king up the narrow shaft, pushing frantically on
the feet of Wing, who is above him and not going as fast as he would like,
he feels a growing panic in his lungs. Finally he understands that he must
fight the urge to hold his breath that his lungs are filled with air at a
much higher pressure than the water around him, and that if he doesn't let
some of that air out, his chest will explode. So against his instinct to
save that precious air, he lets it boil out of his mouth. He hopes that the
bubbles will pass by the faces of the men above him and give them the idea
too. But shortly after he does it, they all stop moving entirely.
For perhaps ten seconds Goto Dengo is trapped in total darkness in a
water filled vertical hole in the rock that is not much wider than his own
body. Of all the things he has experienced in the war, this is the worst.
But just as he gives up and prepares to die, they begin moving again. They
are half dead when they get to the breathing chamber.
If Goto Dengo's calculations were right, then the pressure in here
should be no more than two or three atmospheres. But he is beginning to
doubt those calculations. When he has breathed in enough air to restore full
consciousness, he's aware of sharp pains in his knees, and it's clear from
the sounds that the others are making that they are suffering the same way.
"This time we wait as long as we can," he says.
The next leg is shorter, but it's made more difficult by the pain in
their knees. Again Rodolfo goes first. But when Goto Dengo rises up into the
next air chamber, about one and a half atmospheres above normal, only Bong
and Wing are there.
"Rodolfo missed the opening," Bong says. "I think he went too far up
the ventilation shaft!"
Goto Dengo nods. Only a few meters beyond where they turned into this
passage is a ventilation shaft that goes all the way to the surface. It has
a sharp sideways jog in the middle that Goto put there so that when Captain
Noda filled it up with rubble (which he has presumably done by now), the
diagonal tunnel their escape route would not be blocked. If Rodolfo went up
that shaft, he found a cul de sac, with no air bubble in the top.
Goto Dengo doesn't have to tell the others that Rodolfo is dead. Bong
crosses himself and says a prayer. Then they stay for a while and take
advantage of the air that Rodolfo should be sharing. The pain in Goto
Dengo's knees becomes sharper, but after a while it plateaus.
"From here, only small changes in altitude, not much need to
decompress. Mostly we swim for distance now," he says. They still have more
than three hundred horizontal meters to cover, pierced with four more shafts
for air. The last of these doubles as a legitimate ventilation shaft.
So from there on it is just swimming and resting, swimming and resting,
until finally the walls of the tunnel peel away from them and they find
themselves in Lake Yamamoto.
Goto Dengo breaks the surface and does nothing for a long time but
tread water and breathe clean air. It is nighttime, and for the first time
in a year, Bundok is quiet, except for the sound of Bong, kneeling on the
shore of the lake, making the sign of the cross and mumbling prayers as fast
as his lips can move.
Wing has already departed, without so much as a good bye. This is
shocking to Goto Dengo until he realizes what it means: he, too, is free to
go. As far as the world knows, he is dead, all of his obligations
discharged. For the first time in his life, he can do whatever he wants.
He swims to the shore, gets up on his feet, and starts walking. His
knees hurt. He cannot believe that he has come through all of this, and his
only problem is sore knees.
Chapter 82 BUST
"Kopi," Randy says to the flight attendant, then reconsiders,
remembering that he is in steerage this time, and getting to a toilet might
not be so easy. It's just a little Malaysian Air 757. The flight attendant
sees the indecision on his face and wavers. Her face is framed in a gaudy,
vaguely Islamic scarf that is the most tokenistic nod to sexual modesty he
has ever seen. "Kopi nyahkafeina," Randy says, and she beams and pours from
the orange carafe. It is not that she doesn't speak English, just that Randy
is starting to feel comfortable with the local pidgin. He realizes that this
is the first step in a long process that will eventually turn him into one
of these cheerful, burly, sunburned expats who infest the airport bars and
Shangri La hotels of the Rim.
Outside his window, the long slender isle of Palawan lies parallel to
their flight path. A fogbound pilot could almost get from Kinakuta to Manila
by following Palawan's beaches, but that is a moot point on a day like this.
Those beaches slope gradually into the transparent waters of the South China
Sea. When you're down there planted in the sand, looking at a glancing angle
across the waves, it probably doesn't look like much, but from up here you
can see straight down through the water for many fathoms, and so all of the
islands, and even the coral heads, have skirts that start out dark brown or
dun near the water and blend into yellow and finally into swimming pool blue
before eventually fading into the deep blue of the ocean. Every little coral
head and sandbar looks like the iridescent eye on a peacock's plume.
After the conversation at Tom Howard's last night, Randy slept in his
guest room and then spent most of the day in Kinakuta buying a new laptop,
complete with a new hard drive, and transferring all of the data from the
drive he salvaged in Los Altos onto the new one, encrypting everything in
the process. Considering all of the completely boring and useless corporate
documents he has subjected to state of the art encryption, he can't believe
he carried the Arethusa stuff around on his hard drive, unencrypted, for
several days, and across a couple of national borders. Not to mention the
original ETC punch cards, which now reside in Tom Howard's basement safe. Of
course that stuff is encrypted to begin with, but that was done in 1945, and
so by modern standards it might as well have been enciphered with a cereal
box decoder ring. Or at least that is what Randy is kind of hoping. Another
thing he did this morning was to download the current version of the
Cryptonomicon from the ftp server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy's
never looked at it in detail, but he has heard it contains samples of code,
or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the
very latest public code breaking techniques in the Cryptonomicon might match
up to the classified technology that Pontifex and his colleagues were
employing at the NSA thirty years ago. Those techniques didn't work against
the Arethusa messages that they were trying to decrypt, but this was
probably only because those messages were random numbers not the real
messages. Now that Randy has what he suspects are the real messages, he may
be able to accomplish what Earl Comstock tried and failed to do during the
fifties.
They are angling across the terminator not the robotic assassin of
moviedom, but the line between night and day through which our planet
incessantly rotates. Looking east, Randy can see over the rim of the world
to places where it is dusk, and the clouds catch only the reddest fraction
of the sun's light, squatting in darkness but glowing with sullen contained
fire like coals in their feathery ruffs of ash. The airplane is still in the
daylight, and is assiduously tracked by mysterious bars of rainbow, little
spectral doppelgangers probably some new NSA surveillance technology. Some
of the Palawan's rivers run blue and straight into the ocean and some carry
enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept
up the shore by currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there
is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of these countries are
burning resources at a fantastic rate to get their economies stoked up,
gambling that they'll be able to make the jump into hyperspace some kind of
knowledge economy, presumably before they run out of stuff to sell and turn
into Haiti.
Randy is paging his way through the opening sections of the
Cryptonomicon, but he can never concentrate when he's on an airplane. The
opening sections are stolen pages from World War II era military manuals.
These used to be classified until ten years ago, when one of Cantrell's
friends found copies just sitting in a library in Kentucky and drove there
with a shitload of dimes and photocopied them. That got public, civilian
cryptanalysis up to where the government was in the l940s. The Xeroxes have
been scanned and OCRed and converted to the HTML format used for Web pages
so that people can put in links and marginal notes and annotations and
corrections without messing with the original text, and this they have done
enthusiastically, which is all very well but makes it hard to read. The
original text is set in a deliberately crabbed, old fashioned typeface to
make it instantly distinguishable from the cyber era annotations. The
introduction to the Cryptonomicon was written, probably before Pearl Harbor,
by a guy named William Friedman, and is filled with aphorisms probably
intended to keep neophyte code breakers from slapping grenades to their
heads after a long week of wrestling with the latest Nipponese machine
ciphers.
The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time
by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.
Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It
generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when
one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly
the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous
days of labor were unable to reveal.
And, Randy's favorite,
As to luck, there is the old miners' proverb: "Gold is where you find
it."
So far so good, but then with a few whacks of the Page Down key Randy's
looking at endless staggered grids of random letters (some kind of
predigital method for solving ciphers) which the author would not have put
into the document if they did not convey some kind of useful lesson to the
reader. Randy is miserably aware that until he has learned to read through
these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War
II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED
LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY
FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that
the book was written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant,
who lived in some radically different pre hokiness era where planes really
did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see
their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in
conversation were likely to end up pitied or shunned or maybe even
psychoanalyzed.
Randy feels like a little shit when he thinks about this stuff. He
wonders about Chester. Is the shattered 747 hanging from Chester's ceiling
just a monumental act of bad taste, or is Chester actually making a
Statement with that thing? Could it be that nerdy Chester is actually some
kind of deep thinker who has transcended the glibness and superficiality of
his age? This very subject has been debated by serious people at some
length, which is why learned articles about Chester's house keep showing up
in unexpected places. Randy wonders if he's ever had a serious experience in
his life, an experience that would be worth the time it would take to reduce
it to a pithy STOP punctuated message in capital letters and run it through
a cryptosystem.
They must have flown right by the site of the wreck. In a few days
Randy will turn right around and come halfway back to Kinakuta to make what
meager contribution he can to the job of dragging gold bars out of it. He's
only going to Manila to take care of some business there; some kind of
urgent meeting demanded by one of Epiphyte's Filipino partners. The stuff
that Randy came to Manila to do, a year and a half ago, mostly runs itself
now, and when it actually requires his attention he finds it fantastically
annoying.
He can see that the modern way of thinking about stuff, as applied to
the Cryptonomicon, isn't going to help him very much in his goal of
decrypting the Arethusa intercepts. The original writers of the
Cryptonomicon actually had to decrypt and read these goddamn messages in
order to save the lives of their countrymen. But the modern annotators have
no interest in reading other people's mail per se; the only reason they pay
attention to this subject at all is that they aspire to make new crypto
systems that cannot be broken by the NSA, or now this new IDTRO thing. The
Black Chamber. Crypto experts won't trust a cryptosystem until they have
attacked it, and they can't attack it until they know the basic
cryptanalytical techniques, and hence the demand for a document like this
modern, annotated version of the Cryptonomicon. But their attacks generally
don't go any further than demonstrating a system's vulnerabilities in the
abstract. All they want is to be able to say in theory this system could be
attacked in the following way because from a formal number theory stand
point it belongs to such and such class of problems, and those problems as a
group take about so many processor cycles to attack. And this all fits very
well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to
do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the
accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples
of things into the proper intellectual pigeon holes.
But the gap between demonstrating the vulnerability of a cryptosystem
in the abstract, and actually breaking a bunch of messages written in that
cryptosystem, is as wide, and as profound, as the gap between being able to
criticize a film (e.g., by slotting it into a particular genre or movement)
and being able to go out into the world with a movie camera and a bunch of
unexposed film and actually make one. Of these issues the Cryptonomicon has
nothing to say until you tunnel down to its oldest and deepest strata. Some
of which, Randy suspects, were written by his grandfather.
The head flight attendant comes in on the intercom and says something
in various languages. Each transition to a new language is accompanied by a
sort of frisson of confusion running through the whole passenger
compartment: first the English speaking passengers all ask each other what
the English version of the announcement said and just as they are giving it
up as a lost cause the Cantonese version winds down and the Chinese speaking
passengers ask each other what it said. The Malay version gets no reaction
at all because no one actually speaks the Malay language, except maybe for
Randy when he is asking for coffee. Presumably the message has something to
do with the fact that the plane is about to land. Manila sprawls out below
them in the dark, vast patches of it flickering on and off as different
segments of the electrical power grid straggle with their own particular
challenges vis à vis maintenance and overload. In his mind, Randy is already
sitting in front of his TV tucking into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. Maybe there
is a place in NAIA where he can purchase a brick of ice cold milk, so that
he will not even have to stop at a 24 Jam on the way home.
The Malaysian Air flight attendants all have big smiles for him on the
way out; as globe trotting expat technocrats all know, hospitality industry
people think it is just adorable, or pretend to think so, when you try to
use some language any language other than English, and they remember you for
it. Soon he is inside good old NAIA, which is sort of, but not fully, air
conditioned. There is a whole group of girls in identical windbreakers
gathered by his baggage carousel, chattering like an exaltation of larks
under a DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS sign. The bags take a long time to arrive
Randy wouldn't have checked baggage at all except that he acquired a lot of
books, and a few other souvenirs, on his trip some salvaged from the ruined
house and some inherited from his grandfather's trunk. And in Kinakuta he
bought some new diving gear that he hopes he will put to use very soon.
Finally he had to buy a big sort of duffel bag on wheels to carry it all.
Randy enjoys watching the girls, apparently some kind of high school or
college field hockey team on the road. For them, even waiting for the
baggage carousel to start up is a big adventure, full of thrills and chills;
e.g., when the carousel groans into action for a few moments and then shuts
down again. But finally it starts up for real, and out comes a whole row of
identical gym bags, color coordinated to match the girls' uniforms, and in
the middle of them is Randy's big duffel. He heaves it off the carousel and
checks the tiny combination padlocks: one on the zipper for the main
compartment and one on a smaller pocket at the end of the bag. There is one
more tiny pocket on the top of the bag which has no practical function that
Randy can think of; he didn't use it and so he didn't lock it.
He deploys the bag's telescoping handle, lifts it up onto its built in
wheels, and heads for customs. Along the way he gets mixed into the group of
field hockey players, who find this extremely titillating and hilarious,
which is slightly embarrassing for him until they start finding their own
hilarity hilarious. There are only a few customs lanes open, and there is a
sort of traffic director waving people this way and that; he shoos the girls
towards the green lane and then, inevitably, ducts Randy into a red one.
Looking through the lane, Randy can see the area on the other side
where people wait to greet arriving passengers. There is a woman in a nice
dress there. It's Amy. Randy comes to a complete stop the better to gape at
her. She looks fantastic. He wonders if it's totally presumptuous of him to
think that Amy put on a dress for no other reason than that she knew Randy
would enjoy looking at her in it. Whether it's presumptuous or not, that's
what he does think, and it almost makes him want to faint. He doesn't want
to let his mind run completely out of control here, but maybe there is
something better in store for him tonight than digging into a bowl of Cap'n
Crunch.
Randy steps into the lane. He wants to just bolt through and head
straight for Amy, but this would be a bad idea. But it's okay. Anticipation
never killed anyone. Anticipation can actually be kind of enjoyable. What
did Avi say? Sometimes wanting is better than having. Randy's pretty sure
that having Amy would not disappoint, but wanting ain't such a bad thing
either. He is holding his laptop bag out before him and drawing the big
duffel behind, slowing gradually to a stop so that it won't roll forward
under its own momentum and break his knees. There is the requisite long
stainless steel table and a bored fireplug shaped gentleman behind it
saying, "Nationality? Port of embarkation?" for the hundred thousandth time
in his life. Randy hands over his documents and answers the questions while
bending down to heft the duffel bag up onto the metal tabletop. "Remove the
locks please?" the customs inspector says. Randy bends down and squints at
the tiny brass wheels, trying to line them up into the right combination.
While he's doing that, he hears the customs inspector working right next to
his head, unzipping the tiny, empty pocket on the top of the duffel bag.
There is a rustling noise. "What is this?" the inspector asks. "Sir? Sir?"
"Yes, what is it?" Randy says, straightening up and looking the
inspector in the eye.
Like a model in an infomercial, the inspector holds up a small Ziploc
bag right next to his head and points to it with the other hand. A door
opens behind him and people come out. The Ziploc bag has been partly filled
with sugar, or something maybe confectioner's sugar and rolled into a cigar
shaped slug.
"What is this, sir?" the inspector repeats.
Randy shrugs. "How should I know? Where did it come from?"
"It came from your bag, sir," the inspector says, and points to the
little pocket.
"No, it didn't. That pocket was empty," Randy says.
"Is this your bag, sir?" the inspector says, reaching with one hand to
look at the paper claim check dangling from its handle. Quite a crowd has
gathered behind him, still indistinct to Randy who is understandably
focusing on the inspector.
"I should hope so I just opened the locks," Randy says. The inspector
turns around and gestures to the people behind him, who en masse move
forward into the light. They are wearing uniforms and most of them are
carrying guns. Very soon, some of them are behind him. They are, as a matter
of fact, surrounding him. Randy looks towards Amy, but sees only a pair of
abandoned shoes: she is sprinting barefoot toward a line of pay telephones.
He'll probably never see her in a dress again.
He wonders whether it would be a bad idea, from a narrowly tactical
point of view, to ask for a lawyer this soon.
Chapter 83 THE BATTLE OF MANILA
Bobby Shaftoe is awakened by the smell of smoke. It is not the smoke of
cookies left too long in the oven, piles of autumn leaves being burned, or
Boy Scout campfires. It is a mixture of other kinds of smoke with which he
has become quite familiar in the last couple of years: tires, fuel, and
buildings, for example.
He props himself up on one elbow and realizes that he is lying in the
bottom of a long skinny boat. Just above his head, a dirty canvas sail luffs
in a treacherous and foul smelling breeze. It is the middle of the night.
He turns his head to look upwind. His head doesn't like it. Fierce pain
is trying to batter down the doors of his mind. But the pain is not getting
in. He senses the muffled booms of the pain's hobnailed boots against his
front door, but that's about it.
Ah! Someone has given him morphine. Shaftoe grins appreciatively. Life
is good.
The world is dark a matte black hemisphere inverted over the plane of
the lake. But there is a horizontal crack around the edge, off to the boat's
port side, where yellow light is leaking through. The light glimmers and
sparkles like stars viewed through the heat waves above the hood of a black
automobile.
He sits up, peers at it, gradually getting an idea of scale. The ragged
trail of yellow light extends from the boat's eight o'clock, all the way
around past the bow, to about one o'clock. Maybe it is some incredibly weird
sunrise phenomenon.
"Myneela," says a voice behind him.
"Huh?"
"It is Manila," says another voice, closer to him, speaking the English
version of the name.
"Why's it all lit up?" Bobby Shaftoe has not seen a city lit up at
night since 1941, and has forgotten what it looks like.
"The Japanese have put it to the torch."
"The Pearl of the Orient!" someone says, farther back in the boat, and
there is rueful laughter.
Shaftoe's head is clearing now. He rubs his eyes and takes a better
look. A couple of miles off to port, a steel drum full of fuel takes off
into the sky like a rocket, and disappears. He begins to make out the bony
silhouettes of palm trees along the lake shore, standing out against the
flames. The boat moves on across the warm water quietly, tiny waves chiming
against its hull. Shaftoe feels as if he has just been born, a new person
coming into a new world.
Anyone else would ask why they are traveling into the burning city,
instead of running away from it. But Shaftoe doesn't ask, any more than a
newborn infant would ask questions. This is the world he has been born into,
and he looks at it wide eyed.
The man who has been speaking to him is sitting on a gunwale next to
Shaftoe, a pale face hovering above a black garment, a white rectangular
notch in his collar. The light of the burning city refracts warmly in a
string of amber beads from which depends, a heavy, swinging crucifix.
Shaftoe lies back down in the hull of the boat and stares up at him for
awhile.
"They gave me morphine."
"I gave you morphine. You were difficult to control."
"I apologize, sir," Shaftoe says with profound sincerity. He remembers
those China Marines who went Asiatic on the trip down from Shanghai, and how
they disgraced themselves.
"We could not tolerate noise. The Nipponese would have found us."
"I understand."
"Seeing Glory was a very bad shock for you."
"Level with me, padre," says Bobby Shaftoe. "My boy. My son. Is he a
leper too?"
The black eyes close, and the pale face moves back and forth in a no.
"Glory contracted the disease not long after the child was born, working in
a camp in the mountains. The camp was not a very clean place."
Shaftoe snorts. "No shit, Sherlock!"
There is a long, uncomfortable silence. Then the padre says, "I have
already taken confessions from the other men. Would you like me to take
yours now?"
"Is that what Catholics do when they're about to die?"
"They do it all the time. But yes, it is advisable to confess
immediately before death. It helps what is the expression grease the skids.
In the afterlife."
"Padre, it looks to me like we're only an hour or two away from hitting
the beach. If I start confessing my sins to you right now, I might get up to
stealing cookies from the cookie jar when I was eight years old."
The padre laughs. Someone hands Shaftoe a cigarette, already lit. He
takes a big suck on it.
"We wouldn't have time to get into any of the good stuff, like nailing
Glory and killing a whole lot of Nips and Krauts." Shaftoe thinks about it
for a minute, enjoying the cigarette. "But if this is one of those deals
where we are all going to die and it sure looks like one of those deals to
me there is one thing I gotta do. Is this boat going back to Calamba?"
"We hope that the owner can take some women and children back across
the lake."
"Anyone got a pencil and paper?"
Someone passes up a pencil stub, but there is no paper to be found.
Shaftoe searches his pockets and finds nothing but a skein of I SHALL RETURN
condoms. He opens one of them, peeling the halves of the wrapper apart
carefully, and tosses the rubber into the lake. Then he spreads the wrapper
out on the top of an ordnance crate and begins to write: "I, Robert Shaftoe,
being of sound mind and body, hereby leave all of my worldly goods,
including my military death benefits, to my natural born son, Douglas
MacArthur Shaftoe."
He looks up into the burning city. He considers adding something like,
"if he's still alive," but nobody likes a whiner. So he just signs the
fucking thing. The padre adds his signature as witness. Just to add some
extra credibility, Shaftoe pulls off his dog tags and wraps the will around
them, then wraps the dog tags' chain around the whole thing. He passes it
down to the stern of the boat, where the boatman pockets it and cheerfully
agrees to do the right thing with it when he gets back to Calamba.
The boat isn't wide, but it's very long and has a dozen Huks crammed
onto it. All of them are armed to the teeth with ordnance that has obviously
come off an American submarine recently. The weight of men and weaponry
keeps the boat so low in the water that waves occasionally splash over the
gunwales. Shaftoe paws through crates in the dark. He can't see for shit,
but his hands identify, the components of a few Thompson submachine guns
down in there.
"Parts for weapons," one of the Huks explains to him, "don't lose
those!"
"Parts, nothing!" Shaftoe says, a few busy seconds later. He produces a
fully assembled trench broom from the crate. The red coals of half a dozen I
SHALL RETURN cigarettes leap upwards into the Huks' mouths as they free
their hands for a light round of applause. Someone passes him a pie shaped
magazine, heavy with .45 caliber cartridges. "Y'know, they invented this
kind ammo just to knock down crazy Filipino bastards," Shaftoe announces.
"We know," one of the Huks says.
"It's overkill for Nips," Shaftoe continues, jacking the tommy gun and
the magazine together. The Huks all laugh nastily. One of them is moving up
from the stern, making the whole boat rock from side to side. He is a very
young, slight fellow. He holds out his hand to Bobby Shaftoe. "Uncle Robert,
do you remember me?"
Being called Uncle Robert is hardly the weirdest thing that has
happened to Shaftoe in the last few years, so he lets it slide. He peers at
the boy's face, which is dimly illuminated by the combustion of Manila.
"You're one of the Altamira boys," he guesses.
The boy salutes him crisply, and grins.
Then, Shaftoe remembers. Three years ago, the Altamira family
apartment, carrying the freshly impregnated Glory up the stairs as air raid
sirens wailed all around the city. An apartment filled with Altamiras. A
squad of boys with wooden swords and rifles, staring at Bobby Shaftoe in
awe. Shaftoe throwing them a salute, then running out of the place.
"All of us fought the Nips," the boy says. Then his face falls, and he
crosses himself. "Two are dead."
"Some of you were pretty damn young."
"The youngest ones are still in Manila," the boy says. He and Shaftoe
silently stare across the water into the flames, which have merged into a
wall now.
"In the apartment? In Malate?"
"I think so. My name is Fidel."
"Is my son in the same place?"
"I think so. Maybe not."
"We'll go find those kids, Fidel."
***
Half the population of Manila seems to be standing along the water's
edge, or in the water, waiting for a boat like theirs to show up. MacArthur
is coming down from the north, and the Nipponese Air Force troops are coming
up from the south, so the isthmus between Manila Bay and Laguna de Bay is
corked at both ends by great military forces waging total war. A ragged
Dunkirk style evacuation is in progress along the lake side of the isthmus,
but the number of boats is not adequate. Some of the refugees are behaving
like civilized human beings, but others are wading and swimming out towards
them trying to get first dibs. A wet hand reaches up out of the water and
grabs the boat's gunwale until Shaftoe crushes it with the butt of his
trench broom. The swimmer falls away, clutching his hand and screaming, and
Shaftoe tells him he's ugly.
There is about half an hour's more ugliness as the boat cruises back
and forth just out of swimming range and the padre handpicks an assortment
of women carrying small children. They are pulled up into the boat one by
one, and the Huks climb off the boat one by one, and when it's all finished
the boat turns around and glides off into the darkness. Shaftoe and the Huks
wade ashore, carrying crates of ammunition between them. By this point,
Shaftoe has grenades dangling off his body all over the place, like teats on
a pregnant sow, and most of the Huks are walking all slow and stiff legged,
trying not to collapse under the weight of the bandoliers in which they have
practically mummified themselves. They stagger into the city, bucking a tide
of smoky refugees.
This low land along the shore of the lake is not the city proper it is
a suburb of humble buildings made in the traditional style, of woven rattan
screens with thatched roofs. They burn effortlessly, throwing up the red
sheets of flame that they watched from the boat. Inland, and a few miles
north, is the city proper, with many masonry buildings. The Nipponese have
put it to the torch also, but it burns sporadically, as isolated towers of
flame and smoke.
Shaftoe and his band had been expecting to hit the beach like Marines
and get mowed down at the water's edge. Instead, they march for a good mile
and a half inland before they actually lay eyes on the enemy.
Shaftoe's actually glad to see some real Nips; he has been getting
nervous, because the lack of opposition has made the Huks giddy and
overconfident. Then half a dozen Nip Air Force troops spill out of a store
which they have evidently been looting they are all carrying liquor bottles
and stop on the sidewalk to set fire to the place, fashioning Molotov
cocktails from stolen bottles of firewater. Shaftoe pulls the pin on a
grenade and underhands it down the sidewalk, watches it skitter for a while,
and then ducks into a doorway. When he hears the explosion, and sees
shrapnel crack the windshield of a car parked along the street, he jumps out
onto the sidewalk, ready to open up with the tommy gun. But it's not
necessary; all of the Nips are down, thrashing weakly in the gutter. Shaftoe
and the other Huks all take cover and wait for more Nipponese troops to
arrive, and help their injured comrades, but it doesn't happen.
The Huks are elated. Shaftoe stands in the street brooding while the
padre administers last rites to the dead and dying Nipponese. Obviously,
discipline has completely broken down. The Nips know they are trapped. They
know MacArthur is about to run right over them, like a lawn mower plowing
through an anthill. They have become a mob. For Shaftoe, it's going to be
easier to fight mobs of drunken, deranged looters, but there's no telling
what they might be doing to civilians farther north.
"We're wasting our fucking time," Shaftoe says, "let's get to Malate
and avoid further engagements."
"You are not in command of this group," says one of the others. "I am."
"Who's that?" Shaftoe asks, squinting against the light of the burning
liquor store.
It turns out to be a Fil American lieutenant, who was sitting way back
in the boat, and who has been of no use at all to this point. Shaftoe knows
in his bones that this guy is not going to be a good combat leader. He
inhales deeply, trying to heave a sigh, then gags on smoke instead.
"Sir, yes sir!" he says, and salutes.
"I am Lieutenant Morales, and if you have any more suggestions, bring
them to me, or keep them to yourself."
"Sir, yes sir!" Shaftoe says. He doesn't bother to memorize the
lieutenant's name.
They work their way north through narrow, clogged streets for a couple
of hours. The sun comes up. A small airplane flies over the city, drawing
ragged fire from exhausted, drunken Nipponese troops.
"It is a P 51 Mustang!" Lieutenant Morales exclaims.
"It's a fucking Piper Cub, goddamn it!" Shaftoe says. He has been
holding his tongue to this point, but he can't help it now. "It's an
artillery spotter plane."
"Then why is it flying over Manila?" Lieutenant Morales asks smugly. He
enjoys this rhetorical triumph for about thirty seconds. Then the first
artillery rounds begin to bore in from the north and blast the shit out of
various buildings.
They get into their first serious firefight about half an hour later,
against a platoon of Nipponese Air Force troops holed up in a stone bank at
the vee formed by a couple of intersecting avenues. Lieutenant Morales comes
up with an extremely complicated plan that involves breaking up into three
smaller groups. Morales takes three men forward into the cover of a large
fountain that sits in the middle of the square. There, they are immediately
trapped by heavy fire from the Nipponese. They squat and huddle behind the
shelter of the fountain for about a quarter of an hour, at which point an
artillery shell glides in from the north, a black pellet easing downwards in
a flawless parabolic trajectory, and scores a direct hit on the fountain. It
turns out to be a high explosive shell, which does not blow up until it hits
something the fountain, in this case. The padre gives Lieutenant Morales and
his men last rites from a safe distance of a hundred yards or so, which is
as good a place as any, since there is nothing left of their physical
bodies.
Bobby Shaftoe is voted new squad leader by acclamation. He leads them
around the square, giving the whole intersection a wide berth. Way up north
somewhere, one of The General's batteries is doggedly trying to zero in on
that fucking bank, blowing up half the neighborhood in the process. A Piper
Cub banks overhead doing lazy figure eights, offering suggestions over the
radio: "Almost there a little to the left no, too far now bring it in a
little bit."
It takes Shaftoe's group a whole day to make another mile's progress
towards Malate. They could get there in no time by simply running up the
middle of major streets, but the artillery fire is coming in heavier and
heavier as they head north. Worse, much of it consists of antipersonnel
rounds with radar proximity fuses that blow up while they're still several
yards above the ground, the better to spray shrapnel all over the place. The
air bursts look like the splayed foliage of burned coconut palms.
Shaftoe sees no point in getting them all killed. So they take it a
block at a time, sprinting one by one from doorway to doorway, and scouting
the buildings with great care in case there are any Nips lying in wait to
shoot at them from the windows. When that happens, they have to hunker down,
scout the place out, count windows and doors, make guesses about the
building's floor plan, send men out to check various lines of sight.
Usually, it is not really difficult to root the Nips out of these buildings,
but it is time consuming.
They hole up in a half burned apartment building around sunset, and
take turns getting a couple of hours' sleep. Then they push on through the
night, when the artillery fire is less intense. Bobby Shaftoe gets the whole
remaining squad, nine men including the padre, into Malate at about four in
the morning. By the time dawn breaks, they have reached the street where the
Altamiras live, or lived. They arrive just in time to see the entire
apartment block being systematically blasted into rubble by round after high
explosive round.
No one runs out of it; no cries or screams can be heard in between the
explosions. The place is empty.
They break down the barricaded door of a drugstore across the street
and have a chat with the sole living occupants: a seventy five year old
woman and a six year old boy. The Nipponese came through the neighborhood a
couple of days ago, she says, heading north, in the direction of Intramuros.
They herded the women and children out of the buildings and marched them in
one direction. They pulled out all of the men, and the boys over a certain
age, and marched them off in another. She and her grandson escaped by hiding
in a cupboard.
Shaftoe and his squad emerge from the drugstore onto the street,
leaving the padre behind to grease some heavenly skids. Fifteen seconds
later, two of them are killed by shrapnel from an antipersonnel round that
detonates above the street nearby. The remainder of the squad backs right
into a group of marauding Nipponese stragglers coming around the corner, and
a completely insane close quarters firefight ensues. They have the Nips
heavily outgunned, but half of Shaftoe's men are too stunned to fight. They
are accustomed to the jungle. Some of them have never been to the city
before, even in peacetime, and they just stand there gaping. Shaftoe ducks
into a doorway and begins to make a fantastic amount of noise with his
trench broom. The Nips start throwing grenades around like firecrackers,
doing as much damage to themselves as to the Huks. The engagement is
ridiculously confused, and doesn't really end until another artillery round
comes in, kills several of the Nips, and leaves the rest so stunned that
Shaftoe is able to walk out in the open and dispatch them with shots from
his Colt.
They drag two of their wounded into the drugstore and leave them there.
One other man is dead. They are down to five fighting men and one
increasingly busy padre. Their firefight has brought down another barrage of
antipersonnel artillery, and so the best they can do for the rest of the day
is find a basement to hide in, and try to get some sleep.
Shaftoe sleeps hardly at all, and so when night falls he takes a couple
of benzedrine tablets, shoots a bit of morphine to take the edge off, and
leads his squad out into the streets. The next neighborhood to the north is
called Ermita. It has a lot of hotels. After Ermita is Rizal Park. The walls
of Intramuros rise up from Rizal Park's northern edge. After Intramuros is
the Pasig River, and MacArthur's on the far side of the Pasig. So if
Shaftoe's son and the rest of the Altamiras are still alive, they have to be
somewhere in the couple of miles between here and Fort Santiago on the near
bank of the Pasig.
Shortly after they cross into the neighborhood of Ermita, they happen
upon a stream of blood trickling out of a doorway, across the sidewalk, into
the gutter. They kick down the door of the building and discover that its
ground floor is filled with the corpses of Filipino men several dozen in
all. All of them have been bayoneted. One is still alive. Shaftoe and the
Huks carry him out onto the sidewalk and begin looking for some place to put
him while the padre circulates through the building, touching each corpse
briefly and muttering something in Latin. When he comes out, he is bloody up
to the knees.
"Any women? Children?" Shaftoe asks him. The padre shakes his head no.
They are only a few blocks from the Philippine General Hospital, so
they carry the wounded man in that direction. Coming around the corner they
see that the hospital's buildings have been half destroyed by MacArthur's
artillery, and the grounds are covered with human beings laid out on sheets.
Then they realize that the men circulating around the area, carrying rifles,
are Nipponese troops. A couple of shots are fired in their direction. They
have to duck into an alley and set the wounded man down. A few moments
later, a trio of Nipponese soldiers appears in hot pursuit. Shaftoe has had
enough time to think this one through, so he lets them get a good few paces
into the alley. Then he and the Huks kill them silently, with blades. By the
time reinforcements have been sent out after them, Shaftoe and his group
have disappeared into the alleyways of Ermita, which in many places are
running red with the blood of slaughtered Filipino men, and boys.
Chapter 84 CAPTIVITY
"Someone is trying to send you a message," Attorney Alejandro says,
scant minutes into his first interview with his new client.
Randy's ready for it. "Why does everyone here have these incredibly
cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don't you people have e mail?"
The Philippines are one of those countries where "Attorney" is used as
a title, like "Doctor." Attorney Alejandro has a backswept grey pompadour
that gets a little curly down around the nape of his neck which, as he
probably well knows, makes him look distinguished in a nineteenth century
statesman kind of way. He smokes a lot, which bothers Randy hardly a bit
since he has been in places, for a couple of days, where everyone smokes.
You don't even need to bother with cigarettes and matches in a jail. Just
breathe, and you get the equivalent of one or two packs a day worth of
slightly pre owned tar and nicotine.
Attorney Alejandro decides to act as if Randy has never made this last
comment. He attends to a bit of business with his cigarette. If he wants
that cigarette up and burning between his lips, he can make it happen
without even moving his hands; suddenly it's just there, as if he had been
hiding it, already lit, inside his mouth. But if he needs to introduce a
caesura into the conversation, he can turn the selection, preparation, and
ignition of a cigarette into something that in terms of solemn ritual is
just this side of the cha no yu. It must knock 'em dead in the court room.
Randy's feeling better already.
"What do you suppose the message is? That they are capable of killing
me if they want to? Because I already know that. I mean, shit! How much does
it cost to have a man killed in Manila?"
Attorney Alejandro frowns fiercely. He has taken this question the
wrong way: as a suggestion that he is the kind of guy who would know such a
thing. Of course, given that he was personally recommended by Douglas
MacArthur Shaftoe, he probably is just precisely that kind of guy, but it is
probably rude to aver this. "Your imagination is running wild," he says.
"You have blown the death penalty aspect of this thing all out of
proportion." As Attorney Alejandro probably expected, this display of
blitheness renders Randy speechless long enough for him to execute another
bit of patter with a cigarette and a stainless steel lighter encrusted with
military regalia. Attorney Alejandro has mentioned, twice, that he was a
colonel in the Army and lived for years in the States. "We reinstated the
death penalty in '95 after a hiatus of ten years approximately." The word
approximately crackles and explodes from his mouth like a spark from a Tesla
coil. Filipinos enunciate better than Americans and they know it.
Randy and Alejandro are meeting in a high, narrow room somewhere in
between the jail and the courtroom in Makati. A prison guard loitered in the
room with them for a few minutes, hunched over with sheepishness, leaving
only when Attorney Alejandro went over and spoke to him in low, fatherly
tones and pressed something into his hand. There is an open window, and the
sound of honking horns comes through it from the street two stories below.
Randy's half expecting Doug Shaftoe and his comrades to rappel down from the
roof and enter suddenly in glittering and screaming cloaks of broken window
glass and extract Randy while Attorney Alejandro heaves his bulk against
this half ton nara table and uses it to block the door shut.
Coming up with fantasies like this one helps to break the tedium of
being in jail, and probably does a lot to explain Randy's jailmates' taste
in videos, which they cannot actually watch but which they talk about
incessantly in a mixture of English and Tagalog that he now almost
understands. The videos, or rather the lack of them, has given rise to some
kind of retrograde media evolution phenomenon: an oral storytelling rooted
in videos that these guys once saw. A particularly affecting description of,
for example, Stallone in Rambo III cauterizing his abdominal bullet wound by
igniting a torn open rifle cartridge and shooting gunpowder flames through
it will plunge all of the men into several moments of reverent awe. It is
about the only quiet time Randy gets now, and he has consequently begun
cooking up a new plan: he will exploit his Californian provenance by
asserting that he has seen martial arts films that have not yet been
bootlegged to the streets of Manila, and narrate them in terms so eloquent
that the entire jailhouse will for a few minutes become a place of monastic
contemplation, like the idealized Third World prison that Randy wishes he
were in. Randy read Papillon cover to cover a couple of times when he was a
kid and has always imagined Third World prisons as places of supreme and
noble isolation: steep tropical sunlight setting the humid and smoky air
aglow as it slants in over iron bars close set in thick masonry walls.
Sweaty, shirtless steppenwolves prowling back and forth in their cells,
brooding about where it all went wrong. Prison journals furtively scribbled
on cigarette papers.
Instead, the jail where they've been keeping Randy is just a really
crowded urban society where some of the people cannot actually leave.
Everyone there is extremely young except for Randy and an ever rotating
population of drunks. It makes him feel old. If he sees one more video
addled boy strutting around in a bootleg "Hard Rock Cafe" t shirt and
fronting hand gestures from American gangsta rappers, he may actually have
to become a murderer.
Attorney Alejandro says, rhetorically, "Why 'Death to Drug Smugglers'?"
Randy hasn't asked why, but Attorney Alejandro wants to share something with
him about why. "The Americans were very angry that some people in this part
of the world persisted in selling them the drugs that they want so very
badly."
"Sorry. What can I say? We suck. I know we suck."
"And so as a gesture of friendship between our peoples, we instituted
the death penalty. The law specified two, and only two, methods of
execution," Attorney Alejandro continues, "the gas chamber and the electric
chair. As you can see, we took our lead in this as in many other things,
some wise and some foolish from the Americans. Now, at the time, we did not
have a gas chamber anywhere in the Philippines. A study was made. Plans were
drawn up. Do you have any idea what is involved in constructing a proper gas
chamber?" Attorney Alejandro now goes off on a fairly lengthy riff, but
Randy finds it hard to concentrate until something in Attorney Alejandro's
tone tells him that a coda is approaching. ". . . prison service said, 'How
can you expect us to construct this space age facility when we have not even
the funds to purchase rat poison for the overcrowded prisons we already
have?' As you can see they were just whining for more funding. You see?"
Attorney Alejandro raises his eyebrows significantly and sucks in his
cheeks, as he reduces a good two or three centimeters of a Marlboro to ash.
That he feels it necessary to explain the underlying motivations of the
prison service so baldly seems to imply that his estimate of Randy's
intelligence is none too favorable, which given the way he was arrested at
the airport might be fair enough. "So this left only the electric chair. But
do you know what happened to the electric chair?"
"I can't imagine," Randy says.
"It burned. Faulty wiring. So we had no way to kill people." All of a
sudden Attorney Alejandro, who has betrayed no amusement thus far, remembers
to laugh. It is perfunctory, and by the time Randy has bestirred himself to
show a little polite amusement, it's over and Alejandro's back to being
serious. "But Filipinos are highly adaptable."
"Once again," Attorney Alejandro says, "we looked to America. Our
friend, our patron, our big brother. You are familiar with the expression
Ninong? Of course you are, I forget you have spent a whole lotta time here."
Randy is always impressed by the mixture of love, hate, hope,
disappointment, admiration, and derision that Filipinos express towards
America. Having actually been a part of the United States at one point, they
can take digs at it in a way that's usually reserved for lifelong U.S.
citizens. The failure of the United States to protect them from Nippon after
Pearl Harbor is still the most important thing that ever happened to them.
Probably just slightly more important than MacArthur's return to the country
a few years later. If that doesn't inculcate a love hate relationship...
"The Americans," Attorney Alejandro continues, "were also reeling under
the expense of executing people and having embarrassments with their
electric chairs. Maybe they should have jobbed it out."
"Pardon me?" Randy says. He gets the idea that Attorney Alejandro is
just checking to see if he's awake.
"Jobbed it out. To the Nipponese. Gone to Sony or Panasonic or one of
those guys and said (now reverting to a perfect American yokel accent), We
just love the VCRs that y'all've been sellin' us why don't you make an
electric chair that actually works?' Which the Nips would have done it is
the kind of thing they would excel at and then after they sold Americans all
of the electric chairs they needed, we could have purchased some factory
seconds at cut rate." Whenever Filipinos slag America in earshot of an
American, they usually try to follow it up with some really vile
observations about the Nipponese, just to put everything in perspective.
"Where are we going with this?" Randy says.
"Please forgive my digression. The Americans had gone over to executing
prisoners by lethal injection. And so we have once again decided to take a
cue from them. Why didn't we just hang people? We have plenty of rope this
is where rope comes from, you know "
"Yes."
" or shoot them? We have plenty of guns. But no, the congress wanted to
be modern like Uncle Sam, and so lethal injection it was. But then we sent a
delegation to see how the Americans lethally injected people, and you know
what they reported when they came back?"
"It takes all kinds of special equipment."
"It takes all kinds of special equipment, and a special room. This room
has not yet been constructed. So, you know how many people we have on death
row now?"
"I can't imagine."
"More than two hundred and fifty. Even if the room were built tomorrow,
most of them could not be executed, because it is illegal to carry out the
execution until one year has passed since the final appeal."
"Well, wait a minute! If you've lost your final appeal, then why wait a
whole year?"
Attorney Alejandro shrugs.
"In America, they usually do the final appeal while the prisoner is
lying strapped to the table with the needle in his arm."
"Maybe they wait in case there is a miracle during that year. We are a
very religious people even some of the death row prisoners are very
religious. But they are now begging to be executed. They cannot stand the
wait any longer!" Attorney Alejandro laughs and slaps the table. "Now,
Randy, all of these two hundred and fifty people are poor. All of them." He
stops significantly.
"I hear you," Randy says. "Did you know that my net worth is less than
zero, by the way?"
"Yes, but you are rich in friends and connections." Attorney Alejandro
starts frisking himself. A picture of a fresh pack of Marlboros appears over
his head in a little thought balloon. "I recently received a telephone call
from a friend of yours in Seattle."
"Chester?"
"Yes, he's the one. He has money."
"You could say that."
"Chester is seeking ways to put his financial resources to work on your
behalf. He feels frustrated and unsure of himself because while his
resources are quite significant, he does not know the fine points of how to
wield them in the context of the Philippine judicial system."
"That's him all over. Is there any chance that you might be able to
give him some pointers?"
"I'll talk to him."
"Let me ask you this," Randy says. "I understand that financial
resources, wielded properly, could free me. But what if some rich person
wanted to use his money to send me to death row?"
This one stops Attorney Alejandro dead for a minute. "There are more
efficient ways for a wealthy person to kill someone. For the reasons I have
described, a would be assassin would first look somewhere outside of the
Philippine capital punishment apparatus. That is why, in my opinion as your
lawyer, what is really going on here is that "
"Someone is trying to send me a message."
"Exactly. You see, now you are beginning to understand."
"Well, I'm wondering if you could give me a ballpark estimate of how
long I'm going to be locked up. I mean, do you want me to plead to a lesser
charge and then serve a few years?"
Attorney Alejandro looks pained and scoffs. He doesn't deign to answer.
"I didn't think so," says Randy. "But at what point in these proceedings do
you imagine I could get out? I mean, they refused to release me on bail."
"Of course! You are charged with a capital crime! Even though every one
knows it is a joke, proper respect must be shown."
"They pulled the planted drugs out of my bag there are a million
witnesses. It was a drug, right?"
"Malaysian heroin. Very pure," Attorney Alejandro says admiringly.
"So there are all of these people who can testify that a sack of heroin
was found in my luggage. That would seem to complicate the job of getting me
out of jail."
"We can probably get it dismissed before an actual trial is launched,
by pointing out flaws in the evidence," Attorney Alejandro says. Something
in his tone of voice, and the way he's staring out the window, suggests this
is the first time he's actually thought about how he's going to specifically
attack this problem. "Perhaps a baggage handler at NAIA will step forward
and testify that he saw a shadowy figure planting the drugs in your bag."
"A shadowy figure?"
"Yesss," says Attorney Alejandro irritably, anticipating sarcasm.
"Are there a lot of those hanging around backstage at NAIA?"
"We don't need a lot."
"How much time do you think might pass before this baggage handler's
conscience finally gets the better of him and he decides to step forward?"
Attorney Alejandro shrugs. "A couple of weeks, perhaps. For it to be
done properly. How are your accommodations?"
"They suck. But you know what? Nothing really bothers me anymore."
"There is concern among some of the officials of the prison service
that when you get out, you may say harsh things about the conditions."
"Since when do they care?"
"You are a little famous in America. Not very famous. A little. Do you
remember the American boy in Singapore, who was caned?"
"Of course."
"Very bad publicity for Singapore. So there are officials of the prison
service who would be sympathetic to the idea of putting you in a private
cell. Clean. Quiet."
Randy cops a questioning look, and holds up one hand and rubs his thumb
and fingers together in the "money" gesture.
"It is done already."
"Chester?"
"No. Someone else."
"Avi?"
Attorney Alejandro shakes his head.
"The Shaftoes?"
"I cannot answer your question, Randy, because I do not know. I was not
involved in this decision. But whoever did it was also listening to your
request for some way to kill the time. You requested books?"
"Yeah. Do you have some?"
"No. But they will allow this." Attorney Alejandro now opens up his
briefcase, reaches in with both hands, and pulls out Randy's new laptop. It
still has a police evidence sticker on it.
"Give me a fucking break!" Randy says.
"No! Take it!"
"Isn't it like evidence or something?"
"The police are finished. They have opened it up and looked for drugs
inside. Dusted it for fingerprints you can still see the dust. I hope that
it did not damage the delicate machinery."
"Yeah, me too. So, are you telling me that I'm free to take this to my
new, clean, quiet, private cell?"
"That is what I am telling you."
"And I can use it there? No restrictions?"
"They will give you an electrical socket. A plug in," Attorney
Alejandro says, and then adds significantly, "I asked them," which is
clearly a little reminder that any fees eventually paid to him will have
been richly earned.
Randy draws a nice deep breath, thinking, Well, it is just
fantastically generous in fact, a little bit startling that the powers that
want to convict and execute me are willing to go to such lengths to allow me
to dick around on my computer while I am awaiting my trial and death. He
exhales and says, "Thank god, at least I'll be able to get some work done."
Attorney Alejandro nods approvingly.
"Your girlfriend is waiting to see you," he announces.
"She's not really my girlfriend. What does she want?" Randy demands.
"What do you mean, what does she want? She wants to see you. To give
you emotional support. To let you know that you are not all alone."
"Shit!" Randy mutters. "I don't want emotional support. I want to get
the fuck out of jail."
"That is my department," Attorney Alejandro says proudly.
"You know what this is? It's one of those men are from Mars, women are
from Venus things."
"I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you
are saying."
"It's one of those American books where once you've heard the title you
don't even need to read it," Randy says.
"Then I won't."
"You and I see just that someone is trying to fuck me over and that I
need to get out of jail. Very simple and clean. But to her, it is much more
than that it is an opportunity to have a conversation!"
Attorney Alejandro just rolls his eyes and makes the universal "females
yammering" gesture: thumb and fingertips closing and opening like a
disembodied flapping jaw.
"To share deep feelings and emotionally bond," Randy continues, closing
his eyes.
"But this is not so bad," Attorney Alejandro says, radiating
insincerity like a mirrored ball in a disco.
"I'm doing okay in this jail. Surprisingly okay," Randy says, "but it's
all about keeping up a kind of emotionless front. Many barriers between me
and my surroundings. And so it just makes me crazy that she's picking this
particular moment to implicitly demand that I let my guard down."
"She knows you are weak," Attorney Alejandro says, and winks. "She
smells your vulnerability."
"That's not all she's going to smell. Is this new cell going to have a
shower?"
"Everything. Remember to put something heavy on the drain so that rats
do not climb up out of it during the night."
"Thanks. I'll just put my laptop there." Randy leans back in his chair
and wiggles his butt around. There is a problem now with an erection. It has
been at least a week for Randy. Three nights in the jail, the night before
that at Tom Howard's house, before that the airplane, before that Avi's
basement floor . . . actually it has probably been a lot more than a week.
Randy needs badly to get into that private cell if for no other reason than
it will give him an opportunity to vent that which is bearing down hard on
his prostate gland and get his mind back on an even keel. He prays to god
that he's only going to be seeing Amy through a thick glass partition.
Attorney Alejandro opens the door and says something to the waiting
guard, who leads them down a hallway toward another room. This one's bigger,
and has a number of long tables, with little familial clusters of Filipinos
scattered about. If these tables were ever intended to serve as barriers
against physical contact, it has long been forgotten; it would take
something more like the Berlin Wall to prevent Filipinos from showing
affection for each other. So Amy is there, already striding around the end
of one of the tables as a couple of guards pointedly look the other way
(though their eyes dart back to check out her ass after she has blown by
them). No dress this time. Randy predicts it will be a few years before he
sees Amy in a dress again. Last time he did, his dick got hard, his heart
pounded, he literally salivated, and then suddenly armed men were putting
handcuffs on him.
Right now, Amy's in old jeans ripped out at the knee, a tank top
undershirt and a black leather jacket, better to accommodate her concealed
weapons. Knowing the Shaftoes, they've probably gone to some very high
Defcon level, the one just short of all out nuclear exchange. Doug Shaftoe
probably showers with a SEAL knife clenched in his teeth now. Amy, who
normally goes for a low, one armed, sidelong type of hug, now throws both
arms up as if signaling a touchdown and crooks both elbows behind the nape
of Randy's neck and lets him feel everything. The flesh of his lower belly
can count the stitch marks in Amy's appendectomy scar. So that he has a
boner is probably about as obvious to her as that he smells bad. He might as
well have one of those long fluorescent orange bicycle flags lashed to the
shaft of his phallus and sticking up out of his pants.
She steps back, looks down at it, then very deliberately looks him in
the eye and says, "How do you feel?" which being as it is the obligatory
question of females, is hard to read deadpan/ironic or just sweetly naive?
"I miss you," he says, "and I apologize if my limbic system has
misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support."
She takes this levelly, shrugs, and says, "No need to apologize. It's
all a part of you, Randy. I don't have to get to know you in pieces, do I?"
Randy resists the impulse to check his watch, which would be pointless
because it has been confiscated anyway. She has undoubtedly set some kind of
world speed record here, in the male/female conversation category, for
working the subject around to Randy's own failure to be emotionally
available. To do it in this setting displays a certain chutzpah that he
cannot help but admire.
"You've talked to Attorney Alejandro," she says.
"Yeah. I assume he's imparted to me whatever he was supposed to
impart."
"I don't have much more for you," she says. Which on a pure tactical
level means a lot. If the wreck had been found by the Dentist's minions, or
their salvage work had been somehow interrupted, she'd say something. For
her to say nothing means that they are probably hauling gold out of that
submarine at this very moment.
So. She's busy working on the gold salvage operation, to which her
contributions are no doubt vital. She has absolutely no specific information
to impart to him about anything. So why has she made the long, alternately
dull and dangerous trek to Manila? In order to do what exactly? It is one of
these fiendish mind reading exercises. She has her arms crossed over her
bosom and is eyeing him coolly. Someone is trying to send you a message.
He suddenly gets the feeling that she's got him right where she wants
him. Maybe she's the one who planted the heroin in his bag. It's a power
thing, that's all.
A big slab of memory floats up to the surface of Randy's mind, like a
floe calved off the polar icecap. He and Amy and the Shaftoe boys were in
California, right after the earthquake, going through all the old crap in
the basement looking for a few key boxes of papers. Randy heard Amy
squealing with laughter and found her sitting in the corner on top of some
old book boxes, reading a paperback novel by flashlight. She had uncovered a
huge cache of paperback romance novels, none of which Randy had ever seen
before. Bodice rippers of the most incredibly cheesy sort. Randy assumed
they'd been left behind by the house's previous owners until he flipped
through a couple of them, checking the copyright dates: all from the years
when he and Charlene were living together. Charlene must have been reading
them at a rate of about one a week.
"Ooh baby," Amy said, and read him a passage about a rugged but
sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with
a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female.
"God!" She frisbeed the book into a puddle on the basement floor.
"I always got the sense she had furtive reading habits."
"Well, now you know what she wanted," Amy said. "Did you give her what
she wanted, Randy?"
And Randy has been thinking about that ever since. And when he got over
his surprise that Charlene was a bodice ripper addict, he decided it wasn't
necessarily a bad thing, though in her circle, reading books like that would
be tantamount to wearing a tall pointy hat in the streets of Salem Village,
Mass. circa 1692. She and Randy had tried, awfully hard, to have an
egalitarian relationship. They had spent money on relationship counseling
trying to keep the egalitarian relationship alive. But she had become more
and more angry, without ever giving him a reason, and he had become more and
more confused. Eventually he stopped being confused and just got irritated,
and tired of her. After Amy discovered those books in the basement, Randy
slowly put a whole new and different story together in his head: that
Charlene's limbic system was simply hooked up in such a way that she liked
dominant men. Again, not in a whips and chains sense, just in the sense that
in most relationships someone's got to be active and someone's got to be
passive, and there's no particular logic to that, but there's nothing bad
about it either. In the end, the passive partner can have just as much
power, and just as much freedom.
Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It
generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when
one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly
the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous
days of labor were unable to reveal.
Randy has this very strong feeling that Amy doesn't read bodice ripper
novels. She goes the other way. She can't tolerate surrendering to any one.
Which makes it hard for her to function in polite society; she could not
have been happy sitting at home during her senior year of high school,
waiting for a boy to invite her to the prom. This feature of her personality
is extremely prone to misinterpretation, so she bailed out. She would rather
be lonely, and true to herself, and in control, in an out of the way part of
the world, with her music by intelligent female singer songwriters to keep
her company, than misinterpreted and hassled in America.
"I love you," he says. Amy looks away and heaves a big sigh like, At
last we're getting somewhere. Randy continues, "I've been infatuated with
you ever since we met."
Now she's back to looking at him expectantly.
"And the reason I've been slow to, uh, to actually show it, or do
anything about it, is first of all because I wasn't sure whether or not you
were a lesbian."
Amy scoffs and rolls her eyes.
". . . and later just because of my own reticence. Which is
unfortunately part of me too, just like this part." He glances down just for
a microsecond.
She's shaking her head at him in amazement.
"The fact that the scientific investigator works fifty percent of his
time by nonrational means is quite insufficiently recognized," Randy says.
Amy sits down on his side of the table, jacknifes, spins around neatly
on her ass, and comes to light on the other side. "I'll think about what you
said," she says. "Hang in there, sport."
"Smooth sailing, Amy."
Amy gives him a little smile over her shoulder, then walks straight to
the exit, turning around once in the doorway to make sure he's still looking
at her.
He is. Which, he feels quite confident, is the right answer.
Chapter 85 GLAMOR
A couple of squads of Nipponese Air Force soldiers, armed with rifles
and Nambus, pursue Bobby Shaftoe and his crew of Huks towards the Manila Bay
seawall. If it comes to the point where they must stand and slug it out,
they can probably kill a lot of Nips before they are overwhelmed. But they
are here to find and assist the Altamiras, not to die heroically, and so
they retreat through the neighborhood of Ermita. One of MacArthur's circling
Piper Cubs catches sight of one of those Nip squads as it is clambering over
the ruins of a collapsed building, and calls in a strike artillery rounds
spiral in from the north like long passes in a football game. Shaftoe and
the Huks try to time the incoming rounds, guessing at how many tubes are
firing on them, trying to run from one place of concealment to the next when
they think there's going to be a few seconds' pause in the shrapnel. Maybe
half of the Nips are killed or wounded by this barrage, but they are
fighting at such close quarters that two of Shaftoe's Huks are hit as well.
Shaftoe is trying to drag one of them out of danger when he looks down and
sees that he is stomping across a mess of shattered white crockery that is
marked with the name of a hotel the same hotel where he slow danced with
Glory on the night that the war started.
The wounded Huks are still capable of moving and so the retreat
continues. Shaftoe's calming down a bit, thinking about the situation with
more clarity. The Huks find a good defensive position and stall the
attackers for a few minutes while he gets his bearings, works out a plan.
Fifteen minutes later, the Huks abandon their position and fall back in
panic, or appear to. About half of the Nipponese squad rushes forward in
pursuit and finds that they have been lured into a killing ground, a cul de
sac created by the partial collapse of a building into an alley. One of the
Huks opens up with a tommy gun while Shaftoe who stayed behind, hiding in a
burned out car heaves grenades at the other half of the squad, pinning them
down and preventing them from coming to help their comrades who are being
noisily slaughtered.
But these Nips are relentless. They regroup under a surviving officer
and continue their pursuit. Shaftoe, now on his own, ends up being chased
around the foundations of another hotel, a luxury place that rises up above
the bay, near the American Embassy. He trips over the body of a young woman
who apparently leaped, fell, or was thrown from one of the windows.
Crouching behind some shrubbery for a breather, he hears a shrill keening
drifting out of the hotel's windows. The place is full of women, he
realizes, and all of them are either screaming or sobbing.
His pursuers seem to have lost track of him. The Huks have lost him,
too. Shaftoe stays there for a while, listening to all of those women,
wishing he could go inside and do something for them. But the place must be
filled with Nip soldiers, or else the women wouldn't be screaming as they
are.
He listens carefully for a while, trying to ignore the lamentations of
the women. A fourteen year old girl in a bloody nightgown plummets down from
the fifth floor of the hotel, thuds into the ground like a sack of cement,
and bounces once. Shaftoe closes his eyes and listens until he is absolutely
sure that he does not hear any children.
The picture's getting clearer now. The males are marched away and
killed. The women are marched off in another direction. Young women without
children are brought to this hotel. Women with children must have been taken
somewhere else. Where?
He hears tommy gun fire on the other side of the hotel. It must be his
buddies. He creeps around to a corner of the hotel and listens again, trying
to figure out where they are somewhere in Rizal Park, he thinks. But then
MacArthur's artillery opens up hell for leather and the world begins to
heave beneath him like a rug being shaken, and he can't hear trench brooms
or screaming women or anything. He has a view east and south towards the
parts of Ermita and Malate from which they have just come, and he can see
big pieces of debris spinning up from the ground over there, and gouts of
dust. He has seen enough of war to know what it means: the Americans are
advancing from the south now as well, pushing towards Intramuros. Shaftoe
and his band of Huks were operating on their own, but it appears that they
have inadvertently served as harbingers of a big infantry thrust.
Terrified by the barrage, a bunch of Nip soldiers stagger out of a side
exit of the hotel, almost too drunk to stand, some of them still pulling
their trousers up. Shaftoe disgustedly throws a grenade at them and then
gets the hell out without bothering to examine the results. It is getting to
the point where killing Nips is no fun anymore. There is no sense of
accomplishment in it. It is a tedious and dangerous job that never seems to
end. When will these stupid bastards knock it off? They are embarrassing
themselves in front of the whole world.
He finds his men in Rizal Park, beneath the shadow of Intramuros's
ancient Spanish wall, disputing possession of a baseball diamond with what
is left of the Nipponese squads that pursued them here. The timing is both
good and bad. Any earlier, and Nip reinforcements in the surrounding
neighborhood would have heard the skirmish, flooded into the park and wiped
them out. Any later, and the American infantry would be here. But Rizal Park
is in the middle of a deranged urban battleground right now, and nothing
makes any kind of sense. They have to impose their will on the situation,
the kind of thing Bobby Shaftoe has gotten fairly good at.
The one thing they have going for them is that the artillery is pointed
elsewhere for the time being. Shaftoe squats down behind a coconut tree and
tries to figure out how the hell he is going to reach that baseball diamond,
which is a couple of hundred yards away across totally flat, open ground.
He knows the place; Uncle Jack took him to a baseball game there.
Wooden bleachers rise along the left and right field lines. Beneath each one
is a dugout. Shaftoe knows how battles work, and so he knows that one of
those dugouts is full of Nips and one is full of Huks and that they are
pinned down in them by each other's fire just like Great War troops in their
opposing trenches. There are a few buildings under the bleachers, containing
toilets and a refreshment stand. The Nips and the Huks will be creeping
through those buildings right now, trying to get into a position from which
they can shoot into the dugouts.
A Nipponese grenade flies towards him from the direction of the left
field bleachers, making a stripping noise as it passes through the fronds of
a palm tree. Shaftoe ducks his head behind another tree so that he can't see
the grenade. It explodes and tears the clothing, and a good deal of the
skin, from one of his arms and one of his legs. But like all Nip grenades it
is poorly made and miserably ineffectual. Shaftoe turns around and uncorks a
spume of .45 caliber rounds in the general direction the grenade came from;
this should give the thrower something to think about while Shaftoe gets his
bearings.
This is actually a stupid idea, because he runs out of ammunition. He
has a few rounds in his Colt, and that's it. He also has one grenade left.
He considers throwing it towards the baseball diamond, but his throwing arm
is in pretty bad shape now.
Besides Jesus Christ! That baseball diamond is just too far away. Even
in peak condition he could not throw a grenade from here to there.
Perhaps one of those corpses out in the grass, between here and there,
isn't really a corpse. Shaftoe crawls towards them on his belly and
establishes that they are most definitely dead people.
Giving the field a wide berth, he begins working his way around behind
home plate toward the right field line, where his people are. He would love
to sneak up on the Nips from behind, but that grenade thrower really threw a
fright into him. Where the hell is he?
The firing from the dugouts has become sporadic. They have stalemated
now and are trying to conserve ammunition. Shaftoe risks rising to a crouch.
He runs for about three paces before he sees the door to the women's toilet
swing open and a man jump out, winding up like Bob Feller getting ready to
throw a fastball right down the middle of the plate. Shaftoe fires his .45
once, but the weapons' absurdly vicious recoil jerks it right out of his
lamed hand. The grenade comes flying towards him, perfectly on target.
Shaftoe dives to the ground and scrambles for his .45. The grenade actually
bounces off his shoulder and falls spinning into the dust, making a fizzing
noise. But it doesn't explode.
Shaftoe looks up. The Nip is standing framed in the women's room door.
His shoulders slump miserably. Shaftoe recognizes him; there's only one Nip
who could throw a grenade like that. He lies there for a few moments,
counting syllables on his fingers, then stands up, cups his hands around his
mouth, and hollers:
Pineapple fastball – Guns of Manila applaud – Hit by pitch
free base!
Goto Dengo and Bobby Shaftoe lock themselves inside the women's room
and share a nip from a bottle of port that the former has looted from a
store somewhere. They spend a few minutes catching up with each other in a
general way. Goto Dengo is already somewhat drunk, which makes his grenade
throwing performance all the more impressive. "I'm hyped to the gills on
benzedrine," Shaftoe says. "Keeps you going, but kind of screws up your aim.
"I noticed!" Goto Dengo says. He is so skinny and haggard he looks more
like some hypothetical sick uncle of Goto Dengo's.
Shaftoe pretends to take offense at this and drops into a judo stance.
Goto Dengo laughs uneasily and waves him off. "No more fighting," he says. A
rifle bullet passes through the women's room wall and digs a crater into a
porcelain sink.
"We gotta come up with a plan," Shaftoe says.
"The plan: You live, I die," Goto Dengo says.
"Fuck that," Shaftoe says. "Hey, don't you idiots know you're
surrounded?"
"We know," Goto Dengo says wearily. "We know for a long time."
"So give up, you fucking morons! Wave a white flag and you can all go
home."
"It is not Nipponese way."
"So come up with another fucking way! Show some fucking adaptability!"
"Why are you here?" Goto Dengo asks, changing the subject. "What is
your mission?"
Shaftoe explains that he's looking for his kid. Goto Dengo tells him
where all of the women and children are: in the Church of St. Agustin, in
Intramuros.
"Hey," Shaftoe says, "if we surrender to you, you'll kill us. Right?"
"Yes."
"If you guys surrender to us, we won't kill you. Promise. Scout's
honor."
"For us, living or dying is not the important thing," Goto Dengo says.
"Hey! Tell me something I didn't fucking already know!" Shaftoe says.
Even winning battles isn't important to you. Is it?"
Goto Dengo looks the other way, shamefaced.
"Haven't you guys figured out yet that banzai charges DON'T FUCKING
WORK?"
"All of the people who learned that were killed in banzai charges,"
Goto Dengo says.
As if on cue, the Nips in the left field dugout begin screaming
"Banzai!" and charge, as one, out onto the field. Shaftoe puts his eye up to
a bullet hole in the wall and watches them stumbling across the infield with
fixed bayonets. Their leader clambers up the pitcher's mound as if he's
going to plant a flag there, and takes a slug in the middle of his face. His
men are being dismantled all around him by thoughtfully placed rifle slugs
from the Huks' dugout. Urban warfare is not the metier of the Hukbalahaps,
but calmly slaughtering banzai charging Nipponese is old hat. One of the
Nips actually manages to crawl all the way to the first base coach's box.
Then a few pounds of meat come flying out of his back and he relaxes.
Shaftoe turns to see that Goto Dengo is aiming a revolver at him. He
chooses to ignore this for a moment. "See what I mean?"
"I have seen it many times before."
"Then why aren't you dead?" Shaftoe asks the question with all due
flippancy, but it has a terrible effect on Goto Dengo. His face scrunches up
and he begins to cry. "Aw, shit. You pull a gun on me and start bawling at
the same time? How unfair can you get? Why don't you kick some fucking dirt
in my eyes while you're at it?"
Goto Dengo lifts the revolver to his own temple. But Shaftoe sees that
one coming a mile away. He knows Nips well enough, by this point, to figure
out when they are about to go hari kari on you. Shaftoe jumps forward as
soon as the barrel of the revolver begins to move. By the time it is against
Goto Dengo's skull, Shaftoe has his finger stuck into the gap between the
hammer and the firing pin.
Goto Dengo collapses to the floor sobbing piteously. It just makes
Shaftoe want to kick him. "Knock it off!" he says. "What the fuck is eating
at you?"
"I came to Manila to redeem myself to get back my lost honor!" Goto
Dengo says. "I could have done it here. I could be dead on that field right
now, and my spirit going to Yasukuni. But then you came! You ruined my
concentration!"
"Concentrate on this, dumbshit!" Shaftoe says. "My son is in a church
right over on the far side of that wall, with a bunch of other helpless
women and children. If you want to redeem yourself, why not help me get 'em
out alive?"
Goto Dengo seems to have gone into a trance now. His face, which was
blubbering just a minute ago, has solidified into a mask. "I wish I could
believe what you believe," he says. "I have died, Bobby. I was buried in a
rock tomb. If I were a Christian, I could be born again now, and be a new
man. Instead, I must go on living, and accept my karma."
"Well, shit! There's a padre right out there in the dugout. He can
Christianize your ass in about ten seconds flat." Bobby Shaftoe strides
across the bathroom and swings the door open.
He is startled to see a man standing just a few paces away. The man is
dressed in an old but clean khaki uniform, devoid of insignia except for a
pentagon of stars on the collar. He has jammed a wooden match down into the
bowl of a corncob pipe and is puffing away futilely. But it's as if all of
the oxygen has been sucked out of the air by the burning of the city. He
throws the match away in disgust, then looks up into the face of Bobby
Shaftoe staring at him through a pair of dark aviator sunglasses that give
his gaunt face the appearance of a skull. His mouth forms into an 0 for a
moment. Then his jaw sets. "Shaftoe. . . Shaftoe! SHAFTOE!" he says.
Bobby Shaftoe feels his body stiffening to attention. Even if he had
been dead for a few hours, his body would do this out of some kind of dumb
ingrained reflex. "Sir, yes sir!" he says wearily.
The General composes his thoughts for half a second, and then says:
"You were supposed to be in Concepcion. You failed to be there. Your
superiors did not know what to think. They have been worried sick about you.
And the Department of the Navy has been positively insufferable ever since
they became aware that you were working for me. They assert, in the most
high handed way, that you know important secrets, and should never have been
placed in danger of capture. In short, your whereabouts and your status have
been the subject of the most intense, nay, feverish speculation for the last
several weeks. Many supposed that you were dead, or, worse, captured. This
distraction has been most unwelcome to me, inasmuch as the planning and
execution of the reconquest of the Philippine Islands have left me little
time to devote to such nagging distractions." An artillery shell rips
through the air and detonates in the bleachers, sending jagged fragments of
planks, about the size of canoe paddles, whirling through the air all around
them. One of them embeds itself like a javelin in the dirt between The
General and Bobby Shaftoe.
The General takes advantage of this to draw breath, and then continues,
as if he were reading this from a script. "And now, when I least expect it,
I encounter you, here, many leagues distant from your assigned post, out of
uniform, in a disheveled condition, accompanied by a Nipponese officer,
violating the sanctity of a ladies' powder room! Shaftoe, have you no sense
whatsoever of military honor? Do you not respect decorum? Do you not believe
that a representative of the United States military should comport himself
with more dignity?"
Shaftoe's kneecaps are joggling up and down uncontrollably. His guts
have become molten, and he feels strange bubbling processes going on in his
rectum. His molars are chattering together like a teletype machine. He
senses Goto Dengo behind him, and wonders what the poor bastard can possibly
be thinking.
"Begging your pardon, General, not to change the subject or anything,
but are you here all by yourself?"
The General juts his chin towards the men's room. "My aides are in
there relieving themselves. They were in a great hurry to do so, and it is
good that we came upon this place. But none of them considered invading the
powder room," he says severely.
"I apologize for that, sir," Bobby Shaftoe says hastily, "and for all
of those other things that you mentioned. But I still think of myself as a
Marine, and Marines do not make excuses, so I will not even try."
"That is not satisfactory! I need an explanation for where you've
been."
"I have been out in the world," Bobby Shaftoe says, "getting butt
fucked by Fortune."
The door of the men's room opens and one of The General's aides walks
out, woozy and bowlegged. The General ignores him; he is gazing right past
Shaftoe now.
"Pardon my manners, sir," Shaftoe says, turning sideways. "Sir, my
friend Goto Dengo. Goto san, say hi to General of the Army Douglas
MacArthur."
Goto Dengo has been standing there like a pillar of salt this whole
time, utterly dumbfounded, but now he snaps out of it, and bows very low.
MacArthur nods crisply. His aide is staring darkly at Goto Dengo and has
already drawn his Colt.
"Pleasure," The General says airily. "Pray tell, what sort of business
were you two gentlemen prosecuting in the ladies'?"
Bobby Shaftoe knows how to lunge for an opening. "Uh, it is very funny
you should ask that question, sir," he says offhandedly, "but Goto san, just
now, saw the light, and converted to Christianity."
Some Nips on top of the wall open up on them with a machine gun. The
flimsy, tumbling rounds crack through the air and thump into the ground.
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur stands motionless for a long time,
lips pursed. His sniffles once. Then he removes his aviator glasses
carefully and wipes his eyes on the immaculate sleeve of his uniform. He
pulls out a neatly folded white hankie and wraps it around his hawklike nose
and honks into it a few times. He folds it up carefully and puts it back in
his pocket, squares his shoulders, and then walks right up to Goto Dengo and
wraps him up in a big, manly bearhug. The remainder of The General's aides
emerge from the shitter en bloc and view the scene with reticence and
palpable tension all over their faces. Profoundly mortified, Bobby Shaftoe
looks down at his feet, wiggles his toes, and caresses the linear scab
running upside his head where the oar clocked him a few days ago. The
machine gun crew up on the wall are being picked off one by one by a sniper;
they writhe and scream operatically. The Huks have come up from the dugout
and stumbled into this little tableau; they all stand motionless with their
jaws hanging down around their navels.
Finally MacArthur unhands the stiff body of Goto Dengo, steps back
dramatically, and presents him to his staff. "Meet Goto san," he announces.
"You have all heard the expression, 'the only good Nip is a dead Nip'? Well,
this young fellow is a counterexample, and as we learned in mathematics, it
only takes one counterexample to disprove the theorem."
His staff observe cautious silence.
"It seems only fitting that we take this young fellow to the Church of
St. Agustin, over yonder in Intramuros, to carry out the sacrament of
baptism," The General says.
One of the aides steps forward, hunched over in that he's expecting to
get a slug between the shoulder blades any minute. "Sir, it is my duty to
remind you that Intramuros is still controlled by the enemy."
"Then it is high time we made our presence felt!" MacArthur says.
"Shaftoe will get us there. Shaftoe and these fine Filipino gentlemen." The
General throws one arm around Goto Dengo's neck in a highly affectionate,
companionable way, and begins strolling with him towards the nearest gate.
"I would like you to know, young man, that when I set up my headquarters in
Tokyo which, God willing, should be within a year I want you there bright
and early the first day!"
"Yes sir!" Goto Dengo says. All things considered, it is unlikely he
would say anything else.
Shaftoe draws a deep breath, tilts his head back, and stares up into a
smoky heaven. "God," he says, "usually I bow my head when I'm talking to
You, but I figure this is a good time for us to have a face to face. You see
and know all things and so I will not explain the situation to You. I would
just like to submit a request for You. I know You are getting requests from
lonely soldiers all over the fucking place at this time, but since this one
has to do with a shitload of women and children, and General MacArthur too,
maybe You can jump me to the top of the stack. You know what I want. Let's
get it done."
He borrows a small, straight twenty round tommy gun magazine from one
of his comrades and they set out for Intramuros. The gates are sure to be
guarded, so Shaftoe and the Huks run up the sloping walls instead, directly
beneath that wiped out machine gun nest. They turn the gun around into
Intramuros, and plant one of the wounded Huks there to operate it.
The first time Shaftoe gazes into the town, he nearly falls off the
wall. Intramuros is gone. If he didn't know where he was, he would never
recognize it. Essentially all of the buildings have been leveled. Manila
Cathedral and the Church of St. Agustin still stand, both with heavy damage.
A few of the fine old Spanish houses still exist as hasty, freehand sketches
of their former selves, missing roofs, wings, or walls. But most of the
blocks are just jumbles of masonry and shattered red roof tiles with smoke
and steam seething out of them. There are dead bodies all over the place,
sowed all over the neighborhood like timothy seed broadcast onto freshly
plowed soil. The artillery has mostly stopped there being nothing left to
destroy but small arms and machine gun fire sound on almost every block.
Shaftoe is thinking he'll have to assault one of the gates. But before
he can even come up with a plan, MacArthur is up there with the rest of his
group, having scrambled up the rampart behind them. This is evidently the
first time that The General has gotten a good look at Intramuros, because he
is stunned and, for once, speechless. He stands there for a long time with
his mouth open, and begins to draw fire from a few Nips hidden in the
wreckage below. The turned around machine gun silences them.
It takes them several hours to make their way up the street and into
the Church of St. Agustin. A bunch of Nips have barricaded themselves inside
the place along with what sounds like every hungry infant and irritable two
year old in Manila. The church is just one side of a large compound that
includes a monastery and other buildings. Many of the structures have been
torn open by artillery fire. The treasures hoarded in that place by the
monks over the course of the last five hundred years have tumbled out into
the street. Blown all over the neighborhood like shrapnel, and commingled
with the bayoneted corpses of Filipino boys, are huge oil paintings of
Christ being scourged, fantastic wooden sculptures of the Romans hammering
the spikes through his wrists and ankles, marbles of Mary holding the dead
and mangled Christ in her lap, tapestries of the whipping post and the cat
o' nine tails in action, blood coursing out of Christ's back through
hundreds of parallel gouges.
The Nips still inside the church defend its main doors with the
suicidal determination that Shaftoe has begun to find so tedious, but thanks
to The General's artillery, there are plenty of other ways, besides doors,
to get into the place now. So it is that, even while a company of American
infantry mount a frontal assault on the main entrance, Bobby Shaftoe and his
Huks, Goto Dengo, The General, and his aides are already kneeling in a
little chapel in what used to be part of the monastery. The padre leads them
through a couple of extremely truncated prayers of thanksgiving and baptizes
Goto Dengo with water from a font, with Bobby Shaftoe taking the role of
beaming parent and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur serving as
godfather. Shaftoe later remembers only one line of the ceremony.
"Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?"
says the padre.
"I do!" says MacArthur with tremendous authority even as Bobby Shaftoe
is muttering, "Fuck yes!" Goto Dengo, nods, gets wet, and becomes a
Christian.
Bobby Shaftoe excuses himself and goes wandering through the compound.
It seems as big and crazy as that Casbah in Algiers, all gloomy and dusty on
the inside, and filled with still more La Pasyon art, made by artists who
had obviously witnessed whippings firsthand, and who didn't need any priest
spouting little homilies about the glamor of Evil. He goes up and down the
great stairway once, for old time's sake, remembering the night Glory took
him here.
There is a courtyard with a fountain in the center, surrounded by a
long shaded gallery where Spanish friars could stroll in the shade and look
out over the flowers and hear the birds singing. Right now the only things
singing are shells passing overhead. But little Filipino kids are running
races up and down the gallery, and their mothers and aunts and grannies are
encamped in the courtyard, drawing water from the fountain and cooking rice
over piles of burning chair legs.
A grey eyed two year old with a makeshift bludgeon is chasing some
bigger kids down a stone arcade. Some of his hairs are the color of Bobby's
and some are the color of Glory's, and Bobby Shaftoe can see Glory ness
shining almost fluoroscopically out of his face. The boy has the same bone
structure that he saw on the sandbar a few days ago, but this time it is
clothed in chubby pink flesh. The flesh admittedly bears bruises and
abrasions. No doubt honorably earned. Bobby squats down and looks the little
Shaftoe in the eye, wondering how to begin to explain everything. But the
boy says, "Bobby Shaftoe, you have boo boos," and drops his club and walks
up to examine the wounds on Bobby's arm. Little kids don't bother to say
hello, they just start talking to you, and Shaftoe figures that's a good way
to handle what would otherwise be pretty damn awkward. The Altamiras have
probably been telling little Douglas M. Shaftoe, since the day he was born,
that one day Bobby Shaftoe would come in glory from across the sea. That he
has now done so is just as routine and yet just as much of a miracle as that
the sun rises every day.
"I see that you and yours have displayed adaptability and that is
good," says Bobby Shaftoe to his son, but sees immediately that he's not
getting through to the kid at all. He feels a need to get something into the
kid's head that is going to stick, and this need is stronger than the
craving for morphine or sex ever was.
So he picks up the boy and carries him through the compound, down
semicollapsed hallways and over settling rubble heaps and between dead
Nipponese boys to that big staircase, and shows him the giant slabs of
granite, tells how they were laid, one on top of the next, year by year, as
the gall