by Ian Barclay
“You gave them the names of three members of the Philippine Communist Party. They were picked up during the first week of your arrest. None of them have been heard from again. They weren’t as lucky as you. Or maybe they didn’t talk. Maybe they didn’t betray other comrades, which is why they are dead now. We know you gave names, Joker. You were the only person they knew who had been recently arrested. You knew all three of them, although they did not know each other. Do you deny this? Claim it was a coincidence?”
“No. I named them.”
“You admit it?” the man shouted.
“They had to be sacrificed,” Joker said in a low voice.
The man with the hard eyes jumped to his feet. His face was flushed. “Sacrificed! They had to die so you could live? You stand here and tell me that, you filthy dog? I’ll shoot you myself.”
Joker spoke calmly with a newly cold edge to his tone. “I had to give the torturers something. I had one secret that I had to make sure they did not learn. The only way I could hold back that secret from them was to tell everything else I knew, so they would think they had broken me fast. I gave them other names besides those three, but they already knew about those people. I told them everything I knew except one thing.”
The interrogator sat down once more. “Was that thing you held back worth the lives of three young men?”
“Yes.”
“I will be the judge of that,” the man said in a contemptuous voice. There was little doubt what his judgment would be.
“No, you won’t,” Joker told him. “I will tell it to Narciso Cojuangco. Find him.”
“He was killed two weeks ago in an attack on an army post. I took over from him. My name is Eduardo Cristobal.”
“I never heard of you,” Joker said.
The man looked stung. “I can make it so that you never forget my name, if you should live so long.”
Joker ignored the threat. He had Cristobal on the defensive, trying to justify his authority. “Find me someone I know. Then we can talk.”
“I am the New People’s Army commander for this part of Negros Occidental. I’ll clear this room if you ask me to. But what you know, you have to tell me.”
Joker looked him in the eyes. “I need authorization for that.”
Cristobal was pissed off at this Manila intellectual called Joker for challenging his authority, and he was angry with himself for not handling the challenge better. Joker knew he was somebody, and that a shit-kicker backcountry commander like Cristobal would have to get permission to execute him. This was what Cristobal intended to do. Then he, himself, was going to fire the bullet into the side of Joker’s head. The man had caused the deaths of three comrades to save his own skin. Now he was inventing some kind of secret in an attempt to talk his way out of paying for his treachery. The rebel code on this was plain: A man died before he turned in to his torturers someone in the movement. If he broke this code, he died, too, perhaps more mercifully but in lasting shame, both on himself and on his family.
Cristobal decided that Joker had hoped to be released from jail in due time and then slip away before the New People’s Army could avenge itself on him. Perhaps he would have gone to America, where there were already more than a million Filipinos; legal immigration was running at thirty-five thousand a year, and no one knew how many illegals were staying on. As Cristobal saw it, things had gone wrong for Joker. He had been “rescued” by the NPA. Now he would have to pay for his real crimes, not the phony charges the military had brought against him.
All the same, Cristobal was being cautious. If Joker was lying, the most he could hope for was to play for time. If that was his game, he would not have come on so strong, demanding to see a communist party official known to him. Joker could expect no mercy from the party for having caused the deaths of three members. What was unusual, too, was the fast response from headquarters when he had sent the list of prisoners in the camp—or at least the names known to the government intelligence agent posing as a lawyer there. The man had a neat, precise mind, and he had remembered sixty-three names before he died of shock from his many mutilations. Was it Joker’s name on that list that caused rush orders from HQ to attack the prison camp and free everybody? Everything was going so well for him now, Cristobal did not want to fuck things up by taking out his rage on Joker, only to find that he had destroyed an important man through his stupidity. Cristobal saw that if he was going to become a famous liberation hero, he would have to learn to wait for the right time to strike, no matter how good it would have made him feel to blow the side off Joker’s skull and watch him twitch in the dust.
Froilan Quijano came from Bacolod in a hurry.
“Joker knows me,” he assured Cristobal, “and he knows my standing in the party. I’ll talk to him, and you come with me. No one is going to play games behind your back.”
“Ka Froilan,” Joker greeted him when they met, using the short form of kasama, the Tagalog word for “comrade.” All the guerrillas called each other by this title in combination with a first name or nickname, second names not being used in order to protect the families and, to some extent, the identity of movement members. Joker and Eduardo Cristobal had very pointedly not been calling each other Ka.
The two men talked casually about the last time they had met, and mentioned mutual friends, several of whom had died in the struggle since they had met previously. The commander sat stiffly apart, saying nothing.
“How well do you know this man, Ka Froilan?” Joker asked.
“Ka Eduardo? Only since he took over as commander a couple of weeks ago. But he is held in high repute. His father fought in the Huk rebellion and joined the Communist Party of the Philippines the year it was founded, 1968. In the next year he was a founding member of the New People’s Party, remembering, as we all must, that power grows out of the barrel of the gun and that the party controls the gun. I never met his father—he died a few years ago, of pneumonia—but many say he brought up Eduardo as a son fit to walk in his footsteps. His father was a tenant farmer, as Eduardo was before he became a full-time fighter. They lived on one of the Velez plantations. Happy Man’s family. Eduardo killed a Velez hacienda manager not long after his father died. He had to go into hiding. He worked in a sparrow squad in the city of Bacolod and in towns in both provinces of the island.” A sparrow squad was a small mobile group of guerrillas that specialized in assassinating local officials and military officers. “Eventually Eduardo came back to his own part of the country as Ka Narciso’s second in command. When Narciso was killed two weeks ago, Eduardo took over. I met him then and approved his appointment as commander. So, as you can see, Ka Joker, I am firmly in Eduardo’s corner. But I have been open with you, and Ka Eduardo has given you every chance, considering the circumstances. You must not ask me for forgiveness or mercy. I would not have come here if that was all I thought you had in mind.”
Joker laughed. He saw that the old communist organizer from Bacolod knew damn well that Joker had information not given to him, which, of course, he took as a personal insult directed at him from HQ. Joker had enjoyed the way Cristobal had silently fumed while Froilan talked about him as if he were not there. These two were not going to be hard to handle.
“I must say, it surprises me that you have not been briefed about this thing,” Joker said, rubbing salt in the organizer’s wounds. “It’s certainly a mistake not to include a man of your rank in the party. I expected that you could have explained everything to the commander here.”
This was too much for Cristobal. “You’re not going to worm your way out of this, Solano!” he shouted. “You promised to tell this secret when I brought you a party functionary known to you. I’ve done that—faster than you thought I could, I bet. No more playing for time! This is it. Either this secret saves your hide or I put a bullet in your skull. Talk!”
Joker looked at the organizer, but he made no effort to calm Cristobal. Joker shrugged and said, “All right, send this two-word message and give me the answe
r. The message is: ‘Aces high.’”
“To headquarters?” Froilan asked.
“Yes. Also to the Soviet Embassy in Metro Manila. Don’t sign a name. Just two words. Your answer will be from party headquarters only.” He smiled at their suspicious faces. “I can tell you one thing already: You two are the aces.”
The organizer nodded. “But you are the joker.”
Roscoe James was shown into General Bonifacio’s office in Metro Manila. The general sat at a battered steel desk, and the only things to sit on in the bare room with institution-yellow walls were some battered steel chairs. Bonifacio was a no-nonsense military man, and he went to great lengths to show that he was not one of the corrupt officers who achieved their rank through political connections.
“Some stuff is hitting the fan,” Roscoe said, “only I’m not sure it’s genuine shit.”
Bonifacio smiled. “If it’s happening here, it’s shit, Roscoe. You’ve been here too long if it starts smelling like anything else to you.”
“All right, listen to this. One of your standard Army Intelligence reports from Negros Occidental, which you float through the CIA computers at the embassy, mentioned an escaped guerrilla suspect nicknamed Joker. Your army informant was at some kind of rebel kangaroo court in which this Joker said he had a secret that justified his betraying three party members. Nothing more. Yesterday a radio message beamed to the Soviet Embassy here from Bacolod contained an uncoded two-word message: ‘Aces high.’ Our computer tied in the two card game terms from one area, aces and joker, both in Negros Occidental.”
The general looked intrigued. “Why would they give themselves away like that?”
“They had no way of knowing that the word joker would come to our attention at the same time and be tied to the embassy message. Except for the computer, it never would have. Besides, these party guys think they’re pretty smart, and it gives them a charge to play little games with dull, slow-witted capitalistic pigs like us.”
Bonifacio did not reply. He had risen from the desk and lowered a wall chart, which he studied intently. He finally asked, “Do you know the name of the area where this Joker is being held?”
Roscoe consulted some papers from his pocket. “San Geronimo.”
The general searched on the chart. The American heard him laugh. He straightened up and said, “You’re going to love this, Roscoe. Know who owns all the land around there? An old friend of yours. Happy Man Velez.”
While the Kalinga funeral ceremonies were still continuing, the dead warrior still strapped to the chair in the hut and beginning to look a bit the worse for wear, Dartley tried to get cooperation from other warriors not closely tied to what was going on. Word had gotten around about how the American had killed the three Velez goons and made a present of their weapons and heads to the local warriors. This was looked upon as extremely generous behavior for an American, who seldom were known to kill people and almost never made gifts of their enemies’ heads or weapons.
Dartley wanted to use the Kalinga tribal skills to penetrate the Velez defenses, or at least find out what these were. Search parties had gone out for the missing men, but their bodies had not been found. As yet, Happy Man had made no attempt at a revenge attack on the Kalingas, but this might have been because his men had not seen any to shoot at. The warriors were keeping away from Velez territory, and it would be pointless and very dangerous for Velez men to come into the forest after the Kalingas, who could be everywhere or nowhere, as they wished.
But Dartley was out of luck at first in getting help from those Kalinga warriors who weren’t spending all their time at the funeral. They were willing, but a major incident occurred, which prevented them from helping. It took place not far from where Dartley and the three others had put their tents. This seemed to be a neutral area of some kind between different Kalinga groups. Early one morning they heard a great deal of shouting nearby, and all four men rushed from the tents with their M16s ready. Some of the men from the long hut where the funeral was taking place were having a violent argument with another group of Kalingas Dartley had not seen before. There were six or seven men in each group, and they waved spears at each other and fitted arrows in bows as the two groups yelled at and plainly cursed each other.
Their friends from up the hill pleaded with Dartley. Rafael did not have to translate for Dartley what they wanted him to do: shoot the others. He backed off, and all four returned to their tents.
“That’s all we need,” Dartley muttered. “Get mixed up in Kalinga gang wars.”
Rafael explained. “We outsiders call these people Kalingas, and they look all the same to us. But to them they all seem different. The people in one valley hate the people in another—and always have, for many generations. When people from another side of a mountain come to their side of the mountain and maybe get lost, they consider these people fools and laugh at them or insult them, even though the same thing would happen to them if they went to a strange part of the mountain.”
Dartley smiled. “They sound like Americans.”
Rafael gestured. “They are like people everywhere. That is what I always tried to understand when I worked here, and that is what many timber workers and other outsiders never get to understand about these mountain people. They think they are savages who do not have thoughts in their mind or who do not think the same things that people who live in villages and towns think. All they say is, these people were headhunters a short time ago. I have seen many arguments like what we have just seen, but I never saw one head cut off until you went with that warrior.”
“I am a headhunter,” Dartley said in an eerily calm voice.
“I think you are fiercer than most of the warriors who are supposed to be wild and savage in these mountains,” Rafael said firmly. “You upset me.”
“You came up here to kill a man,” Dartley said. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“No,” Rafael answered without hesitation. “I am just interested in comparing us with the Kalingas. I am no better than you are, only with less skill, strength, and courage. I can compare you with the Kalingas. Me, Benjael, Harry… I think we are tamer men.” He laughed. “But worth every dollar you pay us. Don’t think you can pay us less because of what I say.”
The shouting was still going on between the Kalingas, some distance away, but it seemed less urgent now, sounding less likely to erupt into violence.
“This argument will be settled by a bodong,” Rafael said. “This is a system of making peace pacts between rival groups who once headhunted against each other. Church and government people got this system going some years ago to stop the headhunting. The bodong depends on the Kalinga men’s pride in their oratory. They sit and drink basi—sugarcane wine—while they debate all the wrongs and insults that the groups have caused each other. The system has been such a success that the church and government people now believe that the Kalingas deliberately start fights so they can party. The government found that their own interference in the people’s customs worked against Manila big-money interests when they wanted to build the four dams. In the old days, with all the groups fighting among themselves, the government could have done what they liked. Now the tribal factions have learned to discuss their differences and have joined together to fight the hydroelectric schemes. You can forget the warriors outside—they will be holding a summit conference for the next few days to solve their differences. And like politicians everywhere, they will have a good time while they are doing it.”
Rafael proved right. Between the warriors attending the funeral and the peace conference, there were hardly any Kalingas left over to deal with the Velez forces. In Dartley’s favor, neither the dead warrior nor the quarrel were of major importance, so there was no chance of the ceremonies running into weeks instead of days. But Dartley’s patience was exhausted. Since Rafael accused him of being a headhunter and as being fiercer himself than most of the Kalingas, he decided to behave like one, to see where it would get him.
The next time Dartley and the three others ran into a group of Kalinga warriors—nine men, not far from the long hut—Dartley handed his M16 to Harry and approached one man in the group. He cursed and shouted at this man, calling him a stupid coward, among other things, for not attacking Velez. The Kalinga did not know a word of English, but he understood well enough that the American was insulting him and had put his weapon aside for the possibility of hand-to-hand combat. When several other Kalingas put in a couple of what sounded like peacemaking words, Dartley yelled at them, pulled his combat knife, and waved it in their faces. Any of these spear-wielding men could have disposed of Dartley in a second if they had taken his knife-waving as anything more serious than a display. Dartley had picked up some pointers from the argument between the two groups, and although he waved the weapon and cursed them, he never moved even vaguely near striking distance to any of them.
Dartley was pleased that the Kalingas seemed to be taking him seriously; if one of them had laughed in his face and asked what this crazy American thought he was fooling, that would have ended it. Dartley’s own men took him equally seriously. Benjael was already doing his Tondo street-tough posturing against some of the Kalingas, showing that, right or wrong, he was going to back up Dartley in any rumble. Harry, clutching two M16s, looked scared enough to open fire on everyone at any moment. Rafael was trying to make peace by standing between Dartley and the Kalingas, talking alternately in their language to them, to Dartley in English, and to Benjael and Harry in Tagalog. Dartley guessed he wasn’t making much sense in any language, which was exactly what Dartley wanted. There was only one way to solve their differences—through the bodong peace pact system.
“Where the roads end the headhunters begin,” Rafael liked to say. But Dartley was aware that it was more complicated than that. For example, the Kalinga women who first had surrounded their car had known that the easiest way for them to render the vehicles almost useless was to let the air out of the tires—hardly the act of totally unsophicated “stone age” people. The women had been amused when Dartley had reinflated the tires from the flask of pressurized air brought in to inflate the rubber rafts. Dartley soon learned that the Kalingas believed in the power of antibiotics, that they liked the idea of electricity and indoor plumbing, distrusted what their children might be taught at government or church schools, and, in general, were much more aware of twentieth-century technology than their appearance might lead a casual observer to expect. They learned to use the three captured M16s quickly, and only Dartley’s limited supply of ammo kept them from becoming expert marksmen.
