by P. F. Kluge
“About what?”
“Come on,” Harding urged. “You know, about places. When we were on that trail.”
“Oh, yes,” Griffin said, pleased that Harding would ask that kind of question, implying that once the story was told it was Griffin’s property. “He said places don’t acknowledge us. Neither do people. Unless we make them.”
“Yes,” said Harding, staring down at Mount Arayat. “That was it. Good line, huh?”
“Good line,” Griffin answered. He studied Harding closely. Someday he might have to describe him. A tall man with narrow shoulders, tan skin, red hair, and blue eyes. Who could light a cigarette and let it burn all the way down to his fingers while he trailed a memory through the smoke. Who shuddered with pleasure at the first swallow of a San Miguel. Who stopped in mid-sentence when the memories came too quickly, immobile, like a pedestrian caught in some imaginary traffic that might carry him along or maybe flatten him, hit and run. A staring, brooding solitary man whom you thought your company might make less lonely, but it was as likely you’d catch what he had as cure it and that was a chance you were willing to take, because he was MacArthur’s Ghost, who’d come back to get or set or put things right.
Suddenly the land below rose up and punched at the underside of the plane. Right below, there were wooded peaks, deep gorges, hairpin trails. The sun glinted on metal roofs and fast-moving rivers, and now they were in, and barely over, the mountains. The plane hardly had to descend to land: Baguio rose up to reach it.
“Slow down, Eddie,” Harding said.
“I’m talking too fast for you, Colonel?”
“You’re driving too fast.”
“I got a convoy of press following me, sir.”
“That’s all right.”
“Any particular place you want me to go?”
“Just meander,” Harding said. He rolled down the window, sniffed the pine air. The well-paved road looped politely around estates, brushing hedges and fences, genuflecting at gateways and guardhouses. The older houses—the ones from the commonwealth period—displayed themselves proudly, mansions, no bones about it. The newer houses were more discreet: you could only guess what lay down those driveways.
“Goddamn,” Eddie said, “I’m leading a motorcade. Where was I?”
“Cecilia Santos.”
“I wish I knew what made that woman tick. I mean, what she really wants.”
“Have you tried finding out?”
“I’ve seen some others test the waters. Macho guys. Money guys. They get nowhere. Miss Fire and Ice, they call her. Damned if I know what she does for fun.”
“What’s she been doing for work?”
“After the colonel spoke at the cemetery, she came up here and read the riot act to Hugh and Larry. Threatened to pull the plug on the whole project unless we started doing things her way, publicity-wise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“For openers, it meant I head you guys off at the airport. No arrival press conference. I take you straight to today’s location and we have a press conference there, in a so-called controlled environment, the point being that the publicity we get should be to promote this movie in particular and movie making in the Philippines in general, rather than—you’re going to like this—the ‘promotion and self-promotion of a so-called book.’ “
“Stop the car,” Harding interrupted. Griffin doubted the colonel had heard a word of what Eddie was saying. He’d been looking out the window, watching Baguio pass by. Now he was staring up at a white three-story place that sat on a hilly lawn. He got out, slammed the door, and made his way across the lawn. Behind, on the road, the motorcade came to a puzzled halt. Doors slammed, people started getting out, talking to each other, like drivers stalled in freeway traffic, wondering what the holdup was. A couple of photographers followed Harding up toward the house.
“Author, author!” someone shouted. Clifford Lerner stuck his head through the window.
“Hello, Clifford,” George said. “I thought you’d left town.”
“And miss the greatest story since—since what, George?—the comet Kohoutek? The Ali-Inoki fight? Evel Knievel’s Snake River jump? Why are we stopping here, George? Is this where Yamashita’s treasure is buried? Should I follow him up there or wait down here? I loathe a parade . . .”
At the steps of the house, Harding chatted briefly with a servant, a liveried butler. Then he turned around and came back across the lawn, ignoring the photographers who scurried in front.
“Bit of an anticlimax, seems to me,” Lerner said. “What was he doing, anyway? Asking directions?”
Harding crossed the road and came face to face with Clifford Lerner.
“Pardon me, sir,” Lerner asked. “This treasure of yours. Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
“Excuse me,” Harding said, reaching for the car door, but Lerner gave ground slowly.
“Can it be found in your average kitchen? Living room? Bedroom?”
Griffin opened the door from inside and Harding got in.
“Is it bigger than a breadbox?” persisted Lerner, now putting on a show for some of the other press. Eddie Richter started the car, but Lerner shouted after them.
“And if I had it, sir, this Yamashita treasure, would I know what to do with it?”
They passed the Hyatt Hotel, a five-star high-rise planted among the pines, and they passed Camp John Hay, with WELCOME: MACARTHUR’S GHOST on a banner across the road.
“That was Uncle Harrison’s house back there,” Harding said. “It was the first place I recognized. I wanted to see who lived there now.”
“Hey, Colonel, I could have saved you the walk,” Eddie Richter said. “Place belongs to Larry Wingfield. His summer place.”
“See?” Harding said to Griffin. “The old man had it right.”
“Is Larry his son?”
“Nephew.”
“No sons of his own?”
“No. I’m the closest he got to that.”
CHAPTER 20
It wasn’t until they walked down to the location that Griffin realized the scene being filmed was the airport skirmish that Harding had described: “the last cavalry charge in the history of warfare.” The press people were led to a roped-off area under a candy-striped tent, where bar and buffet awaited them. Griffin nodded to Cecilia Santos, who ignored him. Lerner came up to him, a plate full of lumpia in one hand, a whole pitcher of gin and tonics in the other.
“No popcorn,” he said. “Tell me, Colonel, is this what it was like?”
“That was a war,” Harding replied, his face set and grim. “This is a movie.”
It was certainly that. The bitter melee Harding had recounted, the poignant beauty of the mountains defiled by a spasm of irrational violence that both sickened and exhilarated, was being transformed into a macho spectacle. Off to one side were the guerrillas, several dozen of them, Americans and Filipinos, including a few seductive partisans whom war had caught half dressed, barmaids come to battle, along with a kindly priest, a fiery Filipino nationalist, a genteel planter, and his Bible-reading wife. And the Japanese! They were all over the airstrip, spread out and dug in, foxholes, sandbags, gun emplacements and—no, it couldn’t be!—a couple of planes painted to look like Zero fighters.
“Yes,” Lerner said, “a movie it is. I love movies. What they lose in fidelity, they make up for in infidelity.”
“Clifford, could you come over here a moment?” Griffin said. Harding was obviously crestfallen and Griffin wanted to save him Lerner’s tiresome irony.
“Yes, George?”
“I don’t get it, Clifford.”
“What’s that, my boy?”
“What are you working on? Who are you working for? What’s up with you?”
“Do you think you’re the only writer who ever had it up to here with pufferoos? That you alone are entitled to the dark night of the soul, the career crisis, the quo vadis? I’m joining you, George.”
“Are you after the colonel?”<
br />
“The so-called colonel, George. Never take anything on face value. Lesson one. He got an honorary commission after the war. And it came from the Philippine army, not the U.S. And George?”
“Yes?”
“You could look it up. It’s called reporting. My idea of a good time used to be an afternoon in some courthouse annex basement. Birth certificates, court transcripts, real estate deeds, licenses. People didn’t like what I found. I got the message. I took up the travel beat. Nothing safer than writing up some frigging beach. But I can still report.”
“You’re staying on this?”
“Yes. And it’s all your fault, my friend. When you look at me, Griffin, I see contempt on your face. Or is it pity?”
“Neither one,” Griffin answered. He wondered whether to continue this. He decided he would, expecting to regret it. “It’s fear. I’m afraid I’ll turn out like you.”
“Am I all that bad?”
“It’s not how bad you are. It’s how good you could have been.”
Lerner nodded, as if he liked what he was hearing. “I’ll show you how good I could have been,” he said.
“You mean to follow us?”
“Good Lord no, I’m a reporter. Not a stenographer.”
An explosion, a fusillade of shots, some screams: the cavalry charge had begun, a master shot that must have lasted a full minute, horsemen bounding out of the jungle, overwhelming sentries, dashing down the airstrip, leaping foxholes, racing toward the Zeros. Great stuff. As soon as cameras stopped, photographers had a photo opportunity before cast and crew broke for lunch. Then came Cecilia Santos’s press conference.
A long table, white table cloth, a bank of microphones: it looked like the setting for a ritual. On the other side, rows of folding chairs, pretty aides with portable microphones, and a glossy press kit on every seat. And now the parish: hacks, stringers, fan-magazine writers. And the performers: Wingfield, Beaumont, and Pineda, the producers. Next, the director, Ernest Baum, a lively, prematurely balding chap who wore an L.A. Dodgers baseball hat.
“I missed his last film,” Lerner said, riffling through the press kit. “Did you see it?”
“What was it called?”
“Amazing Mindanao.”
“Who was in it?”
“Philippine Airlines.”
Next to Baum sat Tom Selleck, still covered with dust and sweat from the carnage on the airstrip. To Selleck’s left sat Jose Valerio, minister of culture, a white-suited smoothie who reminded Griffin of Ricardo Montalban on “Fantasy Island.” There were two kinds of Filipinos: the vast majority who weren’t going anywhere, and knew it, and the tiny minority for whom these islands were a launching pad. And next to Jose Valerio were the biggest surprises of all. Four old-timers, Harding and three others, four likeable old warriors, chockablock with yarns.
“We think it is appropriate that this film is an American-Filipino coproduction,” Minister of Culture Valerio began, “which goes back to a time when our partnership was solemnly tested in the dark days following Corregidor and Bataan—”
“Tested and survived,” Larry Wingfield interjected. “There’s a lesson here. An important lesson about friendship and respect and love of country. Of more than one country, actually.”
Then, like a baton in a relay race, the audience microphone was passed from one enthusiastic reporter to the other. Patty-cake questions, until the microphone landed in the fist of a young Filipino who reminded Griffin of the radical student at the University of the Philippines. This could be his older brother, who had lost the angry substance but retained the adversarial style.
“There have been many sensational reports about this movie,” he said, “and the story behind it. We have heard mysterious reports of secrets, mysteries, treasures. Is this your movie’s theme?”
Jose Valerio said that he was glad that question had come up. Hugh Beaumont was glad too. So was Larry Wingfield. And Ernest Baum, the director, was happiest of all. There was a difference between a feature film and a documentary, he said, between fact and fiction, art and life.
“I thought it was Colonel Harding’s story,” the wised-up radical persisted.
“I’ll speak to that,” Hugh Beaumont said. “We’re all proud and pleased to have obtained Colonel Harding’s permission to tell elements of his story, and we were additionally delighted he agreed to come back and visit. But this is not the story of any one man. It’s a composite adventure that draws on the experiences of many men, living and dead.”
“It’s a montage,” Baum said. “A mosaic. There are so many stories. If we can only capture the spirit of that heroic time. Not the details of all campaigns, not even the details on any one campaign—but the essence!”
“Colonel Harding is one of a number of guerrilla leaders who are consultants to this project,” Wingfield said. “I’d like to introduce them. Down at the end of the table is Colonel Harding himself.”
Harding stared out at the meeting. “Hello,” he said.
“Not so fast,” someone interrupted, and Griffin’s heart sank when he saw that it was Clifford Lerner. Not the genial, burnt-out hack, but a different Lerner, a tabloid bully, snide and sardonic. “These other men are fine and I can hardly wait to hear how the war turned out . . .”
The other reporters laughed and nodded at each other. A country with a neutered, self-censoring press nonetheless appreciated the adversarial style.
“I have a report I’d like Colonel Harding to confirm or deny,” Lerner said. “Won’t take a minute.”
“What’s that?” asked Harding.
“A report that your life has been threatened by the NPA. Any comment?”
“No.”
“What I want to know is . . . is this a bona fide threat or is it something that you, sir, or your associates, have concocted to obtain publicity for your film? Or your book. Or yourself.”
“I concocted nothing,” Harding said.
“Is this nothing?” Lerner asked. He held up the front of a newspaper, a half-Tagalog, half-English ax-murder sheet with a banner headline: NPA PLANS BIG MAC ATTACK. He turned to show the headline left and right. He was more like a prosecutor than a journalist.
“What do you call this, Colonel? I call it free publicity.”
“If we could move along . . .” Cecilia Santos pleaded.
“I am moving along,” Lerner said. “I’m almost done.” Now he gave Harding a look of sympathetic understanding. “An old man comes back, full of stories. Some he forgets. Some he remembers. Some he makes up, some he changes. No?”
Harding didn’t deign to answer. He sat motionless, eyes forward.
“It was so long ago, after all, and who’ll contradict you now? Forty years. With not much to show for them. Your postwar record. Your employment. Your income. On the spotty side . . .”
“That’ll do,” Larry Wingfield said. “We’ve got a press conference to hold. Not an inquest. Next to Colonel Harding is Captain David Freitag. Captain Freitag commanded a PT boat in Mindanao. After Corregidor, he went ashore, which is where he stayed till 1944. On Captain Freitag’s left is Colonel Wilfredo Pintor. When the war broke out, Colonel Pintor was right here in Baguio, on the staff of the Philippines Military Academy. The academy had closed its doors and sent home its students a few months before. Well, Colonel Pintor made his way back to his home island of Panay—that trip is a movie in itself, believe me —contacted his former students, and led a postgraduate course in guerrilla warfare you wouldn’t believe. Our fourth consultant we flew all the way from Connecticut, which shows what we think of him—Sergeant Jay Devlin, a defender of Corregidor and an escapee from the Bataan Death March . . .”
There was a round of applause when Beaumont stopped. Cecilia Santos then suggested that, while Colonel Harding had already been heard from and, indeed, had a “supposed” book in progress, the “less-publicized” veterans might share some of their experiences with the press. David Freitag, a dignified, banker-like man, clearly accustomed to co
mmand, went on for an hour. Wilfredo Pintor was good for a second hour, a garrulous little popinjay. Then it was Jay Devlin’s turn. Three hours of war stories, and, it was fair to add, war stories that were pretty well told. There were jokes, wisecracks, embarrassments. There was loss and pain. There were tears, and silences that indicated some stories never got told.
And no one gave a damn. You could watch it happen, little by little. That was the worst of it. Freitag described the beheading of an American prisoner, something he witnessed from hiding, trapped and powerless to prevent, and someone came for the director, who shrugged apologetically and slipped away. Pintor was recounting a moonlight rendezvous with a submarine off Leyte and someone tapped Tom Selleck on the shoulder. Off he went, trailing photographers. He was a movie star, the veterans were talking heads, old ones at that.
Jay Devlin was the worst-treated. He described the Bataan Death March—thirst, dysentery, shootings, beatings—and Jose Valerio glanced at his watch, displayed astonishment at how time passed, and interrupted Devlin to apologize. His services were in demand elsewhere in the republic, he told them, and that was when Griffin looked at Devlin, flushed, trembling, fighting tears, halfway through a story he’d never even told his wife, bayoneted comrades, an officer run over, and over, by a column of trucks, and Jose Valerio was saying that the bar would be open as long as anybody was thirsty and how he wished he could stay, and now only a dozen reporters were left, most of them wilted by humidity, logey with beer and lumpia, and it broke your heart, and Griffin found himself looking at Cecilia Santos, standing coolly at the back of the tent: her moment of victory. End this now, he pleaded silently, enough is enough. And to his surprise, she saw his look, nodded graciously, and headed toward the microphone.
“Wait a damn minute everybody!” It was a voice out of a cattle auction, a twanging, nasal voice that Cecilia Santos hardly recognized as human. It ignored microphones, protocol, and her.
“Who are you, sir? And who do you represent?”
“My name’s Bill Roach.” The room was awake now, the booming voice even brought back some of the strays. Amazing. Now the director and star poked their heads in to see what all the fuss was about. It was about a tall, gangly, country-looking fellow with a narrow head, bulging eyes, a chin that disappeared and an Adam’s apple that made up for the chin’s absence. All this, a string tie and a beaded belt.