Rebound

by Ian Barclay

  “First thing a spy needs,” said the Filipino, resuming, “is a gun. I know where you can buy a good one.”

  Dartley smiled. This peddler had the right attitude for what he had in mind. By now they wandered into Old Manila, what was left of the ancient, Spanish walled city, now mostly rundown buildings occupied by squatters who nailed plywood and sheets of tin over gaping holes. Trucking and warehouse companies occupied other buildings, while still others showed signs of gentrification. Some areas were leveled, and bleak, low-income concrete apartment complexes stood nearby, suggesting what the whole area would ultimately look like. They took Jones Bridge north across the river Pasig to Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown. Here the buildings were run-down also, but they had a faded elegance with wrought-iron balconies, huge wooden doors, and tiled roofs with tufts of grass growing in them. Here modern buildings also were being raised everywhere. The car treaded slowly through the winding narrow streets. Horse-drawn passenger carts, right out of the nineteenth century, bumped over the cobbles,

  They came to Recto Avenue and passed into the Tondo district. There was nothing quaint, charming, or picturesque here. Tondo was a teeming slum by the city piers, and the people on the streets here—men, women, and children—looked leaner and meaner than elsewhere. The peddler waited for Dartley to pull into a wide street lined on both sides by tenements and told him to stop halfway down the street. When Dartley did, children of all ages gathered around the car and stared in at them.

  “I will be back in a few minutes,” the peddler said, opening his door. “If anyone asks why you are waiting here, say you’ve come to see Benjael Sumiran.”

  The peddler’s few minutes turned into half an hour. Finally he came, bringing with him a tough, squat man with long arms who carried a small suitcase. The children, who had been pestering Dartley on and off all this time, drew back respectfully as they neared the car. The peddler had no name to give Dartley, and it seemed to embarrass him that he was not able to introduce the two men. The man Dartley assumed to be Benjael Sumiran wore a singlet, a dirty pair of baggy pants, and sandals. Tattoos of scaly Chinese dragons and bleeding Christian saints covered his light brown skin. As he got in the car next to Dartley he filled the enclosed space with the odor of stale sweat. He placed the small case between them and opened its lid. The peddler stood outside, looking in through the open window. The kids still kept their distance.

  Inside the case were four Colt .45 semiautomatic pistols, all new and obviously stolen from the American bases. A 9 mm Smith & Wesson Model 39 and three small .22 automatics probably came from burglaries of U.S. officers’ homes. Dartley did not want anything that could be associated with the U.S. military, since he did not want them blamed for any killing he had to do. He had his own weapons supplier, arranged by Herbert Malleson, but he saw this deal as a way of establishing himself with some locals. Sumiran had a few revolvers and other semiautomatic pistols, but they were so beat up that Dartley did not bother with them. The only other gun in good condition—not new but well cared for—was a 9 mm pistol Dartley did not recognize. It bore the engravings “Fabrik Sendjata Ringan” and “Pindad P1A9 mm.”

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “That is a Pindad. Very good gun. It is made in Indonesia and used by the army there.”

  That explained its source, Dartley thought. It was almost an exact copy of the Browning HP 35, he realized, maybe even a licensed version of it. It took thirteen rounds and had an effective range of sixty to seventy yards. The fact that it came from the neighboring islands of Indonesia, instead of the United States, was a big plus, in case it got left behind at the scene of some violence.

  “How much?” Dartley asked.

  “Three hundred American dollars,” Sumiran snapped back. He probably would have mentioned that sum regardless of which weapon Dartley had selected, figuring it as the amount the traffic would bear.

  “Too much,” Dartley said, to show that he could not be taken advantage of so easily. He did not care about the money.

  “I give you three hundred nine-by-nineteen Parabellum shells,” Sumiran offered, sweetening the deal.

  Dartley paused, then pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills that was only one bill short of a hundred—the bill he had paid the peddler—ten thousand dollars in all. He pinched off the three uppermost bills and handed them to the gun dealer, who could not keep his eyes off the wad. The peddler was staring in the car window at it. Dartley slowly peeled another bill off the wad.

  “You know who Happy Man Velez is?” he asked, knowing that Sumiran and the peddler were thinking about relieving him of his money here and now. Dartley had the Pindad pistol but no ammo yet. He was sure Sumiran was carrying a gun in those baggy pants—all the weapons in the suitcase were unloaded.

  “Everyone knows who Happy Man is,” Sumiran growled, and accepted the fourth hundred-dollar bill.

  “Does he hire guns in Tondo?”

  Sumiran nodded.

  “Find out what they do for him,” Dartley said, peeled a fifth bill from the wad, and handed it to him. He put the money back in his pocket, reached in the suitcase for the three packets of one hundred shells each, and closed the lid of the case. “I’ll be in touch,” he said dismissing Sumiran, who got out of the car, uncertain about whether he should try to rob this foreigner or go to work for him. There was something cold-blooded and deliberate about the foreigner that made the Filipino wary and slow to act. Benjael Sumiran had a great respect for the capacity of others. He had seen too often what could happen when a victim had been sized up wrong. He had learned early not to make his move if anything at all seemed out of the ordinary, and he liked to claim that he owed his life and freedom to this piece of wisdom.

  Sumiran got out of the car, and the peddler got back in, looking highly pleased with himself, no doubt because he was getting a percentage of what the American paid Sumiran.

  “I’ll drop you home,” Dartley said as the car moved forward.

  “No. Do not bother. I live in walking distance from here.”

  “I’ll let you off there and pick you up tomorrow morning,” Dartley said.

  “No. No. You must not. You are too kind.”

  “Show me the way,” Dartley said.

  The peddler became more agitated as he realized that Dartley was not just making him a kind offer. He was demanding to be shown where the Filipino lived. They stopped outside a gloomy old apartment house, teeming with children, drying clothes on bamboo poles, and shouting women.

  “Up on the fourth floor. No elevator. It is a big climb.”

  “I’ll come,” Dartley said.

  They climbed the litter-strewn stairway, strong with the smells of cooking. Inside the peddler’s two-room apartment three underfed children clustered around their mother, who was still pretty but wouldn’t be much longer. She looked at the stranger with a frightened face, and her husband spoke to her in Tagalog, which did not seem to have much of a calming effect on her.

  “What’s your name?” Dartley asked the peddler for the first time as he looked the place over.

  “Enrique Corwelio. On the street they call me Harry.”

  “Okay, Harry. You be here tomorrow morning and show me some more of the sights. Same rate as today.”

  Harry watched the American nod politely to his wife and slip out the door. Then he had to listen to her complain about the man, say there was something evil or strange about him, not to bring him there ever again.

  He told her she was a foolish, ignorant woman and gave her the hundred-dollar bill. All she could think of then was food and clothes for the children. But secretly Harry had to agree with her. He never should have brought that man here. Harry saw it from the look the foreigner had given him inside the apartment. He had just offered his family as hostages to this stranger. And the American meant by that look that he wanted Harry to know it.

  Dartley drove east out of Manila along the northern shore of Laguna de Bay, the huge lake just inland from the city. He
had read in a newspaper about the planned decongestion of the city and began to see what this involved—the building of huge housing projects on what had probably been farmland and rice fields only a few years ago. He could feel here, as he could in some part of the States, that asphalt was literally covering the land. He felt relief as Metro Manila thinned out and what was left of the countryside of Rizal province began to appear.

  He was on his way to see Happy Man’s “town house,” his closest residence to Manila. According to Malleson’s information, Happy Man spent a lot of his time there, relaxing, waterskiing on the lake, and visiting country clubs nearby. It was not far from the National Botanical Gardens at Siniloan, so that a tourist like Dartley should not be very noticeable in the vicinity. He might even lose his way and wander by accident into Happy Man’s place.

  Velez’s power base was Balbalasang, in the mountains in the north. In addition, the Velez family had huge sugarcane plantations in the province of Negros Occidental, in the central Philippines. His place near Siniloan was just for recreation, and the reason Happy Man was there so much of the time was because he went in a lot for recreation. Malleson hadn’t been able to tell him much more than that about the place. Dartley figured it would be as inconspicuous a place as any to check out Happy Man.

  As he passed into Laguna province the foliage became more dense. Rice, corn, and sugarcane grew in the foothills of two big extinct volcanoes. A Spanish colonial church dominated every village, in which the houses were pretty with flower boxes in their windows. People sold straw mats and hats, rattan furniture, pots, and food under the coconut trees. Dartley liked the easygoing atmosphere of the place and stopped to eat white cheese and rice cakes, refusing the coconut wine.

  The way to Happy Man’s house was described to him, and he followed some side roads until he came to a walled enclosure. The cinderblock wall was about twenty feet high and topped by coiled knife wire. Somehow Dartley had been expecting an elegant mansion on the lakefront without jailhouse security. He was sure this had to be Happy Man’s place, since the people who gave him directions would have been sure to mention it if it wasn’t. They had said nothing about a wall and knife wire—perhaps such things always went along with power here.

  He came to a pair of heavy steel gates near the end of the wall and slowed the car to approach them. Judging from what he had seen, the wall enclosed an area of at least twenty acres. These gates were the only entryway from the land side. Presumably the view of the lake would not be blocked by a similar wall, but he could not see that far through the bars in the gate. The entrance drive snaked off through high stands of bamboo and tropical trees, which blocked the view of the house and whatever else lay beyond.

  Dartley got out of the car and walked to the gate. Two men emerged from a steel-plated sentry box inside the gate. Both were armed with M16s and sidearms. The gate seemed to be electrically operated, but there was no video camera. Happy Man depended on human eyes.

  “Are the Botanical Gardens closed?” Dartley asked.

  “These no Botanical. Botanical that way.” The guard pointed. “These private property.”

  “This looks very interesting. Does someone important live here?”

  “Very important. Happy Man Velez. You hear of him in America?”

  “No.”

  “Big man in Philippines.”

  Dartley looked impressed. “Do you think he would mind if I just drove in to see his gardens?”

  “Oh, yes, he mind very, very much. He mind so much, he shoot you.”

  The two guards smiled at each other over the innocence of this pushy tourist and went back to their steel-plated box.

  The afternoon sun beat down on Alongapo, and Americans off duty from Subic Bay Naval Base took it easy in the cool shady bars, sipping ice-cold beer from the bottle. Things were quiet. The air was too damn warm and sticky for anyone to have any energy. After sundown, when it got cooler, things would really get jumping.

  Out on the street a Filipino in a baseball cap, sweat-soaked T-shirt, and blue jeans pulled his light motorcycle in to the curb. He chained it to a lamppost and walked a little way down the sidewalk to a Coke machine. He inserted coins and got a cold bottle from the dispenser. After twisting off the cap he drank down a little of the contents as he walked back to his bike. From the saddle bag he took a plastic container of the herbicide paraquat and added some to the Coke bottle. He screwed the cap back on and shook the bottle vigorously. Then he replaced the paraquat in the saddle bag and walked back to the Coke machine. Some people were passing, and cars were driving by, but no one paid him any attention. Bending down, he inserted the Coke bottle sideways up into the dispenser. He went back, unchained his bike, and pushed it forward, so that he was closer to the vending machine.

  Four young boys came along and stopped at the machine. From where he sat on his motorbike the man shouted to them in Tagalog. “The machine is broken. I’ve just lost my money in it.”

  “Thank you,” one boy said, and they moved on.

  Two Americans with brush cuts, white T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers came slowly along, their faces flushed with heat.

  “I’m gonna get me a cold Coke,” one said, reaching in his pocket for change.

  “Make you sweat more.”

  “I’d prefer to die of that than thirst.” He put coins in the machine and heard the bottle drop into the dispenser and hit another. “Hey, we got two bottles for the price of one. Take one.”

  His friend took the bottle readily enough. “Sure, it ain’t costing me anything….”

  The man on the motorbike smiled grimly to himself. Something for nothing was always too good to refuse—even if you didn’t want it in the first place. He didn’t know which of the bottles contained the paraquat, so he kept watch on both of them. Now was the crucial moment— when they twisted off the bottle caps. On the tampered bottle the seal at the base of the metal cap was broken. Would the man who had it notice? Or would he be too hot and thirsty? And if he did notice, would it be enough to stop him from drinking the cold soda on this hot day? He sat on the bike and watched them.

  They twisted off the caps and took long drafts of the cola.

  “This shit tastes strange,” one said, looking at his bottle.

  “Yeah, it’s that new Coke. They should never have changed it.”

  “Least it’s cold. Boy, I can feel it in my gut.”

  The man in the baseball cap started his motorbike and pulled out into traffic.

  It had taken Richard Dartley an hour to drive back from Happy Man Velez’s fortress on the lake to his hotel in the Ermita section. Exhausted from air travel and moving around in the heat, he slept for a couple of hours. When he awoke, his head was fuzzy and he listlessly turned on the TV. On the screen, one car chased another along the streets of Los Angeles, going about a hundred miles an hour, tires screaming around blind corners. A guy had once tried that with Dartley—for real. Maybe he had been a fan of this show or the fifty others like it. Dartley had pulled in behind him in the Inglewood area, not far from Hollywood Park Race Track, and had been spotted as a tail. The guy took off like a bat out of hell in his Trans-Am, fishtailing and burning rubber, and turned a blind corner four blocks down and rear-ended a double-parked truck. The truck bed sheared off the windshield and half the roof. Dartley got a look at him before the ambulance came. He would not live to see the hospital emergency room. Driving at high speed in L.A., four blocks would be about average, Dartley reckoned. Pity the TV didn’t explain that.

  He took a shower, and when he came out, the news was on, in English. Mostly it was about local matters that meant nothing to Dartley. Then, at the end the announcer repeated the warning that had apparently headed the broadcast. Everyone buying soft drinks from vending machines should check to make sure that the cap seal on the bottle was intact before drinking the contents, and if more than one bottle or can was found in the dispenser, neither should be consumed. He said that an American Navy man had died from the effects of po
isoning. A Japanese doctor suspected that the poison had been paraquat and said that similar occurrences had taken place in Tokyo. Paraquat, it was explained, was the spray used in Mexico and elsewhere to kill marijuana plants; the herbicide was easily obtainable in agricultural stores.

  The item was treated on the newscast as a general threat to the population by a madman, rather than an attack specifically aimed at a U.S. serviceman. But this was enough for Dartley. It would take time for him to prove Happy Man responsible, and if he was, it would take a longer time still to lure him from his well-protected lair and eradicate him. Dartley had to stop the killings somehow. He could not continue to let Americans die while he took the time to carefully plot and execute a plan of action. He paced the room in a cold rage.

  It would be safer and easier to prove things against Velez if he said nothing and let the servicemen continue to die. To stop their killings he would have to reveal his hand—do something to make Happy Man think twice before he ordered fresh killings. But that in itself would serve as a warning to Velez and make him harder to catch.

  The way Dartley saw it, he had no choice. These innocent men did not deserve to die just because they were American. It bothered Dartley none to watch a traitor gasp his last inside a plastic shopping bag, but he could not stand by and let these Air Force and Navy guys get killed—even though he had been Army, himself!

  He opened an English-language Manila paper on the bed, searched for the words he needed and cut them out with his nail scissors. Using cellophane tape, he stuck the words on a leaflet for a porn show someone had handed him in the street. He read the message thoughtfully, then folded the paper twice and put it in his pocket.

  It was dark by the time he reached Laguna province in his car. He pulled over once he had left the main road and taped newspaper over his license plates. He drove slowly, and soon his headlights picked out the cinder-blocks of the high wall around the Velez compound. He eased up to the gate and got out, leaving the engine running and the headlights on. Floodlights came on, illuminating the whole area in front of the gates but leaving the sentry box in shadow.