Rebound (19 page)

Joker ignored the threat. He had Cristobal on the defensive, trying to justify his authority. “Find me someone I know. Then
we can talk.”

“I am the New People’s Army commander for this part of Negros Occidental. I’ll clear this room if you ask me to. But what
you know, you have to tell me.”

Joker looked him in the eyes. “I need authorization for that.”

Cristobal was pissed off at this Manila intellectual called Joker for challenging his authority, and he was angry with himself
for not handling the challenge better. Joker knew he was somebody, and that a shit-kicker backcountry commander like Cristobal
would have to get permission to execute him. This was what Cristobal intended to do. Then he, himself, was going to fire the
bullet into the side of Joker’s head. The man had caused the deaths of three comrades to save his own skin. Now he was inventing
some kind of secret in an attempt to talk his way out of paying for his treachery. The rebel code on this was plain: A man
died before he turned in to his torturers someone in the movement. If he broke this code, he died, too, perhaps more mercifully
but in lasting shame, both on himself and on his family.

Cristobal decided that Joker had hoped to be released from jail in due time and then slip away before the New People’s Army
could avenge itself on him. Perhaps he would have gone to
America, where there were already more than a million Filipinos; legal immigration was running at thirty-five thousand a year,
and no one knew how many illegals were staying on. As Cristobal saw it, things had gone wrong for Joker. He had been “rescued”
by the NPA. Now he would have to pay for his real crimes, not the phony charges the military had brought against him.

All the same, Cristobal was being cautious. If Joker was lying, the most he could hope for was to play for time. If that was
his game, he would not have come on so strong, demanding to see a communist party official known to him. Joker could expect
no mercy from the party for having caused the deaths of three members. What was unusual, too, was the fast response from headquarters
when he had sent the list of prisoners in the camp—or at least the names known to the government intelligence agent posing
as a lawyer there. The man had a neat, precise mind, and he had remembered sixty-three names before he died of shock from
his many mutilations. Was it Joker’s name on that list that caused rush orders from HQ to attack the prison camp and free
everybody? Everything was going so well for him now, Cristobal did not want to fuck things up by taking out his rage on Joker,
only to find that he had destroyed an important man through his stupidity. Cristobal saw that if he was going to become a
famous liberation hero, he would have to learn to wait for the right time to strike, no matter how good it would have made
him feel to blow the side off Joker’s skull and watch him twitch in the dust.

Froilan Quijano came from Bacolod in a hurry.

“Joker knows me,” he assured Cristobal, “and he knows my standing in the party. I’ll talk to him, and you come with me. No
one is going to play games behind your back.”

“Ka Froilan,” Joker greeted him when they met, using the short form of
kasama,
the Tagalog word for “comrade.” All the guerrillas called each other by this title in combination with a first name or nickname,
second names not being used in order to protect the families and, to some extent, the identity of movement members. Joker
and Eduardo Cristobal had very pointedly not been calling each other
Ka.

The two men talked casually about the last time they had met, and mentioned mutual friends, several of whom had died in the
struggle since they had met previously. The commander sat stiffly apart, saying nothing.

“How well do you know this man, Ka Froilan?” Joker asked.

“Ka Eduardo? Only since he took over as commander a couple of weeks ago. But he is held in high repute. His father fought
in the Huk rebellion and joined the Communist Party of the Philippines the year it was founded, 1968. In the next year he
was a founding member of the New People’s Party, remembering, as we all must, that power grows out of the barrel of the gun
and that the party controls the gun. I never met his father—he died a few years ago, of pneumonia—but many say he brought
up Eduardo as a son fit to walk in his footsteps. His father was a tenant farmer, as Eduardo was
before he became a full-time fighter. They lived on one of the Velez plantations. Happy Man’s family. Eduardo killed a Velez
hacienda manager not long after his father died. He had to go into hiding. He worked in a sparrow squad in the city of Bacolod
and in towns in both provinces of the island.” A sparrow squad was a small mobile group of guerrillas that specialized in
assassinating local officials and military officers. “Eventually Eduardo came back to his own part of the country as Ka Narciso’s
second in command. When Narciso was killed two weeks ago, Eduardo took over. I met him then and approved his appointment as
commander. So, as you can see, Ka Joker, I am firmly in Eduardo’s corner. But I have been open with you, and Ka Eduardo has
given you every chance, considering the circumstances. You must not ask me for forgiveness or mercy. I would not have come
here if that was all I thought you had in mind.”

Joker laughed. He saw that the old communist organizer from Bacolod knew damn well that Joker had information not given to
him, which, of course, he took as a personal insult directed at him from HQ. Joker had enjoyed the way Cristobal had silently
fumed while Froilan talked about him as if he were not there. These two were not going to be hard to handle.

“I must say, it surprises me that you have not been briefed about this thing,” Joker said, rubbing salt in the organizer’s
wounds. “It’s certainly a mistake not to include a man of your rank in the party. I expected that you could have explained
everything to the commander here.”

This was too much for Cristobal. “You’re not going to worm your way out of this, Solano!” he shouted. “You promised to tell
this secret when I brought you a party functionary known to you. I’ve done that—faster than you thought I could, I bet. No
more playing for time! This is it. Either this secret saves your hide or I put a bullet in your skull. Talk!”

Joker looked at the organizer, but he made no effort to calm Cristobal. Joker shrugged and said, “All right, send this two-word
message and give me the answer. The message is: ‘Aces high.’”

“To headquarters?” Froilan asked.

“Yes. Also to the Soviet Embassy in Metro Manila. Don’t sign a name. Just two words. Your answer will be from party headquarters
only.” He smiled at their suspicious faces. “I can tell you one thing already: You two are the aces.”

The organizer nodded. “But you are the joker.”

Roscoe James was shown into General Bonifacio’s office in Metro Manila. The general sat at a battered steel desk, and the
only things to sit on in the bare room with institution-yellow walls were some battered steel chairs. Bonifacio was a no-nonsense
military man, and he went to great lengths to show that he was not one of the corrupt officers who achieved their rank through
political connections.

“Some stuff is hitting the fan,” Roscoe said, “only I’m not sure it’s genuine shit.”

Bonifacio smiled. “If it’s happening here,
it’s shit, Roscoe. You’ve been here too long if it starts smelling like anything else to you.”

“All right, listen to this. One of your standard Army Intelligence reports from Negros Occidental, which you float through
the CIA computers at the embassy, mentioned an escaped guerrilla suspect nicknamed Joker. Your army informant was at some
kind of rebel kangaroo court in which this Joker said he had a secret that justified his betraying three party members. Nothing
more. Yesterday a radio message beamed to the Soviet Embassy here from Bacolod contained an uncoded two-word message: ‘Aces
high.’ Our computer tied in the two card game terms from one area, aces and joker, both in Negros Occidental.”

The general looked intrigued. “Why would they give themselves away like that?”

“They had no way of knowing that the word
joker
would come to our attention at the same time and be tied to the embassy message. Except for the computer, it never would
have. Besides, these party guys think they’re pretty smart, and it gives them a charge to play little games with dull, slow-witted
capitalistic pigs like us.”

Bonifacio did not reply. He had risen from the desk and lowered a wall chart, which he studied intently. He finally asked,
“Do you know the name of the area where this Joker is being held?”

Roscoe consulted some papers from his pocket. “San Geronimo.”

The general searched on the chart. The American heard him laugh. He straightened up
and said, “You’re going to love this, Roscoe. Know who owns all the land around there? An old friend of yours. Happy Man Velez.”

While the Kalinga funeral ceremonies were still continuing, the dead warrior still strapped to the chair in the hut and beginning
to look a bit the worse for wear, Dartley tried to get cooperation from other warriors not closely tied to what was going
on. Word had gotten around about how the American had killed the three Velez goons and made a present of their weapons and
heads to the local warriors. This was looked upon as extremely generous behavior for an American, who seldom were known to
kill people and almost never made gifts of their enemies’ heads or weapons.

Dartley wanted to use the Kalinga tribal skills to penetrate the Velez defenses, or at least find out what these were. Search
parties had gone out for the missing men, but their bodies had not been found. As yet, Happy Man had made no attempt at a
revenge attack on the Kalingas, but this might have been because his men had not seen any to shoot at. The warriors were keeping
away from Velez territory, and it would be pointless and very dangerous for Velez men to come into the forest after the Kalingas,
who could be everywhere or nowhere, as they wished.

But Dartley was out of luck at first in getting help from those Kalinga warriors who weren’t spending all their time at the
funeral. They were willing, but a major incident occurred, which prevented them from helping. It
took place not far from where Dartley and the three others had put their tents. This seemed to be a neutral area of some kind
between different Kalinga groups. Early one morning they heard a great deal of shouting nearby, and all four men rushed from
the tents with their M16s ready. Some of the men from the long hut where the funeral was taking place were having a violent
argument with another group of Kalingas Dartley had not seen before. There were six or seven men in each group, and they waved
spears at each other and fitted arrows in bows as the two groups yelled at and plainly cursed each other.

Their friends from up the hill pleaded with Dartley. Rafael did not have to translate for Dartley what they wanted him to
do: shoot the others. He backed off, and all four returned to their tents.

“That’s all we need,” Dartley muttered. “Get mixed up in Kalinga gang wars.”

Rafael explained. “We outsiders call these people Kalingas, and they look all the same to us. But to them they all seem different.
The people in one valley hate the people in another—and always have, for many generations. When people from another side of
a mountain come to their side of the mountain and maybe get lost, they consider these people fools and laugh at them or insult
them, even though the same thing would happen to them if they went to a strange part of the mountain.”

Dartley smiled. “They sound like Americans.”

Rafael gestured. “They are like people everywhere. That is what I always tried to understand
when I worked here, and that is what many timber workers and other outsiders never get to understand about these mountain
people. They think they are savages who do not have thoughts in their mind or who do not think the same things that people
who live in villages and towns think. All they say is, these people were headhunters a short time ago. I have seen many arguments
like what we have just seen, but I never saw one head cut off until you went with that warrior.”

“I am a headhunter,” Dartley said in an eerily calm voice.

“I think you are fiercer than most of the warriors who are supposed to be wild and savage in these mountains,” Rafael said
firmly. “You upset me.”

“You came up here to kill a man,” Dartley said. “Are you having second thoughts?”

“No,” Rafael answered without hesitation. “I am just interested in comparing us with the Kalingas. I am no better than you
are, only with less skill, strength, and courage. I can compare you with the Kalingas. Me, Benjael, Harry… I think we are
tamer men.” He laughed. “But worth every dollar you pay us. Don’t think you can pay us less because of what I say.”

The shouting was still going on between the Kalingas, some distance away, but it seemed less urgent now, sounding less likely
to erupt into violence.

“This argument will be settled by a
bodong,”
Rafael said. “This is a system of making peace pacts between rival groups who once headhunted against each other. Church
and government people
got this system going some years ago to stop the headhunting. The
bodong
depends on the Kalinga men’s pride in their oratory. They sit and drink
basi
—sugarcane wine—while they debate all the wrongs and insults that the groups have caused each other. The system has been such
a success that the church and government people now believe that the Kalingas deliberately start fights so they can party.
The government found that their own interference in the people’s customs worked against Manila big-money interests when they
wanted to build the four dams. In the old days, with all the groups fighting among themselves, the government could have done
what they liked. Now the tribal factions have learned to discuss their differences and have joined together to fight the hydroelectric
schemes. You can forget the warriors outside—they will be holding a summit conference for the next few days to solve their
differences. And like politicians everywhere, they will have a good time while they are doing it.”