Romancing the Past

by Darcy Burke

  “I have to get the mutton out of the oven,” he said, knowing it was a flimsy excuse. Moss could see that his chef was taking care of things just fine.

  He tried again: “There is a mint sauce that I have prepared specially.” That was true, but it was already made, and the sous-chef was now placing it in a crystal bowl.

  Della nodded.

  He wanted to tell her the truth, that if he stayed in her arms any longer, he would be tempted to leave with her. The party could hang for all he cared. So could all politicians, especially imperialists who danced over the bones of the republics, Philippine and American.

  Della pulled her hands from his—not fast like he was on fire, but slowly, reluctantly, like she was forcing herself to give up Crème de Cacao forever. “Tend your party,” she said, a small smile on her lips. The woman had gotten so used to people giving up on her that she had learned to make them feel less terrible as they did it.

  “And then I will—”

  She shook her head. “I shall be fine.”

  And she would. The dreamy look in her eyes had dissolved. Della Berget, commodore of reality, was back. She pushed open the door and returned to the reception.

  Chapter 8

  The Refusal

  Americans had taken to Filipino party hours, if nothing else. The last guests left the reception just before one in the morning. Moss had gotten up well before dawn every morning this week, but he could not go to bed right away, not until he spoke to Della. He felt like celebrating. He felt impulsive. He did not know what he would tell her, but this time it would have nothing to do with mutton or mint sauce.

  He saw the congressman alone in the dining room. The man was finishing his whiskey and writing in his own little red notebook. Della’s own must have been a gift from him. Maybe the older man was not as unfeeling a cur as Moss thought.

  Holt did not look up from his book when Moss approached. No doubt he kept careful notes of those he met in case a connection proved profitable. Publicly, the congressman credited his career to an enviable Civil War record. At the green age of nineteen, Holt had single-handedly raised his own Union company from a then-Confederate state. His first duty was to oversee the vote on West Virginia statehood and restoration to the Union. Holt made sure everyone in Manila knew that story, as if the current war could be boiled down to a lesson of loyalty.

  It was more a lesson of opportunism: much of the man’s early fortune came from confiscated Confederate property. Moss felt no sympathy for the graycoats, but Holt’s path proved he was a selfish, meticulous, and calculated ladder-climber. How else had a landlocked West Virginian earned a seat on a Congressional committee overseeing island-dwellers?

  Moss sat. Holt looked up. His eyes, his most distinctive feature, seemed a half-size too large for his narrow, angular face. “Well, Mr. North,” the congressman said, “you should be congratulated for a successful evening.”

  It had been successful. Moss had even gotten some compliments on the food, though not every dish out of the kitchen had been popular. He had fed the extra gazpacho to his staff. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Good Tagals you hired.”

  Holt captured all the condescension and disdain of the worst epithets, without the worst words. Moss pushed his chair back in case he needed to leave quickly. “I’m glad you are pleased.”

  “A damned sight better service than the celestials I met our first day. The Chinaman works hard, but he’s most resistant to English.”

  Not as resistant as Americans were to Chinese or Tagalog. “Representative Holt, there is something I would like to talk to you about, if you have a minute.”

  “Oh?”

  “It is personal.”

  Holt smoothed down a few imaginary strands of hair but said nothing.

  “It is about your granddaughter,” Moss began. “I would like your permission to court her.”

  Holt stared.

  “If you’re worried about us out in Manila,” Moss kept on, hoping to win the man over by sheer zeal, “we can dine here—with a chaperone. And only if she is interested, of course, but I believe she will—”

  “No.”

  “If you ask her—”

  “I have no intention of doing so.”

  “Why?”

  “Della is my family.”

  “And?”

  “She deserves better,” Holt said.

  “I was only a private in the Minnesota Volunteers, but before that I was a long-time employee of the best hotel in the Midwest, the White Elephant.”

  “Strange name.”

  It was a good story when well told. “My uncle owned the hotel until recently. He was a respected member of the St. Paul business community.”

  Holt’s face stayed blank.

  “I am from an honest family,” Moss insisted. The death of his parents was an accident, not a condemnation of their lives.

  The congressman sighed and spoke slowly, as if to an idiot. “My granddaughter needs to be protected from the ugliness of this world. I cannot expose her to ridicule and shame.”

  “I would not—”

  “You want to get close to me, and you are using her to do it.”

  “No, I—”

  “I meet your kind all the time.”

  People who despise arrogant politicians?

  “And do not go around me on this,” Holt continued. “You think you can charm her into disobedience, telling her she’s special and—”

  “She is special.” But Moss instantly regretted speaking up. This man would not understand—he did not think his granddaughter was unique in any way other than her deafness or her inheritance.

  “Della is not yours to judge,” Holt said.

  “As she taught me herself. She is frank when she wants to be, but I would not change that, nor anything else about her. I want Della to follow her ambitions, to be the writer she wants to be.”

  “Ha,” the older man scoffed. “What do you know about her writing?”

  She had a nose for scandal that was too good by half. “She can practically read a lie on a person’s face. What better skill is there in a presswoman?”

  “Her tuition at that asylum was high enough that she might have been studying dental surgery, as far as I know.” Holt paused for a chuckle. “Lord knows what they published in that silly newspaper of theirs.”

  “You haven’t read her articles?”

  “It was a charity project! They printed it to wheedle out another donation from me.” He pointed at Moss’s chest. “That’s what I mean—people use her to get to me. They always have. You are no different.”

  None of this was progressing as Moss had imagined, but it was Holt’s pity for Della that angered him the most. No, to pity her, he had to see her as an entity separate from himself. He thought of her like a kid glove, a possession to be kept clean and boxed until it was useful.

  Was Moss any better? The thought settled around his heart like lead. How could he give her what she needed, when he was half petrified that her stories could cost him his job? Beyond that, what could he offer Della beyond a small apartment in the catacombs of a hotel? Even in America, he had no place to call home. He barely knew his brothers and sisters, nor had he been close to the uncle who raised him. The men he considered fathers were chefs and desk clerks, most of them dead by now. What could Moss offer a bride?

  “I am sorry that you don’t see what I see, sir, but your granddaughter is smarter than either of us. Any man she chooses will be lucky . . .”

  Moss trailed off when he saw Della at the entrance of the dining room. Even at this distance, Moss could plainly see her surprise that he was sitting with the congressman.

  What are you doing? her eyes asked.

  Moss glanced back at Holt, but he had already returned his attention to his journal.

  Della’s lips turned down, and she wrung her hands—not the reaction he was expecting. She spun and vanished through the beaded curtain door. Moss rose from the table and walked with as much s
elf-restraint as he could muster, but it was not long before he ran to follow.

  She was halfway across the gleaming mahogany floor of the lobby and almost at the stairs that led down to the red-tiled main entrance. The punkah boy had barely begun his exertions to cool the cavernous room, and she was already leaving it. Where the devil did she think she was going?

  Moss followed.

  She led him through a maze of hallways that no guest should know, and into Moss’s own office, which was dimly lit by a single electric bulb. It did not surprise him that Della had been lurking around the bowels of his hotel, investigating God-knows-what. She leaned against his desk.

  “I do not know how to tell you this gently,” she said. “But in two days, you are going to be arrested.”

  Chapter 9

  Eyes Closed

  Della wondered how many more times she would have to repeat the warning.

  “Arrested?” Moss asked again. “Just because I show interest in his granddaughter? For that, he would have me hauled away?”

  Della blushed. “You told him about the dance?”

  “No, I am still alive—for now. But I declared my intentions.”

  Intentions. She liked the determination of the word.

  “That is not why,” she said. “It is because of the six bags of flour.”

  Moss ran a hand through his hair. “Who cares about flour?”

  “The quartermaster. You have hundreds of dollars of government supplies in your storeroom.”

  “We buy surplus goods. For the reception, I purchased some mustard and—”

  “Mustard?”

  “Just one jar. Okay, a big jar. Maybe they should not sell to veterans, but I think it’s a regular practice. Nothing illegal.”

  He rubbed his bloodshot eyes, and Della realized how exhausted he was.

  She reached up and touched his face. “Look at me,” she said. “Listen.”

  He moved his head into her hand, and she caressed his cheek. He closed his eyes and relaxed into her care. “I am listening, even if my eyes are closed.”

  She did not understand how he could trust his ears that much, but she talked to his closed eyes, as he wished. “The quartermaster of Southern Luzon is a man named Captain Barrows,” she began softly. She rubbed her fingers in his hair above his ears, and he breathed on her wrist. “Barrows has made a lot of money selling supplies—like bacon and flour—from the Army depot. Only he did not report the sales. He pocketed the cash. One of his accomplices got scared and turned him into the military police, but not before Barrows made as much as $100,000.”

  Moss opened his eyes. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Per month.”

  “Jesus. What does this have to do with me?”

  “How often do you get deliveries from the quartermaster?”

  “Why?”

  “There is something I need to show you.” She drew her fingertips down the sides of his face, leaving his skin with one last gentle press of reassurance.

  Della used her now unsteady hands to light the new German pressure lamp on his shelf. It took a few tries.

  “Here,” she said. “Take this.” He did not need the lantern; he probably knew the way in the dark through the unelectrified passage, behind the empty kitchen, and into his storeroom. So did she, but she would get to that.

  He led her into the storeroom, as she wished. The glowing white mantle lamp painted the closest shelves with light. If he wanted to see into every corner, he would have to press the electric switch—but maybe the lamp was enough truth for him, for now. He set it down on a table.

  She gestured to the bags in front of them. Flour, Wheat. U.S. Army Issue. 50 lbs. Net. Contract No. NXS-16007. There were six of them, just as she said.

  “There’s rum and brandy here,” she said. “Vinegar there, salt there, and then there’s all that.” She pointed to a line of cans—Mother Fuller’s corned beef hash, Heinz baked beans, and Armour fried bacon—all with U.S. Army purchase labels pasted across them.

  “You know my inventory better than I do.”

  “Yes.”

  Moss looked at the sacks. He touched a can. “You think I stole this?”

  “No.”

  “Why were you poking around here to begin with?”

  She stepped around the lamp to face him head-on for a flatter light. “Because that is what I do. They are going to search the whole place on Saturday with list in hand of the most pilfered items—these things here are on the list.”

  “All hotels need these things.”

  “Well, you can tell that to Colonel Wilder, the Chief of Police. He’s the one who downed a quarter of a bottle of whiskey in your dining room tonight.”

  “Damn it.” Moss shook his head. “Why Saturday?”

  “Grandfather asked them to wait until the reception was well over.”

  “Can’t let my incarceration impede his shindig. When did you learn about this?”

  “About the date of the search? Tonight.”

  “But you’ve been poking around longer than that.”

  “I knew about the scandal, but I didn’t think you were involved, not until I saw this stuff coming and going.” She had spent her day watching and counting. The windows of her bedroom were huge, and they overlooked the service entrance.

  “Della, what do you expect? This flour”—he patted a bag—“could have been ordered by my new baker, Luz. She probably bought it from Clarke’s.”

  “They have not implicated Met Clarke. At least, not yet.”

  “As if the police would know where to look. That man has more warehouses than the Army itself,” Moss said. “I shall talk with Luz.”

  “If she is involved, would she tell you anything? Better to leave you holding the bag—literally.”

  “She would not do that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  Della knew that an angry American constable could probably terrify Luz into giving up the Virgin Mary herself. A policeman back home in Washington, D.C. would be limited by due process of law in the Fifth Amendment; the same officer in Manila was not. “I hope you are right,” she said.

  “Why did you wait to tell me this now?”

  She held out her hand, but he did not take it.

  She moved the lamp directly between them, again seeking better light on his face. “I had to piece together a lot of different conversations. I looked for you after but . . .”

  “I was easy to find. I was with your grandfather.”

  It was hard for Della to watch both lips and eyes, but she did it well enough to recognize Moss’s anger. “You have more faith in your baker’s intentions than in mine.”

  “No.” He paused. “I think we are missing something here.”

  “Missing what?” She narrowed her gaze. “Ah, you think I could not understand what those men said right in front of my eyes.”

  “You said yourself it was difficult to follow them.”

  “Yes, it is always difficult. It takes work, and it is exhausting. But have I misunderstood you once tonight?” She waved a hand at the single lamp, as if he could understand how difficult its shadows made her task.

  “Della, there has to be another explanation.”

  She pulled her gaze from Moss’s mouth and looked straight into his eyes. “Then I shall leave you to find out what that is. Good luck.”

  Chapter 10

  Need to Know

  Moss stopped Seb just as he was about to go home for the night. “You can’t leave yet,” Moss told him. “Not until we sort this out.”

  “Sort what out?”

  “You know what.” Moss was angry at himself, but his friend probably could not tell the difference.

  Moss had to remind himself that a two-and-a-half-year friendship outweighed three hundred pounds of flour, no matter what the kitchen scales said. For most of that friendship, Seb had been the one doing Moss the favors. There was the night when Moss mixed local coconut wine with Cyru
s Noble Rye Whiskey. Not caring for God, man, or devil, Moss had thought midnight the perfect time to sing an off-key serenade to the lovely Marita two streets down. When he failed to attract Marita to the window, he pounded on the door, so loaded for bear that he shrugged off all of Seb’s tugs and warnings. The door finally opened to reveal an angry, silver-haired patriarch—a man Moss later learned was a spy for the Filipino Revolutionary Army. Seb had somehow smoothed things over the next morning, and he had never told Moss how much it cost him.

  There were a dozen similar stories—a history that made the present conversation much more difficult. Moss had never questioned Seb’s decisions before, and he did not want to do so now. When Seb said to leave the inventory to him, the one with grocer and supply connections, Moss was thankful. That was how it worked between them: if Manila was the grandest motor of modern life in the Pacific, Seb was the chief engineer and Moss the tenderfoot salesman.

  But tonight Moss dragged Seb to the storeroom and asked only one word: “Why?” He pointed to the flour, the canned goods, and the booze.

  Seb looked confused. “You needed flour for Luz. It is good quality, just like the soldiers use.”

  “Not just like the soldiers use, Seb. Exactly what the soldiers use.”

  “So?”

  “The flour is stolen.”

  “I did not steal it.” But Seb did not seem surprised.

  “Who sold it to you?”

  Silence.

  “Dammit, Seb,” Moss whispered.

  Moss’s friend took a step back, like the curse itself was a blow. “I filled the empty shelves. You did not ask questions.”

  “Don’t tell me this is the ‘local’ way of doing business—”

  “No, it is the white man’s way!” Seb shook his head. “This is how the Oriente did business before you and I came. I had no choice.”

  “With whom did you make this arrangement?”