Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Dingca, the father not the Inspector, had for many minutes been saying ‘Exactly, Mam’ and ‘Nowadays you can’t be too careful’ to a succession of teachers wearing their best shoes. He now caught sight of Patti Gonzales a little way off and in the sudden lurch this caused him made two simultaneous discoveries. One was that she was Patti Gonzales as in Butz Gonzales, the owner of Bowl-o-Rama; the other was that she looked a good deal like Babs. Babs? That twilight creature? His asset? But yes… Especially the perfect teenage neck. And this realisation smeared a grotesque continuity over the whole morning, eliding the sleaze pits of Ermita with the rural innocence of San Pedro, and doing something too complicated to think about to his image of Patti. He and her father exchanged waves and began drifting in each other’s direction.

  ‘Hey, Rio.’

  ‘How come I never knew you had a daughter? Especially one so beautiful? I thought you just had the boys.’

  ‘She’s our youngest. The scholar of the family. Thank God there’s one, eh? If she gets this NCEE thing it’s either the Civil Service or dentistry. Got to have someone to keep us in old age, right? No, Patti doesn’t go out much. Books, books, books. Either at home in her room or in the library here. Right, Patti? Pat, come say Hi to one of Manila’s Finest.’

  ‘Finest what?’ His daughter moved languidly over, the now wilting white flowers nodding tiredly over her ID as though sated and weakened by too lengthy proximity to her breasts. ‘Joke only.’

  ‘Policemen, of course,’ said Butz, ignoring her last words. ‘It’s an expression.’

  ‘Thank you, Daddy.’ She held out a long, slender, ringless schoolgirl’s hand. ‘A great pleasure to meet you, sir.’

  ‘This is Rio Dingca. He’s a lieutenant and one of my greatest bowlers.’

  ‘Dingca? Are you Eunice’s dad, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Indeed I am. None other. Though nowadays I’m actually an inspector.’ The shy boy betrayed by his own pomposity.

  ‘Wow. We’re all envious of Eunice, you know. She’s so clever. And beautiful.’

  Dingca was aware, from a certain peppery scent like playground dust in the air, that he had strayed onto the outer fringes of some secret teenage battlefield. He suddenly felt protective of his own daughter. Patti’s graceful neck, he now saw, had on one side the faintest blemish, a slightly darker oval patch. Only someone looking quite hard would have noticed. A fading bruise? Such as one might accidentally pick up in a library when a heavy book toppled from an upper shelf, h’m? Butz would have fallen for it. Fond dad with his attention fixed more firmly down the road at Los Baños, where he was planning to open another Bowl-o-Rama if he could arrange a little juggling with the land use of a plot on the outskirts. Dingca caught himself staring too intently at Patti, scanning her as if anxious to detect signs of coarseness from close to, little giveaways blatant only when set against his own daughter’s authentic dewiness. But the faint bruise apart, there was nothing. Patti in propinquity was as monumentally perfect as Patti at a distance. Big Girl. Not big in the blowsy sense, and certainly not strapping. She was only slightly taller than most of her fellow students though it was exaggerated by her slender figure. No, she was a Big Girl to Dingca’s little boy: the sort of girl his thirteen-year-old former self had looked up at in covert wonderment as too distant in age and beauty even to be a realistic repository for desire, for anything but the most diffuse and poignant longing. He had been obliged to turn back to girls his own age who still gulped down glasses of Sunny and went about with the ghost of an orange moustache. Touching, but not it. Nor were their legs ever as good as those of the Big Girls. They still bore the circular fading scars of a hundred childhood sores, most of which had healed without trace other than a slight blotchiness here and there, deeper brown on brown. But real Big Girls’ legs were unmarked, as if they had been chosen from infancy to remain immune to the frequent bakukang around which flies clustered and which could leave legs mottled from the knees down. And if it was true of legs, so of faces. Big Girls never had acne, either. Big Gi-

  ‘Do you know what Eunice is planning to do, sir?’

  ‘Oh.’ Dingca shook himself back to being forty-plus. ‘Do? Eunice?’ To his own astonishment he realised he had no idea. He must have been consulted or told a thousand times this last year, surely? He nearly said ‘Dentistry’ before remembering in time that this was what Butz had just said Patti was considering. He found the solution. ‘I thought everything nowadays depended on the, um, NCEE?’

  ‘Do you know if there’s any truth in this rumour, sir? That they’re going to do away with the NCEE? Or replace it or something? A national examination, yet none of our teachers seems to know.’

  ‘You mean a policeman would?’

  One way and another it had been a weird day with its own particular ghosts in close attendance. One of the less substantial but still pervasive of these had been Lettie Tan’s. Back on duty Dingca had been duly despatched with a PO1, a rookie named Benhur Daldal, to visit the cemetery and report on the condition of the Tan cenotaph. Unsure where to look they had driven up past the barrier towards the central cluster of chapels. In one of these they found the cemetery police unit playing pusoy. Between them they found a Tan lot on the faded old plan. Back in the jeep they meandered through the network of miniature roads with mature trees casting their shade across the pavements. They met nobody. The plot offered one of the less pretentious tombs: a plain two-storey narrow building washed in dull yellow. Instead of iron gates it had a pair of bronze doors which were shut tight. Dingca and Daldal walked all around it, peering in through a couple of barred windows. Everything seemed secure. The bars were firm in their cement, the panes unbroken. Inside, a marble sarcophagus glimmered in semi-darkness.

  ‘Are we looking for unlawful intruders or what, sir?’ asked the rookie.

  ‘Who knows? We just had this report which said the place had been messed about. It looks okay to me.’

  ‘It’s in a lot better condition than my place.’ Daldal, Dingca knew, lived on the railway tracks over in Sampaloc in a house to whose rear wall a squatter’s shack clung like a barnacle, splashed whenever a train rumbled through the puddles into which the lines had sunk. ‘Imagine all this just for a dedbol.’

  ‘We can’t see anything wrong, agreed? Woman needs her head examined.’

  ‘You don’t think,’ the rookie said tentatively once they were back in the jeep with José Mari Chan singing “Beautiful Girl”, ‘there might be more than one Tan tomb?’

  ‘No relation, you mean?’

  ‘It’s a common name.’

  Back to the map. After reorienting themselves they drove down towards the gate and branched off parallel to the boundary. The road ahead curved gently around to the right, following the perimeter.

  ‘Susmaryosep.’ They both saw it simultaneously: a sort of miniature Moorish villa in white with turrets. Over the door, which was bound in polished brass straps like a family Bible, incised golden letters said TAN. Around the entire building ran portcullis-style iron railings, points uppermost, painted black. Evidently the place was comparatively new.

  ‘If you saw that over in Dasmariñas Village you’d think it belonged to a presidential aide.’

  ‘A small one, though.’

  They climbed out once more and reconnoitred. From the front the place looked pretty much as the builders must recently have left it. Round the back it presented a different aspect. Several of the iron railings were missing. The white walls were covered in graffiti. From here the land sloped sharply down to the perimeter wall thirty feet away. Above this, as well as through a narrow gap, the tin roofs and hunched lean-to architecture of San Clemente were visible. In the middle of a pool of mud studded with ad hoc stepping stones (concrete blocks wrenched from the wall, the curved spine of a palm frond, a wooden plank) and littered with empty shampoo sachets, a rusty gooseneck of piping emerged. From it water dribbled and fed the surrounding swamp.

  ‘Now I see what she’s complaining about,’
said Dingca. A child with a plastic bucket appeared in the gap in the wall, took a nonchalant step into the cemetery, caught sight of the two men and froze. ‘Come here, boy,’ called Dingca. The child fled, bucket banging hollowly, ‘I wonder how long this has been going on?’

  ‘Probably you only need to read the Tans’ water meter to get a pretty good idea,’ said Daldal shrewdly.

  ‘If you’re not careful you’ll turn into a detective instead of a policeman.’ Dingca squeezed in through the broken ironwork and inched along the gap between it and the mausoleum’s wall. ‘But if you look a bit closer you’ll see they aren’t paying. The water company is.’ A pipe emerged from the ground, turned at right angles, passed through a meter and entered the white wall. It was still possible to see where the trench had been cut, leading diagonally back towards the barrio and the illegal standpipe.

  ‘Neat job, huh?’

  ‘No,’ said Dingca, ‘a lash-up. See how the ground here’s soggy, just beneath the meter? They cut into it one night, put in a T, couldn’t borrow a proper pipe threader and wrench so just bound the joint with rubber. It’s leaking steadily. More to the point, having done that and filled in the trench, why didn’t they go the whole hog and run the pipe right down into San Clemente instead of stopping halfway?’

  ‘Lack of pipe,’ hazarded the rookie.

  ‘More than likely. I wonder if that damp’s getting inside? We’ll have to induce Madam Tan to open up before we can make a full and proper report on damage. I’d be curious to see inside a place like this, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Not really,’ confessed Benhur. ‘I don’t mind morgues but I’m not too good in cemeteries. They say the Chinese dead have special spirit guards to protect them. Not like ours.’

  Dingca had also heard this, otherwise he would have rejected it as a superstitious invention. ‘Well anyway,’ he said, ‘we’ve got what we need. Damage to water main; damage to railings; damage to rear wall, to wit, graffiti. Gang stuff mostly, it looks like. Let’s see. Oh, this’ll do.’ He took out a ballpoint and copied down one of the evidential phrases. “Wake up, Cory! The Chinese dead have roofs over their heads, your people have none!” The revolutionary lost command of San Clemente, no doubt. Come on.’

  All that had been eight months ago. Within a week or two the railings had been repaired, the graffiti painted out, the MWSS had grubbed up the illegal spur. The Tans had increased their contribution to the cemetery police and arranged for one of them to be beaten up in order to encourage his comrades. The officers now made nightly visits to the tomb before settling down to their pusoy, reading horror comics and otherwise waiting for serious grave-robbers to strike. Lettie Tan had never allowed Rio Dingca inside to inspect for damage.

  A week after her arrest the woman who had tried to abduct the child in Harrison Plaza had sworn she was unconnected to any kidnapping ring, had merely been ‘freelancing’ and yielded to spur-of-the-moment temptation. Bail had been posted at five thousand pesos, an absurd sum the poor woman couldn’t possibly have afforded in a lifetime. The poor woman promptly paid it and vanished. Or someone paid it for her and vanished her. The main point was that the case fell through its own bottom like ice cream through a soggy cone, leaving any possible Tan connection unresolved. Then in early June Babs had been found rolled up in a mat in San Andres. His perfect teenage throat (he was actually 28, Dingca discovered) had been cut from earring to earring. His cock had also been cut off and stuffed up his own rectum. Dingca hoped very much this had happened after death but gloomily doubted it.

  Poor Babs. Nowadays when he thought of him Dingca was unable to work the trick in reverse, go from the transvestite’s face to that of Patti Gonzales, regenerate any of the connections that had worked once and once only for a single day in March. To tell the truth, he hadn’t given another thought to Butz’s daughter from that moment to this; whereas he often found himself seeing Babs passing fleetingly through the faces of perfect strangers imperfectly glimpsed, as if his asset were still hovering forlornly in limbic form, despairingly trying on body after body to find the one into which he could slip back. ‘Too kind, Inspector. Fried chicken would be just the thing. A girl’s got to keep her strength up if she’s expected to talk as well as everything else. Now, stumped, are we? We’re in need of a little tip from the twilight zone, h’m?’ Dingca had in fact hardly ever seen Babs in full drag. Whenever they met on anonymous ground somewhere like Quiapo he was a rather ordinary looking young man in denim and T-shirt, not even effeminate. The policeman had tried to see in the face hungrily tearing at a chicken leg across the narrow formica tabletop the exquisite feminine lines and planes which emerged after dark in The Topless Pit’ and which had more than once (Babs claimed) caused tourists to come to blows with each other in their attempts to carry him off to the Hilton, if not absolutely to paradise itself. It caused Dingca an additional pang that Babs had met his death in working costume. In some sense it was a beautiful young woman who had died so horribly that night. He had seen assets come and go for a variety of reasons, only a few of them terminal, but none of them affected him as Babs had. Somewhere caught up in it all, or hanging about it like a poignant scent, was an aching sense of waste. Now and again it came to him, the feeling of an unguessable substance unravelling – inside or out he couldn’t tell – as if certain faces or certain presences held things together but that when they were gone a dissolution set in which could catch him sitting in front of a lone bottle of beer in a bar when he might have been driving home to San Pedro, Laguna.

  Well. His old station, Station 5, had got nowhere on Babs and now never would. Tourist Belt entertainers were always turning up dead. It was a high risk profession. Impotent as he was to express any proper emotion for an informer he’d hardly known (but whom he now wished he had), Rio Dingca opted for loyalty of a sort. At least he could take seriously whatever Babs had been trying to tell him. But his last information had been vague and had already come to nothing. A finger pointed at Lettie Tan, that was all. Of course she was bent. A wealthy family who owned all sorts of things besides a night club in Ermita: how could she not be? But faint as the links were, they touched him in one way or another by connecting with San Clemente. He’d tried a friend in Station 5 for anything recent on ‘The Topless Pit’ and its proprietress and had come up with a sheaf of technical infringements, short cuts, bribes and a scandalous piece of conveyancing. The most one could shake out of all that would be the odd henchman, some goons, and more than a few fellow-policemen. There was no sense in even thinking of going after one of the Tans because there was no earthly way you could get anything to stick. And if you did by some miracle make a case and live to file charges and see it presented, the likelihood of a Tan seeing the inside of a jail cell even for ten minutes was too remote to bother with. And if they did, you’d have a lot more to worry about because your own troubles would only just have begun, and wouldn’t be over until you were too.

  10

  PRIDEAUX HAD ALWAYS thought the notion of Press responsibility was another of those self-negating phrases like ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘native delicacies’. Since meeting Vic Agusan, however, he had begun to reconsider. The need to sell newspapers did indeed result in some pretty inventive journalism now and then, but in a land already inured to grotesque scandal there was really no way of outdoing the stories which had been proved to the hilt and even turned out to understate the truth. In a sense that was the scandal; and those papers which took risks by publishing unconfirmed gossip or which linked already tainted public figures with – for a change – a scam of which they were quaintly innocent were not, he now thought, irresponsible within the larger context. After all, if the great and the good turned out to have been unjustly maligned they could always sue, as Cory Aquino had Luis Beltran and his publisher when he described her as trying to take cover under her bed during a coup attempt. After a duly solemn visit by the jurors to the Presidential residence on Arlegui St. the court had accepted that this was an impossibility since
there was a clearance of only a few centimetres between the bed and the floor. Beltran’s claim that he had merely been employing a figure of speech, such as any writer might, was of no avail. The accusation of cowardice had stung the President and now she was going to sting in return, to the tune of two million pesos.