Smaller and Smaller Circles

by F. H. Batacan

“The truth, Ben. Sometimes it takes a while.”

  Then he eases out of the room and leaves Arcinas alone, fuming in the semidarkness.

  Jerome shoves a cassette into the tape deck of the car as they drive out of the NBI grounds. Saenz grits his teeth and braces himself for some extremely reckless driving. The powerful presto movement of the Summer concerto from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons blasts through the car’s interior.

  “You want to tell me where we’re going now?” Saenz says, trying to make himself heard above the music.

  “We’re paying Councillor Mariano’s caterer a visit.”

  At the nbi’s parking lot, Joanna Bonifacio has been sitting in the car, waiting for the two priests to leave the building. She watches as they come out the side entrance and proceed to their car, grim faced.

  “How come we didn’t ambush him?” Leo asks.

  A network grunt for over a decade now, having moved up from driver to light man, assistant cameraman to cameraman, Leo is a veteran at shoving microphone and camera lens in the faces of unwilling newsmakers. Murder suspects, government officials involved in various scams, pregnant starlets who only months before were professing their virginity—Leo has hounded these and then some, all in the line of duty. And Saenz is just famous enough to warrant an ambush interview.

  But after almost a year of working with Joanna, he knows the ambush is not her style. She finds her own way and usually ends up with footage of raids being conducted, arrests being made, hostages being rescued or released.

  “It’s not the right time,” she says. Joanna can be infinitely patient.

  21

  The catering company operates out of the home of Mrs. Erlinda Salustiano. With large sections of roof tile missing and its white paint now a dingy grey in places, the blue-and-white bungalow has seen better days. It’s in the Fairview area, straight down Commonwealth Avenue and not too far from Payatas. There’s a makeshift carinderia set up in front of the gate. It’s shielded from the elements by a canvas awning; beneath it, a glass-fronted wooden counter displaying trays of tired-looking pastries. Four sticky, grease-stained plastic tables and their diners take up most of the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to step down from the curb to get past.

  When Saenz and Jerome get there, they find Mrs. Salustiano herself manning the chafing dishes. She’s a thin, middle-aged woman with a hard face and greying hair cut in a severe pageboy bob. When they introduce themselves, she looks at them warily but continues to serve customers. Jerome notices she takes an inordinately long time to dole out portions, counting every chunk of meat, every cube of carrot and potato, every chickpea and raisin, every last teaspoonful of gravy, until she is satisfied that she has maximized the cost-profit margin of each serving. Only then will she grudgingly hand it over to the customer. Jerome glances at Saenz to see if he’s noted this as well, but Saenz is already grinning at him mischievously. The older priest presses his lips tightly together to keep himself from laughing, because they’re here for a serious reason.

  It’s not a very large operation, she tells them—for sit-down events, they can only handle around one hundred fifty guests. But providing meal packages is much simpler, requiring fewer materials and less manpower.

  She’s a cousin of Councillor Mariano’s assistant, so she often gets first dibs on any informal catering jobs the councillor’s office needs to outsource. The provision of free meals at the parish church on weekends is one of those jobs.

  “Why are you asking all these questions? Was there a problem with any of the meals we prepared?” she asks guardedly, looking from one priest to the other and back again.

  “No, no,” Jerome says reassuringly. “Not at all. But we do need your help with something.” He draws a folded piece of paper from one of his shirt pockets, unfolds and then refolds it in a different way so that she can see. It’s a copy of the charge sheet against Carding, with a picture of his face on one side, and Jerome is careful to show her only the picture. “Have you ever hired this man to help with your deliveries?”

  She sets down the ladle she is holding and squints at the photograph. After a few seconds, she shrugs and says, “I don’t know. I don’t go with the van when it makes the deliveries; I’m far too busy. But my son does.” She turns and yells in the direction of the glass-fronted counter. “Oy! Rommel! Come here.”

  From behind the counter rises a head, then the shoulders and, finally, the torso of an enormous man—just around five feet eight inches tall, but easily three hundred pounds if he’s an ounce. He looks to be in his late twenties; his eyes, tiny and black, are set in a pale, doughy face; his body is nearly as wide as the counter, and he has no neck to speak of.

  He looks at his mother in irritation. “What do you want?” he whines.

  “I said, come here,” she says, more shrilly this time. “Lazy clod,” she complains to the priests as Rommel lays a handheld video game down on the counter and ambles over to them. “Nothing but video games all day, all night. Never helps with either the cooking or the customers.” She turns to face the jiggling mountain of pale flesh that is her son and waves the piece of paper in front of his face. “Look at this. You seen him before? At the church?”

  He studies the photograph, then looks at her and then back at the photograph, his mouth open and lower lip slack. “Who’s he?”

  “How should I know?” she asks, her voice rising even higher. “They want to know if he’s ever helped you with the deliveries.”

  Rommel turns to look blankly at the priests. “Why do you want to know?” He reaches out for the paper with sausage-like fingers, but Saenz takes it from Mrs. Salustiano’s hand before he can unfold it and study it more closely.

  “We just need to talk to him, that’s all. We’re checking if his family is eligible for the church’s Christmas gift-giving program just a few months from now.”

  It seems to take a moment or two for this to register in Rommel’s mind, and while they wait, they are treated to the sound of his loud breathing, his lungs straining to expand against the pressure of his excess weight.

  “That looks like Carding,” he says. “First few deliveries, he was always hanging around the church gates. So me and Mang Omy, we told him to help unload the boxes from the back of the minicab.”

  “Who’s Mang Omy?” Saenz asks.

  “Our driver,” Mrs. Salustiano says.

  “And Carding—he’s been helping you with the deliveries ever since?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you pay him?” his mother asks in dismay, pinching his fleshy arm hard. “Out of our profits?”

  “He gets a free meal or some pocket change every now and then, Ma,” Rommel wails in protest, even as his mother continues to poke and pinch his arm. “Stop that. Stop.”

  “You lazy—you stay in the minicab, don’t you? You let Omy and whoever it is you yank off the street do all the work while you stay in the minicab and play with that stupid thing. You’re just like your good-for-nothing father, leaving me to do all the work while you—”

  “Maaa,” he bleats woefully, and he turns to Saenz and Jerome with a look of supplication. “See what you’ve done? We were just having a quiet day. Please go away.”

  “We just want to—”

  “We already told you what you want to know, so you’d better leave,” Mrs. Salustiano screeches. “We’re running a business here.” She turns on her son again. “Something which you don’t seem to understand. You pick up some layabout hanging around the church and you . . .”

  Saenz looks at Jerome; there’s nothing more to learn here. They thank Mrs. Salustiano and excuse themselves, but she doesn’t pause even once in her rant.

  Jerome remains silent throughout the drive back to the university, knuckles white as he grips the steering wheel, the car weaving in and out of traffic in near-suicidal bursts of speed. Saenz tries to relax in the passenger seat; from the corne
r of his eye, he can see the concentration in the other priest’s face, knowing only too well that it is devoted to matters other than driving.

  When they pull into the parking lot outside the building that houses the laboratory, Saenz gets out of the passenger side, but the younger priest remains in the car, thinking.

  Saenz moves to Jerome’s side and motions for him to roll down the window.

  “You think Arcinas took the path of least resistance.”

  “He’s not a complete idiot. They would have chosen Carding well. They haven’t told us much about him other than that he’s confessed to the killings. But I’m sure if we checked into his background, we would probably find a repeat offender, someone with a string of sex-related crimes. Molestations, maybe. Flashing.”

  “We can’t ignore the facts. We now have confirmation that he’s connected to the meal deliveries.”

  “But you said it yourself—the community is a closed system. Carding has lived there all his life. Why is he killing now? What has triggered it that wasn’t there before?”

  “We don’t know everything about him, Jerome. His history, the pressures he’s under. It could be anything.”

  Jerome looks up at him sharply. “You mean, you actually think he’s our man?”

  “I’m not saying that.” Saenz leans against the hood of the car, near Jerome’s window. “I’m saying, let’s look at everything that we have and don’t have. He fits our physical profile of the killer, the height, the build—he even has about a size-six foot, as far as I could tell. Remember the imprint of the rain boot? And then let’s consider the things he knows about the killings. He knew what kind of weapon was used. He knew about the faces. He knew about the genitalia.”

  “But think about it, Gus. They wouldn’t even have had to coach him, really. All they had to do was ask stupid questions that gave the details away, coupled with some expertly administered police brutality.” Jerome stares down at the steering wheel, trying to organize his thoughts. “But even without that, it’s the grey areas that make me wonder.”

  He pauses, long enough that Saenz has to prompt him to continue. “Grey areas?”

  “He kept looking at my ring. That tells me he wants things, material things, a shot at something better in life. He said he killed those kids because he was angry. But his anger was about general things: poverty, his mother being sick, not having a regular job. You don’t kill kids because life is hard. You might steal; you might attack a cop. But you don’t kill the way our kids were killed: in a highly specific, organized way.”

  “So what you’re saying is . . .”

  “I’m saying our man is focused. There’s nothing random about his choice of victim. He remembers how many times he’s killed. He does it the way he does it for a reason. He sees himself as a victim, sees the killings as some kind of redress. And he’s smart too. You said it yourself—the way the weapon was handled, the way he left little that could be traced back to him, the way the faces were removed—there’s a precision, a symmetry to his work.” Jerome looks up at Saenz again. “Gus. Do you honestly think Carding is capable of all that?”

  Saenz shakes his head sadly. “You already know the answer to that.”

  At this, Jerome throws his hands up in the air. “Then what do we do?” He looks out beyond the almost-empty parking lot, beyond the street and the buildings, beyond the chicken-wire fences and the traffic on the road outside. “And you know what? We’re just days away from the first Saturday of August.”

  And Saenz finds himself staring off in the same direction, thinking the same thought.

  If Carding is the wrong man, another victim is going to turn up soon.

  22

  Saenz is in the middle of a working lunch in his office at the Anthropology Department when Jerome calls.

  “Lunch?” Jerome asks.

  “Can’t,” Saenz says, his mouth full.

  “But you’re eating already,” Jerome protests.

  “Susan gave me a peanut butter sandwich.”

  “You hate peanut butter.”

  “You’re not helping, you know.” He takes another bite then keeps talking. “Anyway, can’t stop for a proper lunch. Rushing a paper.”

  “Which one is this?”

  “School of Science and Engineering.”

  “You mean the science and spirituality thing? That’s tomorrow morning, isn’t it?”

  Saenz groans. “I’m supposed to talk for ten minutes.”

  “Well, how far along are you?”

  “I’ve written about a minute and a half.”

  Jerome shakes his head. “You definitely don’t have time for lunch.”

  “What, you’re giving up that easily? I’m open to persuasion.”

  “You’re less than twenty-four hours away from a ten-minute presentation, and you’ve only got a minute and a half down. Only thing I’m persuading you to do is to keep working.”

  Saenz sighs in mock despair. “Some friend you are. Where are you off to? Katipunan?”

  “I’m not telling you, because as soon as I say where, you’ll be bolting out of your office. Stay put and work on your paper. I’ll bring you a doggie bag from wherever I have lunch.”

  “It had better not be a peanut butter sandwich,” Saenz says glumly. Just then, there’s a knock on his door. “I’ve got to go. Someone at the door. I’m serious—no peanut butter or I won’t speak to you for a week.” He hangs up, then calls out: “Come in!”

  The door swings open, and Rommel Salustiano’s massive body appears on the other side. He is wearing baggy khaki trousers and a polo shirt that used to be black but has now faded to grey. There are sweat stains on his armpits, collar and chest. He looks dully at Saenz with his tiny, black eyes, his mouth hanging open. Even from this distance, Saenz can see the saliva glistening on his lower lip.

  “Mr. Salustiano?” Saenz asks, trying not to sound too surprised.

  Rommel spends about half a minute breathing noisily before shuffling through the open door. “Hi, Father.” He stops just inside the threshold and doesn’t close the door behind him.

  “Hello.” Saenz rises to his feet slowly, feeling a vague sense of unease. “What brings you here?”

  He points with a large finger to a chair in front of Saenz’s desk. “Can I sit?”

  “Yes, certainly. Come.”

  The chair is a spindly thing with a wooden back and seat and thin iron legs. It creaks when Rommel sinks into it. This close, Saenz can smell the musty scent of clothing carelessly washed and dried, mixed with the heavily pungent tang of persistent body odor.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Instead of answering, Rommel reaches out for a plastic canister that holds Saenz’s pens and pencils, reading aloud what’s printed on the outside: “La Salle-Ateneo Golf Classic.” He stares at the letters for some time, still breathing heavily, then puts the canister back on the desk. “You play golf?”

  “No, I just like freebies.” Saenz waits for Rommel to react, but the man just stares blankly at the mess on his desk. “Rommel, is there anything I can do for you?”

  Rommel looks at him, and then the tiny eyes narrow. “You didn’t come about the gift-giving program.”

  Saenz straightens up in his chair, the unease much deeper now. “Excuse me?”

  “The other day. When you came by asking about Carding.” He leans back in the chair, and it groans under his weight. “I hadn’t seen the news yet when you and the other priest were at the house. I only saw it that same night.”

  Saenz laces his fingers together on top of the desk. “What news?”

  Rommel giggles, a small, high-pitched sound. “Oh, you know what I mean.” He half rises from his chair and leans forward, his chest pressing against the edge of Saenz’s desk. “You’re famous, you know. I didn’t recognize you at first. But as soon as I did, I put two
and two together.” He smiles, his eyes narrowing further even as his entire demeanor grows more animated, more enthusiastic. “I’m sharp that way,” he says slyly. “My mother doesn’t think so, but I am.”

  Saenz remains still in his chair, alert to possible danger. Rommel’s physique may not fit their profile of the Payatas killer, but Saenz knows only too well that a profile is little more than a series of probabilities, and therefore no profile is completely accurate. “Why exactly did you come here, Rommel?”

  Rommel snickers. “The police and the NBI say Carding killed those kids.” When Saenz doesn’t say anything, he snickers again and then bestows a bright smile upon the priest. “But you don’t think so, do you?”

  The unease in the pit of Saenz’s stomach has turned into fear. If Rommel were to try to harm him, he could probably fight him off, but Rommel has youth and bulk and unpredictability on his side. “Rommel, I’ve really got nothing to do with—”

  “Because he’s not smart. Right? You don’t think he’s smart enough to have done all that.” Without warning, he reaches out and touches Saenz’s computer monitor, turning the screen a few degrees toward him. But Saenz quickly stands and moves the monitor back to its original position.

  “Look, I’m really busy right now,” he begins, but Rommel cuts him off again.

  “Who do you think did it? I mean, you must have some idea. They say you’re one of the best; that’s why the police keep calling on you.”

  At that moment, Saenz sees Jerome framed in the open doorway. “I thought I’d go for pasta—Oh.” He stops short at the sight of Rommel.

  “Jerome,” Saenz says, and there is more than a slight note of relief in his tone. “You remember Mrs. Salustiano’s son.”

  Jerome looks at Saenz, then back at Rommel. “Yes, I remember. What’s up?”

  When Saenz looks at Rommel again, he is back to staring blankly at the things on the desk. “Hi, Father.” He stands and lumbers toward the door, briefly giving Jerome an unpleasant whiff of his body. “Gotta run. Maybe I’ll see you both at the church sometime.” And he’s gone, his broad shadow gliding along the walls of the corridor.