The pretender to the Emperor's throne stood in the innermost sanctum of the deposed ruler's palace and listened, beaming with pride, as the younger of his ten-year-old twin daughters finished reading the framed poem aloud. The poem had been left behind on the wall when the deposed ruler fled into the night.
“âYours is the earth and everything that's in it,'” she read, “âAndâwhich is moreâyou'll be a man, my son.'”
The ten-year-old girl had read Kipling's “If” with what at one time was called expression. The Filipinos in the line behind her applauded enthusiastically. She turned, curtsied prettilyâdespite the jeans she woreâthen looked up at the big Chinaman (as she and her sister always thought of him) who was not only her father, but also pretender to the throne of the Emperor of China.
“Very, very nice,” said Artie Wu who stood six foot two and three-quarters inches and weighed 249 pounds, only six percent of it pure blubber.
His younger daughter made a face at the poem on the wall. “God, that's dumb.”
“Mr. Kipling had an unhappy childhood,” Agnes Wu explained.
“To make up for it he sometimes became a trifle optimistic and overly sentimental.”
Her daughter nodded wisely. “Mush, huh?”
“Mush,” agreed Agnes Wu whose Rs were tinged with a slight Scot's burr. Everything else she said sounded like the English spoken by those who have gone to proper schools that place a high premium on received pronunciation. But none of the schools were able to do anything about the burr of Agnes Wu who had been born Agnes Goriach.
The older of the twin daughters (older by twenty-one minutes) turned on her sister. “It wasn't half as dumb as âInvictus' that you got out of and Mrs. Crane made me memorize last year. You want mush? âOut - of- the - night - that - covers - me - black - as - the - pit - from- pole-to - pole - I - thank-whatever- gods- may - be - for - my- unconquerable-soul.'
That's
mush.”
“You're holding up the line, ladies,” said Artie Wu as sternly as he ever said anything to his daughters. Totally incapable of assuming the heavy father role, Wu continued to be surprised at his daughters' reluctance to take advantage of his faltering will. His twin thirteen-year-old sons were something else. His sons would flimflam a saint.
The Wu family moved out of Ferdinand Marcos' small private study whose shelves still contained scores of pop histories, biographies and steaming political exposes, writtenâfor the most partâby American authors. The study was a windowless room tucked away in the Malacanang Palace on the banks of the Pasig River in Manila. The Wus had already toured the discothèque, the throne room, and were heading for Imelda Marcos' bedroom when Agnes Wu turned back to the trailing Peninsula Hotel limousine driver who was also visiting the palace for the first time.
“How much time do we have, Roddy?” she asked.
Rodolfo Caday glanced at his watch. “Plenty, ma'am. The flight's not till four and I fix it with A and A to meet us here outside.”
A and A were the twin thirteen-year-old Wu sons, Arthur and
Angus, who already had toured the palace twice on their own. “Then we don't have to go back to the hotel for them?” Agnes Wu said.
“No, ma'am.”
With a small gesture that took in the palace, Agnes Wu said, “Well?”
Rodolfo Caday frowned, then shrugged. “Much foolishness.”
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In the bedroom of Imelda Marcos one of the volunteer Filipina docents was commenting in a not quite bored voice on several of the room's more interesting items, particularly the huge red satin bed. Some ten thousand Filipinos were trooping through the palace each day and the handful now in the bedroom made no effort to disguise their voyeurism. Some of the men nudged each other. Some of the women giggled. Others kept handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths as if to strain out any of the remaining bad-luck germs that had infected Imelda Marcos.
Artie Wu's younger daughter looked up at him. “How come they bought so muchâwell, muchness?”
“It may have been a way to keep score.”
“You mean the lady with the most shoes wins?”
“Maybe.”
“But she didn't.”
“Maybe that's the point,” Artie Wu said.
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Standing in the center of the bedlam that was the Manila International Airport, Wu peeled off fifty-peso notes and handed them to sons and daughters, porters and self-proclaimed expediters, and to the driver, Rodolfo Caday, dispatching them all on real and imagined errands that would give Wu a few minutes alone with his wife.
Almost everyone liked to stare at Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Case Wu.
They especially liked to gape at the tall woman with the pale yellow hair, the big smart gray eyes, and the not quite perfect features that seemed almost regal until she grinned. When she grinned she looked just a bit wacky.
The gapers also liked to dart quick and, they hoped, undetected glances at the big Chinese in his white silk suit and Panama hat who carried an ebony caneâa walking stick, reallyâthat they all knew concealed a sword, although it didn't. Agnes Wu always referred to the white silk suit as the “get out of here and get me some money suit” because Wu almost never put it on unless they were broke or nearly so.
Agnes Wu ran a hand down the suit's immaculate lapel, smoothing out an imaginary wrinkle. “So riddle me this,” she said. “When you get up to Baguio, what if you and Durant still can't find the Cousin?”
“We'll find him,” Artie Wu said.
“You're going to have to face it sooner or later, Artie. The Cousin took you and Durant.”
Wu nodded. “That's why we have to find him. After all, Quincy and I have our reputations to think of.” Then he smiledâthe great white Wu smile behind which laughter bubbled, threatening to erupt. The smile told Agnes Wu she could disregard everything her husband had just said.
She grinned back at him, again making herself look just a few charming bubbles off level. “So when you don't find the Cousin and your reputations are in shreds, then what?”
“Then we come back down here and take the next plane to London and the fast train up to Edinburgh. Durant likes trains.”
“Bring money, Artie.”
“Don't I always?”
“Bring bagsful this time.”
“Bagsful,” he promised.
“Take care of yourself.”
He nodded.
“And look after Durant.”
“Or vice versa,” Artie Wu said.
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The Peninsula Hotel in the Makati section of Manila was owned and operated by the same organization that operated the Hong Kong Peninsula. About the only difference Artie Wu could detect was that the Hong Kong Peninsula sent a Rolls-Royce to pick you up at the airport whereas the Manila Peninsula made do with a Mercedes.
As Wu entered the many-sided lobby he saw that most of its tables were filled as usual by well-dressed Manileños who had gathered to gossip and drink coffee or maybe something with ice in it. And, as usual, many of them stared at him when, swinging his cane, he strode across the lobby toward the concierge. Wu looked left once and right once, checking to see if there were any faces out of his past.
The only familiar one belonged to the Graf von Lahusen whose ancestral estates lay unfortunately on the wrong side of the Elbe. The thirty-seven-year-old count had dropped out of the Sorbonne at nineteen to take the hippie trail to Southeast Asia where he soon discovered that his title, looks and four languages could earn him a decent if questionable living.
Wu was remembering the time the count and Otherguy Overby had run the ancient Omaha Banker wheeze, Overby playing the role of the remorse-stricken banker to perfection, when the Graf von Lahusen looked up, saw Wu, rose and bowed gravely. Artie Wu stopped and bowed gravely back. The count's mark, a middle-aged Japanese, twisted around in his chair to see who was doing all the bowing and scraping. He seemed visibly impressed by the Chinese gentleman in the splendid white silk suit and Panama hat who carried what obviously was a sword cane.
Wu continued to the concierge's desk, pleased to see that Mr. Welcome-Welcome was on duty. The assistant concierge's name was really Bernard Naldo but Wu always thought of him as Mr. Welcome-Welcome
because that's what he always said to Wu, even when they had seen each other only minutes before.
“Welcome, welcome, Mr. Wu,” the assistant concierge said as Wu reached the counter and leaned on it, noting that Naldo still looked like a genial brown frog, all dressed up in a black coat, white shirt and striped pants, who would turn back into a prince once he had answered the millionth tourist's millionth dumb question.
“Got my bill ready, Bernie?” Wu said.
Naldo reached beneath the counter and came up with a thick sheaf of computer-printed billings. “As requested,” he said. “The total is, let's see, sixty thousand two hundred and nineteen pesos.”
“Settle for three thousand U.S., cash money?”
“Of course.”
Wu took out a fat roll of $100 bills and started counting them onto the counter.
“Wife and kiddies get off safely?” Naldo asked.
Wu nodded and kept on counting.
“You had a visitor.”
Wu stopped counting and glanced up. “Who?”
Naldo sniffed his disapproval. “Boy Howdy. He was looking for either you or Durant.”
“What'd you tell him?”
“That you were out sight-seeing and that Durant was touring somewhere down south. Mindanao, I told him, around Zamboanga.”
“He believe you?”
“No.”
“When he comes back tell him I checked out and Durant's down on Negros, dickering for a sugar plantation.”
“He won't believe that either.”
“I don't want him to believe it; I just want him to feel unwanted.”
Naldo sniffed again. “Terrible man. But I suppose he really can't help it, being Australian.”
“Three thousand,” said Wu, sliding the money toward Naldo who
picked it up and counted it with amazing speed. “Three thousand two hundred,” he said.
“I know.”
“Oh,” Naldo said, pocketing two of the $100 bills. “How can I be of service?”
“I need one of the hotel Mercedes for a few days.”
“Of course. Would you like Roddy to drive again?”
“No driver.”
Naldo was instantly dismayed. “You want to drive yourself? The hotel can't be responsible.”
“It's my kind of traffic, Bernie. I'm like a fish back in water.”
“No, I'm sorry, but we can't permit it.”
“Bernie, let me ask you something. How much money have Durant and I spent with you guys the last three or four months?”
“You're both highly valued guests, butâ”
“I want the car outside at seven tomorrow morning, all gassed up and ready to go.”
Naldo sighed. “Do you mind if it's our oldest Mercedes?”
“As long as it has wheels.”
“And your suite?”
“Run a tab on it.”
“When can we expect you and Mr. Durant backâshould you both survive?”
“A few days.”
“You wouldn't reconsider andâ”
“No,” Artie Wu said. “I wouldn't.”
Wearing a yellow People Power T-shirt, seersucker pants and a pair of sandals, Artie Wu ate a large buffet breakfast in the Peninsula Hotel's La Bodegaâwhere they always lost money on himâand by 7:05 A.M. was slipping the hotel's black Mercedes sedan through Manila's demented traffic. As always, the Filipino drivers relied exclusively on their horns to signal their uncertain intentions. Artie Wu matched them toot for toot.
At a long red light two professional beggar children approached him. The older child was a girl of no more than ten who carried her emaciated four-year-old brother in her arms. Their eyes were enormous; their expressions pitiable; their minds possibly retarded by malnutrition. Although suspecting that all beggar children stood for hours in front of mirrors to get their woebegone looks down pat, Wu nevertheless rolled down his window and put a twenty-peso note into the four-year-old's palm.
He knew the children would be lucky to get a dime out of the dollar he had just handed them. The rest would go to the cops and the syndicate they worked for. Wu also knew if they managed to live another year or two, the syndicate might fatten them up and turn them into child prostitutes.
After leaving Manila, Wu didn't stop until he reached Angeles and was past both the sprawling Clark Air Base and the long line of open-air shops that offered black market PX goods. He stopped at a McDonald's for coffee and watched the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old U.S. airmen and their fifteen- and sixteen-year-old whores put away the Big Macs and the Cokes and the french fries at ten in the morning.
Later, not far from Tarlac, which was Corazon Aquino's hometown, Wu again stopped, locked the car, and walked up a short hill to inspect the memorial built on what was said to be the exact spot where the Bataan Death March had ended in 1942. Wu had passed the memorial several times, but had never stopped and was curious about what its plaque said. But there was no plaque. None that Artie Wu could find.
The only other visitor was a lanky red-faced man with thinning gray hair and a limp who wandered around taking pictures with his Instamatic.
“Where's the plaque?” Wu asked him.
“Guess somebody stole it,” the man said in an accent that Wu thought could be from either of the Dakotas or possibly Minnesota.
“Hell of a thing,” Wu said.
“Hell of a walk.”
“You weren't old enough.”
“My daddy,” the man said. “That's how I still think of him. Daddy. He shipped out to the P.I.'s in thirty-nine. I was two then. Don't even know if he made it up this far. Never did find out what happened exactlyâto him, I mean. But I thought I'd stop by and, you know, kind of pay my respects.”
Wu nodded. The man glanced around, not much liking what he saw. “Looks like they could spruce it up a little.”
“People like to forget lost wars,” Wu said.
The man nodded. “I guess.” He squinted at Wu through the ninety-degree glare. “You're not Japanese, are you?”
“No,” Wu said.
“For a second there I thought you coulda been one of the Japs that might've known my daddy andâaw hell, you know what I thought.”
“Sure.”
The man turned as if to give the Death March memorial one last look. “Well, what the fuck, I don't even remember him anyhow.”
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Wu stopped for a late lunch at a resort called Agoo Playa that offered a fine black-sand beach facing the South China Sea and enough luxury rooms to sleep 140 guests. The town of Agoo in La Union province was near the foot of the Cordillera Mountains in northern Luzon and almost as far north as Baguio itself.
Wu assumed the hotel-resort had been built by the Marcos government, or by some of the ex-President's closer cronies. He sat, the lone guest in a dining room that would seat eighty, and ordered a beer and the seafood salad from one of the five young waiters who hovered close by. When the beer came, Wu asked, “How many guests do you have?”
“In the rooms?” the young waiter said.
Wu nodded.
“Four.”
“Think business will pick up?”
The waiter shrugged. “When it gets hot.”
“It's hot now.”
“Hotter,” the waiter said.
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Wu's last stop before Baguio was the Marcos Park clubhouse that served an eighteen-hole golf course. He had a cup of coffee and admired the empty golf links and the nearly empty clubhouse. He was high in the mountains now and the temperature had dropped from 90 degrees to the mid-70s. The course below looked green, tough and inviting, and Wu thought it a shame nobody was playing.
When he finished his coffee Wu went out on the stone verandah and gazed up at the great stone head of Ferdinand Marcos who glowered down at him. He had seen pictures of the head before, perched up on its own mountain, but had never been able to get a fix on its true size. He now guessed it was either five or six stories tall.
Next to Wu was the only other touristâa fiftyish man who was using a pair of binoculars to inspect the Marcos head. Still gazing through the binoculars, the man said, “Look at that, will you?”
“What?”
“The nose,” the man said in his New Zealand accent.
Wu looked at the Marcos nose with its flared nostrils. He could just make out two small figures, suspended by ropes as they swung from the left stone eyebrow toward the nose. One of the figures was carrying something white.
“What're they doing?” Wu said.
“Here. Take a look.” The man handed him the binoculars. As Wu put them up to his eyes and adjusted the focus, the man said, “Unless I miss my guess, those kids're shoving a booger right up the old boy's nose.”
The binoculars came into focus. “Maybe it's dynamite,” Wu said.
“Mmm,” said the man from New Zealand. “Didn't think of that, did I?”
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Artie Wu sometimes estimated that fifty percent of the Filipinos he met had been to San Francisco. And of those who had, one hundred percent always insisted the California city reminded them of Baguio.
He didn't buy the similarity. Both cities had hills and cool, even chilly, weather, but Baguio always reminded Artie Wu of some southern U.S. piney woods town during a spring cold snap. Asheville, maybe.
Still, Baguio deserved its Summer Capital title because all Manila had once migrated there when the hot season began in March. All
Manila meant the President, the Cabinet, select members of the National Assembly, the generals, the press, the new and old richâand the swarm of civil servants and hangers-on who followed in their wake. Durant had once called Baguio the place where “the elite meet to eat and fuck up the country.”
But that year the President was spending a hot March in Manila, trying to nail her country back together. As Wu drove past the presidential summer residence (where some kind of topiary spelled out “Mansion House” in ten-foot letters), he became stuck in a traffic jam and noticed the soldiers who guarded the mansion entrance were selling film to tourists. Wu took it as a sign of the new entrepreneurial spirit abroad in the land.
Because he would rather drive one hundred miles the wrong way than ask directions, Wu took a wrong turn and wound up going downhill on Sessions Road, which was Baguio's steep main commercial street. This led him down into the gridlocked market area that he had to honk and swear his way out of. Finally, by luck and guesswork, he wandered onto South Drive and found the Hyatt Terraces where Mr. Welcome-Welcome had reserved him a room.
Once up in the room, Wu took a bottle of beer from the mini-refrigerator, drank half, picked up the phone and called the woman he always thought of as the Rich Widow. A servant answered on the second ring. Then Emily Cariaga came on with a warm and low-pitched, “Artie! How nice.”
“How've you been, Emily?”
“Let's talk about that later. Here's Quincy.”
The first thing Quincy Durant said was, “Where are youâthe Pines?”
“Quincy,” Wu said. “The Pines burned down two years ago.”
There was a brief silence until Durant said, “I blocked it, I guess. So. If you're not at the Pines, you're at the Hyatt.”
“Right.”
“I'll pick you up downstairs in ten minutes and we'll go see him.”
“See who?”
“The Cousin,” Durant said. “Who else?”
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Camp John Hay served primarily as a country club for the U.S. airmen and officers stationed at Clark Air Base. In addition to its kilometer-and-a-half altitude, it offered golf, tennis, swimming, bowling, American films, a wealth of PX goods and an ocean of beer. But mostly it offered an invigorating change of climate. Well-behaved Filipinos could also use certain sections of the carefully tended grounds as a public park.
It was almost dark when Quincy Durant stopped the Honda Prelude he had borrowed from Emily Cariaga at the camp gates and asked the MP on duty how to get to the post hospital. The MP handed Durant a map marked with a red X. As they drove on, Artie Wu asked, “Who're we?”
“Business associates,” Durant said.
At the post hospital an enlisted orderly steered Wu and Durant into a small office where a young uniformed Army doctor, wearing a captain's bars, sat with his feet on a desk, reading Time. He looked up at Durant, then at Wu and back at Durant.
“You the Durant who called?”
Durant nodded. “I'm Durant; he's Wu.”
The Captain put his
Time
on the desk, his feet on the floor and rose. “I'm Doctor Robbie. Let's go.”
Wu and Durant followed the Captain down a hall, a flight of metal stairs, and along a short basement corridor. The Captain used a key on a lock and tugged open a thick door. Wu and Durant felt a rush of cold air.
Captain Robbie reached around the door and switched on a light. Wu and Durant followed him into the room, Wu closing the door behind them. It was cold inside and the only furniture in the 9 X 12âfoot refrigerated room were two gurneys. On one of them was a
man, naked except for a bath towel with Camp John Hay stitched across it in red letters. The towel covered the man's crotch. He had light brown skin, a handsome playboy face, and appeared to be about thirty. His throat had been cut. Captain Robbie lifted the towel to give Wu and Durant a glimpse of the man's crotch. “They got his balls too,” Captain Robbie said as he let the towel drop and turned to Durant. “Well?”
“What was he wearing?” Durant said.
“Why?”
“When they cut off his balls did they take his pants down, off or what?”
Captain Robbie gave his head a small shake, as if he didn't understand Durant's questions. “They found him just like that, naked as a jaybird, at oh-three-hundred this morning down by a post beer joint that's called the Nineteenth Tee. His throat was cut and his balls were gone. No socks, no shoes, nothing. Just him. Buck naked and stone dead. You guys know him or not?”
Durant looked at Wu. “I'd say that was Ernie, wouldn't you?”
Wu nodded. “Poor old Ernie.”
Captain Robbie took a ballpoint pen and a small spiral notebook from a shirt pocket and clicked the pen into write. He opened the notebook and looked at Durant. “Ernie what?”
“Ernesto Pineda,” Durant said and spelled the surname slowly.
“He was what to you?”
“We did some business with him once,” Wu said. “We thought we were going to do a little more, but I guess we aren't.”
“I guess not,” Captain Robbie said. “Who's his next of kin?”
“The only kinfolk I ever heard him mention was a third cousin,” Durant said.
“Nobody closer?” Captain Robbie asked. “Wife, parents, brother, sisterâeven a niece or nephew?”
Durant shook his head regretfully. “That third cousin was the only one Ernie ever mentioned.”
The Captain shook his head and asked, “What's the cousin's name?”
“Ferdinand Marcos,” Durant said.
Captain Robbie's smooth young face wrinkled itself into lines of worry and disbelief. “Tell me you're kidding.”
Wu solemnly shook his great head from side to side.
Captain Robbie winced and turned to stare down at the exiled President's dead third cousin. “Goddamnit, Ernie, what a pain in the butt you've turned out to be.”