Ghosts of Manila (12 page)

‘You know I told you I was an atheist Jew? Afterwards, I remembered that joke, only it’s not quite a joke. A young Jew bumps into his local rabbi and feels obliged to say “Listen,
Rebbe.
It’s time I made it clear that I’m an atheist.” The rabbi looks him up and down and says in amazement, “You don’t know Torah, then?” “Hardly.” “Not even the Wisdom of the Fathers,
Pirke
Abot
?” “That least of all.” “In that case I have news for you,
boychik
” the rabbi tells him disgustedly. “You’re not an atheist, you’re an ignoramus.”’

‘But you’re not an ignoramus in that sense.’

‘How could I be? My parents are Orthodox. I learned what I was taught and I’m glad I did. You don’t have to
believe
it. Just doing the work changes you. The joke’s correct: you have to earn the right to call yourself an atheist.’

‘I’ll tell the senator.’

‘The joke?’

‘How else do I tell him he’s got to earn the right to call himself a Jew?’

Under strain, these days, as seasonal clouds bottled up the heat or shed warm, unrefreshing rain tasting like perspiration. Ysabella saw the strain in Sharon, began at last to see it in the faces of people doubling up to wedge themselves on and off the ever-crowded jeepneys, in the sidewalk vendors, in the drenched boys tottering beneath smoking blocks of ice, in the fabric of the city itself as its overloaded beams and girders and transoms and bridges juddered continually. England suddenly began heaving itself up behind her conversations and reflections, unaccountably, as if its very irrelevance made it uniquely apposite. After Sharon’s tirade its solid presence for Ysabella, eight thousand miles over the horizon of Manila Bay, thinned uncertainly. It, too, had little which could stand beside a literate nationhood of three thousand years. Its culture was surely too much of a class and not of a people.

Daily she read the newspapers, coming to rely on her regular dose of the baroque. Yet with each turn of the page it was as though she learned, by some insinuating alchemy, the odd news of her own country’s essential frailty. Here, anarchic feudalism had been built to last; there (Quiet shires! Unarmed policemen! House of Windsor!) a papery fragility suddenly hung about things as if at any moment the patient claws of
lex
talionis
might at last unsheathe themselves and rend the scenery from behind. Or again (and she thought of childhood model-making with her cousin Jeremy) a Montgolfier balloon made of tissue paper would triumphantly rise trailing fumes of methylated spirits – Technology! – and turn into a brief ball of flame before descending as flakes of ash. Such an image might pop into her mind on reading something as seemingly unrelated as a newspaper account of two Manila policemen shooting each other – one fatally – in a quarrel over a corpse each had pre-sold to a rival funeral parlour. What on earth was the connection? One more in the list of uneasy mysteries which the city posed its well-heeled visitors from orderly lands.

At 4.15 a.m. in the TriTran bus terminal at Lawton she saw a wooden board nailed to a tree, half concealed by leaves. In letters of runny paint it offered circumcision, virginity restoration, bust/nose lift and a phone number. This is dawn, she said to herself as the bus didn’t start and a man lay curled up on a table beneath the tree. Be stoical. Keep silent about our fate. We have to be careful of not waking whatever sleeps inside us. Sometimes it turns over, muttering of the
emptiness we have embraced. We catch a few words and grow cold, knowing that soon or late and relieved its long hibernation is over, it will awake and embrace us in turn.

I
’
VE BEEN THINKING
,’ said the tinny voice. ‘I think we ought to have a look at these vampires. Have you seen
People’s
this morning? It’s their lead story for the second day running. Why don’t you give it the once-over?’

‘Bong, I’m up to my eyes in salvaging and I’ve just been landed this “Queen of
Shabu
” case. A paper like ours oughtn’t even to
mention
vampires, much less send a reporter.’ Still less your senior crime reporter hot from the Navotas marshes, Vic hoped his tone implied.

‘People’s
sent Narciso.’

‘Of course they did. It’s the perfect Mozzie story. Remember the election?’

‘Well, by God, that sold a lot more newspapers than full-page interviews with what we called “Presidentiables”. Everybody loves a vampire story.’

Vic Agusan did have to concede that when the choice was between reading a political candidate’s forty-third repetition of their one speech and a ghost story, most sane people chose the latter. They certainly had back in March 1992, when in the Election campaign’s last couple of weeks a
manananggal
had been spotted flapping over the rooftops in Tondo. This was a peculiar and terrifying creature, half woman and half bat, which perched in the rafters of houses at night and let down a long tongue into the mouths of babies and the elderly, sucking out their livers. The Tondo
manananggal
had run for several days and totally eclipsed the serious newspapers’ election coverage.
Besides, a half-woman half-bat was a cartoonist’s dream. The upper half appeared most felicitously as that of Miriam Santiago Defensor, a former judge who was even then being tipped by some as the next President. That she didn’t win, and later accused President Ramos of having rigged the election, was neither here nor there. What one remembered was this strange composite creature, superstition melted into political caricature, hovering above the late campaign. It was not overlooked that the Philippines’ Transylvania, the home territory of such horrors, was generally believed to be Iloilo which curiously enough happened also to be the lady’s own province.

‘So send Bobby Aguilar.’

‘Bobby’s on the Padilla case. Anyway, he’s strictly showbiz.’

‘And I’m strictly crime, Bong.’

‘The Queen of Sheba doesn’t sound very criminal.’

‘Shabu,
Bong,
shabu.
“Poor man’s crack”, if you remember. You’re acting like one of those dumb uniforms in American cop soaps whose role is to have everything spelt out to him. He represents the viewer.’

‘I still think it’s got a smell to it.’

Vic Agusan leaned against the wall of the
National
Chronicle
’s lobby and collapsed the antenna of his cellphone. A knot of people stood at the desk waiting for IDs. The doorway behind them was a rectangle of glare. Was this self-importance, or just getting older? Until recently he had revelled in the bizarre juxtapositions of newspaper work. Days were hectically slashed with stories. Grieving relatives/Leaked exam. papers?/Floods trap tots/Binondo’s oldest resident/. For a moment he could imagine what it felt like to be God, privy to simultaneous lives and events unrolling and intersecting in every direction. For one or two instants, in fact, he could glimpse the whole: the connections between virtually any narratives. These brief moments of insight occurred during heavy drinking sessions in whatever was the preferred after-hours watering hole. They were usually thrown as if by a film projector onto the cracked and crusty glaze of a urinal. Pilfering on increase in North Harbor/Man eats cellmate for Xmas dinner/Police vs. Police shootout/. No problem. They simply fused together. He could see exactly how each story was so dependent on the others that it was all really a single story after all. True, in the morning the mechanics of this perception had vanished and he was left with a headache and a vague understanding that each
story was equally typical of this bizarre country. (That, too, was a sign of ageing. Increasingly he was looking at his own land with the eyes of an outsider preparing to board a flight out.) The Xmas dinner story had been a lulu, come to think of it. In the early hours of Christmas morning two guards in a municipal jail out in the provinces somewhere found an inmate sitting on the floor of his cell covered in blood and eating a chunk of raw liver. Next to him was the body of the cell’s other occupant whom he’d attacked and killed as he slept. The weapon, Vic remembered, had been the little tin stand for a mosquito coil. Security in the jail had to be tightened to protect the man from the irate relatives of his
noche
buena
snack.

Something nowadays made Vic impatient with distraction, like a soap addict wrenched from the TV by his doorbell. It really
was
all the same story: that of a country at war with itself where eighty percent of the people were landless labourers, small farmers and workers living below the poverty line, while between eighty and ninety percent of the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were millionaires. Virtually everything else flowed from these simple facts. It was, he considered, nothing less than the world in microcosm, the globe’s huge unrest transcribed as a nation’s instability. Terminal, without a doubt. The notice board in the Crime office upstairs was a mass of thumb-tacked headlines and quotations which curled and wagged like tongues in the fans’ draught. Some were stories he himself had worked on; most had been culled at whim. Here were sundry gems, including the
Daily
Inquirer’s
ambiguous headline about a DILG official’s visit to Cotobato after some rebels there had killed eighteen people in a raid, either reading of which was equally plausible: ‘Alunan urges local execs to help massacre survivors.’

*

‘Official remedy for sexual harassment of OCWs: “Send only uglies abroad”.’

‘Only 1 in 4 Parañaque cops use drugs.’

‘Kindergarten sex slaves. Tots test HIV positive!’

‘“Only a little formalin” in Xmas apples.’

‘“No-one left to kill” claims disgruntled Ranger.’

‘Child workers win mercury from ball-mill effluent.’

‘
3 bn. of Pinatubo relief diverted to ghost projects.’

‘Fake circumcision rites trick farmers into surrender.’

‘Husband made pregnant by wife.’

‘“Please Pray the Rosary” – Mama Mary.’

*

It didn’t much matter to him which story was thrown into his lap. More and more Vic wanted to be left to stick with it, to unravel it past its generally familiar ingredients until something else was revealed. This was usually debt or greed. Yet surprisingly often he believed he found private truths lurking behind the political scandal: a wife’s frigidity, the fear of baldness, a love rejected twenty years ago. True, salvaging didn’t quite fit with this. It was a classic story for Vic Agusan, doyen of crime reporters who had once offered himself as go-between in a hostage deal and had been shot in the thigh for his pains. It didn’t fit because jungle law pre-empted the luxury of private symptoms. He was homing in on Sergeant Cruz. That morning spent lying out in Navotas marshes had produced evidence on film of the man’s direct involvement in dumping murder victims, an activity far enough outside a policeman’s official remit as to be likely to cook Cruz’s goose for him even if there was still no proof that he had also killed them. It was a solid step forward but Vic couldn’t pretend there was any real urgency about the story. Policemen had been killing criminals ever since juries failed to convict, and would go on doing so. Perhaps after all vampires were light relief instead of nettling to the self-esteem.

He sighed and pulled out the antenna again. For all that he worked for a rival paper Mozzy Narciso was generally friendly and helpful. Younger and slightly in awe, might have been an explanation. Yet Mozzy was himself talented. He definitely had the demotic touch. He was an ace on rapists who terrorised squatter areas most of Vic’s readers scarcely knew existed; no less ace on backstreet abortionists, fake priests soliciting funds and haunted jeepneys. Vampires were right up his street. A Naga City elementary school haunted by a dog with horns had been quintessentially a Mozzy story. Mozzy’s drawback – and the real reason why Vic didn’t feel daunted by the threat of his rivalry – was that his aceness extended little further than tracking down exactly the right vox pops. He knew instinctively that victims themselves were often too boring, traumatised or plain ashamed to give a good quote. You went for their mothers, their
lodgers, their children. In case after case of Mozzy’s coverage the quotations shook themselves free of print and stayed in the mind. ‘He had spotty balls.’ ‘It was sad when he left. We’d grown used to the sound of his farts.’ And, of a bogus gynaecologist, ‘Where he operated
was
her purse.’ This was Mozzy’s gift. He moved from story to story tugging out nuggets while scarcely digging at all. He was no doubt giving his readers a terrific hearsay account of vampires hovering, vampires squatting and slurping, blighted neighbours clutching crucifixes. If Vic was going to get involved in the story he was going to ask: But why
there
?
Why
now
?
Cui bono
?
Crime taught one nothing if not that the supernatural was just another make of gun. He pushed buttons and waited until his secretary two floors overhead came on the line.

‘Cindy, I’m still in the lobby. Listen, do we have Narciso’s number in the book? No, not him, he’s our bent Customs man. The
People’s
journalist. Mozart P. Narciso. Okay, then, just remind me of the
People’s
number. I’ll track him down myself.’

Standing there watching the comings and goings of dark figures outlined against the glaring screen of the main door he wondered about the Englishman, Prideaux. Would John be interested in vampires? To be truthful, Vic wasn’t absolutely clear about what kind of research the man was doing. Something about breaking points. For that kind of research he needed to know about the City’s police: their organisation, attitudes, scams and the rest. He had interviewed senators and doctors and priests. Vic had pushed a variety of contacts his way including a personable killer on the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission, an ex-Aquino staffer unsacked for fraud, a senior inspector in the NBI’s Narcotics Division and a Congresswoman of great charm and immeasurable greed. More importantly, Vic had introduced Prideaux to his own wife and family, to friends and colleagues, men and women whose humour was shot through with bleakness. All had agreed that John was a good fellow with an intelligent grasp of this and that, but were none the wiser. ‘Some anthropology thesis’ more or less laid to rest their mildly unsatisfied curiosity. People had their own agendas. Call him up, why not? Vampires were all part of it, too.

It was only now he realised that the reason for the lobby’s shadow-play was another of Manila’s power failures. The chiaroscuro of
flitting denizens outlined against the daylight had suited his mood. The lethargy which left him slumped by the water cooler with a portable phone was probably caused by the air conditioners shutting down. He pulled himself together, tilting the instrument’s keys to the light.

‘Vic
Agusan
? Wow. Tell you the truth, I wasn’t thinking of going back there. So what’s the connection? What’s the connection?’

‘Mozzy, old thing, relax. I promise you, I know zilch.
I’m
ringing
you
for information. If there’s a criminal link here it’s not one known to me or to anybody else in this building. Just Bong, with some idea that I need light relief. Vampires are it. I promise you I’m not muscling in. If ever there was copyrighted Mozzy Narciso territory, it’s vampires. Everyone knows that. What can you give me?’

‘Hysteria, frankly, not a lot more. They’re over in San Clemente. Do you know where that is?’

‘Vaguely,’ Vic said guardedly. That was Cruz’s patch, oddly enough. If Mozzy found out he was already on a story involving the police in that area he’d jump to conclusions. ‘Sort of up by North Cemetery somewhere?’

‘That’s it. Just about where you’d expect vampires to hang out, come to think of it. Do you know, that hadn’t occurred to me? Thanks for the tip.’

‘Pleasure, Mozzy. Is there anything else you can tell me which you didn’t know?’

‘Not really. It’s pretty much the usual thing. Couple of local drunks sitting up late at night see this figure hovering over the barrio. After a bit it sits on a roof. The only difference is this one leers and has huge fangs.
Ningas
kugon.
A grass fire, a nothing story. I went back yesterday to do a follow-up and just got the usual collection of babies that won’t wake and dogs giving birth to litters of cockroaches and Bibles that glow in the dark. You know. Nobody’s actually
seen
anything. My guess is it’s all a plot dreamed up by some local wag who’s got it in for these two stumblebums. Squatter humour. Nothing to ping off the walls about unless it goes on happening. I bet most of these things start as a joke.’

‘Did the creature look like Brenda?’

‘According to my drunken informant’s original description it had a face like that of his own wife, whom I met afterwards. I don’t know whether he knows that, but he was pretty close. Anyway, today I’m on
a totally different story. At last we’ve got a lead on the Little League cheating case. Remember that? Our team won the world title last year in Pennsylvania before being stripped of it for cheating? Right… That’s the one. We’ve just found a woman who admits her boy, who was fourteen then, took on the identity and academic records of some twelve-year-old so as to be eligible for the age limit. It’s a break, Vic. Once her story comes out we’re betting the other mothers’ll come forward. Imagine, a whole goddam national team of ghost kids.
Little
League
baseball!
Is nothing sacred? Okay, I can’t believe it’s worth our best crime reporter’s time to go vampire-hunting in San Clemente, but if you want my drunken guy’s name you can have it with pleasure, Vic. Full marks to you if you can dig anything out of it other than the visions of a boozy squatter. What is it drunks see in America? Isn’t it pink elephants? Our equivalent is vampires. I suppose it’s all those centuries of Catholicism. Ha, yes, poor old Brenda. Do you think she’ll ever get her recount?’