Along the Broken Bay

by Flora J. Solomon

  “It’s no problem, Ling. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you. I lock up everything, and security lights are on. I come back in the morning and let the cleaning staff in.” He left with a bounce to his step.

  Gina slapped at Arielle’s arm. “You’re terrible. No more teasing. Everyone deserves some time in the sun.”

  “Don’t be a sourpuss, Gina. He can take it. Didn’t you see the twinkle in his eye?”

  Gina had a love-hate relationship with her apartment over Pearl Blue. After a tiring night’s work, she embraced the solitude, but often she found it a lonesome place with only Aleo the Cat to keep her company. Holidays always brought on a special sadness, remembering the used-to-be days of secrets and surprises with her husband and child.

  Tonight, she especially missed Ray. She had no connection to him—not a letter, not a picture, not Cheryl’s wide-set eyes and square-chinned face to remind her that he had ever existed. With nothing tangible, her memories were becoming fragile, like whiffs of delicate scents that dissipated in the slightest breeze, and the thought of losing him frightened her.

  Miguel had delivered a letter from Cheryl, thanking her for sending the Valentine candy with its printed messages: Love Me, Be Mine, and Forever Yours. She picked up the note and read it again, noticing how much Cheryl’s handwriting had improved, no more squiggles or backward-facing letters. Her child was growing up without her. Others were shaping her memories and values. Would Gina ever survive the guilt? Would Ray ever forgive her for abandoning their daughter? It wasn’t supposed to be. MacArthur had promised a quick resolution, not a multiyear war.

  One day at a time, she reiterated in her thoughts, knowing it was a ploy to drag her feet. She could close Pearl Blue tonight if she chose to and be reunited with her daughter. The decision had never felt as viable as it did on this Valentine’s Day.

  The apartment too warm, she opened a window that gave her a view of the bay. A Japanese fleet, newly arrived, was a commanding sight, and she turned off the lamp to take in the imposing patterns of bridges, turrets, towers, and massive guns shadowed against a full moon. A shiver went up her back. Would the war never end? With her indecision to stay or leave Manila still unresolved, she climbed into bed, promising herself she would make up her mind one way or another in the morning.

  Hours later she stirred and turned over in her half sleep, dreaming she heard a scuffle of shuffling feet and the squeaks and pings of bicycles. “Speedo!” she heard called in her dream. She awoke with a start, sat up, and listened. The noise wasn’t a dream but was drifting in through her open window. She peeked out and saw hundreds of shuffling prisoners of war marching to the docks. “Speedo,” rang again, this time punctuated with a crack of a whip. She jumped back from the window so fast she stepped on Aleo the Cat, who let out a yowl and scurried under the bed. Gina stayed on the floor in the dark listening, certain that nothing good was happening.

  After the last soldier passed by, she quickly dressed and slipped out the stage door. The air was warm and wet and every light a halo. Keeping low, she crept through the alley behind the restaurants and shops, hearing rats scurrying in the garbage. The docks lay just ahead. She crouched behind pilings and witnessed the prisoners being loaded onto barges, motored into the harbor, and herded into the hold of the Nissyo Maru, a rusty merchant ship, the old vessels often targets for American bombers. Gina clenched her teeth to keep from yelping her anguish. Seeing all that she needed to, she retraced her steps, being careful to stay in the shadows. But as she approached Pearl Blue, she heard, “Halt! You there! Halt!”

  Oh, my lord! No! Please no!

  She sprinted to Pearl Blue’s stage door, bounded through it, and locked it. Panting, she scurried to her office and fumbled in her desk drawer for a pencil, her hand shaking so hard she could barely hold it. She scribbled a note describing what she’d observed, the date, time, and—what was the name of the ship? The name of the ship? She scrawled Nissyo Maru.

  A bright light shone through the window, illuminating her desk, her chair, and the trash can before swooping around the walls. Gina stood with her body flattened behind the door, where the beam couldn’t reach. The light disappeared, but thumps came from the front of the building, a command to halt, and then a gunshot.

  Gina’s ears rang from the blast, and she stifled a scream, certain she was in mortal danger. Gulping air, she rushed to the stage, opened the top of the piano, and slid the note between the piano’s middle C string and its hammer. Another gunshot and the front door crashed open. Lordy! She ducked behind the folds of the stage curtain and stood still as a stone statue. Her heart thumped a tattoo, and sweat beaded her forehead.

  Her hearing acute, Gina detected every footfall coming from the front door, through the vestibule, and into the Orchid Room. The sentry stopped on the dance floor, and she prayed the stage curtain wasn’t rippling. Through a gap in the fold, she watched the beam of his flashlight reflect in the mirrors and sconces on the walls, and sweep over the bar. Gina shifted her weight, and a board creaked. The beam swiftly came to the stage. She held her breath and wished herself invisible.

  In a violent sweep, the curtain was ripped away, leaving her prey to the grip of a beefy hand. She yelped and cringed back, but the sentry grabbed her hair and yanked her forward, where she tripped and landed at his feet. He jerked her up, his fingers digging deep into her arm, and propelled her, kicking and fighting, to where Ling lay facedown in a pool of blood. The scream Gina had been holding inside swept through the air, skipped across the water, and echoed off the mountains beyond.

  She dropped to her knees in the puddle of Ling’s blood and placed her hand along his neck. Please, let there be a pulse. Oh God, please. The kick of a hobnail boot to her ribs tumbled her to the ground. She rose to her hands and knees and shrieked, “You dirty coward. You shot him in the back!”

  The outburst earned her a kick to her left jaw, and she sprawled on the ground again, tasting blood and detecting a back-tooth wobble. The guard yanked her up, slapped her face, and tied her hands behind her with a leather thong. He half marched, half pushed her to the dock, where he shoved her into the back seat of a car and slammed the door, missing her legs by a minute degree.

  Left alone, she saw Ling’s blood on her dress—too, too much blood, beginning to dry and turn crusty. She gulped back her sobs, and tears coursed down her cheeks. Oh! Ling? Not Ling! She shook with rage at the uncalled-for death. “Butchers!” she screamed, then shrank down, now fearing her own death and those of Cheryl and Ray.

  Her tears depleted, she numbly watched another group of shuffling American soldiers being loaded onto the Nissyo Maru, disappearing into the ship’s hold, from where many would never return. All might not ever return, she amended. She prayed Julio would discover the muted key on the piano and find the hidden note in time to stop the carnage.

  As the sun rose in the sky, inside the car heated to sweltering, and sweat ran in rivulets down Gina’s forehead and from under her arms. Every bone in her body ached from the guard’s kicks and slaps. An officer and his driver entered. Wilted beyond reason, Gina mumbled, “Water, please.” A canteen landed in her lap, but with her hands tied behind her, she had no way to drink from it. She leaned back with her swollen eyes closed and parched mouth open. Breathe in. Breathe out. Survive.

  When the car slowed, Gina forced her eyes open in time to see the massive pillars and arched entry into Fort Santiago, the principal defense fortress of Old Manila, built in the 1590s. She had often played golf on the grounds for charity events, never once giving thought to the many prisoners who’d been tortured and executed over the centuries in the fort’s dungeons and dropped into the Pasig River through a hole in the floor.

  Those images came to mind, blurring her thoughts as she was hustled inside, where a clerk removed her bindings. Her hands tingled as blood flowed back into them. “The benjo?” she asked in a squeaky voice that sounded terrified. The clerk pointed to a door a few steps away.

 
; She scrubbed her hands clean and then cupped them to guzzle water. The abrasions on her legs and arms stung when she washed the dirt away. A vision of Ling lying dead brought on a wave of agony, and she struggled against more sobs of despair. Her thoughts flew in rampant circles: Cheryl, Inez, Arielle . . . breathe in. Breathe out.

  The clerk locked her in an empty, windowless room. She paced the perimeter, the magnitude of her situation beginning to sink in. She’d witnessed what she shouldn’t have, and there would be a penalty to pay unless she could talk her way out of it. At worst, the impact could be far reaching, from Pearl Blue to Davy’s guerrillas to the resistance at Cabanatuan and ultimately to Cheryl. She sat in a corner, her legs drawn up, hugging her knees. Denying her discomfort, she struggled to stifle her fear and began preparing her story.

  Time slowed. It seemed like hours she sat in the room, hearing Japanese voices from outside the door but not knowing what was happening. She listened for a familiar tongue—had others of her network been rounded up to squat in rooms nearby, also bruised from the guards’ rough treatment? Ling came to her thoughts, and a sob erupted from deep inside her. I’m so sorry, so sorry. What Chan and Biyu must be going through today. Upon hearing a key in the lock, she gasped and pressed her body against the wall.

  A guard approached her carrying a stick and a hood.

  “No, please,” she begged, “you don’t need—”

  She stumbled out of the room and into another, her vision shrouded, a guard gripping her already bruised arm. Shoved into a chair, she clutched the armrests like they might be her only salvation. She heard the rustle of paper. A voice said, “State your name.”

  She stiffened. She knew that voice. It belonged to an officer in the Kempeitai, skinny as a rail and fox faced, a regular customer at Pearl Blue. She garbled her name, it painful to speak. “Signora Angelina Aleo.”

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “Yes, sir. I was out after curfew. I can explain.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She swallowed and took a painful breath, her rib cracked from the guard’s cruel kick. “I was asleep in my apartment on the second floor of Pearl Blue, the nightclub I own. My bedroom window was open. I woke up and thought I heard a child crying. I went outside and looked around. I didn’t find a crying child. I must have dreamed it. I’d just turned to go back inside when the guard saw me.”

  There was a rustle and a lengthy discussion in Japanese.

  The officer said, “Signora Aleo. Do you swear everything you said is the truth?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For your own good, you must tell us the truth. The Japanese are smart people. If you lie, we will know it, and being a woman won’t protect you. We treat man and woman the same. Do you understand?”

  His message chilled Gina to her core, and she gripped the chair arm tighter. “I understand. I have nothing to hide. I have no reason to lie.” Picturing Ling lying in a pool of blood, she struggled to hold her voice steady.

  The officer grunted. “I have here the arresting guard’s report. He says he saw you on the dock after curfew. You ran when he approached and didn’t stop when he called for you to halt. He followed you to Pearl Blue, a place of business, where he found you inside hiding behind a curtain.” The officer’s voice was thick with insinuation. “What were you doing on the dock after curfew?”

  “The guard didn’t see me on the dock. I was outside my own establishment, sir.”

  There was another unintelligible discussion, and her mind wandered to Chan and Biyu. Had they been awoken by the gunshot and witness to the scene? She sniffed back tears and choked, it hard to breath under the hood.

  The interrogator broke into her thoughts. “The guard ordered you to halt. Why didn’t you stop?”

  Gina feared an uphill battle. “Because I didn’t hear him. I must have been inside already. That’s when I heard a gunshot. Did the guard tell you he killed my security man? He shot him in the back!” She hiccuped a sob. Don’t let them see you cry. She felt someone standing close to her. She curled her body tighter, fearful of what he might do.

  “Signora Aleo. What did you see when you were on the dock?”

  The central question, Gina knew. “Nothing. I was never on the dock.”

  The blow came as a surprise, hitting her over the loose tooth, the pain so intense it radiated to her shoulder.

  “I’ll ask you again. What did you see?”

  “Nothing,” she cried. “Please don’t hit me. I didn’t see anything until the guard put me in the car. Then I saw the ship’s crew being loaded. That’s all.”

  The officer paced. “The ship’s crew?”

  “Yes. I guessed it was the crew. My eyes had swollen almost shut and were full of tears. I didn’t consider it unusual. Ships come and go, and so do the crews.” The menacing presence who’d hit her was beside her again. She drew away.

  The interrogator asked variations of the same questions until Gina’s voice gave out, and she couldn’t speak above a whisper. After the interrogator left the room, a guard removed the hood.

  Gina closed her eyes to the brightness. Her jaw was so sore she could barely move it. She felt she had answered the interrogator’s questions to his satisfaction. She would return to Pearl Blue, close its doors, and flee to the mountains.

  She opened her eyes and tried to stand, but an acute pain in her side doubled her over. She folded her arms tight to her body and struggled to breathe. The guard ordered her to remove her shoelaces, a ring she was wearing, and the bobby pins from her hair.

  She protested. “What for? I answered your questions. I have nothing more to tell you.”

  The sergeant cuffed her hands behind her, grasped her arm, and propelled her bent and squirming along thick-walled hallways, down a flight of stairs, and through several archways and locked doors to a long corridor of cells.

  “Stop,” she cried. “I shouldn’t be down here. This can’t be happening. I’m innocent of any wrongdoing.” She smelled mold and filth and heard the rustle of bodies moving, stifled coughs, whispers, and troubling moans. A guard unlocked a cell door, released Gina from her cuffs, and pushed her inside a five-by-eight-foot cell.

  She perceived a premonition. I’m going to die here.

  Chapter 30

  INTERROGATION

  How thin the veneer—that which we call civilization! Is there meaning in all the suffering?

  —Ray Thorpe, Fukuoka #17, Japan, February 1944–September 1945

  Gina felt the gaze of five curious women. She stumbled over another dressed in fatigues and sleeping on the floor. “Sorry,” she mumbled, recoiling from the dirty-looking woman at her feet.

  “No talking,” the guard bellowed and threatened her with his baton, but she stepped out of his reach and stood with her back to the stone-block wall. She swayed, her knees buckled, and she slid to the floor, praying that somehow the message had been sent to the others in her network: “Kitty is on her way to school.”

  A woman wearing a badly stained business suit turned her back to Gina, and a Spanish mestiza holding a black shawl tightly over her shoulders eyed her suspiciously. When the guard left, three nuns dressed in stained white habits clustered around and handed Gina a cup of water and a chunk of dried bread. In a whispered babble, they all quizzed her at once about what was happening outside.

  Her jaw swollen and not able to talk above a whisper, Gina related what she’d last heard from Jonesy. “There’s fighting in the Philippine Sea. They’ve disrupted the Jap supply lines.”

  A round-eyed nun introduced as Sister Agnes peered into Gina’s face. “We hear airplanes. Are they Japanese or American?”

  “It could be either, but the Japs are getting weaker. They don’t have the resources to replace the planes and ships they’re losing.”

  “We can tell when the Nips lose a battle,” a nun named Sister Bruna quietly hissed. Underneath the grime, she had a sassy young face. The back of her tattered habit attested to her menstruating witho
ut protection. “The guards forget the Lord says, ‘To give us this day our daily bread,’ the yellow-bellied bastards.”

  Gina blinked, surprised at Sister Bruna’s choice of words.

  Sister Margaretta, who carried herself with an air of authority, sucked in a sharp breath, but she didn’t admonish the young sister.

  “How long have you been here?” Gina asked Sister Bruna.

  “Twenty-nine days. If I had my watch, I could tell you the hours, minutes, and seconds, but the guards stole it.”

  Gina’s sore jaw clenched, sending pain to her ear. She could never survive a month inside this moldy gray cell crammed to suffocating with unwashed, lice-ridden bodies.

  A guard approached, and the women stood and remained silent, as required.

  Gina detected the guard taking special notice of her. She endured his unwelcome stare. A pervert? A customer of Pearl Blue? If so, an ally?

  For days Gina sat nearly mute, mourning Ling’s death and crazy with worry about what was happening to her friends and coworkers outside the walls of Fort Santiago. As her body healed, she craved exercise, but in the tight confines, she could barely move without stepping on someone. Her ears desired quiet, but every impassioned shout, every clang of an iron door, every footfall of the guards echoed off the rock walls. She wished to plead her innocence, but time passed, and she feared she had been forgotten.

  The Spanish mestiza offered no succor. “You’ll be summoned by interrogators in five minutes, five days, five months, or maybe never.” She drew her shawl tighter over her shoulders.

  Infested with fleas, Gina continually scratched.

  “Don’t do that,” Sister Bruna warned. “If a bite gets infected, it won’t heal. We’re not getting enough essential foods. I taught hygiene in the convent school. I know all about nutrition and health.”

  Gina stopped scratching the bite that now stung. The sister didn’t look old enough to be a schoolteacher. “What did you do to end up in here?”