Tree of Smoke (76 page)

That he should mention the Polo Club! The letter came among a batch Eddie had taken to the club to peruse over lunch—an airletter, written in a very small hand and postmarked Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Charges? Hanging? For what? Eddie had heard nothing about it. He had a friend at the Manila
Times
who could perhaps see about all this. And the colonel, alive? He’d never had any report to the contrary, never any word of the colonel’s demise. He wasn’t in touch with any of “the bunch” from back then, but surely he would have known if the colonel had died.

How often he’d thought of Skip Sands. How seldom he’d done anything about it. He’d made no attempt to track him down. He associated Skip with the murder of the priest along the Pulangi River in 1965, by far the worst thing he’d done in his life, and the circumstances, war, duty, good intentions, made no difference.

Eddie left his table under the awning near the swimming pool and strolled through the restaurant to the bowling lanes. The man knew his shoe size without having to ask. A couple of kids bowled in the center lane, not doing too well with these duckpins, half the size of tenpins, and a ball without finger holes, held in the hand, hard to aim, and prone to little effect on the targets. After each turn a boy dropped from the darkness above the fallen pins to capture and resettle them. As a teenager Eddie had flung the ball hard and sent the pins flying in hope of catching one of those kids in the head with one, but they knew the game and stayed clear.

Eddie bowled a line in the low nineties, not unrespectable for duckpins, and drank 7Up and grenadine as he’d done when a boy. Six weeks ago, after a debauched New Year’s Eve, he’d sworn off liquor.

He went up the stairs and through the lobby to the intercom and buzzed Ernesto in the drivers’ shack and stood out front waiting. The grounds and the drive of the Polo Club hadn’t changed in decades, and beyond the grounds, in the subdivision of Forbes Park, all was still well, but beyond Forbes Park chaos waited. The quarantine of beautiful lawns and stately homes was massed about with the choking city. He had plans to relocate. He was rich, he could go where he wanted. He only lacked an idea where.

Imogene wasn’t home. The children must be out of school by now but off visiting, or looking for trouble.

In his office upstairs he sat at the desk, his chair turned toward the window, and cradled a cup of coffee in his hands. He didn’t like coffee. He just drank it.

“A letter has come.”

“What?”

Carlos, the houseboy. The formerly beautiful Imogene preferred he say “servant.”

Carlos placed the envelope on his desk. “It comes from Mr. Kingston. His driver brought it in the car.”

Kingston, an American, lived nearby. The letter, he saw, came from Pudu Prison and was addressed to Eddie care of Manila’s Canadian Consul. Kingston had clipped to it a note reading, “This was given to me by John Liese of the Canadian Embassy. I believe it’s for you—Hank.” The connection, Eddie guessed, was that Kingston did a lot of business with Imperial Oil of Canada, and Sands was masquerading as a Canadian.

He looked again at the first letter:

—That one had come addressed to Eduardo Aguinaldo, Forbes Park, Makati, Rizal, Philippine Islands. No house number, no street address, but it had found him. And his name wasn’t Eduardo. His name was Edward. As a kind of mockery between chums, Skip had called him Eduardo. Skip had mocked himself as well. Maybe under the Latin influence, in these islands named for a Spaniard king, he’d cultivated a silly mustache, and Eddie had called him Zorro. Certainly he remembered the young American with the crew cut and the mustache.

He stood by the window of his office and looked out on the pool, the bathhouse, the acacia dropping whirling blossoms on the lawn, and wondered if his happiest times hadn’t come in his teens, when he was down here in Manila on holiday from the Baguio Military Institute, running wild in a city without limits; and in his mid-twenties, those patrols in the jungle with Skip Sands, the man from the CIA.

His window fronted none-too-sturdy-looking high-rises veiled, as Skip said he imagined, in fumes. Once the places with better views had looked out on fields of high coarse elephant grass, dirt roads, open spaces with a few tall buildings. The Rizal Theater had been visible from two miles off. All his life he’d lived in Forbes Park. At the edge of a burning field once he’d found a dead dog with newborn pups at her teats, and he’d taken the minuscule beasts home and tried to nurse them from an eyedropper. That’s who he’d been once.

Recently he’d been struck with an idea for a wicked lampoon of
My Fair Lady
—a one-act,
The Wedding Night of Liza Doolittle and Henry Higgins
, with off-color lyrics set to the familiar melodies of “The Street Where You Live” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”

The trouble was that in this cultural environment such a show would be, like Liza Doolittle (as he imagined her for the purposes of this entertainment), unmountable. And for the same reasons: conformity, prudery, feminine cowardice. He felt himself unsuited for the climate of his times. He could only stand outside and laugh at his own class, the educated emulators of British and American manners—his wife, her father the good senator, all those people—a light scum of gentility floating on a swamp.

And everybody else, all his fellow Filipinos: a lot of superstitious maniacs, miracle-seekers, statue-worshippers, stigmata-bleeders, berserk flagellants running on Good Friday through province after province with dripping, self-inflicted wounds while others came out to beat them with sticks or soothe their gashes with water hurled from old soup cans, and a man in Cotabato Province who had himself crucified annually before his weeping neighbors in a church.

Skip Sands to the gallows. Me too.

Why the jolly hell not?

He thinks, I’m a jolly good fellow and an unhappy man.

A
pproaching the steps to Kuala Lumpur’s Old High Court on the day of sentencing, Jimmy Storm looked up toward the second story and saw a number of women in bright dresses—secretaries, maybe—picnicking on a balcony, taking lunch with their rice bowls in the laps of their bright dresses. As they fed themselves they held the bowls up close to their faces, conversing, laughing, sounding almost as if they sang to one another.

On the top step he paused. He didn’t know where to go. He consulted the day’s printed agenda in its glass case while dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his shoe, and then pushed through the great wooden doors of the Old High Court—Moorish in its architecture, tropic Colonial in its spacious interiors, resonant and shadowy, dwarfing and cooling the concerns of those who came here.

He took a seat in the rearmost pew of Courtroom Seven, where at 1:00 p.m. a Chinese gun dealer named Lau would be sentenced. Then, at 2:00 p.m., the prisoner calling himself William French Benét.

One yellow fire extinguisher. Twelve overhead fluorescent lights. A sign in Malaysian or whatever they spoke—
DI-LARANG MEROKOK
—which he took to mean “No Smoking.” Eleven wall-mounted electric fans, should the central cooling fail. Storm doubted it ever would. Everything worked perfectly in Kuala Lumpur. People seemed competent and agreeable.

At the front of the courtroom, a lawyer in a gray suit sat at the defendant’s table and examined the evidence against his client, spinning the cylinder of what appeared to be a Smith & Wesson Detective Special, cocking back the hammer and taking aim, for an empty, meditative moment, at the elevated bench from which, according to the agenda out front, Mr. Justice Shaik Daud Hadi Ponusammy would momentarily preside.

Except for Storm, the lawyer had the courtroom to himself. He aimed the pistol at the court secretary’s empty desk, in particular at the sign on it reading
DI-LARANG MEROKOK
. He pulled the trigger, and the pin snapped.

Lunch was over. Storm heard footfalls echoing through the building. He stood up and went to a window with a view down into the driveway, where a blue van was arriving now from Pudu Prison. Lettering on its flank read
POLIS RAJA DI MALAYSIA
. Among the half dozen Chinese and Malay prisoners he could easily pick out the false Canadian Benét, his face looking white and small in the van’s back window.

Storm took his seat again. A few people had scattered themselves among the pews by now, a half dozen reporters and a couple of spectators. The court’s secretary came, and one security guard; and then Benét’s barrister, Ahmed Ismail, entered the courtroom. He looked soft and favored, with the big, wet eyes of a child, arranging his papers before him in the shadow of the judge’s looming bench. Very plush purple curtains covering the rear wall gave the courtroom the air of an old theater, and for a moment Ismail looked like a schoolboy, absurdly dressed in a black three-piece suit, coming to see a movie.

A staircase led up from the lower floor directly into the prisoner’s box in the middle of the Old High Court, so that climbing it the accused, Lau, a Chinese boy looking around himself wildly, suddenly surfaced in the midst of his dilemma.

All stood for the entering Mr. Justice Ponusammy, who positioned himself behind a large ceremonial mace that rested on his desk. The prisoner leaned on the railing of his box, supporting himself with both bound hands.

All were seated.

They ran the court in English. The prisoner’s lawyer explained his client didn’t speak it and would use an interpreter. The boy had been convicted of dealing in firearms and of possessing a large quantity of ammunition. The judge went over the submissions, the precedents, and all the rest. The small man interpreting for the prisoner seemed nervous, sitting on his wooden chair beside the barrister and jiggling both his knees violently. When the judge addressed him he jumped up, and the prisoner also rose, though nobody had asked him to.

On hearing of his arrest, the Chinese boy’s mother had killed herself by swallowing insecticide. “He does not yet know,” his lawyer told the judge in English. The Chinese boy stood there oblivious. His interpreter failed to translate. “He will soon know, and that will perhaps be his biggest punishment.”

Justice Ponusammy never once looked at the prisoner. He gave him six years and six strokes of the rattan cane, and three more years for the ammunition.

During the break, while they waited for the prisoner Benét to be brought up, Storm went forward and approached the lawyer Ismail. “My name is Storm.”

“Mr. Storm. Yes.”

“Your client. Benét.”

“Yes.”

“Is he coming up?”

“Yes, in five minutes’ time.”

“Can you give him a message for me? A message from Storm?”

“I think I can, yes.”

“Tell Benét I’m completely capable of everything he fears.”

“For goodness’ sake, man!”

“Did you hear my words?”

“Yes, Mr. Storm. You say you are capable of everything he fears.”

“Tell him I’ll be at the prison tomorrow. Tell him it’s Mr. Storm.”

“Is it a metaphor?”

“Tell him.”

When Storm had found his seat again in the back, the lawyer was still watching him.

Ismail turned away as his client Benét trudged up the stairwell from below them with his hands cuffed before him. He was in fact, and as Storm had believed, William Sands.

Like the previous prisoner, Sands supported himself on the railing of the prisoner’s box as the judge entered and everyone stood up.

Sands still wore the short hair, and the mustache—no longer silly or affected, but long and derelict and grandiose, accentuating his sadness. His cheeks needed a shave. He wore a shabby blue sweater against the chill of central air-conditioning and seemed to be feeling somewhere between sulky and comatose. He was skinny and hollow-eyed and looked like he might even have a soul.