Smaller and Smaller Circles

by F. H. Batacan

He flexes his foot so that the scar catches the full light from the moon before the curtain’s shadow passes over it.

  At a certain angle, the foot appears perfectly smooth and unblemished.

  He and Jerome have agreed to meet at the NBI in the morning. Jake Valdes says he will try to convince Arcinas to allow them to speak to his suspect. Saenz is deeply grateful for this intervention, because he knows Arcinas would never agree to it if he himself made the request.

  Saenz recognizes that this is a crucial moment, and with all humility, he hopes and prays that Arcinas has found the right man. And yet, he wonders if anyone can—if it is possible to detect the scars that lie under the surface, to get at the diseases that take root not in blood or muscle, not in bone or pulsing organ, but in the mind, which can cunningly hide its ills beyond the reach of X-rays and electronic probes and surgical needles.

  He wonders if he knows enough to recognize the scars when he sees them, just beneath the skin of some, deceptively normal man.

  He flexes his foot again, and the scar reappears. It is a while before he closes his eyes, and when he does, there is one question in his mind.

  In what kind of light will I see your scars?

  19

  “All right, I’ll let you talk to him. But only for a few minutes.” Arcinas closes the folder on his desk ceremoniously, as though closing the book on their involvement in the case. “Though there’s really no point. He’s confessed to everything.”

  Jerome’s face is grim, his teeth tightly clenched. He is holding his anger back in a supreme effort of will. Humble pie time, Jerome, he reminds himself; the need to get at the truth is more important than his own professional pride.

  “Still,” he says, and the words come out clipped, “I think the director would want us to question him.”

  Arcinas’s snakelike eyes narrow. “The director has given me full operational control over this case from here on, and now that we’ve brought it to such a successful conclusion, I’m sure he would agree with me that your—uh, assistance—is no longer necessary.”

  Okay, that’s it, Jerome thinks. “Which direc—,” he begins, but this time Saenz is ready. His arm shoots out to restrain the younger priest, and he turns to Arcinas.

  “Precisely because you have concluded this case so well, you must be anxious to ensure the correctness of this arrest.”

  A trace of apprehension touches Arcinas’s face, but it is quickly replaced by a look of undisguised antipathy. “All right. Ten minutes.”

  On their way downstairs with the officer Arcinas has assigned to assist them, Saenz and Jerome see a tall woman with a serious face taking the steps two at a time. A small man, about five feet two inches tall, lugging video camera and kit, struggles to keep pace with her.

  She stops short when she sees them.

  “Father Saenz,” she says, holding out her hand to the older priest, and Jerome is startled at both the easy familiarity with which she greets Saenz and at her deep, throaty voice—a cross, he decides, between Lauren Bacall and Bela Lugosi. “Voici!”

  Saenz’s face registers surprise, and then he smiles broadly in recognition. “Joanna—salut!”

  The woman takes the older priest’s hand and shakes it vigorously, then begins to speak to him in rapid French. “I’m not surprised to see you here. How’s the weather up there?” she asks, tilting her head in the direction of Arcinas’s office.

  “Very sunny. Arcinas is quite pleased with himself.”

  “Ah, Arcinas. The nutcase,” she snorts in contempt. Then she scrutinizes Saenz’s face. “But you suspect it’s all a scam, right?”

  Saenz shrugs. “I have no idea, Joanna.” He pauses as Jerome clears his throat, then switches to English. “My manners. Joanna, may I introduce my friend Father Jerome Lucero?” He turns to the younger priest. “Jerome, this is Joanna Bonifacio. She was one of my students at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine.”

  “That explains the French,” Jerome says with a grin. He holds out his hand, and she takes it; her grip is like a construction worker’s.

  Her eyes search you, he thinks. For uncertainty. For dishonesty. For fear.

  The woman gestures toward the cameraman, who has put down his equipment and is now wiping sweat off his brow with a checkered handkerchief that has seen better days. “Leo, my colleague,” she says, and the compact, dark brown–skinned man flashes them a brilliant but gap-toothed smile.

  “Joanna is a producer for that crime show. First Person.”

  Ah, Jerome thinks. First Person. Loud, sensational, top-rated, five years running. Often intelligent. Occasionally brilliant.

  “Unusual career choice,” Jerome says. He meets her gaze and holds it without flinching.

  “Why?” she asks, a quiet challenge in that single word. For a few seconds he imagines that she is considering decking him, but unexpectedly, she gives him a conspiratorial wink: you’re all right. “It’s my apostolate, eh, Father Lucero?” She shifts her focus to Saenz once more. “So, come on, Father. I’ve been hanging around here since last night, but nobody will tell me anything.”

  “Operationally, that was probably very wise of them.” He chuckles.

  She ignores the good-natured jibe. “There was another one. In February. It made the news but was quickly overshadowed by bigger stories. So I have lots of questions. How many others have there been? Why didn’t he talk about them in his little press conference yesterday? And why haven’t they come out into the open and warned the public until now?”

  “I’m sorry, Joanna. I wish I had answers for you. You’d better go and talk to Ben. I’m sure he’ll see you.”

  “Yeah, right.” Another snort; she rubs the tip of her nose with the back of her hand, a mannerism Saenz knows well from her student days in France. “I gave him hell with that bank robbery a couple of months ago, remember? He’ll be jumping for joy to see me.”

  Saenz shakes his head; Joanna is a good friend and an excellent pupil, smart as a whip—and just as pleasant. Which is to say, not at all.

  “Je suis désolé, Joanna. You know I can’t give you any information until this whole matter is settled.”

  “D’accord.” She shrugs, then pulls a thin silver case out of her back pocket. It is an oddly elegant thing, something Jerome would not immediately have associated with this gruff giant of a woman. He notices that it is engraved with the initials acb.

  As she takes out a calling card, she catches him studying the monogram and snaps the case shut. “My dad’s,” she says dismissively as she shoves it back into her jeans pocket and out of sight. “Old-fashioned frippery, if you ask me, but useful on occasion.”

  Jerome detects a note of profound sadness underlying her self-possession.

  Joanna turns to Saenz again. “Voici ma carte,” she says, handing the card to the older priest. “If you need to talk to anyone, Father, I don’t have to tell you I’m your best bet.”

  “Better yet, you don’t have to tell me you’ll be hounding me from now on, n’est-ce pas?”

  She winks at Jerome again, then practically leaps past them and up the stairs toward Arcinas’s office. Leo the cameraman gives them the same gap-toothed smile before taking up his equipment and following her.

  “Interesting woman,” Jerome says.

  “A first-rate mind, Joanna,” Saenz says, as they proceed down the corridor with the slack-faced officer who has been waiting at the foot of the stairs all this time. “And a genuine pest.”

  Before they enter the room, Saenz takes Jerome by the arm and pulls him to one side. “What will we be looking for?”

  Jerome glances at the officer to see if he is listening, but the man is fiddling with a set of about a dozen unlabeled keys hanging from a key ring made of bent wire.

  “Not sure. If he is who Arcinas says he is, he wouldn’t have confessed so easily. The care with which the murde
rs are committed, the absence of witnesses, the uniformity of the mutilations—they all point to a highly organized mind.”

  “Sir?” The officer has finally found the right key and is now holding the door open for them.

  “You do the talking, Jerome. I’ll sit in and observe.”

  20

  The room is windowless, with walls painted a drab institutional grey. There are two fluorescent rods in the ceiling, but only one of them is working, and it emits only the faintest glow. There is a small wooden table in the middle of the room, with two wooden chairs on opposite ends of it. Two other chairs, side by side near the door, are the only other furniture in the room.

  “Looks promising,” Jerome says, his lips set in a grim line. “What did they say his name was?”

  “Ricardo Navato. Carding for short.”

  Saenz takes his place quietly in a corner of the darkened room.

  The door opens again and two officers escort a young man in handcuffs into the room. Jerome waits until he has been seated at the table and the two other men leave. Then he takes the second chair.

  The suspect is young—perhaps too young, Saenz thinks to himself—in his late teens or early twenties. He is thin, with spindly legs and arms, narrow shoulders, curly, close-cropped hair. Both eyes are almost swollen shut, and his upper lip is split in two places. Evidently he found himself on the receiving end of that brand of tender loving care for which several quarters of the Quezon City police are known before he was transferred to NBI custody.

  “Hello, Carding,” Jerome begins cautiously. “How are you?”

  The young man doesn’t say anything. He shifts in his seat, his expression difficult to read because of the injuries to his face.

  “My name is Father Jerome. Father Emil sent me to see you. You know him, right?”

  Carding shrugs, then slides lower in his seat.

  “How are they treating you here?” Jerome asks.

  “Just fine.” He is cold, still, suspicious. In the dullness of the young man’s eyes, Jerome can imagine the cramped space in which he lives; the tacky, plastic matting laid over a dirt floor; the empty containers of PX cheese balls and chocolate gathering dust on wooden shelves. The octopus wires that hook up electric fan and lights and battered old refrigerator to an illegal connection. Outside, there would be well-worn clothes—yellowed whites and fading colors—hanging dripping from wire clotheslines or collapsible space-saver hangers made of cheap plastic.

  Jerome knows the mingled smells of infrequently washed bodies and stale food and bar soap and old cooking oil that hang over Carding’s days and nights like frayed mosquito netting. He knows there is a store not far away where the young man can buy cigarettes and chewing gum and single-serve packs of three-in-one coffee. He sits there at night drinking cheap gin and beer with other jobless dead enders, in what passes for a social life, muttering about their lack of money and the better-looking girls in the neighborhood in the same numb monotone he speaks in now.

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  Another shrug, another refusal to meet his gaze. Jerome folds his hands together on top of the table and leans forward. Then, a curious thing happens: the young man looks down at the priest’s hands, at the ring on his right middle finger, a heavy but beautifully wrought gold band surmounted by a small disc of onyx, the onyx inlaid with a golden Greek cross. His eyes stay on the ring; it is something Jerome picks up quickly. The priest adjusts his hand ever so slightly, and the other man’s eyes follow, glued to the ring.

  Beautiful thing, isn’t it?

  “They tell us that you killed all those children.”

  “I did,” he says dispassionately.

  “How many?” Jerome moves the fingers of his left hand and covers the ring, casually, a test; when he looks up, he sees that it has also disappeared from the other man’s consciousness and that his attention is now focused on the priest.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Five or six?” Jerome prompts.

  Fidgeting in his seat now, wary of a trap. “Six.”

  The priest raises an eyebrow. “You must have been very angry.”

  No response.

  “Have you lived in Payatas a long time?”

  “All my life.”

  “So you knew those children. You’d seen them around.” Jerome glances at Saenz and is mildly puzzled to find him staring intently at Carding’s feet. “Maybe you can tell me why you chose them.”

  Carding shifts again, masking his growing unease with impatience. “Why are you asking me? You just answered your own question. I knew them; I’d seen them around.”

  Jerome waits. “Father Emil says he knows you. He says you’re a good kid and that he knows your mother.”

  At the mention of his mother, the young man’s shoulders droop slightly. Jerome feels a shift from defensiveness and suspicion to anxiety and fear.

  “Did you ever talk to him about the things you did?” he asks gently.

  “No, I couldn’t tell anyone.”

  Jerome lowers his voice. “Why did you kill them?”

  “I was angry.”

  “About what?”

  Jerome feels that the younger man is on the verge of crying, but the tears do not come; he holds them in check with fierce self-control. He may be frightened, but he is also tough, a veteran of dump and slum: he will not cry in front of a man, even if that man is a priest. “Look, you’d be angry too, you know? Living like I do. No job, no money. My mother is sick. The doctor told me that I have to take her to live somewhere else, that being near the dump is not good for her. Where will I take her? We have nowhere to go. We have to live on what I make from the dump. There are no steady jobs for people like me.”

  “So how do you get by?”

  A small, bitter laugh escapes him. “Don’t you know, Father? People are so generous here. Politicians, rich people, the Church. Everyone is so eager to help people like me.”

  Jerome says nothing, only waits until Carding grows uncomfortable with his silence.

  “I do odd jobs occasionally. Carry this, lift that. Every once in a while I help to load and distribute food and groceries from the local government.”

  Without looking, Jerome knows Saenz has leaned forward to listen closely. “Distribute food—you mean like the free meals for the parish church on Saturdays?”

  “I help load; I help unload. In, out. Sometimes I get twenty pesos. Sometimes all I get is one of the meal packets. Hey, better than nothing, right, Father?”

  Saenz stays in the shadows, listening.

  “When you killed the children—what did you use?”

  “A knife.”

  The lack of detail is telling, so Jerome presses him. “What kind of knife?”

  “A small one.” When Jerome says nothing, the young man tries once more to fill in the gap of silence. “I would offer them something—a soft drink, a cigarette, a snack. When they came with me, I would do it.”

  “What exactly did you do?”

  “I would . . .” He hesitates, and Jerome notes that sweat is beading on his forehead, above his upper lip, along his neck. “I would take off their faces.”

  “How?”

  There is a soft, hesitant rapping on the door. He glances up in time to see Saenz open it a bit, a slice of light coming through the crack. There are whispered questions and answers. The door closes again.

  Jerome turns back to Carding. “How did you take off their faces?”

  “I would cut them off.”

  “Using what?” Jerome is pushing harder now, trying to imagine pounding heart, warm, quivering organs, the smell of blood, comparing what his mind conjures up with the reality of this neighborhood tough, with his flat voice and his dispassionate, too-ready answers.

  “The knife. I sliced off their faces. I took their hearts; I cut off t
he boys’ . . . things.”

  “The boys’ things,” Jerome repeats thoughtfully.

  But they were all boys.

  “And the girls? What did you do with the girls?”

  Suddenly Carding sits up straight. He clears his throat and tilts his head to one side, as though measuring Jerome. “But they were all boys, Father.”

  It’s as if he’d momentarily forgotten what he was told to say or how to say it and has just now remembered.

  Another interruption, but this time there is someone else outside the door: Arcinas, banging angrily on the wood with his fist. “All right, that’s enough.” The lawyer’s voice is muffled, but there is no mistaking the anger in it.

  Jerome nods, then stands up. “Okay, Carding. Thank you for talking to me. I’m sorry I took up so much of your time.”

  “It’s okay, Father.”

  Jerome moves away from the table, then seems to remember something and turns back to the young man.

  “Do you realize how serious this situation is, Carding? How much trouble you’re in?”

  The swollen eyes blink once, twice. Arcinas bangs on the door again.

  “I mean . . . You know you could get the death penalty for this, don’t you?” There is urgency now in Jerome’s voice. “Regardless of what they promised you—you know that it could happen, right?”

  The young man swallows, lowers his eyes, stares at the tabletop. “Yes, Father.”

  Jerome turns around, and although he cannot fully see Saenz’s expression in the shadows, they have exchanged the same look of unease. Seconds later, the door is unlocked from the outside, and Arcinas pushes his way in, his face livid.

  “What took you so long?” he demands of the priests, as two other men following close behind him take Carding and hustle him out through the other door.

  Jerome bites one side of his lower lip, gives Arcinas a look filled with all the scorn and disgust he can muster. With one final glance at Saenz, he brushes past the lawyer and into the hallway without saying a word.

  Saenz looks dispassionately at the lawyer.