Moondogs

by Alexander Yates

  It gets no easier when they finally arrive at the Shangri-La. Guards at the giant glass entryway take time patting them down and staring into their faces. They are allowed inside but aren’t in the lobby—and Christ, what a lobby—for a full minute before a prim little concierge sets on them. “What do you want?” she asks, wasting no time on hospitality, or English.

  “We are guests from—”

  “What room?” she asks, a hand already on each of their arms, already walking them back to the giant glass doors.

  “Room 506,” Ignacio says, setting his heels but unable to resist the pull of her hard, tiny fingers.

  “There is no room 506,” the concierge says.

  “I bet you there is,” Ignacio says.

  “Fine,” she says, “there is. But it isn’t yours.” They have reached the glass doors now. Not wanting to make a scene, Ignacio frees himself from her grip and exits on his own steam. But the concierge follows. “These two,” she says, talking now to the guards. “No. No. They are not allowed.” The guards look at their shoes, ashamed. And Ignacio and Littleboy retreat to a Starbucks across the street, drinking frothy iced drinks for hours as they wait for a shift change.

  THEY TRY AGAIN in the afternoon. Through the glass doors, past the new guards—staring, patting, cupping just as suspiciously—and into the shiny lobby. There’s the bank of elevators just ahead and Ignacio goes for it at a jog-walk with Littleboy stumbling gape-mouthed behind. “Iggy,” he says, “Iggy, are you seeing this?”

  At the elevators Ignacio presses the button, hard. He and Littleboy wait. He presses the button again. And again.

  “What do you want?” He turns and sees another concierge, this one just as prim, just as little, just as beautiful and cold. But now he’s ready for her.

  “Driver, ma’am,” he answers, in broken taxicab English. “Boss stays here,” he points above, vaguely. “Sends text he needs me.” Then, remembering Littleboy: “Us.”

  “What room?”

  “Room 506,” Ignacio says. He has to restrain his smile. He feels that by repeating this arbitrary number he is somehow sticking it to them. And he is.

  The concierge sighs—a light, scolding sigh—and tells them to next time use the service entrance. Then she takes a card from her uniform pocket and inserts it into a slot above the elevator button. The doors open promptly. Ignacio and Littleboy step inside and wave thanks to the concierge. The doors close, and now Ignacio restrains nothing. He smiles and he laughs and he gives her the finger. Littleboy does as well. And they remain like that, flicking off their reflections in the shiny doors as they are ferried upward to the fifth floor of the Shangri-La.

  THEY DON’T GET OFF when the elevator stops, though Littleboy tries, saying: “But, 506?” when Ignacio pulls him back. Together they wait for the doors to close again. Then Ignacio removes Howard Bridgewater’s key-card from his wallet. He’s noticed a slot above the polished regiment of numbered buttons—a slot much like the one in the lobby below. Could it really be this easy? Howard’s key-card fits in perfectly and gives Ignacio the appealing sensation of sliding a hot knife through brass. He removes it and one of the buttons lights up, as though pressed. Jackpot, he thinks.

  The hallway on Howard’s floor is quiet and empty, save an unmanned housekeeping trolley decked with towels and sheets and rich person freebies. The dark heavy doors are all closed, some with do-not-disturb signs lynched from their handles, others glowering over the remnants of room service, or newspapers in plastic sacks. Ignacio and Littleboy walk the length of the hallway twice, looking for some clue. Or at least Ignacio is looking for a clue. But Littleboy gets distracted by the papers. The front page bears an airbrushed cover photo of Charlie Fuentes under the headline: On Election Day, Senate Braces for Dose of Justice. That smarmy jackass has been on the cover of everything this month.

  Littleboy stops by one of the closed doors, plucks up the paper and tears open the plastic sack. “Don’t do that,” Ignacio says. “Someone’s going to notice.”

  “But, there’s plenty,” Littleboy says, gesturing down the hall. And he’s right, there are plenty. Every third door has a special May 10 Election Edition of the Bulletin sitting before it. And Ignacio guesses that the other doors only lack newspapers because the guests inside have already claimed them. The guests inside …

  Holy Christ. God is clearly, clearly on their side. Ignacio races back to the far end of the hall where he sees a door that has not one, but three newspapers lying before it. Monday May 10, Sunday May 9—bearing a cover story about some headless body found in Iraq—and Saturday May 8—the Presidential Palace promising honesty at the polls. When had they taken Howard again? Sometime on Saturday, but before dawn. Before the early edition, for sure. He jabs the key into the door and a little green light blinks welcomingly. The locking mechanism makes a futuristic unlocking sound. And as easily as that, all of Howard Bridgewater’s wealth and power are rendered open and available to Ignacio.

  BUT NOW WHAT TO DO? Ignacio and Littleboy stand dumbstruck in Howard’s Bridgewater’s room—or rather in his rooms. He expected the suite to be nicer than his home, sure, but not bigger. Ignacio kicks off his shoes and walks through the rooms one by one. Bedroom, kitchenette, study, bathroom. Carpet on his toes, cool tile on his toes, carpet again, tile again. He ends his circuit in the study, where a neat stack of important-looking papers sits atop a table. Putting on an air of informed purpose, Ignacio plants himself in one of several office-style swivel chairs and begins leafing through the papers. He’d noticed a wet bar off the kitchen, and he tells Littleboy to make him a drink.

  Littleboy returns with a brimming tumbler—he’s poured the scotch as though it’s juice—as well as a plastic tray of bluefin sushi from the fridge. It’s a few days old, but smells all right, and the scotch helps burn away the after-tang. And it feels good, doesn’t it? Sitting here in Howard’s room. Drinking Howard’s scotch and eating his sushi. Snooping through what are no doubt very important business documents.

  Ignacio allows himself to laugh a little. He feels so good he gets up and, sloshing tumbler in hand, turns on the stereo, scanning stations until he comes to “Bakit Papa?” by the SexBomb Girls and blasting it. Because why not? The empty, pristine suite confirms that fatty is a bachelor. A bachelor who hasn’t been missed—not yet at least. They have plenty of time to figure out what to do. Time to compose the perfect ransom letter. Time to take this suite apart panel by panel searching for cash and whatever else. Feeling confident, feeling downright kingly, Ignacio swings open the balcony door and steps out into the heat. All of Makati cowers at his feet—all the shops and towers and banner-waving election marchers. All the Americans and Chinese and rich-ass high-nosed Forbes Park coños. Ignacio lifts his ridiculously overfull tumbler to them, as though to toast, and gulps down as much of the expensive scotch as he can bear.

  Then there’s a loud knock on the door that straight up ruins his mood.

  IGNACIO SETS HIS TUMBLER down and turns, looking back into the suite. Littleboy is in the study, facing the front door, frozen. And again the knocking—three hard raps, loud enough that they can hear it over the radio. Is it one of Howard’s friends? Or maybe just housekeeping? A huge problem, either way. Littleboy makes for the door and Ignacio is suddenly, horribly certain that the simpleton is going to answer it. He’s going to swing it wide and expose them. Ignacio knows he should chase after, but his lungs and legs have turned to mud. He briefly contemplates leaping off the balcony.

  But instead of answering the door—Ignacio should have more faith in his brother, he’s not that stupid—Littleboy just presses his face to the peephole. He looks through for a long while. Then there’s another knock and he jerks backward, as though someone has struck his face. He turns to Ignacio. Are those tears in his eyes? Is he crying? No—weeping! Silently bawling. He waves Ignacio over, pointing at the peephole. Slowly Ignacio exits the balcony and puts his eye up to the minuscule little window.

  There’s a polic
eman out there.

  An officer. Ignacio recognizes the classic light blue shirt and dark blue pants, the badge-blazed beret leaning off the side of his meanly shorn skull. He’s out there, holding up a piece of paper, double and triple checking the number in his notes with the number on the door. “Hello,” he calls. “Mr. Howard Bridgewater?”

  Littleboy must be having trouble hearing, because he turns off the radio and leans his ear into the door. The policeman notices this and pauses, as though expecting some answer. Ignacio, now crying silently as well, slaps Littleboy on the forehead. His brother is stupid. It was wrong to have faith in him.

  “Can you hear me, sir?” The officer’s expression is put out, but his voice exceedingly polite. “I am here to follow up regarding your emergency call on the morning of the eighth.” Another pause. “Mr. Bridgewater?”

  He jiggles the handle.

  Ignacio is in a flat panic. He knows that if he answers the door, that’s it. They’re done. And not just in the short term—they’re finished for life. But if he fails to answer it, the officer will get worried. And he’ll return with one of the steely concierges and a master key, which would be even worse. There’s only one way for Ignacio to evade this fate. He closes his eyes and concentrates. He conjures, from memories of his DVD collection, the perfect American accent. Like Mel Gibson, from Ransom. Though, come to think of it, he’s Australian. Maybe Tim Roth? But no … he’s British, isn’t he? Fuckitall. Here goes.

  “What do you want?” Ignacio groans, all twang and marmalade.

  A silence. Then: “Hello, sir? Mr. Bridgewater?”

  “What do you want?” Ignacio repeats. “I was sleeping.”

  “I … you made an emergency call, sir? Some days ago?”

  “And?”

  More silence. “Are you all right? Did you want to file a report?”

  “No. I mean, I’m fine. No report.”

  The officer takes a breath and briefly holds it. He looks back down at his notes, and then at the door again. Ignacio wonders if his shape is somehow visible through the tiny fish-eye glass. If the officer has some sense of him and his duplicity. “Sir,” he asks, “are you sure there is no prob—”

  “Go away,” Ignacio says. “I need to sleep.”

  And, after a small pause, the officer does go away. He walks back down the quiet hallway. And distantly they hear the pleasant chime of the arriving elevator. He is gone.

  IT’S HARD TO BE TOO ELATED. The foolishness of this visit to the Shangri-La springs up about Ignacio like a brushfire. What the hell was he thinking? He’s seen enough movies to know that the story he’s in—the story he’s willingly hopped aboard—never ends well. Sooner or later the hostage gets away. Sooner or later Gibson or Fuentes or Sutherland gets the better of you. They tap your telephone. They put snipers on the roof. They hide paint bombs in the ransom money. Eventually they find you and hit you in the face, really hard. Eventually, reluctantly, they shoot and kill you. And the audience cheers, and you, in death, are humiliated.

  Ignacio gazes about the suite, horrified by his own carelessness. He can only imagine his fingerprints—his bare footprints for God’s sake!—spattered about the room like flecks of fallen snow. His spit on that leftover sushi. His dandruff flaked over Howard’s documents. Moving slowly, as though to avoid further disturbing the very air of the suite, he puts his shoes back on. He closes the sliding glass door to the balcony. He and Littleboy slip out of Howard’s room, hanging a Do-Not-Disturb sign on the handle as they depart.

  They ride the elevator back down in something of a haze. Charlie Fuentes’s get-out-the-vote rally has turned down Ayala Avenue, and they can hear the whistles and drums and chanting as they return to the lobby. None of the concierges hassle them as they cross the shining expanse of polished marble. In fact, other than the raucous sounds from outside, the vaulted space has turned quiet and still. Ignacio notices that everybody—the guests, the staff—is at the far end of the lobby, huddling in a couch-strewn grove of mustard-yellow columns. There are flat-screen televisions mounted to some of the columns. Everybody is watching them.

  At first he thinks it’s just election news, but as Ignacio passes he hears the word kidnapped. He stops for a moment to listen.

  “Please can we go?” Littleboy asks.

  “Hush. Just a second.”

  The report is about that headless body discovered in Iraq over the weekend. It turns out that it was the body of an American who was working in Baghdad. His kidnappers have released a video today. A video of the beheading. The American squats in an orange jumpsuit with a line of black-clad masked men behind him. Reading in Arabic. Chanting in Arabic. Hollering in Arabic. The video cuts out and the news anchor explains why.

  “Please, can we go, please?”

  Littleboy tugs at Ignacio’s arm, but he won’t budge. His gaze has drifted from the television to the audience. To the suited, jeweled businesspeople looking up at the screen. Every one of them—the pale blondes and brunettes and redheads—is transfixed. And they are terrified. More terrified, Ignacio realizes, than even he is. More terrified than he could ever be. And this heartens him tremendously.

  Chapter 10

  DANCER AND THE GREEN DRESS

  Even though he was exhausted, Benicio slept poorly. He woke intermittently to kick off his travel clothes, drink all the bottled juice in his minibar, and have a long pee. He had the dream again—the one about snow falling in the jungle—but this time it was different. His father was there, standing on a path beneath a forest of palms, watching as the flakes floated down through the frond canopy. Snow covered the way forward and it covered the way back. His father took up a handful and it scattered from his grip like down in the wind. But the wind was just the air-conditioning. Benicio was in his room, awake, facing a picture window set before his bed like a hospital television. The sun was just above the horizon, burning.

  He lingered under the warm blankets for a moment, getting his bearings. It was Friday morning, just after dawn. His suite, filled as it was with orange light, was beautiful. In fact, it was beyond expectation. The front door opened up to a carpeted sitting area that was larger than his living room back home, and unapologetically decadent. Long red couches and armchairs were arranged around a crystal-topped coffee table, upon which sat a varnished wooden bowl brimming with fruits that—aside from a banana and a Fuji apple as big as a grapefruit—he couldn’t identify. Atop the fruits sat a single white and burgundy orchid, cut high and jagged at the stem but still looking fresh and alive. The orchid was one of perhaps fifty placed about the room with no apparent thought to diluting the effect—they sat in a soap dish by the sink, sprouted from a delicately arranged pot of smooth stones and moss on his bedside stand and filled two vases flanking the front door. All were bright and odorless. All nodded at him gently on the conditioned breeze.

  The first thing he did was set his laptop on the crystal table. He logged on to the hotel WiFi and sent an e-mail to Alice letting her know that he’d gotten in fine, leaving out how his father had flaked and not shown at the airport. He figured it was too early to knock on the adjoining door to Howard’s suite, so he switched on the TV and scanned channels. He flipped past news in Arabic and Chinese, past two Koreans fighting with brooms before a live audience, past Englishmen arguing about Iraq before finally stopping at a soap opera in Tagalog. He left the program on as he showered, brushed his teeth and dressed. He’d never heard the language before, but there was something familiar about it—sounds and phrases that could have escaped his mother’s mouth. These were bisected by the occasional English word: a hard Tuesday, or a lilting Bas-ket-ball.

  It was still barely light out by the time he’d dressed. In fact, it seemed darker. Benicio stared out the large window, watching the sun. It wasn’t rising from the distant bay, but sinking into it. He checked his bedside clock and saw a tiny pm beside the time. Whether because of exhaustion or jetlag, he’d gone and slept through his whole first day in the Philippines. And if
that wasn’t annoying enough, there hadn’t been so much as a fucking peep out of his father all day. Not a phone call, not a knock on the door, not even a note saying: Welcome. Glad you’re here. Thanks for coming.

  Benicio banged on his father’s door, hard. There was no answer. He tried the handle, and found it unlocked. “Dad,” he called as he pushed the door open. Still no answer. “Howard,” he called louder, adding three hard raps on the now fully open door. Nothing. The curtains were drawn and Howard’s suite was dark. A faint acrid smell hung in the air, and as Benicio’s eyes adjusted he saw that the bed was made, and empty. “That’s fine,” he said out loud. “If that’s how you want it, fine.”

  Benicio shut the adjoining door. Then he opened it again. That acrid smell troubled him. He took a step into the suite and found that it wasn’t so faint at all. It was an unmistakable stink, like unclean dive gear that’s been left to sit in the sun. He walked further into the room and experienced one of those morbid fantasies that has a whole life-cycle in three or four seconds—his father was dead, he was in here rotting, Benicio was about to discover the body, he’d have to bury it, he wouldn’t have any parents, everybody would feel sorry for him. Get ahold of yourself, what an awful thing to think, who the hell cares if anybody is sorry for you, anyway? And besides, this is silly. A body would smell worse than this.

  He groped along the dark wall and found a light switch. He flipped it on and stood there for a moment, shocked. His father’s suite made his own gilded room look like the servant’s quarters. It was the size of a large apartment, complete with a living room, bedroom, study, kitchenette and a tremendous balcony. The rooms were immaculately clean, save a round table in the study that the maids seemed to have gone to pains to avoid. It was strewn with papers that they must have assumed—perhaps correctly—were important. Benicio leafed through them, overturning some tented documents to reveal the source of the stink: a takeout tray of half eaten sushi that was yellow-green and festering. Once uncovered, the fish stank twice over. He had to hold the tray far away from his averted face as he dumped its contents into the toilet.