by Ian Barclay
Dartley took a hand off the steering wheel, reached in his pocket, and handed Harry a hundred-dollar bill. “Go on.” he said.
Harry hesitated.
“You heard me,” Dartley said with an edge in his voice. “Go on.”
“Well, I’m just putting one and one together now, and the answer is coming out two.” He placed a small .22 pistol on the bench seat between them. “I thought you might need this, since I believe you had to throw that Pindad away.”
“What makes you so sure?”
The tone of Dartley’s voice scared Harry. But it was too late now for him to worry if he had gone too far. “You wanted to know if I had been using my brain. This is my answer. I’m not sure you did it, but when I saw about that American being killed yesterday and then about two of Velez’s guards, I began to think. It was on the radio this morning that 9 mm bullets had been taken from the two bodies. That’s when I decided that maybe I could sell you this gun. For three hundred dollars, like you paid Sumiran.”
“He threw in three hundred rounds,” Dartley said, bargaining.
Harry sighed in relief that the American was going along with him. “I only have a hundred rounds, but the way you had to replace the Pindad after only a few shots, that should be no problem. I want three hundred dollars.”
Dartley grinned, pulled out three bills, and handed them to him. “You think Sumiran has been making the same guesses as you?”
“Not yet. But he will.”
“When he does, where will he go?”
Harry thought about that for a moment. “You’ve shown him you are a generous man. He’d be a fool to think he could do better with Velez. And Benjael Sumiran is not a fool.”
“He might be tempted to come to both Happy Man and me, so he could collect double.”
Harry shook his head. “Men who collect double do not survive long in Manila. Both Benjael and I have lived long enough to have learned that.”
“I want you to keep an eye on him.”
“I can’t do that!” The little peddler was clearly upset at being asked to check on the brawny, tattooed gun dealer.
Dartley let that go. Then he spoke in an icy drawl that gave Harry goose pimples. “Of course, you and I know, Harry, that you have too much to lose if ever you were tempted to go behind my back.”
Harry tried to say something, but no sound came out. He vowed that as soon as he got home, he would move his wife and children to his parents’ home on the other side of Tondo. This American would never find them there.
They drove in silence for a while, moving aimlessly into the heavy traffic south of the river.
Dartley broke the silence. “So now I know that you’ve been thinking, Harry. But I still don’t know where you are taking me today. I need to get to some of Happy Man’s operations.”
“I know he owns a lot of businesses here in Manila. I will find out some of them for you.”
“I already know which ones, Harry.” Dartley had been looking over the data supplied him by Herbert Malleson. “You know people in the real estate business?”
Harry laughed. “Yesterday I was selling ashtrays on the street. Would I be doing that if I knew people in the real estate business? I am a poor man. Poor men don’t know anybody except other poor men.”
Dartley found that reasonable. He stopped at some stores and had Harry buy himself a white shirt, gray pants, and black socks and shoes to replace the burnt-orange shirt, marine-blue baggy pants, and thong sandals he was wearing. Harry had never heard of a company called Luzon Star Development, which Malleson’s papers listed as a major real estate company with Velez as sole owner, but he knew where Ayala Avenue was. It was often called the Philippines’ Wall Street and was the main artery of Makati, Metro Manila’s financial district. Harry directed Dartley there and listened to instructions on what he was to do. He showed Dartley Makati Avenue, down Ayala Avenue past the Hotel Intercontinental, and they arranged to meet at one of the restaurants there. Dartley dropped him off outside the high-rise office building on Ayala Avenue in which Luzon Star Developments had offices, and he drove around the prosperous area for a while, looking at the fancy stores and wealthy residential “villages.”
Harry showed up in the restaurant, tense in such unaccustomed elegant surroundings. He was secretly elated by how well he had done, demanded a bottle of champagne, and ordered the most expensive item on the menu.
“I did what you told me to. I said to the first person I saw that I represented an American licensed to import agricultural machinery. She picked up on this immediately and asked why a license was needed. I said it was for very special agricultural machinery. She said I had to see Mr. Santiago. When I got in to see him, I said you were looking for a warehouse to store the machinery unless, of course, you could wholesale the entire shipment and wouldn’t need storage space. He wanted to know exactly what machines were being imported. I said I didn’t know but that the American himself was now in Manila to discuss these details. I suggested that he and you meet. He said you should talk to Mr. Cabalan. Then he wanted to know when this agricultural machinery was going to arrive—he was talking about guns, I could see that. Again I told him how this American tells me nothing, sends me here and there, do this, do that, but tells me very little. ‘Maybe you’re better off that way,’ he said to me, looking at me closely to see how much I really know. He decided I’m of no account. Then Santiago said that Mr. Cabalan will see you anytime this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”
“You didn’t make an appointment at an exact time?”
“This is not America. Here in the Philippines today or tomorrow morning is an exact time.”
Dartley laughed. “It might surprise you, Harry, but I got a feeling that the people around Makati believe time is money, just like they do in New York.”
They were on their way back to the car when Harry heard a Tagalog newscast on a blaring street radio. He translated it for Dartley: A U.S. Navy man had been killed by a car bomb near Subic Bay. Dartley stood stock-still on the pavement, and the crowds had to move around him. He stared straight ahead, fighting to control the rage sweeping over him. When he looked at Harry again, Dartley’s eyes were so cold that they might have been made of glass.
Harry offered in a faint voice, “I can take a jeepney home.”
“Be careful,” was all Dartley said to him before walking away.
Harry got the message that the one he had to be careful about was Dartley.
“Mr. Kelly to see Mr. Cabalan.”
The pretty receptionist crossed her legs and showed him a shapely knee as she telephoned inside. She smiled at him and replaced the receiver. “Mr. Cabalan is expecting you. Someone will be right out.”
Another pretty girl appeared almost immediately, and Dartley followed her sashaying ass down a corridor past open office doors. She paused outside a closed door at the end of the corridor and knocked. Then she showed Dartley in and closed the door after him.
Dartley found himself in a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows along two walls looking out from the twenty-second floor over the urban sprawl. A short, fat man with smooth, light skin in a pin-striped suit came from behind the desk to shake his hand. Dartley refused an offer of a drink and a seat. He stood by the half-open window looking out.
“Makati can’t compete with Manhattan or Chicago,” Mr. Cabalan gushed, “but we do our best. As recently as the fifties, this was all swampland. It was part of the Ayala family estates and considered worthless. But they developed it into what you see today. From swamp to swank, we like to say here in Makati.”
Dartley gave him a watery smile and went back to looking out the window.
“The staff criticizes me for opening my window,” Mr. Cabalan went on, “because they think it interferes with the air conditioning. But I’m a country boy at heart, and I like to breathe God’s fresh air.”
Dartley could not help smiling genuinely at what they both knew was bullshit—no one on the staff would dare criticize
this man no matter what he did, and the kind of countryside he was talking about had lawns and Olympic-size pools.
“Being a country boy, Mr. Cabalan, will make you an expert on farm machinery.”
The Filipino smiled. This was what he liked about Americans: They came to the point so quickly. “Yes, indeed. We have needs in that area. Who gave you my name, Mr. Kelly?”
“No one. The only name I have is the one behind Luzon Star Developments.”
“That will be enough,” Cabalan said. “This equipment is American?”
“No. Swedish, Belgian, and Swiss.”
Now the short, fat man with smooth skin was interested. His eyes gleamed as he waddled over to Dartley.
Dartley let him come, then grabbed him by his belt and one lapel. Using the man’s forward momentum, he lifted him off his feet and threw him head first through the gap in the swing-out window. His body forced it open, and Dartley watched him sail downward, looking smaller as he went, before leaving the office and closing the door. The pretty secretary who had showed him in smiled at him from her alcove.
He was walking fast down the long corridor when he suddenly remembered something. Two for every one. Cabalan was not enough. He had to kill someone else. Who? Certainly not Cabalan’s secretary. He liked her ass. The receptionist with the nice legs was at the far end of the corridor. But why kill her? She probably knew nothing about Happy Man’s activities or even the fact that he owned Luzon Star Developments. He could find someone more deserving than her. Dartley looked in the next open doorway. A pleasant-looking guy about twenty years old sat at a desk. The office was tiny, his desktop was crowded with paper, and he looked overworked. Not him, either.
A small secretary’s room opened to his left off the corridor, and beyond that he glimpsed another large office. The name on the door plate read SANTIAGO.
“Mr Cabalan told me to go right in and see Mr. Santiago,” Dartley told the secretary, another leggy beauty who smiled sweetly at him as he went in the office and closed the door behind him. The office was slightly smaller and much less plush than Cabalan’s, and the man behind the desk was younger and not so plump and smug; but he was getting there. He looked up from some papers when he heard his office door shut.
Dartley strode swiftly across to him, a smile on his face. “I’m Kelly. Cabalan says he wants you in on this deal. He told me to brief you. No, please don’t bother to get up,” he told the man, who had began to rise from behind his desk. Dartley leaned across and placed a hand on his right shoulder, pressing him back down into his office chair.
Santiago blinked. He was of the opinion that Americans were all crazy and had no manners, but this one was even worse than the others.
That was his last conscious thought as Dartley grabbed his hair and yanked his head down fast, so that his forehead met the sharp edge of the hardwood desk. Dartley did it twice more, needlessly, because he had cracked open the man’s skull with the first blow.
CHAPTER
6
Ruperto Velez swam four miles in the Laguna de Bay, a speedboat manned by four heavily armed men inching along close to him. When a fishing boat or pleasure craft came too close to the swimming man, the men loosed some shots in the air and gestured for them to keep away. Happy Man stepped out of the water at his estate and was met by servants carrying a terry-cloth beach robe, towels, messages, and two cordless telephones. Ruben Montova sat at a rattan table beneath a large shade tree, sipping tuba, a coconut wine, and admiring the hibiscus and frangipani shrubs, which had just broken into flower.
The two men greeted each other effusively. Velez scanned his messages, handed them back, and sent the servants away with the telephones and everything else.
“If a man cannot take time out to talk with a good friend,” he said to Montova as he settled himself in a rattan chain and poured a tuba, “the life he has made for himself is not worth living.”
Montova raised his glass. “I am complimented.”
They fenced back and forth with some more elaborate pleasantries before they got down to brass tacks.
“Four people got a real good look at him,” Montova said. “The two men’s secretaries, the receptionist, and an accountant. This man was definitely American. He was forty at most, maybe less, had close-cropped black hair, and a lean face with high cheekbones. All three women noticed that his eyes were light gray-green.”
“He sounds like an officer from one of the bases,” Happy Man said.
“That’s what the Presidential Palace said too. Whether they really believe it or not, they’re using this to hit Bonifacio with. I don’t think we should let them use us, Ruperto. What you and I need to do right now is look at this thing very closely and see what we have to gain and what we have to lose.”
“I can see where all this is heading,” Happy Man grumbled tolerantly. “You’re back to saying that enough Americans have been killed and that we must stop.”
“That would have been the inescapable conclusion of my argument,” Montova admitted. “So? Why did you order them killed at all? Only to be a major force on the national scene and to pick up left-wing support.”
“I was being ignored as some kind of soft, pleasure-loving rich boy.”
“You were. Now you showed them. The government is afraid to try anything against you and blames Bonifacio so they won’t have to face up to you. The Americans can do nothing because you are too powerful. The communists are beginning to see that they will not be allowed to win a military struggle, and so they will back you as the least capitalistic evil and as the one they will most likely be able to topple after you are in power. You’ve made your point. Everyone high enough in the power structure to know what’s really going on now regards you as a force to be reckoned with. It’s time to change your tactics.”
“I don’t want to be seen as so easily forced into a change,” Happy Man said. “I would be sending out the message that a lone individual with no special access to me can force me to change my plans by killing a few of my men. I’d hate for some people to start thinking that.”
“I agree,” Reuben Montova said, knowing he had made his point and that he must now pull back and let Happy Man feel that he was the one who was making the entire decision.
“But likewise, I don’t want them to think I haven’t got sense enough to change course when I meet obstacles,” Velez said, continuing. “This American assassin has become a serious obstacle. I don’t care about him killing guards at my gate—muscle is cheap. But Cabalan is a big loss to me on the business side, and Santiago was second in command. Luzon Star Developments is in trouble unless I can find someone to take over fast. I have to be able to trust him. There’s no shortage of sharp operators, but ones you can trust are scarce.”
“I’ll find someone,” Ruben offered.
Happy Man grinned. “Anyone you found for me is the last one I’d trust, Ruben. No offense, but he’d be loyal to you before me.” He accepted a cigar and a light. “This damn American probably has a list of my companies here—I had to file one to do some business on the New York Stock Exchange a couple of years ago, a big takeover. He could go on hitting me through those companies, and he’d only have to do it a few more times before top people started leaving me. They’re not going to sit around and wait to be made a martyr over something they know nothing about. I’ve decided to suspend attacks on Americans for a while, but I’m not going to break up my group. Know what I’m going to do? Put them after this American. I’ll put a price on his head.”
Montova smiled. “Ruperto, you have the makings of a great man.”
Dartley drove around Laguna, following the lakeshore past Happy Man’s estate without taking the side road that passed by the gate. He pulled into some country clubs and yacht clubs, but they were “members only,” and he left without a fuss. The last thing he needed was people asking him who he was, who he knew, what he did. His intention was to get information on the layout of the Velez place through casual conversation. Only the very rich,
as Happy Man’s guests, and the very poor, as Happy Man’s servants, would have this knowledge, and Dartley, as a foreigner, was not finding any opportunities for such casual conversation. Of course, neither the very rich nor the very poor, for different reasons, have much time to stand around and get in idle conversations with strangers. He decided that Harry would be immediately spotted as a big-city intruder out here in the sticks and might attract the wrong kind of attention. He was standing at a marina, looking over the boats for hire. He could take a speedboat on a few runs past Happy Man’s place, but he suspected that he would not see much because the water level would be well below that of the land and there would probably be bushes and trees to further block the view. As he stood on the pier jutting out into the lake, a solution glided over his head.
The glider pilot expertly used an ascending thermal, rising from where the water met the land, to spiral higher, soar, and climb again. Dartley asked several people before he found one who knew where the airfield was. There they agreed to rent him a glider after Dartley presented a hundred-dollar bill as his pilot’s license.
The two-seat sailplane was a Schweizer 2-33A, a very popular American training craft because it was not temperamental. It had a fiberglass nose, and the rest was metal and fabric. The performance was not great—a 22 to 1 glide ratio, meaning that the plane could glide twenty-two feet for each foot of altitude—but Dartley was not trying for any records; all he wanted was to see what lay inside those walls.
“We have no surface wind,” the youth helping him in the front cockpit said, “but you got some pretty good thermals at the lake edge. You going up alone?” When Dartley nodded, he shut the canopy over the empty rear seat.
Dartley checked the control stick and rudder pedals. Since there was no engine, the instruments were simple: a vertical-trim lever; a spoiler-control lever; a yaw indicator; a variometer for measuring the rate of climb or descent relative to the horizon; an airspeed indicator; and an altimeter. He harnessed himself into the seat and nodded to the youth to close the Plexiglas canopy. The youth then attached one end of a towrope beneath the nose of the glider and dragged the other end forward to a small two-engined plane taxiing across the grass toward them. The plane turned around, and the rope was fixed to it. The youth walked back and lifted the glider’s right wing tip off the ground. Dartley worked the rudder from side to side, a signal to the pilot that he was ready to go.
