“But he wouldn’t,” Isabel said.
Señora Fabella gazed at her daughter. “No, he wouldn’t. He just stood there with his jaw clamped shut. Then your father asked me to leave the room, saying it was now a matter between two men. Minutes later, Elias came running out with a bloody cut on his eyebrow.” Señora Fabella sighed. “Now I have to deal with the boy’s mother.” Then she added, “I hate it when your father is always proven right.”
Isabel sat on the stool in front of her mother, a bag of books pressed close to her chest. There’d been a book stall at the park, selling discarded library books from American high schools at only twenty pesos each. “Mama,” Isabel began, but couldn’t go on.
Señora Fabella glanced at her daughter, then at the bulging bag. “Oh Isabel,” she began, before falling silent. Isabel waited. Then Señora Fabella took a deep breath and repeated what her husband had said to her an hour before: “We will not speak of this again.”
Isabel went to their secret cave later that day, sneaking out at siesta time—and the next day, and for days after that. It was Elias who had found the hole in the banyan tree behind the city hall, when he moved the rock covering it. It was big and deep enough for a small person to hide in. Here she left Elias sardine cans, only one or two a week, to avoid suspicion. She was ecstatic to find the cans gone every time she returned, and she went to bed knowing that Elias was safe in their secret cave, where he made his home every night. Isabel was convinced that if she found Elias, she would take him back home and confess the truth. But of what use was her confession if Elias wasn’t there to be exonerated?
For six months she faithfully left him his sardines until, one morning, a box of imported Spam was delivered to the house. Señora Fabella rewarded the workers with bonus gifts of Spam each time they reaped a windfall at the plantation. That morning, Isabel slipped a can into her schoolbag and left it in the tree on her way home. The next day, after school, as she crossed the plaza to go to the tree with the hole, she saw a ragged old man sitting on the grass, clutching the can of imported Spam. He flashed her a toothless grin.
Soon, the words The Datu, scrawled over the zigzag figure of a crocodile, began to dominate Davao City’s graffiti. The Datu’s rise to street gang leadership was easy and quick. Cell phone snatching, not breaking-and-entering, was his specialty. But the Davao Death Squad’s mission was to rid the city of vermin like him, either by extermination or recruitment. The Datu had all the makings of an excellent young recruit.
The Philippine Center for Human Rights Research is a nongovernmental organization that monitors violations of human rights in the Philippines. It is committed to producing material that is well informed and objective. I am writing to solicit your views for our research on the pattern of execution-style killings of suspected petty criminals and street children.
Isabel glances up from her laptop to mull over the next sentence of her letter. Only then does she realize that the café in the Intramuros Hotel is now filled with people. She had been the only customer an hour ago, after strolling back from the Casa Manila. Next to her, there are two other people hunched over their laptops. Three ebony-haired elderly ladies are at another table, conversing softly. The quiet is unusual for a café these days, when such places have become the favorite venue for conducting job interviews or presenting sales pitches, interrupted only by the noise of motorcycle engines outside and the occasional backfire.
Isabel leans back in her chair and wishes, at this moment, that she had a more normal job than writing up reports on human rights violations. She’s been stonewalled by enough government officials in her own hometown to delude herself that bureaucrats in Manila would be any more forthright when she interviews them. Death squads? she can almost hear them say in the patronizing tone that she’s learned to tune out. You mean like in the backwater barrios down south? Nah, tell your boss there are no human rights violations here. Just your ordinary run-of-the-mill crimes. We’ve got the peace-and-order situation here under tight control.
Isabel fantasizes that Elias is sipping cappuccino with her in this café, and she’s interviewing him instead. Is it true there are death squad training camps here, now, in Manila? Were you sent here to run them? Or are you in hiding from them yourself? Do you ever regret joining the DDS? Do you ever regret killing my father?
And there he is, on the other side of the café’s glass wall, gazing at her. “Elias!” she blurts out, and realizes that her voice rings out above the other customers’ hushed voices, because they have all stopped to stare. She gestures at him to wait, then hurries outside.
“Uy,” she says, and gives his arm a light slap. “Must na, ’dong?”
“Maayo man, ’day.” Elias starts to smile, but the somber expression remains. The shiny scar across his left eyebrow is almost imperceptible. “You’re still following me.”
Isabel keeps an eye on her laptop through the café’s window.
“Don’t worry, no one will take it.”
“You sound so sure.”
Elias finally breaks into a smile. “You’re safe with me. I’m DDS, remember?”
“Was.”
He doesn’t respond but asks her instead if she wants a special tour of Intramuros.
“Now? It’s after dark.”
“The best time of day, if you want to see the real Intramuros.”
She goes back into the café to retrieve her laptop and deposit it in her room. She decides to leave her bag behind and pocket whatever she needs, so her hands will be free of any encumbrance. A camera, too, would be unwise.
“What? No map?” Elias asks when he sees her empty-handed, making Isabel laugh. “Barrio Santa Lucia has an ancient well at the very heart of it,” he says. “Legend has it that nuns threw their aborted fetuses into the well. Would you like to see it?”
Isabel nods.
At the barrio, lightbulbs strung above the narrow alley can be turned on and off by anyone who knows where the switches are. Very convenient for anyone living a fugitive life. “Do you live here?” she asks.
“No,” he replies without elaborating further.
She wants to ask if he has a family—and if so, where they are—but she doesn’t.
Beneath the Intramuros of contrived nostalgia and simulated refinement is a maze of underground tunnels that neither guidebook, tour guide, nor map hint at. The night guards at every building Elias and Isabel go to are his friends. They all speak Visaya, the language of Davao, and they are very pleased to know that Isabel speaks their language too. They let the two wander around on their own. Elias takes Isabel first to a boys’ school that had once been a convent. The guard on duty insists on lending them two flashlights when Elias tells him he wants to show his friend the tunnel. As Elias and Isabel walk through it, they can hear the muffled sound of tricycles mixing with that of horses’ hooves and calesa wheels grating against the pavement above. They exit the tunnel into the basement of a bank that had once been a monastery. A friendly guard greets Elias there too, calling him “sir.”
Isabel wonders aloud if anyone has ever tried a bank heist via the tunnel, and Elias says, “We could do it together. Like Bonnie and Clyde.”
Breaking-and-entering was never his thing, Isabel remembers. Elias had gone directly from snatching cell phones to “salvaging” people.
There are three more tunnels underneath former monasteries and convents, and more friendly Visayan security guards in each one. Elias then takes her to the abandoned shell of the largest building of all—a bombed-out cathedral. It is in an out-of-theway place, obviously a section of Intramuros that the local officials haven’t gotten around to making over yet. Promenaders dare not venture there, and not a single tricycle nor calesa passes them on the street.
In a corner of the ruins, Elias clears away loose rubble, soil, rocks, and bricks over a square slab of stone before lifting it. A neat, circular hole reveals itself. They go down the stone steps that lead to a cavernous passage. It is two calesas wide, two men high,
and lined with red adobe bricks. They have gone in only a few steps when Elias points to a pair of skeletons lying prone on a ledge. They are the remains of not very grown people. “Maybe this was the way our Spanish masters got rid of their vermin too,” he says.
They walk another five meters to a fork in the passageway. “If we go left, we go out to another former convent. If we go right, we end up at the other cathedral, the one that survived the war. Which one do you want to take?”
Isabel’s gaze follows the beam of her flashlight as far as it can go and sees that both tunnels are the same size as the main passage. “The cathedral,” she says.
He leads the way. They continue walking until his flashlight shines on the stone steps leading up. She calculates that they’d be underneath the middle of the cathedral now. Here it is absolutely still.
“Turn around, Elias,” she says. She has taken a pistol out of her pocket, the only thing she has brought with her on this “tour.”
He turns around and the corners of his mouth twitch in amusement. “A mousegun?” he says. Death squad members always use .45-caliber handguns.
“I don’t do this for a living.”
“No, you don’t,” he says. Besides, she was never a doer. She always just read and wrote. As he knew her, this was the last thing she’d be able to do. “And you don’t want to start. It gets easier after the first.” He sees her finger tighten on the trigger. “There are witnesses. All my friends will know it was you.”
He means the security guards. But their loyalty is to their job, Isabel knows that much. Not one of them would be likely to come forward to admit that he’d let two trespassers in on his watch.
Elias guesses what she is thinking. “I mean the police. I help them get rid of the vermin here too.”
“I have the right credentials. What are yours?”
“You’re right. I’m the killer here. You’re the defender of human rights.”
“Only because I wanted to find you.”
“You’re blaming me for your father’s death? It was you who stole that money. Because it certainly wasn’t me. A measly hundred pesos—”
“I tried to make it up to you.”
“With sardines?”
“You wouldn’t let me give you anything else.”
“Give. What could you have given?”
He was put in prison with his mother and father even before he’d committed any crime. Anything Elias did after that was bound to be suspect. Isabel understands this. But none of it had been her making. Nor her murdered father’s.
Elias makes a grab at the gun.
Back in the café, Isabel resumes writing her letter to the mayor of Manila.
Although reports of targeted killings in the Philippines are not new, the number of victims has seen a steady rise over many years. In recent years the geographical scope of such killings has expanded far beyond Davao City on the southern island of Mindanao, to Cebu City in central Philippines, and now to Manila. An already serious problem is becoming much worse.
There is no end to the vermin needing extermination.
SATAN HAS ALREADY BOUGHT U
BY
LOURD DE VEYRA
Project 2, Quezon City
"Do you know what shabu means? Did you know that each letter means something?” Cesar asked, pressing a clean sheet of aluminum foil between two one-peso coins.
“You mean an acronym,” Franco replied, a dull glint of the strip crossing his vision.
“A what?”
“An acronym. That’s what you’re trying to say. Each letter stands for a word. Like PBA. Philippine Basketball Association. Or NBA …”
“I get it. Exactly. An acronym. So … you know what shabu means?”
“I didn’t know it meant anything.”
“Satan Has Already Bought You.”
“What?”
“Satan … has already bought … you,” said Cesar, his index finger digging into Franco’s shoulder for emphasis. “Satan.”
“I don’t remember selling anything. Least of all to the devil,” said Franco, his gaze still fixed on Cesar’s deft hands.
“Satan has already bought you.” Cesar tried to sound priestlike.
“So that means he’s bought you too, Cesar?”
“I guess. Satan has already bought you. You too.”
“Where the hell did you come up with that?” Franco asked.
“Heard it on the radio. Some Christian station.”
Franco chuckled. “Wait. Lemme guess … that’s probably DJ Dan. That holier-than-thou asshole. Did you know he was a major meth-head a couple of years back? You should’ve heard him when he was still with that station RA 106. Major psycho. Broke up with his wife on air, just before he played some stupid Duran Duran song. Oh, these born-again Christian pricks. Getting high on Jesus is the worst. There’s no rehab for that.”
“Satan. Has. Already. Bought. You,” Cesar muttered under his breath.
“What’s with the You? Following that logic, it ought to be SHABY. Right? Or it could also mean, Satan Has Already Bought US.”
“Just shut the fuck up and gimme that packet already, will you? How much is this worth?”
Cesar’s sudden display of impatience shook Franco. “One-five,” he replied, giving the small plastic pocket a little shake to loosen the milky crystal bits inside.
Cesar inspected the packet against the light and made a few gentle taps with his index finger. “This definitely does not look like one-five. Are you trying to put one over on me again?”
“Why the fuck would I do that?”
“This isn’t the first time, Franco. You know that—”
“Hey, fuck you, man.”
“I remember the last time. I just kept my mouth shut. I know you smoked some of my shit at Bing’s house.”
“That’s not true.” Franco’s protest dissipated into a whine.
“And the one before that. One-five? Looked more like P500 to me. You know you shouldn’t be doing that. In other places, you could get killed. You don’t fuck around with other people’s hard-earned money like that.”
“What the fuck are you talking about!”
“Shut up. You’re ruining my concentration.” Cesar reached for a pair of scissors, the cheap, plastic kind for grade-schoolers. It was small but its edges were monstrously sharp, ending in frightful angles. They let kids use these in classrooms? he thought, then snipped off the top of the plastic packet and placed it once more against the fluorescent light.
“I swear, dude, I didn’t smoke from your stash. You gotta trust me.”
“Lemme guess. You sent Jong to do the scoring for you, right? You lazy, thieving subcontractor.”
“No. Look, you know how these things go. There’s no Department of Trade and Industry representative to inspect if they’re serving the exact weight. There ain’t no customer-complaint desk. One week it’s a full packet, the next it’s just a fourth. And if you ask why, they’ll just say, ‘Not enough supply’ or, ‘Cops shaking us down again,’ or some other excuse.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just shut the fuck up and hand me that lighter.”
Cesar sprinkled a few bits of the meth onto the small aluminum gutter in his hand. Seen from the side, the sheet was folded in an almost perfect V.
The temperature was razor. Cesar felt like his eyeballs were being roasted. They said that Quezon City was the ideal place because it had more trees than, say, Manila or Pasay. Here in Project 2, there seemed to be more greenery per square meter than most cities, but the heat was brutal. It was the kind that broiled brains, which, in turn, lead to stupid decisions, smashed bottles, broken teeth, slashed wrists, and hogtied corpses fished from the river.
Cesar decided to change the subject. “But then there’s Precinto Cinco—that’s where bad things happen. It’s on the corner of Bignay Street and Anonas Road, and it’s cursed. No business that has opened beside it has ever lasted, not even a year. Cursed, I tell you.”
“What I remember was
the Adobo Republic—”
“Not even six months.”
“Too bad, cause their adobo was to die for. And before that, there was the pawnshop. I remember the robbery—”
“Two security guards dead. One stabbed in the eye. Cursed!”
“Yeah. Who the hell stabs people in the eye?”
“To be fair, this is good shit.” Cesar took another whiff. “Look at how this thing rolls. Beautiful.”
Like a distended teardrop, a clear globule slid down the aluminum strip, turning from an opaque yellowish-white into pure white smoke, gently flowing into the small tube tucked between Cesar’s lips. The tooter looked like some stylishly alien cigarette.
“Told you. Quality over quantity.”
“I still think you cheated me.”
“Will you just cut it out, Cesar? Sheesh.”
“Good thing you didn’t cross a cop. Otherwise, they’d be fishing your body out of the Quirino River by now. Those cops don’t have a sense of humor. Especially the ones in Precinto Cinco.”
“Those guys are the biggest, nastiest drug dealers in the district,” Franco agreed.
“I know. And the last guy who turned out to be a bad customer got his balls cut off. You know where they found his balls?
On the counter of Kawilihan Bakery. Imagine buying your early morning pan de sal and you see that …”
“Pan de sal with eggs. Perfect.”
“Don’t laugh. I think they should do that to you too.”
“For the last fucking time, I did not—”
“Satan has already bought you!” Cesar yelled, taking Franco by surprise. “Hahaha. Wanna smoke? It’s your turn, though I bet you already had your share before coming here.”
“My father told me a story,” Cesar started a little while later. “They had orders to finish this teenage pickpocket, who was a repeat offender. He was in and out of jail every week, it was almost like he lived there. And the cops got used to the routine, until the kid did something really stupid. He—with his cousin, another worthless druggie—held up a jeepney. It was an improvement over lifting wallets and snatching bags. But, know what? He crossed a line. He cut the finger off this nursing student.”
Manila Noir Page 4