MacArthur's Ghost Page 11

  “They recorded him,” he said.

  “They what?”

  “Put a tape recorder under the bed while they—you know—rutted. You must hear it. Cries and whispers and then a snatch of an Ilocano love song. The students used to play it on the UP radio station. That was before martial law of course. Oh, you must listen. It’s a lulu!”

  Not sure whether he was more surprised at Marcos’s supposed philandering or the priest’s feverish recounting, Griffin turned back to the main program. There was nothing funny about the speaker now, a dark, granite-faced nun reciting a grim litany of summary executions by army and police.

  “What’s a salvaging?” Griffin asked the priest.

  “The army’s way of salvaging a situation,” the priest replied. “They shoot someone—while trying to escape, of course.”

  “And what’s a ‘lost command’?”

  “Paramilitary groups—hit squads—operating on the fringe of things. Charley’s Angels is one of them. Another was called the Kawasaki Boys. They rode around on motorcycles, murdering people down in Mindanao. There’s a gang called ‘the Fun Bunch.’ “

  “. . . and Mr. Griffin, whom you may have read about in connection with the celebrated return of Colonel Harry Roberts Harding . . .”

  Oh, my God! He was being introduced. Pipe in hand, genial, courtly Jun Villanueva was talking about him.

  “. . . about the role—if any—of tourism in the so-called Third World. The floor is open.”

  Griffin checked the room. He saw the genteel, well-dressed upper middle class whose power Marcos had usurped. Pity. And the students, skinny, earnest kids who stared at him, hard stares that stopped just short of insolence, a polite race, late in learning rudeness.

  “I have a question.” A nun arose, a Filipina, young, fervent.

  “Yes, sister, go ahead.”

  “The government spent money bringing Mr. Griffin and other travel writers to the Philippines. Does Mr. Griffin believe the funds spent on his airfare and his meals and his hotels were well spent?”

  “No,” Griffin answered.

  “No?” Jun Villanueva said. “Just no?”

  “I think that says it all.”

  “Do you believe,” the nun resumed, “that it is wise policy for such a nation to encourage tourism?”

  “Probably not,” Griffin answered. “Depending, I suppose, on what the money would have been spent on otherwise. On balance, I would say I’m harmless.”

  “Harmless?” Now the nun was challenging him. “What about the impact of tourism on local culture?”

  “Local culture? Waiters? Bellhops? Taxi drivers? They get lonely . . .”

  “There’s more to local culture than that,” the nun countered.

  “All right, sister,” Griffin answered. He was getting irritated. Sure, the questions were fair, the cause was probably worthy, but there was something whining and querulous about this group. He found himself missing the blaring jukeboxes, the “hey Joe” solicitations, the bar girls with names like Funny Face, Captain Marvel, Miss Sixty-niner. Who represented them? And what about the gangs of men you saw on every downtown sidewalk, clutching applications, bio-data sheets, photographs, queuing up outside labor recruiters who offered jobs for drivers in Kuwait, pipe fitters in Abu Dhabi, janitors and barbers in Riyadh?

  “Forgive my flippancy,” Griffin said. “But as far as a tourist is concerned, local culture is a meal they hope won’t give them dysentery, some handicraft, a dance troupe, and—maybe—a few girls who aren’t particular. If local culture is alive, tourism can’t hurt it. If tourism hurts it, it was dying anyway. I don’t worry too much about local culture. And I don’t know many people who do.”

  “No regrets?” Jun Villanueva asked.

  “I hope to redeem myself in other ways,” Griffin replied, sounding pompous.

  “Ah, yes!” Jun Villanueva had found his opening. “All of you know Mr. Griffin has been named to author the memoirs of MacArthur’s Ghost, Colonel Harding. Not by chance, a movie is being made of these same adventures.”

  “Mr. Griffin!” It was one of the students, a heartbreakingly pretty Filipina who had to screw up her courage to speak. “What does Mr.—Colonel—Harding think of what has become of the country he fought for?”

  “Fought in, not for,” someone corrected. It was a male student, one of the hard starers. “He fought here, but not for this country. We should remember that.”

  “I thought it was a partnership,” Griffin volunteered, more to help out the girl than anything. “An alliance.”

  “Then you were misinformed,” the student countered.

  “Is that so?”

  “What Colonel Harding thinks, all his war stories . . .” The student’s voice trailed off, then renewed. “There are other people here. They have memories also.”

  “I think he knows that,” Griffin said. “It’s why he came back.”

  “The story isn’t over,” the student said. “The fighting continues every day. Nothing is over.”

  “I think he knows that,” Griffin repeated. “He’s looking for the ending.”

  “There is no ending!”

  “If there are no further questions,” Jun Villanueva said, “I have one.” He was sucking on his pipe, chuckling, the image of a sly, droll fellow. “Have you found Yamashita’s treasure yet? At the end of the rainbow?”

  “I haven’t even found the rainbow,” Griffin answered quietly.

  CHAPTER 17

  “Birdy likes you,” Susan Hayes announced later that night. They had just left the Villanuevas’ post-meeting party at a seafood restaurant in Makati.

  “Should I be flattered? Or rush to the airport?”

  “I’d stay. She’s hard to impress.”

  “Is it me or is it Harding?”

  “Why worry? Anyway, the whole dinner revolved around you. All that historical talk.”

  Griffin had indicated he couldn’t say much about the Harding book. It was a matter of “doctor-patient” privilege he claimed, and the other guests respected that. But the conversation was nonetheless historical. Jun Villanueva wondered aloud who were the heroes of the Philippines? Who were the men students should admire? That was when the merry-go-round began. They started with Jose Rizal, the physician-patriot whose monument stood near the Manila Hotel, guarded round-the-clock. “An American invention,” someone sniffed, a dilettante liberal who went to his death believing Spain’s feudal rule could be ameliorated. Then there was Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the turn-of-the-century guerrilla campaign against American occupation. A feisty fighter—when he fought. But they said he’d sold out his country three times—to the Spanish; and then, after capture, to the Americans; finally to the conquering Japanese in 1941. What, then, of the commonwealth’s great leader, Manuel Quezon? An upper-class oligarch. What of Roxas, Manuel Roxas, the postwar leader? A Japanese collaborator, personally retreaded by MacArthur. What of Ramon Magsaysay? A vigorous, well-meaning CIA stooge.

  On and on it went, Mabini, Luna, Laurel, Aquino. Griffin didn’t know most of the names, but he was beginning to figure out the game. In these islands, history was a series of compromises and betrayals. All victories were tainted, all contests fixed, all elections rigged. The border between heroes and villains was permanently—deliciously—blurred. A merry-go-round. Heroes were lowered and rogues were elevated and it was all a matter of perspective, and why not, in a nation where people were always changing sides? The longer you rode the merry-go-round, the more you were accused of. And Marcos had ridden the merry-go-round longer than anyone. The affable guerrilla Griffin had seen on Corregidor, the choked-up old soldier, the aging dictator—he was the uninvited guest tonight. He was everywhere.

  In the morning, the newspapers featured Marcos’s photo, greeting visitors, making speeches. He starred on television. Harding and Griffin had spent a lazy morning watching Marcos open a golf tournament at the Puerto Azul resort outside Manila. Wisecracking, joking with aides, he lofted golf balls out ov
er the course, onto the rough, into the jungle, spectacularly errant shots, and an army of caddies raced after the balls, for which they received a hundred pesos and a presidential handshake. Manila bristled with Marcos talk: guerrilla exploits, real or imagined, elections true or false, trials fair or crooked. His performances in office, in politics, in war and peace, were endlessly studied. His performance in bed, also, because if you couldn’t take your leadership personally, if you couldn’t wonder what—or who—the king was doing tonight, why bother? Bed? Beds. Nuptial beds, extramarital couches, and finally, hospital beds. Sexual speculation yielded to pathological gossip about kidneys, heart, skin, lupus, cancer, shrapnel, allergies.

  Maybe that was why Harry Roberts Harding had come back. He could have done his memoirs anywhere, could have found a better ghost-writer, a fatter deal. But he had come back here and, in coming back, exposed himself to the same merry-go-round that gilded and tarnished all the rest. No one was immune, not even a hero. Especially not a hero.

  “How about out at the university?” Griffin asked Susan Hayes. “Was I okay there?”

  “Sure.”

  “With Sister Mary Agony . . . and that fire-eating student?”

  “Every year, that campus sends some students to the NPA. You attend these opposition meetings and they seem so pathetic. But people are getting killed. That’s really pathetic.”

  “When Marcos goes, can you picture those kids marching out of the mountains?”

  “There are alternatives. Jun Villanueva is one. Or some of the people in exile, like Aquino. And some of the cleaner army people. Nestor Contreras for one. American-trained.”

  The car stopped outside a walled compound in Pasay City. A security guard opened the gate. Security guards were at the beginning and end of every journey.

  “A Chinese merchant had a big house,” Susan Hayes said. “And built four identical houses for each of his children. Here’s mine.”

  Griffin opened the door and stepped aside. “I’ll walk you to the front.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know that.” A dog was sleeping on the pavement. There were dozens of potted plants set out in tin cans. “I have a question.”

  “Oh.” He could feel her tense. And he wondered why it was that, no matter how old you got, there was always this crunch when you walked a woman to her front door, that moment when she turned to face you under a porch light and you were back in high school.

  “I was wondering,” Griffin said. “The first time you saw me, with those travel writers, in the Champagne Room, I was wondering what you saw.”

  “Ah.” She leaned against the door, then motioned him toward a wicker chair that sat out on the porch. She fished in her purse for a cigarette, lit it, sat across from him.

  “I saw a potential problem. I’m trained to spot them. I saw someone who was smart. Reckless. Self-destructive. A problem.”

  “That bad.”

  “There’s more. When I saw you, I said there’s a man who has read Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene and Lord Jim. There’s a man who loves Sidney Greenstreet. There’s a man who could be interested in a tropical-weight white suit and a wicker chair and a Manila cigar and an overhead fan. In short, all that stuff.”

  “Oh, my God . . .”

  “A dreamer. I have a weakness for them.”

  “You do? How much of a weakness?”

  “Dream on.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “Where have you been?” Harry Roberts Harding called out cheerfully. With half a dozen tourists and as many more security guards looking on, the legendary guerrilla was piling his luggage into the trunk of a yellow taxi. “I’m tired of listening to the sound of my own voice. Time we hit the road. We’ll pick up your stuff on the way to the airport. We’re going to Baguio first. And then . . .”

  “You’ve got our campaign mapped out?”

  “It’s a guerrilla campaign,” Harding said. “No itinerary. Targets of opportunity.”

  “I’m ready,” Griffin said. Harding’s energy was contagious.

  “Not so fast,” Harding said, speaking quietly. “There’s a fellow in the lobby wants to talk to us before we go.”

  “A reporter?” Griffin guessed that Harding loved stirring things up, but he had hoped that phase was over. Watching reporters probe and test the colonel only reminded him of how little he knew. He wanted time alone with Harding to get ahead of the pack. But, no, the colonel told him, this wasn’t another reporter. This fellow said he was from the U.S. embassy.

  “I’m Phil Robinson,” the man said. Thin, sandy-haired, thirtyish. Barong shirt, crisp blue slacks, loafers. Lively eyes.

  “What can we do for you?” Harding asked, then adding for Griffin’s benefit: “He wanted to see the two of us together.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Robinson said. “How about some coffee and maybe a danish. I’m on strict orders to bring some back for the girls at the office.”

  “Well, I don’t mind,” Harding said. They followed Robinson out to the dining area at the edge of the swimming pool, which, like the Manila Hotel itself, was an amazing oasis of decorum and class in a city of disorder and decay. Clear blue water, spanking white lawn chairs, neatly clipped Bermuda grass, two or three towel boys, cabana boys, barmen, and waiters for every Ludlum-reading tourist. Down beyond the sea wall at the edge of the hotel property was Manila Bay, a septic tide lapping in each morning’s deposit of broken rubber sandals and soiled pampers.

  “I won’t keep you long,” Phil Robinson said, offering a pack of business cards. “For openers, this is who I am and where I work and how I can be reached. Take a couple, please. It may mean nothing to you, but I’d feel better knowing you were carrying them around.”

  The cards showed his name, said he was in the political section of the U.S. embassy, and specified where he could be reached, day and night.

  “I’d have looked you up anyway, even if I didn’t have to,” Robinson said. “I’m a history buff. I can’t tell you the weekends I’ve spent over on Corregidor. I’ve crawled over that island by the inch. Colonel, when I heard you were coming back, it was the Dodgers moving back to Brooklyn. I can’t wait to read your book.”

  “That’s nice,” Harding said.

  “Now comes the hard part,” Robinson continued. “This is where we advise you not to travel around the Philippines. This is all off-the-record. For now. This whole meeting’s off-the-record. But the important thing is, you’ve been warned.”

  While Harding and Griffin traded glances, Robinson dipped his danish into his coffee. “Frankly, I’m glad that’s over with.”

  “You mean that’s it?” Harding asked.

  “You’re a ghost, Colonel,” he said. “You really are. And people are scared of ghosts. It’s that simple.”

  “I thought I was a harmless old man,” Harding said.

  “Like hell you did.”

  Harding smiled at that. He liked the sass. “Well, who’s after me?”

  “Who is it you’re after, Colonel? Marcos? MacArthur? Contreras? The NPA? The opposition? Who? Is it the treasure? No, not the treasure. That’s just bait. Who are you after, really?”

  “All of ‘em,” Harding said. “None of ‘em.”

  “Then they could all, or none, be after you,” Robinson replied.

  “Could be,” Harding said. “Just tell me what you heard.”

  “Okay,” Robinson agreed. “But what you hear depends on where you listen. You listen in other places, you might hear the same thing . . .”

  “Where’d you listen?”

  “We listen where we’re worried. On the left. The NPA.” He decided to include Griffin. “That stands for New People’s Army.”

  “I heard it stands for Nice People Around,” Griffin said, only wanting to show he’d been doing some homework on his own.

  “That’s an old joke,” Robinson said, “and not a very funny one at that. The New People’s Army is the military arm of the communist party of the Philippin
es. Ten or so thousand armed guerrillas, at least some of whom might be willing to deprive me of the book you fellows are working on. No joke.”

  “So that’s what you hear?” Harding asked.

  “Just a whisper. From a paid informant who’s usually reliable. Usually, not always. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “That’s nice,” Harding said in exactly the same tone he’d received Robinson’s enthusiasm for their book.

  “It stands to reason, sort of,” Robinson went on. “All the attention you’ve been getting. That picture of Marcos hugging you ran all over the place. And the movie. If they got you, it could embarrass the government.”

  “Well . . .” Harding finished his coffee, picked at the crumbs from his danish, brushed them into a pile, swept them into his hand, and deposited them in an ashtray. “I’m not surprised. You still game, Griffin?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.”

  Robinson signed the bill and accompanied them out to where their taxi waited. Harding paused before stepping inside. “These people who whisper to you . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Does it ever go two ways? You ever whisper back?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you did. Whisper this. Whisper that my target—my only target—the only person I’m after out here is myself.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Good-bye, Manila,” Harding said as soon as they were on the plane to Baguio. “I think Elbert Hubbard Harding was right, heading for the mountains.”

  No argument from Griffin. Beyond them, Manila was a smudge, polluted air, littered land, poisoned sea, a triple-decker defilement. Where sky was smoke, rain was sweat, and the bay was a catch basin for all the world’s infections. Now they were flying into a bowl of blue. There were rice fields and villages and a startling, solitary mountain rising out of the plains. That was Mount Arayat, Harding said.

  “I never thought I’d see that mountain again,” Harding reflected. “Damn. What was it Uncle Harrison said?”