by Gina Apostol
“Useful fool,” I repeated, questioning the phrase. Then I said: “So it was all premeditated. Our friendship?”
“No. Of course not.” She reached over briefly to hug me, to smooth my hair as she used to do, absentmindedly. That was Soli’s gesture: absentmindedness. She said: “Of course, it wasn’t diabolical like that. It was Edwin’s idea to talk to you, but then when I got to know you, I hoped you would be with us. I thought you should be with us. But then, remember, when I took you to that funeral parlor—in Monumento.”
I didn’t speak.
“You vomited on the street. I felt helpless when I saw—maybe I was wrong. Edwin told me you’d be the worst kind of recruit—”
“Thanks—”
“But it seemed right at the time that you should join.”
“How strange.” I stared at Soli.
“You’re right to be mad. I’m sorry. I should have thought about it a bit more. I should have thought of the consequences for you—the burden on you.”
“The burden?”
“That you would hate yourself,” she said.
For a moment there, I hated Soli all over again: I hated the way she pitied me.
But she sat with that repose she had in the right moments—her impressive control. Her dark, long fingers rested on the tabletop, in devotional clasp; her back was straight, leaning slightly toward me. Her eyes seemed to darken with her alertness as she looked at me squarely.
“But it was I,” I said, speaking more softly. “I did it all myself. It was not your plan: it was mine. I did wish to be a part. It was I who wished to join your group. I thought—I thought it was the one thing that would make me whole.”
“That’s what Edwin said.”
“I know.”
I looked at her. We started to laugh.
Soli reached for my hand and held it.
“Jed was not a part of it, Sol,” she said softly. “Jed had no hand in our investigation of you.”
“Investigation?”
“We investigated you, of course. S.I. Social investigation. Your background, your friends, your interests.”
“Edwin was stalking me.”
“Not really.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t care about any of that. What are you going to do now? Don’t go looking for them, Soli. It’s not worth it.”
I felt her grip on my wrist, a moist, tight squeeze. Smell of butterscotch and fish.
“I have to go now anyhow,” she said. “Want to go with me to the factory picket line?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I have to go—.”
“Well then.”
I stood up as she did. “Are you really going to look for them?” I asked. I decided. “I’ll go with you, Soli, if you want to look for Jed. You can tell him what you think. That he is out of bounds. That he is doing stupid things.”
“No, stay.” She sighed. “You know, you’re right. I shouldn’t believe those stories. The idea’s stupid—a macho fantasy. It’s absurd. For one thing, Ed’s a coward. He’d be too scared even to be a lookout, you know. Jed, on the other hand. You’re right. It can’t be true. I have to go back to the workers. The strike’s in Cubao. You don’t want to come? Pay the bill anyway.” She grinned.
“Right,” I said. “Once a useful fool, always a useful fool.”
She stooped to hug me. I hugged her back. Fish. She hated mackerel—or I do. I smelled it, the fish balls and the mackerel, a long time after she left: the afterlude of her takeout from Ah Me! Kitchenette. That gesture she made as she smoothed hair on my brow before she walked away, her tall, straight-backed figure, fleeting glimpse of rare mahogany.
I should have run after Soli, but I didn’t.
Instead, I gave her the wrong address. My little prevarication: useless lies from a useful fool.
I picked up the tab. I looked absently onto the splattered mess on the street. Ants were already at it, circling the soft-drinks stain, taking in the sulphur of Makati.
3
AS I SAID, in those last days in Jed’s apartment, I had gained an aggressive clarity.
Jed shook his head at my insistence.
No, he said, it can’t be, he said.
It was I who insisted: I insisted that it be the Colonel.
“It has to be,” I said. “He’s a regular man. He goes to the gym at exactly three o’clock. He’s probably never late for work.”
“How do you know?” said Jed.
“The first trick about reconnaissance,” I said, “is this: you watch.”
“You’re right: He’s very regular. He has very orderly habits. He would be the best target, certainly. And yes: He’s the enemy. He’s the brains. The general’s just for show. We know that. But, Sol, he’s too cautious. The others think he’s too cautious, and I agree. He will be hard to get. The Colonel doesn’t even ride his car without checking at it on all sides, inspecting the works. The General will be easier to kill.”
“He’s just caressing his stupid hubcaps,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I looked at Jed. “It’s true. He’s not inspecting anything. He doesn’t think anyone will shoot him. He just wants to know his hubcaps are there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s what he said at LOTUS, at his headquarters. He checked the tires on both sides that day, and Uncle Gianni noticed.”
“Explain the whole thing,” Jed said. “Slow down.”
“When we all had lunch with him once. Trust me. He’s not afraid of bombs. Far from it. He’s an arrogant man. That’s why he sticks to his schedule. Don’t you see? He doesn’t even travel with guards. His hubcaps had been stolen once, and now he obsessively checks them out everytime he travels. It must be something about Vietnam, being a prisoner—he hates loss.”
“The day you had lunch with him he did this?”
I nodded. “I saw him bending over his car. Just as you said. But he wasn’t looking for bombs. He was just looking down at a hubcap, tapping on it, cleaning off a scratch or something. He’s arrogant, really. He’s pretty sure he won’t be killed. He’s right, if you think about it. It would be a diplomatic uproar, an all-out hunt for the criminals, and very bad P.R. He’s a war hero. A P.O.W. A decorated Vietnam vet. It’s the kind of death out of which, I imagine, old-timers would make a howling wilderness.”
“He’s just checking his hubcaps,” Jed mused.
“Yes,” I said.
“When did you have lunch with him again?” Jed walked away from me to light a cigarette. The fan whirred his way, and his hand held steady against the flame, blocking it against the hoary air.
“The day we were let out for Christmas. My uncle is still mad at him.”
“Yeah, you were telling me,” Jed said.
“Did I tell you about that? The Colonel promised to be at my uncle’s tournament, the one we’re going to.”
“He’s a funny guy, your uncle,” Jed said, politely blowing smoke away from me. He smiled. “Edwin thinks we should kill him instead.”
“That’s not funny,” I said.
“YOU CAN’T JUST let me stay home.” I was so angry with Jed my ears hurt, that sharp tension in the back of my head that signified a migraine, a tantrum.
“There’s nothing for you to do. Everything’s in place. Stay home, stay put, go away.”
“I will not. At least tell me when you’re doing it, let me know your plans. I want to be a part.”
Jed sat shaking his head.
“No one tells me what to do, Jed. Not even my dad.”
“It’s not a slumber party, Sol.”
“Oh, come on, if she just wants to be near—”
Jed shot angrily at Edwin: “Easy for you to say—shut up, Ed. You’re not even going anywhere near the place on the day—you know it’s dangerous.”
“Where’s Ed going?”
“He’s going to the provinces to visit a dying aunt.”
Ed shrugged, looking sheepish.
“She’s sick. I owe her everything—my tuition fees, even my dentist.”
“Hah,” I said. “Then let me be a part, instead of Edwin.”
“No. You hear me, Ed. I want her safe in her house, or on a beach in Thailand, or some place. I want you to go on to college in America and research dead Romans. Why don’t you leave the country early, go shopping in Hong Kong?”
“You think that’s all I’m good for.”
Edwin was smirking.
“If that’s what you want to think. Just go away. For your own good.”
“Bok,” Edwin said. “What’s the harm? Let them call her. They do need one last errand.”
4
IT WAS EARLY in the morning, but the household was already in motion. The gardener greeted Mr. Kow Lung, the feng shui man, who always came around during the holidays. He lived in a smaller village nearby named after an archangel or a beer company; the gardener Manong Armando always greeted him with a bow—he looked so dignified but spoke so little, like a kung fu sage—and he led him from the living room where the Ming vase and the Buddha held sway, like stout philosophers, like those gigantic icons arising from the sandstone of a temple, cross-legged, omnipotent, and expressing the recklessness of everyone else’s fate. Mr. Kow Lung inspected the décor, the way the shadows fell on the Buddha; the house was at peace. The furniture had already been dusted; the curtains let in the light. And Mr. Kow Lung went on to the kitchen where he had breakfast, his third meal of the day; in this way, houses in Makati retained their auspicious glamour, and during Christmas Mr. Kow Lung never stepped foot in a grocery store or paid for his meals. It was a good exchange.
In fact, before Mr. Kow Lung’s arrival, the help had already started their own party. It was their New Year’s Day celebration, an anachronistic moment that lagged behind the country’s, perhaps the busiest time in the kitchen. Postmen, cake-deliverers, blind masseurs, linen-vendors, psychics of different specialties, traveling knife-sharpeners, amateur painters of Philippine farm scenes, milkmen on motorbikes, all came by at one point or another on this appointed day. It was a time of community, when all of the deliverers claimed their yearly reward—Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men—and ate Manang Lita’s honey ham and rice. The place was so busy no one would have noticed my disappearance, or the absence of other regulars at the table, except that even then, who knows, maybe rumors were already in the wind.
OVER IN NEW Manila, a dark-blood saloon reached its turn near the gasoline station. The Metro Manila cleaning aide in charge of the street was humming, sweating but humming, in the rising heat, her bandanna keeping her trim hair in place, her red and yellow outfit marking in random, zigzag streaks the gray tidiness of the sleeping street, where if one noticed the car coming in the other direction—was it white or green? two men or four?—who would have risen up, lazily on one’s elbows, shielding light from one’s brow as the sound neared and uttered its soft drone? No one. It was too early in the day for most drunk people in Manila.
I REMEMBER SOLI WRAPPING her takeaway lunch: dried mackerel and warm rice. The whiff of the fish would remain for days. Skin of mahogany. A woman of repose. I hated mackerel—the greasy brown fat and mordant stench. I imagine things in broad details, fish smells, the garish sunlight of Manila’s rising day on the long jeep ride she would take to the picket lines, her straightforward destination. The aluminum foil crackled as she put the fish in her bag; I wrinkled my nose. It stank.
It would seem, at first, like a New Year’s prank. A tardy firecracking explosion, a hissing Roman candle. Then (too early in the morning) the rat-tat-tat of the guns sounded like a Judas Belt, Sinturon ni Hudas, the usual belated medley of holiday cheer. It was the distinct memory of the street-cleaner that she smelled the sulphur first, the wild watusi air, before she heard the bullets: but from the beginning of the holiday season, the street itself had smelled daily like a war zone, a debris-filled, cacophonous smoke. The aftermath of New Year’s was one of the most hectic times for Metro Manila cleaning aides.
And so he died with his head splashed, like a dull pitcher, against the pierced armored glass. His driver made a blind, swerving dash as the car was hit at the gas-station corner, that empty, festering region that Jed and I had walked so often, counting even our steps. No one was in sight, not even the monkey and his crippled captor by the store on Third Avenue. The street was asleep. The stores were boarded up, blind. It was true that, later on, various witnesses were said to have arisen like crickets from the cracks, trilling their tall tales of license plates and other things; but early morning on that street, we knew, had a mint, unstamped aura to it—a blank reverie. You could walk it like a lover and feel free.
The street-cleaner, yellow kerchief tightly tasseled on her head, was almost swiped by Colonel Grier’s car, the maroon Mitsubishi saloon, armored and impregnable (so they say), as his shocked, desperate driver made the futile, unseeing hurtle down the street, carrying his car’s riddled right side like a flopping organ, an ear, a lung. The sight of the damaged car was such that the getaway group got away—the street-cleaner gawking. Decent-looking face, sleeveless shirt. Red bandannas. A long barrel—a gleaming weapon—obscured one man’s fate. She couldn’t see him behind his gun. But then the witness could not be sure if it was one or three, those gunmen, or white or blue, the car. Was it a white limousine, a long white car driven by a spoiled brat?
Later, when she was asked to identify the abandoned vehicle, the so-called getaway car, she hesitated, she wasn’t sure. The car had gone toward San Francisco del Monte? Yes, she said: that is true. Anyway, she herself had almost been killed as she sidestepped from the wounded, wobbling saloon. Colonel Arthur Grier’s last sight was a bright yellow flap outside as he bent to the left, a fluttering coin, a golden bird wing, a glinting medallion, or was that the sun, as he turned his head, and the street cleaner made a wild dancing leap, blindly hopping away.
5
I DID THE LAST job out of jealousy, out of spite and anger with Jed. I refused to accept that in the end I had been merely a useful fool. But on the way to the apartment, leaving Ah Me! Kitchenette, down the rutted streets, familiar potholes, and landmarks of cloud-shaved trees, through the ruins of Kalentong shops into the ordinary roads of New Manila, I already began to feel the pulse, that quickening in my wrists, that signaled, like a conditioned dog, my stupid lust. The entire route was a map to Jed—stones, houses and stoops. A turn down the alley from a vacant movie palace, a silent church, a streetlight, then the first glimpse of that obsolete gas station—all these played, in scattered overture, prologues to his presence.
The apartment window looked out upon the unpaved road leading to the gas station, from which Jed, daily, had kept his faithful watch on the comings and goings of the street.
Looking up at the window, I imagined his hunched shape, with the throb in my breast that I thought must be the sentiment of cancer, a livid nerve that drove my blood. I thought I saw the mist of Jed’s curls, or was that cigarette smoke.
He would be gone, of course. My job was a tail-end adjunct to the event. But I at last would be a part. Jed had chosen the apartment window for its angle. Often we had watched the car make its turn, its careful decision by the corner; daily he knew where it slowed. Even its cunning schedules—never arriving at the street at the same time or route—could be ferreted out, for those who planned ahead.
By the time I arrived, it was over. I saw the commotion at the corner, the street was not yet blocked. I entered the apartment. I watched from the window, noting all the necessary events—police cars, kibitzers, taxis and jeeps clogging the street to make their drive-by assessments. One has those dreams where the sound track is screwy. Sirens and car horns before the ambulances actually arrived. I hear the sound of gunshots, again and again, though Jed was gone, vanished with his cohorts, and the getaway car (I hoped) had long removed itself to the city’s suburbs. I see Soli repeatedly, walking down William McKinley Road, hailing a jeep from Ah Me! Kitchenette
, to the picket lines in Cubao. The opposite direction. I hear the sound of shots, like triangle bombs, watusi rockets—over and over: while dust motes roved through the air in distinct, gross forms in the apartment in New Manila, that glazed, cheap room, oddly, with its windows like iron grisaille, looking like a decrepit set from Apocalypse Now—fan whirring like a dying breath in the late morning, light particulating even as it glowed—the fan beating its monotonous, clunky groan.
In truth, it was the only sound I must have heard: the bleared fan’s groggy whine. And the staid, steady ornaments in the room—the faded mimesis of a tropical jungle—were the most truthful witnesses of what I knew.
I checked the room completely for any evidence, for any scrap of their crime. That was my job. Everything was in place. As I said, Jed liked danger, but he always planned ahead. On the way out, I took a spotted seashell and put it in my purse—I don’t know why, unless it was for memory.
But I omit a detail. This is the thing. I went to look. Not part of the plan. I couldn’t help it. I still don’t know what came over me; the knot of adventure in us all, the curious malice of ordinary persons. Because I could. I walked off. I see the sun at its height, heat stammering, skewering the light. No one noticed me—or I noticed no one. I shouldered my way in: stupefaction still held sway, the crowd a ruckus of distraction. I saw the body. Bent toward the side window, eyes to heaven. Wide eyes. Indecent eyes: motherfucking—goddamn—blank medallion eyes. To my surprise, he looked alive. Something about the body holds on to life—the turn of his cheek, which had an air of boredom. But then I shifted my view, jostled by the crowd—and that sudden movement—a mere nail-shaving of an inch—revised my deceived glance. His sunburned jaw was a grimace, a cubist pose, frozen between panic and oblivion. Blood on his slack chin attracted flies and dust. There was no doubt about it. I trudged back to the apartment. I made a call, an extra errand, my last words. Colonel Grier—he was dead.