by P. F. Kluge
“I missed the part about being a bodyguard,” Griffin said. He took Susan by the arm and started leading her away. “Nice seeing you.”
He felt Santos’s eyes on his back as he walked out toward the street.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Susan asked.
“I don’t get it. What on earth was Cecilia Santos doing there?”
“Why? Did it surprise you?”
“She works for Marcos, doesn’t she? And she shows up—does she ever show up!—at a party given by the leader of the legal opposition, the man all lovers of democracy and military bases hope will succeed Ferdinand. I don’t get it . . .”
“Look at me,” said Susan. “Are my eyes a little greener than usual?”
“I’ve done it, haven’t I?”
“Cecilia Santos is Birdy Villanueva’s younger sister.”
“What?”
“Welcome to Manila.”
CHAPTER 34
Riding through the night, sharing the back seat of a car with a desired woman. Tingling combination of intimacy and strangeness. Shine of headlights down the highway, low gleam of instruments along the dashboard, rolled-down windows open to the wet, summery air.
“That’s it, isn’t it, for the parties?”
“Not quite,” she said. She was curled up, studying him.
“You’re giving me a green-eyed look,” he said.
She reached forward and pulled a curtain that separated the driver’s seat from the back of the car. “Come over here.”
He’d wanted her ever since they met at the Manila Hotel. Now he found the feeling was mutual. She was in his mouth, in his hands, surging closer, no equivocation or hesitation about this last New Year’s Eve party. No stopping, either. Until she stopped.
“Since it’s very clear we’re going to fuck . . .” She said it so briskly, like a diplomat delivering a communiqué, Griffin had to laugh.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“So am I. You’ll see. But now there are some things I have to tell you.” She lit a cigarette, and from the way she inhaled, he guessed she enjoyed the few that she allowed herself. She seemed like a person who rationed pleasures. “I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. I played tennis, I rode horses. I loathed gospel music. I was a scholarship student, a super-achiever. First black this, first female that, first black female something else. At the time, it seemed important. A lot of people were watching me. I got married the June I graduated from college, from Spelman. My husband was an all-American from Morehouse. Academic all-American . . .”
She inhaled again and Griffin admired the way she told the story so far, so evenly that he couldn’t decide whether the academic all-American husband she’d just mentioned had been wrenched away in a tragic plane crash or dumped off in divorce court. He was interested in finding out.
“When a marriage ends, it ends in one of two ways,” she continued, still so perfectly reasonable she might have been talking about tourist visas. “One way is that somebody fails to keep the terms of the original deal. That’s sad. What’s sadder is the second way. When somebody decides to change the deal, wants something else, something more. That was me. It wasn’t about money or kids or sex. I didn’t know what it was about. Maybe it was that I wasn’t going to be the first female this or first black that anymore. I was going to be the next or the latest of just another . . .”
“So you saw an ad for the Foreign Service.”
“When I studied for the examination it was . . . something to do. The way people study for law school, just to see if they have what it takes to get in. I did.”
“I’ll bet you did.”
“At first I was playing. But I’m not playing now. I’m serious now. I want you to know that. I can see you getting hooked on Manila. The mystery and the intrigue. I don’t blame you. I felt the same way too. But then I realized I had a choice to make and I had to make it before it was too late. So do you. You have to decide whether you want to be a part of the history of this place or whether you want this place to be a part of the history of you. Do you understand?”
“A marriage or a fling.”
“Put it that way if you like. Whether this is where you stay or whether it’s an episode on the way to someplace else. Well I’ve made that decision. I’m here to do my job well so I’m in line for advancement. That means the same job in a better place or a better job in a place like this.”
“I see,” Griffin said. “You have work to do, places to go, people to see.”
“You make it sound silly. Maybe it is. Anyway, I’m here now. Next year I’m gone. So no promises, Mr. Backyard Faraway. That’s all.”
She sat back when she was done, relaxing as if the delivery of that speech had been the last item on a long list of things she had to do before leaving work. Griffin wondered if he ought to reciprocate, if this were part of what it was all about when you got into your thirties. You exchanged credentials. Maybe it was his turn to clear his throat and offer up his childhood in New Jersey, newspaper work, lure of New York City, travel writing as a ticket round the world. He turned to begin—it seemed only fair—but the car moved onto a rough road, headlights probing a driveway flanked by orderly ranks of coconut palms.
“We’re here,” she said. “Hallelujah!”
“Where are we?” Griffin asked, chagrined that he’d missed the chance to respond to her preconjugal speech. Maybe she knew all she had to know. Or all that was worth knowing. Maybe she didn’t care.
The car pulled in front of a main house, plantation style, verandah and all, with one light on in an office at one side. The driver drove off, leaving Griffin standing outside while Susan entered, stepped behind a registration desk, and found some keys that had been left out for her. Outside, Griffin’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. He saw a dozen cottages scattered among the palms, like illustrations in a children’s book, a peaceful village in a happy land.
“Hidden Valley,” she said. “It’s my getaway spot. A little resort.”
“Is it a plantation?”
“You’ll see. And George . . .”
“Yes?”
“Let’s forget all the other stuff for a while. Your career, my career . . .”
“Let’s.”
Inside their cottage, she slipped into the bathroom, and came out in a white terry-cloth bathrobe. She told him to take off his clothes and wrap a towel around himself.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ve got ten minutes. It’s New Year’s Eve, remember?”
She was smiling her green-eyed smile, the wise and knowing smile he’d noticed before, the smile that Harry Harding had seen on a postcard once and never forgotten. The waiting-for-you-down-the-road look. Had Harding ever caught up with such a smile?
She led him past the main house, past a thatched shelter that looked like a dining area, with tables, bar, and the inevitable bandstand. They passed through the palms, into a wooded area, a jungle that had been tamed and trimmed into a botanical garden. They crossed a stream, passed one pool, then another, then a stream again. The sound of running water was on all sides.
“Bathing pools,” Susan said. “The man who owned this place wanted an old-world spa like Carlsbad or Baden-Baden. Each pool tastes and feels a little different. Some are warm, some are icy cold. . . . Hurry up!”
She took his hand, tugging him along. The path hair pinned up the side of a hill, squeezing around rock faces, skipping over roots, brushing through rustling thickets of bamboo. The sound of water grew louder.
“It’s a cascade,” she said, almost running. “My favorite place.”
At last they were there, at the place she’d chosen for the stroke of twelve. A pool fed by a waterfall above, feeding into a waterfall below, lined with moss-covered rocks and fern-covered banks. A rock garden with hanging vines and creepers, overarching trees. Above it all, a cleft of night sky and a fleet of stars.
“I’ve always wanted to be here with someone I liked. . . . I haven’t managed that.” She stood next to him, drew clo
se. “I have to be careful,” she whispered. Her lips were at his ears, her hands circled around him, meeting at his chest. “You understand. A single woman. A black woman. I have to be discreet.” Her hands retreated; she was tugging at her bathrobe. “A woman in a foreign country, a diplomat besides . . .” She drew against him again, this time without her bathrobe. “But every now and then,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders, guiding him into a turn so that he would come face to face with her, “especially when you’re in a perfectly nice place,” and he felt her legs against him, and her breasts, and her arms wrapped around, and his hands moved down her shoulders, down and down, but he kept his eyes on hers, because he wanted to see what they looked like the moment he caught up with her, “with a perfectly nice man,” and her lips moved across his, across his cheek to his right ear, “on New Year’s Eve, twelve midnight,” and to his other ear, “I say fuck discretion.”
Griffin awoke at sunrise—a habit he’d acquired during his travels with Harding—got quietly out of the bed he’d shared with Susan, slid open the screen door that gave out onto the cottage verandah, and stepped out into the morning. It was the best part of the day, the old man always told him, first and best and now, not even a tumultuous night, making love from pool to pool, a night so close to erotic fantasy it was almost frightening, not even Susan could deprive him of it. “Top of the morning,” the old man always said. Though it lasted only twenty minutes, you could always count on the top of the morning. He could picture Harding sitting on a front step somewhere with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, or leaning against the hood of their car, using the first light to look over his father’s maps, which he must have memorized by now, yet carried like a Holy Book. Count on the morning. Count on him in the morning: he was there. Hovering. Why else was it when he opened his eyes and found Susan beside him, when he was all full of pleasure and pride and wonder, he felt a small twinge of guilt? The same sort of guilt he’d felt when Lerner took him out to Tondo to face Felipe Olmos. It was as though, in giving himself to someone else, he’d gotten off the track. Oh, had he ever!
He looked down at Susan, spying on her. He saw tousled hair, shrewd face, luxuriant breasts, full thighs, a body so ripe, so manifestly sexual, he had to marvel at the force of will that had kept her out of maternity wards and landed her in an embassy across the world. She’d made herself a diplomat, but that wasn’t the direction nature had pointed her in. She was something so gorgeously out of fashion the words for her were 1950s words, dated and sexist words like bombshell, knockout, piece of ass. For her, last night was a relapse, no doubt about it, an attack of something she’d seen coming. That explained that odd cautionary speech in the car: what you get tonight, Mr. Backyard Faraway, isn’t what you get tomorrow, or the next day. No promises.
Now, out on the verandah, he watched the first light infiltrate among the palms and sparkle on the morning grass. The dew was so heavy, you’d guess that it had rained. Now there was sunlight on the hedge of croton, turning waxy yellow leaves to gold, lighting up the red and purple bougainvillea blossoms, white flowering ginger. You could smell the ginger. And another scent. Oh, God! The smell of coffee and frying bacon from the kitchen across the lawn!
“Why are you laughing?” She came out and sat beside him, wrapped in the terry-cloth bathrobe from the night before.
“Because it’s perfect. It’s unreal.”
“You’re right,” she said, settling down beside him. For a while, they were content to sit together and watch the place come to life. A dog trotting by and a boy leading a mud-caked carabao out to pasture, and someone in the kitchen deciding that, it being all of 6:00 A.M., it wasn’t too early to start blasting a Wayne Newton tape.
“We have all sorts of options. Breakfast, of course. A morning swim before breakfast, though. And before the swim, I’d like us to . . .”
“Yes?” He knew what was coming, but he wanted to see what she’d say. A question of syntax. Would she say “make love”? Or did she have a coarser verb in mind?
“. . . make love,” she said.
The sign on the door said DO NOT DISTURB. They were sprawled on the bed, exhausted, contemplating each other: the sort of regard that gently segues from gratitude for past pleasures to a lust for new performances. But there was a knock on the door.
“Miss Hayes?”
“Yes?” she called.
“A phone call, mum. A Mr. Robinson.”
“All right.” Already she was changing: brisk, competent, back on duty, while Griffin was still resenting that Robinson knew her plans so well. “I have to be reachable,” she said over her shoulder. She went out the door to take the phone call in the office. When she came back, she said they’d have to leave. Colonel Harding had disappeared.
CHAPTER 35
It was New Year’s Day and the embassy air conditioners were off duty. Griffin felt his shirt stick and come unstuck every time he shifted on the couch outside Phil Robinson’s office. Amazing how things could go downhill. At sunrise, everything was perfect. But there was something in the world that could come out of the end of the phone or the inside of a letter, or off the tip of your tongue, a force stronger than gravity that hated happiness.
“Hey, so how’s the budding author?” Eddie Richter sauntered into the office. “Looks like it’s really hit the fan.”
“What do you know?”
“I hear he slipped the leash, ran into the boondocks. The newspapers are on it. I got some calls.”
“You mean you made some calls.”
“All right already. They were gonna hear anyway. Better they should hear it from me. It’s happening fast.”
“Can’t hurt the movie, can it, Eddie?”
“No, my boy. I won’t lie to you. You noticed. Another thing it can’t hurt is your book. In case you didn’t notice that . . .”
“Gentlemen . . .” Phil Robinson opened the door to his office and stood aside to admit them. This was Phil Robinson on overtime, sleeves rolled up, cigar in hand, crisis-managing. “Come on in. . . . I think you know almost everybody.”
He knew Susan, though Eddie didn’t. Robinson introduced them. They both knew Cecilia Santos, in her bruncheon finest, and they both knew Charley Camper, in dungarees and T-shirt.
“Phil, I haven’t had the pleasure.” The speaker, off to one side, was a bright, good-looking young man in the uniform of the Philippine army.
“Sure. Eddie Richter, George Griffin, this is Major Prospero Herrera of General Contreras’s staff. Now, just let me recap. Colonel Harding is missing, since the day before yesterday, early in the morning. In the course of—what should I call it?— a sentimental journey through the Philippines, with his memoir writer in tow, he visits Charley Camper, wartime associate, now residing in Subic Bay. After one night, Mr. Griffin leaves Colonel Harding and goes to Manila. Whose idea was that, by the way?”
“It was mutual,” Griffin said.
“Mutual? You both thought of it?”
“Yes.”
“At the same time?”
“I can’t say. We’d covered a lot of ground together. A lot of emotions. I wanted to get back to Manila for a while . . .”
“What about those emotions you mentioned?”
“His or mine?”
“His, of course. Anything that suggested he might do something?”
“Something . . . like what?”
“Come on, Griffin. Like what he did!”
“I’m not sure what he’s done,” Griffin countered. “He’s visiting Charley Camper. And he decides to leave. So?”
“Okay,” Robinson acknowledged. “Mr. Camper, why don’t you tell Mr. Griffin what you told me.”
“George?”
It hurt to see a big man scared, to watch him shift uncomfortably in his chair, lean back, rock forward. “I thought I’d take him out fishing. I got the use of this boat. I thought he’d like that. Or maybe we’d go into town and shoot pool, or watch a movie at the base. Lots of guys around who wanted to mee
t him. You know that.”
“Sure.”
“He’s not the easiest man to be with, one on one, with nothing to do . . .”
“I know that, Charley.”
“He stayed inside, the day you left. I only saw him to eat. He stayed up late that night. The light was on in his room. Toward dawn, he comes into my room. He says he figured he’d be leaving. I ask where. He shrugs his shoulders. Like he was saying ‘out there.’ I tell him I’m coming with him. He says no. What’s he looking for, I ask him. Old friends, he says. That’s what I am, I say. There’s more out there, he says. I say, they’re dead, the ones I know about. Maybe, he says. Maybe not. ‘Who you looking for, Colonel?’ I ask. ‘Who you really looking for?’ He says, `Juan Olmos.’ “
“Christ!” Robinson burst out. “Yamashita’s damn treasure wasn’t enough. One crock of shit wouldn’t do. He had to have Juan Olmos too.”
“The treasure was all right,” Eddie Richter said. “We had plans for treasure. We could maybe tie it to the movie. Could’ve had a contest, could’ve had maps and clues in the newspapers, and the first person figures out where we put the treasure gets a trip from Manila to Hollywood, like they used to do with—what was it—Canadian Club whiskey . . .”
“A suggestion that was canceled,” Cecilia Santos interjected with a withering stare at Eddie Richter, “because of its flabbergastingly bad taste.”
“And its danger,” Eddie fired back. “Seems like it’s touch and go up in those mountains. Things out of control. One revolution or another, I forget.”
“Mr. Richter,” Major Herrera intervened. “You know Colonel Harding. Any notion of what he has in mind? Friendship? Revenge? Or—forgive me—publicity?”
“Sorry,” Eddie said. “I don’t know him that well.”
“Mr. Griffin?”
“I can’t say.”
“But there is something you can say,” Herrera continued. “You can say why you and Mr. Lerner went to Tondo yesterday afternoon to visit Juan Olmos’s brother.”
