The Leper Spy (3 page)

By the end of October 1941, the rhetoric was fevered. The new Japanese premier, Gen. Hideki Tojo, said that Japan “must go on and develop in ever expanding progress—there is no retreat!”

“If Japan's hundred millions merge and go forward, nothing can stop us,” he said. “Wars can be fought with ease.”

On October 31, Halloween, a German U-boat torpedoed the USS
Reuben James,
which was on neutrality patrol near Iceland, the first sinking of an American destroyer by the Nazis. The ambush killed more than one hundred men. German chancellor Adolf Hitler's spin the following day, that the United States had attacked the submarine, was viewed as an attempt to pull Japan into the war. And it was followed by increasingly hostile rhetoric in the Japanese press.

On December 5, just as a group of educated Japanese civilians began an effort to convince the government to appoint a commission
to try to solve the Pacific deadlock, President Roosevelt learned of the massing of Japanese troops in French Indochina. He called for an explanation. Two of Tokyo's envoys, Ambassadors Kichisaburo Nomura and Saburo Kurusu, showed up at the diplomatic entrance to the Department of State.

News cameras flashed as the two walked in, smiling blandly. They were ushered into the office of Cordell Hull, the Tennessean who had been secretary of state since 1933. The two met with Hull for twenty-five minutes. The United States was demanding that Japan sign a nonaggression pact and evacuate China and Indochina or its assets would remain frozen. Japan wanted America to halt its naval expansion in the western Pacific. Talks quickly broke down, and the envoys left Hull with a terse 150-word response from Tokyo, saying Japan was only reacting to aggressive Chinese troop movement: “As a natural sequence of this step, certain movements have been made among the troops stationed in the southern part of the said territory. It seems that an exaggerated report has been made of these movements. It should be added that no measure has been taken on the part of the Japanese government that may transgress the stipulations of the protocol of joint defense between Japan and France.”

The War Department cabled MacArthur, saying, “Hostile action possible at any moment” and that “the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.”

“Everything is in readiness,” MacArthur replied.

It was not.

Lookouts sighted aircraft north of Manila, near Clark Field.

The next day, a Japanese reconnaissance plane was spotted in the sky.

The next day, at dawn, planes appeared once again, dark spots in the clouds above a peaceful island.

Later, MacArthur would write, “I prepared my meager forces, to counter as best I might, the attack that I knew would come from the north, swiftly, fiercely, and without warning.”

On the night of December 7, all of Manila seemed to be partying. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the most important event on the calendar, the celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary receiving the Messiah, was the next day. So the boys and girls danced the night away at the University of the Philippines. There were cocktail parties in Malate and jam sessions in Tondo. The twelve hundred men of the Twenty-Seventh Bombardment Group crammed into the Manila Hotel to celebrate their brigadier general's birthday. As they poured drinks and lit cigarettes, the Empire of the Sun was preparing for war.

T
he cadets stood in rigid formation on the reviewing grounds, their spines unbowed, rifles at their sides. Father John Fidelis Hurley was shown to his seat, a few feet from the podium erected for his friend the president. He recognized familiar faces in the crowd, practically all the ranking officials of the Commonwealth of the Philippines—Supreme Court justices, congressmen, senators, cabinet members. Beyond them sat thousands, here to watch the formal military review of the young men in the Reserve Officers' Training Corp (ROTC) at the University of the Philippines.

Hurley, the powerfully built superior of the Jesuit mission since 1936, was friendly with most of the politicians, even if he sparred with them occasionally. Some even attended Sunday Mass at the college he ran, the Ateneo de Manila. In a country where 90 percent of citizens were Catholic, the line between church and state, if such a line even existed, was blurry.

Hurley had come on the advice of a friend, a priest who organized the chaplain corps for the Philippine Army. He told Hurley the day would be unusual, that President Manuel Quezon seemed heavily burdened lately and had spent the week nervously preparing his address.

As the cadets finished their drills without incident, Hurley noticed the air was cool and the sky cloudy. It smelled like rain.
When Quezon approached the podium to give his speech, the sky opened, and a hard, drenching downpour fell. The cadets broke ranks without orders and sprinted for cover. Quezon was angry and bellowed at them, and the boys sheepishly returned.

The president clearly had a prepared speech, but he shoved the papers aside and leaned on the podium, his expression stern. “I am here to make a public confession of my first failure in public life,” he said. A suppressed laugh rose from the crowd. Quezon was not joking. “If bombs start falling in Manila next week …”

Hurley couldn't hear what the president said next, because laughter thundered from the crowd. Hurley saw fury in Quezon's eyes. “You fools!” he shouted. The crowd fell silent. “If bombs start falling in Manila next week, then take the traitors and hang them to the nearest lamppost.” Quezon continued, trying to warn them that war was coming at any moment and nobody was ready.

Hurley had never seen a man so sincerely honest, but the crowd reacted with incredulity. Even the cadets. They didn't know that Quezon had spent weeks complaining to US president Franklin Roosevelt about the weak defenses in the islands, or that Quezon had felt the need to tell his countrymen that war was coming when Roosevelt had begged him not to for fear it would upset the delicate international situation. He had defied Roosevelt out of a sense of duty to his people, and they had laughed.

M
aybe war was coming, but there was always one last dance to be shared at the Silver Slipper, one last Hollywood film at the Ideal or the Lyric cinemas on Escolta, one last sweaty swing at the Santa Ana Cabaret, the largest in the Pacific. This was peacetime in the Philippine Islands for a generation that had never known war. And in the folds of that intoxicating happiness, a young man and a young woman found love.

The young woman was petite, with narrow shoulders and slender arms. She parted her curly black hair on the left, and the ringlets fell down past her dark eyes to her shoulders. Her pedigree did not match his. Born on August 5, 1917, Josefina Veluya grew up outside Manila, to the southeast, in the rural province of Lucban. Her name meant “God shall add.” As a child, the girl they called Joey idolized Joan of Arc.

She'd read the story of the young warrior in a book, and it awoke in her a powerful defiance. She used to pretend to be the martyr saint, pretend she could hear the voice of God, comforting her and commanding her in battle. She got bored pretending and asked her brother if he could pretend to be the voices, which always made her laugh.

Earnestly, she prayed each day that God would let her be a nun and live a cloistered life in service and reflection. When her parents
both died unexpectedly, the Good Shepherd Sisters convent seemed like a natural place for her, but her body was attacked by tuberculosis and the nuns did not have the capacity to give her care.

She was taken in by her grandparents, who owned a coconut plantation, and she soon regained her health. She was then sent to live with an uncle in Manila for schooling, and he enrolled her in studies at the nearby convent, where her new classmates were children from wealthy families. She was well read, spoke proper English, and adored all things beautiful—art, poetry, and especially music. When her inheritance ran low, she started working to pay her own tuition. At the convent, she was a member of every athletic team—swimming, baseball, basketball. She was elected president of the student council.

Renato Maria Guerrero was a rising medical student, a scion of one of the most distinguished families in the Philippines, with deep roots in intellectual society in the city. He came from painters, lawyers, poets, journalists, and doctors, many of them revolutionaries as well. His father, Manuel Severino Guerrero, was the most renowned doctor of his time. People said he had a clinical eye, because he could diagnose a man's illness simply by studying his outward appearance. He taught medicine at the University of Santo Tomas, wrote for
La Republica Filipina
and
La Opinion,
and published a short story collection on the side. His reputation connected him to Manila's elite, men and women whose names would live on the city's infrastructure, its signposts and buildings, long after they were gone.

The doctor gave his children all the comforts his wealth afforded. He bought them the latest gadgets from shops like La Puerta del Sol, white rolls of linen, silverware of all kinds, wine and chocolates and Piña hams. The family lived in a two-story house facing Plaza Ferguson and owned two cars and a horse. In the summers, the doctor rented a large nipa house in Antipolo, not far from the church. He bought his children one of the first gramophones in the islands, the kind you had to wind by hand after each record. The children
went to sleep at night listening to Caruso, Chaliapin, Tetrazzini, Wagner, Beethoven. Young Renato, the eldest of the children, studied piano and practiced until he became a brilliant player. His favorites were the Debussy pieces.

The family was the wealthiest of all the Ermita Guerreros, so refined that the children were forbidden to eat with their hands, which was customary in the culture, or to converse in Tagalog, the native tongue.

They were pious, too, and each child was baptized almost immediately after birth. The elders used to ask the children, “Why were you born?” And the answer they expected was “To know, serve, obey, and love God on earth and be happy with Him in heaven.” They learned the catechism, memorized Our Father, Hail Mary, and the Apostles' Creed, and took Communion daily, rain or shine.

Their father had a quirk, though, in that he was terrified of germs and communicable diseases. He rarely opened doors unless he had a handkerchief or napkin, and he was constantly washing his hands.

When he fell ill from stomach cancer in 1919, he sent Renato, twelve at the time, to fetch a priest, and his sick room was soon occupied by the upper crust of Manila. He received the sacred viaticum, the
extremaunción,
and the plenary indulgence for the time of death. When he had finished, his children approached him one at a time.

“You don't understand anything about death,” he told Manuel II, who was holding a toy.

“This one is undefinable,” he said about Wilfredo, who would become perhaps the greatest playwright in the Pacific. “God will take care of you, my son.”

He called Renato closer.

“You, being the eldest, must be like the father of your younger brothers,” he said.

He blessed them all, and the visitors in his room began to weep. He spoke softly of the Virgin Mary and then died. His wife was so
sick with grief that she would wear black every day for the remaining thirty-nine years of her life.

Renato helped his mother and aunts raise his brothers. His father left the family a ten-thousand-peso insurance policy, two cars, the house, and all his possessions, but because the children were all minors, their mother could not spend any money without permission from the family's lawyer. She eventually sold both cars, moved her children into a rental flat, and rented their large home to Americans. She kept her sons fed off the monthly rental income.

The boys attended the Ateneo de Manila, inside the walls of the Spanish city of Intramuros, where they sang in the chorus in lieu of paying tuition. All but Renato, whose high school and college were paid for by Dr. Gregorio Singian, a famous surgeon. It was the Jesuit priests at the Ateneo who introduced him to Joey.

It wasn't long before she had shortened his name to Rene. They took long strolls together down the Escolta, in the thick and warm evenings. He fell hard for her. He liked what he called her snub nose, which turned up ever so slightly, and her high cheeks. She carried herself gracefully but could also be a clown.

They married on April 21, 1934. He was twenty-six and she was just sixteen and they moved into a lovely home on Florida Street in the Ermita district of Manila. His studies and hospital work kept him away from home, busy as he was on the ward at St. Paul's Hospital in the old walled city of Intramuros. But the job afforded them a long and sleek Buick, a driver, and two live-in maids.

Less than two years after their marriage, Joey learned she was pregnant. Rene was now a doctor, so Joey began to plan for a home birth. On November 6, 1936, she gave birth to a baby girl, and they named her Cynthia. She had big brown eyes and dark chestnut hair and beautiful white skin. Joey thought the child took after her own mother, who was Spanish. Even as a baby, Cynthia was full of unpredictable humor and kept her parents laughing.

Joey fell in love with the baby, the only child she would have. The only child she would have to give away.

G
eneral MacArthur could see the Rock from his favorite balcony, which opened off the dining room. The jungle-covered island of Corregidor rose from the sea in the shape of a tadpole. At roughly one and a half miles wide and two and a half miles long, it was the largest of the four fortified islands planted in the mouth of Manila Bay, and it was divided into three defensive shelves: Topside, Middleside, and Bottomside, the low center of the island. Administrative offices were located Topside. Barracks and living quarters were on Middleside. And Bottomside held the cold storage installations, Filipino barracks, warehouses, the shop area, the power plant, and the docks. Beyond Bottomside rose Malinta Hill, reaching an elevation of four hundred feet above sea level. Inside the belly of the hill was an extensive tunnel system. A small landing field occupied the tail of the island, farther to the east.