They were playing hip-hop and it was really music for the cheapskate New Year’s Eve crowd, but we danced anyway. People hardly dance in clubs anymore. Everyone just stares at everyone else, worried that everyone else is having a better time. Gil Gordon was now staring at my hand on the small of her back, and it felt wet with sweat. I thought of what chances I’d have against him. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d made a fist.
Andy’s mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear what she said. I moved my face close to hers and put my ear right next to her mouth. She was asking me if I wanted to do a couple of lines. I never say no to that, so I tailed her into the bathroom, where they pumped the music in so it was like a little club built for two. When we came out, Gil Gordon was blocking the doorway with a funny smile on his face.
My father once told me that in a fight, I should never look into the other guy’s eyes. He told me to focus on the little spot where the eyebrows meet. As soon as I clocked Gil Gordon right on the jaw I thought it was probably the first successful punch I’d ever thrown. Blame it on the music. Blame my next punch on the way Andy was looking at me. I would have thrown another if the bouncers hadn’t stepped in. The way they handled the situation you could tell it happened a lot, except that maybe this was kindergarten stuff compared to the things that sometimes went down.
I can’t remember if Andy grabbed my hand or it was the other way around, but the next thing I knew we were getting into my car. Drive fast! she yelled. Don’t think, let’s go! One-two-three. That’s how my father taught me things happen in commercials.
Andy was all giddy. She had her bare feet up on the dashboard and kept playing with her phone. She said she wanted to text her friends about what went down at the club, but she just couldn’t type properly. Fucking autocorrect! I said she didn’t need to, her friends were bound to find out soon enough. The way shit like this spreads. Manila is so small, I said. It’s twenty million people but I was talking about the people and the places we knew. Shit, she said, shit. You shouldn’t have done that. She couldn’t help but laugh again, briefly caressing my cheek with her hand. Not that guy. You shouldn’t have done that.
I drove hard until we had gone past the Makati skyline and we were on my side of town, whizzing past the dark apartment buildings and the shophouses on J.P. Rizal. I swung a hard left and we were on my street. You can’t miss the building where I live because there’s an InstaPure water refilling station on the ground floor and a twenty-four-hour Mini-Stop right across from it. There’s an elevator but it takes forever and we were still really lit so we walked up ten flights to my floor. I didn’t know what she’d think of my shit apartment but I mostly didn’t care.
I took a couple of joints out of a jar in the fridge. We smoked them and we didn’t really move, not for what seemed like hours, and it felt unnatural when we lifted our hands to smoke or shifted our legs. The only thing that felt easy was talking.
She asked me what I did for a living, who my parents were, what they did. Things you never really ask when you’re in a club. I told her I was an adman, just like my father had been. Remember that TV spot where a girl walks into a bar full of men and orders the nonalcoholic beer? That snap election commercial where the female candidate confesses that she’s just a woman and isn’t really fit to run the country? All my father’s. But talking about it that way somehow made it mine, as if I could inherit things like that instead of money.
When I grew tired of talking Andy asked me to take her home. We were both exhausted, though the weed had done much to make us forget what had happened earlier. It was still dark outside. It was maybe four in the morning when we stepped out of the apartment into the thick smoke of last night’s firecrackers, holding our breath until we got back into my car.
There were clusters of people out on the streets drinking gin and beer and lighting up whatever firecrackers were left. I thought I could hear each bang go off separately. We saw a couple of punks at the intersection ahead lighting up some stuff, waiting to toss it under the car as we drove past.
The shape appeared in front of us like it was formed out of fog, an SUV in a straight path toward us. I saw Gil Gordon at the wheel, his face briefly lit by the splash of headlights across his windshield. His elbow rose at the last second to shield his face and swerve at the same time. He fishtailed and his rear flank spun toward us.
I thought about my mother who never had to work a day in her life, until my father died from of all sorts of complications following a stroke. It followed a long night of work, following a successful pitch, following a long-wished-for promotion. Which is why I drove his car—the only thing he had passed on to me—for fourteen years before I earned the company car plan. I drove my mother around—to the grocery, to the mall where she watched one movie a week, to my aunt’s office in Legaspi Village where she did part-time work. And my mother kept reminding me to drive carefully, reaching over to knock on the speedometer loudly whenever I went over whatever speed limit she had in mind at the time, because she was sitting in what she called the “death seat.” The kind of catchy phrase my father would have invented to scare enough shit out of people to make them want to buy whatever he was selling—hand cream because chores caused sores, mouthwash because gingivitis would eat up your gums, disinfectant soap because things had consequences and your conscience would never forgive you.
I asked Andy if she was okay and she said yes she was. I brushed my hands over her body from her scalp to her ankles. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for—broken bones, maybe, or the sudden wetness of blood, but I didn’t find anything. I kept asking if she was okay and she waved me off and was already trying to make a call on her smashed phone.
My cell phone’s gone dead. The fat man sticks his arm out again, a fresh cigarette between his fingers, a tattoo of someone’s initials on his forearm. For a moment I think I see the driver flicking a firecracker in my direction. I bang my fist on the horn and get nothing but the sound of plastic being punched.
An explosion makes my ears ring and I can hear the blood throbbing like it’s trying to find a way out of my head. I can’t hear the music anymore. The smoke fills the car and it’s making me sleepy, but something tells me we’re back on J.P. Rizal again. Andy’s leaning back against the headrest. Her face is frozen and her mouth is in the shape of an O, looking like it’s right in the middle of singing a song.
PART II
BLACK PEARL OF THE ORIENT
COMFORTER OF THE AFLICTED
BY
F.H. BATACAN
Lagro
The neck is broken. That’s why the head is turned at such an unnatural angle. The body is lying chest down on the floor, but the head tilts upward and twists sharply to the right, a rotation of more than ninety degrees. The eyes are open, staring. Something in that frozen expression makes Saenz think she did not go down meekly. Her fingernails are rimmed with gunk from where she scratched her attacker, raked flesh, drew blood.
Senior Inspector Mike Rueda stands quietly behind the priest, waiting.
Saenz straightens up from a crouching position over the body with a slight groan.
“You okay, Father?” Rueda asks.
“I’m an old man,” Saenz mumbles, almost to himself. He strips off the latex gloves, presses the heel of his left hand against his right eye to relieve the pressure there. He is about to absentmindedly stuff the bloodstained gloves into the pocket of his jeans when Rueda reaches out to stop him.
For a man with a prizefighter’s face, Rueda is surprisingly gentle. “Let me take those.” He holds open his own gloved hand. Saenz realizes his mistake, grunts, and hands the gloves over. He glances down at his jeans and notices a small red streak where the gloves have made contact with the denim.
“Like I said, Mike. An old man.”
Rueda bags the gloves. “You need a vacation.” He shrugs at the woman’s body. “Well, maybe after this one.” He turns, motions for a young officer to take the small bag for disposal. When she’s out of
earshot, he moves closer to the priest. “So was it the broken neck, or the glass?”
She had fallen from the stairs onto a glass-top table. The blood pooled beneath her head was from where a large sliver of glass had lodged itself in her brain.
“Either, both,” Saenz shrugs. “What matters is, was she pushed?” He glances up at the stairs, waving long fingers toward a section of the balustrade near the top that had given way. “You try a fracture-match on that, and I’m guessing the stress marks will be consistent with a forceful impact. Not with any mere weakness in either the structure or the material.” Back to the woman now, fully absorbed in her face. “Gave him hell, though. Her luck ran out at the top of the stairs, but before she went down, she made him suffer nearly as much as she did.”
Rueda surveys their surroundings. Books have fallen off shelves, picture frames knocked off walls, furniture overturned. “Satisfied it’s a him, then?”
Saenz nods. “There’s a full-length mirror on the door of one of the bedrooms. It’s cracked. Nothing lying around it, and a bit of blood and hair at the point of impact. So what cracked it was a someone, not a something. Someone’s head, in fact.”
“And it’s a him because …?”
“The hair is short.” A note of exasperation lends a slight edge to Saenz’s voice. “And the point of impact is a few inches above where it would have been, had that head been hers. She’s, what—about 5'5", 5'6"? Bit taller than the average woman here. So if the person who cracked the mirror is even taller, odds are it’s a man.”
Rueda takes a deep breath, biting down his own frustration. Father Augusto Saenz is a forensic anthropologist by training, and technically his expertise wouldn’t be needed for cases like this. But if Rueda and his people could see things as clearly, connect the dots as quickly as the Jesuit does, he wouldn’t be asking him to his crime scenes so often. “Okay. I’ll make sure someone gets samples from the mirror too.”
Saenz doesn’t answer, doesn’t even seem to have heard. He is still looking intently into her face. “You brave girl,” he mutters. “You brave, brave girl.”
Her parents have been arguing for what seems like hours, but suddenly the shouting stops.
They told her to stay downstairs but she needs to know if it’s all right to come up now, if they’re going to start making dinner soon. So she creeps up the stairs and then she hears it, thud-thud-thud, like someone hitting the wall with a fist, then gasping, panting, whispered words that she can’t quite understand.
When she opens the door, her father has his hand around her mother’s throat, and he is pounding her face against the headboard.
Blind instinct, blind rage, blind something else that the child can’t understand makes her rush toward them, makes her clamber up the bed and onto his back. She grabs great thick fistfuls of his hair, tugs hard, and he releases his grip on her mother, pulls himself up from where he has been looming over the woman and pinning her down. He turns his attention to the screaming six-year-old on his back, and with one easy motion flings her off.
The child falls and hits her head on the floor, pain blooming a dozen colors in her field of vision before bleeding into white, but she gets up and lunges for him, all fingernails and elbows and tiny sharp teeth. And he knocks her back just as easily as the first time, and still she comes back for more.
The fourth time she comes at him, he picks her up by an arm, shoves her out of the room, and locks the door. The child doesn’t know it yet, but her shoulder has been dislocated.
Under ordinary circumstances, someone would have heard. The Lagro house is in a subdivision carved out of the side of a hill, and although each house is built on its own little plot of land and surrounded by concrete walls, someone would still have heard something. The living room had been a wreck when Saenz, Rueda, and his team arrived; the bedrooms only slightly less so. When she fell from the stairs, it was likely that she screamed. When her body landed below, the glass table had shattered on impact. Either of the two would have woken someone.
But everyone was awake, and still nobody heard anything. A much bigger racket was drowning it all out. It was New Year’s Eve when the killer came into her home, and nobody heard them battling it out above the din of firecrackers, blaring car horns, paper trumpets, random gunfire, and people shouting and singing in the streets. He could not have chosen a better time to strike.
Saenz is sure of one thing: she knew the man. She knew him, and she had let him in. She was polite. She made coffee. She served cookies. They talked, they drank. Somewhere between coffee and her neck breaking, something happened, an argument perhaps. He had flung her around the room, but she had flung him right back. She had been a strong woman, and she didn’t make it easy for him. If a neighbor hadn’t made an excess of potato salad for medianoche, brought it over to share with Libby, taken the open gate as an invitation and the ajar front door as a warning, Libby’s body might not have been found for days.
Saenz had taken a picture of her before they removed her body. His phone is filled with dead faces. He remembers each and every one of them, the ones he could help and the ones he couldn’t. The faces are mostly slack and blank. Sometimes the fear is unmistakable, drawn plain in the wide eyes, the twist of the open mouth.
Her dead face is different, neither blank nor afraid. When he goes to bed he tries to forget it, but her face stays in his mind, hovering in the darkness there. Several times in the night he is compelled to look at the photograph. Just one more time, this will be the last, I’ve got to get some sleep.
He finally recognizes what’s written on her face: not fear, but fury.
She’s fourteen. She comes home from school one day, her mother is sitting on the kitchen floor. There is broken glass everywhere, shards of plates whose patterns she can still recognize.
She knows her mother will be sitting on the floor like this for a while. She takes a broom and a dustpan and begins to sweep carefully around the woman.
When they go shopping for new plates days later, the girl suggests to her mother, with deliberate nonchalance, that they buy plastic ones. “It’s cheaper,” she explains, and leaves it at that.
Her name was Olivia Delgado—Libby. She was thirty-nine, and she lived alone. She read a lot, and liked Jack ’n’ Jill potato chips (twelve packs in three different varieties in the kitchen cupboard). Libby didn’t seem to have many friends, if her profile page on one of those social networking websites is anything to go by. She wasn’t pretty, but in her pictures she looked straight into the camera, relaxed, confident, the barest hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. She wasn’t into sports but had climbed six mountains, wasn’t much into clothes but had forty-three pairs of shoes.
Saenz wants to pull aside and question the few people at her memorial service—relatives, friends, colleagues. But they recognize him from the television news; they know who he is and what he does for the police, and they actually go out of their way to avoid him. He finds this odd. He tells Rueda a few days later and Rueda grimaces.
“I thought you priests were trained to be sensitive. You didn’t think it was a bad time to be asking questions?”
“I was trying to help,” Saenz snaps.
“I know, Father. I didn’t mean to—”
Saenz waves him away. “No, you’re right. It was … inappropriate.”
Rueda has known Saenz for decades. When the priest was younger, he used to be genial, easygoing. Over the years, however, he has grown quieter, more guarded. He still looks preternaturally young—Saenz in his sixties remains a showstopper of a man— but his eyes are ancient, haunted. He’s prone to irritability and ill temper. It’s difficult now for Rueda’s younger officers to believe that the priest who comes to their crime scenes every once in a while ever used to be a “nice man.” At best he’s reserved; at worst he’s testy and dismissive. And he’s always in a rush, always telling people to hurry up. Age slows most people down, but then again Saenz isn’t most people. If anything, age seems to have sped h
im up, downright turbocharged him, with little patience or understanding to spare for anyone who can’t keep up.
Rueda thinks Saenz is racing to finish as much as he can, while he still can.
He slides a notepad across the table to the older man. There’s a list scribbled on the top page. “I don’t have enough people to do this, and I’ve got my hands full till Wednesday.”
Saenz rips the page off and folds it neatly, slips it into his shirt pocket, makes for the door. Rueda is grateful but he doesn’t say anything. They know each other well enough that such niceties are no longer necessary.
She’s sixteen, old beyond her years, and finally escapes high school. It’s time for her real life to start, she’s good at math, she chooses a major. She keeps everyone at bay because people are always asking questions she doesn’t want to answer.
She’s seventeen, she tries out for the swim team and makes the dean’s list, her mother breaks and heals and breaks again. She’s eighteen, she passes her driving test. She wants to wait for her father outside his office and run him down, back up, and drive over him, again and again in a loop until there’s nothing left but a stain on the concrete. It’s a fantasy, she knows she can’t do it, so she studies hard, she applies herself. She sees the future as a dark tunnel through which she must pass to get to the light, dragging her mother behind her.
She graduates with honors, gets three offers almost instantly, and chooses the best, not the one that pays the most. She combs through real estate listings, claws her way to independence. She learns to climb mountains. She bides her time.
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