Fall Out

by M. N. Grenside

  “The shipment for the Cheetham’s wedding leaves at 11AM. They have now finally paid in full… once I threatened not to deliver,” the young girl replied.

  “You’re learning. You just have to be tough, Bella. Some rich people need to be reminded that we can all bite,” Cara said with a smile. With that she turned and went out into the loading yard, Cato snuffling at her heels.

  Her dedicated workforce of gardeners, buyers, and floral display team were her real family now. Her business, The Santa Ynez Proposal, had grown from a small shop to five retail outlets and a successful contracting business.

  “Oh, the courier re-delivered that package here to the office as I requested,” Bella added following Cara as she handed over a manila envelope.

  After a long day Cara returned home and listened to a single voice message left on her home phone.

  That loathsome man Louis McConnell wanted to know if she had received and read a screenplay from Sam Wood. How the hell had he known about that?

  Making a face at the answer machine, she really wanted to go to bed, but the message had upset her and now she wanted to know what was in Sam's script that was bringing all these people back into her life. She started to read. Like Marcus, she was quickly drawn into Sam’s fast-paced thriller. However, she grew uneasy as whispers of the past echoed in Sam’s story. Is that what had triggered McConnell to contact her? She read through it again focusing on what had happened to her husband and trying to see if Sam was telling her more. There must have been a reason he had sent it to her.

  FALL OUT was about the founding and eventual implosion of two criminal empires. The screenplay opens with the suicide of 55-year-old property magnate Frank Kiddo leaping to his death from the window of his eleventh-floor office. The story then flashes back to the mid-1990s and an old flour mill in Panama City and the story that leads to his suicide. Former strong man President Manuel Noriega has been sent to rot in a Miami jail, but his cronies are everywhere. Two men, each representing two criminal organizations, jointly buy the mill and start its demolition, but their secret goal is to strip the business of a hidden fortune buried inside. Frank Kiddo, a powerful young New York property developer, leads an American syndicate and provides credibility for the project. He is joined by his finance partner, Joe Nisten. The other group is run by a Panamanian local wise-guy Aguinaldo Sosa who owns a demolition and construction company.

  The men’s secret plan succeeds, and they discreetly melt away to divide the proceeds, their tracks hidden by the banker. Over the years, they continue to work together to build a massive illegal arms business that feeds weapons to criminals and armed conflicts worldwide. But greed ultimately destroys their partnership. The title said it all: FALL OUT.

  * * *

  It was 4:30 a.m. by the time Cara finished reading the script for the third time. Cato had long given up any hope of his mistress going to sleep and was on her lap, the only sound in the house his rhythmic snoring.

  Cara kept returning to one scene. The first time she read it, something had snagged her memory. The scene was near the beginning when the two heads of the different crime groups are scouting out the mill where a huge weapons stash had been hidden by the ousted President Noriega, the recovery of which would found their empires.

  * * *

  FALL OUT (cont’d) Page 18

  SCENE 6

  EXT. CLOUDS. DAY. PANAMA CITY, PANAMA 1990

  * * *

  The grey clouds part revealing a beaten-up pickup truck as it rumbles through the mean streets of the city. All the while in the background, an Irish melody plays incongruously, evocative of all that this place is not. The rain lashes down against the windshield as the vehicle pulls to a halt, the road now almost more river than track.

  * * *

  The two men stare through the windshield, the passenger is FRANK KIDDO – small, overweight, early thirties, American. The driver is a tall local man, same age, AGUINALDO SOSA. We are just able to make out a giant outline towering above them in front of the car. It’s an old run-down flour mill. A large sign hangs crookedly on the building, displaying the word Masa (Flour) painted below a large tiger logo.

  * * *

  AGUINALDO

  In there. The old Bick flour mill. Buried supplies from the old days.

  * * *

  FRANK

  CIA support for Noriega?

  * * *

  AGUINALDO

  When you guys still put up with his pineapple face. Before Reagan changed his mind. Enough for a small army. Medical supplies too. Morphine.

  * * *

  FRANK

  (Hopelessly drawing on a cigar, which is now soaked from the rain slanting through his open window. He glowers at it)

  Think it will work?

  * * *

  AGUINALDO

  We’ll get permission so long as we look real. (Smiling). Demolition and reconstruction work and when it stops, they’ll be more interested in looking for our missing friend in the Masa Bick rubble than in what happened.

  * * *

  FRANK

  (He flicks the stub out through the side of the pickup truck).

  You’re on.

  * * *

  “Oh my God!”

  Cato awoke with a start. “Marcus you’re in danger…”

  Cara had suddenly realized why the first time she read that scene something had caught her subconscious eye. It was obvious now if she read it in the right way. It was 5.30 a.m. She reached for her phone and typed a text message.

  “I’m driving to LA. Meet me at the Griddle Café on Sunset. 8 o’clock. God, Marcus. It’s in the script, you just have to look…”

  Part II

  THE RAISING

  12

  MANILA, PHILIPPINES

  MARCH 1945

  “ICHI, NI, SAN, SHI, (one, two, three, four,)” the crowd chanted in slow disciplined unison. Although in Manila, the assembled were counting in Japanese and accompanied each number with a single clap.

  “GO, ROKU, SHICHI, HACHI, KYU, JU, (five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.)” Perfectly executed.

  Tan grinned with pride and stood back. He was drenched in arterial spray and behind him lay ten decapitated bodies. The victims’ hands still tied behind their backs; their heads were mired in a lake of blood on the stone courtyard floor. He basked in the spontaneous applause of the assembled VIPs as well as his fellow comrades of the Kempeitai, the military police in charge of Manila. Tan posed once again for the press, his bolo by his side. The Fort Santiago cells above which he now stood were crammed with an endless supply of prisoners awaiting the same fate.

  Since leaving Major Okobudo to rot in the cave with the other men, Tan had returned to Manila with General Yamashita. Tan’s strong right arm silenced any dissent to Japanese rule. Again, and again he proved that no one could compare with the accuracy and consistent strength of the swing of his bolo. The weapon was a fearsome long-curved machete whose blade swelled at the tip making it a heavy and terrifyingly effective weapon. He was the most feared executioner in all the Philippines.

  Press photos complete, Tan turned back to the crowd, soaking up the applause. These executions were the highpoint of his life.

  He was born a Filipino, in his mind a second-class race compared to the mighty Japanese. But now he was not only one of them but being applauded. He beamed with pride. He thought back on his journey to this supreme moment of joy.

  * * *

  Tan had been plucked from obscurity and probable death by a stroke of luck. More accurately, by the stroke of his bolo when he had helped the occupying Japanese troops a year or so before. He had hated his childhood spent in the village of Kalayaan, south east of Manila on the shores of Laguna de Bay. The other children had teased him mercilessly about his looks and called his beloved mother the village whore; no one knew who his father was. He was never called by his first name but merely by his last, Tan. Tough as his beginnings in life had been, he nevertheless had grown strong, tall, and wide.
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  His physical bulk and a burgeoning mean streak began to counter the snide comments of the other kids. If only he had been born in Japan, he might have been summoned to become a ‘rikishi’ (trainee) at a Sumo wrestling stable. Tan admired the Japanese determination to extend their sphere of influence using the only power that could determine change: military might. International opinion was weak. Japan was imposing its strength and discipline on the rest of Asia, taking control of Korea and great swathes of China.

  At age twenty, before the outbreak of war and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, Tan’s mother died. He had left the village and vanished into the jungle. He chopped his way into the wilds using only his bolo to make a path. In a clearing at the foot of a small waterfall, he hacked down several bamboo stalks and constructed his own Nipa, the traditional peasant Filipino dwelling. Standing on two-foot tall stilts complete with thatched roof, reed mattress and a few cooking pots, this 25-square-foot home was his refuge from the world.

  In this lonely retreat Tan channeled his aggression and frustration in a time-honored manner. He bred a fearsome string of fighting cocks and made a good living from it. His success at least garnered him some grudging admiration, if not friendship, from the locals.

  His Nipa was his sanctuary, no one was ever invited. When he needed female companionship, he would buy it in the local village with the winnings from the fights his cocks nearly always won.

  As well as creating his home, Tan’s blade had chopped down branches to make pens to house the birds. He had even dug his own pit where he could train the animals to fight.

  Before every contest he would hack down some palm leaves and weave a new salacot, the Filipino conical shaped straw woven hat. As the cockerels often looked very similar to one another, the bets placed by the crowd at ringside and taken by the casador, were identified by the handler as opposed to the actual bird. Each handler held up the bird to show to the crowd before each fight. One handler wore a hat, one did not. Tan always wore the hat. He had hardly ever left a cockpit with a defeated bird, one that would end up in a talunan stew made out of the bloodied remains. Death and defeat were for his opponents.

  Following the invasion of the Philippines, the Japanese occupiers left Tan alone. Although they enjoyed coming to the fights, their priority was the never-ending skirmishes with the local resistance. One late lazy afternoon, after Tan had fed his birds and was tending his meager vegetable patch, he heard shots, a yelp of pain and the sound of running feet crunching the dead leaves of the jungle floor. Into his clearing came three youths from the village. He recognized them immediately. How cruelly they had once teased him, but now they were desperate for help. The smallest, named Teodoro, was bleeding from a gunshot wound to his buttocks. Tan smirked to himself.

  “Couldn’t even get shot anywhere on the front like a real man, just in the ass running away,” he mocked.

  “Hide us, Tan” pleaded a panting Teodoro. Tan remained expressionless. “We did nothing. We met up with a Japanese patrol. They said we had to bow down to them. We said screw yourself and ran off.”

  “The Japanese are our saviors, you should show them respect,” Tan said, now glaring defiantly at the young men. “Pathetic”.

  They saw the anger and hatred in his eyes. They realized the kid they had tortured and bullied had grown into a man who was never going to help them. They turned and started to run into the jungle. Trying to keep up but stumbling along behind, Teodoro quickly collapsed but his light frame was held upright by the vines of the forest.

  Moments later the group of Japanese soldiers burst into the clearing. Immediately the first soldier in the group raised his gun, aiming it at Tan.

  Tan raised his hands and smiling said clearly “You have nothing to fear from me. I embrace the Emperor and welcome your forces and discipline to our land.”

  The soldier hesitated. Then making up his mind, his finger started to squeeze the trigger, just as a swagger stick crashed across his knuckles.

  The rifle now lowered by the young soldier, the Major who had struck him, coolly lit a cigarette “You can identify the terrorists?” he enquired. “If you can lead us to them, we might spare your life. If not, I need to apologize to this brave soldier I have struck and let him execute you. I hate apologizing.”

  “This way,” Tan replied calmly and confident, seizing his opportunity. “Major…?”

  “Okobudo,” replied the Major with a cold smile as Tan leaned down to pick up his bolo. Three rifles instantly trained on him.

  “Let me cut a path. You will catch them. They will never make headway.” With the soldiers behind him, rifles still pointed at his head, Tan soon led them to the unconscious form of Teodoro, spread-eagled on the clinging arms of the jungle. The Major yanked the young man’s hair.

  “Which way?”

  Teodoro’s eyes flickered open in a haze of semiconscious pain. He made a valiant attempt to spit but passed out as the phlegm rose in his throat. The Major stepped back and withdrew the long sword at his side.

  “Permit me, please Major” said a voice behind him. With a swing of his bolo, Tan severed Teodoro’s head from his body. Then for good measure he brought the blade down against each arm, so Teodoro’s torso fell forward freed from the embrace of the blood-soaked branches.

  Major Okobudo grinned. He was impressed and sheathed his sword. He had found the perfect bodyguard, a Filipino, but seemingly totally loyal to the Japanese cause and willing to execute his countrymen. Okobudo nodded in the direction of the others. True to his word, Tan caught the remaining two and dispatched both with equal ruthlessness.

  From that day on, Tan never left the Major’s side, fiercely loyal to his new master and the Japanese Emperor. Tan’s knowledge of the local landscape and customs, and his contempt for his own people made him indispensable to Major Okobudo.

  But Major Okobudo had misjudged the loyalty as being just to him, rather than the Emperor. It was this loyalty to the Emperor that had led Tan eventually to inform General Yamashita, the Major’s superior, of Okobudo’s treasonous act and thereby to seal his fate. Tan knew there would be no alternative but to silence the Major along with everyone involved in the project.

  In the spring of 1945, the Japanese occupiers were desperately trying to subdue the local population, which was growing more rebellious the closer General MacArthur and his U.S. forces got to the Philippines. Yamashita decreed that all males over 14 years old were to be treated as guerrillas and arrested, a pronouncement that was quickly followed by mass executions; most carried out by Tan.

  The General needed his executioner to instill fear.

  * * *

  Tan’s thoughts were jerked back abruptly to the present as an air raid siren suddenly reverberated around the concrete courtyard. A wave of American bombers was flying in low over the city. He turned to run for cover in the deep dungeons but slipped in the pools of fresh blood around him. He crashed to the ground, his head slamming against the stone floor. A few minutes later as he slowly regained consciousness, the bombs were pounding the Fort. He frantically rose to his feet trying to dash to the door and safety below. He never made it. There was a blinding flash, then a rush of heat.

  The next thing he remembered was the hospital. His head was heavily bandaged; his right arm a bloody stump just below the elbow. His days of wielding the bolo were over. He stared at what was left of his arm in utter disbelief.

  For weeks he sweated in a half delirious state, tended by a Japanese girl who worked there. He remembered the day he first heard American voices at the hospital. General MacArthur had indeed returned. No one had any idea who Tan was, only that he had been found in the wreckage of the Fort, clothes torn from his body. The nurse told the G.I.’s he was a Filipino prisoner who had escaped execution. A few days later she took him home.

  When the bandages came off, Tan looked in the mirror as a tear rolled down his cheek. Not because he had become so thin and disfigured, but in relief that no one would ever recognize him. He
was safe from retribution.

  He married his nurse and they hid in the wreckage of Manila. No one, except his wife, knew of his past but Tan was dead from the inside, his purpose and vision in life ripped from him. Nearly eight years later after she eventually gave him a son, Tan sank deeper into depression and drunkenness. He never had a chance to get to know his half-Japanese son, because the former executioner died of heart failure soon after he was born. Mother and child simply disappeared into the chaos of post war Philippines.

  13

  BEL AIR, LOS ANGELES

  Jonathan had returned from his trip to the Philippines and had fully debriefed his boss the day before. Freshly showered and dressed, he got in the Range Rover. He was off to ensure that the Marcus Riley threat was to be neutralized. He thought back on his recent visit to his homeland and the death and destruction Sam’s visit there would now bring.

  It hadn’t taken him long to uncover what had caused Sam Wood to write that script when he had returned from his trip to the Philippines. No surprise. Rafael Satow had been the problem. He had always been weak.

  Born in 1953, Rafael Satow had tried to live a quiet life. He was devoted to his mother who had brought up her only child without a husband. Rafael’s father had died shortly after his birth, before the boy was old enough to have any memory of him.