Ghosts of Manila (29 page)

And it was all he would say on the subject, leaving Prideaux to wonder for long afterwards whether by a brilliant sleight some ignorant gathering had wound up tucking into roast colonel, down there in the dark jungles of Mindanao. When it was clear Melchior had lost interest in the topic he asked: ‘What happened to them? Your buddies? The unit?’

‘Ah.’ A long sigh. ‘Broken up. Gone. Dispersed. Some dead, some re-assigned, some plain vanished. Back to their families, AWOL, unemployed. I tried to keep in touch with a couple but then this –’ the stump of his right hand made a blunt gesture which might have been referring to itself or the body it was attached to. ‘Know what? I found it doesn’t really matter. They’re still there inside,
sa
loob,
where the debt is. It’ll be the same for all of us. Somewhere all the old teams are still together. You think this is crap? Sentimentality?’ This time the
Captain’s right hand went up behind the Book of Job where it sketched a limp circling motion in air. ‘Before I die they’ll be here. Converge On Me. They’ll come.’

For the first time in this recital the literal had failed. The ruined man and his discourse fell out of the suspended noonday heat into somewhere more shadowed. Prideaux recognised the moment; it occasionally happened during interviews for documentaries. Just when you’d convinced yourself that the whole of life was nothing but hearsay, wandering narratives of what happened to whom, you discovered that a complete dream was walking about inside. Did they know it was there? he always wondered. Beneath what they thought was a plain account of events another text showed through in an entirely different register. It was like suddenly recognising that lines of vernacular hid a poem.

‘They may come. But will they recognise you?’

This time the smile stayed a little. ‘Well, good for you, John Something. You’re older than me, I was forgetting. Yeah, perhaps they won’t.’

‘Did you ever think of killing yourself?’ Prideaux was astounded by his own ruthlessness. It was an art he thought he’d forgotten.

‘Sure I did. Tried it. Didn’t work.’ Once again he held up the maimed club of hand. ‘That’s like asking why I didn’t go amok. I’ve known several amoks. The military’s a good place to see them, what with all that stress and weaponry and all. I watched them very carefully, how they’d go quiet before. It’s a special way of going quiet, not like a guy who just wants to be let alone because he’s got one of those letters from his chick. More broody, heavy, like he was hearing all his life come clumping down the stairs. Then suddenly he gets this look, his hair starts to come up and he goes for a gun, knife, whatever’s handy. But he’s not setting out to kill people, that’s the point. Not like some crazy bastard planning a series of murders in cold blood. The amok’s enemies are all inside. All he knows is it’s his last chance to go in there and rescue his soul. It’s been tortured and squeezed every which way and it’s the only thing left on earth which is his, and he’s gotta hack it
free.
He’s running inwards, right? That’s why he doesn’t see the guys he’s chopping and shooting, his own friends, his buddies even. They’re not real. They’re just part of the dream. Only the soul is real.’ He paused. ‘Do you believe that?’

‘About the soul?’

‘Only the soul is real. That’s why I don’t kill myself. Like going amok with myself as victim? This –’ his left hand pointed the Coke bottle’s empty muzzle from swollen legs to upper chest, leaving a dark line of spots on the filthy fatigues, ‘this is a dream. We’re religious people, us Filipinos, know that? Don’t let anyone tell you different. You shouldn’t take your own life. You should find a way of walking out on it, carrying your soul. To die not in possession of your own soul is the worst damn thing there is.’

‘La
vida
es
sueño?
Life is a dream?’

‘Castilian, right?’

‘Title of a play. In one place it says “Now I’m asleep I can see that when I’m awake I’m dreaming”.’

‘Yeah? That’s good. That’s it. You look at people in the street, people everywhere, any of us. Know what? We’re all out on patrol. The whole world’s out on patrol. We’ve been given this mission, right? Target briefing. One: Get to the end of life richer than you started. Two: Have a good time along the way. Three: Breed up a family to carry it all on. Everything we do to carry out our orders is okay, sensible, rational, sane, purposeful, whatever. Then flick-flick, you’re cursing a stranger for driving funny, shouting at the wife, hitting the kids, kicking the pooch. Flick-flick we wake up and find we’re hunkered down around a camp fire eating some sorry bastard. People commit murder all the time but they don’t know it. Specially those crazy politicians. Just that their victims are a long way away. Look at San Clemente. Look at this country. Look at the world. Is this a sane way to run things? That’s how it is. Nothing people do is strange. Flick-flick.’

Far from having wearied himself with talking Captain Melchior now seemed more animated, if a little hectic about the eyes. A lizard croaked and rattled nearby and then fell silent, leaving a hush in which the faint hiss of intense sunlight on stone was clearly audible. Far away behind it lay directionless urban sound like a steady ocean gnawing at a coastline.

‘Know what a gook is?’ the Captain asked unexpectedly.

‘Well, in Vietnam –’ Prideaux began.

‘Fuck Vietnam. Forget Vietnam. The original gooks were us Filipinos. It was what the Americans called our nationalist guerrillas
who fought them for independence at the end of last century. They say it comes from Bicolano or something,
gugurang
or
gugu.
I don’t speak the damn language. What it means is a kind of spirit. You know, like you have a guardian angel? This is a guardian demon. Hell, John Something, you’re in a land of spirits, didn’t you know? Every last snot-nosed kid of us. You expect spirits to behave like everyone else? Like the British, maybe? Forget it. Never happen.’

Certainly the diseased Captain refused Prideaux’s offers of further refreshment, food, clothing, money and medicine with all the detachment of a spirit. He seemed happy to lie on his tombstone and talk. He spoke of the time he’d first met the cemetery police when they passed on patrol, stumbling through the weeds with a weak flashlight, all four of them ‘bunched together like schoolgirls’. He was lying up in one of the disused niches in the wall, a long cool pigeonhole, and gave a stage groan, followed by ghoulish laughter which pursued their panicky retreat. He’d gone and found them huddled in the church, their card game abandoned. He managed to convince them he wasn’t a ghost, that the apparently un-Filipino habit of sleeping in a graveyard was explained by having been a Ranger in Mindanao. After that, there was nothing left to be scared of.

‘What’s going on in San Clemente?’ Prideaux asked as he was about to leave. It was early afternoon and Melchior suddenly wanted to sleep. He himself was dazed with words and the stench of pear pollen. ‘Vampires and stuff?’

‘You don’t believe that kidshit? It’s a Chinese offensive.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

But the Captain slithered flippantly away. ‘You did this morning. Couldn’t stop yourself. It’s the stories.’ He sounded content and once again sketched his melancholy gesture in the air summoning ghosts, buddies, Chinese policemen, British anthropologists or anyone else who would listen. ‘Gets ’em every time.’

T
HE INSTANT
they carried Eddie’s body in at five-thirty one morning Nanang Pipa experienced the effect that a sudden lightning flash has on a nightbound traveller. It was a shock too quick for detail but it left her with the general revelation of a large and menacing landscape stretching to all horizons in which her own figure was tiny and without the slightest significance. They laid him on the table and she lit a candle with shaking hands and had somebody go and fetch Fr. Bernabe. It was so brutal and unexpected that at first she was beyond emotion and could only stand, stroking his forehead and saying, ‘Oh Eddie. My poor Eddie. What have they done to you?’ where ‘they’ meant nothing more than life itself personified by its faceless agents who were never in short supply. Whatever they had done had left his face caked with blood around the mouth and with all his front teeth knocked out. He had been found up the hill, just inside the wall by the shanties as if tossed over already dead like a piece of refuse, falling in an attitude no natural death could assume. While her eldest daughter Gaylin and the youngest Jinky hurriedly rolled up their sleeping mats on the floor she fetched a bowl of water and sponged Eddie’s face clean, dried it and laid a crucifix on his chest. He suddenly looked shrunken and depleted as if what had filled him in life had been the largesse of his gestures, the weight of his passion, the force of his laughter. Only when she realised that never as long as she lived would she hear that laugh again did Pipa begin her weeping, a desolate crying that penetrated the nearby shanties’ slat walls.

The family rallied around. Fr. Bernabe arrived still sleepy and they held a vigil around the body for an hour or so before the first neighbours came to pay their respects. Most of the members of the sewing cooperative came, as of course did all the old friends: Bats, Judge, Billy and Petring. From all over San Clemente they came, many in tears, to see the body. The barangay captain, Monching Jandusay, arrived smelling of yesterday’s drink and urine. With that divorced observation which often strikes people who ought to be otherwise preoccupied Nanang Pipa noticed that in the morning light his skin was papery and translucent, as if the more he poured gin into his body the more he was turning into a mere container, a fragile and unsteady kind of bottle. Still, what mattered was that he had come and been seen to come, as duty and etiquette required. Yet although this was all proper and consoling, it was as if Pipa were still waiting for someone secure and fatherly into whose hands she could yield the whole sorry mess. And at nine o’clock Rio Dingca appeared in the doorway smelling of Dial soap, having been alerted on arrival by PO1 Benhur Daldal who had deserted his post by the priceless pit outside in order to leave the message at Station 14. After the body had been taken away for the cause of death to be ascertained Pipa tearfully confided to Dingca that Eddie had made a confession only yesterday.

‘It was all his own idea,’ she said. ‘The vampire. That’s what he told me. I’m so ashamed.’

‘But he was drunk all the same?’

‘Oh, he was drunk all right. He really did think he’d seen something, too, except it was probably the moon or a cloud, you know. But he said he’d had it at the back of his mind to invent a story which would frighten people off investigating our hole too closely. He’d already found the skull, you see, and those bits of china, and we’d decided to keep it a secret. Then Ming Piedragoso told us about the spirit guardians Chinese pirates used to put over hidden treasure and Eddie said that gave him the idea. But it backfired, like so many of his brilliant ideas, and now he’s
dead,
’ she ended in disbelief that something as trivial as one of Eddie’s stories, no more substantial than a fume of gin, could have had such a lethal outcome.

Rio Dingca took her hand. ‘That didn’t kill him,’ he told her. ‘We don’t know what did, yet, but it wasn’t that.’ For it was as if the news of Eddie’s death had made Dingca privy also to Nanang Pipa’s
lightning flash, leaving him with a cop’s conviction that a complicated hinterland lay beyond these rickety houses, a hinterland in which powerful forces were moving with cold deliberation under cover of darkness. ‘Where did he go last night? When did you last see him?’

‘I don’t know. He was around for supper and went off at about eight or nine. I don’t know where or with whom. Out with his
barkadas
as usual, I thought. You’d better ask Bats and Judge and that lot.’

‘Was he drunk?’

‘No. Not at supper, anyway. Actually, he said after that day you were here with those newspaper people he wasn’t ever going to drink again.’ Her eyes filled at the thought of his good intentions and their unexpected fulfilment.

‘Anything odd or strange you’ve noticed recently?’ It was a dumb policeman’s question ineptly put and as soon as it flew out of his mouth Dingca wished he could retrieve it, cancel it, try another tack.

‘Odd? Strange?’ She looked straight at him with brimming eyes.
‘
Diosko.
Everything’s a disaster, Rio. Don’t you see he was right? He said it was all my fault. If I hadn’t made him dig that hole none of this would ever have happened. From the moment I opened my stupid mouth it all began going wrong. Oh, if only I could go back –’ and she wept again in earnest for a while, finally shuddering and dabbing at her eyes. ‘Strange?’ she said at last with a deep sigh. ‘Have you ever taken out a St. Jude?’

‘A novena? No, can’t say I have.’

‘I did some months ago. I asked for several things including that Eddie would get out of jail and he did. It was you who got him out.’

‘I didn’t know you’d made a special novena, though.’

‘I never told anyone except my friend Doding Perez. She said St. Jude was the best and she was right. But there was one thing I didn’t ask for. Someone I know stole one of our edging machines. Brand new, it was. Just walked off with it and disappeared. I tried asking Mama Mary but that didn’t work and I thought no, it’s too mercenary to ask St. Jude to bring a sewing machine back, and I saved my special requests for Eddie and Gaylin and Boyong. Here’s the strange part, though. A week ago this woman turns up again, bold as brass, says she’s sorry she took the machine but it was a family crisis, she just had to have the money, the usual. Lots of tears and begging my forgiveness. “Oh yes?” I says. “Brought it back, then, have you?” I mean, she’d
been gone months. Well, no, she hadn’t brought it back but she wanted me to have
350 which was all she could afford right now. “Three hundred and fifty?” I says. “Have you any idea how much that machine cost?” “I ought to,” she says, “I’m a member of the cooperative that bought it.” “Not now, you’re not,” I told her. “Passed unanimously, don’t you worry. It’s there in the minutes,
nem.
con
.” So she starts crying again and I tell her to get out and take her money with her.
“Walang
hiya
talaga,”
I told her. Shameless bitch. You’d think she wouldn’t have the nerve to come back to a place like this where everybody knows her, wouldn’t you? But she’s around, all right. The strange thing I wanted to tell you is that it’s her been going about this last week spreading rumours about dogs giving birth to cockroaches and how there’s a curse on San Clemente and that the dead I’ve disturbed are going to rise and take a terrible revenge on us all. She’s got a lot of people scared, too. Some are even talking of moving out, apparently. She tells them the end has started and right now,’ Nanang Pipa said bleakly, ‘I’m beginning to wonder myself.’

‘You never told me about this theft,’ said Dingca.

‘You’re right, I never did,’ agreed Pipa, and in her answer could be read an entire history of the relationship between squatters and police irrespective of trusted individuals.

‘But you’re going to tell me now who she is,’ he said persuasively. ‘Somewhere there’s a connection, Pipa. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do.’

‘What, you mean she…
she
killed Eddie?’

‘No, no, no, not that direct a connection. But she’s part of it.’

Nanang Pipa only shook her head and squeezed her handkerchief tighter. ‘I start shopping people to the police and I’m done for in San Clemente,’ she said simply. ‘I’m probably done for anyway. It was our hole. They’ll probably force us out for bringing ruin. It won’t be enough that my husband’s dead, it’ll just be proof of how evil I am.’ Tears ran down her cheeks.

‘Listen, Pipa, I’m not just the police, I’m someone you’ve known for two years. We’re friends. At least I hope we are because you’re shortly going to need all the friends you can get. Have you any idea what’s going to happen when the newspapers get hold of poor Eddie’s death? They’ll be back here before the morning’s out. Plus we’ve now got a real live senator taking a personal interest in your comfort room that
was. Listen,’ he said earnestly, reaching forward and taking her hand again, ‘if it turns out Eddie was murdered, and it certainly looks that way, you’re going to be involved with the police whether you like it or not. I can pull enough strings to make sure I get assigned the case but I can’t do a thing unless you help me. There’s something going on here that’s much bigger than a hole in the ground with seven-hundred-year-old bones at the bottom, and I’m going to dig it out. Trust me, Pipa. Who is she?’

‘Ligaya Rosales,’ came the small reply at length. Looking up at the way he repeated the name she saw him staring with a faraway expression at the tapestry of the dogs playing cards. She’d never liked that thing, she realised irrelevantly. Eddie had arrived home with it one day saying it had fallen off a stall in Divisoria. True, it covered the stencils which betrayed the plywood behind it as having come from dismantled tea chests, but still she’d never liked it. Everyone said it was cute, but bulldogs in eyeshades didn’t look cute to her. Oh Eddie, she thought, her eyes filling once more, what
was
it all for? All of it? She tried to imagine him now, sitting for ever in glory, happy that it was over, happy to be happy. Could he see her now? she wondered. Fr. Bernabe had said that he could, but she wasn’t sure.

‘That name, Rosales, I know it. Yes, got it. By God, Pipa, I think that’s it.’

‘What?’ she asked again, but he wouldn’t say.

He’d been right about the newspapers coming back, which the same old tabloids did well before lunch. And when the terrible news leaked out about the cause of Eddie’s death they all came, worse than ghouls themselves, to ask her what it felt like to be the wife of a man who’d been well and truly vampirised. For according to Rio Dingca when they’d opened the body at the autopsy they’d found precisely nothing. Nothing whatever. Eddie’s entire internal organs were missing from tongue to rectum. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.

‘How…?’ she had begun, faltering. ‘Who…?’

‘I don’t know, but I shall,’ Dingca had promised her, and added a merciful fiction of his own. ‘The surgeon said death was instantaneous. He couldn’t have suffered.’

‘Oh my God, how can he know?’

‘Haemorrhage patterns,’ Dingca improvised sagely. ‘There’s not so much blood lost if the heart stops at once.’ Eddie’s heart, of course,
had vanished entirely. The truth was, Rio wanted to believe it as much as he wanted her to believe it, as much as he himself had once chosen to believe the surgeon who said Babs was dead before his body was mutilated. In fact Edsel Tugos’s remains had been exhaustively autopsied and photographed while his case was being written up for the annals. From the direction of the tears and ruptures in the remaining tatters of his diaphragm, taken in conjunction with the severe damage to the oral cavity, the experts determined he had been put to death in an entirely novel way. Some sort of high power vacuum pump, such as might normally be used for aspirating sewage out of a blocked drain, had been employed to suck the innards from his body. It had been done with disgusting cold science as well as with the brute force needed to ram an overlarge metal nozzle into his mouth hard enough to have dislocated the jaw.

Nanang Pipa valiantly contrived to block out these details even though they were soon retailed in large print by all the tabloids. Meanwhile something like a genuine hysteria was beginning to build up in the barrio.
People
said…
People said no human agent could have done such a thing. Who’d ever heard of an entire body being sucked hollow before? People said it was unquestionably a
manananggal.
They said poor Eddie hadn’t been seeing things after all. They said they’d heard of cases like this before in Iloilo, in Bohol, in Camarines, in Negros… People said it was a demon the Chinese had placed to stand guard over the dead in their cemetery, come to take revenge on Eddie and anyone else in San Clemente who’d messed with the tombs and stolen water and electricity. People said Eddie’s accomplices, especially Bats and Judge, would be the next to go. And indeed Bats and Judge were nowadays seldom seen outside their houses where they were holed up, white-faced and clinking with crucifixes. People said.

And the more people said, the more Nanang Pipa managed somehow to keep a clear head, asking them where they’d first heard it. In a few days her suspicions were confirmed and she had passed them on to Rio Dingca. The grossest rumours, the direst predictions eagerly taken up by the tabloid reporters had come from Ligaya Rosales. Dingca kept missing this woman whom he was now very anxious to interview and suspected she was lying low somewhere outside the barrio. Then one day he and Benhur Daldal caught her in a
sari-sari 
store down by the Kapilang, thanks to an informer. He recognised her at once, arrested her on the spot, took her down to Station 14 handcuffed to the grab handle of his jeep, booked her and threw her into a cell. Later, he went back up and told Nanang Pipa that Ligaya was already wanted for jumping a
5,000 bail some months back while awaiting trial for trying to abduct a child in Harrison Plaza.