Back in the bedroom, Alice snored. It was totally dark outside and the moon hung in the top corner of his picture window like the head of a hammered nail. He stood naked in the middle of the room, his body still steaming, his pores drinking the chill of the air-conditioning. He lifted a corner of the heavy blankets and began to slide in. Then he heard a noise, and stopped. Something—a door? a drawer?—opened and slammed closed again. Footsteps smacked with the sound of sandal flapping against heel, and a moment later came the bang of something heavy dropped on something hard. The sounds were coming from his father’s suite. The police had been in there, of course, in the first days after the news broke. But it was supposed to be empty now. Benicio dressed as quickly as he could—no underwear or shoes, just the slacks he’d worn to the meeting that day and an unbuttoned work shirt—and slipped through the door to the adjoining suite.
It looked different than when he’d explored it nearly a week ago. The mess of papers on the desk had been scattered across the study floor, as far as the kitchenette and living area. His father’s sport coats and blazers—big billowing things that Benicio could have wrapped two or three times around his own shoulders—lay with their pockets turned out atop a kindling tent of wooden hangers on the bed. More noises came from the walk-in closet. Solita was in there, squatting with her back to him, turning his father’s folded socks inside out. At least this time she hadn’t brought the kid.
“If you leave right now, I won’t have you arrested,” he said.
Solita jolted up and spun to face him. In one hand she held a purse made of worn denim and in the other dangled a knot of socks. “Your father owes me money,” she said.
“If you have business with my father, come back when he’s home.”
“What if he’s never home? What if he dies?” She saw the change in his face and switched tactics, quick. “June and I can’t wait forever. I need the money for him. He needs a good doctor.”
“Yeah? Tell me what he has and you can walk out with whatever you can carry.”
“Cancer,” she said without hesitating.
“What kind of cancer?”
“In his hands.” She looked down at her own hands, and then back up at Benicio. She seemed to know the lie was spoiled. He left her in the closet and dialed the front desk on the bedside telephone. He gave them the suite number and said there was an intruder in his father’s room, speaking loud enough for her to hear.
“I’m not a thief,” she said as she emerged from the closet, heading to the front door at a fast walk.
“You’re stealing,” he said. “You’re a thief.” He caught her by one of the faded straps of her denim purse and she pivoted to punch him in the neck. He brought his forearm up, braced it against her collarbones and pinned her to the wall beside the door. She kept hitting him until he was able to pull the purse away, fling it to the opposite corner of the room and use his free hand to pin her wrist as well. He realized at that moment that he was on the verge of the kind of violence that would change the shape of his life. He was capable of it.
“He’s not even your kid, is he?” Some of his spit spotted her forehead. “What is he, your little brother? And you’re using him to steal from my dad when he’s in trouble.”
“Your little brother,” she said. “Not mine.” Her hips bucked against his and her knee struck out, but missed. The skin of her belly touched the skin of his. She anticipated the change in him, and pressed in close. He let her go.
“Leave now,” he said.
“I need my purse.”
He retrieved the purse from where he’d flung it, upended the contents on the floor and offered it to her.
“Some of that is mine.”
“I’m supposed to believe you?”
Solita didn’t move. Her eyes darted from him to the small pile of tissue paper, photographs and bright peso bills on the floor. They could both hear the elevator dinging in the hall outside. “I need to get home,” she said. “First a bus, then a taxi.”
He didn’t realize that he wasn’t breathing until his chest started to hurt. “That’s fine,” he said. “You can have it. What do I care?” He scooped everything back into the purse and handed it to her. The second she had it she rushed out the door.
A QUINTET OF SECURITY GUARDS arrived in short order and Benicio had to persuade them that he was unharmed. They checked every room in the suite and examined the electric lock with little penlights and dental mirrors. They reprogrammed the lock and issued him a new key. They knew who Solita was—described her as “Howard Bridgewater’s usual friend.” Benicio asked that she not be allowed back into the hotel. They said she never would be again. They said they were sorry she ever had been. They said good night, and they left.
Chapter 22
THE VILLAINS’ DAYS ARE NUMBERED
The incident at the Blue Mosque shakes Ignacio’s confidence something awful. Then, when news of what he’s done breaks across the country—across the world—he just about goes over the edge. He tweaks again, smoking rough crystals off of rutty takeout tinfoil—his first high since they kidnapped Howard. He paces the living room in his underwear, a frozen orange pressed against his busted nose, grating his addled teeth down to almost nothing. News reports boom through Howard’s shuttered door, each more horrifying than the last. The Manila Police announce that they have a sketch of the kidnapper. The National Bureau of Investigation steps in to coordinate. The American Embassy offers logistical assistance and, in his hysteria, Ignacio imagines this to mean: Commandos. But worst of all is news that Reynato Ocampo has personally taken charge of the case. In typical fashion the supercop—upon whose life Littleboy’s beloved Ocampo Justice films are based—stands before a fawning clutch of reporters and says: “The villains’ days are numbered.” Littleboy, failing at first to understand that they are the villains, becomes very excited. Then, when Ignacio explains things to him, he cries for a long, long time.
It’s Wednesday, exactly a week after the fiasco, before Ignacio skews up the courage to leave the house. Even then it’s under cover of an oversized ball cap and a slathering of his wife’s pale makeup. He drives the family taxi to the ritzy Glorietta shopping mall, seeking the anonymity of an Internet café. There’s really only one thing he can do now. He’s got to call it off. The plan to sell Howard to insurgent Moros is kaput, having been exposed to—and ridiculed by—the Pinoy punditocracy. He figures that his only way out of this mess is to ditch the evidence—all those coy, carefully worded, but still plenty incriminating posts he’d made on popular Moro blogs and websites. He’s also got to think of something to do with Howard. And yes, something maybe means killing him. It’s not that he wants to! Cutting Howard’s ear off was one thing, but stabbing him in the throat until his heart stops would be something else entirely. Ignacio isn’t sure he can do it.
But first things first. He parks in a covered garage and heads to the café with his eyes on the sidewalk, bearing nothing but the bill of his cap to the security cameras mounted in the palms above. It begins to rain, a steady sunshower. Ignacio’s parents would have winced at the bad sign—a sunshower to them meant that Tikbalang, the horse people, were getting married. Which meant more horse people. And horse people were a problem, apparently. But all the sunshower does is help disguise Ignacio’s nervous perspiration, and he’s glad for it. He reaches the café and finds it full of uniformed children fresh out of school, all playing together on the local network, filling the room up with the sound of trash talk and artificial guns. Ignacio pays up front and settles before one of the few open machines. He glances about to see if anybody is looking. And everybody is looking—all the kids have turned away from their monitors to stare at him. Ignacio feels a tickle on his upper lip. It’s not rainwater—his nose is bleeding again, specking the keyboard below. There is a collective: Eww gross! It’s like he’s in goddamn school again. Anything he says will egg them on, so he just grins at the room, blood dribbling thinly down both sides of his lips, down his cheeks and con
necting at the point of his chin in goatee form. Eventually they turn away. Even the clerk up front looks spooked and stares deliberately down at his ledger.
Ignacio gets to work. The connection is agonizingly slow, but he’s determined. He comes to his first posting, weeding through thickets of mockery before he can delete it. That becomes a pattern. On the Moro Islamic Liberation Front message boards they are calling him the stupidest man in the nation. On the Bangsamoro homepage they are calling him an idiot who deserves to be hit by a truck. A blogger from Mindanao has even gone about linking Ignacio’s police sketch—a distressingly accurate likeness—to the discussion boards and forums. He even looks like a genius, written beneath in caustic italic. “Yeah, well fuck you, too,” Ignacio responds, aloud. The child immediately beside him gets up to change computers. “I still think it was a good idea.”
Then, about halfway through his work, Ignacio comes across a different reply. One that doesn’t start with Dummy or Moron or What is he thinking? It’s from someone with the username Khalid Bakkar, a slightly off-kilter crescent moon as his profile image. The message is just a number—a phone number!—followed by five short words. If you’re for real, call.
Ignacio’s throat catches. He knew it. He fucking knew it. All those politically correct jackasses on TV saying there was nothing to his strategy. All those self-righteous citified Moros saying it would never work. Ignacio gives a little hoot and jumps up from his chair, sending it crashing to the floor behind him. All the children look again, but he doesn’t care. He borrows the clerk’s pen and writes Khalid Bakkar’s phone number on the dry, tucked hem of his shirt. Then he shuts the computer down and strides triumphantly out of the Internet café, out into the wedding of the horse people, out into the drizzle and dazzle.
Chapter 23
EFREM’S FATHERS
Efrem Khalid Bakkar follows Ka-Pow up to the roof at midnight. From atop the apartment high-rise the city looks like nothing but tendrils of metal and light sprung from a void. The lit homes and offices float like satellites, drifting among sparkshower from welding torches, held by untethered workmen on steel, building more homes, and more offices. Elvis and Racha spread a drop cloth over the roof and lie on their backs to watch the moon reckon with this smoggy, starless world. Lorenzo gulps a two-liter with more rum in it than cola, passing it around like he’s at a picnic. Reynato sucks his unlit cigar. Only Efrem is tense. It’s been just over a week since the raid against the pirate. And now, as he clutches a list of the pirate’s criminal network written in ink and Racha’s blood on a thousand-peso bill, they expect him to finish the job.
“You know Efrem, this puts me in a holiday mood,” Reynato says, his tone warm and easy. “This is just like New Year’s in Manila. You have that problem down south? Up here it’s the same story every damn year. A pretty little honor student, or a mother of six, killed while walking home from a party, their brain a landing strip for vertical gunfire. Struck down by a bullet just falling out of the damned sky like some kind of apocalyptic birdshit. Bullets belonging to one of ten thousand morons who prefer shooting the moon to fireworks. It never fails, and on January first every year I sit in my kitchen with the paper and just fucking marvel at it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished shit like that would happen to the people who actually deserve it. I mean, if this is going to be a country where it can rain bullets, and I mean really rain them, then shouldn’t it at least be a country where they land right?”
“On with the show!” Lorenzo calls, spilling rum and cola as he shakes his bottle. Efrem crosses to the center of the roof, Tingin loose at his side, eyes turned up. Reynato follows and puts his soft, tiny palms on Efrem’s shoulders.
“Don’t let him rush you,” he says. “You just take your time. I can see how a decision like this is tough, even for a man with your history. To be honest, I’d be turned off if you said yes right away. Stone-cold killers can’t be trusted. I like a man who gives the rules some good consideration before he breaks them. And I know you expected things to go different when you joined up. The problem with the lies we’re told is we start out wanting to believe them. Wanting to believe that the shabu dealer in Davao spent more than just a week in jail; that he isn’t back home, one-man-banding his poorest lady customer as we speak. Wanting to believe that we could really arrest every man and woman on this list and that they wouldn’t wind up snug between bribed judges and threatened prosecutors. Wanting to believe that our country would be better off spending millions of pesos just so some Manileños can wear suits for a few afternoons in a row. Wanting to believe the faith healers who tell us we’re not so sick that we can’t get better.”
“Come on already,” Lorenzo yells, cupping his hands around his mouth as though calling to people on the other side of a ravine. “Get to the shooting!”
Without turning around Reynato threatens to toss Lorenzo off the roof and see if he can’t pull a parachute from that ear of his. “I can send them away,” he says, all quiet, “if you’d rather do this alone.”
Efrem shakes his head. “They won’t be able to see anything, anyway.” He hands the note to Reynato and asks him to read it aloud. Shouldering his Tingin, he aims straight up, eyes agape, pupils unhinged.
“You don’t even know, do you? You don’t even know how good you are,” Reynato says. He steps back, puts on his reading glasses and holds the list up so it catches floodlight spilling off the adjacent scaffolding. He reads like a radio announcer. “Ting Dangwa!” Efrem exhales slowly and lets his gaze trickle upward. He floats, clutching sooty clouds for purchase, climbing to a spot from which to spy upon the marked men. It always takes longer if he doesn’t know where to start, but the name is the important part. Manila glows in darkness below. Many Tings, doing Ting things, flicker among long gridlines of incandescent yellow. One twinkles brighter than the rest. Alone in his apartment, he reheats a steaming meal still frozen inside. He’s naked save an undershirt, nose pressed against the microwave door to watch his dinner spin. Efrem picks out a little window in the hallway and shoots, his silenced Tingin making a puff-cheek sound. Ting passes by carrying his plate just in time to catch it in the neck. Reynato reads another name. “Melvin Alao …” sits in a girly bar on Roxas, getting a lap dance in the back room. A woman wearing nothing but sequins twists her shoulders, flips her hair and runs out the neon door when Melvin’s face gets on hers. “Ed Recto and Joey Tanga …” both doze in the back of a jeepney traveling north on the superhighway. The kerosine engine is so loud that no one hears gasping replace their snores. “Angel Saya …” is farthest away. Efrem doesn’t recognize the place, but it’s daylight wherever she is. She walks along a leaky canal wearing a light jacket and hat decorated with plastic flowers. When she falls a blond man tries to help her up, as though all she’s done is slip on a slick cobblestone.
The list is done. A breeze scores the roof and Reynato lets the scrawled-upon bill fly out of his hand and disappear over the edge. He’s still close enough to touch Efrem, but doesn’t. “I’ve got one last name for you,” he says. “Howard Bridgewater.” He puts a hand flat along Efrem’s rifle-sight and pushes it down, breaking his aim. “You’re not killing this one,” he says. “I just want you to tell me if he’s still breathing.”
“Who is he?” Efrem asks.
“Howard’s one lucky asshole, that’s who he is,” Reynato says. “He’s American. One of Charlie Fuentes’s buddies who had sense enough to donate a whole lot of scratch to the campaign. And those facts have earned him the right to some scary-ass guardian angels.” Reynato cups his hands around the tip of his cigar, as if to block wind from fire that isn’t there, and puffs. He waits patiently while Efrem stares. “See him yet?”
“I see him. He’s hurt badly, but alive.”
“Fine,” Reynato says. “Super. I guess we’re going to have to keep him that way.” He shakes his head, as though amazed. “I help get the motherfucker elected and still he feels like he can call in favors. He swears this is the last
one. Charlie wants us to rescue that clown.”
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME Efrem’s used his ability to check in on people from afar. He’d been a frightened child; convinced his adoptive mother could fall ill at any moment. He used to cast long glances homeward, ready to sprint back if she stumbled in the rock garden or tumbled off the roof while mending thatching. He was beside himself when she let the Holy Man—self-appointed nurturer and interpreter of Efrem’s curse—take him away to practice soldierkilling. They motored about in the Holy Man’s low-lying boat for nearly a year, searching for and never finding a horizon beyond which Efrem couldn’t see. He knocked whole flocks of pelagic birds out of the sky with lengths of dried coral. The Holy Man gave him an ancient Russian rifle and taught him to shoot pigs drinking at the distant sulfur spring. Together they peopled a deserted island with fake soldiers, placing coconut heads atop driftwood bodies, scattering the wooden mannequins in beach caves and beneath the root-canopy of a giant strangler fig. They motored some fifty kilometers away and Efrem decimated the imaginary battalion in a quarter of an hour.
Years later, after he’d graduated from wooden soldiers to real ones, Efrem still glanced homeward to check in on his mother. He lived among rebels, fellow apprentices of the Holy Man who made fertilizer bombs and dug tiger pits. From their hidden camp he watched, helpless, as his mother woke in moonlight and struggled to find a position she could breath in. He watched his uncle and cousins load her into their boat, the Hadji Himatayon, giving her sips of fresh water as they raced northeast to Zamboanga City. His uncle traded the unreliable outboard for a room near the hospital and sold the boat itself to pay the Manileño doctor’s fee. Efrem was still watching when his family returned home by slow ferry a month later—his mother’s symptoms diminished but not gone. No one aboard noticed the bomb hidden below a rice sack. It was a small charge, just strong enough to knock the knees off of an old man and punch a hole in the hull. His family survived the blast. They all escaped the sinking ferry. They swam for hours. Currents separated them, out of earshot, out of eyeshot. His cousins each drowned alone. His uncle drowned alone. His mother drowned in the arms of a stranger, held under by those arms till she screamed in a lungful of ocean. The stranger, a young rubber tapper, took her floating barrel for himself. He survived, washing ashore that afternoon and wandering about praising Jesus. He got a few hours’ celebration in before falling stone dead on a dark street, nailed to the ground by fifteen shots out of the sky.
Moondogs Page 27