Monkey on a Chain (18 page)

“You’re being deliberately vague,” he said. “You might be interested in knowing that I have been in contact with a man from your embassy about you. A man in a position to know the American interests here. He has assured me that you are not acting for your government. That you are on your own. You do not have their protection. And that means you are vulnerable. You should be very careful what you do here.”

“The American government has interests, and then it has interests. Don’t trust what you hear from a clerk.”

“The man I spoke to is hardly a clerk. I have dealt with him for many, many years,” he paused and watched me thoughtfully. “But I am all too aware that your government sometimes plays more than one game at a time.”

I smiled at him innocently. “Well, all that’s neither here nor there. I’m just on vacation with my…my girlfriend. And I sure don’t need any more trouble than you’ve already got me into.”

“Pig!” April said.

“Then stay out of the mountains, Mr. Stephenson.” Yabut stood up. “We will be keeping an eye on you. For your own protection, of course.”

April watched him leave, then turned to me. “A farmer’s daughter?” She laughed. “Your jeep broke down on the road, and this farmer came along and offered to fix it if you’d just take his daughter into the bushes for a drink of water?”

“Can it,” I told her. “The bar has ears. Let’s go eat.”

Yabut’s appearance had cast a pall over the evening, at least for me. It had also given me some things to think about. The NPA and maybe some of the old Huks were still active in the mountains, of course. But they were going to be harder to find with official attention directed my way. And then there was the mysterious man from the embassy Yabut had contacted. Our passports would stand a superficial scrutiny, but I didn’t want them looked at too carefully. If anything had been set in motion by Yabut’s questions, our time was limited. We had to get back to the states and lose these identities quickly. On the other hand, I’d left Yabut with some doubt about my true status, and possibly some suspicion of the man from the embassy. And he had given me an idea for making contact, if I could get April to go along with it.

Our internal clocks were set to some time zone in the middle of the ocean. We turned in soon after dinner. By nine in the morning, I had rented a jeepney and checked us out of the hotel. I didn’t say goodbye to Pete.

We drove around Manila for a while, taking in some of the sights and doing a bit of shopping for the sake of the eye Yabut had promised to keep on us, and then drove to Angeles City, out near Clark Air Base. By early evening, we were checked into a hotel called the Presidente. We spent another few hours driving around, familiarizing ourselves with the area. The hotel was within walking distance of the strip.

I recognized it immediately. The buildings were two or three stories, hotels and apartments above, bars, massage parlors and strip joints on the ground level. A lot of traffic on the street: young Americans wearing short hair and civilian clothes. The bars had names like the Green Light, the Yellow Pearl, Half Moon House. Their neon signs featured girls dancing in bikinis. Glass-covered pictures framed the doorways. I didn’t have to look at the pictures to know what they advertised.

April looked at me curiously when I took a second tour through the area, then watched the girls standing in the doorways. They were inevitably young, pretty, and very friendly. Their clothing tended to be party dresses and high heels.

“Nice neighborhood,” she said dryly.

“Just looking.”

“Do you have a reason?”

“Yes.” I drove us back to the hotel and found the restaurant. After dinner, we went to our room. I told April that I was going out and that I’d be late. She followed me to the door, as I had expected. I turned on her. “Look, you can’t come tonight.”

“Where are you going?”

“When Yabut was talking to us yesterday, he said the Huks run the whorehouses in town. I’m going to look them over. You’d be out of place.”

“Why?”

“Why?” I shook my head. “Why would a man take a girl along to a whorehouse?” I asked her.

“Maybe I’m kinky?” She said. “Do you think I’m crazy? I’m not going to let you out alone in a place like that. You might be tempted to do more than ask questions.”

“I wouldn’t be half so tempted if you’d wear a nightgown like a decent woman.”

“Who said I was a decent woman? Besides, I want to see.”

“See what, for Christ’s sake?”

“See that you don’t get in any trouble, for one thing.”

“I won’t get in any trouble.”

“You might not call it trouble.” She put her back to the door and glared at me. “If you go, I go.”

I tried one last tack. “With you along, I’m going to have more trouble explaining what I’m doing there. You won’t be helping. You’ll be making it harder.”

“You never had a hard time explaining anything in your life,” she said. “If anyone asks, tell them you’re looking for a farmer’s daughter. And as for the other, I’m used to making things harder for you. I’m going.”

There was no way out. “Okay,” I said. “But keep your mouth shut.”

“Great!” She was delighted. “I’ll be ready in a minute.” She spent half an hour on her face and applied way too much makeup. I finally had to remind her that she was supposed to be a shopper, not merchandise.

My intention was to spend the evening drinking and looking over the action. I wanted to get an idea how much money was flowing through the shops, and maybe a hint of which ones were run by the Huks. The owners of record would be middlemen, of course, but it might be possible, with enough pressure, to learn what I needed to know. How to contact Freddy, if he was still alive.

Our first stop was a place called the Bird of Paradise. It turned out to be a straightforward strip joint. April watched the girls on stage grind their way down to tassels and G-string, then toss those into the audience and parade back and forth. She seemed more interested in the audience than in the girls. Of course, they had nothing she needed to pay to see. I watched the action at the bar and promoted a conversation with the girl behind it that went nowhere.

She was interested in selling me drinks, of course, but became very stupid when I asked who the owner was. A few minutes later, an older woman came up to me, told me she was the manager, and asked if she could help me. I told her I was an American journalist and I wanted to do a feature on the local night life. She didn’t buy it for a minute, but I got the feeling that she owned the place. I took April out of there as soon as the next girl finished her set.

The second place was called Seven Delights. It was a big step down from the Bird. The girls danced there too, but without a stage. They danced on a table in the center of the room, and they started where the others had ended. Naked. Not nude. Nude is too classy a word. These girls were bare-ass naked.

I tried a different approach. Instead of talking to the employees, I bought a drink for a sergeant named Jim, who looked like he had spent more than one tour in the Orient and was too old for his rank. He was a leathery, brown-haired man about my age. He let me buy the drink, but his mind and his eyes were on April.

“Who’s the lady with you?” he asked.

“The lady with me.” I emphasized
me
. April was listening and pretending to ignore us. I felt her foot on my leg under the table.

“So what’s the score?” he asked.

“Looking around. Checking things out.”

“Looking for anything in particular?”

“A little information, maybe.”

He looked wary. “What about?”

“Not you. Not the base. The action.” I nodded vaguely toward the bar, the girls. “You been around? You know what’s what?”

“Got a crib in the neighborhood. Yeah, I know what’s happening. What you wanna know?”

“The ownership around here. I’ve got a little free capital, and I was thinking maybe I could pick up a piece of the action.”

“Buy in, you mean?”

“If necessary.”

“So let’s see some of that free capital you’ve got.”

I laid a fifty on the table and he put it away. “So, ask already,” he said.

“I hear rumors about who owns some of these joints. I hear the Huks.”

“That’s mostly the other side of the street. There’s a place called the Back Door that’s theirs for sure, but most of the joints on that side are owned. If you’re straight about looking for an in, you stay away from them.”

He gave me a measuring look. “Course, that’s if you’re being straight.”

“How sure is this?” I asked.

“It’s sure. The girls talk to each other, and my shack job is one of the girls.” He nodded at the one on the table. I looked her over. She was pretty. Dark eyes, light brown skin, hair piled high, a butterfly painted on her left cheek in fluorescent pink. She was bending over at the moment, watching us expressionlessly from between her legs while she did a series of slow grinds. “Nice,” I told him.

“You wanna trade? For the night?”

I thought about it for a few seconds. “Nice butterfly—” April kicked my leg “—but I guess I’m satisfied.”

He shrugged. “Whatever you’re up to, be careful. This place is rough. And the piece you’re with is some powerful bait. I’d hate to see a fellow American get in trouble so far from home.”

“Hate it enough to help?”

“Not a chance, buddy. I live here.”

“Fair enough.” I put another bill on the table. “Don’t remember me,” I told him.

“Who?” he asked.

Outside, April grabbed my arm. “Trade?” she said. “You guess you’re satisfied?”

“You kicked me,” I said. “I had to guess what you meant.”

“I should have kicked harder. And higher!”

We walked across the street and down a block to the Back Door Club. The place was a step sideways from the Seven Delights. The lighting was just as dim, and the smell was the same. Female sex and cheap whiskey. But the girls didn’t dance. They smothered you. Three of them converged on me as I entered, then hesitated when April followed me in.

Two of the girls were Filipinos. The other wasn’t. I got an idea. I wrapped my free arm around the third girl and steered her toward a booth in the back. She was wearing a white vinyl mini-skirt with a fringe, matching cowboy boots, and a tiny vest. She wore nothing under the vest. She looked about sixteen. April followed closely.

“You buy me drink, GI?” the girl whispered. “You GI?” Her eyes were on April. She looked puzzled.

“Sure, I buy,” I told her. We sat. One of the other girls came over and took our order. Two beers and a glass of what I pretended to believe was champagne for the girl. Thirty dollars. I handed it over. She tossed down the champagne.

“Don’t push it,” I told her. “No more champagne.” She started to stand. I grabbed her arm and held it. “Ten minutes,” I said.

“You hurting me, GI,” she said.

“No, I’m not. You talk a minute. Then maybe I buy another drink.”

She sat back down and the muscle man at the door relaxed. “What you want to talk about?”

I nudged April. “El Paso,” I told her. She nodded slowly, staring at the girl and said hello in Vietnamese.

The girl jerked as though she’d been slapped. She focused on April and started chattering. I grabbed my beer and headed for the bar. “Hey!” I called. “Bring me some goddamn champagne. What’s the matter with you guys?”

The girl behind the bar sold me a bottle. She wanted a hundred, but I told her I wasn’t that stupid and gave her a fifty. She took it with a smile that said I was. I carried the bottle back to the table. The girls were talking too fast for me to follow.

I leaned over them and put a hand on each of their backs. “You know what to ask,” I whispered to April.

“I need time,” she said.

“Right.” I headed back to the bar, slid onto a stool, and nodded toward the girl with April. “How much?” I asked the barmaid.

She looked at an older man sitting at the end of the bar.

“You like her?” he asked. “Very pretty!”

I moved down next to him. “She’ll do,” I said. “My friend likes her.”

“She likes girls?”

“She likes to watch.”

“Me too,” he said. “You want a room?”

“You got bugs?”

He shook his head vigorously. “No bugs. Nice clean room. One hundred dollars. You take all the time you want.”

“Not here,” I said. “My hotel. All night. How much?”

“She don’t go out. You stay here. All night, five hundred dollars. Where you stay?”

“The Presidente,” I told him. “Five hundred dollars is too much. One hundred.”

“Five hundred. All night.”

“I want to rent her, not buy her. Five hundred is too much. I pay two hundred.”

“She not for sale. That cost you five thousand, anyway. Four hundred, all night.”

I shook my head at him. “Two hundred.”

“Why go to the Presidente? Very nice here, very clean. Three hundred here, all night.”

“I don’t want you to watch,” I told him. “Three hundred at the Presidente. But I don’t pay the girl any tip. You pay her.”

He looked at me, then decided he’d gotten all he was going to get. I was probably paying three times her going rate anyway.

“Three hundred,” he agreed. “But you treat her nice. Big tip.”

I pushed the money toward him. He handed it to the girl behind the bar and stood. Both April and the girl watched him carefully as he approached. She looked frightened. He spoke to her in rapid Filipino for a few minutes, and she went into the back room.

“She come in one minute,” he told me. “You treat her nice. She good girl. Fuck like rabbit.”

April stood beside me. She looked frightened too. He paid no attention to her. “You send her back okay,” he warned me. “I don’t want to look for her. You understand?”

“I understand.”

The girl joined us at the door. She had changed into street clothes, perhaps to pass inspection at the Presidente. We walked back to the hotel in silence. The girl seemed very nervous. April took the key from me and led her upstairs. I started to follow, but she shook her head at me.

I found a bellboy and gave him a ten and an order for some food and beer. I told him to take it to the room. Then I went into the lounge to wait.