by P. F. Kluge
“Oh, shit!” Cadillac Bill’s shout jarred Griffin awake. He saw it was dusk, that there were rice fields left and right, and that the road ahead was blocked by a row of oil barrels that were painted like barber poles.
“What’s this?” asked Griffin.
“A pain in the ass is what it is,” Cadillac Bill replied, pumping the brakes. Weaving through the barrels, the Cadillac was forced to a crawl. “And that’s the excitement of the Philippines. You never know who’s blocking the road.”
Griffin saw some men behind the barricade of oil barrels. For a moment, he was back with Harding, in a white Packard roadster, coming up on Japanese sentries at a trestle bridge over a river that led to the South China Sea: “Mean” Meade at the wheel.
“They’ve got rifles,” Griffin said.
“So? Is a bear Catholic? Does the pope shit in the woods?”
“And uniforms. It must be the army.”
“That’s not exactly cause for celebration. They’re a tribe, that’s all. A tribe among tribes. Got it?”
A half dozen soldiers moved toward the car, walked around it appraisingly, like customers in a showroom. Cadillac rolled down the window.
“Howdy, gents,” he called out. Nervous as he was, he slipped nicely into the role of an affable yokel. “What’s cooking?”
They laughed—at him or with him, you couldn’t say. It was one of those two-edged moments that could end in a party or a spray of bullets. They’d been drinking, Griffin saw. A couple of San Mig cases were stacked at the side of the road, like some sort of last-ditch stockade. They were casual about casualties out here and scrupulous about empties.
“Where are you going?” one of the soldiers asked. A white strip over his chest pocket identified him as DEL CAMPO, M., LT. “San Leandro,” Cadillac Bill said.
“Why?”
“My girl’s got family there. Her mother’s sick.”
“Where is your girl?”
“Ca-li-for-ni-a,” Cadillac Bill responded. “Visiting my mother. It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
Lieutenant Del Campo leaned down and peered into the back seat, capacious and leathery and lightly powdered with dust.
“You get plenty girls back there?” Del Campo asked. “You open the door and they jump right in, no?” He translated for the other soldiers, who laughed appreciatively. “You screw them in the pussy and the ass and in the mouth and then you drop them on the road and drive off in your pussywagon. You got passports?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind?”
“American.”
“Let me see.” He sat down on a case of empty beer bottles and read every page. Next he took a piss. Then he walked over and returned their passports, staring hard at Griffin. “You travel too much.”
CHAPTER 42
The cathedral was still there, birds circling the spire as the sun slanted downward in the west: everything was briefly golden. San Leandro was as Harding described it, the square, the school-yard, and the municipal building, which he and Juan Olmos had conquered for a night forty years before. “For a little while, we owned the world.” The municipal hall was as stolid and ugly as he said it was, a banner across the door proclaiming that its imminent renovation was a personal project of First Lady Imelda Marcos, head of the Human Settlements Ministry. Cadillac parked the car right in front and sat behind the wheel, like a taxi driver waiting for a customer to decide where next.
“Welcome to San Leandro, jewel of the rice lands,” he said. “What now?”
Griffin wasn’t sure. How do you go looking for ghosts? Or finish a dead man’s story? Yet there was something different about this town, a sullen reserve that distinguished it from the dozen places he and Harding had walked through together. Where were the radios, the tape players, the musical racket? Where was the rickety movie house, the lazy barbershop? Where were the kids who swarmed around the pink Cadillac in every other town, the ones who made every American feel like Santa Claus? The town held back. Why? On one corner, a group of men sat drinking beer and holding fighting cocks in their hands. Except for the swig of a beer bottle or the stroke of a plumed neck, they were motionless.
“What’s our strategy?” Cadillac Bill asked.
“I’m not sure,” Griffin said. “Could we just walk around?”
“Sure,” Cadillac rejoindered. “Real natural like, huh, pardner? Hey, I’ve got news. Americans don’t come to a place like this and take walks.”
“We will.”
“Correction: you will. I’ll stay with the car. This town gives me the willies.”
The square was part pavement, part cobblestones, part mud, just as the old man had said. The nipa huts were gone, at least from around the square. Wooden houses with tin roofs had replaced them, plus a few cement-block structures. Walking in the square gave Griffin a surrounded feeling, as if he was on the inside of a livestock pen. He nodded at the cluster of men in front of the store. They watched his every step. Their eyes were like the eyes in trick medieval paintings, following you as you passed in front of them. The men’s eyes, and the roosters’.
The schoolyard was off one end of the square, oddly luxuriant and grassy, and some kids were kicking a ball around, playing a kind of volleyball that permitted players to use both hands and feet to keep the ball aloft. Griffin lingered in the shadows, watching, which was a relief after so much being watched. But when he moved, they saw him. The ball dropped to the grass and rolled off, and the kids stopped and stared at him, just like the men at the store.
He followed the road north, to the trestle bridge that spanned the river. Some Japanese troops had died here. They’d died in the square as well, and in a ditch on the other side of town, and one by one out in the cane fields, squealing like rabbits. That was the first Battle of San Leandro. It had left no marks behind, no monuments. But what about the second battle? How to recover a battle that was nothing louder than a dead man’s whisper? Might as well ask the cobblestones to speak, or the birds, or the river Juan Olmos had followed into town.
“You got some mail,” Cadillac Bill said, handing him an envelope.
“Mail?”
“A kid come running to the car, run off again before I could talk to him. Didn’t even stick out his hand for a peso. This town is strange.”
Griffin’s name was on the envelope. That was hard enough to accept, in a town where no one knew him. What was inside was more incredible still. The note said that it was necessary for him to drive two kilometers on the road north and to turn left on a dirt track through the sugar fields, to drive as far as it was possible and then to wait—if he wanted to meet Juan Olmos.
“I’m telling you,” Cadillac Bill said, “it’s those soldiers, man. They saw your name on the passport. Man, we’re sailing right into it. One pink pussywagon and two dead tourists . . .”
“The soldiers don’t know about Juan Olmos though,” Griffin reminded him. That stopped Cadillac Bill, but not for long.
“I’m supposed to feel better because of that? Hey, come on, Mr. Griffin! You tell me. You’re driving around Detroit, let’s say, and some kid hands you a note and it says, Hi, I’m dying to meet you in the park at midnight and tell you all my secrets, signed yours truly, Jimmy Hoffa. You jump right at that, do you? Is that the way you go about it? There’s our left.”
“Where?”
“There,” he said, pointing at a barely noticeable gap in the fields of sugarcane. “Where there’s a sign, an arrow, says this way to the ambush. Shit, I don’t believe this!”
The road was made for carts and carabao. Cadillac Bill’s machine touched the ranks of cane on either side, a constant brushing and snapping sound, like driving through a slightly kinky car wash. Cadillac Bill snapped on his headlights.
“Just thought I’d give ‘em something to aim between,” he said.
At the end, the road rose slightly. Suddenly they were out of the cane fields in a clearing. Down below, far away, they could see the few lights that betrayed the presence of
San Leandro—no more than on a ship at sea—a display of lights that was mocked by the countless stars above.
“Well, no one’s here so I guess we can go,” Cadillac Bill said, mock hopefully.
“I see some old buildings over there.” Griffin pointed toward some rafter beams silhouetted against the night sky, a broken wall below, and overgrown bushes that were left from someone’s garden.
“Some old estate, probably. Lot of them that were destroyed during the war never got rebuilt. The owners stayed in Manila and ran things from there. It was more fun being absentee landlords, I guess.”
Griffin got out and walked toward the ruin, wondering if this was one of the plumes of smoke that Harry Roberts Harding had seen, looking down from Mount Arayat after the first Battle of San Leandro. Juan Olmos had made a joke about it, a rare joke, coming from him. The peasants, he said, were “burning off the fields.”
Gravel crunched underfoot: he was walking on someone’s driveway, a graceful loop that led to the front steps, fine and wide. All around him was charred wood and broken masonry and shrubs, hibiscus and bougainvillea, that closed over the house the way the sea engulfs a sunken ship.
“George, goddamn it, there’s something coming up the road,” Cadillac Bill shouted from behind. “Shit, it’s a jeep! I told you it was the army. Christ, we’re in for it now. A tribe, George. A tribe among tribes . . .”
Griffin watched the headlights light up the cane fields, scattering beams high and low as they took the bumps. The jeep pulled into the clearing and stopped in front of the Cadillac. It was full of the same merry company that had manned the roadblock.
“Howdy!” Lieutenant Del Campo shouted. “What are you doing out here in the dark?”
“We heard there was a square dance.”
“You got some pussy in your Cadillac?”
It was getting ridiculous, Griffin thought, a gang of pistoleros right out of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Eddie Richter was right. This was where the old movies went to die.
“I guess we’ll be going,” Cadillac Bill said, opening the car door with exaggerated nonchalance. “We didn’t mean to trespass or anything.”
Lieutenant Del Campo’s response was direct. He drew out his pistol and shot out Cadillac Bill’s right front tire. The air seeped out with a hiss and the Cadillac settled onto the ground, violated and deflated.
“You stay,” Del Campo said. “You wait.”
“What for?” Griffin asked.
“Your friend. Juan Olmos.”
The helicopter came in from the west, searching for the signal fires that Del Campo had his men build. A searchlight pointed down as the helicopter hovered overhead. It lit up the old ruin and Griffin saw things that he’d missed before: a tile-bottomed fish pond, some broken lawn furniture, a ghostly, overgrown gazebo, and what must once have been a tennis court. Every turn of the helicopter lit up another corner of the past. But when the helicopter landed it wasn’t the past that came walking out. It was the distinctly contemporary figure Griffin had last seen in Phil Robinson’s office at the U.S. embassy: Major Herrera.
“Very good, Mr. Griffin.” Herrera stopped to light a cigarette, one of the clove-scented cigarettes that people smoked in Indonesia. “I made a bet with someone that you would never get to San Leandro. I underestimated you.”
“Who was the bet with?”
“General Contreras. He’s a very poor loser.”
“Jesus,” Cadillac Bill moaned. “Contreras. We’re in the deepest possible shit.”
“And this is Cadillac Bill. The famous Cadillac Bill. And his famous Cadillac. ‘Viva Las Vegas.’ Did you have a chance to look around? This was quite a place once. It belonged to Harrison Wingfield.”
“He lived here?”
“He lived in lots of places. It’s been many years now, but people remember him. The great American. You must talk about him with General Contreras.”
“Must we?” Cadillac Bill asked.
“Shall we go?”
“Hey, Major,” Cadillac Bill protested. “I’m just a taxi driver.”
“The helicopter. Please.”
“My car!”
“These gallant soldiers will need the keys,” Herrera said. “Well, actually they don’t need the keys. They’re all accomplished car thieves. But it would be helpful. I’ll have one of these fellows drive it to Angeles City. I’ll have all of them drive it.”
“Christ.”
“Gentlemen? Shall we?”
CHAPTER 43
Davao Imperial Resort. Set in a nest of birds of paradise, shrewdly illuminated by a spotlight hidden among ferns, the sign recalled Griffin’s adventures on the Faraway Places beat. So did the driveway, winding through a tropical garden that was floodlit like a stage set, Midsummer Night’s Dream, maybe, with pastel beams hitting orchids and ginger blossoms. Just as they slowed to take a speed bump, they were spattered by an errant lawn sprinkler.
“It never fails,” Major Herrera sighed. “They put more water on the driveway than on the garden.”
“What is this place?”
“Our newest five-star hotel-casino. Not yet open to the public.”
Griffin had expected a tent encampment in the mountains or a ramshackle military headquarters near one of the fenced, fortified “strategic hamlets” the Philippine army had been hammering together to win hearts and minds in Mindanao. Mindanao was the Philippines’ wild west, Siberia and the Amazon all in one; island of gold, lumber, pineapple, sugar, and bananas, island of stone-age tribes, twentieth-century pirates, Moslem separatists, NPA rebels, lost commands.
They stepped into a lounge, just off a not-yet opened casino, with rows of one-armed bandits still in packing cases. The place was jammed with men in uniforms and hostesses, as though the military had volunteered for a not-so-dry run that would give the new resort a chance to test the act that would lure high rollers from Thailand and Macao. The evening’s entertainment was a Las Vegas lounge act, a road company Tony Bennett with an overlay of Latin charmer, Fernando Llamas or Ricardo Montalban. “Thank you, thank you very much. For my next song . . .”
Major Herrera led Griffin and Cadillac Bill to a VIP table in the back of the room, with a good view of both stage and audience.
“Where’s your boss?” Griffin asked.
“My boss?” Herrera returned. “Don’t you know? That’s him onstage.”
General Nestor Contreras, boy partisan, U.S.-trained junior officer, leader of the Philippines Vietnam contingent, shadowy master of guerrilla warfare, possible heir apparent to the presidency, was challenging his troops to a version of “Name That Tune.”
“Come on, ladies and germs, just give me the name of a woman, any kind of a name. Hey! Any kind of a woman . . .”
“Donna!” someone shouted. Immediately, General Nestor Contreras whispered something to the leader of a trio that looked as if it was minutes from a firing squad and launched right into a version of the old Paul Anka tune. “Maria,” and he was Tony from West Side Story. “Mary,” and he was Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan, shuffling and smiling as he lauded the virtues of an old-fashioned, simple girl. “Lucille,” and he was Little Richard. On and on. He was Buddy Holly singing “Peggy Sue,” Maurice Chevalier singing “Gigi.” Filipinos had been around Americans a long time and they were famous, also infamous, for their ability to copy. They were a nation, or a not-quite nation, of talented imitators. That’s what Contreras was doing, but he did it with a vengeance. Depending on the song, he was a fifties rock-and-roller, a savvy song-and-dance man, a red-neck minstrel, a well-traveled crooner. He could do it all, his performance declared, do it just as well as the originals, but there was an anger in each of his impersonations, as if he were working his way through all the different kinds of persons Americans could be, the whole national gallery, mastering their manner, learning their music, and moving on. Come on, come on, he exhorted his captive audience. Lola. Sheila. Donna. Lili Marlene. Finally he was done. He headed toward them.
&nb
sp; “Who’s who?” he asked Herrera.
“This one is Griffin,” Herrera answered. “And this is called Cadillac Bill.”
Contreras sat down. “The men in the glass suits. Name your name. Mr. Johnny Walker. Mr. Haig and Mr. Haig. Mr. Jack Daniels. Mr. Jim Beam.”
Griffin could see how people might find Contreras dashing.
He had matinee-idol looks and, though a touch of silver streaked his hair, he was a youthful Kennedyesque figure nonetheless, a fiftyish playboy-general. But there was something else, a certain recklessness, a take-it-to-the-limits manner that made him volatile and unpredictable. He was one of those men who could go either way, a lover or a killer. You could see why people talked about him. And why they worried.
“Out,” Contreras said to Major Herrera. “The men, the girls, the band, the waiters. Everybody out.”
Contreras sat back and watched the crowd disperse. Two bottles of scotch and a bucket of ice arrived. In a minute they had the place to themselves, an empty stage, tables covered with glasses and bottles, the smell of new carpets and old cigarettes hanging in the air.
“What did he say about me?” Contreras asked.
“Not a word,” Griffin answered.
“You’re lying,” Contreras snapped. “You’re scared and you’re lying. Reconsider.”
“I heard your name on Corregidor, when he arrived. Since then, I’ve heard your name from other people. Everyone’s been asking what he had to say about you.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“But he never mentioned you, I swear to God.”
For a moment, Contreras seemed disappointed, like a poet who found he was too inoffensive to have his book burned or a gangster who found the police weren’t even interested in him.