1993 - The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “Goodbye, Mother. And thank you.”

  The thought came to him as it always did on parting that he was the product of the strangest union—the meeting of a timid Scottish engineer from Dundee and a combative provincial mestiza heiress from southern Luzon. No wonder he could not fathom his own personality, sometimes.

  “What do you mean thank you? Are you all right?” she asked. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You’re not going away again, are you? It was so long the last time. I’ll be dead soon, you can go away anywhere then.”

  “No, no, I’m not going away. I’ll be here.”

  “Well be careful. And you can bring that wife of yours the next time, if you want. I won’t be rude to her.”

  “I will, she’d like that.”

  He kissed her again and left her on the azotea. He waved back at the small figure as the carriage pulled out of the house’s forecourt and bore him down the driveway towards San Teodoro, flashing in and out of the shade cast by the avenue of nassa trees. He felt his spine stiffen and his shoulders broaden as he contemplated what lay ahead, Archibald Carriscant’s son, truly. There was a smell of molasses carried to him on the breeze.

  DAWN ON THE PASIG

  Frail coils and eddies of mist rose up from the turbid green-grey waters of the Pasig as the small flat–bottomed ferry nosed up to the jetty on the northern bank. Dr Salvador Carriscant, wearing a frayed and worn dustcoat and a small peaked cap, was the only passenger at this hour. He stepped off the prow on to the wooden decking and pulled his collar up. He was dressed this way in an attempt to allay suspicion and to draw the minimum of attention to himself. It was still cool and fresh and the almost-risen sun gave the air and dew-drenched landscape a pewtery, matt finish. He hurried past the curious glances of the few indio peasants, waiting with their sacks of vegetables, and disappeared down the path that led through a fringe of riverine trees towards the distant white walls of the Malacanan Palace.

  This was his third crepuscular visit to the archery field, driven there by a vague and desperate plan of first seeing the American woman again and then perhaps following her back to her home or place of work. But it was the need to take action itself, primarily, actually to have something to do, that prompted these early rises. He felt that he could not make any more enquiries without drawing attention to himself, and he certainly could not, should he ever encounter her again in public, approach her and try to explain who he was and why he was there. He had to see her on his own, he realised, only then could he resolve the misunderstanding.

  And he deliberately did not think beyond that moment, if it could be engineered, and what would happen subsequently; all his efforts would be directed simply to bringing it about, after that chance, destiny, fate would have to determine what happened next. He felt both foolish and exhilarated by these dawn excursions: he knew, from the vantage point of disinterested rationality, that all this creeping about in the bushes was preposterous and demeaning, and yet there was no denying that the sense of adventure, of what might be, was exciting and fulfilling in its own right. In the past few days he had lived more intensely, his waking hours had been more charged with anticipation, than he could remember in years. Perhaps this was a definition of an obsession? The ability both to see the manifest error in a course of action and yet pursue it fiercely just the same…Whatever it was it fulfilled him; it allowed him to go about his business in the hospital, to lead a normal family life with some measure of control and equanimity, for he knew that in a day or so he would be sitting damply once again in the acacia wood near the Palace, the sun warming the treetops, waiting for Delphine to appear.

  Delphine.

  He muttered the name to himself, tasting its two syllables, as the path entered the woods. Delphine. At least that ghastly encounter on the Luneta had procured her Christian name. The other day he had been on the point of asking Bobby if he knew an American woman called Delphine but at the last moment an onset of caution had made him hold back. That question could only prompt others in return; better to keep his own counsel for the moment.

  He left the path and made his way through the wood towards the screen of cogal bushes that marked the perimeter of the archery butts. He had found a position that gave him a good view of the field and of the track that led from the Palace and San Miguel, up which carriages had come. He settled himself down in his hiding place, his back against the seamed trunk of an acacia tree, and prepared to wait.

  The grass field was fully sunlit and the first flies were beginning to buzz around his head when he heard the clopping of horses’ hooves and the crunch of carriage wheels from the lane. Three carriages pulled up and about ten or a dozen ladies noisily descended, fussing around, fitting wrist guards, stringing bows and selecting arrows for their quivers. He saw almost at once that she was not there and the frustration that this covert scrutiny had held at bay for the last forty-eight hours washed over him with full depressing force. He sat back wearily against the tree, rebuking himself all over again, the cries and laughter of these young American women at their sport carrying to him across the grass, and the soft padded thuds as the first loosed arrows struck home against the straw targets.

  He called to mind her face, that first day he saw her; called to mind the way the quiver strap had defined her breasts—quite full and large, he thought now, larger and rounder than Annaliese’s. And he found himself remembering too the way she had swung her hips to the music that evening on the Luneta…She was a tall woman, there was nothing gamine or petite about her, nothing girlish. And her skin was so strange, white as a milkfish…Her buttocks would be milk-pale too, he thought, and her thighs…He tried to imagine her naked, shutting his eyes against the dappled canopy above him, altering his position to allow his swelling erection a chance to shift freely beneath his trousers. A wand of sunlight beamed through a gap in the leaves above him and warmed his flank. Holding these images in his mind, embellishing them, he reached for his handkerchief with one hand while his other tremblingly undid the buttons on his fly. Delphine. Shucking off her quiver, her light fingers on her blouse buttons, her pale blue-veined bubs, freed, swaying, her—

  “Yay! Pasayluha ako.”

  The old thin-chested man in a frayed knee-length baro stood about twenty feet away, staring in amazement at him through a gap in the trees, frozen in the attitude of picking up a fallen branch, a small bundle of firewood under his other arm.

  Carriscant clawed himself to his feet, aghast, doubling over simultaneously, covering himself.

  The old man smiled warmly at him, showing his few remaining betel-stained teeth and said something in Tagalog, chuckling.

  Carriscant thrashed his way through the undergrowth to the path. He heard the old man calling after him and somehow his delighted words penetrated the howling screeching mortification that reverberated in his head.

  “It’s only human, my son!” The old man was shouting after him in Tagalog. “Don’t feel shame, it’s only human!”

  THE BRIDGE AT SANTA MESA

  Annaliese woke him, shaking his shoulder gently, and calling his name. “Salvador…Salvador, there’s a man here to see you.”

  Cariscant sat up abruptly, oddly embarrassed to find his wife in his study. She wore a woollen robe pulled tightly around her and her hair was uncombed and tousled. She let the mosquito net drop and stepped back uncertainly from the divan bed as if she too suddenly felt the shame of being confronted by their unorthodox sleeping arrangements.

  “What man?” Carriscant said, peering at her through the gauzy muslin. “Pantaleon?”

  “An American. He says it’s very urgent.”

  Carriscant dressed quickly and went through to the living room. Paton Bobby stood in the middle of the carpet, dressed in uniform, wearing a full-length cloak. Nervous servants peered, big-eyed, from doorways.

  “I’m sorry, Carriscant,” Bobby said. “Wieland can’t be found. There’s been another killin
g.”

  Just beyond Santa Mesa, a poor, mean hamlet two miles east of Manila, a stone bridge crossed the San Juan river. The carriage—Bobby driving, Carriscant beside him—rumbled across its cobblestones and stopped with a gentle lurch. It was 3 o’clock in the morning. Down below them, by the water’s edge, Carriscant could see half a dozen American soldiers, some holding lanterns.

  Carriscant slithered down the grassy bank behind Bobby who was handed a hooded lantern by one of the soldiers. “It’s under the bridge,” Bobby said flatly, swinging the beam in that direction. Carriscant followed its unwavering path cautiously, the ground damp and marshy beneath his feet, a reek of decay and human excrement filling his nostrils.

  The body of the man had been propped against the stone supports of the bridge’s first arch, almost as if it had sat down there for a rest and had fallen into a doze. It still had trousers and boots but there was no trace of the rest of the uniform. This time cause of death was immediately apparent: a single blow from a bolo delivered to the top of the head, splitting it like a melon. The entire torso was soaked in treacly, dried blood, which had flowed from the head wound and, Carriscant saw, with a lurch of shock in his chest, as he crouched down to examine it, from a more torn and unstitched version of the inverted L–shaped wound that had disfigured Ephraim Ward’s corpse. About two feet of intestine, ragged and frayed, had been dragged from the belly, probably by river rats. The right hand and forearm were missing, severed neatly at the elbow.

  “Found at midnight,” Bobby said, his voice reverberating beneath the vault of the bridge. “He was on furlough. Last seen last night at 10.30 a.m. in a Sampaloc bar.”

  “Just over twenty-four hours…Sampaloc’s only a mile or so from here. He’s a soldier?”

  “Corporal Maximilian Braun. German spelling.”

  “I can’t examine him here. Let’s get him back to the hospital.”

  There was the sound of wheels echoing on the roadway above their heads and soon they were joined, to Carriscant’s vague surprise, by the young colonel, Sieverance, who greeted them both with due solemnity.

  “Christ’s blood, what a stench there is down here! What do they dump in these rivers?” He leant forward carefully, like a man peering over a parapet on a high building and spat fastidiously on the ground. He held his handkerchief to his nose as he talked. “Governor Taft wants a full report,” Sieverance said, explaining his presence. He took off his hat and scratched his head vigorously, nervously. He was bleary–eyed and the tuft of hair he inadvertently left standing made him look absurdly young and vulnerable, Carriscant thought.

  “I’m most grateful to you again, Dr Carriscant,” he said. “We did eventually locate Dr Wieland but he’s incapable of conducting any sort of investigation. He couldn’t even investigate the whereabouts of his boots when I tracked him down.”

  A stretcher was called for and Corporal Braun’s body was carried carefully up the river bank and loaded on to Bobby’s carriage. A tarpaulin was thrown over it and Bobby and Carriscant, with Sieverance close behind, made their way back through the darkened, silent city to the San Jeronimo. Porters unloaded the body, placed it on a wooden gurney, and the three men followed its monotone rumble along gloomy corridors to the morgue. The door was locked; the porter’s key did not fit, neither did Carriscant’s. The sister on duty was summoned and she explained that Dr Cruz had had the lock changed and the only key was in his care.

  Carriscant managed to control his anger somehow and instructed the porters to take the body into his operating theatre and strip and wash it. In the meantime he, Bobby and Sieverance drank a cup of hot tea laced with rum in his consulting rooms.

  Bobby seemed moved and upset. “This is crazy,” he kept repeating. “One, yes, you can explain. Some thug with a grievance decides to cut up his victim. Two, and it’s a whole different thing. Major problem.”

  “Who did you say he was?” Sieverance asked.

  “A Corporal Braun.”

  “Two soldiers. Got to be insurgents, surely?”

  “Except the only insurgents left are three hundred miles away on another island being chased by thousands of American troops.”

  “I suppose so,” Sieverance frowned. “Yes. Fair point.”

  “A major problem.”

  In the theatre Braun’s washed and naked body lay in a pool of brilliant light on the operating table. Both Sieverance and Bobby seemed more impressed by the gleaming chrome and general cleanliness of the room than anything else as they moved around investigating the equipment.

  “This is quite an establishment, Doctor,” Sieverance said. “No disrespect, I mean, I feel I could be in the US.”

  “Well, you’d have to be somewhere very special,” Carriscant said. “Not all of this equipment is commonly available.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Sieverance nodded appreciatively. “When I think of Wieland’s surgery. The filth, the primitiveness—”

  “We got to talk about Wieland, Colonel,” Bobby said. “Seriously.”

  Carriscant approached the body while they conversed briefly in low voices. Braun had been a stocky man, in his late thirties, with a sizeable paunch. His chest and belly were covered in a thick growth of springy grey hair. Carriscant selected a thin probe from his tray of instruments and inserted it into the wide wound in the chest.

  “The heart has gone,” he said.

  “What?” both men answered simultaneously and strode to the table. “The heart—and the right hand, obviously. Removed competently but with no great skill.”

  Sieverance turned away, paling, his fingerbacks to his lips. “That make any sense? Is there some sort of native cult out here? Sacrificial cult or something?”

  “Not that I know of,” Carriscant said.

  “And what about this L-shape?” Bobby said. “Are the other organs there?”

  Carriscant duly opened up the wound. There was some displacement of the intestines, as he had expected, but otherwise everything else seemed to be as normal as possible.

  “And the last one was stitched up,” he said, “but the heart was there. This time the heart is removed and the wound left open. It makes no sense to me—I can’t see any reason behind it.”

  “But it can’t be a coincidence,” Bobby said. “We know that it must be the same murderer. Or murderers.”

  “Where was he last seen?”

  “He went out the back of a Sampaloc cathouse to take a leak. Nobody noticed he never returned. Figured he was upstairs.”

  “What’s in the back of these places?” Sieverance asked.

  Carriscant coughed and cleared his throat, they both looked at him expectantly but he raised his spread palms in apology. Bobby shrugged.

  “Some yards, few shacks, vegetable plots, open country,” he said. “Anyone can get in or out.”

  Carriscant and Bobby left Governor Taft’s office in the Malacanan Palace and walked down the wide corridor in silence to the central stairway. Taft, a vast genial man, sweating copiously in a white suit, had been suitably grateful for Carriscant’s help and, in confidence, had asked him for his professional opinion of Dr Wieland. “An incompetent and diehard quack,” was Carriscant’s candid verdict. On their leaving Taft had asked for his compliments to be presented to Mrs Carriscant, a request that had taken Carriscant somewhat by surprise until he remembered Annaliese’s social connections with the Governor’s wife.

  Standing beneath the lofty porte-cochere waiting for their carriages Bobby said, “You know, Corporal Braun used to be in Sieverance’s regiment as well.”

  “Odd. He didn’t say anything.”

  “I guess Brown sounds a common name. Can’t tell how it was spelled. Didn’t realise.”

  “Didn’t recognise, either.”

  “I wouldn’t recognise you with your head split to your bottom teeth,” Bobby said with sardonic levity. “Got to shake him up some, though, when he finds out.”

  Carriscant thought. “You think it was someone who was in the unit? Some
grudge?”

  “That’s one explanation.” Bobby smoothed his wide moustache with his thumb and forefinger. “And here’s another thing, your colleague, Dr Quiroga—”

  “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “One of his uncles is General Elpidio. Esteban Elpidio. The one who led us such a merry dance in Tabayan this spring.”

  “What are you saying? You captured Elpidio.”

  “No, it was something you said about the organs in Ward’s body. The disturbances. Now a heart’s missing—competently removed you said—maybe a professional’s hand was—”

  “Just stop now, Bobby. This is ridiculous. If you’re going to start suspecting any Filipino related to an insurrecto you’re going to—”

  “I’ll suspect anyone I fucking want, Carriscant, anyone.” Bobby looked at him fiercely, irritated by his tone, then his shoulders slumped and he smiled, apologetically.

  “Sorry, sorry…” Bobby said, laying a hand gently on his sleeve for a moment. “I don’t know, my head’s just spinning with this one. Spinning.”

  PITCH, YAW AND ROLL

  You have no right, no right at all to address me this way,” Carriscant said, trying to keep the tremble of fury out of his voice. There was an air of hostile self-assurance in the room, an unpleasant, potent complacency in the atmosphere. These two men, Carriscant thought—promising himself that he would remain absolutely calm no matter how he was provoked—these two men think they hold the balance of power, feel sure the dealt cards favour them. What did they know, he wondered? What could explain this smug and threatening confidence?

  Dr Isidro Cruz and Dr Saul Wieland sat stiffly like magistrates in chairs in Cruz’s office. Cruz had just come from an operation: there was an exclamation mark of bright blood on his stiff collar, like a brooch, and his clothes carried with him an odour of something frowsty and corrupt. Wieland, cold, blank-faced, scrutinised the cuticles on the nails of his right hand, then his left, affecting disinterest. Carriscant had refused a seat—he did not intend to linger—and stood in the centre of the silk rug in the middle of Cruz’s office, a gloomy place with dark polished floors and heavy, over-elaborate furniture. Only the privileged knowledge that those few leather-bound books in the glass fronted bookcases were medical texts would have alerted you to the fact that you were in the consulting rooms of a once eminent surgeon.