Ghosts of Manila (9 page)

One of the most telling shots in this short documentary was a quick cut of an international aid agency’s Bangkok Field Director who spoke a few glowing sentences about Toytime as, he believed, ‘typical of the small and as yet uncoordinated efforts on the part of caring people to ease the lot of perhaps the most overlooked and defenceless casualties of this appalling war’. This showed that not only did the scrawny old
fool not have the first idea what Toytime was up to but that the ex-Master Sergeant’s business could flourish openly with the connivance of corrupt authorities and ignorant charity directors.

‘Can’t touch it, John.’ How many mouths had he watched frame these words as they munched in London restaurants or dribbled smoke in offices? ‘I mean, Christ almighty, what a
story.
I can’t wait to see the rough cut. If it was up to me, of course, it would go out prime time, triple star rating, required viewing. Move over
Panorama
and
World
in
Action.
But I know those guys upstairs. The bottom line is
no
way
.’

After they had seen some clips from the the rough cut and the lights had come up, leaving the mouths shaken and troubled, they changed to a different tack, as if relieved at finding a rationale for turning the film down.

‘
You
know it’s going on and
I
know it’s going on. Enough to make you puke. Those poor little. But there’s no… actual…
proof
. Is there? Really, John? When it comes down to it? What you’ve got – and I must say I think you’ve done an absolutely brilliant job, Christ, some of that footage – what you’ve got is a certain amount of very suggestive circumstantial evidence and a certain amount of hearsay, but you’ve not got the clincher.’

‘Like a kid actually being fucked to death or throttled till her eyes pop? You mean if I had
that
you’d go with it? Put it out and hang the consequences?’

‘I didn’t say that, John. I only meant we could cover ourselves. Legally, morally.’

‘Supposing I tell you I’ve got that footage?’

The mouths always opened at this point. ‘Aw, Jesus.’

‘Does that mean you’ll show it?’

‘No, of course it bloody doesn’t. Look, I understand what it’s like. You’ve become emotionally involved in this thing and who can blame you. If it’d been me I don’t think I’d ever sleep again. But you know as well as I that if you’re going to do investigative documentaries you’ve got to show the crime being crimed. By and large. That’s what was so ace about
Parrot’s
Beak
and
Money
Men.
That’s why you got the awards, John. They’re absolute models of how to do it. Here’s what’s happening. Here’s your allegation in words. Here’s more visual proof.
Boom.
But in this thing you’ve got a crime that’s far too horrible and,
let’s face it, too
minority
to be shown. Most viewers wouldn’t even stand for it being delicately hinted at, still less our Head of Docs. Not now. Not a chance. Perhaps in twenty years. But not now… Have you
really
got it on film?’

Of course Prideaux didn’t have it on film, but of course the entire business of legality was an irrelevance. Once out in the polished roar of Great Cumberland Place he knew in his heart this was right. Certain stones were inherently untouchable. This was 1971 and the Americans were washing their hands of Vietnam. Nobody back home in the States wanted any more painful revelations about what really had gone wrong, what really had happened. They wanted oblivion. They didn’t even want to see their own boys arriving home. And England, pusillanimous little England, would go on supporting them to the bitter end, not rocking the boat. His eyes filled with tears of frustration, not unmixed with a sentimental rush on behalf of the nameless victims even then, like as not, speeding to their first and last party in new knickers and T-shirt.

So fuck TV, there was always the Press. But there wasn’t, for all the same reasons. For a while it looked as though the
Sunday
Times
might run it in ‘Insight’, backed up by carefully-chosen stills from The Film No-one Would Show. But this, too, fell through. Vietnam was either too long ago or too recent, the mouths couldn’t agree on that in between their gulps of wine or instant coffee. In any case the timing was wrong. So it was even for ‘Footnotes’ since
Private
Eye
was currently distracted by libel actions.

Prideaux didn’t have Manson-style snuff action in the can, but he did have a body. A voice on the phone had woken him in the old Flower Palace in Bangkok. Sound and lighting were goofing off somewhere in town so he and Pete Rivett the cameraman dressed and got into their hired Simca.

‘It’s at moments like this one pauses for thought,’ Prideaux said, his hand on the ignition key. Outside, Patpong’s nightlife thudded and flashed. ‘When gumshoes are woken amid bachelor sleaze with anonymous tip-offs of corpses, they know their first duty’s to tell the cops. But they, like us, want a scoop and a headstart.’

‘So let’s go.’

A white tourist stood woozily on the kerb and urinated at the passing cars. Prideaux stared without seeing him.

‘Okay, John,’ Rivett had said, ‘it’s a set-up. Your caller’s a cop who’s sick of us interfering, right? We go out, we find the bod, and suddenly
whango,
on come the headlights. “Why you no tell us? Since when you do Thai police work? Maybe you the ones who kill.” That’s always possible.’

‘But maybe it’s also that final damning piece of evidence we need.’

‘Yeah,’ Pete said. ‘So we risk it. We go.’

In the adrenal, neon-lit night beyond the car windows a thousand reasons for not going winked with mocking clarity. Apprehensively Prideaux had started the Simca, shamed into action as, without knowing it, men are shamed into gallantry. He, as they, retained a small rage tucked away. It knew that Pete Rivett was braver because stupider. After all, he had only come up with one possible scenario. Prideaux could think of dozens.

In the film, the sequence was climactically stark, short, gaining everything from his loss of nerve.

‘A midnight caller told us where one of Toytime’s victims had been dumped.’

The V/O accompanied some wild footage shot from the same car on another night. Girlie bars streamed past. Revellers lurched. Traffic melted like tears, highlights rolling off cellulose curves and stippling glass.

‘If true, this was not work for a British film crew but for the Thai police. If false, the information could be a trap set for meddlesome foreigners. Given what we already knew about the involvement of at least one senior officer we dared not trust the police.’

By now the car was in open country, heading down the airport road, shot three nights later when nerves had recovered and no hue and cry had started. Oh – Prideaux told Pete – he repeated it. Twice, actually. He said the next turn after Sukvannet. There’s a gas station serving the village road and the
klong
running parallel to it. Drivers stop in front, boatmen tie up behind. Burnt out a couple of months back, he said. There, right behind the facilities, you’ll see.

They almost missed the garage, dark as it was, and swung off across the apron, tyres poppling on char and scraps of rusty metal. We’ll have to try and get it in one pass, Prideaux said, stopping abruptly like a motorist who knows he’s taken a wrong turning. If it’s an ambush we want it on film. Shoot from the back seat, right
hand side. According to him it’s behind the truck, wherever the f-, ah, yuh.

On the film the light sidles over the oval end of a rusting petrol tanker hunkered down on its brake drums in crusted puddles of wire and carbonised rubber. The relic slides past, industrial dinosaur, all blacks and greys and curved ribs as if dug out of the La Brea tar pits. Then a blotch of white. Someone is watching, casually, sitting on the rusty springs of the driver’s seat down on the ground. The camera doesn’t stop but drifts past, catching the whole child, leaving the individual eye to pick for ever the detail which burns. For Prideaux the instant he saw him was no different from the thousandth time that versions of him had curled up on the cutting-room floor. It was the right leg, not broken he was sure but flopped over with a child’s flexibility, the inside edge of the sneaker flat on the concrete forecourt. It was the most defenceless object he had ever seen, this thin brown leg, so assertive in its vulnerability that it obviously longed to be free of the upper half of the body which was so clearly dead. The boy’s head was tilted forward so the features were foreshortened and no expression was readable. He was examining the hand lying in his lap. The other was palm up beside the seat. In the shadow cast by his own features the mouth was pouchy or swollen or protrusive. As the camera passed it took in the yellow ligature around his neck, visible from the side, a rolled bandanna or Scout scarf, it looked like.

Go
go
go
– Prideaux said, hyperventilating, although he himself was driving, and took off like a lunatic, throwing Pete into a heap of power packs and film canisters. This would be the moment for the actinic flare of headlights, the hail of bullets.

‘Our unknown informant had not lied.’

‘The child’s body had been left exactly where we were told.’

Head bowed, the meditative small figure went on sitting in Prideaux’s mind, foot bent over, palm outflung. Was still there twenty years later although by now he had stiffened into an emblem, the
rigor
vitae
having set in which afflicts those doomed to live only in survivors’ minds. The little body exerted a terrific gravitational pull such that unlikely moments and extraneous topics would be dragged inwards to confront it. It was he who sat in London restaurants and offices, listening to executive mouths deny him a hearing even as they chomped and sucked and swilled. Prideaux shielded him from
executive eyes, denying him to all but a couple of waverers who might finally have been convinced.

‘Oh my God. Oh my God. I don’t know what to say. God, John, it’s. I mean. The best thing you’ve done. In its way. It’s just gotta be shown. But it can’t be. No way can we put that out.’

This went on. Then one day Prideaux showed it to a friend of Pete Rivett’s, an American cameraman who had freelanced Tet and sold ABC its best footage of Hue. ‘Yeah,’ he said at the end, stubbing out a Camel in the armrest tray, ‘can we run it again?’ There were only the three of them in the viewing theatre. The second time around he said ‘You didn’t like Bangkok, right?’ He was talking to Pete.

‘I didn’t like the story.’

Prideaux heard this as a betrayal. ‘Who did?’ he asked.

‘Sure. But it shows in the camera. It’s not as good as your Cambodia thing. Or the money scam. Loved that. Nobody in Nam who didn’t know that was going down. Sniffing out that account, what was it called, Prysumeen? Righteous stuff. But this thing don’t cut the mustard. It kinda doesn’t matter in the same way.’

‘Doesn’t
matter
?’

‘It’s not news, not like the others. What you’ve got here’s a slimeball running a business for scuzzbuckets. Could be anyone, anyplace, doing a little free enterprise on the edge of a war zone. Sure, it’s gross, but it’s one guy in a million catering for five guys in a million. A real pity he’s American, John. Y’understand what I’m saying? “The Master Sergeant”. Ex-GI. Troops on R&R. War orphans. It’s all claiming to be up there with My Lai and Calley but it’s not. That was about what constant fear and danger and grief can do to your average down-home cracker when he reaches breaking point in hostile territory. He goes amok, right? But your guy’s an entrepreneur, not a combat victim. Sure do wish he’d been French or Australian. Or a Brit, ’n I sure wish we could say his clients were chiefly foreign correspondents and cameramen stead of grunts on R&R. Cos I reckon the typical GI, even if he has been in firefights in the last few months, ’s no more likely to want to snuff kids in a heavy sex scene than the typical film crewman who’s been
filming
those firefights. ’ts what I think.’

It was what Prideaux was thinking, too, only hadn’t known until that moment when he sat in the viewing theatre with a draining
sensation. The child was never to have his posthumous justice, then. Or maybe the journalist would be denied his next palm.

‘’nany case the title’d have to go. Too close to that Rod Steiger thing.
The
Sergeant.
Now that. Shit, that opening sequence. That landscape. Henri Persin, beautiful camerawork. “I wanna see this place CLEAR! CLEAR! CLEAR!”, the whole method bit, great movie.’

Only those with Prideaux’s arrogance could have understood what it was to aim for a masterpiece each time rather than for the respectably cumulative, the solid, which builds a professional reputation. It was as if he might always have given up after three films, having tried that medium, conquered it, retired disdainfully leaving the field free once more for the less talented to plod on, slowly filling their bookshelves with bronze statuary and citations sandwiched in lucite slabs. There was no provision inside him for his own miscalculation. Outright failure could always be smudged, glossed as merely a matter of ill-informed opinion. But misjudgement, wrong reading… How wrongly could one read the boy on the charred seat, the lolling sneaker? His next documentary was about the popularity of bingo, a sociological sign of the times in working class Britain. It was thought amusing in a melancholy sort of way, without the expected patronage, full of striking images. Vietnam was over, so Nixon’s bombing of Hanoi in that Christmas week of 1972 seemed like the gratuitous start of an entirely new war. Twenty years later strange relics still survived those times, occasionally exploding with disabling force. Among this buried ordnance was always the sight of the bleakly moated US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. The golden eagle still spread its wings on top. The hedges down below, once trampled into matchwood by anti-war protesters and police horses skidding on toy marbles, had long grown back. Only for a few would it forever remain Genocide Square.

Documentaries, documentaries.

Those with somewhere to go, go. Those without do supplementary degree courses in their forties. The documentaries had taken him everywhere and nowhere. Maybe anthropology would be a staid enough discipline on which a wayward traveller might hone a working lifetime down into a few slender rules with which to puncture stay-at-home academics. John Prideaux, the man with the producer’s ticket,
was long since played out and washed up. In theory he too should have matured into a mouth, wining and dining young hopefuls who nowadays didn’t even have to book a viewing theatre to get their stuff seen. They produced cassettes from every pocket like cigarette packs, fed them into players, flooded your office with instant sound and images before you could say ‘Make an appointment with Jackie, ’kay?’ In practice, mouths were mouths because supplicants couldn’t look them in the eye; couldn’t raise their own vision beyond the lips spilling smoke and phrases like ‘Can’t use it, I’m afraid,’ or ‘The idea’s got legs but the film just stands still.’ Or just ‘Jesus, have I got problems enough with the union.’ Besides, British TV documentaries had long since ossified into two or three versions of the same film, which Prideaux supposed was a slight advance on the radio documentary which existed in only one version endlessly repeated. (‘Do you one in a morning, single-handed, any subject you like,’ he’d once told a radio producer. ‘Step one is to send down to the music library for a remotely relevant theme song. For instance, anything to do with the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange or higher finance you have to get Abba going “Money, money, money”. It’s compulsory. You play a wodge of that at the beginning, that’s three minutes’ script time saved. You go on putting musical bites in at regular intervals and the half hour’s already down to twenty-two minutes. You send someone out into the street to get some vox pops, any old brainless opinions, it doesn’t matter. Cut those in and you’ve dropped to eighteen minutes. Then you ring up one of your list of tame experts to find his viewpoint and book him. You work out what the opposite view would be and find another expert to espouse that. That’s called balance. Then all you need is a third expert who can say ‘But as usual the truth probably lies somewhere between. Meanwhile, the City …’ and it’s a wrap. Do it in my sleep’.)