My day with Juan Ponce Enrile enlightened me in some ways, puzzled me in others. Steele Bosserman and Todd Sonarr predicted correctly that an election was in the cards, but they were the only people I’d yet encountered who thought Ferdinand Marcos was in any danger of losing it. Also they numbered among the few people outside the regime who wanted him to stay in office. Enrile gave me a look at some highlights of Metro Manila, such as they were, but he’d carefully kept us moving fast on nice streets and main highways. I’d spent enough time among “real people” around the world to know that I hadn’t seen much of them yet in the Philippines, excepting possibly the punks that jumped me my first night out on the town.
I needed a look at Manila’s “real people.” And who was going to lead me to them? I’d already lined up my guide.
*
Assuming that the nature of her business entailed wee small hours, I waited until late morning to go to a lobby pay phone and dial the number Luz gave me for her aunt. She picked up right away. “Yes?” a weary female voice answered.
“Good morning. A young woman named Luz gave me this number to call.”
“Luz? Yes. And what can I do for you, please?” The voice brightened slightly but still sounded wrung out.
“Am I speaking to her aunt?”
“I am her aunt. And you are…?”
“Jack Philco. Luz paid me a visit a week ago.”
“Was she satisfactory?”
“A most beautiful, charming young woman. Entirely satisfactory. That is why I am calling. I would like to see her again.”
“I am delighted to hear that. I am very proud of Luz, my niece, you know. I will be happy to arrange another meeting. The person who engaged her for you instructed me to gratify your every desire.”
“Very thoughtful,” I said, “but this has nothing to do with that. I want to hire her as an escort for an entire day, and I would be paying her fee myself. I do not want to involve anyone else in this.”
“We are discreet, Mr. Philco, on that you can rely. What day do you have in mind?”
“The day after tomorrow? Is she available?”
“I will make sure she is. She gave me a good report on you, Mr. Philco. She will call you at the hotel this evening to set up the arrangement. Say about eight o’clock?”
“Very good, but I think it would be better if she came in person. Could she meet me in the hotel bar?”
“That can be arranged, but it is more complicated. I cannot guarantee the exact time, but she will meet you there in mid evening. Will that do?”
“It will be fine. Much obliged, Miss…”
“Just call me ‘Auntie’,” she said and hung up.
So now I had a Mother in Calcutta and an Auntie in Manila. Some extended family.
*
I took a visible table in the bar at 2000 hours, and Luz appeared a nursed beer later. She glanced around, spotted me and came over. “Good evening, Mr. Philco,” she said with an alluring smile.
“Hello, Luz,” I said. “Sit. Can I order something for you?”
She daintily settled her little self into the chair beside me and edged it over, putting us thigh to thigh. “No,” she said, “I have an assignment this evening, but I excused myself for a few minutes to run an important errand, assuring my client that when I returned I would be all his. I have to hurry right back, as he was very excited to see me. Auntie said you want me to give you the tour you mentioned the other night?”
“Yes, the day after tomorrow, if you can. I think we should take the whole day, as I want to see Manila from top to bottom and best to worst. Can you arrange for an inconspicuous car, one several years old with dents and scratches in the paint?”
“You mean like all the other the cars on the road? No problem.”
“I’ll need a place to change my clothes.”
“My place, no problem.”
“Good. Should I meet you at your place in the morning?”
“It will be better if I come in my car, and we’ll take it to my place and go from there in the inconspicuous car.”
“I like the way you think, Luz,” I said. “Anything else I should do?”
“Shall I arrange for a gun?” she asked.
“Gun?”
“If you want a thorough tour of Manila, in some districts you wouldn’t want to be the only man without one.”
“I’ll bring my own.”
“That covers everything important. Anything else that arises, we can deal with it on the way. What time shall I arrive?”
“Nine in the morning?”
“Excellent, Mr. Philco. I’ll see you then. Now I must be off. So we shouldn’t be talking over the phone in your room, then?”
“Not about anything important,” I said.
“You are a very wise man,” she said. She got up, gave me a little squeeze and a warm peck on the cheek, and swayed away. Exceptional rear view.
*
I spent the next morning in the Makati commercial district interviewing the publisher of a Philippine business magazine. I took notes for show, but it was the same dog-and-pony routine I’d heard before, covering the glories of the Philippines, the stability of the government and the rosy future that a large loan would unleash. In other words, like everyone else I’d talked to, he was in Marcos’s pocket. He treated me to another lavish lunch in a restaurant where everyone knew everyone else intimately, after which I bade him an appreciative good day and emerged on the steamy streets of business district Manila.
First I reconned a few boulevards and side streets to gather an impression of what Juan Q. Publico was wearing. Definitely not fashions from Barney’s and Paul Stuart. My high-powered investment banker costume was posh even for the Makati district here, and mugger bait outside of it. Nor would the outdoor gear I’d brought along blend in to any surround we’d be passing through. A firm picture of mid-scale Manila dress in mind, I hiked over to the SM Mall along the EDSA (as the locals call E de los Santos Avenue). A gigantic enclosed shopping palace, the mall housed a collection of sleek stores and shops offering anything any Filipino might need or desire. It would have not looked out of place on the outskirts of any upscale American suburb. I had no trouble locating shirts, trousers and shoes that would blend me into the local flow.
That errand accomplished, I walked over to the Intercontinental Hotel, just a couple blocks away. It catered to the international business crowd, and my investment banker duds fit in better there. At the desk I asked for Evgeny Grotelov. He was out, the clerk informed me. I took a seat at the bar off the lobby and cooled down from my sun-broiled perambulations with a San Miguel. Grotesqcu didn’t show by the time I finished it. I’d nothing urgent to see him about, so I took a cab back to the Manila Hotel figuring I’d catch up with him another time.
The civvies I bought were fresh and crisp, which wouldn’t fit some places I wanted to see. Neither did I want to go out of investment banker character by wearing them around the Manila Hotel. I rolled up the shirt and pants I’d wear on the tour and carried them down, via the back staircase, to the fitness room, which, it still being business hours, sat empty. I changed into them and ran a brisk several miles on the treadmill, then engaged in a strenuous half hour on the machines. That took away the fresh off-the-rack look. I’d rough them up a little more at Luz’s.
*
Luz showed up in a midnight blue Mercedes sedan, having dressed down from her usual elegance for the occasion. “It’s Auntie’s car,” she explained. “She thought it would be more proper for an investment banker.” I stuck my Gucci satchel in the back seat and climbed aboard. She deftly drove us through the morning traffic into a nicer section of the city and dove into the underground parking beneath a modern high rise. “That’s my car over there,’ she said, pointing to a shiny red, vintage Ford Mustang. A beat-up Toyota Corolla occupied the adjacent space. “Do you th
ink that one would be okay for the tour?” she asked. “I borrowed it from a friend.”
“Looks right to me,” I said. We rode the elevator up to her place. It was a two-bedroom condo unit with a good view out to sea. She’d furnished it tastefully: the gal had style. “Where can I change my clothes, and then we’ll get going?” I said. She pointed to a bedroom. I noticed a planter on her balcony. “I need to make some little adjustments,” I said. I took my clothes from the satchel, stepped through the sliding glass door out to the balcony and scrambled a little dirt from the planter into the shirt to make it look worn. Then did the same with the pants.
Luz watched with interest. “You are a very unusual investment banker,” she observed. “You brought your gun? May I see it?” I pulled it from the bag and passed it to her, and she inspected it while I slipped into the civvies. “A SIG Sauer? Like the commandos use? Not only an unusual investment banker, but also a well-armed one. You raise questions in my mind, but I’ll not ask them.”
“That’s best,” I said.
“If you are trying to look Filipino, come in here,” Luz said, and she led me to the bathroom. “I’ll fix your hair.” She applied a little mousse and a comb, and I looked much less like an American investment banker. Then she took out a make-up kit. “Your natural face is in the right direction, but this will help,” she said. She unlimbered some foundation and applied it lightly over my face, taking care to round out my cheeks. She stepped back, inspected her work and said, “That’s better. From a distance no one can tell.”
I checked the results in the mirror. “You do good work, Luz.”
“In my line of work we have to know our cosmetics,” she said.
We took the elevator back to the garage and mounted the Corolla. “Will I need to carry my gun everywhere?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you when,” she said. “For now leave it on the floor.” When we emerged onto the street she announced, “We’ll start at the top and work our way down.” Soon we were on the EDSA, heading for the Makati district.
“The topmost level of Manila is Forbes Park,” she said. “It is a gated, heavily guarded community where government officials and big businessmen live. Ordinary people cannot enter, but I come here often enough that the gatemen know me. It would be helpful if you give him a twenty-dollar bill,” she added. She turned off the EDSA to a side road and after a few twists and turns past lush landscaping stopped at to the lowered gate.
A uniformed, armed guard stepped out of the kiosk. “Holla, Luz,” he said. “What, coming down in the world?”
“My Mustang’s in the shop. They loaned me this wreck for the day. I want to show my cousin around Forbes, how the ricos live. He’s from Cebu, never been to Manila.” She slipped him my twenty, which promptly vanished as he ushered us in with a broad smile.
Shades of Beverly Hills and north Tehran. The lush lanes of Forbes Park revealed mini-palaces galore, sited on tropically landscaped spreads, sitting at the ends of spacious driveways. But in neither Los Angeles nor the rich side of Tehran did the ultra-wealthy live behind such heavily armed protection. Bodyguards, yes, but not the shotguns and machine pistols I noticed. Not only did we encounter a number of prowling patrol cars (which slowed down to scope us out), but some mansions had manned guard posts at the gates. “Is all this security necessary?” I asked.
“Kidnappings are a problem for the wealthy in the Philippines,” she answered, “and our robbers are bold, skillful and ruthless. Fewer incidents happen where there are guards present.”
We cruised a few more streets and I’d seen enough to grasp the gist. “What’s our next stop?” I asked.
“What, you don’t want to spend the rest of the day admiring how our upper crust enjoy the nation’s money?” she chided. “I could point out which homes have Olympic- size swimming pools and who drives Rolls-Royces, if you’d like to know. We could drop by the country club and the polo field. No? (I shook my head) Well then, let’s go see where their employees live.”
We crossed the Pasig River to the San Miguel district, location of Malacanang Palace, and continued to Sampaloc, home of several universities. She drove by one that looked like many an American college campus—a mixture of well-kept traditional and modern buildings teeming with clean-cut, eager young people. And also a big mob of students gathered in what seemed to be the Main Quad, ranting and chanting and waving protest signs. “An anti-Marcos rally?” I asked.
“They have them all the time here,” Luz said. “At other universities, too. The children from Forbes Park attend them. Even some of the wives do, and often their maids come along.”
A facet of Manila life Enrile had neglected to show me.
Some adjacent residential sections sported bungalow housing as you might see in 1950s-ish Southern California suburbs, but other sections displayed shophouses and two-story apartment buildings intermixed with recent low-rises already edging toward shabby. Not so much landscaping in these areas, no posted guards, no sleek new cars, no driveways. A lot of churches, which, judging by their architecture and condition, had been around for a long time. Street life was lively in the shopping areas, mostly tidily-dressed women going about daily routines. “Who lives here?” I asked.
“Professional people—teachers, office workers, business people. You know, middle-class.”
By American standards, lower middle-class, anyhow. Now I was seeing the upper reaches of Manila’s “real people.” From my reading I’d learned that of Manila’s roughly five million people (about half the size of L.A.), half lived in slums. I asked to see some of those. “First, let’s have some lunch,” Luz suggested. “How about Chinese?”
“Not Filipino food?”
“If you insist…”
“Chinese is fine.” The restaurant was a favorite of hers if a client wasn’t springing for it, and I let her do the ordering. It beat what I was used to in Southern California, and the menu offered items you’d never see in your neighborhood take-out joint: chicken claws? shark fin soup? pork fat?
I prodded her along, not wanting to waste the day with another Filipino leisurely lunch. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Such a hurry to see misery.” Lunch downed, we headed out again. “Hold your pistol on your lap, never can tell. And keep your arm inside the car unless you want to lose that nice wristwatch at a traffic stop.” I slipped it off and pocketed it. She took us into a neighborhood of shacks, tarpaper, rust, garbage and droopy banana plants, as bad as any I’d seen in Indochina or the Caribbean. Our beat-up Corolla quickly became the ritziest ride in sight. It was a busy place. Skinny, dirty little kids thronged the streets. Clusters of small, dark people—men in dirty shorts and singlets, women in thread-bare, faded dresses—eyed us suspiciously as they shambled about their business. Streets held markets of bamboo-and-canvas food vendor stalls. Shabby shops and dram houses interspersed the rusty tin and scrapwood shacks. Crude signs, gang-tags and random paint splotches of graffiti covered everything.
“Seen enough real people?” Luz asked. “I don’t like to be here very long. Things can happen.”
“Is this the worst slum in Manila?”
“By no means. There are plenty of worse ones. We are in one of the better slums. Most of these people own or rent their shacks, such as they are, and many work at menial jobs—laborers, cleaners and so forth. But youth gangs have territories here, and they can be troublesome. If we attract their attention they may try something. We have much that they want.”
“Sure, I’ve seen enough of this,” I said, a hair too late. Luz had slowed down to veer around a pig ambling across the street, and two boys suddenly jumped in front of us, causing her to slam on the brakes. Two others then stepped from the shade of a roof overhang and closed up behind us. More boys were assembling along the street’s edge. One of the ones in front moved toward Luz’s side of the car and motioned that she should roll her window down. If I got out and confronted them, no tell
ing how large a force I’d be facing, and I had only the clip in the gun. The gangs probably shot each other up all the time, but they’d not cotton to an outsider horning in on the action.
So I jacked a round into the chamber, rolled my window down, leaned out and fired a round into the dirt by the foot of the guy on my side of the car. He made a big jump away, and I said, “Go, Luz.” She did, grazing the one on her side with the fender as she spurted forward, knocking him on his ass. I fired two shots in the air as we pulled away and leaned on the horn, and people cleared a path. For good measure I lowered the gun and aimed it around at the people we passed. Dodging as fast as she could around litter, dogs, scruffy kids and other obstacles, she reached a wide lane and slewed around the corner. Luckily it was not a dead end. We’d stirred up a commotion, but no one was in hot pursuit. I suppose gunfire is common enough there that a couple shots wouldn’t set the populace on red alert. After a few false starts Luz found her way back to a main road.
“You like our real people?” she asked.
“We have them in America, too,” I said, though I couldn’t think of any American slums this wasted. Watts was Easy Street compared to this.
“I have one other slum to show you, if you want to see Manila’s worst example.”
“I signed on for the whole tour,” I said. “Bring’em on.”
“Many of the poor are squatters,” Liz explained. “A family puts a hut on an empty plot, and then other join them, and soon you have a neighborhood living on somebody’s land. We are now going to Tondo. I have never been there myself, but everyone says it is the worst place in Manila. I will not drive the car into it, if there even are roads, so I hope you can satisfy your curiosity from a distance.”
Luz consulted her map and went down some doubtful lanes, and presently we approached Tondo’s border. One look and I didn’t want to venture in either—distance was good. “Okay, stop here,” I told her. It was as if some cosmic litterbug had strewn a square mile with trash and garbage, and then a bought-off judge had sentenced thousands of people to live in it. I could make out definitions of possibly habitable enclosures haphazardly stacked into the distance, in a jumble with barely coherent street patterns. Smoke from trash fires and cooking fires hung over the landscape, adding acridity to the rancid odor of rot. Emaciated, desperate-looking people stood, squatted or shuffled about, reviving Calcutta memories. When a clutch of them started moving in our direction with their hands outstretched I said, “Okay, seen enough.” Luz eagerly put the car in gear, hung a U-ey and beat a smart retreat.
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 33
