Out on the Rim

by Ross Thomas

“Of course.”

  Wu took out a fat roll of $100 bills and started counting them onto the counter.

  “Wife and kiddies get off safely?” Naldo asked.

  Wu nodded and kept on counting.

  “You had a visitor.”

  Wu stopped counting and glanced up. “Who?”

  Naldo sniffed his disapproval. “Boy Howdy. He was looking for either you or Durant.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “That you were out sight-seeing and that Durant was touring somewhere down south. Mindanao, I told him, around Zamboanga.”

  “He believe you?”

  “No.”

  “When he comes back tell him I checked out and Durant’s down on Negros, dickering for a sugar plantation.”

  “He won’t believe that either.”

  “I don’t want him to believe it; I just want him to feel unwanted.”

  Naldo sniffed again. “Terrible man. But I suppose he really can’t help it, being Australian.”

  “Three thousand,” said Wu, sliding the money toward Naldo who picked it up and counted it with amazing speed. “Three thousand two hundred,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Oh,” Naldo said, pocketing two of the $100 bills. “How can I be of service?”

  “I need one of the hotel Mercedes for a few days.”

  “Of course. Would you like Roddy to drive again?”

  “No driver.”

  Naldo was instantly dismayed. “You want to drive yourself? The hotel can’t be responsible.”

  “It’s my kind of traffic, Bernie. I’m like a fish back in water.”

  “No, I’m sorry, but we can’t permit it.”

  “Bernie, let me ask you something. How much money have Durant and I spent with you guys the last three or four months?”

  “You’re both highly valued guests, but—”

  “I want the car outside at seven tomorrow morning, all gassed up and ready to go.”

  Naldo sighed. “Do you mind if it’s our oldest Mercedes?”

  “As long as it has wheels.”

  “And your suite?”

  “Run a tab on it.”

  “When can we expect you and Mr. Durant back—should you both survive?”

  “A few days.”

  “You wouldn’t reconsider and—”

  “No,” Artie Wu said. “I wouldn’t.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Wearing a yellow People Power T-shirt, seersucker pants and a pair of sandals, Artie Wu ate a large buffet breakfast in the Peninsula Hotel’s La Bodega—where they always lost money on him—and by 7:05 A.M. was slipping the hotel’s black Mercedes sedan through Manila’s demented traffic. As always, the Filipino drivers relied exclusively on their horns to signal their uncertain intentions. Artie Wu matched them toot for toot.

  At a long red light two professional beggar children approached him. The older child was a girl of no more than ten who carried her emaciated four-year-old brother in her arms. Their eyes were enormous; their expressions pitiable; their minds possibly retarded by malnutrition. Although suspecting that all beggar children stood for hours in front of mirrors to get their woebegone looks down pat, Wu nevertheless rolled down his window and put a twenty-peso note into the four-year-old’s palm.

  He knew the children would be lucky to get a dime out of the dollar he had just handed them. The rest would go to the cops and the syndicate they worked for. Wu also knew if they managed to live another year or two, the syndicate might fatten them up and turn them into child prostitutes.

  After leaving Manila, Wu didn’t stop until he reached Angeles and was past both the sprawling Clark Air Base and the long line of open-air shops that offered black market PX goods. He stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee and watched the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old U.S. airmen and their fifteen- and sixteen-year-old whores put away the Big Macs and the Cokes and the french fries at ten in the morning.

  Later, not far from Tarlac, which was Corazon Aquino’s hometown, Wu again stopped, locked the car, and walked up a short hill to inspect the memorial built on what was said to be the exact spot where the Bataan Death March had ended in 1942. Wu had passed the memorial several times, but had never stopped and was curious about what its plaque said. But there was no plaque. None that Artie Wu could find.

  The only other visitor was a lanky red-faced man with thinning gray hair and a limp who wandered around taking pictures with his Instamatic.

  “Where’s the plaque?” Wu asked him.

  “Guess somebody stole it,” the man said in an accent that Wu thought could be from either of the Dakotas or possibly Minnesota.

  “Hell of a thing,” Wu said.

  “Hell of a walk.”

  “You weren’t old enough.”

  “My daddy,” the man said. “That’s how I still think of him. Daddy. He shipped out to the P.I.’s in thirty-nine. I was two then. Don’t even know if he made it up this far. Never did find out what happened exactly—to him, I mean. But I thought I’d stop by and, you know, kind of pay my respects.”

  Wu nodded. The man glanced around, not much liking what he saw. “Looks like they could spruce it up a little.”

  “People like to forget lost wars,” Wu said.

  The man nodded. “I guess.” He squinted at Wu through the ninety-degree glare. “You’re not Japanese, are you?”

  “No,” Wu said.

  “For a second there I thought you coulda been one of the Japs that might’ve known my daddy and—aw hell, you know what I thought.”

  “Sure.”

  The man turned as if to give the Death March memorial one last look. “Well, what the fuck, I don’t even remember him anyhow.”

  Wu stopped for a late lunch at a resort called Agoo Playa that offered a fine black-sand beach facing the South China Sea and enough luxury rooms to sleep 140 guests. The town of Agoo in La Union province was near the foot of the Cordillera Mountains in northern Luzon and almost as far north as Baguio itself.

  Wu assumed the hotel-resort had been built by the Marcos government, or by some of the ex-President’s closer cronies. He sat, the lone guest in a dining room that would seat eighty, and ordered a beer and the seafood salad from one of the five young waiters who hovered close by. When the beer came, Wu asked, “How many guests do you have?”

  “In the rooms?” the young waiter said.

  Wu nodded.

  “Four.”

  “Think business will pick up?”

  The waiter shrugged. “When it gets hot.”

  “It’s hot now.”

  “Hotter,” the waiter said.

  Wu’s last stop before Baguio was the Marcos Park clubhouse that served an eighteen-hole golf course. He had a cup of coffee and admired the empty golf links and the nearly empty clubhouse. He was high in the mountains now and the temperature had dropped from 90 degrees to the mid-70s. The course below looked green, tough and inviting, and Wu thought it a shame nobody was playing.

  When he finished his coffee Wu went out on the stone verandah and gazed up at the great stone head of Ferdinand Marcos who glowered down at him. He had seen pictures of the head before, perched up on its own mountain, but had never been able to get a fix on its true size. He now guessed it was either five or six stories tall.

  Next to Wu was the only other tourist—a fiftyish man who was using a pair of binoculars to inspect the Marcos head. Still gazing through the binoculars, the man said, “Look at that, will you?”

  “What?”

  “The nose,” the man said in his New Zealand accent.

  Wu looked at the Marcos nose with its flared nostrils. He could just make out two small figures, suspended by ropes as they swung from the left stone eyebrow toward the nose. One of the figures was carrying something white.

  “What’re they doing?” Wu said.

  “Here. Take a look.” The man handed him the binoculars. As Wu put them up to his eyes and adjusted the focus, the man said, “Unless I miss my guess, those kids�
��re shoving a booger right up the old boy’s nose.”

  The binoculars came into focus. “Maybe it’s dynamite,” Wu said.

  “Mmm,” said the man from New Zealand. “Didn’t think of that, did I?”

  Artie Wu sometimes estimated that fifty percent of the Filipinos he met had been to San Francisco. And of those who had, one hundred percent always insisted the California city reminded them of Baguio.

  He didn’t buy the similarity. Both cities had hills and cool, even chilly, weather, but Baguio always reminded Artie Wu of some southern U.S. piney woods town during a spring cold snap. Asheville, maybe.

  Still, Baguio deserved its Summer Capital title because all Manila had once migrated there when the hot season began in March. All Manila meant the President, the Cabinet, select members of the National Assembly, the generals, the press, the new and old rich—and the swarm of civil servants and hangers-on who followed in their wake. Durant had once called Baguio the place where “the elite meet to eat and fuck up the country.”

  But that year the President was spending a hot March in Manila, trying to nail her country back together. As Wu drove past the presidential summer residence (where some kind of topiary spelled out “Mansion House” in ten-foot letters), he became stuck in a traffic jam and noticed the soldiers who guarded the mansion entrance were selling film to tourists. Wu took it as a sign of the new entrepreneurial spirit abroad in the land.

  Because he would rather drive one hundred miles the wrong way than ask directions, Wu took a wrong turn and wound up going downhill on Sessions Road, which was Baguio’s steep main commercial street. This led him down into the gridlocked market area that he had to honk and swear his way out of. Finally, by luck and guesswork, he wandered onto South Drive and found the Hyatt Terraces where Mr. Welcome-Welcome had reserved him a room.

  Once up in the room, Wu took a bottle of beer from the mini-refrigerator, drank half, picked up the phone and called the woman he always thought of as the Rich Widow. A servant answered on the second ring. Then Emily Cariaga came on with a warm and low-pitched, “Artie! How nice.”

  “How’ve you been, Emily?”

  “Let’s talk about that later. Here’s Quincy.”

  The first thing Quincy Durant said was, “Where are you—the Pines?”

  “Quincy,” Wu said. “The Pines burned down two years ago.”

  There was a brief silence until Durant said, “I blocked it, I guess. So. If you’re not at the Pines, you’re at the Hyatt.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll pick you up downstairs in ten minutes and we’ll go see him.”

  “See who?”

  “The Cousin,” Durant said. “Who else?”

  Camp John Hay served primarily as a country club for the U.S. airmen and officers stationed at Clark Air Base. In addition to its kilometer-and-a-half altitude, it offered golf, tennis, swimming, bowling, American films, a wealth of PX goods and an ocean of beer. But mostly it offered an invigorating change of climate. Well-behaved Filipinos could also use certain sections of the carefully tended grounds as a public park.

  It was almost dark when Quincy Durant stopped the Honda Prelude he had borrowed from Emily Cariaga at the camp gates and asked the MP on duty how to get to the post hospital. The MP handed Durant a map marked with a red X. As they drove on, Artie Wu asked, “Who’re we?”

  “Business associates,” Durant said.

  At the post hospital an enlisted orderly steered Wu and Durant into a small office where a young uniformed Army doctor, wearing a captain’s bars, sat with his feet on a desk, reading Time. He looked up at Durant, then at Wu and back at Durant.

  “You the Durant who called?”

  Durant nodded. “I’m Durant; he’s Wu.”

  The Captain put his Time on the desk, his feet on the floor and rose. “I’m Doctor Robbie. Let’s go.”

  Wu and Durant followed the Captain down a hall, a flight of metal stairs, and along a short basement corridor. The Captain used a key on a lock and tugged open a thick door. Wu and Durant felt a rush of cold air.

  Captain Robbie reached around the door and switched on a light. Wu and Durant followed him into the room, Wu closing the door behind them. It was cold inside and the only furniture in the 9 X 12—foot refrigerated room were two gurneys. On one of them was a man, naked except for a bath towel with Camp John Hay stitched across it in red letters. The towel covered the man’s crotch. He had light brown skin, a handsome playboy face, and appeared to be about thirty. His throat had been cut. Captain Robbie lifted the towel to give Wu and Durant a glimpse of the man’s crotch. “They got his balls too,” Captain Robbie said as he let the towel drop and turned to Durant. “Well?”

  “What was he wearing?” Durant said.

  “Why?”

  “When they cut off his balls did they take his pants down, off or what?”

  Captain Robbie gave his head a small shake, as if he didn’t understand Durant’s questions. “They found him just like that, naked as a jaybird, at oh-three-hundred this morning down by a post beer joint that’s called the Nineteenth Tee. His throat was cut and his balls were gone. No socks, no shoes, nothing. Just him. Buck naked and stone dead. You guys know him or not?”

  Durant looked at Wu. “I’d say that was Ernie, wouldn’t you?”

  Wu nodded. “Poor old Ernie.”

  Captain Robbie took a ballpoint pen and a small spiral notebook from a shirt pocket and clicked the pen into write. He opened the notebook and looked at Durant. “Ernie what?”

  “Ernesto Pineda,” Durant said and spelled the surname slowly.

  “He was what to you?”

  “We did some business with him once,” Wu said. “We thought we were going to do a little more, but I guess we aren’t.”

  “I guess not,” Captain Robbie said. “Who’s his next of kin?”

  “The only kinfolk I ever heard him mention was a third cousin,” Durant said.

  “Nobody closer?” Captain Robbie asked. “Wife, parents, brother, sister—even a niece or nephew?”

  Durant shook his head regretfully. “That third cousin was the only one Ernie ever mentioned.”

  The Captain shook his head and asked, “What’s the cousin’s name?”

  “Ferdinand Marcos,” Durant said.

  Captain Robbie’s smooth young face wrinkled itself into lines of worry and disbelief. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  Wu solemnly shook his great head from side to side.

  Captain Robbie winced and turned to stare down at the exiled President’s dead third cousin. “Goddamnit, Ernie, what a pain in the butt you’ve turned out to be.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Quincy Durant sat propped up in the Hyatt hotel bed, smoking a rare cigarette and drinking Scotch and water, when Artie Wu came out of the bathroom, shrimp pink from his shower and wearing only a pair of voluminous white boxer shorts. Wu started putting on the pants to the white silk money suit. He spoke only after he had the pants on and was buttoning a tent-size blue chambray shirt. “How much?”

  “About a thousand,” Durant said. “I spread it around town with the word that I was trying to locate Ernie. I got a call at six this morning from a taxi dispatcher. One of his drivers took an Air Force CID major to that post beer joint, the Nineteenth Tee, where they’d found Ernie. The Major’s car wouldn’t start, which is why he called a taxi. The driver recognized Ernie.”

  “But didn’t say anything.”

  “Not to anybody but the dispatcher.”

  Wu, looking into the mirror, carefully continued to knot his paisley tie. “What d’you think?”

  “What or who?”

  “Who.”

  “A cuckolded husband. A disappointed bankrupt maybe.”

  “Christ, that second one’s us.”

  “The list goes on,” Durant said and took another swallow of his drink. “A spurned lover, male or female. Some guy who didn’t get the job in the ministry of works, or whatever, that he’d paid Ernie to get him. A
n NPA sparrow team.”

  “Sparrow team. That’s nice.”

  “You prefer hit squad?”

  Wu shrugged. “Not really, but you may be right at that. Let’s say Ernie’s out cruising. He meets this young sparrow, male or female, in a bar and they agree to a quickie in the front seat of Ernie’s BMW. The second sparrow’s already down behind the back seat. He cuts Ernie’s throat, they drive out to the camp, strip him, cut him some more and leave him in the neo-colonialists’ playground as a warning to whoever they’re mad at this week. If you needed a symbol of corruption, you couldn’t do much better than Ernie.”

  “I always kind of liked him,” Durant said.

  “So’d I, until he stiffed us.” Wu crossed to the mini-refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap, had a swallow and looked at Durant. “It’s a write-off, isn’t it?”

  “The three hundred thousand? Total.”

  “How much’ve you got?” Wu asked.

  Durant finished his drink, put the glass down, ground his cigarette out, locked his hands behind his head, leaned back against the bed’s headboard and stared at the ceiling. “Three thousand two hundred and twenty-three dollars and a Gold American Express card that’ll lie still for a couple of months if we don’t beat it too hard. You?”

  “About the same,” Wu said. “Maybe two or three hundred more. I’m afraid to count it.”

  “If we needed to front something, I could probably borrow ten thousand from Emily.”

  “Front what, for Christ sake?” Artie Wu said as he put his beer down, picked up the white money suit’s jacket, flicked something from its left sleeve and slipped it on.

  “No idea.”

  Wu turned to examine himself in the mirror that hung over the bureau. “Boy Howdy’s looking for us.”

  Durant’s long face went still. Nothing moved. Not the green-gray eyes or the wide mouth that always stayed turned up at its ends. Artie Wu watched him in the mirror, trying to detect some reaction. It was no use looking for a flush because Durant wore one of those hot country tans that takes years to acquire and never seems to fade, not even in cold climates.