he who suggested I came today.’

‘He’s a lying hound,’ said Eddie. ‘Generous, though.’ He tilted an empty gin bottle so that it clinked with heavy significance against its hollow companions. Vic produced some money and was about to hand it to the nearest child with orders for reinforcements when Eddie called ‘Judge!’ A lean man in an unravelling sombrero stepped forward, took the money and vanished. The journalist read this with amusement, making a mental note to tell the Englishman afterwards since he would probably have missed it. With his celebrity Eddie was being accorded a social status which Vic was sure he never normally enjoyed, and with it went a subtle re-ordering of his friendships. The man in the hat had briefly become an
alalay,
somewhere between a bodyguard and a gofer, as if Eddie himself were a proper little
amo
now (useless lusharooney though he clearly was. Vic had taken in the whole setup the instant he’d caught sight of the gin bottles, their labels already glowing brilliantly in the morning sunlight).
‘He
hasn’t been today, though.’

‘Who, Mozart? No, he’s on another story. So who’s been this morning?’

‘Oh.’ Eddie looked around for Judge and found Bats instead. Bats was tilted back against the tree wearing borrowed shades, Mr Cool himself, slightly but fatally upstaged because the vampire had chosen the Tugos roof on which to perch. ‘Who was here, Bats?’

‘Bandera.
Abante.
Tempo,’
said Bats, hardly moving his mouth.

The tabloids, thought Vic disgustedly. The real scuzz, sniffing around for the tabloid angle. What the hell was he doing here wasting time with these leaky bladders? ‘Why do you say Mozart’s a liar, Mr Tugos? Do you think he misrepresented something you said?’

At this moment the man in the sombrero reappeared, clutching bottles and a plastic bag of ice. Bottle caps popped and twirled in the air, were retrieved by scrambling barefoot children eager to scrape out their linings to see if they’d won a jackpot. Glancing around to make sure his guests were properly seated, the glasses and bottles correctly disposed, Eddie said with unexpected precision, ‘He couldn’t help misrepresenting everything I said because he didn’t believe a word of it. Not one word.’

‘Well, I read his two articles and they seemed pretty fair to me. Good faith, and so on. After all, it’s a pretty strange story, you’ve got to admit. And it’s not as if you took photographs of the apparition.’

‘It wasn’t an “apparition”, it was a
manananggal,
man,’ said Eddie vehemently. ‘That’s exactly what
he
did, this Mozart friend of yours. He didn’t actually write lies because he didn’t need to. What he did was…’ Eddie thought for a moment, ‘undermine my credibility. That’s it! Look,’ he reached down and from the ground plucked two copies of
People’s.
That morning’s edition had a banner in three-inch red capitals which said ‘THE VAMPIRE’S EVIL SPREADS’ surmounted by an outline drawing of a creature all wings and fangs hovering as if about to alight on the headline. Beneath all this was room for only a couple of inches of print. One turned the page expectantly only to find a spread of perfectly ordinary stories such as ‘Teenager Mashes Girls’ and ‘Fake Cop Nabs Real Cop in Error!’

‘Page four,’ said Eddie with hurt in his voice. On page four the vampire story was taken up again in normal print. ‘Here’s an example,’ he reached across and tapped a paragraph. “His wife Epifania, who runs a sewing business from her home, said her husband
had been under a strain recently. There had been a lot of worry over family matters.” See what I mean? How craftily it’s done? His wife runs a sewing business, get it? Not him. His wife. In other words she’s a hard-working, level-headed woman who can be trusted. Notice it’s
her
home and not mine, which I built with these two hands,’ Eddie stared rhetorically at his spread palms, ‘the same hands which are digging her the precious comfort room of her dreams which is causing all this –’

‘Comfort rooms, Eddie,’ interrupted Bats firmly from behind his shades. ‘Mr Agusan and his American guest didn’t come to San Clemente to hear about toilets. They came to hear about the
manananggal
which I also saw. We were equal witnesses,’ he explained to Vic and Prideaux.

‘Okay, okay,’ agreed Eddie, though obviously unwilling to abandon his general thesis. ‘The whole point is, I’m discredited, right? You know perfectly well that when someone in a newspaper’s described as having been under a strain recently it means they’re either off their heads or pissed incapable. I’ve been under a strain for more than recently!’ he suddenly yelled towards his own shut front door. ‘Damn near twenty-two years! It’s called marriage!’ Everyone looked nervously towards the house as if expecting the door to fly open and a virago spring out with a flashing pair of cutting-out shears. When nothing happened Eddie said reasonably, ‘You see my point, Mr Agusan? Nobody takes it seriously. But we saw it. We
did.
That’s why we all need gin. There, look at the label. See? It’s a defence against the Devil. The triumph of San Miguel.’

‘So what about all this other corroborative stuff?’ Vic tapped the newspaper. ‘The neighbours? The glowing Bibles? The cockroaches?’

‘We can’t say,’ said Bats. ‘We didn’t witness any of that. I expect it’s all true. Everyone knows everyone in San Clemente. We know who the liars are. It’s not surprising, though, is it? When an evil spirit that powerful materialises it has all sorts of side effects. It stands to reason.’

‘That’s quite right!’ put in a woman from among the crowd of onlookers gathered at the foot of the tree, ‘I’m Julie Orallo, the Mrs Orallo in that same newspaper. My Santo Niño fell off the wall and it’s never done it before. The way that Narciso man wrote it, it was a bit of a joke. But you tell me what the chances are of my Santo Niño falling at
exactly the same moment as the
manananggal
appeared. You tell me that, clever-clogs!’

‘
I
didn’t write that, Mrs Orallo,’ said Vic mildly. ‘I’m just listening.’

‘And I’m just telling you. All those smarty-boots journalists from downtown, they drift up here from their aircon offices and say it’s all, er,
hysteria.
But we in San Clemente, we
felt
that wave of evil. That’s not hysteria. That’s something you feel, isn’t it?’ The crowd murmured its agreement. ‘And all our hair stood on end at once, didn’t it? And that’s something anyone with eyes can see.’

‘Okay,’ said Vic pacifically, ‘okay. I’m keeping an open mind, remember?’

‘An empty head, more like,’ said a voice in the crowd. ‘Joke only,’ it added, and there was laughter as well as nudging and shushing.

Vic turned to Bats. ‘Perhaps Mr Bats here would tell me exactly where he saw the
manananggal
.’

Prideaux had followed all this with difficulty, meanwhile, since it was in Tagalog. The general drift, though, was clear enough: an anger on the part of the locals that they weren’t being taken seriously. When the impassive man in dark glasses pointed to a nearby roof Prideaux saw an expanse of rusty tin, much patched and with several bald motor tyres lying on it presumably to prevent the wind lifting the sheets. The house itself was two-storeyed and leaned in neighbourly fashion against that next door, which in turn was sandwiched into a general rookery of similar buildings both high and low. He imagined that people added another floor to their houses when they had a bit of spare cash or else some materials came their way. He could even see a couple of makeshift balconies. ‘Rough, I’d guess,’ Vic had said on the way over when asked what San Clemente would be like, and images of violence and desperation had come to him, as they so often did nowadays. Yet sitting in the shade of a palm tree at a table hospitably spread with refreshments he felt a peaceable, almost rural atmosphere quite different from that of the carefully contrived oases downtown. Those hotel gardens squeezed by a grid of streets, their high boundary walls painted with crude trompe l’oeil vistas of Mt. Mayon as glimpsed between jungled headlands, were nothing but tropicopolitan fakery. San Clemente, despite its own high walls, was unquestionably authentic, as elemental as befitted a lot of people living on a hillside.

For there was indeed a view: a rare sense, for this city, of being
positioned in a landscape. From where he was sitting he could see the upper part of the barrio rising towards where, a hundred or so metres away, the huge cemetery began. Beyond the shanty roofs were big old trees, their dark crowns dense as sponge, and between them the pale gleam of tombs. He could judge the point from which Vic and he had walked down into the barrio and now saw it was not the very top of San Clemente. They had come in about a third of the way down. The shanties stretched on in a narrowing wedge beyond to a point he could calculate by mentally prolonging the cemetery wall’s diagonal. Besides the vista of trees there were other signs of rurality. Ducks paddled in the sludge between the dwellings. From a nearby gully (actually the long sewage outfall leading from behind the Tugos house down to the invisible Kapilang) came the squeal of piglets, reflected from the bleached and rotting walls of the latrines lining its far side. A scatter of hens scratched in the dust, while nearby a fighting cock was tethered by one leg on a length of nylon cord simply nailed into the baked soil. Its wattles glowed with rich blood; the sun burnished its metallic plumes until they bled gold and copper and bronze; the proud arch of its tail dribbled inky lights. It was a dazzling bird.

Just then Prideaux caught sight of a familiar figure emerging from a nearby house and turning away up the alley. At least, he was pretty sure it was familiar. He hadn’t seen Fr. Herrera since their lunch together in the New Era but the plump torso and spectacles were surely unmistakable. He got abruptly to his feet with one of those all-purpose hand gestures at once indicating excuses and a short absence and, without taking his eyes off the place where he’d last seen the priest, hurried after him.

Five minutes later the Tugos front door opened and a tall, fortyish man in T-shirt and slacks came out, laughing. He paused in the sun, looking over at the table and the crowd. Eddie was just describing some details of the fangs which he’d newly recalled. Everyone’s attention was on him except Vic Agusan’s, distracted by this stranger’s appearance. How is it one can always tell? he was asking himself as he so regularly did. They had that look about them which one couldn’t quite pin down. It didn’t matter what they wore or what they were doing; sooner or later that little inward voice spoke up and said ‘Cop’. After all these years of talking to them, drinking with them, following and watching them, Vic always knew if the man was what he called a
proper cop or merely some military no-neck pretending to be one. This man was a proper cop, the full Academy-trained article with, what? eighteen or twenty years on the clock and not enough seniority to show for it. His hair was greying, Vic noticed.

The man walked over and listened for a moment before Eddie saw him and broke off in mid-reminiscence. ‘Rio!’ he exclaimed, getting unsteadily to his feet. ‘A drink for the Inspector, Judge, he ordered, as to the manner born. ‘I owe this man my life,’ he explained to his audience. ‘If it hadn’t been for him I’d still be rotting in jail on a trumped-up charge.’ He threw an arm around the T-shirt; the tall man smiled faintly. ‘Imagine
me
being accused of carnapping! It’s like accusing a eunuch of rape. I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to.’