1993 - The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  A rare and untypical nausea made his gorge rise. The tongue was such a curious part of the body, a flickering pulsing muscle with its two senses—taste and touch—a kind of amphibian organ planted in the throat like an anemone anchored to its rock, unsure whether it should be inside or outside the body. When he cut it seemed to flinch.

  He stopped himself, angrily: why was he thinking like this? He felt his keening headache return and with it the memory of its cause, the brief intense argument he had had with Annaliese that morning. “Work, work, work,” she had cried spitefully at him as he dressed for work. “Why get married, why bother having me in your life?…Why indeed”, he had shouted back, if this is meant to be wedded bliss. Stupid, purblind woman.

  The porters wheeled away the still comatose Chinese boy and he and Pantaleon moved next door to change back into their clothes.

  “What do you think?” Pantaleon asked. “It seemed to go well.”

  “We’ll see how it heals. At least he’s got some tongue left.”

  “Cruz will go mad if it works,” Pantaleon smiled. “Madder.”

  “If it works we photograph the next one. Write it up.”

  “The Carriscant glossectomy.”

  Señora Diaz interrupted their self-satisfied chuckles to tell them that someone from the Governor’s office was looking for Dr Cruz. Carriscant shrugged on his coat, straightened his necktie and walked up the corridor to his office, rubbing his hands together vigorously—the carbolic in the soap dried the skin and caused flaking at the knuckles. He opened his office door and a man in military uniform—khaki, leather–belted—rose to his feet from the chair in front of the desk and saluted. He was portly, running to fat, and his uniform was tight across his belly. He had a high forehead and thinning hair, and a neatly trimmed wide moustache that effectively divided his face in two.

  “Dr Carriscant, thank you for seeing me,” he said. “I’m Paton Bobby, Chief of Constabulary.”

  THE FIRST BODY

  Dr Carriscant stood beside Paton Bobby in the rice field looking down at the naked half-submerged body of what had been an eighteen-year-old Kansas militiaman.

  “That is no fucking gu-gu,” Bobby said, a frown pulling his eyebrows together and cabling his forehead. “In fact that is just about the whitest man I’ve ever seen.”

  There was a peculiar bluish, icy tone to the body’s general pallor, it was true. The fat on the buttocks seemed to shine through the skin like ice-cream wrapped in parchment, Carriscant thought, quite pleased with his simile.

  “That’s because we’re standing in a solution of his blood,” Carriscant pointed out. The body lay in the centre of a dark brown stain, still spreading, stirred by the sloshing of the men’s boots. Carriscant leaned over: there was a pestilential buzzing of insects and the solitary eye that was above the surface of the water was dark with flies feeding on its jelly.

  “Has anybody moved it?”

  “The farmer who found him, turned him over. Got a look,” Bobby said. “That’s how we knew we needed a doctor.”

  “What about Dr Wieland?” Dr Wieland was acting medical superintendent to the US Governor. Carriscant had met him several times, a genial, superannuated alcoholic whose medical knowledge was about as far advanced as Cruz’s.

  “Dr Wieland is…unwell, today,” Bobby said, half concealing a smile. “He suggested we consult Dr Cruz,” he shrugged. “He wasn’t there. But we are very happy with you. No disrespect.”

  “None taken, Mr Bobby, none taken…May I look?”

  Carriscant turned the body over gently with the toe of his boot; it rolled easily, buoyant on the brown water. The flies rose up with an irate hum. He fanned them away from his face.

  There was a long inverted L-shape wound carved into the torso, and laced like a football. The long cut extended from the breastbone to the genitalia. The short arm of the wound ran at right angles across the left side of the chest two inches below the nipple. The wound had been effectively and tightly sewn together with string. The flies resettled and began to investigate.

  “It’s quite neat.”

  “You can see why we thought a surgeon should look at it.”

  “Who is he?”

  “We think he’s Private Ephraim Ward. Absent without leave for three days. I’ll get one of his unit over to identify him. May we use your morgue?”

  Carriscant was somewhat surprised at this request. “Well, yes, I suppose so, but isn’t this a government matter?”

  “Sure as shit it is, Doc. But it’s also a Paton Bobby matter. This fellow didn’t prick his finger with a sewing needle.” Bobby grinned, after a fashion: only his mouth moved beneath the wide moustache, his eyes stayed watchful, alert. “I get to say where this stiff goes.”

  They waded back to the roadway. A few young American soldiers stood by the carriages that had brought them to the paddy field. They slouched in their loose baggy uniforms, the blue shirts over the khaki trousers dark with sweat. Sullen and nervous, they had their Krags held needlessly at the ready, as if insurgents were about to spring from the roadside ditch. Bobby ordered them to collect the body and offered Carriscant a small cigar from a pewter tin. Carriscant declined, stamped the mud off his boots and looked around him: the paddy field was near Paco, a village a mile or so south-east of Manila. Everywhere were the remains of old trenches and earthworks overgrown with grass and straggly milim bushes. This had been the American front line when the rebels attacked in 1899. Carriscant remembered the day well, standing on his azotea in the city, with a cup’ of tea in his hand, listening to the mumbled boom of artillery, feeling the air shiver, setting the dust motes dancing to the distant percussion, the teaspoon rattling on the porcelain.

  He turned to Bobby, who was blowing on the end of his cigar, puffing it orange.

  “You do know where we are…”

  “Yes,” Bobby said. “I just wonder if it’s significant.”

  Private Ephraim Ward lay supine on the marble-topped examination table in the San Jeronimo morgue, free of flies at last, the blaze from the lamps above him enhancing his remarkable bloodless lucency. Carriscant had told Bobby that he was not prepared, nor really qualified, to perform an autopsy. Bobby demurred, politely, arguing that Carriscant was probably the most qualified person in the Philippine archipelago to do just that, but in the event he would be more than happy with an expert’s investigation of the wound and perhaps some hazarded interpretation of what exactly had occurred.

  Carriscant inspected the sutures. Sailmaker’s twine, he would guess, and sewn with a sailmaker’s needle. Or a leatherworker’s needle. Manila was full of people who could do a job such as this: anyone who had ever made a jute sack could have stitched up Ephraim Ward’s belly. Carriscant began to snip his way up the length of the incision, turning right at the breastbone. Here he saw, as the lips of the wound yielded beneath his shears, a great clotting of blood. He fitted a pair of retractors and held the wound open, cleaning and scraping away the black muddy residue of the clot. He saw very soon that the heart had been torn, badly gashed.

  He opened wide the wound at the abdomen revealing the vermiculate coils of the intestines and the other internal organs, strangely reduced, washed by their long immersion in the paddy field, isolated somewhat in the stomach cavity like mean portions of food in a too-large bowl. He completed a swift check: everything appeared to be there, if not exactly in order. So, Private Ward had been stabbed in the heart, between the sixth and seventh rib, and the entry wound had been temporarily disguised by this subsequent mutilation. It made no sense to him at all.

  Bobby called round later that afternoon to hear his conclusions, Carriscant sat behind his desk as he relayed them, while Bobby paced thoughtfully to and fro, smoking another small ill-lit cheroot, occasionally setting a big haunch down on the desk corner and letting the freed boot swing as he listened.

  “You’re not Spanish, are you?” Bobby said suddenly.

  “No. Well, my mother is half Spanish, my father was Bri
tish.”

  “So, you have British nationality.”

  “Yes…Why do you ask?”

  “It makes it easier, when I report to the Governor. Especially if we’re going to work together.”

  Carriscant did not respond to this, though he was curious about what manner of collaboration Bobby was talking about; but, as collaboration was being mooted, he decided to enter into the spirit of the arrangement.

  “There was one thing,” Carriscant began, slowly, “it was impossible to be sure, but I had the impression that the organs in the gut—the intestines, liver, kidneys, stomach—had been…I don’t know, had been displaced or manipulated.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Have you ever opened a dead body?”

  “I came here from the Boxer rebellion,” Bobby said. “I’ve seen a lot of dead and mangled men.”

  “Not the same thing. When you open the abdominal lining and reveal the organs below you wouldn’t believe how…” Carriscant stopped and searched for a word. “How neatly it all fits together. How astonishing the design, how compact.” He stood up and clapped his hands on his chest, his side, his belly, pushing his fingers into his stomach. “They call it a trunk and the word is apt. Everything is packed in, held. It can move but it’s secure. Everything in its place, working. And the jobs being done…I won’t go on, but there was something about Ward’s organs, even though the blood and the fluids were gone. It didn’t look—”

  “Someone been poking around, sort of thing?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Where does that get us?”

  “You’re the sleuth. I’m just a surgeon.”

  Bobby had to leave to make his report to the Governor. His own hunch, he told Carriscant, was that Ward had been killed by a man in his own unit, a fight had got out of hand, a blow had been struck. Filipino insurgents often mutilated their victims, he said, the guilty party in this case probably wanted it to seem as if a rebel had done the deed.

  “They don’t usually mutilate in that fashion,” Carriscant said.

  “Sure,” Bobby said. “Then you go and cut your buddy’s pecker off and stick it in his mouth. Kinda hard. Simpler to make some, you know, L-shape or something.”

  “Why sew it up, then?”

  “I don’t know, Carriscant, I don’t know,” Bobby said, a rasp of irritation in his voice. “Yet…I’ll try and find out, but we got so many crackers in this army I don’t count on being successful.”

  “Crackers?”

  “Southern boys. They all seem to be from Mississippi, or Texas, or Kansas. Patriots all. Stick together.” Carriscant smiled. He could see the quality of robust intelligence behind Bobby’s vulgar confidence, sense the energies that stirred beneath the corpulent ease.

  “I got to go see Governor Taft. Been a big help, Carriscant.”

  Carriscant showed Pantaleon the body in the morgue. They had postponed their fistula operation designated for that afternoon.

  “An American?” Pantaleon said dispassionately, walking round the head. He took hold of it and moved it to and fro as if to obtain a better angle on the man’s slack features. “At least they can’t make any reprisals, now.”

  “They think another American did it.” Carriscant told him about Bobby’s theory, but Pantaleon seemed uninterested. The dead American soldier seemed to have preoccupied him and he began to tell Carriscant a rambling story he had heard from an uncle about a company of American soldiers who had been pursuing General Elpidio in Batangas. One of the soldiers had fallen into a pit, the base of which had been lined with bamboo spears. In retribution every inhabitant of the nearest two villages—men, women and children—had been shot and their bodies burned.

  “I think about two hundred people paid with their lives for that one man’s life…” He shrugged. “It seems very unfair. I mean—”

  “I would rather you didn’t talk about it,” Carriscant said abruptly; he stood very still, stiffly, like someone who has just put his back out and is terrified to move.

  Pantaleon was upset and very apologetic. “I’m so sorry, Salvador,” he said, “I forgot. I’m very sorry, please forgive me.”

  Carriscant recovered himself. “It’s been a strange day,” he said. “Normally, I’m fine. I think the American—” He stopped talking and managed a kind of smile. “Pantaleon,” he said, “could I come home with you? Just for an hour or so. I don’t feel ready for work, and—”

  “Of course,” Pantaleon said, hiding his surprise. “In any case I’ve been meaning to ask you back for a while, now. I’ve got something I want you to see.”

  THE NIPA BARN

  Dr Salvador Carriscant and Dr Pantaleon Quiroga boarded a horse tram at the Plaza Magellanes, crossed the Pasig at the Bridge of Spain and made their way towards the suburb of Santa Cruz. The tram was crowded with Indio workers returning from their jobs in the city and Carriscant was conscious of their candid stares as they tried to divine what these two kastilas in their suits and ties were doing on this poor man’s mode of transport.

  The two men left the tram at Calle Azcarrega and walked to Pantaleon’s house, a two-storey adobe and lumber building in a relatively smart street. Pantaleon occupied half the rooms, sharing the rest with an American couple, teachers, who were setting up the reformed educational programme at the local school. They paused only long enough to collect a key and then walked down a dirt lane through kitchen gardens and out on to an area of waste ground on the north bank of an estero, one of the Pasig’s many meandering arms. Ahead of them was a line of trees that marked another wormy loop in the river’s progress and over to the left Carriscant could make out the galvanised iron roofs of Sampaloc; He had not realised Pantaleon lived quite so close to Sampaloc; he filed that piece of information away in his mind.

  The afternoon sun was obscured by a layer of hazy clouds and the heat was going out of the day, and from time to time the breeze from the south carried the rich yeasty smell from the San Miguel brewery. Pantaleon was striding out with genuine enthusiasm and Carriscant had to stretch his legs to keep up with him.

  They pushed through a gap in a plumbago hedge and beyond that, on the edge of an elongated meadow of sun-bleached grass, he saw a recently built nipa barn, unusually broad, its bamboo walls still green and its palm leaf thatch only partially faded.

  “What’s this?” Carriscant said.

  “It’s mine,” Pantaleon said. “I had it built. I own this land here.” He gestured at the blond meadow stretching in front of them.

  Pantaleon unlocked the padlock on the barn doors and swung them open. Carriscant peered into the gloom and saw what he took to be a curious assemblage of wood and wires that was raised from the earth floor on numerous wooden trestles. It looked, at first glance, as if Pantaleon was constructing a giant hollow cross, laid out horizontally, but, as his eyes became accustomed to the murky light, he began to make out other details that were less easy to explain: various wheels, levers with wires attached to them and what looked like two large bicycle saddles set in tandem. Carriscant wandered around the construction, touching the tightly strung wires, plucking at them with his fingers. It made no sense at all.

  “You made this?” he asked Pantaleon.

  “Local carpenters. To my specifications.”

  “A kind of dwelling? A prefabricated shelter?”

  Pantaleon laughed, high-pitched, delightedly.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “You couldn’t be more wrong. It’s—” he paused for effect. “It’s a heavier-than-air flying machine.”

  Carriscant was late returning home. After the visit to the nipa barn he and Pantaleon had gone to the café opposite the Zorilla theatre in Santa Cruz and drunk a few glasses of American beer—Schlitz—and Pantaleon had tried to explain the concepts behind the flying machine he was building. Carriscant had been cheered by his friend’s excitement and realised he now had the answers to the question he had posed earlier in the day regarding the expenditure of the Quiroga salary. He had taken a
carromato back to Intramuros and had reached his home long after dark. The wide front door was opened for him by Danil, his cook’s wife, whom he asked to bring him some coffee. He passed on through the ground-floor area of the house where, as well as providing rooms for his servants, his two carriages were stored and his ponies stabled. The taste of beer was still sour in his mouth and he felt a slight tension in his shoulders as he walked up the steps from the interior courtyard to the living quarters on the first floor. Oil lamps burned in the public rooms, their orange glow reflected in the glossy polish of the hardwood floors. At the rear of the house, overlooking the walled garden, was a wide stone patio—the azotea—and he could see Annaliese sitting there reading by the fuzzy light of an Aladdin lamp. The night was cool and breezy and from the garden came the guttural croaking of frogs and the monotone brrrr of cicadas.

  Annaliese looked around as he crossed the living room, the oval discs of her spectacles flashing white for an instant as they caught the light. He kissed her lightly on the forehead and sat down on a rattan chair opposite her, apologising for his lateness. He explained about the discovery of the murdered American and how his day had been disrupted.

  She looked at him evenly, as if he were a witness and she a lawyer assessing the veracity of his evidence.

  “Do you want to eat?” she said eventually. “There’s some pork left.” Her German accent was mild: Carriscant remembered how he had been attracted to it once, how it had seemed exotic and strange, how it had excited him at certain moments.

  “No, thanks. I had some beers with Pantaleon. You won’t believe what he’s—”

  “I thought you said this murder business had detained you?”

  “Well, it did. But then Pantaleon asked me to see this contraption he’s building. A flying machine—can you believe it?”

  “He’s such a child, Pantaleon.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  This was the disagreement they had been waiting for and they had a short and vicious argument about whether it was childish to build a flying machine or inspirational. The barely covert venom in their exchange seemed, paradoxically, to reduce the tension in the air. The animosities had been freed, loosed momentarily; as with a lanced abcess the flow of purulence relieved the pain for a while. Carriscant’s coffee was served and he sipped it slowly, studying his wife’s face over the rim of the cup, watching her read. She wore small oval spectacles which had the effect of ageing her somewhat, especially as her hair was pulled tight around her head, tucked behind her ears. She had never looked beautiful, he considered, but neither could she be described as plain. There was no feature of her face that could be listed as objectionable, but there was nothing particularly attractive either. He asked himself, as he often did in the aftermath of one of their arguments, what on earth had made him want to marry her.