‘Message from the Captain. He wants you to check out a story about vampires in San Clemente.’
‘Vampires? Get lost, Sergeant.’
‘No, really. Apparently it’s in People’s for the second day running.’
‘Wow. It must be true, then. And where’s the Captain, may I ask?’
‘He’s over on Carmona. Thay had an amok down there last night. Chopped up seven. Four dedbol plus the amok.’
‘Anyone we knew?’
‘Don’t think so, Lieutenant. Radio repairer or something. The usual quiet sort.’
‘Mm. And I get vampires, that it?’
‘Only passing on what the Captain said, Lieutenant. You’re the one with the contacts in San Clem.’
This provoked a snigger or two in reference to the ancient joke about Dingca’s having a second wife up there among the cemeteries who made him his clothes in return for regular megaboffing. Since this was none other than the virtuous Nanang Pipa, from whom he bought the girls’ T-shirts at cost, Dingca hadn’t minded the ribbing. It seemed a small price to pay.
‘Okay,’ he said. Any job outside would be preferable to sitting here by candlelight. ‘Anyone got a People’s?’
It was headline stuff in two-inch high red capitals, a Mozart P. Narciso special full of interviews with mothers who had found their babies unaccountably drowsy with strange marks on their necks. ‘I can’t wake my baby,’ sobbed one housewife hysterically. ‘He’s been asleep now for seventeen hours. He’s never done it before. To my mind he’s possessed.’ Another resident said that although she had the greatest respect for their parish priest, San Clemente needed the services of a specialist ‘like that priest who did the Cavite dwarves.’ Never one to leave his readers baffled by a reference, Mozzy had taken time out – and a box outlined in heavy black type – to remind everyone of the incident some months ago when an elementary school in Cavite had been closed for days because of a plague of black dwarves which had invaded classrooms and pulled the pupils’ hair. The children described the dwarves as having black beards and being about as tail as a family-size Coke bottle. A trained exorcist had been summoned and had done a number on them and successfully sent them packing back to their underground kingdom.
On his way out and with heavy humour Dingca laid his bolstered pistol on the desk.
‘Shan’t be needing this, Jun. But can you issue me a bottle of holy water, please?’
‘Yeah, look, I’m sorry, Lieutenant. It’s nothing to do with me. Captain said it’s not going to look good if it’s up there in the headlines and not a cop in sight. You know how these stories can attract trouble.’
‘We’re service-oriented…’
‘… not mission-oriented. You’ve got it.’
But Rio Dingca picked up his gun again after all and tucked it into his waistband as he trotted down the station steps into blessed sunlight.
19
AS THE National Chronicle’s chief crime reporter Vic Agusan rated a car and a driver, as distinct from the limo and chauffeur enjoyed by the paper’s editors. For some jobs – lurking with macro-zoom lenses as cops dumped their victims, for instance – he preferred to use his own Toyota, and it was in this that he called for Prideaux on the way to San Clemente. He referred to it fondly as ‘The Hersheymobile.’ Years of scalding sun and atmospheric pollutants had etched its once-glossy brown cellulose to a matt bloom. Together with the odd wisps of silver trim which still adhered, the crumpled wings and dented roof, this gave the vehicle a considerable resemblance to a block of chocolate on which somebody had stepped.
Somewhere up José Abad Santos he glanced at a map and saw that one didn’t after all drive to the area in which San Clemente must lie, there being no road, so he parked the Hersheymobile in the approach to the Chinese Cemetery. Thus it was that he and Prideaux, having consulted the guard at the barrier, walked up and along past the new Tan mausoleum (‘God, look at that’), cut sharply down to a hole in the hollow-block perimeter wall and squeezed through into the village. Vic thought it pretty much what he’d expected but could see his British companion apprehensively taking in a detailed inventory of slimy pathways and the shanties’ patchwork sides which came practically up to the wall.
‘Hooches,’ Vic heard him murmur, ‘It’s a ville. As in “Let’s waste this ville”.’
It was not hard to find Eddie Tugos. With the exception of their vampire he and Bats Lapad had temporarily become San Clemente’s most famous inhabitants. The visitors were led along meandering passageways strung with washing, here and there negotiable on tiptoe across swampy tracts sown with pieces of wood, a cylindrical length of palm trunk and the bashed honeycomb of a car radiator. Curious eyes and surprised giggles followed Prideaux. Hands which might or might not have been friendly clutched at his forearms. Cries of ‘Kano!’ and the running feet of children could be heard spreading through the warren of alleys. Finally they reached a tiny clearing. There, beneath a single palm tree with a basketball hoop nailed to its trunk, was a low rickety table made of packing-case slats and covered in bottles and glasses. At this, holding court, sat Eddie and Bats surrounded by assorted drunks, cronies and children.
‘I have to tell you,’ said Eddie with becoming frankness once introductions had been made and he had overcome his initial disappointment at finding his foreign visitor was not a member of the international press, ‘that you’re not the first today. No, no. Never mind, eh? Come one, come all. Do you know Mozart? What do you think of him?’
‘A first-rate investigative reporter,’ Vic said promptly. ‘It was he who suggested I came today.’
‘He’s a lying hound,’ said Eddie. ‘Generous, though.’ He tilted an empty gin bottle so that it clinked with heavy significance against its hollow companions. Vic produced some money and was about to hand it to the nearest child with orders for reinforcements when Eddie called ‘Judge!’ A lean man in an unravelling sombrero stepped forward, took the money and vanished. The journalist read this with amusement, making a mental note to tell the Englishman afterwards since he would probably have missed it. With his celebrity Eddie was being accorded a social status which Vic was sure he never normally enjoyed, and with it went a subtle re-ordering of his friendships. The man in the hat had briefly become an alalay, somewhere between a bodyguard and a gofer, as if Eddie himself were a proper little amo now (useless lusharooney though he clearly was. Vic had taken in the whole setup the instant he’d caught sight of the gin bottles, their labels already glowing brilliantly in the morning sunlight). ‘He hasn’t been today, though.’
‘Who, Mozart? No, he’s on another story. So who’s been this morning?’
‘Oh.’ Eddie looked around for Judge and found Bats instead. Bats was tilted back against the tree wearing borrowed shades, Mr Cool himself, slightly but fatally upstaged because the vampire had chosen the Tugos roof on which to perch. ‘Who was here, Bats?’
‘Bandera. Abante. Tempo,’ said Bats, hardly moving his mouth.
The tabloids, thought Vic disgustedly. The real scuzz, sniffing around for the tabloid angle. What the hell was he doing here wasting time with these leaky bladders? ‘Why do you say Mozart’s a liar, Mr Tugos? Do you think he misrepresented something you said?’
At this moment the man in the sombrero reappeared, clutching bottles and a plastic bag of ice. Bottle caps popped and twirled in the air, were retrieved by scrambling barefoot children eager to scrape out their linings to see if they’d won a jackpot. Glancing around to make sure his guests were properly seated, the glasses and bottles correctly disposed, Eddie said with unexpected precision, ‘He couldn’t help misrepresenting everything I said because he didn’t believe a word of it. Not one word.’
‘Well, I read his two articles and they seemed pretty fair to me. Good faith, and so on. After all, it’s a pretty strange story, you’ve got to admit. And it’s not as if you took photographs of the apparition.’
‘It wasn’t an “apparition”, it was a manananggal, man,’ said Eddie
vehemently. ‘That’s exactly what he did, this Mozart friend of yours. He didn’t actually write lies because he didn’t need to. What he did was…’ Eddie thought for a moment, ‘undermine my credibility. That’s it! Look,’ he reached down and from the ground plucked two copies of People’s. That morning’s edition had a banner in three-inch red capitals which said ‘THE VAMPIRE’S EVIL SPREADS’ surmounted by an outline drawing of a creature all wings and fangs hovering as if about to alight on the headline. Beneath all this was room for only a couple of inches of print. One turned the page expectantly only to find a spread of perfectly ordinary stories such as ‘Teenager Mashes Girls’ and ‘Fake Cop Nabs Real Cop in Error!’
‘Page four,’ said Eddie with hurt in his voice. On page four the vampire story was taken up again in normal print. ‘Here’s an example,’ he reached across and tapped a paragraph. “His wife Epifania, who runs a sewing business from her home, said her husband had been under a strain recently. There had been a lot of worry over family matters.” See what I mean? How craftily it’s done? His wife runs a sewing business, get it? Not him. His wife. In other words she’s a hard-working, level-headed woman who can be trusted. Notice it’s her home and not mine, which I built with these two hands,’ Eddie stared rhetorically at his spread palms, ‘the same hands which are digging her the precious comfort room of her dreams which is causing all this –’
‘Comfort rooms, Eddie,’ interrupted Bats firmly from behind his shades. ‘Mr Agusan and his American guest didn’t come to San Clemente to hear about toilets. They came to hear about the manananggal which I also saw. We were equal witnesses,’ he explained to Vic and Prideaux.
‘Okay, okay,’ agreed Eddie, though obviously unwilling to abandon his general thesis. ‘The whole point is, I’m discredited, right? You know perfectly well that when someone in a newspaper’s described as having been under a strain recently it means they’re either off their heads or pissed incapable. I’ve been under a strain for more than recently!’ he suddenly yelled towards his own shut front door. ‘Damn near twenty-two years! It’s called marriage!’ Everyone looked nervously towards the house as if expecting the door to fly open and a virago spring out with a flashing pair of cutting-out shears. When nothing happened Eddie said reasonably, ‘You see my point, Mr Agusan? Nobody takes it seriously. But we saw it. We did. That’s why we all need gin. There, look at the label. See? It’s a defence against the Devil. The triumph of San Miguel.’
‘So what about all this other corroborative stuff?’ Vic tapped the newspaper. ‘The neighbours? The glowing Bibles? The cockroaches?’
‘We can’t say,’ said Bats. ‘We didn’t witness any of that. I expect it’s all true. Everyone knows everyone in San Clemente. We know who the liars are. It’s not surprising, though, is it? When an evil spirit that powerful materialises it has all sorts of side effects. It stands to reason.’
‘That’s quite right!’ put in a woman from among the crowd of onlookers gathered at the foot of the tree, ‘I’m Julie Orallo, the Mrs Orallo in that same newspaper. My Santo Niño fell off the wall and it’s never done it before. The way that Narciso man wrote it, it was a bit of a joke. But you tell me what the chances are of my Santo Niño falling at exactly the same moment as the manananggal appeared. You tell me that, clever-clogs!’
‘I didn’t write that, Mrs Orallo,’ said Vic mildly. ‘I’m just listening.’
‘And I’m just telling you. All those smarty-boots journalists from downtown, they drift up here from their aircon offices and say it’s all, er, hysteria. But we in San Clemente, we felt that wave of evil. That’s not hysteria. That’s something you feel, isn’t it?’ The crowd murmured its agreement. ‘And all our hair stood on end at once, didn’t it? And that’s something anyone with eyes can see.’
‘Okay,’ said Vic pacifically, ‘okay. I’m keeping an open mind, remember?’
‘An empty head, more like,’ said a voice in the crowd. ‘Joke only,’ it added, and there was laughter as well as nudging and shushing.
Vic turned to Bats. ‘Perhaps Mr Bats here would tell me exactly where he saw the manananggal.’
Prideaux had followed all this with difficulty, meanwhile, since it was in Tagalog. The general drift, though, was clear enough: an anger on the part of the locals that they weren’t being taken seriously. When the impassive man in dark glasses pointed to a nearby roof Prideaux saw an expanse of rusty tin, much patched and with several bald motor tyres lying on it presumably to prevent the wind lifting the sheets. The house itself was two-storeyed and leaned in neighbourly fashion against that next door, which in turn was sandwiched into a general rookery of similar buildings both high and low. He imagined that people added another floor to their houses when they had a bit of spare cash or else some materials came their way. He could even see a couple of makeshift balconies. ‘Rough, I’d guess,’ Vic had said on the way over when asked what San Clemente would be like, and images of violence and desperation had come to him, as they so often did nowadays. Yet sitting in the shade of a palm tree at a table hospitably spread with refreshments he felt a peaceable, almost rural atmosphere quite different from that of the carefully contrived oases downtown. Those hotel gardens squeezed by a grid of streets, their high boundary walls painted with crude trompe l’oeil vistas of Mt. Mayon as glimpsed between jungled headlands, were nothing but tropicopolitan fakery. San Clemente, despite its own high walls, was unquestionably authentic, as elemental as befitted a lot of people living on a hillside.
For there was indeed a view: a rare sense, for this city, of being positioned in a landscape. From where he was sitting he could see the upper part of the barrio rising towards where, a hundred or so metres away, the huge cemetery began. Beyond the shanty roofs were big old trees, their dark crowns dense as sponge, and between them the pale gleam of tombs. He could judge the point from which Vic and he had walked down into the barrio and now saw it was not the very top of San Clemente. They had come in about a third of the way down. The shanties stretched on in a narrowing wedge beyond to a point he could calculate by mentally prolonging the cemetery wall’s diagonal. Besides the vista of trees there were other signs of rurality. Ducks paddled in the sludge between the dwellings. From a nearby gully (actually the long sewage outfall leading from behind the Tugos house down to the invisible Kapilang) came the squeal of piglets, reflected from the bleached and rotting walls of the latrines lining its far side. A scatter of hens scratched in the dust, while nearby a fighting cock was tethered by one leg on a length of nylon cord simply nailed into the baked soil. Its wattles glowed with rich blood; the sun burnished its metallic plumes until they bled gold and copper and bronze; the proud arch of its tail dribbled inky lights. It was a dazzling bird.
Just then Prideaux caught sight of a familiar figure emerging from a nearby house and turning away up the alley. At least, he was pretty sure it was familiar. He hadn’t seen Fr. Herrera since their lunch together in the New Era but the plump torso and spectacles were surely unmistakable. He got abruptly to his feet with one of those all-purpose hand gestures at once indicating excuses and a short absence and, without taking his eyes off the place where he’d last seen the priest, hurried after him.
Five minutes later the Tugos front door opened and a tall, fortyish man in T-shirt and slacks came out, laughing. He paused in the sun, looking over at the table and the crowd. Eddie was just describing some details of the fangs which he’d newly recalled. Everyone’s attention was on him except Vic Agusan’s, distracted by this stranger’s appearance. How is it one can always tell? he was asking himself as he so regularly did. They had that look about them which one couldn’t quite pin down. It didn’t matter what they wore or what they were doing; sooner or later that little inward voice spoke up and said ‘Cop’. After all these years of talking to them, drinking with them, following and watching them, Vic always knew if the man was what he called a proper cop or merely some military no-neck pretending to be one. This man was a proper cop, the full Academy-trained art
icle with, what? eighteen or twenty years on the clock and not enough seniority to show for it. His hair was greying, Vic noticed.
The man walked over and listened for a moment before Eddie saw him and broke off in mid-reminiscence. ‘Rio!’ he exclaimed, getting unsteadily to his feet. ‘A drink for the Inspector, Judge, he ordered, as to the manner born. ‘I owe this man my life,’ he explained to his audience. ‘If it hadn’t been for him I’d still be rotting in jail on a trumped-up charge.’ He threw an arm around the T-shirt; the tall man smiled faintly. ‘Imagine me being accused of carnapping! It’s like accusing a eunuch of rape. I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to.’
‘That either,’ said a voice from the crowd. ‘Thanks to St Michael.’ There was laughter. ‘Joke only.’
‘What? What?’ demanded Eddie, deftly intercepting a glass of gin and draining it at a gulp. This, together with Judge’s rolled eyes and raised eyebrows, drew more laughs since the drink had been intended for the new arrival.
‘San Miguel, Eddie,’ explained the cop with a kindly pat on his host’s shoulder. The patron saint of family planning.’ This provoked further amusement, as did the dumb show with which he managed to accept a fresh glass which Judge had passed behind Eddie’s back.
But Eddie had embarked on another reminiscence, one which required an actor’s concentration. ‘“Just drive,” they said, “that’s all you have to do. Drive to the guy’s house and you go free. We’ll take it from there.” Rrrrmm, rrrrmm!’ He stamped his right foot repeatedly on the ground as on an accelerator pedal. ‘Rrrrmm! Nothing. Bugger all.’ He stretched both arms out, gripped an imaginary steering wheel and gave several thrusts with his pelvis as if to urge a recalcitrant vehicle into motion. He glanced over the jeep’s side at the unmoving ground and shook his head in bafflement. ‘Rrrrmm?’ The crowd, most of whom had seen the dramatic re-telling of Eddie’s miraculous deliverance from jail many times before, were perfectly content to see it again. This was vintage Eddie, pissed by ten-thirty in the morning, the darling of the ghostbusters, the man who’d just put San Clemente on the national map. This was Eddie’s day.
Ghosts of Manila Page 22
