“Never mind him.” Reynato gestures to an open spot with his spoon. “Sit.” Efrem leans his Tingin carefully against the wall and sits. Brig Yapha and Charlie bow their heads in prayer, but everyone else reaches out hungrily for scoops of rice and duck. Reynato gets the bony grouper head. Lorenzo comes away with the best piece of beef shank and goes right for the marrow. Charlie lets them fill their plates with his food before serving himself. He eats like a bird, chattering about the upcoming election—just twenty days away now—more than he chews. He’s nervous about how he did today, and not shy about showing it, which lowers him even further in Efrem’s esteem. His campaign manager’s in the hospital, will be for a while yet, and this is his first trip solo. No talking points. No prepared remarks. Everything on-the-fly. He really hopes he didn’t screw up.
“Fuck your nerves,” Yapha says. “You’re a natural. Did you even see the kids today. Swooning like girls at a concert.”
They keep at it, and the pace of their talk makes Efrem’s eyes unfocus. The discussion is difficult to follow. What they’re saying, even who’s saying what—it all pushes past faster than he can unjumble it. Yapha bemoans that he’s not yet a full general and Charlie says forget it, quit, run with me. Don’t laugh! Better than a soldier’s pay, am I right? Second District, Davao del Sur, is coming open. Castillo’s got nut cancer and his son’s in New York learning how to be a better fag. You’ll be a shoo-in, come up to Manila and give me some help against those fucking cha-cha crybabies. Brig Yapha shyly sucks shank. They’ll never elect a Pangasinense down here, let alone a Yapha. Don’t be so sure. They know you well enough and they won’t care. What you need to do is start a fight. Get your name in the papers followed by a list of dead Abu Sayyaf terrorists. Who doesn’t like a hero? I don’t, Reynato says, picking his braces with a grouper bone. Don’t you even! I’m not even going to start with you. Charlie grins a soft, cowardly grin. You and your tired excuses. You squanderer of big-ass chances. National hero, tough on crime, connections at the top and at the bottom. The very bottom … and the very top. No telling how far a shred of ambition could take you. Mayor of Manila? Or elected to the Senate, with me, assuming I get there? Goddamnit, Renny, the way your rep cleans up at the box office … you’d be a fucking force at the ballot box. I mean, running on your name, how could you lose? Reynato belches and sort of karate-chops the air. No doubt, he says. But haven’t you beat me to it? Seems to me that you’re already running on my name. And I guess there’s only room for one Reynato Ocampo, real or fake, in voters’ heads. But more power to you. Power, and luck.
Reynato reaches across the table and uses the edge of his spoon to cleave off a brittle duck leg. He pauses to chew, crunching charred fat and bone.
EFREM IS HUNGRY BUT EATS LITTLE. Queasily he turns down blood-dripping shank and pork-spoiled banana flower. He lets Lorenzo have his unopened beer and scans the table for a water jug. He swallows what he can, pushes his plate away and watches the three bruhos. Lorenzo eats with abandon, emptying his plate as fast as he fills it. He’s dressed oddly. On his head is a wide-brimmed straw hat; the kind mothers make for daughters old enough to bend daylight on the rice paddies. Around his shoulders is a plastic rain poncho, clasped below his chin with a copper button. Open and flowing, it dances in the fan draft like a transparent cape.
Elvis is coated in thin filth, his hair a net for twigs and rainwater. He drinks more than he eats, looking just as vacant at the table as he did among the trees. It’s not just an expression—his face is smooth, empty, featureless. Efrem can’t place his age. He could be a tired thirty or a tight-skinned sixty.
But Racha, the man with the gnarled hide, is the most interesting. Efrem realizes that Racha’s whole body is covered in scars. He’s given and received pain enough times to know what mutilation looks like, the different marks left by different attacks. Just by looking at Racha’s exposed forearms, neck and face, he can tell that he’s been shot, stabbed, burned, bitten, whipped, strangled, stung by jellyfish, beaten with a manual can-opener and possibly scalped. Among those dark inches he can’t find a scrap of healthy skin—Racha is all made of scar tissue. And what’s more amazing than the scars is the fact that he survived long enough to collect them all.
Lunch concludes with plates of leche flan and small cups of civet coffee. Reynato sighs contentedly and leans back against the wall, looking across the table at Brig Yapha, and at Charlie. “Well,” he says, “that was a treat. I hate to sour the afterglow by talking business.”
Yapha puts on a quizzical expression. “You have business? What business do you have?”
“Cute.” Reynato places his cigar back in the corner of his mouth. Still he does not light it. “What do you want for him?”
Brig Yapha and Charlie Fuentes exchange looks. “Well,” Charlie says, all soft and friendly, “Tony and I were talking about that a little, before lunch. And you know, it’s a hard, a tough loss for the Division, right? Because Efrem is his best, and—”
“Motherfucker, you didn’t even know what he was till I told you.”
“True enough,” Brig Yapha says. “But the boy’s still mine. He gets no transfer, no discharge without my say-so.”
“Not that we’d keep him from you,” Charlie rushes to add. “But, it’s just, there’s a whole lot of ways you could be helpful in the coming weeks. I mean, today was great—don’t get me wrong … but, you know, it would also be cool if you stood out front a bit more. Gave a few nice words to the reporters. Amoroso’s hammering my ass on law-and-order. Maybe you could say a little something at Director Babayon’s next press conference. Maybe you could get some of the officers to come out for me. I mean, they worship the ground you walk on, Renny.”
“Ah-ha.” Reynato sits forward and places his elbows on the table. He puts his chin in his hands like a girl looking at her date, but his expression is sour. “So, let me get this straight—for years you make yourself famous, and rich, pretending to be me. Then you turn that fame and money into a run for the Senate. You put my name on your campaign posters, fucking act like me while you’re on stage. And now I’m supposed to go out and stump with you?”
“Hey …” Charlie sounds, and looks, genuinely hurt. “That’s not fair. You’ve seen some scratch from those movies, too. I didn’t write your contract. Hell, if you’d have shown it to me back then, I’d have told you to get a lawyer.”
“And you?” Reynato turns on Brig Yapha. “What’s in this for the not-quite general?”
“Don’t get short, Renny,” Yapha says. “What you saw back there wasn’t just political stagecraft. My men are hurting—for ammunition, rations, body armor and some damn downtime. I need all the friends in Manila I can get, and Charlie promises to be one. Besides,” he glances now at the bruhos from the trees, “it’s more than a fair trade. Efrem would be the perfect addition to your wily crew.”
The table goes quiet for a long while. Reynato stirs his coffee, spoon hammering the insides of the cup. Elvis, Lorenzo, and Racha all lean forward like birds over a kill. Finally Efrem breaks the silence with his first utterance since entering Fuentes’s house. “Sorry, but what’s happening? Where am I going?”
Everybody laughs. “Shit,” Reynato says, downing the last of his coffee. “Sorry about that, Mohammed. Don’t mean to treat you like a barter chip—I won’t even take you if you don’t want to come. You see, the boys and I, we run this little task force.”
“Overmodest,” Charlie protests, clearly thrilled by the diffused tension. “There’s nothing little about it, Efrem. We’re talking presidential directive. We’re talking a four-time cover story in the Bulletin. Reynato here runs the finest police crew in—”
“Not strictly police,” Reynato cuts him off. “Our shop gets funded by the National Bureau of Investigation, and we operate across jurisdictions. We specialize in kidnapping cases and the prosecution of outstanding warrants … basically we go in for high value arrests when the local cops can’t close the deal. Some newsboy called us Task
Force Ka-Pow a while back, which has kind of stuck. But I’ll give you fair warning, Efrem, if you join up you’ll be dealing with some real rough folks. From Chinese guns in shabu labs, to armored car hijackers with hand grenades, these boys do not play nice. My crew,” he gestures to Lorenzo, Racha and Elvis, “are stretched thin as we get. Poor Racha got shot in the foot just last week.”
Racha nods solemnly.
“So it’s no dream job,” Reynato says. “But our pay is a step up, I can promise that. And you’ll likely get more chances to fight. You like that, don’t you? How could you not, a man with your record?” He smiles. His gums are bleeding. “If you didn’t enjoy pulling the trigger the ninth time, then you wouldn’t have pulled it the tenth. So … would you want in on this dangerous silliness? Should I buy you an early discharge by signing my time away to these two slick motherfuckers?”
There’s no choice here at all. Efrem enjoyed his years in the army, sure, but this is Reynato Ocampo. This is his chance to be the hero that his mother, that his whole island expected him to be—a chance to stick up for the unstuckup for. He can almost hear a pulsing beat coming in through the windows, the Ocampo Justice theme song filling the plantation the way it filled the outdoor movie house. Yes, he says, or maybe he just thinks it, because everybody keeps staring at him. “Yes,” he tries again, his voice thick and gurgly.
“Well all right,” Reynato says. “I’ll probably regret this, knowing how hard these jerks will squeeze the lemon.” Reynato puts an arm over Efrem’s shoulder and chuckles. His breath is rot. “You all can fax me his discharge paperwork, and I’ll have my girl back in Manila get him into our system. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I need to get him oriented. Especially if you all plan to bring me on tour.” Together he and Efrem walk out to the yard. Racha, Lorenzo and Elvis follow close behind.
Outside it’s brilliant bright, and everybody must wear sunglasses. Task Force Ka-Pow moves back into the banana trees, up toward the road and the waiting jeep. Efrem feels himself pushed forward by a sea-swell. He can’t grab onto anything, not a branch or vine, because it’s all moving with him.
Chapter 9
HOWARD’S ROOM
It’s crazy-making how heavy this motherfucker is. Ignacio takes his legs and Littleboy his shoulders, but they only make it a few steps before the American slips fatly, wetly, out of their grip. Littleboy takes his legs and Ignacio his shoulders. Not much better—they get to the curb and again he defeats them with dead heft. This is bad. Late as it is, it’s still Manila. Any minute now a car, a jeepney, a motor-trike or night-roving squatter will be along. Early risers will hit the pavement as insomniacs stumble home. Someone is sure to hear this commotion in the steamy, after-rain quiet. Someone is sure to notice what they’re doing. God, what on earth are they doing?
After a few tries it’s clear they’ll never get him up the concrete steps and through the front door without more help. Ignacio goes inside to wake his wife. Waking his wife is hard. She’s crashing after a five-day tweak, courtesy of the rough shabu that Ignacio manufactures in his bathroom and sells to some of his regular taxi customers. Like all of Ignacio’s schemes—the short-lived rental store for pirated movies, the cockfight training academy opened in the wake of Kelog’s retirement—this one is small scale; successful mostly in maintaining their private stock. Always enough meth on hand to chase the dragon, should they care to. And they care to often. Ignacio is chasing the dragon right now. He’s on three days running without sleep.
Finally he rouses her and drags her outside. To his surprise she takes the sight of the American, facedown and bleeding from his head and fingers, in stride. She only asks once what Ignacio is doing, and accepts his hollered response that he has no fucking idea without comment or critique. Together the three of them hoist the fat man up the steps and through the front door, which Ignacio closes and locks behind. Then they pause, catch their breath, and look at one another as though for answers. Kelog, roused by the commotion, hops atop the unconscious man and pecks at the blood spots speckling his shirt.
“Is he dead?” she finally asks.
“Of course he’s not!” Ignacio pauses to check. And there it is—the tiny, regular spasm of a pulse. “Of course he’s not.”
She is clearly pleased by the news. “Well, where’s he going to stay?”
“He can have my room,” Littleboy says. “I can take the couch, no problem.”
“Guys.” Ignacio removes Kelog from the American’s chest. “He’s not a fucking houseguest.”
“Ah-ha,” his wife says, breathing evenly. “All right then, what is he? Who is he?”
A good question. Ignacio goes through the fat man’s pockets and finds a ratty wallet, swollen and old. An expired driver’s license inside identifies him as Howard Bridgewater, from Illinois. Ignacio had been confident he was from the States when he barked obscenely into his cell phone back in the taxi, but now there is no question: the man lying on his living room floor is American. Why does this thought thrill him so? Why, he wonders, does it terrify him so?
Ignacio’s wife takes the wallet and inspects it carefully, leafing through the contents with her fingertips as though turning the pages of an old book. “No money,” she says. There is nothing accusatory in her tone. She’s just voicing an observation.
“Of course there’s money.” Ignacio snatches the wallet back and upends it on the floor. But she’s right—nothing in there but faded paper and some generic-brand condoms. “He’s got to have money. He was going to the Shangri-La. And he promised to pay me meter plus a hundred.”
“Maybe he was going to rob you,” she says, smiling a smile that makes her look old. Then her smile fades. “I don’t see why you had to hurt him that badly. He can’t have run away.”
“Someone like him doesn’t have to run.” Ignacio leans over the unconscious American—over Howard—to search him. With Littleboy’s help he tips him over to get at his back pockets, finding a key-card for the hotel as well as another wallet. This second one is new and cheap, containing nothing but two crisp hundred-peso notes. Junk change considering the risk Ignacio has taken, but it’s promising—obviously a decoy for pickpockets. Which means there must be a real stash somewhere else.
They find it in his socks and shoes. Twenty-thousand pesos, rumpled and stinking and wet from the rain. Not bad at all. Ignacio keeps searching while his wife and Littleboy lay the notes out to dry them. He unzips Howard’s pants, hoping for one of those gut-hugging money-belts popular with tourists. But all he finds is a naked abdomen rubbed bare of body hair and rutted with stretch marks like the weathered slope of a mud hill. He zips Howard’s fly back up and buttons his pants. Of all the things he’s done tonight this is the only one that makes him squirm, just a little, with self-reproach.
“Do you want to bring him somewhere?” his wife asks. “We could leave him close to a hospital.”
Ignacio shakes his head. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he knows he isn’t done with Howard yet. “You were right,” he says. “We should put him in Littleboy’s room.”
“I’ll make the bed,” she says, nodding. Littleboy stands to help.
“Don’t,” Ignacio says. “Move it. The bed … everything. Let’s get it all out of there.”
And so they do. Still sore from dragging Howard inside, the three of them empty Littleboy’s bedroom, moving the well-kept secondhand bed frame, the rattan hutch and electric fan like roomies helping a departing friend. They even take his Ocampo Justice posters off the walls, hanging them instead in the living room beside Ignacio’s extensive collection—relics from his short-lived video rental place. Charlie Fuentes looks right at home beside Tim Roth and Kiefer Sutherland. Now that Littleboy’s room is totally bare it becomes Howard’s room. They drag him inside and close the door. Then they mill about, quietly. What do you do with your morning when you’ve already done this?
“I’m going to bed,” Ignacio says. Then, to his wife: “You coming?”
“No,�
�� she says. “You know how it is.”
He does know how it is. He pulled her out of a crash, and now that she’s awake it’ll be a few hours before she gets that urge to tweak again. She’ll have some early breakfast, maybe watch some television. Ignacio, for his part, is ready for a crash of his own. He’s ready for the clear head that he knows will follow sleep, and holy shit, he feels like he could sleep for hours, if not days. He goes into the master bedroom and curls into the still warm hollow his wife left in the mattress. Out in the living room she and Littleboy turn on the televison, filling their home with the booming lullaby of international news. Ignacio is out in seconds.
And he dreams. A wonderful dream wherein he, Charlie Fuentes, Roth and Sutherland rob a bank. They shoot up the place. They torture the safe combination out of the manager’s throat. And they get away with millions.
TWO DAYS LATER, a Monday, Ignacio and Littleboy head to the Shangri-La hotel. Ignacio’s plans at this point are still murky. Part One is find Howard Bridgewater’s room. Part Two is steal whatever they discover in there—presumably luggage, jewelry and a shit-ton of cash. Part Three is yet to be determined, though Ignacio has vaguely considered a ransom note of some kind. Or a false suicide note. Or a fire. He’s still in the brainstorming stage, really.
But even before Part One, at Part Zero, he and Littleboy run into complications. Ignacio had hoped to arrive in the morning, before the commotion of checkout and the attendant bustle of housekeeping. But he hadn’t reckoned on how much the already-terrible Manila traffic would be worsened by the elections. He hadn’t, in fact, even remembered that today was Election Day. But there it is; a big-ass rally right in the middle of EDSA, with Charlie Fuentes appearing in person to get out the vote. Littleboy asks if they can stay and watch and Ignacio says no. But it makes no difference. They idle in the gridlock for over an hour, catching most of the speech, Littleboy clapping and cheering out the passenger window.
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