“Anything useful?”
“A lot. Can you ask Arcinas to dig up whatever he can on someone named Isabelo Gorospe? He used to be Alex Carlos’s PE teacher at Payatas High School.”
“Who’s he?”
“If what Mr. and Mrs. Carlos told me is true, he might have been Alex’s first victim.”
There is a moment’s silence at the other end of the line.
“Tell me what you know.”
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
W. H. Auden,
“September 1, 1939”
42
Back at their home, Flora Carlos is sitting on the bed in Alex’s room, wide eyed and unblinking in the dim, yellow light of the room’s lone light bulb. She has her son’s photograph lying in her lap.
“Mama,” her husband says, stroking her back gently.
“Was it a mistake?” she asks him, anxious to the point of panic. “To talk to that priest? You think it was a mistake, don’t you?”
“Mama, I don’t know what to think any more.” He sinks down beside her, then lies back, staring at the ceiling, his legs dangling over the edge of the bed. “You realize he’s never stayed in this room? All these years we’ve had this house, he’s never slept here. I don’t even know why we kept this room for him.”
“Because he’s our son. Our only boy.” She turns to him. “What if he never comes back to us? What if we lose him?”
“Mama, I think we lost him a long time ago.”
She grimaces. “Don’t be silly. That’s not the same. If he is responsible for what happened to Gorospe—to those boys the priest was talking about—God knows what might happen to him.”
Mr. Carlos doesn’t answer, and so she smacks him hard on his thigh in frustration. “I’m serious. If they catch him, if he goes to jail . . . I suppose if I had to, I could live with that. But what if it’s worse? What if—” and she shudders in horror, leaving unsaid the worst that she thinks can possibly happen.
He turns to his side, rests his head on his arm. “What do you want us to do, Mama? What can we do?”
When he looks at her face, it is hard, determined. “He needs us.”
He sits up and then tries to put his arms around her, but she struggles.
“No. He has been through enough already. Do you want him to go to jail?”
“But Mama, it was you who—”
“No.” She spits out the word fiercely, resolutely. “You call him. His number is by the phone. You go out there, and you call him now. You tell him they came looking for him.”
“Mama, stop,” he protests, when she starts pushing him off the bed, away from her.
“You give him a chance to get away,” she says. “He did it; you and I both know he did it.” When she hears herself say the words out loud, she is ashamed, and she claps a hand over her mouth, as though she has said an obscenity. Then she starts pushing him away again. “Go. Call him. You do this for him. You do this one thing for your son.”
He stands, staggers through the door and heads toward the living room. He is wondering why his vision has suddenly become so blurred. When he puts his fingers to his eyes, they come away wet.
Jerome is so wrung out when he gets back to his quarters that he calls Saenz and asks to meet up the next day instead.
“Do you mind?”
“No, no. I understand. You’ve told me everything I need to know. Are you all right, though?”
“I will be. I think I just need to . . .” Jerome pauses, stabbing the surface of his wooden desk with the tip of a ballpoint pen.
“You’re angry,” Saenz says.
“I guess I am. It’s all so . . . senseless. All this blood and suffering. The man should have been locked away decades ago,” he fumes, and Saenz knows he’s not talking about Alex. “If he had, who knows? Maybe none of this would have happened. I don’t know. There are days when it’s a struggle even to keep the faith.”
“Go and rest, then.”
“Thanks. See you in the morning?”
“You forget, we’ve both got big department meetings in the morning and I’ve got a make-up class after lunch. Can’t wriggle out of any of them without getting into trouble.”
“Afternoon then? Around three?”
“Good, off with you now. And remember that prayer from the Sarum Primer.”
God be in my head, and in my understanding . . . God be in my heart, and in my thinking. Jerome hangs up, then takes a shower and goes to bed. He falls asleep almost as soon as his head hits the pillow.
He begins to dream.
In the dream, he is in a cold, dimly lit place—a garage or a warehouse, or maybe even a gym. When he looks up, he sees a number of small, shrouded figures hanging from a ceiling he cannot see, the figures swaying ever so slightly, wrapped up in heavy cotton gauze.
The faces are also wrapped. Thick bands of electrical tape cover the linen where the eyes and mouths should be.
When he turns around, he sees a small boy sitting on a toilet bowl. He is completely naked, his head resting on his knees. Blood is running in thin, dark, glossy streams down the sides of the bowl. Jerome feels himself walking in dream-slow time toward him.
The boy looks up, and Jerome sees his own thirteen-year-old face streaked with tears, a contorted mask of unnatural hate.
“I see you, Priest,” the boy says coldly.
The phone in Alex Carlos’s apartment rings six, seven times before he’s able to pick up. Very few people know this number—Alex doesn’t like phones or phone calls—so when it rings, he knows it cannot be good news.
It’s his father.
He lets the man ramble on a bit without responding: something about coming home, something about being sorry for everything that happened to him. He can hear his mother’s voice in the background, and she’s weeping. He’s tried to detach himself all these years, from his memories, from them, but he knows he can never get away completely, even though he’s found a way to cope, however temporary.
His father says something about a priest coming to visit, about the police looking for him, and that’s when he sits up and pays attention. “A priest? What did he look like? Tall, thin? No? No, that’s the other one. Never mind. Where is he now? What did you tell him?
“Stupid. You stupid, stupid people.”
He yanks the phone out of the jack and hurls the entire instrument against a wall. It breaks apart into about a dozen pieces, big and small. He moves closer to the wall, gets down on his knees to examine the broken casing, the fragments of metal and plastic.
He should have done this a long time ago.
43
Jerome has barely come through the door of the receiving area when Saenz bounds out of the laboratory.
“We’re driving.”
“You mean I’m driving. Where to?”
“Jake Valdes has found someone he’d like us to meet.”
They meet Jake Valdes at a rundown, open-air vulcanizing shop along Don Mariano Marcos Avenue. Even in the late-afternoon heat radiating off the shop’s rusting, galvanized-iron roof, he is cool and unruffled, his shirt crisp and dry at the collar and armpits.
“Thanks for coming,” he says, offering his hand. Saenz and Jerome take turns shaking it. “You asked me to dig up anything we might have on Alex Carlos. The man who owns this shop was a high school classmate of his. He . . .”
A small man with a dour face emerges from a ramshackle shed behind the shop and comes toward them, a smoldering cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. He is a little wary of Valdes, but he eyes the two priests with ill humor.
“Guillermo Ricafrente,” Valdes says. “Emong. He filed a police report last year involving Alex.” He nods toward Emong, signaling him to speak.
He glances at all of them one by one, takes a puff and then removes the cigarette from his mouth.
“Hadn’t seen him since high school, you see? So I thought it was strange, him coming here all of a sudden.”
“What did he want from you?”
“I wasn’t too sure. Kept talking about high school, how he hated it, if I knew where any of the other guys were.”
“Other guys?”
He studies the three men through a haze of cigarette smoke.
“Our classmates. Wanted to know if I kept in touch with any of them.”
“You were good friends?”
Emong shrugs. “We hung out together sometimes, along with a whole bunch of other boys. But he was kind of different—shy, quiet. We didn’t talk much.”
“What happened next?”
“He said he’d run into our old PE teacher, Gorospe. Thought it would be nice to pay him a visit. Surprise him, you know.”
Jerome takes a step forward. “What did you say?”
“Told him to go by himself. I’m a busy man. Don’t have any time to socialize.”
“How did he take that?”
Emong tosses the spent cigarette onto the dirt floor and stubs it out under a dirty rubber slipper with tightly controlled fury. “Went crazy, you know? Started yelling at me, told me I was no friend. I told him, ‘Look, pare, I barely know you. We weren’t friends then, and we aren’t friends now, you hear?’”
“And then?”
“He starts throwing things around here. My things, you understand? My tools, my materials. Nearly got hit in the eye with a monkey wrench. Then he took a jack and started hitting the hood of one of my clients’ cars. That’s when I lost it.”
“Lost it?”
“I got mad. I told him, ‘Look, pare, I don’t want any trouble; you just leave us in peace now, or else we’ll have you arrested.’ When he wouldn’t stop, I told my wife to call the police, the barangay tanod.”
“Do you know what made him so angry?”
“How should I know?” Emong asks, his voice rising to a high-pitched whine. “Like I told you, I barely knew him anymore. He looked like he’d made it through life better than the rest of us, you understand? He’s got decent clothes and a nice enough car, and then he comes here, out of the blue, and wants some kind of class reunion.”
Valdes clears his throat and comes closer. “He tried to hurt you.”
“Came after me with that jack, he was so angry. And the whole time we’re yelling and he’s chasing after me with that jack, the neighbors are hearing everything, you know? When people started coming out to see what was going on, he threw the jack at me, got into his car and drove off.”
“And the police—the tanod—they didn’t get here in time?”
“No,” Emong says. He drags out a dingy plastic stool from one corner and sits down on it. “He was long gone by the time they arrived, the stupid bastards. I filed a police report and all, but nobody ever came back to talk to me about it. Guess they figured if I didn’t die, it wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“When did this happen?”
“Round April—no, wait. May. It was May, last year.”
Saenz and Jerome exchange glances, then turn to Valdes, who merely acknowledges their questioning looks with the slightest tilt of his head.
Jerome refocuses his attention on Emong. He’s plainly angry. And while Jerome can understand that he would dislike Alex intensely after last year’s confrontation, there’s something else simmering beneath the anger. And he remembers Mr. Carlos’s words in the church that afternoon: Alex wasn’t the only one.
“Did you like Mr. Gorospe?”
Emong’s face twists into a sour smile. “Like Gorospe?”
“You know. Was he a good teacher? Didn’t you feel like paying him a visit?”
“Like I said, I didn’t have time for all that nonsense. I wasn’t Alex’s friend, and he was stupid to ask me.”
“But would you have gone—by yourself, if not with Alex?” Jerome is very still, and Saenz picks up on this stillness almost immediately. “To see your old teacher? If you knew where he lived?”
Emong blinks up at Jerome several times, as though he can’t quite grasp the question. He has not thought about high school since Alex’s visit, and before that he had tried to put it out of his mind for the longest time. He had dropped out as soon as his father died; it was easy then to say he had to find work, to put food on the table and keep the family together. Mainly he had just wanted to forget. High school was one very long, very bad dream.
“I didn’t like him all that much,” he says, and he looks away from them as he says it. Jerome has seen it enough times to know what it is: dissembling.
“You didn’t like him because he hurt you too. Isn’t that right?” Jerome keeps his voice as steady, as even as he can.
Emong rises to his feet so quickly that the plastic stool topples over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. That’s why Alex came to see you. Out of the blue, just like that. Because he thought you, of all people, might understand.”
Valdes studies Emong’s face and then Jerome’s. “What’s going on, Father Lucero? What are you saying?”
But Jerome isn’t paying attention to anyone but Emong. He sees it clearly now: the undersized frame, the thin limbs, the large eyes—Emong looks a lot like Alex, and in their teens, they would have looked exactly like the dead boys in the landfill, small for their age, small in the world, easy to frighten and take advantage of.
“He hurt you too,” Jerome repeats.
He says it very softly, and perhaps that’s what makes it all the more devastating. In a blur of movement, Emong shoots forward and lashes out with his fist, catching Jerome off guard. The fist connects, and Jerome falls backward on the dirt. Saenz rushes to help him, and Valdes tries to hold Emong back, but he’s on the offensive now, trying unsuccessfully to stomp on Jerome’s legs and thighs, kicking up clouds of dust and dirt. Valdes is barely able to overpower the smaller man, gripping his arms and lifting him bodily away from Jerome, avoiding the flailing, kicking legs.
Jerome staggers to his feet and puts a hand to his lower lip; it is split open and bleeding.
“All right, that’s enough. Enough now.” Valdes is still holding on to the wriggling Emong. “Calm down. Just calm down and let us explain.”
“I don’t need your explanations. Just get out of my shop.”
“Please, just listen for a moment.” Saenz waits until the man stops struggling, until his breathing slows. Over Emong’s shoulder, Valdes shoots Saenz a look to reassure him that he has the mechanic under control. It’s his cue to continue. “You’ve probably heard about the young boys found dead in the Payatas dump.”
“Nothing to do with me,” Emong answers dully.
Saenz lets this pass. “We think Alex may have been involved in these murders.”
“So what?” Emong twists his head around to look at Valdes. “You said you wanted me to tell these people why I filed a police report against him. I already told them what happened; why are you all still here?”
Valdes’s face is impassive, his tone firm without being harsh. “If there’s anything more you can tell us—about him, about your time in school together—please don’t withhold it.”
Saenz looks down at Emong. “Please,” he appeals to him. “We need to find out everything we can about him so we can understand why he’s doing it.”
“Well, why don’t you just catch him?” He turns to Valdes again. “Why don’t you catch him?”
Valdes releases him, and then adjusts his shirt, rumpled a bit in the scuffle. “We don’t have any proof yet.”
Jerome moves closer to Emong. “Look, anything you say will remain private. Nobody outside of this
group will know. Will you help us? Will you tell us what you can remember about him?”
It was so long ago; what’s the point of telling anyone? Nobody has to know.
But what about the boys? You’ve heard the talk in the neighborhood. All the rumors about the missing boys. Could it really have been Alex? How is that even possible?
What if he takes your boys next? Joseph is just about to finish sixth grade, not so bright but a good, hard-working boy. And Michael is so small.
And Alex knew where to find you.
What have you got to lose?
“There were seven or eight of us,” Emong begins. “We were small boys, about twelve to fifteen years old. We couldn’t keep up with the rest of the class—all that running, all the contact sports and the calisthenics—so Mr. Gorospe used to make us stay after school, sometimes two or three at a time.
“He would take us to the gym, and he’d lock the doors. It would be dark by then—past six in the evening. He’d turn off the lights.” He stops, wipes a grease-stained hand across his eyes as his face hardens in anger. “It wasn’t enough that he would do things to us.”
Jerome is appalled, and when he glances at Saenz, it’s clear that he, too, realizes what Emong means. He would make you do things to each other, as well, Jerome thinks, filling in what Emong cannot seem to bring himself to say.
He’s watching Emong carefully now, fearing that he might shut down if he’s forced to examine his own past torments too closely. “Tell us about Alex,” he says, shifting the focus away from Emong’s own painful secrets.
“He liked Alex best. Alex was smart, clean, neat. He used to get us all together and tell us that Alex was his special boy, that he enjoyed everything Gorospe did to him. And we knew it wasn’t true. We all felt sorry for Alex.”
“The scholarships stopped in his second year.”
Emong nods. “How could anybody expect him to go on? He was a mess. After a while, it was just him, him all the time, and we all knew.” He pauses, trying to remember more. “He couldn’t stand it when we looked at him, and he used to pick fights whenever he caught any of us looking at him. He would sit all the way in the back of the classroom, and soon he was all alone; he wouldn’t talk to anybody. When he had to, though, he would never look them in the face.”
Smaller and Smaller Circles Page 24