Authors: James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Men like telling them.’
Captain Melchior focused a brief glare on Prideaux seated on an adjacent grave. Then he uncapped the Coke and took another pull at it. Tawny suds bustled behind the glass. ‘Do you enjoy going to confession?’ he asked with another belch.
‘I don’t go.’
‘Your funeral. But if you did you wouldn’t enjoy it. You’re not meant to. When I talk about my life in the Rangers it’s confession, gotta be said before it’s too late. Not what I did, except a few things, but what we saw, what we knew, how things are. We’re weird creatures, know that? Truly weird. One moment dead normal, the next completely out of our gourds. Then back again. Flick-flick. Over and over.’
‘Ah. You’re going to tell me the story of the good doctor. He’s the rock-solid family man who leaves his suburban home at eight every morning, drives to a clinic behind high walls, changes out of his suit, puts on a long white rubber apron and spends the day skilfully eliciting just the right quality of scream for the men with the tape recorder.
There’s a sound system in this surgery of his which plays Mozart continuously. The good doctor hums along, occasionally stopping what he’s doing to point out the beauty of a particular passage and asking the patient’s own opinion. Then back to work. At five o’clock the surgery is sluiced down, the good doctor showers, changes back into his suit and drives home in his unassuming little car. He greets the family, helps the kids with their homework, walks the dog, watches a bit of TV and so to bed. I’ve heard that story, Captain, don’t worry. We’ve been telling it in Europe for most of this century.’
‘Sure you have. I didn’t exactly mean that. Now your guy, your doctor, he’s pretty much split clean down the middle. Day and night, on duty and off duty, black and white. Compartments, right? I’m talking about the whole time, flick-flick, never one thing or the other. Know anything about electricity? Like AC current, always changing direction. But it happens so fast the light looks steady to us. Normal. Whatever we do kind of smooths out so we think it all hangs together. If you ever stopped, though, bang, right there in the middle of something and looked again you wouldn’t hardly believe what you were doing. Me? I’m just sitting here round the fire eating with my good buddies.
Tsibog-tsibog,
chow down. I’m a
what
?
I’m a
cannibal
? Don’t give me that shit, man. Cannibals are African, right? Big-game hunters tied up in an iron pot, guys in grass skirts dancing around waving spears. Hell, this ain’t but ordinary Moslem stew.’
‘Moslem stew.’
‘Right, right. Not the whole kit, usually. Just bits. Specially ears. You mix ’em in with pork and whatever else. It’s the insult. Pork and Islam don’t mix, right? They do in Mindanao, though. Point is, it’s no grand occasion. Nobody giggles and whispers. Into the pot they go with the chopped onions. Know why?’
‘Comradeship.’
For the first time Melchior looked up at Prideaux with something like serious consideration. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘Epoxy. Sticks us together so’s nothing can get us apart. Nothing. All for one, one for all, like the fella said.’
‘The
Three
Musketeers.’
‘Right. Great movie. You ever had that? The buddy system where you’d do anything, and I mean anything, for the guys you’re with because you know they’d do the same for you?’
‘I can imagine it,’ Prideaux said cautiously. ‘I’ve always been able to imagine it.’ He could feel himself physically skirt a pit of longing.
‘Ah, man, this isn’t imagination. You’re out there in the boonies with those guys, I mean sleeping rough, eating rough, that’s one hundred percent enemy terrain. Punji stakes smeared with shit, ambush, all that. You never know when. Bad enough dealing with the raggies and the locals betraying your ass but you’ve got your own side to watch out for, too. You’ve got commanding officers selling off your equipment to the black market and cutting themselves illegal logging deals in the areas you’ve bust your balls to win. You’ve got air-support snafus because the fly-boys are all grounded suddenly. Shortage of fuel. Turns out it’s been sold, to hell and gone in unmarked drums. And you’ve got the pols. New initiatives, light at the end of the tunnel, hearts and minds. Suddenly you discover you’re no longer in the Philippines, you’re stranded in some chunk of territory they’ve signed away behind your back called ARMM. Autonomous Region of Moslem Mindanao. Jesus Christ, what’s this shit? Retreat! Retreat! And watch your ass before some raggie sticks a Kalashnikov up it and our President tells him no sweat, pull the trigger, that Ranger’s got no business in your homeland. So yeah, in those circumstances the world kinda shrinks down to you and your buddies.’
‘And Moslem stew.’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s like cops and salvage, isn’t it? There’s Us and there’s Them.’
Captain Melchior was not paying attention. ‘Sometimes you get a laugh out of it, though. A while back we had these journalists down, choppered in, coupla guys from Manila and a coupla foreign correspondents. Italians? French? Can’t remember. They wanted the whole thing, burnt villages, atrocities, you name it. What they got was hearts and minds from the brass and not much action, just a lot of bumping along lousy trails in jeeps. We could see they were disappointed. What were they going to tell the folks back home? We tried to say it wasn’t all settled, not by a long way, they’d just hit a flat spot. What the hell, it wasn’t a stage show they’d paid to see, some nonstop performance they could drop in on when they fancied and quit when they got bored. So we gave them an evening of jungle living. We made arrangements and served up this ace dinner, not just ears but an entire guy. Butcher it Chinese-style and you can’t tell. We had
ourselves a real cook-out, villagers, sing-song, the works. The journalists loved it. Wild deer and
baboy
damu,
boar we’d shot on patrol, we said. How do you like it? Swell, great. Next morning they all choppered out again. No-one ever told them. To this day they don’t know they ate an MNLF rebel. Laugh? We couldn’t stop for days.’
‘And that wasn’t cannibalism?’
‘Hell no. Like I said, that’s what Africans do. You’re a cannibal if you don’t know any better. This was eating a man. You eat a man when you’ve got good reason. Remember Manero? Don’t tell me he wasn’t making a point, even if the guy was a missionary.’
It was in connection with this celebrated case not long after Prideaux’s arrival that someone had coined the phrase about the notorious porosity of Muntinlupa State Penitentiary. Norberto Manero had been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing an Italian priest, Tullio Favali, in April 1985. Immediately after committing the crime he was witnessed by passers-by laughing uproariously with his fellow-assassins before scooping out the missionary’s brains and eating them raw in handfuls. This had made a national impression. It emerged that he had accused the priest of being a communist sympathiser, but in the Cotabato region of Mindanao where he came from it meant he considered Favali had sided with the Moslem Moros. Manero himself was a Christian who had long been engaged in local militia activities against Islamic radicals who wanted independence. Back in the Sixties he had been a member of a dreaded vigilante group called the Ilaga whose vicious skirmishing with the Moslem Blackshirts had directly led to the Moro secessionist war which was declared in earnest in 1973 and still rumbled on. Manero was also an active member of a Christian cult called Tadtad, whose name meant something like ‘The Choppers’, which specialised in hacking their victims with bolos and quickly eating their entrails in front of their eyes before they could die as an act of ultimate dishonouring. One way and another he was better behind bars. After serving a mere two years in Muntinlupa Manero was transferred without proper authorisation back down to Mindanao, to a small penal colony in Davao from which, averaged out, there had been a jailbreak every thirty-eight hours over the last five years. In his turn Manero duly absented himself, a fact which only came to official notice when he was seen standing a few feet from President Ramos himself at a welcome rally in
Cotabato City. The ensuing outcry provoked reluctant enquiries which exposed an entire chain of complicities and negligence. Police and military involvement in Manero’s escape was assumed from the start, and was scarcely at odds with the discovery that in the months before being recaptured he had been working in Central Mindanao as a police ‘asset’ while being groomed by the military to hunt down the elusive Pimpernel himself, Commander Mubarak, the man with the foetal talisman. Manero had recently been returned, laden with irons and smiling broadly, to Muntinlupa where he was placed under a 24-hour armed guard, less to prevent his re-escaping than to protect him from the senior PNP and military officials he might decide to bear witness against should they ever come to trial for having facilitated his lengthy holiday from jail. This last part of the Manero story was where everybody felt they’d come in. It was the warm, slithery handfuls of brains they remembered.
‘You said you fragged your CO?’ Prideaux prompted.
There was a pause. Captain Melchior was draining the last of the Coke. He shuddered. ‘My taste’s all screwed up, you know. This stuff’s sweet, right? But just recently it’s been getting bitter. It’s not the Coke, it’s the disease, the nervous system. I smell disgusting smells that aren’t there. Herrera comes up, hears my confession, says it isn’t nerves, it’s conscience. Makes everything bitter and foul. He’s just the sort of guy to have around when you’re dying. Be right back.’
He swung himself off the tombstone with slow-motion urgency and moved like a scarecrow behind the wall which hid the improbable savannah. Faint sounds of retching reached Prideaux. It was getting on for noon. The sunlight beyond the shade in which he sat was a drench of energy so rich that things no longer looked as clear as they had, blurred by thermals and his own wincing retinas. When he returned, Melchior was moving more easily. He was carrying a green rag which, as he folded and bunched it to cover the Book of Job, was revealed as a military T-shirt. ‘Damn marble,’ he said as he stretched out and gingerly lowered his puffy head.
‘You don’t mind talking?’
‘Got nothing else to do. You reckon I’m the sort of person does things he doesn’t want? Where was I? Yeah. Colonel Half. Colonel Saturnino Calajate. And I never said I fragged him. I said I arranged for him to die. Doesn’t matter how. What matters is why. He was the one
had the logging deal going. Once for forty-eight hours we couldn’t stop rebels consolidating an area we weren’t defending because our vehicles couldn’t get out on patrol. The whole base was out of gas. How come, since we remembered seeing the Petron truck come in from Cotabato City? The SAO had signed for it and certified it only contained 500 litres. That took care of the Colonel’s jeeps okay. The truck turned around and went off and sold the rest of the 30,000 litres cut price to a private gas station. After the driver had got his percentage the Colonel and the Supply Accounting Officer split the rest. Took us some time to work it out but before we lowered his flag for him the Colonel confirmed it. Cost us eleven men to re-take that territory. That kinda thing pisses you off.
‘But it wasn’t that. He acted improperly towards our dead, and let me tell you no-one,
no-one
messes with any man of mine killed in action. We do it by the book, down to the last comma and period. SOP – and this is the Army minimum – specifies that everyone gets a standard coffin and a fifteen day embalming, right? The body’s properly washed, completely dipped in formalin, and the veinous system’s infiltrated with formalin. Then you open it up and remove the guts, because that’s your prime source of decomposition. You pack it with offcuts of sewing material and
bunot.
You know
bunot
?’
‘No.’
‘Coconut fibre. The husk, right? But very refined and combed out till it’s fluffy like brown wool. Okay. That two weeks gives time for the deceased’s relatives to get to the funeral, do the whole thing with decorum. Now, if the relatives are abroad, in the States, wherever, they get a thirty day embalming. Automatic. It’s right there in the regulations. That’s a more thorough job, more soaking in formalin plus the main veins and arteries are stripped out. You better believe all this costs: refrigeration, mortician’s fees, enbalming fluid. The Colonel couldn’t figure a way to work a scam, not with me standing there over my men making sure it all went by the book, so he’d say “Get him into the ground, Captain, that’s an order. That guy’s a GI sheet job. This is a fighting unit. We’ve got a war on. There isn’t time to putz around. We’ll tell his relatives, sorry, we had to get him into the ground.” Shit.’
Looking up at Melchior’s change of tone Prideaux saw he was wiping bright blood from his upper lip.
‘Nosebleed again,’ said the Captain, holding the T-shirt to his face. ‘Happens all the time these days. Don’t know why. It’s all packing up.’
‘Shall I get you some ice?’
‘I could handle another Coke.’
This time the boy was eating a plate of rice, the kitten on the plastic tablecloth beside him chewing fishbones with its head on one side. He must have had other customers in the interim since he now had some change and the second bottle cost Prideaux rather less than the first. His teeth were as white as the cat’s.
‘You won’t see this story I’m telling you,’ the Captain said when he’d drunk. He dabbed gently at his crusted nose. ‘If you’ve never been in the army you won’t understand. That guy on the table having his intestines taken out’s your buddy. There’s just nobody in the world, I don’t care if it’s the President himself, comes telling you What the hell, it’s too much trouble, get him into the ground. Sure, sometimes you have to. If you can’t retrieve a KIA for a couple of days decomposition’s well set in and there’s nothing to do. Embalming’s useless. The blood’s clotted so you can’t pump the formalin through the veins. The whole system’s solid. You can push it in, but it all seeps back out again and the coffin drips. You gotta seal ’em in GI sheet and that’s it. Yeah.’ The bottle tilted once more. ‘Colonel Saturnino Calajate. Colonel Half.’ A smile crossed his face which seemed so ridiculously small, as if the tumours were slowly squeezing his features together at the centre. ‘Nobody ever stood around
his
coffin, that’s for sure.’