Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘What, about corruption and fatalism?’ But Ysabella sounded spikier than she can have felt, for eventually she introduced Prideaux to Ben, who loved nothing better than expounding on his countrymen’s character. It would all have been fine had the man been twenty-five. Or perhaps not fine but explicable. What was a person like him doing still wandering the world in middle age asking dim, sophomoronic questions? At least (thought Ysabella, noting the precise position of a greyware dish on her plan and re-checking it with the tape measure) her sort of work was practical, tangible, and brought to light things which nobody even knew were hidden. At the end of the day one could point to a row of pots on a shelf, to skeletons and flints and coins and shards and glass beads. It was so much easier to ask questions of the dead. They were somewhat tight-lipped but what little they gave away one could put under a microscope or fluoroscope, test its thermoluminescence and subject tiny samples to gas chromatography and carbon dating. But the living were all motives and lacked anything concrete. They lied and deceived themselves. They lived in private dreams and pursued their own ends even as they made deals and public declarations they promptly welshed on and forgot. She had exposed Hugh’s protestations, for instance, as pure blarney. Now that she came to think about it there was something about this Prideaux fellow that reminded her slightly of Hugh: a certain absence, as though a part of him were always standing a little to one side facing another direction and thinking about something quite else. Well, look where it led. This Prideaux was a horrid object lesson Hugh really ought to see before it was too late. it was true that part of Hugh’s problem was that he had too much money, but a far bigger part was that he had not enough ambition. His particular brand of selective intelligence and sensibility was easily subverted into moans about mortality which produced its own hopeless inertia. In her view, after due thought in a harsh exile, it wasn’t thoughtfulness at all. It was altogether less admirable, more like indecisivencss, a radical inability to make decisions and stick to them. They were both rather timorous men, she considered; and if she were to see much more of this lost old has-been, Prideaux, she would probably tell him so sooner or later. Sharon might mock her, but infantile did seem the only possible description of a middle-aged student.

  And the sun roared down and drummed on the taut plastic as she squatted there day after day in her fake Levis and Chinese Cartier watch, assiduous, intent. When ducks waddled up to the edge of the trench and roosters crowed and sparrows twittered in the lone palm’s dusty fronds it was easy to imagine herself out in the coutryside. Only when she cocked an ear beyond the immediate sounds did the city’s encircling drone seep in like the rising groundwater which heralds an incoming tide. From nearby shanties came a cacophony of radios and TVs: bursts of machine-gunning and women’s crying or else polyglot soap powder and fast food ads. The sounds of an alien culture energetically lived. How alien it was could be judged by the people who came to squat on the edge of the trench for hours on end, just watching her and her colleagues at work as if ordinary concepts like time and boredom had no meaning. Most alien of all was a hideously disfigured creature dressed in ragged army surplus gear who was once suddenly there when she raised her head. He had watched in silence, swaying slightly with illness, before saying in shockingly clear American English: ‘I guess you’ve reached the future’ before drifting unsteadily away, leaving her speechless with horror and pity and surprise with a little ochre skull between her hands. It was all a lot more interesting than South Kensington, as she put it in a letter to her mother. She still couldn’t quite believe that her father had actually died here, breathing this air, beneath this sun, surrounded by these people.

  24

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER his first visit to San Clemente Vic Agusan had written a think-piece calculated to induce an unwise editor to reconsider before ever again sending a crack crime reporter out on a wild goose chase. Entitled ‘Ghosts and Gunsmoke’, it pointed out that these vampire stories so beloved by the popular press always had a function and were always timely. Apparitions were actually smoking guns, but when fired in squatter areas seething with secret politics only the locals knew for certain who had pulled the trigger and where the bullet had gone. Now and again (as in the case of Tondo’s Miriam Defensor manananggal in the run-up to the 1992 election) it might be supposed there was more at stake than purely local politics. That had surely been an instance of a well-established popular genre being used as a tactic in an adroit strategy of character assassination. Miriam was dead; long live Brenda… This current vampire in San Clemente (Vic’s column concluded) will be just as deliberate an invention but it is most unlikely that we, the general public, will ever discover its true purpose. Irreducible and ubiquitous though they are, squatter areas exist in a social limbo, drifting in and out of visibility according to the kind of scrutiny they are subjected to. Town planners and visiting popes can’t see them at all, while the police can often see nothing else. It is hardly surprising that most readers will be entirely ignorant of a subculture and its currents in a festering barrio hidden behind cement block walls.

  This article was favourably received as a departure from his usual chronicle of police misdoings and Vic had enjoyed a day of praise which even included an editorial mention in the Philippine Daily Inquirer referring to his column as ‘a welcome breath of Agusanity’. If he had allowed a certain lordliness to creep into his style it was no doubt just a way of publicly chiding his editor, Bong. Since the story was so obviously a three-day wonder, he implied, just one more ningas kugon in a regular yearly tally, let’s all hurry up and get back to the nits and the grits of serious investigative reporting.

  His repentance started immediately. As if part of a shrewd plot to ruin his reputation the news of San Clemente’s archaeological find had broken almost at once, followed not long afterwards by that of Eddie Tugos’s horrid and sensational end. Vic did not enjoy being chastened by events and set about trying to repair the damage. Bong, meanwhile, lost no opportunity to point out to Chronicle staffers how necessary it was for an editor to have a ‘nose’ for the right story. Had he not been convinced all along that there was something in San Clemente’s vampire worthy of Vic Agusan’s talents even when both had seemed proved wrong? However, Vic still held a trump card, as he well knew. The case had now turned into a homicide investigation and he had just formed a working alliance with the Inspector in charge.

  ‘If it wasn’t personal before, it damn well is now,’ Dingca said. ‘I knew poor old Eddie and he surely didn’t deserve an end like that.’

  They were standing at the spot where the body had been found. Someone had planted a tiny rough cross in white wood at the foot of the wall. On it was written in pencil ‘Edsel Tugos’ and the date.

  ‘Let’s keep moving,’ Vic urged. ‘I don’t want to be seen with you too much. The other reporters’ll think we’ve got an exclusive deal going.’

  Accordingly they moved through the gap in the wall and walked up to the railings at the rear of the Tan mausoleum.

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve got some NBI plodder from Homicide due any moment now with more autopsy details. I’m against giving those guys the slightest chance to horn in. This is my case and my patch. If they find me goofing off with the Press instead of going around San Clemente with a magnifying glass and clue bag they’ll start leaning on my OIC.’

  ‘What details?’

  ‘He didn’t say much on the phone. Something about fragments of phosphor bronze in Eddie’s mouth. Off the nozzle of that damn machine, I suppose. So okay, the NBI can sleuth that one if it likes: they’ve got the lab. facilities. But I’m after the person who gave the order to suck Eddie’s guts out,’ he glanced up at the funerary blockhouse, ‘and I don’t care if she is listening.’

  ‘You’re still convinced, then?’

  ‘Any money you like, son.’

  ‘Cop’s nose? I’ve already had my journalist’s nose put out of joint over this slum.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’ll set straight before
this is finished. You getting anywhere with the real estate angle?’

  ‘I’ve run the usual checks. Town Hall, municipal offices. It’s a shitheap, this whole area. As far as I can see it’s a mass of tiny plots and holding companies right out to Kalookan. You’d need months to sort it out, go through the records, track it all down. There was an outfit called Trax Tracts holding this land in escrow in the middle of 1989. That’s the date it was filed. The directors all sound like Pinoys and they all give business addresses in Oceanside, California. I don’t know if they’re still the nominal holders because those particular files are being quote updated, close quote.’

  ‘I’m not too hot on this legal stuff, conveyancing or whatever the hell it is,’ admitted Dingca.

  ‘Escrow’s just a third party deal, right? A third party holds the deeds of the land until certain conditions are met and it’s transferred to the grantee.’

  ‘So what’s the name on the deeds?’

  ‘Something called Varvispo.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s got to do with bishops,’ said Dingca intelligently. ‘It’s probably run by the Vatican.’

  ‘Just don’t let your conspiracy theories run away with you, that’s all. The dread hand of the Vatican’s one of my colleagues’ favourite explanations for just about everything from leaking condoms to the election results. As of this moment Varvispo’s about number four hundred and eighteen on the list of companies being investigated as probable beneficiaries of Marcos behest loans. It’s alleged to have got two hundred and seven million unsecured pesos of the taxpayer’s money. Since the committee’s reached company number forty-six after five weeks’ beavering through the evidence and the amnesty deadline’s about three weeks away, I’d say Varvispo’s home and dry. Our problem is that the committee has subpoenaed all the files. I’m working on a way of getting some leverage on a couple of guys but it’ll take time. There’s still an alternative route. I’ve got a pipit in the BIR who usually sings if I give his balls a good squeeze. He might be able to get us a list of Varvispo’s directors though I doubt if he’ll give us any financial details.’

  Dingca shot Vic an appreciative glance for a co-conspirator who has access to a completely new range of informants. ‘The Bureau of Internal Revenue’s a good source,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t let a cop like me in to buy a Coke in the commissary. We really need that link.’

  ‘Don’t worry. One way or another we’ll get it.’

  This turned out to be true, but in so painless a fashion it was anticlimactic. About ten days after Eddie’s burial when the first San Clementeños, their nerves shaken, were dismantling their shacks and moving elsewhere of their own accord, an urbane lawyer named Melvin Go-Bustamante emerged from nowhere and made a statement. He was doing so, he said, to clear up any doubts about the Philippine Heritage Museum’s legal right to declare its dig a National Site. Speaking for the land’s future titleholders, Tango Muniplex Corporation, he said there was absolutely no conflict of interest and no question of the Museum’s right to excavate.

  ‘I can say that TMC actively welcomes this wonderful discovery,’ said Melvin Go-Bustamante, his rimless spectacles flashing. The lights behind him rendered his filmy white barong Tagalog transparent, revealing a trim athletic figure which suggested a Harvard Law School Class-of-’Seventy-nine hardness. ‘In the past such finds have often been unpopular with landowners, who saw them as infringing their right to exploit their property’s potential to the full. TMC dissociates itself completely from this attitude, believing that an archaeological site of this significance and rarity is an asset in its own right as well as a priceless part of the nation’s history. As of this moment the Corporation is applying for planning permits to develop historic San Clemente as a Heritage Mall with a complex of stores and offices landscaped around the dig itself, which will be permanently protected by an air-conditioned atrium. TMC believes that people in this part of the city will welcome such a development. It will, of course, attract tourism with all the spin-off benefits to the local economy and employment, thus opening up to greater prosperity an area which is sorely in need of redevelopment. Once completed, such a project can only have a long overdue beneficial effect on the locality’s health standards. And finally, it will help restore peace and tranquillity to the adjacent cemeteries which at present are subject to constant vandalism, theft, and impropriety of every kind.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ said Dingca to Vic that evening. They had arranged a meeting on neutral territory, a dimly-lit bar off Pedro Gil where neither had been before.

  ‘Or not.’

  ‘I meant unbelievable the amount of trouble he’s saved us. Tango, eh? Tan-Go. Go-Bustamante.’

  ‘Oh, all that,’ agreed Vic dismissively. ‘Sure. But you’ve still got a murder to pin on old Lettie and I don’t think we’re very much closer. If by any chance you find the murder weapon I presume you don’t imagine her prints’ll be conveniently on the button? You don’t think they held Eddie down and shoved the nozzle in his mouth and then the Queen of Shabu clicked the switch and watched his lights and tripes go flashing up the tube in a red froth? I’m worrying about you, Rio. It’s beginning to smell of a one-man vendetta. At some point it’s going to stop being another job and turn into Dingca’s Last Case, isn’t it?’

  The policeman drank some beer in silence, then poked a thick forefinger into the bowl of salted peanuts and stirred them vacantly. ‘I guess it might,’ he said at last. ‘No point in going on until I have a heart attack. I’ve earned a few years of not having to wade through it all day, every day. Do a little business, maybe, practise my bowling, talk to my family.’

  ‘You don’t talk to them now?’

  ‘Only out of the side of my mouth, my old lady says. That’s no way to live, is it? How much longer has any of us got?’

  ‘In your case not long at all if you’re staking everything on tangling with the Tans. Why don’t you let it go, Rio? She’s just one. Think how many more there are out there.’

  ‘I want her,’ he only murmured. ‘I want her for Babs and I want her for Eddie and I want her for being the Queen of Shabu and very soon I shall want her for what she’s about to do to eight or nine hundred people up there in the barrio, good people like Eddie’s wife and kids.’

  ‘Who’s Babs?’ asked Vic acutely.

  ‘Just someone. Seeing you’re so full of good advice, what are you planning to do? I guess it’s just another Vic Agusan story, right?’ ‘More or less. Generally speaking, I don’t go gunning for people because I haven’t got a gun and I’m not in this business to work off grudges. My job’s to dig up the evidence, present it and say “There you are, guys. Go gettem.” I’m not paid to make citizen’s arrests. In this game you’ve got to keep a sense of proportion. Some of your cop colleagues have got real nasty habits, Rio, but we know the tone’s always set from above, right? It’s the fat cats and the pols who’re ultimately to blame for the system, not a police force grotesquely underpaid and mismanaged. Look closely and you’ll see my tears. Now, in this particular case I’ll tell you the line I’m going to take. I shall exploit the whole business of squatters being evicted because it raises basic human rights issues. That sort of thing’s increasingly effective. Good tearjerking stuff. Nobody feels comfortable with pictures of wretched people being chivvied around a city’s waste lots with crying kiddies and pathetic bundles of belongings. Second, if we can dig out a piece of evidence that finally and definitely links Lettie Tan with this TMC outfit, that’s about the best we can hope for. At which point I can turn around and write furious columns saying “How the hell’s the so-called Queen of Shabu being allowed to redevelop San Clemente in the name of the national heritage and general moral uplift? What kind of crooked deal is this? Is a woman of her reputation to be allowed to push eight hundred and umpty-seven of our most defenceless citizens out onto the streets without anyone in authority raising a squeak in their defence?” Blah, blah. Then we can hint darkly that there’s already been a murder which lo
oks as though it was committed deliberately to play on people’s fears and encourage them to leave before it came to eviction orders and bailiffs. Really, that was quite subtle. If you were a squatter you could treat it either as a crude worldly threat or as a nasty message from the powers of darkness. How do you resist all that if you’re dirt-poor and have no legal right to the land you’re squatting on? I think whatever happens we can at least make the whole thing a major story. The San Clem Affair. Plenty of human interest, follow-ups with people like your friend Mrs Tugos once they’re thrown out on the streets, all that good stuff. Don’t forget we’ve also got a tame Senator on the scene displaying the wiliness of his species. He’s just waiting to see which way the wind blows before taking sides. I’ve got his number. I think I’ll start pushing him tomorrow on the human rights angle. We can make Vicente look pretty sleazy if he comes down on the side of antique pots and business deals while standing right there in the middle of a lot of evicted families. Yeah, I like that,’ Vic said as to himself and jotted a few words on a paper napkin. ‘Plus have you noticed he seems to have something going with one of those American girls? British, American, whatever the hell she is? Hot little chick, I’d say, that one.’ He made another note. ‘Vicente might be vulnerable there… All this we can do, Rio. But to tie up the whole bag of tricks good and tight, to make it a real winner, we still need to show the merciless hand of our Lettie personally pulling the levers in the background.’

  Two weeks later that hand was revealed, but by an agency bizarre beyond anyone’s imagining. It was certainly not the result of sleuthing by either Dingca or Agusan, although once again Vic had spent whole days going through company files, running checks, leaning on his sources, calling loans. By the end he knew beyond doubt that the San Clemente project was another part of Lettie Tan’s empire-building but he couldn’t have proved it on paper. Dingca was equally getting nowhere with the murder. He wasn’t surprised. This was definitely one of those cases which broke downwards if at all. Eddie’s killers would be shopped as bargaining chips if ever a big name got its ass in a crack. Certainly nobody in the barrio was talking. San Clemente was sullen, the people closed and resentful. There were already gaps among the houses where families had left, taking with them whatever parts of their shanties were worth salvaging. The little heaps of rusty sheeting and crumbling cement blocks which remained had scarcely been pawed over. Scrap timber was taken for firewood but little else. No-one in San Clemente was in the mood for building.