Smaller and Smaller Circles

Copyright © 2015 by F.H. Batacan

 

Portions of this book were first published by the University of the
Philippines Press in novella form under the same title in 2002.

Published by

Soho Press, Inc.

853 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Batacan, F.H.

Smaller and smaller circles / F.H. Batacan.

ISBN 978-1-61695-398-0

eISBN 978-1-61695-399-7

International PB ISBN: 978-1-61695-527-4

1. Teenage boys—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Serial murder

investigation—Fiction. 3. Priests—Fiction. 4. Forensic

anthropologists—Fiction. 5. Catholic Church—Fiction. 6. Payatas

(Philippines)—Fiction. 7. Quezon City (Philippines)—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9550.9.B35S66 2015 823'.92—dc23

2015001668

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

 

 

  

  

To Tess and Frankie, for all that I am.

To Coke, for all that I cannot be.

To Jamie, for all that I will yet become.

 

 

 

 

“A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes, and equally so his regained security. Such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment, and is inexhaustible in evasion of communication, desires and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his friends; and supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will some day be opened to the fact that there is nevertheless a mask of him there—and that it is well to be so.”

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

Some days I just can't seem to focus. It's hard to concentrate on what's going on around me, on what I'm doing.

 

 
It's been getting worse lately. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed from the moment I wake up in the morning, as though something bad is going to happen. I can't breathe right; my hands and feet are cold. My head hurts.

 

I feel like everything I do from sunup to sundown is just to keep this bad thing from happening. And every day I have to do more and more. It is exhausting. Nothing that I do is ever enough.

 

I feel like I'm always being watched.

 

I hate being watched.

Prologue

Emil is running
after his slum kids, panting in the noonday sun, loosening the high collar of his shirt as he goes.

The children urge him on, their voices shrill with agitation.

“Not much further, Father Emil!”

“Over here, this way!”

“Just a little more!”

His fear grows with each step. It tastes like rust, feels gritty like dirt in his mouth.

The stench from the sea of garbage around them is overpowering. It rained last night, and now that the sun is out, the dump site is steaming. Awful vapors rising lazily with the heat: wet paper and rot and excrement mixing in a soup of odors around them, above them.

You'd think by now you would be used to this
, he tells himself,
but you're not. One never gets used to this.

At last they come to a small space about five feet in diameter, where the garbage has been cleared away to expose the older, compost-like layer beneath.

“There.” One of the children points.

Even before he looks in the direction indicated by the thin forefinger, he detects it, a new note of putrescence among all the putrescences mingling in the unwholesome air.

A small, thin, pale hand protrudes from beneath the garbage.

“Mother of God,” he mutters under his breath. He turns to the children. “Quick, get me a long stick.”

Three children immediately come forward, offering him the digging sticks they use to poke through the garbage. He takes one and walks grimly toward their discovery.

He is about to begin when a flash of concern for the children stabs through the grey, slow-moving haze of fear. He stops, turns around and tells them to leave.

“No, Father Emil,” they say, first one voice, then many voices. “We will stay with you,” and in their faces there is a kind of quiet determination and sympathy so grown-up it startles him.

Secretly he is glad of the company. He does not repeat the order and returns, face set, to the business at hand.

All right. Here we go then.

He begins to root through great clumps of garbage, and slowly the thing begins to emerge. He won't look at it yet—although he already knows what it is—not until he has more or less cleared away the refuse above and around it.

When he is done, the body of a child emerges. It is a boy about eight to ten years old, though it is difficult for Emil to tell the age accurately. Even at fourteen or fifteen, most of these kids are small, very small, owing to malnutrition and disease.

It is lying face down in the muck and completely naked.

The smell of it—now the dominant note in the vile broth of rot smells; it hangs heavy and horrible in the air.

Flies like fat, shiny blue-black beads, buzzing around the body insistently.

Emil cannot see any marks or wounds on the back or on the back of the head. Afraid to touch the corpse, he slides one end of the stick underneath the body, just beneath the chest, and uses it as a lever to turn the body over. The deadweight almost breaks the stick in two.

The sudden silence among the children is odd. In fact, the whole world seems to Emil to have fallen silent. The neighborhood sounds and the sounds of the traffic from the highway have faded to a strange, low rumble in his ears.

The front of the child's body seems to be moving, and it takes the priest a few seconds to comprehend that there are maggots in it, thousands of them. Gaping wounds—no, holes—in the chest and stomach.

Emil realizes the heart has been removed, the child eviscerated. The genitals are missing.

He looks at the face.
Please, God, let the face remind me this used to be a human being.
Another few seconds and he realizes the face is gone, as though it has been scraped off, leaving a mess of jellied eyeball and bone protruding here and there through muscle.

Hard to make sense of what is missing, what is left.

Purple-brown scabs on the child's knees, probably from an afternoon's rough play.

The spell abruptly broken now, the children running, screaming, from the clearing, leaping goatlike over the garbage in terror.

Emil turns, staggering away from the body, and throws up until his stomach feels completely empty. It does not seem enough; he still feels sick, and he forces his throat to constrict several times, to no avail.

Through the tears that stream from his eyes, he sees that three of the older children have remained. They come toward him now, wordlessly take him by the hand and lead him out quietly, gently, through the garbage.

 

 

It rained last night. Heavy rain from a blood-red sky, crashing down for hours without stopping.

 

I like the rain. Sunny days and their heat make me listless, sluggish, depressed. Isn't that strange? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

 

But when it rains I feel powerful.

 

The rain sends everyone running for cover. But while they scurry like rats for the nearest shelter, afraid of the wet and the thunder and the lightning, I come alive.

 The rain makes it easier to do the things I have to do.

1

“Horrible weather.”

Gus Saenz looks up. Water is running in rivulets off Jerome's wet umbrella. Between the beating of the rain on the roof and the steady thump of the music blaring from the stereo component system, Saenz didn't hear the other man come into the room.

Jerome folds up the umbrella, props it up against the wall in a corner beside the door, looks around. “Where's Tato?”

Tato Ampil is Saenz's young autopsy assistant, a med school dropout who decided in his fourth year that he really wanted to be a musician of some sort, although after nearly two years, he hasn't quite figured out what sort yet.

“You just missed him,” Saenz says. The surgical mask he wears over his nose and mouth muffles his warm, deep voice. “Hot date.”

“Lucky guy. At least he's someplace warm.”

The air-conditioned room is inhospitably cold; colder, of course, because of the weather outside. The high-ceilinged laboratory is a study in white: white walls, white floors, white ceiling. Almost all the equipment and furnishing in it is shiny stainless steel, from the shelves suspended from sturdy brackets fixed to the walls to the two gurneys pushed to one corner.

Mounted on the wall opposite the door is a large whiteboard about four feet high by six feet wide. Close by stands a do-it-yourself workstation, incorporating a computer table, bookshelves and cabinets in honey-colored wood.

A spanking new computer sits in the middle of the station, with a very large monitor. Saenz bought it with grant money from a Japanese foundation. It is used, among other things, to construct three-dimensional skull-photo superimpositions, which help in the identification of the dead—a tedious task for forensic anthropologists before advances in computer technology made it simpler.

Gray's Anatomy
; works by Boas, Coon, Lacan, Malinowski; Darwin's
The
Origin of Species
; Landsteiner's
The Specificity of Serological Reactions
; and Coleman and Swenson's
DNA in the Courtroom: A Trial Watcher's Guide
share the bookshelves with a complete set of Asterix comic books, yellowing reams of classical guitar scores. Glossy, full-color volumes on the works of Magritte, de Chirico, Modigliani. The exhibition catalog from the 1995 Monet Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

On hanging shelves and wall cabinets scattered throughout the room are odds and ends of equipment and supplies Saenz uses in his work. Plaster casts of skulls and teeth with paper tags dangling from them on bits of string. Sealed specimen jars of several sizes, with or without sundry discolored bits of unpleasantness floating in them.

Most visitors find it unsettling to talk to the priest in plain sight of this particular collection. The jars demand attention and usually get it, no matter how strong the outsider's resolve to ignore them.

Depending on what type of case he happens to be handling at the moment, Saenz will often wrap his long fingers around a particular jar, prop it up on his chest and stare into its contents, meditating on vein and muscle and membrane for hours on end.

On a small table, Telesforo—Saenz's prized tempered-ceramic model of a human torso with removable, vividly colored polyurethane organs—stands upright on his cut-off thighs, a navy-blue New York Mets baseball cap perched rakishly atop his headless neck. He, too, was purchased with grant money, this time from a Baltimore firm that specializes in casting anatomical models for use in medical schools.

A clothesline stretches across another wall, garlanded with strips of photographic negatives processed by Saenz himself in the small darkroom off to one side of the laboratory.

On other walls hang huge, glass-framed reproductions of four of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical studies. The organs of the thorax. The heart and the main arteries. Profile studies of a skull facing left. The principal female organs.

Jerome looks at Saenz, listens briefly to the music and rolls his eyes. “R.E.M.?”

Saenz smiles, and the crow's-feet fan out from the corners of his eyes, the eyes of a man who smiles often. “Ah, there's hope for you yet.”

Gus Saenz is tall, a little over six feet—the metal autopsy table at which he is working has been adjusted so that he won't have to bend too far over it—and he has the wiry muscularity that comes with zero body fat. He has angular mestizo features, thick, wavy hair greying at the temples.
Rock star hair
, Jerome often teases him.

Jerome fiddles with the volume control knob until he is satisfied. Even after nearly two decades, he has yet to get used to Saenz's performing autopsies to very loud music. “You're too old for this.”

The stereo component system is surrounded by stacks of CDs and cassette tapes: András Schiff and Glenn Gould playing Bach partitas, Julian Bream and Manuel Barrueco on the guitar. A large collection of Gregorian chant recordings from way before Gregorian chants became hip. And The Clash, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Sex Pistols, the Grateful Dead. R.E.M. is a recent addition to his postmortem repertoire.

Saenz raises his head; he's grinning under the surgical mask. “Don't knock it. It's the closest either of us will ever get to sex.”

Jerome feigns shock with open mouth and bug eyes. “Reprobate.”

“Why, thank you. Coffee in the pot if you want it.”

The younger priest shakes water from his hair and then busies himself with getting a cup of coffee.

Father Jerome Lucero is about five foot nine, of a physical type that is usually described as “compact” or “solid.” Beefy arms, broad shoulders tapering down into a slim waist and hips. Wavy hair tamed in a severe crew cut; wide, dark eyes. He has an intensity, a seriousness about him that makes him seem older than his thirty-seven years.

Only the keenest observer would note that he walks with an almost imperceptible limp.

He sips the coffee, then makes a face. “Oooh, that's bad.”

Saenz pulls his mask down beneath his chin, his hand encased in a stained surgical glove. “Cost cutting.”

Jerome notices that the older priest is lisping a little. “How's that tooth?”

It is the other man's turn to grimace. “Don't talk to me about it.”

Jerome laughs quietly. Saenz has an impacted tooth in the left side of his mouth that has been due for extraction for several months; it has now nearly rotted through. Whenever the subject of dental work comes up, Saenz is transformed from open-minded, logical man of science to fearful, petulant child.

The older priest scowls at Jerome's amusement.
“Vos vestros servate, meos mihi linquite mores.”

Jerome nods in mock solemnity. “‘Keep to your own ways, and leave mine to me.' Yes. Well. I'm quite certain Petrarch wasn't talking about tooth decay. You realize, of course, that putting that off could be bad for your heart?”

“I'll tell you what's bad for my heart. Pain and terror.
That's
what's bad for my heart.” Saenz straightens up with a groan. He hunches his shoulders to relieve the tension in the muscles there and then relaxes them again before surveying his work, now in the final stages. “Looks like number six to me.”

Jerome walks over to the metal table, where the remains of a child's body lie. Its back rests on a rubber block, pushing the chest up and out for better examination.

“Viscera gone?”

“Pretty much. Heart missing. Face peeled off.”

“Neat bladework.” Jerome bends at the waist, tilting his head to one side to look obliquely into the chest cavity. “Skull?”

Saenz nods. “Heavy blow. From the fracture lines, it looks like—”

“It came from the right.” Jerome straightens up. “About how old?”

“My guess, about twelve or thirteen.”

Jerome picks up a pair of surgical gloves from the stainless steel trolley and pulls them on, the rubber snapping against
the skin on the underside of his wrists. He quickly surveys the
other injuries. “Genitals removed.” He leans forward and runs the tip of his forefinger in a straight line beneath the child's exposed chinbone. “Face flayed, just like the others.”

Saenz nods. “Clean horizontal slit under the chin from ear to ear.”

Jerome looks up at him. “What do we know about the knife?”

“Again, very likely a small blade, about six inches long, no more than an inch wide. Something easy to handle for close, detailed work. Very sharp, no serration. And we've got the same grooves on the chinbone.”

Saenz peels off his gloves and drops them into a bucket reserved for medical waste. He walks to a drafting table to one side of the room. The table is a cast-off from the university's Mass Communications Department; it was originally used by film students for drawing cartoons. In the center of it is a translucent circle of hard, movable plastic, with a lightbulb underneath. He flips on the switch and slides two sets of photographic negatives onto the plate, motioning for the other man to look.

Jerome follows him, stripping his own gloves off as he goes and dropping them into the same bucket. He squints into the magnifying glass Saenz holds over the first set of negatives, black-and-white photos of thin, scratchy marks gouged through flesh and into the child's chinbone.

“They're a bit difficult to see with the flesh still clinging to the bone, but they're there if you look closely.”

Unlike this boy, most of the other victims were examined by Saenz either weeks or months after they had been killed. By then much of the flesh that had remained after the flaying had decomposed, revealing far more of the bone surface, and any instrument marks that had been made on it, than with this victim.

The younger priest stares down through the glass for a few moments. “Long marks, and deep. Think it was the same blade used on the torso?”

“No, the blade notches on the ribs are slightly thicker.” Saenz moves the magnifying glass over the second set and waits while Jerome examines them. This second set of negatives was taken from the sternum and some of the ribs exposed after evisceration of the body.

“Could have been the tip.”

Saenz frowns and shakes his head. “Still too thick. No, I don't think it was even a blade at all.” He switches off the light as Jerome moves back toward the body. “Ask me about the teeth.”

“Father Gus, what about the teeth?”

“Pitting.”

“A mouth breather. Just like some of the others.”

The front teeth of three of the five other victims they'd seen had minute pits, invisible to the naked eye. This showed that they had breathed often through their mouths—a sign of chronic respiratory disease. Their families could rarely afford meat or fish, and so the children were raised on diets short on protein, long on carbohydrates and other soft, mushy, insubstantial food. The lack of protein in their diets also partly explained how small they were as they hit their teens.

“Sexual assault?”

“Nope.”

Jerome nods. “But the excision of the genitals
. . .
I still can't fully account for that.” He thinks back to previous case reports and clinical assessments that he had come across during his studies in abnormal psychology. “Some sexual conflict in there somewhere.” He thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. “Time of death?”

“When he was found, he was a mass of maggots. The weather's been both humid and wet. I wouldn't put it at more than two, three days. Four at most, but highly unlikely.”

Saenz walks over to his desk and puts on his reading glasses, then picks up a clipboard and squints down at a document typed in smudgy carbon on a sheet of onion skin. “Like the others, there was very little blood found around the body.”

“Suggesting
. . .
”

“That he killed them elsewhere. Wherever he does it, there's going to be a lot of blood. So it must be fairly well hidden. Or at least somewhere easy to clean, easy to flush out—a bathroom, a garage. He would have had to change clothes too before he dumped the bodies, to avoid suspicion.”

Jerome runs a hand over his face and holds it over his mouth for a few seconds before walking to the whiteboard. Saenz joins him there.

Six
is the heading of a new column on the extreme right of the board. Down the leftmost column, marking out the rows, is a series of categories:
age
,
sex
,
date found, approximate date of death
,
mutilations
.

“The body was found on the seventh of this month,” Jerome says. He picks up a marker, stares at the blank space at the end of a row titled
approximate date of death
and starts tapping the board, as though counting. Then he glances over his shoulder at Saenz. “So we're looking at, what?”

“Medicolegal officer says the fifth, most likely.”

Jerome turns to the whiteboard again and writes
July 5
in the space. He caps the marker, puts it on the whiteboard ledge and steps back. That's when he notices Saenz staring hard at the board, his brow furrowed in concentration.