Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Something nowadays made Vic impatient with distraction, like a soap addict wrenched from the TV by his doorbell. It really was all the same story: that of a country at war with itself where eighty percent of the people were landless labourers, small farmers and workers living below the poverty line, while between eighty and ninety percent of the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were millionaires. Virtually everything else flowed from these simple facts. It was, he considered, nothing less than the world in microcosm, the globe’s huge unrest transcribed as a nation’s instability. Terminal, without a doubt. The notice board in the Crime office upstairs was a mass of thumb-tacked headlines and quotations which curled and wagged like tongues in the fans’ draught. Some were stories he himself had worked on; most had been culled at whim. Here were sundry gems, including the Daily Inquirer’s ambiguous headline about a DILG official’s visit to Cotobato after some rebels there had killed eighteen people in a raid, either reading of which was equally plausible: ‘Alunan urges local execs to help massacre survivors.’

  *

  ‘Official remedy for sexual harassment of OCWs: “Send only uglies abroad”.’

  ‘Only 1 in 4 Parañaque cops use drugs.’

  ‘Kindergarten sex slaves. Tots test HIV positive!’

  ‘“Only a little formalin” in Xmas apples.’

  ‘“No-one left to kill” claims disgruntled Ranger.’

  ‘Child workers win mercury from ball-mill effluent.’

  ‘ 3 bn. of Pinatubo relief diverted to ghost projects.’

  ‘Fake circumcision rites trick farmers into surrender.’

  ‘Husband made pregnant by wife.’

  ‘“Please Pray the Rosary” – Mama Mary.’

  *

  It didn’t much matter to him which story was thrown into his lap. More and more Vic wanted to be left to stick with it, to unravel it past its generally familiar ingredients until something else was revealed. This was usually debt or greed. Yet surprisingly often he believed he found private truths lurking behind the political scandal: a wife’s frigidity, the fear of baldness, a love rejected twenty years ago. True, salvaging didn’t quite fit with this. It was a classic story for Vic Agusan, doyen of crime reporters who had once offered himself as go-between in a hostage deal and had been shot in the thigh for his pains. It didn’t fit because jungle law pre-empted the luxury of private symptoms. He was homing in on Sergeant Cruz. That morning spent lying out in Navotas marshes had produced evidence on film of the man’s direct involvement in dumping murder victims, an activity far enough outside a policeman’s official remit as to be likely to cook Cruz’s goose for him even if there was still no proof that he had also killed them. It was a solid step forward but Vic couldn’t pretend there was any real urgency about the story. Policemen had been killing criminals ever since juries failed to convict, and would go on doing so. Perhaps after all vampires were light relief instead of nettling to the self-esteem.

  He sighed and pulled out the antenna again. For all that he worked for a rival paper Mozzy Narciso was generally friendly and helpful. Younger and slightly in awe, might have been an explanation. Yet Mozzy was himself talented. He definitely had the demotic touch. He was an ace on rapists who terrorised squatter areas most of Vic’s readers scarcely knew existed; no less ace on backstreet abortionists, fake priests soliciting funds and haunted jeepneys. Vampires were right up his street. A Naga City elementary school haunted by a dog with horns had been quintessentially a Mozzy story. Mozzy’s drawback – and the real reason why Vic didn’t feel daunted by the threat of his rivalry – was that his aceness extended little further than tracking down exactly the right vox pops. He knew instinctively that victims themselves were often too boring, traumatised or plain ashamed to give a good quote. You went for their mothers, their lodgers, their children. In case after case of Mozzy’s coverage the quotations shook themselves free of print and stayed in the mind. ‘He had spotty balls.’ ‘It was sad when he left. We’d grown used to the sound of his farts.’ And, of a bogus gynaecologist, ‘Where he operated was her purse.’ This was Mozzy’s gift. He moved from story to story tugging out nuggets while scarcely digging at all. He was no doubt giving his readers a terrific hearsay account of vampires hovering, vampires squatting and slurping, blighted neighbours clutching crucifixes. If Vic was going to get involved in the story he was going to ask: But why there? Why now? Cui bono? Crime taught one nothing if not that the supernatural was just another make of gun. He pushed buttons and waited until his secretary two floors overhead came on the line.

  ‘Cindy, I’m still in the lobby. Listen, do we have Narciso’s number in the book? No, not him, he’s our bent Customs man. The People’s journalist. Mozart P. Narciso. Okay, then, just remind me of the People’s number. I’ll track him down myself.’

  Standing there watching the comings and goings of dark figures outlined against the glaring screen of the main door he wondered about the Englishman, Prideaux. Would John be interested in vampires? To be truthful, Vic wasn’t absolutely clear about what kind of research the man was doing. Something about breaking points. For that kind of research he needed to know about the City’s police: their organisation, attitudes, scams and the rest. He had interviewed senators and doctors and priests. Vic had pushed a variety of contacts his way including a personable killer on the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission, an ex-Aquino staffer unsacked for fraud, a senior inspector in the NBI’s Narcotics Division and a Congresswoman of great charm and immeasurable greed. More importantly, Vic had introduced Prideaux to his own wife and family, to friends and colleagues, men and women whose humour was shot through with bleakness. All had agreed that John was a good fellow with an intelligent grasp of this and that, but were none the wiser. ‘Some anthropology thesis’ more or less laid to rest their mildly unsatisfied curiosity. People had their own agendas. Call him up, why not? Vampires were all part of it, too.

  It was only now he realised that the reason for the lobby’s shadow-play was another of Manila’s power failures. The chiaroscuro of flitting denizens outlined against the daylight had suited his mood. The lethargy which left him slumped by the water cooler with a portable phone was probably caused by the air conditioners shutting down. He pulled himself together, tilting the instrument’s keys to the light.

  ‘Vic Agusan? Wow. Tell you the truth, I wasn’t thinking of going back there. So what’s the connection? What’s the connection?’

  ‘Mozzy, old thing, relax. I promise you, I know zilch. I’m ringing you for information. If there’s a criminal link here it’s not one known to me or to anybody else in this building. Just Bong, with some idea that I need light relief. Vampires are it. I promise you I’m not muscling in. If ever there was copyrighted Mozzy Narciso territory, it’s vampires. Everyone knows that. What can you give me?’

  ‘Hysteria, frankly, not a lot more. They’re over in San Clemente. Do you know where that is?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ Vic said guardedly. That was Cruz’s patch, oddly enough. If Mozzy found out he was already on a story involving the police in that area he’d jump to conclusions. ‘Sort of up by North Cemetery somewhere?’

  ‘That’s it. Just about where you’d expect vampires to hang out, come to think of it. Do you know, that hadn’t occurred to me? Thanks for the tip.’

  ‘Pleasure, Mozzy. Is there anything else you can tell me which you didn’t know?’

  ‘Not really. It’s pretty much the usual thing. Couple of local drunks sitting up late at night see this figure hovering over the barrio. After a bit it sits on a roof. The only difference is this one leers and has huge fangs. Ningas kugon. A grass fire, a nothing story. I went back yesterday to do a follow-up and just got the usual collection of babies that won’t wake and dogs giving birth to litters of cockroaches and Bibles that glow in the dark. You know. Nobody’s actually seen anything. My guess is it’s all a plot dreamed up by some local wag who’s got it in for these two stumblebums. Squatter humour. Nothing to ping off the
walls about unless it goes on happening. I bet most of these things start as a joke.’

  ‘Did the creature look like Brenda?’

  ‘According to my drunken informant’s original description it had a face like that of his own wife, whom I met afterwards. I don’t know whether he knows that, but he was pretty close. Anyway, today I’m on a totally different story. At last we’ve got a lead on the Little League cheating case. Remember that? Our team won the world title last year in Pennsylvania before being stripped of it for cheating? Right… That’s the one. We’ve just found a woman who admits her boy, who was fourteen then, took on the identity and academic records of some twelve-year-old so as to be eligible for the age limit. It’s a break, Vic. Once her story comes out we’re betting the other mothers’ll come forward. Imagine, a whole goddam national team of ghost kids. Little League baseball! Is nothing sacred? Okay, I can’t believe it’s worth our best crime reporter’s time to go vampire-hunting in San Clemente, but if you want my drunken guy’s name you can have it with pleasure, Vic. Full marks to you if you can dig anything out of it other than the visions of a boozy squatter. What is it drunks see in America? Isn’t it pink elephants? Our equivalent is vampires. I suppose it’s all those centuries of Catholicism. Ha, yes, poor old Brenda. Do you think she’ll ever get her recount?’

  The presidential campaign had revealed that Miriam Santiago had an alleged history of psychiatric instability. Despite the glaring sanity evidenced by her having called a congressman ‘fungus face’ she herself had been given one of the nicknames cheerily bestowed on the afflicted. It happened to be Brenda (for ‘bren-damage’), but might just as easily have been Rita (for ‘retard’). In the circumstances Vic considered that this, in its way, was a form of voting. As a keen student of the foreign English language press he had long assumed that the choice of the name ‘Andy Capp’ to describe the common man’s dimmest strip-cartoon exemplar was no accident. It so happened there was a Rita familiar to everyone in the Chronicle building who mopped and mowed harmlessly about the area, his face split by a huge grin as he begged for coins and capered a few steps. He was generally treated with cheer and kindness, given small change and applauded ironically. Several of Vic’s colleagues, including his own secretary Cindy, were convinced that giving Rita a 2-peso coin brought them luck. It certainly brought Rita his survival. Vic supposed this was how it had been in Europe back in the days when idiots were considered as having been touched by God, and therefore holy. Presumably modern public health provisions and state medicine had put paid to them or kept them hidden from view, poleaxed with drugs and with their affliction given one of those names which implied that somebody somewhere knew all about it. He wondered if vampires had also disappeared from the advanced West or whether they still crouched in unexpected places under an assumed identity.

  14

  INSP. DINGCA was himself moving through haunted weather these days. He presumed one had first to reach a certain age to allow for a build-up of the general wastage that life offered and of which one was willy-nilly a spectator, until such time as one became a ghost for somebody else. That seemed to be the deal. Babs was now a ghost, of course. Dingca was glad he had heard nothing to suggest that the entertainer had died specifically for being an informer, that he himself was directly responsible. He was thankful too that he hadn’t mired Babs still further, as so many cops did their ‘kids’ and ‘assets’ by using them to funnel back onto the street part of whatever drug hauls they confiscated and which they could spare from their own habits. Dingca had always paid Babs in cash. True, he was also funneling back money which had fallen into the police’s hands by one route or another: payoffs, tong, recovered unmarked loot. Still, he had played Babs straight and had been left with a heavy heart but a cleanish conscience.

  These days other ghosts were joining Babs’s. They popped into his mind at irregular intervals, stepping out of a building as he drove past, sitting in familiar offices with unfamiliar occupants, leaning on tables in bars and restaurants. They were the unresting: those whose lives had been emptied out by injustice, casually, as one might tip up a bowl of waste water. They were forced to swill about the earth, their thin voices calling endlessly for redress. Other cops saw and heard them too, he had learned from gab-sessions with Sergeant Macawili; but old Bryan had retired last year and gone off to live with his daughter in Malolos, Bulacan. On the one occasion Dingca and a couple of others had driven up to see him (a trip marked by a near-fatal blowout at Meycauayan) they had found him almost speechless with emphysema.

  What they had in common, these ghosts, was that he still felt bad about them in some way even though it was not obviously a simple matter of his own conscience. There were plenty of episodes he regretted deeply but which were not particularly haunting. It couldn’t be denied there were unpleasant things to be done in the line of duty. Yet here was a mystery. In his career he had met many killers, not all crazed and quite a few in uniform, and knew absolutely about himself that he was not one of them. He did kill, however. He had seldom had to fire his gun in self-defence, but salvage was another matter. It was not really an issue of conscience for most cops, he knew, and nor was it for himself. There were certain animals who had roamed the streets long enough, wearing their gang tattooes like medals won in a war against civilisation. Left alone, they bred. They needed steady culling. As far as Dingca was concerned it was a kind of moral affirmation in the face of bribed judges and porous jails. Salvaging was seldom done by a cop working alone unless it was an especially private matter; it reinforced a comradeship which was equally affirmative. Some cops elected simply to be Out. The ones who were In all the way usually made quicker progress up through the ranks. Offhand, Dingca could hardly recall a single individual in whose death he had participated. It was not until someone brought up a name that he was occasionally able to brush the cobwebs away from a face or a scene.

  All that killing had produced only one ghost for Rio Dingca, and quite unaccountably at that. It was the ghost of an expression he had glimpsed when they had gone one night to a house in Grace Park following a tip-off. The man they were after – his name still eluded Rio – was a specialist in armed robbery who had started at the age of sixteen by throwing fuming nitric acid into the faces of late-night jeepney passengers. His first attack had blinded a woman and disfigured her sleeping children and netted him 37 pesos. From this he had graduated, via a very lucrative tourist bus heist, to the daring holdup in broad daylight of an unmarked police jeep doing an emergency security run, a strongbox delivery from bank to bank. It was an inside job. In the unmarked jeep were three policemen in street clothes, including the driver. Two were sitting with Armalites across their knees, a fatal mistake when quick action was needed, especially for the one hunched up beneath the low hood in the back. The jeep was crawling along Padre Faura towards the lights on Mabini, in the heart of the tourist belt. The streets were crowded with lunchtime pedestrians, office workers from government buildings and nurses from the General Hospital nearby. The man chose his moment with care, weaving up from behind on an aged Kawasaki 100. As the jeep drew level with the corner of Bocobo the motorcyclist came up on the inside, shot dead the policeman in the front seat and then the driver before turning to deal with the one in the back who was barely starting to react. The motorcyclist fired again and hit him in the thigh, which galvanised the policeman into bringing up the Armalite in a blind frenzy, squeezing the trigger even before he could aim, hitting the already lifeless body of his comrade in front and dissolving the jeep’s windscreen into a white hail of crystals until the muzzle caught on a headrest. This time the motorcyclist shot him cleanly between the eyes. He dumped the Kawasaki on its side, ran around the jeep and hauled the driver out onto the road. So far it had all taken eight seconds and pedestrians were only just beginning to realise what was going on. As the dead driver’s foot came off the clutch the jeep stalled with a bang. Coolly the man climbed in, restarted the engine, swung right and, bumping over the Kawasaki’
s front wheel, tore up Bocobo against the one-way traffic stream, swerving on and off the pavements, with two dead bodies and a strongbox. It had all been so cold and fast and well informed that it made the headlines of the evening papers. Next morning the heavier editorials talked about war on the streets and how the police were often a more fatal medicine than the disease they were intended to cure. Right from the start it was assumed that the robber was himself a cop, which incensed only those policemen who were sure he wasn’t. Their righteous anger turned sour when it emerged that the tip-off had almost certainly come from a bank guard who was indeed a moonlighting cop.

  Leaving aside the one-year-old infant hit in the head by a stray bullet, one of the dead was a colleague of Dingca’s. When months later they learned the motorcyclist was to be found in southern Grace Park, four of them went there one night without it even occurring to them to pay a courtesy call on Station 2. They went in front and back, flushed out some elderly women watching Raven on TV, and found their man asleep in a curtained-off alcove. He was alone and, incredibly, unarmed. He sat up on the mat, turtle-lidded in the glow of the 20w bulb, a nineteen-year-old youth wearing a Batman T-shirt and a cotton blanket. His mouth said ‘Oh’, even as his brain was tearing itself free of the dream which still held his face in the slack innocence of a child. And this was the expression which was to haunt Dingca as they all shot him: the eyes turned to him in soft wonderment as if he were watching a miracle, an ordinary event which without warning had leapfrogged over credibility and was waiting on the other side for him to catch up. They had found no gun under his pillow or, indeed, anywhere in the house, but had brought one for him just in case and pressed it unfired into his dead hand. For a couple of days Rio was convinced they had killed the wrong man but then the lab reports came through: fingerprints which tallied with those on the police jeep’s steering wheel and matched the ones on an empty acid bottle.