The Leper Spy (4 page)

If the United States and the underprepared Filipino army stood any chance of defending the islands, the Japanese could not be allowed access to Manila Harbor, and all that was protecting the harbor was Corregidor. The Rock would be the most important real estate in the archipelago.

Defense of the island fell to a Texan, Maj. Gen. George F. Moore, and he was in constant fear of a surprise attack before the Japanese declared war. He often stood Topside at night and peered out over
the black water toward the lights of Manila. And every night, about a mile away from Corregidor, drifted a fleet of one hundred or more Japanese fishing boats, each one capable of carrying one hundred men. He thought about what might happen if the boats made a coordinated dash in the darkness for the island while his men were quietly sleeping.

For nearly the past year, Moore had been rushing to prepare the island for attack. He started by evacuating the families of American service personnel back to the United States. Then he doubled training time for the men involved with the harbor defense, subjecting them over and over to simulated Japanese attacks. He trained more radio operators and held practice air-raid tests. He ordered the construction of new barracks, new tunnels, and new roads, which snaked to nine new antiaircraft machine gun towers. He increased the number of men on twenty-four-hour alert. He leased an auxiliary mine planter, a ship called
Neptune,
and covered the Manila Bay passes with underwater mines.

In late November 1941, Moore received a message from MacArthur saying talks were breaking down with Japan and telling Moore to “take such measures as [you see] fit to insure the readiness of the command to meet any eventuality.” Moore called his staff and ordered them to head for their battle stations. By the time the sun came up, they were as ready as they could be.

The surge of American weapons to the islands, the installation of new antiaircraft guns, and the fortification of Corregidor and Bataan, brought a sense of safety. People talked of the thousands of new planes parked on landing strips up and down the islands and of the brigade of tanks that regularly raced up and down the beaches. This was American military might on full display. It was hard to imagine Japan would attack.

* * *

Moore's phone rang at 3:40
AM
on December 8. It was 8:40
AM
on December 7 in Hawaii, more than five thousand miles away, on the
other side of the International Date Line. The caller was manning the navy radio intercept installation on Corregidor. He told Moore he had just received two messages.

“Hostilities commenced with air raids on Pearl,” he said.

“And the second?” Moore said.

“Air raids on Pearl Harbor. This is not drill.”

Both had been signed by the naval commander in chief.

Moore sprang from his bed, dressed quickly, and hustled to the harbor defense command post, H Station, where his staff officers were gathering. He started rattling off orders. Alert the seaward defense commander, antiaircraft defense commander, and beach defense commander, he said. Tell them to ready sea and air surveillance against a surprise dawn attack. He told them to transmit the text of his orders to MacArthur at the headquarters of the US Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), in Manila. He suspended all passes and canceled the morning boat to Manila. He ordered the ordinance officer to establish munitions dumps and the surgeon to set up aid stations. He prepared them to put the war plan in place.

At 6:02
AM
, a message came from USAFFE: “A state of war exists between the United States and Japan. Govern yourself accordingly.”

The first air-raid siren blared at 10:26
AM
when a flight of seventeen enemy bombers was spotted flying toward the island from the east. The fleet turned away before it was within range. But now there was no doubt.

F
irst came the headaches, pounding and pulsing behind her temples, worming into the backs of her brown eyes, stealing her sleep.

Then came the fatigue, robbing her of energy and strength. She felt as though some force was slowly occupying her body, staking out its land under foreign flag. She kneeled and prayed with all the faith she could muster. She worried.

Then came the loss of appetite. For months she had to force herself to eat.

Then a small blemish appeared on her cheek, a pink splotch on her light skin that first could have been mistaken for a pimple or a bug bite of some sort but soon began to take an odd shape, spreading, swelling outward, expanding, an amorphous alien growth that could not be dislodged.

She finally told Renato.

He took her to the best infectious disease specialist he knew, and the doctor ran a battery of tests and delivered the diagnosis, which fell out of his mouth like a stone. Leprosy.

She struggled to understand what it meant, seized by confusion, her future tumbling, crashing. She felt betrayed by her body. The scriptures crawled through her mind, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Kings, the Gospels.

And if the priest see that, behold, the scab spreadeth in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean (Leviticus 13:8).

The leprosy therefore of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto thy seed for ever (2 Kings 5:27).

She pictured the worst, the loss of feeling, the crooking of her fingers and toes, the boils upon her face and arms and back. Renato tried to calm her, to inform her that the stigma was incorrect and her false ideas of biblical leprosy were not factually sound. He told her that it wasn't as contagious as many other diseases and explained to her the known phases and treatments. He put his arm around her.

“We will live through this,” he said.

“At least there are medicines,” she said. “The disease can be cured.”

“True,” Renato said. “With the proper rest and medicines.”

Nonetheless, she would be judged. Too little was known about the disease. In Manila, lepers were feared, were made to ring a bell and carry a sign indicating they were contagious. Those who complied were shunned, dispatched to live outside the city in colonies. There were some eight thousand leprosy victims being treated at that time in the Philippines, with primitive medicines like chaulmoogra oil and its derivatives, but no one knew how many were in hiding or wandering among the general population.

The doctor informed the young couple that to safeguard Cynthia, who was just five years old, from infection, she and Joey could not live under the same roof.

Joey died a thousand deaths.

The pain was excruciating. She called it her Calvary. She knew what she had to do. She couldn't even kiss her daughter good-bye.

Cynthia went to live with Rene's mother, a frugal Spanish woman who loved her granddaughter. Rene moved in with his mother as well, leaving Joey alone in their Florida Street home, with two servant girls. Joey took pains to be careful. She made certain everything she used and sent out of the house had been sterilized.

Rene found a doctor who would treat Joey in private, in her home, and the treatments seemed to be working. The skin lesions were kept at bay. The fatigue and headaches were bearable. She maintained her beauty, and though she didn't venture out but to receive Mass, she maintained her status in society.

Nobody seemed to notice anything amiss. She and Rene and the servant girls and the doctor had a simple secret they'd share with no one.

T
he newsboys shouted from the corners of Makati and Ermita and Intramuros, their voices rising above the Filipinos in their finest clothes queuing before cathedral doors for the most important Mass of the year.

“Honolulu bombed!” the boys hollered, shaking pages in their inky hands.

The faithful were going down on their knees as word spread that it wasn't just Honolulu. High overhead, Mitsubishi G4Ms adorned with blood-red suns let loose explosives over territory that had belonged to the United States since the 1898 Treaty of Paris—Clark Field to the northwest, Baguio to the north, Iba to the east, Del Carmen to the southeast—catching fleets of US airplanes, P-40s and P-35As and B-17s, on the ground, immobile, the jet fuel igniting and giving rise for the last time to flaming fuselages.

Doors blew off hinges. Nipa huts disintegrated. Black sprays of sand climbed over the treetops. Flames sprinted across tarmac. The detonations came quick and cracked like short, sharp thunder, and towers of fire licked at the sky, then gave way to pillars of black smoke. The piers were burning. The docks were burning. Depots and hangars jumped from the earth and separated at the seams, and wafts of cordite filtered through the trees. The sky was a horde of white hornets. American soldiers, boots planted on shaking ground,
fired .45-caliber pistols worthlessly into the air. The few planes that were scrambled came down as quickly as they had gone up. Guns lit up on Corregidor as enemy bombers passed to the east, out of range. Fire leaped across rice paddies and parade grounds and city streets. The Twenty-Sixth Cavalry, the last horse unit in the American army, the most professional and best-trained combat unit in the islands, advanced in long columns down Dewey Boulevard, northbound, their mounts rustling nervously in trailers with each new concussion, a prideful portrait of an impoverished strategy.

The twelve-acre campus of the Ateneo de Manila was covered in festive bunting, and a band played in the schoolyard as the boys, out of class for the feast, gathered for Mass at noon in a state of confusion.
Was it true?
The American Jesuit fathers were searching for information themselves about the attacks outside the city.

“I've just been informed that Fort Stotsenberg has been bombed,” the rector told the boys, interrupting Mass, “and that the United States has declared war on Japan.”

Father Forbes Monaghan saw a newsboy run into the Ateneo with the morning paper as a throng gathered around. “State of war!” the boy shouted.

Planes soon appeared over Manila, but the boys on the ground had trouble believing they were Japanese planes. The Japanese didn't even make good toys, they thought. How could they build airplanes that could reach Manila? Some believed they were German planes being flown by German pilots. All day they came, whoever they were, and even though the city was under a forced blackout that night, the planes still roared in. The pilots used the shorelines of the Pasig River and Manila Bay as navigational tools and struck Nichols Field, just to the southeast of the city, and the Cavite naval base on Manila Bay. Maj. Gen. George Moore and the soldiers on Corregidor watched Cavite burn.

When the sun came up, Father Monaghan watched the sky as thirty pursuit planes raced north to repel another attack on Clark Field. It was the first and last time he'd see them as a fighting organization. The next day, they were gone, just like the bomber fleets.

US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the world what he knew, that the Empire of Japan had suddenly and deliberately attacked the United States at Hawaii, which was just one piece of a wild and surprising portrait of the Asian nation's march across the Pacific. Yesterday they attacked Malaya, he said.

Last night, Hong Kong.

Last night, Guam.

Last night, the Philippine Islands.

Last night, Wake Island.

This morning, Midway Island.

“As commander-in-chief of the army and navy,” he said, “I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”

Quickly, the Philippine government activated reserve divisions, and young Filipino soldiers began to report to the University of Santo Tomas, on España Boulevard, the second-oldest university outside of Europe. They marched in prepared for the unknown, cured of their sentiments, ready to defend a country that was home but that they had never really owned. Some had barely a week of training; the veterans had no more than four months. The police commandeered private trucks and buses across the metropolis, and the long columns of transports carrying soldiers by the hundreds pushed north out of Santo Tomas toward Lingayen Gulf, the most likely landing shore for Japanese foot soldiers. The army moving out of the city had been organized just four years before. The men were raw, inexperienced, and ill equipped. They came out of the rice paddies and out of merchant tents and off fishing boats and didn't fully understand why they were fighting for America. But they were vicious and loyal.

They trusted the Americans. They trusted MacArthur. As Japanese bombers pounded their shores, sinking their boats in the harbor, blasting their buildings in Pasay and Malate, they cinched their belts and tugged on their cheap US-issued shoes and fired unfamiliar
Enfield rifles into the sky. Even those not in uniform trusted. As Japanese troops steamed toward landing zones on Luzon, they insulted the enemy in the pages of the
Manila Herald
and on radio stations like KZRH, where Leon Maria Guerrero of the Ermita Guerreros, who had learned to use the equipment with the Ateneo Jesuits, started the
Victory Broadcast.

At the Ateneo, telegrams poured in from frightened parents telling their children to come home. Some packed up quickly and left with short good-byes. The Jesuit fathers decided to send the boarders home, all but the ROTC cadets. Word reached the Ateneo that General MacArthur and Philippine president Manuel Quezon had instructed the cadets who had finished the basic ROTC training to stay on, to be rapidly trained for military service and sent to the field as officers when training ended in January. Hundreds of boys stayed and began drilling, digging trenches with intensity, and studying war plans.

The boarders who hadn't left, plus those from closed schools across the city, grabbed their belongings and rushed to the pier to catch one of the few interisland boats leaving Manila to return home to their families in other island provinces, Cebu and Davao and Zamboanga and Mindanao. Some twelve hundred crammed onto the
Corregidor,
an eighteen-ton transport ship that was fleeing Manila harbor for the safety of the outlying islands. But the ship struck a mine at the mouth of Manila Bay and sank in two minutes. Navy small boats picked up 280 oil-covered survivors, and others helped as well, searching for the living in shark-infested waters, but some 500 passengers were lost. Those who survived were taken to a building at the Ateneo that had been turned into a Red Cross station. The Jesuits accepted any survivors, and the campus—with its main academic building, the famous Manila Observatory, the auditorium, the laboratories, the library, the chapel, and the gymnasium—became an unofficial refugee center. When word spread that the religious school was taking refugees, more began to arrive. The population swelled by an additional four hundred people, from the
navy yard at Cavite and Nichols Field, women without husbands and babies without fathers.