Ghosts of Manila (8 page)

They climbed out once more and reconnoitred. From the front the place looked pretty much as the builders must recently have left it. Round the back it presented a different aspect. Several of the iron railings were missing. The white walls were covered in graffiti. From here the land sloped sharply down to the perimeter wall thirty feet away. Above this, as well as through a narrow gap, the tin roofs and hunched lean-to architecture of San Clemente were visible. In the middle of a pool of mud studded with ad hoc stepping stones (concrete blocks wrenched from the wall, the curved spine of a palm frond, a wooden plank) and littered with empty shampoo sachets, a rusty gooseneck of piping emerged. From it water dribbled and fed the surrounding swamp.

‘Now I see what she’s complaining about,’ said Dingca. A child with a plastic bucket appeared in the gap in the wall, took a nonchalant step into the cemetery, caught sight of the two men and froze. ‘Come here, boy,’ called Dingca. The child fled, bucket banging hollowly, ‘I wonder how long this has been going on?’

‘Probably you only need to read the Tans’ water meter to get a pretty good idea,’ said Daldal shrewdly.

‘If you’re not careful you’ll turn into a detective instead of a policeman.’ Dingca squeezed in through the broken ironwork and inched along the gap between it and the mausoleum’s wall. ‘But if you look a bit closer you’ll see they aren’t paying. The water company is.’ A pipe emerged from the ground, turned at right angles, passed
through a meter and entered the white wall. It was still possible to see where the trench had been cut, leading diagonally back towards the barrio and the illegal standpipe.

‘Neat job, huh?’

‘No,’ said Dingca, ‘a lash-up. See how the ground here’s soggy, just beneath the meter? They cut into it one night, put in a T, couldn’t borrow a proper pipe threader and wrench so just bound the joint with rubber. It’s leaking steadily. More to the point, having done that and filled in the trench, why didn’t they go the whole hog and run the pipe right down into San Clemente instead of stopping halfway?’

‘Lack of pipe,’ hazarded the rookie.

‘More than likely. I wonder if that damp’s getting inside? We’ll have to induce Madam Tan to open up before we can make a full and proper report on damage. I’d be curious to see inside a place like this, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not really,’ confessed Benhur. ‘I don’t mind morgues but I’m not too good in cemeteries. They say the Chinese dead have special spirit guards to protect them. Not like ours.’

Dingca had also heard this, otherwise he would have rejected it as a superstitious invention. ‘Well anyway,’ he said, ‘we’ve got what we need. Damage to water main; damage to railings; damage to rear wall, to wit, graffiti. Gang stuff mostly, it looks like. Let’s see. Oh, this’ll do.’ He took out a ballpoint and copied down one of the evidential phrases.
“Wake up, Cory! The Chinese dead have roofs over their heads, your people have none!”
The revolutionary lost command of San Clemente, no doubt. Come on.’

All that had been eight months ago. Within a week or two the railings had been repaired, the graffiti painted out, the MWSS had grubbed up the illegal spur. The Tans had increased their contribution to the cemetery police and arranged for one of them to be beaten up in order to encourage his comrades. The officers now made nightly visits to the tomb before settling down to their
pusoy,
reading horror comics and otherwise waiting for serious grave-robbers to strike. Lettie Tan had never allowed Rio Dingca inside to inspect for damage.

A week after her arrest the woman who had tried to abduct the child in Harrison Plaza had sworn she was unconnected to any kidnapping ring, had merely been ‘freelancing’ and yielded to spur-of-the-moment temptation. Bail had been posted at five thousand pesos, an absurd
sum the poor woman couldn’t possibly have afforded in a lifetime. The poor woman promptly paid it and vanished. Or someone paid it for her and vanished her. The main point was that the case fell through its own bottom like ice cream through a soggy cone, leaving any possible Tan connection unresolved. Then in early June Babs had been found rolled up in a mat in San Andres. His perfect teenage throat (he was actually 28, Dingca discovered) had been cut from earring to earring. His cock had also been cut off and stuffed up his own rectum. Dingca hoped very much this had happened after death but gloomily doubted it.

Poor Babs. Nowadays when he thought of him Dingca was unable to work the trick in reverse, go from the transvestite’s face to that of Patti Gonzales, regenerate any of the connections that had worked once and once only for a single day in March. To tell the truth, he hadn’t given another thought to Butz’s daughter from that moment to this; whereas he often found himself seeing Babs passing fleetingly through the faces of perfect strangers imperfectly glimpsed, as if his asset were still hovering forlornly in limbic form, despairingly trying on body after body to find the one into which he could slip back. ‘Too kind, Inspector. Fried chicken would be just the thing. A girl’s got to keep her strength up if she’s expected to talk as well as everything else. Now, stumped, are we? We’re in need of a little tip from the twilight zone, h’m?’ Dingca had in fact hardly ever seen Babs in full drag. Whenever they met on anonymous ground somewhere like Quiapo he was a rather ordinary looking young man in denim and T-shirt, not even effeminate. The policeman had tried to see in the face hungrily tearing at a chicken leg across the narrow formica tabletop the exquisite feminine lines and planes which emerged after dark in The Topless Pit’ and which had more than once (Babs claimed) caused tourists to come to blows with each other in their attempts to carry him off to the Hilton, if not absolutely to paradise itself. It caused Dingca an additional pang that Babs had met his death in working costume. In some sense it was a beautiful young woman who had died so horribly that night. He had seen assets come and go for a variety of reasons, only a few of them terminal, but none of them affected him as Babs had. Somewhere caught up in it all, or hanging about it like a poignant scent, was an aching sense of waste. Now and again it came to him, the feeling of an unguessable substance unravelling – inside or
out he couldn’t tell – as if certain faces or certain presences held things together but that when they were gone a dissolution set in which could catch him sitting in front of a lone bottle of beer in a bar when he might have been driving home to San Pedro, Laguna.

Well. His old station, Station 5, had got nowhere on Babs and now never would. Tourist Belt entertainers were always turning up dead. It was a high risk profession. Impotent as he was to express any proper emotion for an informer he’d hardly known (but whom he now wished he had), Rio Dingca opted for loyalty of a sort. At least he could take seriously whatever Babs had been trying to tell him. But his last information had been vague and had already come to nothing. A finger pointed at Lettie Tan, that was all. Of
course she was bent. A wealthy family who owned all sorts of things besides a night club in Ermita: how could she not be? But faint as the links were, they touched him in one way or another by connecting with San Clemente. He’d tried a friend in Station 5 for anything recent on ‘The Topless Pit’ and its proprietress and had come up with a sheaf of technical infringements, short cuts, bribes and a scandalous piece of conveyancing. The most one could shake out of all that would be the odd henchman, some goons, and more than a few fellow-policemen. There was no sense in even thinking of going after one of the Tans because there was no earthly way you could get anything to stick. And if you did by some miracle make a case and live to file charges and see it presented, the likelihood of a Tan seeing the inside of a jail cell even for ten minutes was too remote to bother with. And if they
did,
you’d have a lot more to worry about because your own troubles would only just have begun, and wouldn’t be over until you were too.

P
RIDEAUX HAD ALWAYS
thought the notion of Press responsibility was another of those self-negating phrases like ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘native delicacies’. Since meeting Vic Agusan, however, he had begun to reconsider. The need to sell newspapers did indeed result in some pretty inventive journalism now and then, but in a land already inured to grotesque scandal there was really no way of outdoing the stories which had been proved to the hilt and even turned out to understate the truth. In a sense that
was
the scandal; and those papers which took risks by publishing unconfirmed gossip or which linked already tainted public figures with – for a change – a scam of which they were quaintly innocent were not, he now thought, irresponsible within the larger context. After all, if the great and the good turned out to have been unjustly maligned they could always sue, as Cory Aquino had Luis Beltran and his publisher when he described her as trying to take cover under her bed during a coup attempt. After a duly solemn visit by the jurors to the Presidential residence on Arlegui St. the court had accepted that this was an impossibility since there was a clearance of only a few centimetres between the bed and the floor. Beltran’s claim that he had merely been employing a figure of speech, such as any writer might, was of no avail. The accusation of cowardice had stung the President and now she was going to sting in return, to the tune of two million pesos.

Well, there could be no gospel version of anarchy. Coming from a country where the police were public servants whose remit was to
preserve public order, Prideaux could only admire journalists like Vic Agusan as day in and day out they presented the ironic and entirely proper spectacle of the public trying to keep the police in order.

Below the surface the joke stopped abruptly. The roll of journalists who had vanished or been found dead was lengthy: over thirty in only the last five years. MIAs and KIAs, as he thought of them, for his sojourn in Manila was doing odd things to Prideaux’s sense of the past.

Some time after turning forty he had begun to see his private history in a new way. Unsatisfactory now was the conventional list of milestones which anybody might tot up; less interesting, too, the inexorabilia of psychoanalytic theory. Quite the contrary: it seemed to him the things which had affected his life most radically had been
absences
rather than actual events. His recent lack of a wife, even of a companion, echoed through his days with far greater resonance than would a plausible (but always hypothetical) account of why. Why did one lack things? Why did one lack money, for example? There was no end to the answers, no combination of which had a fraction of the explicatory power over a life as did penury itself. Or aloneness. Which law of chance said it was inevitable that by the age of forty one would have met a suitable mate? Or did this mean most people became flexible as time ran out, willing to make strange compromises while still pretending to an ideal partner? In any case that was certainly one of Prideaux’s absences. But lately he had become convinced that the most formative absence of his entire life was missing Vietnam.

When he was seventeen Prideaux was a bright English public schoolboy who had already won himself a place at Cambridge. Instead of leaving school at once and filling in the intervening year profitably he had elected to stay on and safely bask in the pleasures of status. It was an error of vanity, one he thought he deserved by way of reward for having overcome years of being dismissed by peers and teachers alike for a certain angularity of mind, a waywardness which occasionally bordered on the mildly outré. This, in that last mandarinesque year of his schooldays, he expressed with perfect conventionality by espousing (in a school whose last collective political thought of the faintest radicalism had coincided with the Repeal of the Corn Laws) a brand of Socialism a little to the left of the Labour Party. The stuffier teachers dutifully pretended to be provoked by this and Prideaux spent
much time haranguing serious bespectacled boys in his study over large and fragrant teas of buttered toast, Battenburg cake and Earl Grey. Revolution was quite often mentioned by this young exquisite, now a weird combination of mandarin and firebrand.

If he achieved little in these long wasted months, this odious young man began at last to be aware of events outside Britain. He was conscious that US troops were being sent to South Vietnam in increasing numbers. In his first term at university came the battle of la Drang Valley. It was November 1965. The war had not yet become a great issue in the British press and the sketchy television news coverage must have made a particular impression on him, like the first time a musical infant hears somebody sing or play a note on a piano. Suddenly, everything conspired at once to make the growing distant war embody forms of loss and longing he never knew he had. This wasn’t the death of boys his own age, it was
Morte
d’Arthur.
Or it was a monstrous crime committed by imperialist capitalist lackeys against defenceless peasants who only wanted to shake off the yoke of foreign oppression. Or else it represented real life in contrast to the anaemic dreamworld in which he found himself boredly cloistered. Whatever else, it was a golden time for deeds of valour and comradeship. It was a nexus of principled opposition, of marching and speechifying and delivering exhilarating denunciations of stone age dons in tweed jackets. Girls could be met at parties and bedded within the hour just on the strength of shared opinions about Vietnam. On the basis of a beard, loons and a peace button total strangers could meet and exchange a vague simulacrum of the complex hand choreography of ‘daps’ with which black GIs were greeting each other in Vietnam. Solidarity was all. Ritually-slapped palms echoed around the world wherever the right-thinking met.

Prideaux graduated in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, that resounding tactical surprise whose psychological effects on America so completely outweighed the military defeat the NVA supposedly suffered. The war was lost; the war went on. Prideaux hung fire. He was not an American, he told himself and others, and he certainly wouldn’t help them if he were. Yet where else was there to be at that moment? He indulged in journalism, flew to Stockholm and interviewed some draft-dodgers. His great coup was to unearth a deserter from the US Marines now living under the name of his new Swedish
wife. Time passed, carrying Prideaux with it. By now he was a war groupie: Ruff-Puffs, klicks, Spooky. Even as he opposed it the war engulfed him. K-bar, A Shau, Bouncing Betty, Ben Tre…
Ben
Tre
…
destroy
it
to
save
it.
By now, too, enough time had gone by for the early years to be casting a rotten, nostalgic glow. Marble Mountain, M-14s, hot LZs. He knew he would have recognised the cool, wet earthenware smell the red laterite soil exhaled at dawn, the ubiquitous stench of barrels of burning excrement soaked in jet fuel, the taste of C-rations corned beef hash. Outstanding. Airborne all the way.

It is very strange for a young man to long for war even as he watches pictures of other young men filing out of C-130s unshaven and hollow-eyed, or choppered back to base in body bags. Stranger still if they are not his countrymen and it is not his war. What are we to think about someone who identifies with ‘the allies’ but sides with the enemy? Nothing much; other than to presume that such things are quite common and merely evidence of the muddle of hormones and cultural inheritance which make young men everywhere willing to fight men they don’t know at the behest of men who don’t know them. A conspiracy of confusion from which myths sprout like headstones. Why didn’t Prideaux get closer? He could have become a war correspondent and drunk life to the lees in the foxhole of his choice. He could have become part of that non-combatant elite who combined the hardbitten knowingness of grunts with classy non-chalance:
Honkers,
Saigers,
Pnompers.
He could have attended briefings in JUSPAO with weary and cynical disbelief then hitched a Huey into the boonies for a taste of the real raw: fragging, Grateful Dead, Morrison, Zappa, the killing box. In 1970 he joined as script consultant a film unit off to Indochina to make documentaries and wound up writing three films. There at last he was ineffectually shot at by child soldiers rendered blind by US steel helmets which fell to mid-nose. He went to Saigon, walked Tu Do as if he’d known it as an old hand in some previous incarnation (it did, too, feel remarkably familiar), photographed large-scale pilfering in the overcrowded port.

But already it was lost. Men were still dying, hooches still burned, but the great withdrawal had long since started. It was lost to him. He kept hearing, ‘That was way back, when? Sixty-six, I guess. Shoulda seen it. Un-fuckin’-real.’ Some time ago at an unspecified but always invocable moment it had been the real war, real Vietnam. Boys had
lost their lives within forty-eight hours of leaving Fort Benning. Prideaux lost his watch to a snatcher in Cholon. They made the films. One was of US troops on the ground in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province, right there in the Parrot Beak area at a moment when the American administration was swearing hand on heart that none of its troops had ever violated Cambodian neutrality. A second documentary concerned the money-changing rackets run mainly by a handful of Indian families in South Vietnam itself. Filming in the first was entirely open; the second relied on a good deal of concealed camera-work with ultrafast film so the eye could plainly catch the constant riffle of notes changing hands in dark huts, the faces of GIs freely laundering military scrip (which in theory was not legal tender off-base) into regular greenbacks. In weeks of filming, tons of money flew between brown and white fingers in a dozen currencies, some of which – Chinese, Burmese, Indian – were supposed to be worthless outside those countries. Both films were widely shown and praised and both won prizes. Prideaux’s scripts were adjudged ‘hard-hitting’ in that way which is especially irritating to film makers who know they were unable to tell the half of it. (‘It’s been going on for years, for Chrissake. Only now that it’s practically over can we get a watered-down version of stuff like this shown. Mustn’t send Mr and Mrs Porch Swing, Idaho, into cardiac arrest’.) Not now;
then
. It was always
Then
: back then, back when the real killing was being made, was going on, when a whole culture was formed and grew out of its founders like a private club.

Almost a quarter of a century later Prideaux was still able to surprise in himself a wistful yearning for retroactive membership of that club, the vast majority of whose members had never wanted to join, whose list had long ago closed and could now only dwindle. It seemed he was nostalgic for times unshared, for comrades he never had; whereas what had happened was that he had once been twenty, and his being twenty had coincided with the great issue of the times. Recalling those times still transported him to territory rich in ghosts, echoing with dated jargon. Yet it was not always reassuring since it came with reminders of failure. Why
had
he not? Not when the time was ripe? Physical fear? Cowardice? Maybe; maybe also an instinctual sense which would always tell him that no matter what one did to seize the moment it had always already passed with a flash of wings, trailing
behind it a purposeful smudge as it roared towards some far-off scene of action. The sidelines, the edge of things; that seemed to be Prideaux’s ordained place as the shuddering air grew still.

Documentaries, documentaries.

Three years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 Prideaux turned thirty. What his twenty-year-old self would have thought an enviable career well begun had taken on the manic inconsequentiality of all TV work. Enough of the schoolboy didact remained in him to resent finding himself part of the entertainment industry, coasting on a reputation which now appeared outdated, even fraudulent, so quickly were those intense years of confrontation and revelation being left behind. He had tried to follow the two films which made his name with one they had shot in Bangkok on the back of the other productions. This was going to be gaff-blowing of a far more emotive kind, a story he had got wind of in Saigon, the one they couldn’t ignore.

It was about a racket run by an ex-Master Sergeant who had resigned the service after two tours of duty in Vietnam, having sniffed out a better line of business. This was catering for the needs of troops on R&R in Bangkok. The advantage the American had over the Thais was that he knew his countrymen better than they did and understood that a few of them – a very few – would pay well for something which went beyond the usual strip-joint menu. He had spotted in the ragged hordes of war orphans sleeping on pavements and in parks a potential source of income. He bought a van and sprayed it pink and blue: jolly pastel shades on which floated solid red and yellow balloons trailing jaunty strings. The name of the ex-Master Sergeant’s company, Toytime, was stencilled in white letters on both side doors. The van would deliver to clients’ apartments – even sometimes to international hotels – refugee children who had been picked up off the streets, given a bath, a square meal and clean T-shirts and knickers before being whisked off to a party. The kids couldn’t believe their luck. Some hours later, in response to a phone call, the same van would call with collapsible packing cases to collect their bodies. It was a straight cash deal. Toytime delivered the goods and disposed of the evidence. Nobody complained because there was nobody to complain.

Prideaux had some good stuff, including the ex-Master Sergeant’s identity and military record. He filmed the van arriving and two children about eight years old being handed over at a door by the Thai
driver. He filmed the van returning and two large cartons being carried out of the house. The van doors slammed, the camera followed at a distance through a rain-spotted windscreen which melted and refracted jewels of neon streaming past on both sides. Despite being a stock piece of ciné vérité this not very brisk chase somehow managed an atmosphere which was becoming the Prideaux hallmark, that of a faint intangible sadness like the pursuit of a fading dream. The sequence ended abruptly when armed Thais in uniform surrounded the camera car at some traffic lights. Between their encroaching torsos were a couple of glimpses of the pastel van with its gay balloons vanishing down a turning beside a
klong
. Next came an abortive interview with a bland senior officer of the Thai Traffic Police whom Prideaux believed was in the ex-Master Sergeant’s pay. Their conversation was intercut with shots of the same officer in plain clothes behind the counter of a shop selling pilfered US matériel. The officer was taking an order in Thai for fifty M-60 grenade launchers, two thousand grenades and forty M-16s. ‘No problem,’ said the English subtitles. ‘What about Claymores?’ The camera, which was shooting from a car parked opposite, picked up a lot of shine from the shop window, plus reflections of passers-by, and intervening traffic added to the problem. But again and again there was no doubt of the officer’s identity as light caught his speaking face behind the pane. The mike was concealed on the customer’s belt in a pouch for sunglasses. It crackled and rustled but the words were clear and intelligible to the Thai who later did the transcription and translation. When the camera panned back to take in the shopfront itself the name above it read ‘Royal Thai Road Safety Campaign’. The implication was obvious. This Thai officer was involved in rackets. If he openly brokered stolen US military equipment why mightn’t he be protecting all sorts of renegade Americans such as the managing director of Toytime? How else would he get his supplies brand new and still slippery with Cosmolene?