Ghosts of Manila (23 page)

When they went back down to the barrio they found no John Prideaux. No Eddie Tugos, either, come to that. His inert form had since been removed by his wife, they were told, and now lay in unconscious disgrace somewhere under the very roof his vampire had chosen as its perch. Bats had taken his place as Master of Ceremonies and Keeper of the Story, though his own version was somewhat different from Eddie’s. Eddie remembered a moonlike face with fangs, whereas Bats was obsessed by a flying half-woman. A learned discussion had just broken out concerning vampires,
manananggal,
aswang
and various other horrors. Someone with a heavy Visayan accent said everybody was wrong, they were called
wakwak,
but whatever you called them the only way to deal finally with them was to stop the flying upper half of the body joining up with its lower half before dawn. Do that and it was dead for several reasons, one being that without a stomach it couldn’t digest the meal of liver and entrails it had just sucked out.

‘Number one job,’ said this man, looking around at the crowd of
drinkers and listeners, ‘number one job is to find who this person is that Eddie and Bats saw. Then when her body separates at night we can take action.’ Everyone looked expectantly at Bats.

‘Hell, fellas,’ said Bats from behind his shades, ‘it was night, okay? You can’t recognise a person’s face at night all the way up on the roof there.’

‘But you must have formed an impression?’ coaxed the expert.

Bats, who had considerably embroidered his own blurred recollections of the episode some nights ago, realised that his credibility hung on naming a name, any name. He chose the barrio’s current demon, the one who’d cut off their water. ‘I won’t swear to it, mind,’ he said.

‘But? Yes?’

‘But it did
faintly
remind me of that woman up there,’ he nodded towards the graveyard. ‘The one who had her goons chase me and Eddie that time. She sucked dry our water and she’s now after our blood, that’s my guess.’

‘
Mrs
Tan
.’

‘Which makes sense,’ as Vic observed to Rio, standing a little apart. ‘It couldn’t still be poor old Brenda Miriam, ex-Presidentiable with the happy turn of phrase. “Fungus-face” – remember that? Anyway, her airspace was different. She used to fly out of Tondo.’

‘There you are. It seems we’re all after the same devil, each of us for our own reasons. I expect it’ll turn out to be a complete illusion,’ Rio added wisely, as a man who has seen ten thousand leads drain away into sand and a career’s-worth of suspects evaporate. ‘You think you’re wasting your time here, don’t you?’

‘Don’t you? If it’s just vampires you’re talking about?’

‘Oh, probably,’ said Rio, to whom wasted time was part of the job. ‘But there’ll be something underneath it somewhere. There always is. I thought I got a whiff of it in Eddie’s house earlier. I was talking to his wife – I’ve known her a couple of years now. She’s a complete contrast. Hard worker, tough, no messing about. I thought she was uneasy today, as if she was hiding something, you know? Ah, is this your Englishman coming? So look, Vic, let’s stay in touch. I’m glad we met. I can tell the wife I spent the morning with a famous journalist. She’s also a fan of yours.’

Prideaux was hurrying because he had become lost and then finally delayed. He had formed the impression that San Clemente was small
and compact, a thinnish triangle skewed into barely an acre or so. But as he’d hurried after Fr. Herrera’s stocky figure the barrio swallowed him up so that it appeared to go on without limit in every direction he took. He felt oversized, too, squeezing through the passageways and ducking low under protruding beams and sheets of tethered plastic. The cries were soon taken up:
Kano!
Kano!
The American who wasn’t one, who couldn’t be bothered to stop and explain yet again. ‘Hey, Joe!’ The GI who wasn’t one, either. With great effort he caught up with the priest’s scurrying form, at the moment of placing a hand on his shoulder realising it was the wrong colour T-shirt. ‘Hello, my friend,’ said a total stranger affably. ‘Where you go?’

But Prideaux never answered. He had caught sight of another figure at the end of the alley into which he had blundered. At this point the beaten earth lane was quite straight and led gently uphill between cupboard-sized stores with their wooden shutters propped up like box lids parallel to the ground. Built to allow a shorter population to pass comfortably beneath, they came at his eye level so that he was forced to duck and crane to see clearly. The figure was standing only twenty yards away, looking back at him. Suddenly a line of sight opened up between them and their eyes met. Prideaux immediately registered dread racing into him.
The
Rotting
Man.
The disgust he felt was explicable enough. Even at this distance he could see the misshapen head, the features encrusted with lumps and tumours. At first he thought the man’s scalp had sprouted leaf-like tags of discoloured skin, then saw he was wearing a camouflage net designed to fit over a military helmet. From beneath this olive mop of plastic tatters, a madman’s laurel crown, the creature held his gaze for a long moment. The dread intensified until the man turned abruptly away, making as he did so a strange gesture at once imperious and forlorn, flinging up a stump of right hand so the fascinated watcher caught the twinkle of open sores in the brilliant light.

A boy with a sack on his head bumped Prideaux from behind, jolting him to one side and out of the clutches of the dream into which he had fallen. He became aware of pairs of eyes watching him from behind the chicken wire covering the little storefronts, peering out between the dangling strips of sachets containing detergent powder, shampoo and toothpaste. Dim hands covered shadowy mouths. Soft giggles leaked out. He turned and tried to retrace his steps, haunted by
the vision of the scarecrow creature standing as though on a skyline, so powerfully had it erased the shantytown setting. Just at the instant when Fr. Herrera himself turned out of a doorway and right into his path Prideaux thought he recognised the gesture The Rotting Man had made. It was an infantryman’s arm signal:
Close
Up
or
Follow
Me,
he couldn’t quite remember.

‘Ah,’ Fr. Herrera greeted him. ‘Yes, they said there was a foreigner here today. I knew it was you from the description. Came up with the Press, didn’t you? The vampires of San Clemente exercising their fascination.’

‘Never mind that. I’ve just seen the most extraordinary person.’ Prideaux described the figure which had stood and stared at him, it seemed from nowhere earthly.

‘Oh, him,’ said the priest. ‘Sounds like you saw poor Melchior.’

‘Who is he? How on earth did he get like that?’

But Fr. Herrera’s mood today was unaccommodating, as if his mind were on other things and was not to be deflected. ‘Who is anyone?’ he asked unhelpfully. ‘How did any of us get like this? He looks like that because he’s sick. Dying, no doubt. He lives rough up there in the cemeteries because he’s on the run. It’s his choice. He won’t let anyone help him.’

‘Is he mad?’

‘Mad? Not a bit. Very interesting guy, you ought to meet him. Used to be in the military down south. I’m sure he could help with your researches into stress. He, too, is atoning. He, too, yearns for clean hands.’

‘The man I saw was probably yearning for any hands at all.’

‘The hardest thing to accept,’ said Fr. Herrera, ignoring him, ‘is the absence of the Day of Judgement.’

Prideaux now thought the priest himself was exhibiting signs of stress. The expansive debater of their lunch together seemed to have been replaced by someone more driven, more oracular, as though he were preoccupied with putting together a definitive sermon which had to be delivered shortly and might make or break his career. Before Prideaux could explain that he must be getting back to Vic, and ask directions, Fr. Herrera was off again.

‘Only yesterday somebody told me that Judgement Day was an absurd and cruel piece of mythology. Wrong! It’s not absurd at all.
People have to believe what they do has consequences, whether roasting for ever in hell or condemned to suffer a thousand more lifetimes locked into the cycle of grasping and loss which Buddhism calls the
samsara
of this earthly life.’

Passers-by were stopping to listen. Prideaux was gripped by an old, familiar rage at yet again finding himself the object of an impromptu public lecture. Was there something about his face? Some quality of laxity or undecidedness which made people feel obliged to hector him back onto the solid ground of moral debate?

‘Even in a barrio like this,’ Herrera indicated his parishioners, ‘where you’d expect to find belief less spoiled by sophisticated cynicism, I don’t find much apprehensiveness about eventually being brought to book. This has a real consequence. I don’t think it makes us behave worse. As I keep saying, I tell these people they’re perfectly free to murder and cheat and steal if they like, but not many take me up on my offer. No, the real consequence is we become depressed and demoralised. Each day we get wind of appalling crimes, not just in this country but all over the world. Slaughters, starvings, rapes, beatings, tortures, bombings. Huge sums of money pilfered which could have saved people’s lives. Even huger sums spent on hateful and ingenious weapons. Utterly ruthless men in this or that uniform ordering whole villages to be gassed or starved out as part of some private political strategy. And we look on impotently, knowing that virtually none of them will ever be made to account for it here on earth, let alone in heaven. The suspicion gradually grows…’

(It does indeed, Prideaux told himself)

‘… that the Courts of God are also full of hoodlums in robes. Why not? Doesn’t the allegedly Loving Father himself stand by as his innocent children are ground up like fish meal? A few years will pass and memory will shift, and the men who did the grinding will have changed into politicians’ suits and be addressing the UN to much applause. Statesmen now. And those who ran drug cartels will have children who know very little about how the family acquired its fortune, and
their
children will know nothing. They’ll be at private schools and colleges in the States and Europe. By then they’ll be old money. Time, the great launderer. Why blame them? According to Horace, though innocent, they must expiate their fathers’ sins; but the modern world doesn’t work like that. The golden word ‘amnesty’ is
spoken and tainted money becomes instantly clean. Torturers go free. The hunt for absconding dictators is called off.

‘So if I lament the loss of people’s faith – and I do,’ said Fr. Herrera, ‘I lament the loss of Judgement Day even more. If you lose your faith in all forms of accountability, whether here or after death, the heart goes out of you. The truly good couldn’t care less about being rewarded because living well is the best revenge, but they wouldn’t mind seeing the truly bad paid back. Why? Not for their own self-righteous pleasure, but because if they aren’t the word ‘justice’ loses all meaning and we may as well all go back to the jungle and stop pretending to be civilised creatures with souls.’

Most of the crowd which had gathered to listen to their priest’s satanic advocacy would surely have missed most of it, Prideaux thought, for his English made no concessions. The speech was aimed unequivocally at him, the foreigner in their midst (but why, though?). However, its general tenor – apparently an impassioned plea for justice – was applauded on all sides. There was even the odd fervent ‘Amen!’ and
‘Siya
nawa!’
,
for all that their priest’s brand of liberation theology sounded radical to the point where Prideaux almost expected to catch a sudden stench of brimstone or see troops burst from the shanties and arrest him. He quite wished they would; it would save him having to listen to any more diatribes. He began to move sheepishly away, a sidling which finally took him to the edge of the little throng undetected, as he thought. He was wrong.

‘Think about justice, John!’ the priest called after him. ‘You’ll see it’s the only consideration. Think about justice before you write your dissertation on stress. Or was it our
dis
tress?
I can’t remember now.’

He found he had only to turn a single corner to glimpse the lone palm’s crown among the rooftops. From there it was a short walk down to where, with relief, he could see Vic Agusan standing near the rickety table in conversation with a tough-looking middleaged man in a vaguely authoritarian pair of fawn slacks.

As they walked back to the Hersheymobile Prideaux said, ‘I got trapped by a rogue priest and bawled out in public. Half this barrio now thinks I’m a criminal.’

‘That’s unusual,’ said Vic, who was thinking about his new alliance with Inspector Dingca.

‘Weird. He was the one I gave lunch to some weeks ago. I may have
told you. But even weirder, I saw this really extraordinary guy, all lumps and wounds. Just rotting where he stood. Gave me this crazy wave.’

‘More denizens of squattertown.’ Vic was clearly preoccupied.

‘Who was that you were talking with just now?’

‘That,’ said Vic, ‘was Inspector Dingca, a colleague of your friend and mine, Sergeant Cruz. You remember Sergeant Cruz? Well, they’re both on at Station 14 and this is in their patch.’ As they passed the guard standing by the barrier at the entrance to the cemetery he gave the man some coins. ‘Old Hershey’s still there, see? Even kept its hubcaps. You bothered? Priests and derelicts ganging up on you and now here’s a mean-looking bastard who’s a colleague of the man we filmed tipping bodies out of barrels? That makes you some sort of accessory. Getting a bit near the edge for an academic anthro?’

‘It’s
not
understanding
that’s the hard part.’

‘So relax. Dingca’s okay. He and I may have a deal going.’

‘About Cruz?’

‘He doesn’t know I’m interested in Cruz. Forget Cruz. He’s unfinished business. He’ll keep… How about that buffoon, then, what’s his name? Tugos. The vampire man who drove into the wall before tossing his cookies? There’s your ghost story. What a waste of time! In three days San Clem’ll be back off the map and the story’ll be dead. A veteran reporter speaks.’