David has seen that look on his father’s face too many times not to know what it means. It’s clear that he’s come to a decision. The realization fills David with dread.
“Pa,” he begs. “Please. You’re going to kill yourself.”
The director doesn’t open his eyes. “They’ll hold that press conference, against all good judgment. I just know it. It will alert the real killer, and he’ll find even better ways of evading us. Or he might simply go elsewhere and slip out of our grasp.”
“Pa. You need more time to rest. You were supposed to recuperate for six to eight weeks, and it’s been barely two. Your doctors here won’t give you clearance, we’ll have to sign a waiver, there’ll be all sorts of complications—”
“A week from now, and no later,” he says, and David knows there’s no arguing when he uses that tone. “If you would be so kind as to buy the ticket today.”
17
It is Jerome’s turn to say the six o’clock Mass at the university church, but this evening he keeps the homily brief. Saenz has invited him to dinner at his family’s home, and Jerome has hardly ever passed up such an invitation.
The drive to Makati is murder as usual. There are patches of EDSA, the metropolis’s main highway, where all vehicles are at a complete standstill, and there is little for him to do but gaze at the fading orange-and-lavender light of the setting sun reflected in the dingy glass windows of the buildings that line the avenue. And then in certain stretches the bottleneck clears, and the vehicles spill forward like beans from a jar, accelerating with a mad, pent-up energy, racing to claim every available space. He has lost count of how many times he has almost been sideswiped by other vehicles trying to squeeze past him. The completed flyovers are absolutely no help in easing the traffic situation, and neither, as far as he can tell, is the Metro Rail Transit. He pounds on the horn with the heel of his palm, like many other irate motorists on the highway, and then shakes his head: conduct unbecoming a man of the cloth.
When Saenz is driving, he is not given to pounding on the horn, Jerome reflects; instead, he seems to grow calmer the worse the traffic gets. In a situation like this, Saenz will usually slide one of his beloved cassette tapes into the car stereo, if there isn’t one playing already, and analyze the finer points of the music, the performance, even the instruments used. Jerome envies him his ready access to peace, the core of quiet he seems to possess.
Jerome is quite the opposite. Blunt to the point of occasional abrasiveness, he has few friends, although those he does have—brothers in the order, colleagues and students from the university—will go the last mile for him. Jerome is restless, dogged and questioning—the type, Saenz says, “who does not suffer fools gladly.” A contradiction of a man: on one hand an intense, volatile temperament, on the other a surprisingly gentle, compassionate nature.
“All that tai chi really pays off, eh?” Jerome kids his mentor on occasion, and all he gets in reply is, “In time, Grasshopper, you too will know these things.”
Saenz’s family lives in a small, gated community in Makati. The parents own valuable urban real estate, while the children have expanded the family’s assets to include a small chain of computer stores and a start-up firm that makes financial and retail software for large corporations.
Jerome has known Saenz’s siblings since he was a teenager. They are all small and fair and fine boned, taking after their mother. Only Gus stands out, with his sharp features, tawny skin and unusual height. Jerome has long taken it for granted—but has never actually sought confirmation—that Saenz was adopted as a child.
It was not in their physical features but in their collective character as a family that Jerome first noted the qualities they shared with Saenz. He recognized in each of them the same genuine warmth and graciousness, the same keen intelligence that he saw in his mentor.
Jerome had entered their home for the first time as a reserved, awkward teenager. His ears buzzed with their multiple conversations, their easy, often raucous laughter. After years of living in his own very quiet home, where his parents rarely spoke to each other and even more rarely to him, Jerome had felt himself become almost giddy with an inexplicable happiness, wonderful and bewildering at the same time. Felt his breathing go quick and shallow, as though he were discovering something new, something he had only heard or read about in books. Of course happy families exist. Of course.
It is nearly half past eight when Jerome finally drives up to the house. Ranulfo, a driver for one of the Saenz siblings, pauses in the middle of cleaning the windshield of a car and waves at him, and he waves back. Ranulfo drops the rag into a bucket and scurries toward Jerome’s car, directing him to an empty parking space along the curb, not far from the gate of the house.
“Parallel parking,” he grumbles. Hands gripping the steering wheel, he eases into the space, then he switches off the ignition and pulls up the hand brake.
“Evening, sir.” Ranulfo holds the car door open for him.
“Hi, Ranulfo. Has Father Gus arrived?”
“Yes, Father. He is waiting for you inside.”
“Thanks.”
He walks up the marble steps to the huge front doors and rings the bell, then waits a few minutes until one of the maids opens the door.
“Hi, Father,” she says brightly.
“Hello, Manang Delia.”
“They’re in the living room. Adrian and Cecille just got back from their honeymoon.”
“Really?” Jerome officiated at the wedding of Father Saenz’s youngest brother, Adrian, some two months before. “It will be good to see them.”
She bustles off down the long corridor. He follows his nose, which has caught the scent of stir-fried vegetables and barbecued spareribs and steamed seafood. The family has an excellent cook, and at these family gatherings Saenz himself will always have cooked at least one of the dishes.
The console table in the dining room is laden with chafing dishes full of food, and Jerome happily picks up a few morsels here and there to pop into his mouth: a broccoli floret, a butterflied prawn, a bit of tender pork sparerib stewed in black bean sauce—a signature Saenz dish.
He realizes how hungry he is; he has not eaten since an early lunch at around 11 a.m., and that had been an unremarkable tuna sandwich and a cup of sugary black coffee.
“All this food and nobody to keep it company.” He shakes his head. “This isn’t right.”
He goes off to look for Saenz and the rest of the family.
In contrast to the usual laughter and talk, the family is gathered silently around the entertainment center in the living room: twenty-eight-year-old Adrian and his young wife, Cecille; tiny Marian, who is several years younger than Gus and oversees the computer store chain, as well as her husband. The twins, Tommy and Tony, who are both MIT graduates, both computer engineers, and married to a pair of sisters who are also twins. Cholo, who oversees the family’s properties. Vicky, who handles investor relations for a Top 100 corporation. Quirky, funny, startlingly intelligent Vicky, with whom Jerome was infatuated many years ago while still in his teens.
Saenz stands in the middle, a head taller than his six brothers and sisters. They are all watching an hourly newscast on one of the top networks.
Jerome moves into the circle, and the siblings turn, smile and pat him on the back. They know only too well that he needs to hear the news, however, and step aside to let him through until he is standing beside Saenz.
On the screen, a perfectly made-up female newscaster is saying: “The suspect is believed to be behind the killing of a young boy in the Payatas area. NBI Task Force officials say the boy, whose body was badly mutilated, was found last month. Authorities also say they purposely did not release details of the murder to avoid a panic in the community.”
Arcinas appears, all hooded eyes and unnatural swirls of reddish hair. “Yes, we had outside help, but to the credit of the
bureau’s personnel, this case was solved with in-house expertise.”
The newscaster comes back on the air to say the full story will be broadcast during the late evening news. But neither of the priests is listening anymore.
“You think he’s the one?” Jerome whispers to Saenz.
“I hope so,” Saenz says. “Dear God, I hope so.”
18
In the huge, open-concept newsroom of a major television network, Joanna Bonifacio glances up every now and then to watch the late night news on one of a dozen television monitors set on stainless-steel brackets on the wall she faces. She is simultaneously making short work of a newspaper crossword puzzle and chewing a large wad of bubble gum.
The room, divided only by chest-high partitions of heavy industrial plastic and grey mohair, is almost deserted. An old dot matrix network printer can be heard tapping out news scripts and reports from the international wire services.
The arctic atmosphere, necessary for the maintenance of broadcast equipment, is air-conditioner sterile aside from occasional stray smells of brewed coffee and toner for photocopiers.
Joanna straightens up in her seat when she sees the NBI’s Benjamin Arcinas, smug and smiling, on-screen.
“Look, Wally,” she calls out to her boss, the executive producer for First Person, the weekly current affairs program for which she writes. Wally Soler is half dozing at the desk behind hers, feet propped up on the edge. She turns around, notes that his socks are mismatched again tonight, then grabs an ankle and gives it a good shake. “Arcinas changed his hair color. Again.”
Wally wakes, stands, stretches himself out with a yawn: a tall, chunky man with salt-and-pepper hair, a square face lined in all directions, small, shrewd eyes. He tilts his head back and puts his face up close to the television set, peering shortsightedly at the screen.
“Hey, it’s redder now.”
“Yeah, kind of strawberry.” She blows a large bubble from the wad of gum in her mouth. “Geez. He sort of looks like Nancy Drew.”
Notwithstanding Arcinas’s paranoia about the press, Joanna Bonifacio really does have it in for him. She has dedicated a large measure of her efforts as a crime reporter to pointing out the most awful errors—and there are many of them—in his handling of criminal cases. And she has done so in precise detail on one of the highest-rated programs on the country’s largest broadcast network.
She is not on his Christmas gift list.
“What’s he talking about?”
Joanna frowns, waves her hands. “Quick, Wally Wonka, turn it up.” She is given to calling her boss strange names.
Wally turns up the volume just as the newscaster is saying, “The suspect is believed to be behind the killing of a young boy in the Payatas area. NBI Task Force officials say the boy, whose body was badly mutilated, was found last month. Authorities also say they purposely did not release details of the murder to avoid a panic in the community.”
Joanna snorts. “Who covered the NBI today?”
“Claire,” Wally says as the broadcast cuts to the junior reporter interviewing Arcinas. Claire Manalo is one of several young and pretty news trainees whom the network predictably favors—with better pay, better opportunities, better support—over older, less telegenic but often more capable journalists and producers.
“I take one sick day—one sick day in three years, mind you—and NBI coverage goes to hell,” Joanna grumbles. “Look at that. She didn’t press Arcinas. She swallowed everything he tossed out without questioning a single thing. What is it with these kids? Easy on the eyes but short on the brain cells.” She pokes Wally’s belly with a forefinger. “When am I going to get that liposuction budget? Huh? Huh?”
Wally chuckles; as a veteran of many newsrooms, he knows all too well the resentment of seeing plum assignments going to better-looking, or better-connected, or more self-promoting upstarts.
“You’re not fat, Joe. You’re Simone Signoret. You’re ample. Curvy. Zaftig.”
She raises her eyes heavenward. “Do you even know what that word means?”
He clips her across the top of her head in response.
“Ow,” she protests.
She blows a noteworthy pink bubble, which bursts and flattens over her chin. Absently, expertly, she lifts it off with her tongue as she turns her attention to the corkboard on the partition in front of her desk. Something makes her lean closer, and seconds later she is practically tearing off the papers and photographs pinned to the cork as she searches for something underneath.
Wally watches all this, puzzled. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The dead boy’s injuries,” she says. “The mutilations they mentioned.”
“What about them?”
“So familiar,” she says, thinking aloud now, scanning the few documents left on the corkboard. “Something I’ve already . . .” and she reaches for a small sheet of lined paper, torn from a spiral steno notebook and covered in her own thin, spidery handwriting. She reads it, and a moment later slams the palm of her hand on the top of her desk, then thrusts the sheet of paper under Wally’s nose.
“See? I was right. They’re familiar. The injuries. The way they were described. Look at this. In February, they found a boy at the landfill site. Dead, naked, similar injuries. A few media outlets picked it up, but nobody was interested for very long.”
“Except you,” Wally says, studying her notes.
“Long enough to find out that they managed to identify the boy. Ryan Molina. But nothing came of the investigation, and there were no other leads. Or, more likely, nobody bothered to look for any more leads.” She takes the paper back from Wally. “I held on to this because . . .” She shrugs. “I thought the kid deserved better. I thought I might want to go back to it when I had the time.”
“But you didn’t have time,” Wally says, and he’s right; often the daily grind of the newsroom makes it impossible to revisit past stories whose trails have grown cold.
Joanna looks up at him sharply. “I do now. Don’t I?”
Wally clears his throat. “Why do I feel a headache coming on?”
Joanna lifts an eyebrow the merest fraction of an inch, and by that fraction Wally is subtly but effectively reminded of many things. That she has a graduate degree in anthropology from a French university. That she speaks four languages aside from English and Tagalog. That she worked three years in Osaka for the United Nations Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders. That she has paid her dues working the police beat for two major dailies.
“Come on, Wally. You know me. I’d never give you a headache without a corresponding reward.”
Conceited old cow, Wally thinks, then permits himself a private laugh. She’s just like her father, God rest his soul.
“Don’t tell me about it. Just get to work. You want Manny to come along?”
Manny is a cameraman, Wally’s photographer-sidekick from the old days when they were both still working for one of the big-name broadsheets in the Port Area. When Wally moved into broadcasting, Manny thought he would learn how to operate a video camera. This was well over a decade ago, and Joanna is not sure that he has quite learned how.
“Not time for the camera just yet. And Manny—you know, the last time you assigned him to me, most of my footage was out of focus. And he smokes like a chimney.” Joanna is allergic to cigarette smoke.
“He’s big and he can look out for you.”
Wally sees Joanna as the daughter he never had. What he did have, though, was four or five failed relationships in the last two decades, all collapsing under the strain of late hours, low pay, dangerous assignments, hard drinking. Serial infidelities on both sides. Didn’t seem to be much point in having children.
Joanna’s father was Wally’s best friend from those early days when reporters still used carbon paper and typewriters, and
Wally was godfather to Joanna and her sisters. He’d always been especially fond of Joanna: she was old for her age, observant, quiet but persistent in her whats and hows and whys. She grew up big and gentle like her father, with her mother’s drive and neuroses and a sharp, probing intelligence all her own.
“Big, nothing. He’s slow and—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. He smells bad.”
Joanna has already begun gathering up her things.
On her way out, she presses her palm against the man’s forehead affectionately, then removes her hand and scurries away, as fast as a woman of her height and size can scurry.
Wally puts a hand to his forehead. He peels something off it, then looks down at the bit of paper.
It is a tiny Bazooka Joe comic strip.
Gus Saenz is a light sleeper. At any time in the night, he can tell if any of the other priests on the same floor is awake or has left his quarters. He remembers sounds in the night, voices, doors opening or closing, the flushing of a toilet down the hall. He remembers if the room grew warmer or colder in the course of his slumber. He has, on occasion, been known to answer questions or join in the conversations of other people in the same room—often coherently—while asleep.
Tonight, sleep, or what passes for sleep, eludes Saenz. In his quarters, he lies in bed in the semidarkness and stares at his long, pale feet propped up on a pillow at the end of the bed.
Tonight, the moon is full. The lacy shadow of the curtain unfurling in the wind passes over the skin of his feet at almost regular intervals, and he holds his breath until the shadow comes again.
Skin.
He has a scar on his left foot, long and wide, its surface paler than the skin that surrounds it. He got it when he was a young boy, thanks to the particularly nasty slip of a new, clumsily held pocketknife, a Christmas gift from his father.
Smaller and Smaller Circles Page 11