“Ah! Now you are making sense,” says Goto Dengo. “You are going to take the gold out and dump it into the ocean, then?”
“No,” Avi says, with a nervous chuckle.
Goto Dengo raises his eyebrows. “Oh. So, you wish to become rich as part of the bargain?”
At this point Avi does something that Randy’s never seen him do, or even come close to doing, before: he gets pissed off. He doesn’t flip the table over, or raise his voice. But his face turns red, the muscles of his head bulge as he clenches his teeth together, and he breathes heavily through his nose for a while. The Gotos both seem to be rather impressed by this, and so no one says anything for a long time, giving Avi a chance to regain his cool. It seems as though Avi can’t bring words forth, and so finally he takes his wallet out of his pocket and flips through it until he’s found a black-and-white photograph, which he pulls from its transparent sleeve and hands across to Goto Dengo. It’s a family portrait: father, mother, four kids, all with a mid-twentieth century, Middle-European look about them. “My great-uncle,” Avi says, “and his family. Warsaw, 1937. His teeth are down in that hole. You buried my uncle’s teeth!”
Goto Dengo looks up into Avi’s eyes, neither angry nor defensive. Just sad. And this seems to have an effect on Avi, who softens, exhales finally, breaks eye contact.
“I know you probably had no choice,” Avi says. “But that’s what you did. I never knew him, or any of my other relatives who died in the Shoah. But I would gladly dump every ounce of that gold into the ocean, just to give them a decent burial. That’s what I’ll do if you make it a condition. But what I was really planning on doing was using it to make sure that nothing of the kind ever happens again.”
Goto Dengo ponders this for a while, looking stonefaced out over the lights of Tokyo. Then he unhooks his cane from the edge of the table, jams it into the floor, and shoves himself to his feet. He turns towards Avi, straightens his posture, and then bows. It’s the deepest bow Randy’s ever seen. Eventually he straightens up and retakes his seat.
The tension has been broken. Everyone’s relaxed, not to say exhausted.
“General Wing is very close to finding Golgotha,” Randy says, after a decent interval has ticked by. “It’s him or us.”
“It’s us, then,” says Goto Dengo.
R.I.P.
* * *
THE CLAMOR OF THE MARINES’ RIFLES ECHOES through the cemetery, the sharp reports pinging from tombstone to tombstone like pachinko balls. Goto Dengo bends down and thrusts his hand into a pile of loose dirt. It feels good. He scoops up a handful of the stuff; it trickles out from between his fingers and trails down the legs of his crisp new United States Army uniform, getting caught in the trouser cuffs. He steps to the sharp brink of the grave and pours the earth from his hand onto the General Issue coffin containing Bobby Shaftoe. He crosses himself, staring at the coffin lid stained with dirt, and then, with some effort, lifts his head up again, towards the sunlit world of things that live. Other than a few blades of grass and some mosquitoes, the first living thing that he sees is a pair of feet in sandals made from old jeep tires, supporting a white man wrapped in a shapeless brown garment of rough fabric with a large hood on the top. Staring out from the shade of that hood is the supernaturally weird-looking (in that he has a red beard and grey hair) head of Enoch Root—a character who keeps bumping into Goto Dengo as he goes around Manila trying to carry out his duties. Goto Dengo is seized and paralyzed by his wild stare.
They stroll together across the burgeoning cemetery.
“You have something you would like to tell me?” Enoch says.
Goto Dengo turns his head to look into Root’s eyes. “I was told that the confessional was a place of perfect secrets.”
“It is,” Enoch says.
“Then, how did you know?”
“Know what?”
“I think your Church brothers told you something that you should not know.”
“Put this idea out of your mind. The secrecy of the confessional has not been violated. I did not talk to the priest who took your first confession, and if I did, he would tell me nothing.”
“Then how do you know?” Goto Dengo asks.
“I have several ways of knowing things. One thing I know is that you are a digger. A man who engineers big holes in the ground. Your friend and mine, Father Ferdinand, told me that.”
“Yes.”
“The Nipponese went to much trouble to bring you here. They would not have done this unless they wanted you to dig an important hole.”
“There are many reasons they might have done this.”
“Yes,” Enoch Root says, “but only a few that make sense.”
They stroll silently for a while. Root’s feet kick the hem of his robe out with each step. “I know other things,” he continues. “South of here, a man brought diamonds to a priest. This man said he had attacked a traveler on the road, and taken from him a small fortune in diamonds. The victim died of his injuries. The murderer gave the diamonds to the Church as penance.”
“Was the victim Filipino or Chinese?” asks Goto Dengo.
Enoch Root stares at him coolly. “A Chinese man knows of this?”
More strolling. Root will gladly walk from one end of Luzon to the other if that’s how long it takes for the words to come out of Goto Dengo.
“I have information from Europe too,” Root says. “I know that the Germans have been hiding treasure. It is widely known that General Yamashita is burying more war gold in the northern mountains even as we speak.”
“What do you want from me?” Goto Dengo asks. There’s no preliminary moistening of the eyeballs, the tears leap out of him and run down his face. “I came to the Church because of some words.”
“Words?”
“This is Jesus Christ who taketh away the sins of the world,” Goto Dengo says. “Enoch Root, no one knows the sins of the world better than me. I have swum in those sins, drowned in them, burned in them, dug in them. I was like a man swimming down a long cave filled with black cold water. Looking up, I saw a light above me, and swam towards it. I only wanted to find the surface, to breathe air again. Still immersed in the sins of the world, at least I could breathe. This is what I am now.”
Root nods and waits.
“I had to confess. The things that I saw—the things I did—were so terrible. I had to purify myself. That is what I did, in my first confession.” Goto Dengo heaves a deep, shuddering sigh. “It was a very, very long confession. But it is finished. Jesus has taken away my sins, or so the priest said.”
“Good. I’m glad it helped you.”
“Now, you want me to speak of these things again?”
“There are others,” says Enoch Root. He stops in his tracks, and turns, and nods. Silhouetted on the top of a rise, on the other side of several thousand white tombstones, are two men in civilian clothes. They look Western, but that is all Goto Dengo can tell from here.
“Who are they?”
“Men who have been to hell and come back, as you did. Men who know about the gold.”
“What do they want?”
“To dig up the gold.”
Nausea wraps around Goto Dengo like a wet bedsheet. “They would have to tunnel down through a thousand fresh corpses. It is a grave.”
“The whole world is a grave,” says Enoch Root. “Graves can be moved, corpses reinterred. Decently.”
“And then? If they got the gold?”
“The world is bleeding. It needs medicine and bandages. These cost money.”
“But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened.” Goto Dengo shudders. “Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build buildings.”
“Spoken like
a true Nipponese,” Enoch says bitterly. “You never change.”
“Please make me understand what you are saying.”
“What of the man who cannot get out of bed and work, because he has no legs? What of the widow who has no husband to work, no children to support her? What of children who cannot improve their minds because they lack books and schoolhouses?”
“You can shower gold on them,” Goto Dengo says. “Soon enough, it will all be gone.”
“Yes. But some of it will be gone into books and bandages.”
Goto Dengo does not have a rejoinder for this. He is not outsmarted so much as sad and tired. “What do you want? You think I should give the gold to the Church?”
Enoch Root looks mildly taken aback, as if the idea hadn’t really occurred to him before. “You could do worse, I suppose. The Church has two thousand years of experience in using its resources to help the poor. It has not always been perfect. But is has built its share of hospitals and schools.”
Goto Dengo shakes his head. “I have only been in your Church for a few weeks and already I have many doubts about it. It has been a good thing for me. But to give it so much gold—I am not sure if this is a good idea.”
“Don’t look at me as if you expect me to defend the Church’s imperfections,” says Enoch Root. “They have kicked me out of the priesthood.”
“Then what shall I do?”
“Perhaps give it to the Church with conditions.”
“What?”
“You can stipulate that it only be used to educate children, if you choose.”
Goto Dengo says, “Educated men created this cemetery.”
“Then choose some other condition.”
“My condition is that if that gold ever comes out of the ground, it should be used so that we do not have any more wars like this one.”
“And how should we accomplish such a thing, Goto Dengo?”
Goto Dengo sighs. “You put a big weight on my shoulders!”
“No. I did not put the weight on your shoulders. It has always been there.” Enoch Root stares mercilessly into Goto Dengo’s tormented face. “Jesus takes away the sins of the world, but the world remains: a physical reality on which we are doomed to live until death takes us away from it. You have confessed, and you have been forgiven, and so the greater part of your burden has been taken away by grace. But the gold is still there, in a hole in the ground. Did you think that the gold all turned into dirt when you swallowed the bread and the wine? That is not what we mean by transubstantiation.” Enoch Root turns his back and walks away, leaving Goto Dengo alone in the bright avenues of the city of the dead.
RETURN
* * *
“I SHALL RETURN” WROTE RANDY IN HIS FIRST E-mail message to Amy after he got to Tokyo. Returning to the Philippines is not a very good idea at all, and probably not the kind of thing that the old mellow Randy would have even considered. But here he is on a beach in the Sultanate of Kinakuta, down below Tom Howard’s personal citadel, dipped in sunblock and Dramamined to the gills, getting ready to return. Reckoning that the goatee would make him easy to identify, he has shaved it off, and reckoning that hair is useless where he’s headed (the jungle, jail, and Davy Jones’s Locker being the three most likely possibilities), has run a buzzer over his head and shorn himself down to about an eighth of an inch all around. This in turn has necessitated finding a hat, to prevent radiation burns of the skull, and the only hat in Tom Howard’s house that fits Randy is an outback number that some cephalomegalic Aussie contractor left behind there, evidently because its fragrance had begun to attract nocturnal rodents with a proclivity for aimless gnawing.
A pamboat is drawn up on the beach, and a couple of families’ worth of badjao kids are tear-assing around, exactly like kids at a rest area on the interstate who know that in ten minutes they have to get back into the Winnebago. The boat’s main hull is carved from a single rainforest tree, fifty feet long if it’s an inch, narrow enough at its widest point that Randy could sit in the middle and touch both gunwales with outstretched hands. Most of the hull’s shaded under a thatched roof of palm fronds, almost all grey-brown from age and salt-spray, though in one place an older woman is patching it with fresh greens and plastic twine. On each side a narrow bamboo outrigger is connected to the hull by bamboo poles. There’s a sort of bridge that sticks way out over the bow, painted with bright red and green and yellow curlicues, like chains of vortices thrown off in the wake of a boat and reflecting the colors of a tropical sunset.
Speaking of which, the sun’s going down right now, and they are making preparations to bring the final load of gold up out of the hull of the pamboat. The land drops so precipitously towards the water that there’s no road access to the beach, which is probably a good thing since they want this to be as private as possible. But Tom Howard had a lot of heavy stuff shipped in here when he was constructing his house, and so he already has a short section of narrow-gauge railway in place. This sounds more impressive than it is: a pair of steel I-beams, already rusting, bracketed to half-buried concrete ties, running fifty yards straight up a forty-five-degree slope to a small plateau that’s accessible via private road. There he’s got a diesel-powered winch that he can use to drag stuff up the rails. It is more than adequate for this evening’s job, which is to move a couple of hundred kilograms of bullion—the last of the gold from the sunken submarine—up from the beach and into the vault in his house. Tomorrow, he and the others can truck it into downtown Kinakuta at their leisure, and turn it into strings of bits representing very large numbers with noteworthy cryptological properties.
The badjaos share the same maddening refusal to be exotic that Randy has found everywhere on his travels: the guy who’s running the show insists that his name is Leon, and the kids on the beach are forever copping stereotyped martial-arts poses and hollering “hi-yaaa!” which Randy knows is a Power Rangers thing, because Avi’s kids did exactly the same thing until their father banned all Power Ranger emulation inside the house. When the first milk crate full of gold bars is dropped off the high bridge of the pamboat by Leon, and half-buries itself in the floury damp sand below, Avi stands over it and tries to utter some kind of solemn prayer for the dead in Hebrew, and gets maybe half a dozen phonemes into it before two of the badjao kids, having pegged him as a permanent stationary object, decide to use him as tactical cover, and take up positions on either side of him madly hi-yaaaing each other. Avi’s not so full of himself that he can’t see the humor in this, and yet not so sentimental that he doesn’t obviously want to strangle them.
John Wayne is patrolling the surf with a cigarette and a pump shotgun. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe rates the probability of frogman attack rather low because the gold in the pamboat is only worth two and half million dollars, an amount that hardly rates anything as elaborate, and expensive, as a seaborne assault. John Wayne needs to be there in case someone gets the mistaken impression that they’ve somehow managed to pack ten or twenty times that much gold into the pamboat. This seems improbable from a hydrodynamics standpoint. But Doug says that overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. He, Tom Howard, and Jackie Woo are up the hill guarding the roadhead with assault rifles. Tom’s been positively strutting. All of his fantasies are coming true in this little tableau.
A large plastic box thuds into the sand, breaks open, and spills out a mess of shattered coral. Randy strolls over to it and sees leaves of gold inside the coral carapace, tiny holes punched into them. To him the holes are more interesting than the gold.
But everyone’s reacting differently. Doug Shaftoe’s always conspicuously cool and sort of pensive in the presence of a very large amount of gold, like he’s always known that it was there, but touching it makes him think about where it came from and what was done to get it there. The sight of a single brick almost made Goto Dengo vomit up his Kobe beef. For Eberhard Föhr, who is out in the cove doing a lazy backstroke, it is the physical
incarnation of monetary value, which for him, and the rest of Epiphyte, has mostly been a mathematical abstraction—a practical application of one particular sub-sub-sub-branch of number theory. So it has the same kind of purely intellectual attraction to him as a moon rock or a dinosaur tooth. Tom Howard sees in it the embodiment of some political principles that are almost as pure, and as divorced from human reality, as number theory. Mixed in with that is some sense of personal vindication. For Leon the Sea Gypsy, it’s just a cargo to be hauled from point A to point B, for which he’ll be compensated with something more useful. For Avi it’s an inextricable mixture of the sacred and the satanic. For Randy—and if anyone knew about this, he would be dreadfully embarrassed, and would freely admit to its cloyingness—it is the closest thing he’s got right now to a physical link with his beloved, in that she was pulling these bars out of the wreck of the submarine just a few days ago. And that is really the only sense in which he gives a damn about it, any more. In fact, in the few days since he decided to hire Leon to smuggle him up the Sulu Sea and into southern Luzon, he has had to remind himself over and over again that the nominal purpose of the trip is to open up Golgotha.
After the gold has been unloaded, and Leon has taken on some supplies, Tom Howard produces a bottle of single-malt scotch, finally answering Randy’s question of who patronizes all of those duty-free stores in airports. Everyone gathers on the beach for a toast. Randy’s a little edgy when he joins this circle, because he’s not sure what he’s going to propose a toast to if the responsibility falls to him. Unearthing Golgotha? He can’t really drink to that. The meeting of minds between Avi and Goto Dengo was a spark jumping across an air gap—sudden, dazzling, and a little scary—and it hinged around their common understanding that all of this gold is blood money, that Golgotha is a grave they’re preparing to desecrate. So that’s not exactly toast material. How about a toast to abstract lofty principles, then?
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