“I lived by a higher law than one being imposed on me.” She sniffed and jutted her chin up. “My sisters and I ran a canteen for the prisoners on a work detail from Bilibid Prison. They marched by twice every day. We sold the usual candy and cigarettes, but we added what we called”—she glanced around—“manna from heaven.”
This young sister’s exuberance and positive outlook on life reminded Gina of Arielle, and she suppressed an urge to wrap her in a protective hug. “Prayers?” she asked.
“No, well. Sort of.” She whispered from behind a cupped hand. “Radio messages. Agnes had a radio hidden in the convent.” She lowered her hand and grinned. “We slipped a few words of interest into the prayers we said for the prisoners as they walked by. A guard caught on, and the jig was up. The Kempeitai came for us before sunup and dragged us away from our morning service.”
Gina lowered her head, not wanting Sister Bruna to see the look of horror on her face. Punishment for possessing a radio was death. Lord, please help this child.
Sister Bruna’s chin trembled ever so slightly. “All of us in this cell are doomed, I’m afraid. The woman in the business suit . . . she had a buy-and-sell business that allowed her to travel. She tracked down Japanese hideouts and reported back to the guerrillas. I don’t know anything about the Spanish mestiza except her name is Lolita. She keeps to herself. The one in fatigues—she’s a guerrilla with the Hukbalahap, the Communist Party. They hate everybody, Americans and Japanese alike.”
Gina remembered hearing Davy rant against the Huks, their guerrilla bands plentiful in the mountains and as brutal as the Japanese patrols.
Sister Bruna reached out for Gina’s hand. “I’ll pray for your soul.”
Gina was touched by this young woman, whose future looked hopeless but who, somehow, retained a generous attitude. “Thank you, Sister. I’d rather you pray for our survival.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll do that too.”
A guard led Gina up a flight of stairs and through a windowed hallway that, after days in the gloomy cell, seemed overly bright. The screened windows let in a refreshing breeze, the river below presented as a blue ribbon, and the flowers in the nearby garden appeared as splotches of glittering pink, purple, and yellow. Gina soaked in the view and gulped in deep breaths of fresh air.
She was led to an interrogation room, a small windowless space. A round-faced captain and a sergeant who had the pointy nose of a Chihuahua were sitting at the table, shuffling through a folder of papers. In place of a chair for Gina was a knee-high bench, the top lined with split bamboo. She wondered how she was expected to sit on the cutting surface.
“Kneel,” the captain ordered, indicating the bench.
“What?” Gina asked, not sure she had heard correctly.
“Take off your shoes. Dress above knees. Kneel on the bench.”
She balked at the command, but she had no choice. She took off her shoes, pulled the skirt of her dress above her knees, and gingerly knelt on the surface, the sharp edges of the bamboo digging into her legs from her knees to her toes. Her body tightened, and she held her breath, trying to make the weight lighter.
“Sit back,” he ordered.
Bastard. It was a word that was coming into her mind more often now. She slowly lowered her body onto her heels, a sensation of entering a tub of scalding water, and she couldn’t help a gasp from escaping. She groaned inwardly. Breathe. Get through it. Panting, she forced her focus outward and saw the folder of papers on the table was thicker than before. Not a good thing—the Japanese were doing their homework. She wondered whether the note hidden in the piano was in the folder, a certain death sentence for her.
She was quizzed on numerous matters she had answered before, and she stuck to her story that she had been outside Pearl Blue because she’d thought she’d heard a child crying and that she had never been on the dock. However, her attention to detail was being sabotaged by the numbness in her feet due to lack of circulation. Afraid she’d lose her toes, she wiggled them.
The sharp-nosed sergeant consulted with his superior, and when he returned to Gina, he asked, “Signora, you claim you were raised in Canada. Have you ever been to the United States?”
Gina felt a flush she hoped her inquisitors didn’t see. “Just once when I was a child. It was a family vacation. My aunt wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”
“You never returned?”
“No, sir.”
“You never went to Hollywood, California?”
Hollywood, California? Where had that question come from, or more importantly, where was it going? “No, sir,” she answered—but then she remembered the business card she’d slipped into the pocket of her dress: Eiji Fugio. Agent to the Stars. Hollywood, California. So the Kempeitai had searched her apartment. What else had they found? She was meticulous to obsession with letters and lists, burning them as soon as they came into Pearl Blue, but still, the searchers had found that obscure business card—in the pocket of her dress! The image of them pawing through her private things gave her the creeps.
The sergeant paced. “We have it from a reliable source that you are friends with Ginger Rogers, the Hollywood dancer, and that you were often a guest at her home in Hollywood, California.”
A reliable source? Eiji Fujio? Why in the hell was he lying about her, or was it his sullen protégée, Baal-hamon? She could only guess—they were Japanese operatives or just greedy sons of bitches. Or had she been set up? A target of an extortion scheme gone bad, perhaps? Gina’s mind was muddled and screaming danger. “I know who your source is. He’s lying to you. Let me be clear—I’ve never been to Hollywood, and I’ve never met Ginger Rogers.” She tensed, waiting for retribution.
The sergeant screamed into her face. “You lie. You go to Hollywood. You friends with Ginger Rogers. You an American citizen. Who you spying for?”
She cringed back from the spray of spittle. “Nobody. I’m not a spy.”
“We’ll see.” The sergeant nodded to the captain, who picked up the phone and spoke into it. Two beefy men wearing white pajama-like uniforms came through the door. As they approached Gina, she sensed greater danger with each closer step. “I swear to you on my mother’s grave,” she cried, “I’m not a spy. I’ve never been to Hollywood.” Her protests unheeded, the men in white dragged her off the bench and into another room, where they strapped her to a table. “No! No! I’m telling the truth. I’m not an American. I’m not spying for anyone,” Gina yowled, just before one brute forced a water hose into her mouth.
Later, the two men in white helped Gina stumble back to the interrogation room. She noticed the torturous bench had been replaced by a chair, the smallest of mercies. Her wet dress clung to her, and her throat felt raw from paroxysms of coughing up inhaled water. She shivered with anger and the aftereffects of the vicious treatment. There was no truth in this room, only insanity, and she had no defense against it.
“Are you ready to talk now?” the officer asked.
“Yes. I’m not a spy. I’ve never been to Hollywood, and I don’t know Ginger Rogers.”
The officer kicked her off the chair, and she landed hard on her left shoulder, the pain shooting to her wrist. She lay with her eyes closed, thinking a nightmare couldn’t possibly be as bad as this dire situation. Her thoughts went to an orphaned Cheryl, and her heart squeezed so tight she felt faint.
The guard half carried and half dragged her back to her cell, her left shoulder painfully clicking. When feeling came back to her legs, the razorlike cuts burned worse than she had ever imagined. The nuns clucked around her with their prayers and cold rags. “Thank you, Sisters,” Gina said, taking comfort in their ministrations.
And so began days of endless questions and alternate tortures: the razor-sharp bench, the water forced down her throat, and always the beatings to coerce her to admit she was an American spy working with the guerrillas. There were nights she was thrown back into her cell with cuts and cigarette burns she didn’t remember getting. The women in
her cell did what little they could to ease her suffering. “Brutes,” Sister Margaretta muttered when applying wet compresses to Gina’s bloodied legs.
“Scoundrels,” Sister Agnes mumbled and offered a prayer.
Gina gave the Japanese nothing for their brutal efforts, never confessing that she was an American spy, their focus of inquiry. Each night, as she lay on the stone floor writhing in pain, she felt she had won a small victory.
The guards changed hourly and strode the corridor from one end to the other and back, and the women were required to stand when they passed by. Gina had learned to recognize certain gaits and gave her oppressors names: Cracker Jack, who was all business; Drippy, who sniffed and snuffed; Fruitcake, who was greasy and uttered lewd comments; and Sicko, who magically appeared whenever one was using the benjo.
Gina craved any food other than the starchy rice lugao served twice a day, often dreaming about bowls of steaming vegetable soup or fragrant, mouthwatering pineapples and mangoes just out of her reach. She desired privacy for her personal ablutions, soap with which to clean her wounds, and a blanket for the comfort of wrapping her body in warmth. On the nights she couldn’t sleep, when the stone floor cut into her hips and ankle bones, she practiced her story in her mind—born in Italy, raised in Canada—going over the smallest details. However, as deprivations increased, so did her memory lapses, and she agonized over her deteriorating mental acuity, which increased the probability she would give away her true mission.
She jerked awake from a recurring nightmare where she was running through a fog, being chased by a big dog, the cur gaining ground in each successive dream. Tonight, it had nipped at her heels. She sat up, her heart thumping as if she’d run a sprint.
“A nightmare?” she heard whispered from a corner.
Gina turned to see the speaker was Lolita. “Yes. It keeps coming back.” She climbed over two sleeping bodies to sit next to her.
Lolita reached under her black lace shawl and produced a cigarette and a match. She lit the cigarette, took a drag, and handed it to Gina, who sucked on it hungrily. “Where did you get this?”
“From a guard who wanted to be friendly.”
Sex for cigarettes . . . how far would one have to fall?
Gina learned Lolita had been arrested almost a year ago for possessing a letter from John Boone, a known guerrilla leader. Her trial was coming up soon, and she expected to be executed. She said, “The letter was planted in my bag. I told the Japs a hundred times I had no knowledge of it.” She took the cigarette from Gina and inhaled the smoke as if it were life giving. “When the Nips get something in their heads, they never let it go . . . ever.”
Ever! Gina heard, and it gave her the willies.
Under the once-beautiful shawl, Gina caught a glimpse of healed scars and oozing sores. Was she seeing her future? The thought precipitated days of hopelessness.
A guard again came for Gina. Barefoot, flea bitten, and wearing the same bloody dress in which she’d arrived, she followed him to the interrogation room, trembling inside but with her back straight and her head held high. “Appear robust. Don’t show fear,” Lolita had counseled.
The interrogators arrived, smelling of bacon and beer.
One officer looked over her file and then ordered her to take her position on the split-bamboo bench. The agony of it radiated from her toes to her teeth.
“Signora Aleo, we believe you are an American spy working with the guerrillas. You know what we can do. You will save yourself much pain if you work with us. Are you ready to tell the truth?”
Fighting back pain, she stated, “I’ve been telling the truth. I have nothing to hide. I’m not American. I’m Italian by birth. I grew up in Canada. I own a nightclub in Manila. I know nothing about the guerrillas.”
The sergeant twirled his club, and she tensed her body.
He flipped a letter close to her face. “Is this your handwriting?”
Her first fearful thought was that they had found the note she had left in the piano for Julio and the death sentence it would be for the hundreds of men trapped in the hulls of the merchant ship Nissyo Maru.
She focused on the squiggles. In the best of times her handwriting was illegible, and tearing from a swollen eye further obscured the cursive. She blinked several times, and the message came into view. It was a note she’d sent to Dion about a shipment of demijohns and calamansi, or cal, as she had abbreviated it, and he’d returned the note with the word received and a T written on the bottom. It would have been burned with other notes, and she wondered if the Japanese had been sifting through the burn barrel in the alley behind Pearl Blue. She’d have to think fast, and that wasn’t good. “I’m not sure. I can’t see very well.” She took the letter from his hand and held it close to her face. “It could be.”
The officer snatched the letter back. “It’s signed on the bottom, T. Who is T?”
T was for Tarzan, Dion’s code name, but she wasn’t going to confess that. “He’s a farmer named Tadeo who supplied my club with demijohns of calamansi lemonade.”
“This Tadeo. His last name?”
She quickly said, “Sanchez.”
The two interrogators exchanged a glance. “Signora. We picked up Tadeo Sanchez yesterday. He’s a runner for John Boone’s guerrillas. He gave us your name as a supporter of the camp.”
Liar, she wanted to say. There was no Tadeo Sanchez who knew her name in any context. She was tired of this charade, the accusations and innuendos. Without thinking, she blurted, “I’ve never supported John Boone’s guerrillas. Somebody is lying, and I know it’s not me, so it must be either Tadeo Sanchez or you.”
Her impudence cost her a slap across her face. Her head flew back, and tears came to her eyes.
“Maybe two weeks in the dungeon will teach you respect.”
“No, please. I didn’t mean it. I’m not disrespectful. Please, no!”
The door burst open, and two guards grabbed Gina and propelled her down a flight of stone stairs to where green moss blanketed grand stone archways and tunnel-like walls. She detected the smell of river water, the Pasig below, and anxiety creeped from her toes to her ears. The dungeons.
One guard left while the other opened a small door to a dark, fetid cell and cautioned her, “Careful. The jamb’s low. Don’t bump your head; the stone’s mighty hard.” After locking the door, he handed her a lit cigarette through the bars. “Why are you here?”
Gina, surprised at his act of kindness, sucked on the cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs for as long as she could before blowing it out. Her voice croaked. “They think I’m an American. I’m not. I’m Canadian of Italian ancestry. Canadian, not American.”
He lingered. “I went to school in the United States. San Francisco. Good education system. My sister’s still there. She’s a nurse.”
Bile rose in Gina’s throat. How dared he. How dared this little piece of slime take advantage of the best America had to offer and then so viciously turn on its people—like Admiral Tanaka had, too, she sadly and finally admitted. “Good luck to you.” She hoped she sounded civil; she sure didn’t feel it. “You got another cigarette?”
The cell was barely long enough for her to stretch out full length. The only natural light came from a little rectangular hole high up on the stone wall. Beyond the bars, a guard sat at a table drinking from a bottle of what she guessed was sake. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall, her hand on her breast, checking to see that the locket, her only connection to Cheryl, was still there. She waited, anticipating the unknown, dreading the day, and frightened by every footfall.
Days passed slowly by. In her solitude she mulled over the last weeks—the physical pain and fear; the innuendoes, intimidations, and accusations of the guards and interrogators; her story, which had become convoluted; and her self-flagellation when she became confused and gave grist to the enemy to mill. She had endured it all. Her body had been broken, but it would heal, and her mind remained sane, she self-assessed. Sh
e drifted in and out of sleep, sensing her mother’s presence in the cell with her, a comforting affect. Hearing her own snoring, she cased her surroundings through half-closed eyes.
A flurry of activity stirred her, and she stood to watch as two guards dragged in a stumbling prisoner. Jonesy! His head lolling, he looked half-alive, like her. She bit down on her tongue to keep from crying out his name. She heard his barred door clang shut, and her emotions bounced like a rubber ball between a frenzied high and profound horror, and she questioned her self-assessed sane mind.
That night a soldier, an all-American, blond-haired, blue-eyed kid looking worse for wear, was lashed to the bars of her cell and beaten in her full view with a leather strap wound in barbed wire. She recoiled with each blow, her eyes squeezed shut and her hands over her ears, trying not to register the boy’s screams of agony or feel the splash of his blood on her legs or the oozy bits of pulp from his disappearing face that landed on her arms. The beating stopped, but the kid’s suffering didn’t, and he was left lashed to her cell’s bars, moaning in anguish. Gina crawled to him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” As she laid her face on the coolness of the slippery floor, her resolve weakened. The Japanese hadn’t been able to break her silence, but now she feared they could break her spirit. She wept until there were no tears left in her to cry.
The beatings of the sacrificial soldier continued the next day until he no longer responded and was dragged out by his feet. Never had Gina felt so guilty. Never had her soul been so dark and her will to survive in this cruel world so frail. But she couldn’t break. So many others would suffer. Someone needed to know she was alive. Mustering what mental and physical strength she had left, she crawled to the bars of her cell and screamed as loudly as her raspy voice allowed, “You asshole. I’m not your baby girl!”
The effect was immediate. The guard, so drunk he couldn’t stand, roared something in Japanese and hurled his bottle of sake at Gina’s cell, where it shattered on the bars and covered her face and shoulders with shards of glass.
Along the Broken Bay Page 29