by P. F. Kluge
“And sir . . . who are you with?” said Santos.
“The Daily Planet, sweetheart. I’ve got a couple questions for Colonel Harding.”
“I was about to close . . .” She was blushing, or flushing, and Griffin saw why. The stranger came forward and his T-shirt came into view: AS LONG AS I’VE GOT A FACE, HONEY, YOU’VE GOT A SEAT.
“This won’t take a minute, darling. Colonel Harding, how you doin’ sir?”
“Fine, thanks,” Harding responded, much revived. “What can I do for you?”
“I want to talk about Yamashita’s treasure, sir.”
“The movie?”
“No, sir, the real thing. I hear you mentioned it the other day. I also hear you’re saving the whole story for your book. But I drove five hours from Angeles City hoping you could tell me a little something.”
“That’s a long drive,” Harding said. “I know.”
“You’ve driven it?”
“And walked it too. And, sure, it was forty years ago. But it was as long then as it is now.”
“Hey, Colonel, this may be out of line or something, but I just want to say I’m glad to see you. I really care about back then. And it plain tickles me, knowing that you’ve come back here.”
“Ask anything you want. I’ll try to oblige.”
“Colonel, in the first place, was there really a treasure?”
“Yes.”
“You saw it?”
“Yes.” Harding snapped off his answers like a parade ground recruit, head forward, eyes shining.
“Gold? Art? Jewels? What was it?”
“I can’t tell you that. Not now.”
“Was it from Bangkok or Rangoon? Singapore? Malaya?”
“It was from here,” Harding said. “It was home-grown.”
“You fixing to get it?”
“I hadn’t decided. The thing of it is . . .” Harding paused and Griffin couldn’t decide whether he was honestly faltering or deliberately building tension. His voice was at the level of a whisper, which everyone, movie people, reporters, and all, leaned forward to catch. “This treasure hasn’t been good for people. It hasn’t made anyone rich or happy. It hasn’t brought long life. On the contrary.”
“Christ!” Bill Roach spun around, almost dancing, he was that excited. “I’m getting hard just thinking about this! You mean it’s one of them jinx treasures, like the Hope Diamond or the Moonstone! The owner dies. It’s a regular—what was that broad’s name?—Pandora’s Box.”
“You said it,” Harding answered. “Pandora’s box.”
“This has gone a little far off course,” Cecilia Santos said.
“Thanks a lot,” Bill Roach shouted. “It was a real pleasure talking to you, sir, and I hope whatever it is you’re looking for, you find it, and if you need any help digging it up, or spending it up, you can count on this boy.”
“You’re welcome,” Harding said.
“Now,” Cecilia Santos announced. “Out on the airstrip . . .”
Out on the airstrip, they were working on a scene that required a Japanese jeep and an American on horseback to charge each other at full speed and then, at the point of collision, the American horseman would jump in the air, leap over the jeep, toss a hand grenade into the driver’s seat, then land safely on the other side. It was a great stunt and Cecilia Santos assured everybody that they wouldn’t want to miss it. But it was too late. Harry Roberts Harding had the place buzzing with talk of Yamashita’s treasure. He’d walked into a trap at the press conference. The trap was normality, repetition, boredom. And—with a crucial assist from Bill Roach—Harding had turned defeat into victory. Harding walked off, magic and mystery intact, while Cecilia Santos touted a horse-and-jeep act.
“I roughed him up.” Clifford Lerner came over to Griffin. His sardonic press conference style was gone. He seemed chagrined. “I want to say I’m sorry. Will you tell him? I didn’t realize this whole thing was a setup. It was clever of them, bringing in some other war heroes. As if they were saying there are lots of heroes, sung and unsung. If I’d realized what they were up to, I’d have saved my questions for another day. I’m sorry. Will you tell him?”
“Sure.”
“I play by the rules. I didn’t know the game was rigged.”
“So what?” Griffin asked. “It was rigged. But in the end, he won it anyway. Didn’t he?”
“I believe you’re right,” Lerner said, brightening. “He won it after all. He certainly did.”
Part Four
TO BATAAN
CHAPTER 21
At night, after listening to the radio reports of fighting on Bataan, Charley Camper and Harry Roberts Harding started an argument that was to last for forty years. It wasn’t an argument, really. It was just that they wondered, sometimes aloud, about the same thing. They never solved it, and they carried their wonderment throughout their lives, so that Charley Camper would be feeding chickens in his farm overlooking the naval base at Subic Bay, watching the fleet come in, and the whores come down to meet the fleet, the whole thing a parody of attack and counterattack, and he couldn’t help musing what would happen if this were, say, San Diego and those ships were foreign. What about those California girls? Would they be putting their little bodies on the block?
And, half a world away, washed up on a Florida coast, Harry Roberts Harding would find himself visualizing the conquest of America. He tried guessing which current leader would take to the hills, how long they’d last. He couldn’t see a political campaign—Dole, Mondale, Kennedy, Tip O’Neill—and not wonder about them. On his bad nights, he pictured all of them, the generals, the candidates, the newscasters, all of them on trial, war crimes trials, like General Yamashita’s or the one at Nuremberg. He couldn’t help himself. Would Alexander Haig mount the gallows as stoically as Yamashita? Would he feign madness, like Hess? How would Westmoreland conduct himself? Who would bow, who would shrug, who would grovel? Would anybody find religion? Which of our Republicans would be a Goering, laughing and baiting, knowing he had a cyanide capsule tucked away in his cell? Morbid thoughts for a Florida motel keeper.
After the airport skirmish, Harding had led them to a place his father had marked, a rocky outcrop near the top of a wooded ridge west of Baguio. They could probably have sat out the war there. The place was inaccessible from below and reachable only by a narrow trail from above. The Mesa Verde cliff dwellings were a pushover, compared to this. They had good shelter, ample canned food. They had water, medicine, ammunition. They had a panoramic view of Baguio, the lost city. And that, finally, was what brought them down.
It started with what they called reconnaissance. They made records of convoys coming up Kennon Road from Manila. They noted plane landings and departures. They tallied armored columns pointing up into the mountain provinces. They crept near town at night, spying on Camp John Hay, purchasing beans and cauliflower, corn and strawberries from outlying farms. They took swims in the therapeutic waters at Asin Hot Springs. They weren’t looking for trouble, they told themselves. But every trip brought them closer to it.
One night, Corregidor radio claimed that the Filipino and American forces had battled the Japanese to a virtual stalemate on Bataan, holding a line halfway down the peninsula, while the exhausted Japanese fell back to regroup. This made the isolation of the cave all the more disturbing. So did reports that a mile-long convoy was on its way from Hawaii, hundreds of planes, thousands of men. But it was an English-language broadcast from Baguio that really inflamed them. Singapore had fallen, the Japanese announced. The last bastion of imperialism was gone: 130,000 troops surrendered. To celebrate, there was to be a victory parade through the streets of Baguio the following day and the entire population was invited.
“You heard what they said,” Meade remarked. “Y’all come.”
“I like that,” Sudul said.
“Like what?” asked Camper. It was too bad about Charley. He was the ideal sergeant, career army through and through, but he wasn’t cut out
for command. He missed the comforting presence of his superiors, of orders from above. He had no ideas of his own, no strategy, so he had fallen into this trap of letting the men propose expeditions, one more dangerous than the other.
“I like the idea of crashing the Japanese victory parade,” Sudul said.
“That’s dumb,” Camper retorted.
“Was there something else you had planned for tomorrow?” Meade challenged him.
“You’re pushing it,” said Camper.
“I aim to push it,” Meade replied, meeting him head on, a cocky country boy who spent most of his time figuring just how much he could get away with.
“Polshanski,” Camper pleaded. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s got to be,” Polshanski said.
Harding was startled. He counted on Polshanski to know more than the others. Harding studied him closely: that thin immigrant face. Those luminous eyes that didn’t miss a thing. Polshanski was the man who knew things. He knew what had to be.
They climbed into the cathedral bell tower and waited for the parade to begin. At dawn, the city was heartbreakingly like the place they remembered, the streets they’d come home on after all-night debauches, with only a few bombed out buildings to show that war had come. First light and roosters crowing from a hundred backyards, dogs sneaking around corners, thin plumes of smoke from cooking fires and women carrying laundry and firewood while it was still cool. Around the middle of the morning, they saw their first Japanese, an officer in a jeep, soon followed by a dozen soldiers and then several Filipinos. Together they decked the street with bunting, with Japanese flags, and with a banner that said FALL, SINGAPORE, FALL. But the street stayed quiet, almost deserted, and now it had the melancholy feeling of a failed carnival, a party that wasn’t quite coming off.
Noon was the announced time for the parade, but the only spectators were some Japanese soldiers and a handful of Filipino police. A Japanese officer paced the speaker’s dais, shouting at aides. At last, a car appeared and some Filipinos in civilian clothes tumbled out. The officer stood on the platform, behind a bank of microphones, haranguing the hapless Filipinos, an oration aimed at an audience of two. When he finished, the Filipinos went off, each of them in a jeep with a squad of Japanese, each carrying a megaphone. You could hear them moving through the city. And now the Filipinos came, emptying out of barrios, out of the marketplace, out of nipa shacks at the edge of the countryside, till they lined Session Road by the thousands. The Japanese officer had his audience now, yet his anger flared. A look at the Filipinos told you why: their pathetic, hangdog manners, their shuffling passivity, their draggedy obedience. When they stood, they slouched, when they sat, they squatted. Anyone who had ever served in an army, or gone to summer camp or public school, could see what the Japanese saw, an ordered-around group of people, just going through the motions, without enthusiasm or conviction.
“Pretty sad crowd out there,” Charley Camper said.
“They should have stayed home,” Meade said.
“They’d’ve been shot,” Harding told him. “That’s what the announcement was.”
“I’d’ve run for the hills then!” Meade said.
“Not everybody has that luxury,” Polshanski said.
“You call it a luxury?”
“Afraid I do,” Polshanski said. He glanced over at Harding, as though he didn’t quite have the heart to pass on some bad news directly. “Afraid I do.”
The parade began with a Japanese officer atop a horse that Camper remembered from the polo stables. Next came a group of Japanese soldiers, high-stepping it, and a military band that entered to a snappy march, then paused in front of the speaker’s platform and shifted into something semi-classical. The Filipino cops circulated through the crowd with miniature Japanese flags, pressing them on spectators. The whole occasion was so forced, so awkward and uncomfortable, that before long Harding felt sorry for everybody, the prevailed-upon Filipinos, the harassed Japanese, for everybody who ever attempted to fulfill a plan, or keep a schedule, or meet a quota in the heat. But his compassion ended when he saw what was left of the parade: prisoners, hundreds of foreign internees, Americans and Europeans, businessmen, commonwealth officials, doctors, priests, nuns, retirees, infants, and invalids—a scared, bedraggled procession stumbling up Session Road while Japanese and Filipino cops exhorted the crowd to cheer, wave their flags, and shout, “Fall, Singapore, fall.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sudul said.
“What’s this?” Camper wondered.
“It’s a victory parade,” remarked Polshanski. “With winners and losers.”
“That’s what you say,” Meade responded.
“I never said I liked it,” Polshanski said. “It’s what it is, is all.”
As the marchers came closer, Harding recognized some of them. A dentist who had drilled and filled his teeth. An umpire from softball games at Burnham Park. A Lutheran missionary and his pregnant wife. A schoolteacher who tutored him in plane geometry. Figures and faces from Easter egg hunts and Christmas parties, from dinner dances at the Pines Hotel, from Uncle Harrison’s front porch.
You could feel the shock go through the crowd. No one was spared. It touched the marchers first, the humiliated ones. They weren’t all good people. Some of them were clubby bores with nasty theories about how Filipinos could never stand independence; some were petulant, fussy women who complained about their servants. There were people who’d stayed too long, and some who should never have come at all. But this medieval ceremony absolved them: now they joined the ranks of victims. They’d never been closer to Filipinos, who were themselves shocked at the sight of a world turned upside down. Here again, you could watch it happen. The Japanese flags motionless in their hands. The chant of “Fall, Singapore, fall” melting away to nothing as one Filipino, then another, rushed out to offer water, fruit, bread. The guards stopped them, scolded them, cuffed them, and finally tossed some of the Filipinos among the prisoners, so that screams and crying broke out all along the route of march.
The Japanese were the most shocked of all that afternoon. It was hard to know what they had hoped for. Enthusiasm? Obedience? Respect? But the whole thing had gone terribly wrong, with one miscalculation piled on another, a victory parade turned into a barbaric spectacle. While Japanese officers shouted commands and the Filipino officials echoed them, the musicians discarded instruments and joined cops and soldiers in their struggle to separate the milling, weeping crowd from the marchers. After twenty minutes of shouts and shoves, shots fired into air, the Japanese cordoned off the prisoners. On a command from the platform, they were marched down an alley that turned off the main street, toward the very hill, and the same church, in which the Americans were hiding.
“Christ,” said Charley Camper. “They’re coming. They’re coming this way.”
“What for?” Polshanski wondered.
“What do they want with a church?” asked Meade.
Harding looked down at the procession that wound its way toward them. In front, a dozen men, Filipinos and Americans, prodded by bayonets. Behind them came the other internees, then hundreds who had watched the parade, all of them wailing and crying so that the whole thing was an echo of the countless religious processions that came this way on Catholic holy days, gold-plated Madonnas, flowers, icons, priests, and choirboys.
“They don’t want the church,” said Harding. “They’re going to the cemetery.”
“The cemetery!”
“You heard me. They want to use the cemetery.”
The Japanese and the prisoners they’d selected headed for a grassy patch right where the headstones began. Some of the soldiers guarded the prisoners. They weren’t going anywhere. Many more soldiers faced out at the hundreds who filed in behind them. They fanned out all through the graveyard, filling gravel paths and flowered plots. Some sat on tombstones, some hunkered down on mausoleum roofs, and they kept coming. Soon they were sitting on the rock wall that ran around the cemete
ry while others, stragglers, packed the courtyard right below the church.
A couple of Japanese soldiers forced their way to the center of the crowd. They gave each of the dozen men a shovel or a spade. They began to dig.
“There’s nothing we can do about this,” Harding said to the others, especially to Meade. “You use your Springfield, there’ll be ten times as many dead. There’s nothing we can do about this today.”
“Today?” Meade questioned. “Those people’ll be dead tomorrow.”
“I know. But we won’t be dead.”
“You got plans?”
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Digging one’s own grave. A common enough expression, a useful metaphor, but only rarely is the deed itself performed. Do you take your time, knowing that each spadeful is a fraction of your remaining life, the equivalent of a month, a year, out of the span you’d hoped for? Do you work quickly, wanting the job to be over with? Do you dig a shallow, sloppy trench or make a proper excavation? Hard questions, and no time to decide. Some of the condemned men went at it furiously, like dogs rooting for buried bones, dirt flying over their shoulders, last one in is a rotten egg. Then they sat, tossing aside their shovels and waiting, like gravediggers, for the funeral to arrive. One of the Filipinos who finished fast saw that an American, a balding, elderly man, was faltering. He changed places with him and commenced to dig a second grave. It was an hour before everyone was done. A Japanese soldier moved in back of the group, arranging the Filipinos on one side of a semicircle, the Americans on the other. Some men sank willingly, even thankfully, to their knees. Others had to be forced down. In the crowd, people were saying the Lord’s Prayer, in English, Tagalog, Spanish, some prayers starting while others were finishing, a broken chorus that the Americans in the bell tower picked up as a Japanese officer stepped behind the first Filipino, unholstered a pistol, and shot him in back of the head, an act he repeated five times, casual as a kid tapping a stick against the pickets of a fence. A soldier followed, pushing the spraddled leg, the extended hand, into the grave. That left the Americans still waiting to be shot. When that didn’t happen, when the executioner stepped back and walked off, one of the Americans looked at the other, who shrugged, and a third, the bald one, turned around to see what was happening, what the holdup was, just in time to see the approach of a burly, oversize Japanese noncom with a long sword . . .
