MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  “You were going to give me an example,” Griffin said, “of how everything connects. From the movie . . .”

  “Well, here we have a film that hearkens back to the glory days of Filipino-American cooperation. A film that celebrates the guerrilla period in a country led by a former guerrilla chieftain, Ferdinand Marcos. And a film that is a primary ornament of Mrs. Marcos’s pet project, the ruinously expensive Manila Film Festival. So I checked into who owns this film. The local connection. Humor me a little, George. Guess.”

  “Marcos, or a front for Marcos?”

  “No.”

  “His wife?”

  “Our Lady of Cinematography? She’s an insomniac, so they say. She has a screening room in Malacanang Palace, watches film cassettes all night long, while Pops is sleeping down the hall. Good guess. But no.”

  “One of the American producers, then. Wingfield, Larry Wingfield. His uncle was out here. Or Beaumont . . .”

  “No again. All of those people have a piece of the film, sure. The whole film is a bit of a wank. Spend a little money here, claim to have spent a lot, accrue your profits overseas where the film is shown. But do you know who’s the initial sponsor? Aurora Santos Villanueva . . . a.k.a. Birdy . . . a.k.a. First Lady of the opposition. So tell me, George. What do you think of that?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Birdy Villanueva loathes Imelda Marcos. You should hear her carry on. What she says . . .”

  “What she says doesn’t matter,” Lerner interrupted. “Oh, I know the line. Imelda’s the First Lady and Birdy’s the wife of the opposition standard bearer. But from where I sit, they’re two of a kind. How much would change if Birdy and her crew took over? You think you could tell the difference on del Pilar Street? In Tondo? In the provinces? Birdy and her pipe-smoking spouse might get to move into Malacanang someday. Call it a victory if you like. A victory for good manners or professional bookkeeping or sound business principles. Just don’t call it a revolution.”

  The nightclub was emptying, although you had the feeling someone would bring them drinks as long as they could pay for them. Manila was a city that never slept; it just rested between customers. Lerner and Griffin wandered out through the deserted handicrafts bazaar. Velvet paintings, lacquered coconut crabs reposed in silence. Woven hammocks and wicker bird cages hung still, screaming eagles called it a night and came to roost.

  “I’ve got something else for you,” Lerner said. “Your friend, Colonel Harry Roberts Harding. I wondered about him. A small matter, something missing, a gap, a hiatus, a lacuna, a stretch of time unaccounted for . . .”

  “Such as . . .”

  “Such as about forty fucking years!” Lerner burst out laughing. “That’s a little longer than a lost weekend. I don’t suppose you’ve wondered . . .”

  “He was running a motel in Florida, I heard,” Griffin volunteered, knowing that it sounded lame.

  “Sure. For five years. But what about before that? And what did he do for money? Remember, all that colonel stuff is local, honorary. He didn’t even qualify for veteran’s benefits.”

  “Was there money in the family?”

  “There was money all right. He got it in 1949, in a will. Before that he was working construction. The money came from here, about half a million dollars of it. From the estate of a Baguio millionaire whose nephew just happens to be one of the film’s producers . . .”

  “Uncle Harrison?”

  “A name you know?”

  “Harrison Wingfield.”

  “See, George. Everything connects. . . . Are you free tomorrow afternoon? Around one?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “A little travel. A little history. A little mystery. Who knows?” Lerner had stopped in front of his favorite place, the G-spot. A door opened and the place breathed out at them: beer, cigarettes, perfume, and Tina Turner’s version of Proud Mary. “I have an appointment with my fellatrix. Care to join me? It might do you good.”

  “Good night, Clifford.”

  “Good night, partner.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Dawn in Manila. In the park outside the Manila Hotel, elderly Chinese finger and punch the morning air. Tai chi. Waiters at the Aristocrat play chess. Nurses wheel baby carriages into the children’s playground behind the Quirino grandstand. Harry Roberts Harding says that sometimes you shrug off the present and sometimes the present shrugs you off. Sometimes, like this morning, it more than shrugs. It giggles, farts, makes babies. It sings, cries, whistles, beeps horns, pisses everywhere, mops sweat, hawks phlegm, and goes about its daily and unhaunted business. Ignorance and bliss. Sure, those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. But if they don’t know their history in the first place, how can they be aware of the repetition? Think about it, Colonel Harding.

  The U.S. embassy to the erstwhile territory, commonwealth, and now republic of the Philippines sits on a grassy expanse that juts from Roxas Boulevard out into Manila Bay. Its seaside posture, the surrounding fence, the guards—understandable, of course—give what would otherwise be a pleasant campus-like complex the feeling of a beachhead, hard-pressed. A show of passport gets me past the Filipino security guards who are the first line of defense. Inside, I sign in and wait while a clerk calls Susan Hayes, the woman of my recent dreams. Immigration. Visas. Veterans affairs. Social Security. On the walls are pictures of Monument Valley, Crater Lake, the Shenandoah Valley: another planet.

  Whoa! Hold it! A woman is looking at me, a longhaired fox is giving me a sidelong glance that is recognition and conspiracy combined, like when you see a kid hiding from his playmates behind a tree and the kid pleads with you not to betray his hiding place: please, it’s just a game we’re playing, don’t give me away. Where do I know her from? She sits across the hall with a six-footer, all crew cut and muscles, who must be a serviceman. He is puzzled by a sheaf of papers. She is not. She leads him through one question after another, pen in hand, brushing aside her hair when it gets in the way, hair that is cascade, veil, and entourage. The same hair—now I have it!—which entranced travel writer Thomas Gibbins a few weeks ago. He’s probably back home, impaled by guilt, while she of the raven tresses sits in the U.S. consulate, helping her latest candidate fill out papers that declare their intention to marry and live happily on the mainland.

  Susan Hayes is unavailable, “tied up in meetings.” Escorting me out, her Filipina secretary gives me a tour of the consular section. (She also gives me a handwritten note, confirming New Year’s Eve.) Like toll booth collectors outside a tunnel—an eight-thousand-mile trans-Pacific tunnel, in this case—the Department of State’s document inspectors sit facing a room full of Filipino visa applicants. Immigration is handled elsewhere, with waiting lists that stretch for years. Immigration is a slow, slow game. Gourmet cooking. Visas are fast food. The document inspectors have a few minutes, not more than five, to scan letters, plane tickets, promises of employment, tax returns, lists of relatives, references, sponsors, all in order to determine whether the applicant can be depended upon to return to the Philippines. They look for reasons that would make Filipinos return: family, job, money, property. All these can be fabricated. Documents can be purchased across the street, suits rented, and prosperous-looking Rolex watches. People can also be rented: there are visa impostors, white-haired grandmothers, saintly and harmless in Manila, who are nineteen-year-old taxi dancers when the plane touches down at Oakland.

  The revolution is not for today. Or for tomorrow . . .

  CHAPTER 32

  “All right,” Clifford Lerner said. They were standing outside the Manila Hotel. “You remember that day out on Corregidor? Marcos hugged your colonel. ‘Welcome home’ and all that. You remember?”

  “Sure.”

  “And did you have the feeling, during and after your colonel’s speech, exemplary and extemporary as it was, that something had gone slightly awry? A false note, an indiscreet reference of some kind, something not quite . . . in the script?�
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  “Yes,” Griffin answered. There was that consultation inside the hospitality tent, right after the abrupt departure of the Marcos party. Hugh Beaumont had worried aloud about a loose cannon on deck. Cecilia Santos propounded the Philippine government’s right not to be embarrassed. Larry Wingfield wanted Harding shipped back to Florida.

  “And being, sort of, a reporter, did you ever find out what was causing the fuss?”

  “Well, in general, there was some concern that—” George stopped in mid-sentence. He sounded like a unit publicist. “No, I don’t know what it was.”

  “I checked the text of Harding’s speech that ran in the papers the next day,” Lerner said. “They’re real good at running out the text of speeches. And then I found a radio chap who’d preserved the whole history-making moment on tape. I was looking to see what, if anything, they’d left out. And guess what? It was the part where he mentions people he fought with back in the glory days. A list of names just like in the detective novels. The first was—”

  “Mr. Clifford Lerner?” Their driver, a slight, polite young man, led them to a jeepney that had been decommissioned.

  Gone were the chrome statues, the phosphorescent paint, tape decks, mirrors. Gone, for that matter, was the dashboard Jesus. All there was was a sign that said: HIBERNIAN FATHERS MISSION. And, below, TONDO.

  “The first was Walter Cushing,” Lerner continued when they’d climbed in back. “He was a mining engineer in northern Luzon, same general area your fellow author comes from. He organized resistance activities, had a merry old time until the Japs cornered him. He saved the last bullet for himself. The Japs were so impressed they gave him a proper funeral.”

  “No harm mentioning him, then,” Griffin surmised. “A dead hero.”

  “No harm,” Lerner agreed. “Another name was touchy, though. Felipa Cualala.”

  “A woman?”

  “Sort of. A big mannish woman, must have been on the rough side. She led what most folks agree was the first battle of the war, the guerrilla war that is. A running battle out in the Candaba Swamps north of here, against a combined force of Japanese soldiers and Philippine police. She was a left-winger, all right, part of the early Huk movement. You’ve heard about the Huks.”

  “Not from you.”

  “Hukbalahap guerrillas. They started before the war. Peasants organizing against landlords. Private armies. Nasty. During the war they fought the Japs. And after the war, they fought the Philippine government—and its U.S. advisers. It went on for years and there are some people who would tell you it never stopped. But in the fifties, under Ramon Magsaysay, the government got its act together. Combination of glove and fist. Free land to surrendering rebels. Bribes, amnesties, military pressure. You know . . .”

  “And this woman . . .”

  “She was long gone by then. She turned bad, they say. Became a bandit. Court-martialed and executed by her own side, the Huks. Went in front of the firing squad saying anybody who passed up a chance to make money had shit for brains. Anyway, she made Harding’s list. Understandable. She had her day . . .”

  “Who else?”

  “An aviator, Jesus Villamor. He’s even on postage stamps. A provincial governor—Ablan, Roque Ablan—who took to the hills and refused to collaborate. Another okay choice. Christ, will you look at that! We’re in Tondo!”

  If someone, a perverse movie director, say, had asked a set designer to throw up an image of poverty, a squatters’ community, money no object, and if the result were Tondo, you would accuse everyone involved of having gone too far. Tondo was excess, wretched excess. Its alleys were too narrow and went on too long, its wooden shacks crowded too close together, its roads were too potholed, too filthy to be believed. The canals that cut through Tondo, open sewers that they were, did they have to be so foul that they bubbled and festered on their way to sea? Did every dog have to be scabrous and sag-titted? Did every wide-eyed rickety kid have to be a beggar, every baby have to squall, each open lot have to be a plain of garbage? It was too much. Too many clouded eyes, too many running sores, bad teeth, curved spines. Too much misery in the crowd of hey-Joe kids who swarmed their jeepney when it paused in traffic. Hey, Joe. Hey, Joe. Echoes of MacArthur’s victory forty years before, chocolate bars and kisses and I have returned. Hey, Joe.

  Passing by an empty lot, traffic at a crawl, they saw some kids crowded around a tethered dog they were taunting and torturing. Two or three older kids took turns clubbing, while half a dozen giggling youngsters looked on. Bloody-mouthed, broken toothed, half blinded, the dog didn’t know what to do or where to turn, whether to grovel, snap, growl, bark, or whine.

  “They’re killing the dog,” Lerner said. “To eat. They say the slow killing makes the meat more tender. Think there could be anything to it?”

  “I don’t know.” Griffin prayed for a break in traffic. He looked away from the dog, only to have his gaze land on a pile of culverts, round pipes stacked on top of each other, with people peeking out of the openings: a return to the caves.

  “They massage beef in Japan,” Lerner reflected. “I did a piece on it. George, you can cut that stuff with your fork, no kidding. Kobe beef, beer-fed. Incredible stuff.”

  “Come on, Clifford,” Griffin pleaded. “Back to the names.”

  “All right. Names. Names of dead warriors so far. And some not so dead. Nestor Contreras is very much alive. A three-star general. Quite a record. Teenage guerrilla during the war, then a can-do junior officer all through the Huk rebellion. Magsaysay found him, promoted him. ‘Living proof that a poor boy can rise to the top of a democratic army.’ That sort of thing. He’s been shipped off to the U.S. two or three times. There’s a photo of him with Jack Kennedy. The thing of it is, despite working under Marcos, Contreras has stayed pretty clean, kept his distance, made himself a name. ‘Dedicated, competent, personally honest.’ Some people think he’s just the ticket after Marcos goes. So when Harding came back and mentioned him on Corregidor, people noticed.”

  “And we’re going to see him?”

  “I’m working on that. He’s in the field somewhere, they say. No, we’re going to see one of the others Harding mentioned. A real war-horse. Fought the landlords, fought the Japs, kept fighting. A Huk. Felipe Olmos.”

  “I know you,” the priest exclaimed. “George Griffin, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But this is Mr. Lerner. He’s the fellow who called you. I just came along.”

  “Of course you did,” the priest said. Murphy was his name, and Griffin couldn’t place him. He was a hearty, jovial Irishman, a brogue on his tongue, a cement mixer in his front yard, a conspirator’s twinkle in his eyes.

  “You say we’ve met before?”

  “In Quezon City. At one of Birdy Villanueva’s get-togethers. I sat next to you.”

  “Now I remember.” The priest who relished National Enquirer–caliber rumors about Malacanang Palace. Affairs, babies, hit squads, salvagings.

  “Well, I won’t detain you. I’ve got work to do. The rules are, I should see everyone who asks to see Felipe Olmos. Not a very onerous duty. He’s upstairs.”

  “Father,” Clifford Lerner asked. “Just wondering—an old lefty like him—what’s he doing here?”

  “He’s a believer, Mr. Lerner. So am I.”

  “Surely not a believer in the same thing.”

  “I’d like to think he is, yes. Social justice. Fair government. Equitable distribution of wealth—all that.”

  “And religion?”

  “Good Lord,” Murphy said, snapping his fingers. “Religion. I almost forgot. I must ask him sometime what he thinks about religion. After you’re done.”

  Griffin nodded and followed Lerner out of the room, toward a flight of steps.

  “Gentlemen?” Father Murphy came out behind them. “Don’t think me frivolous. He’s a believer. I am. If we believe in the same thing, fine. If it turns out our faiths are different—well, that just doubles the chance that someone around here is right.”
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br />   Felipe Olmos stood waiting at the top of the stairs, an alert, wiry little man in plain khaki trousers and a blue short-sleeved shirt. He greeted Lerner politely but perked up when Griffin was introduced.

  “MacArthur’s Ghost’s ghost! That’s a lot of ghosts, I think.” He laughed at his own joke, a distracted giggle, as if someone were tickling him.

  “You want to put me in the movie?” he asked. “You want me to play a part? I can be the good guy. I can be the bad guy. I’ve played many parts.”

  “No, sir,” Lerner said. “We had more serious things in mind.”

  The interview was all downhill from there. Maybe it was too long ago. Maybe he’d shared too many platforms with “I led three lives” FBI men and ministers who’d escaped from behind the iron curtain. It seemed it was easier for him to remember the things he said than the things he’d done. He offered memorization, not memories. A paragraph about his love of American democracy, from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King. A sad, sweet little riff about old socialist times in Luzon, the twenties and thirties, when he and a handful of others corresponded with Eugene Debs and Leon Blum. Textbook dissertations about revolution and counterrevolution, ancient intramural spats between populists, socialists, agrarian reformers, Marxist theoreticians, all the feuds and schisms of a long-lost cause. According to Lerner, Juan and Felipe Olmos had risen high in the rank of the Huks. “Felipe was the talker, the theoretician, the philosopher. Juan did the fighting. A one-man land-reform program, Juan was: six feet of ground for the oligarchs, two hectares for the peasants.” Felipe Olmos had been caught or surrendered—that was unclear—in 1950 and served fifteen years in prison. Marcos had released and adopted him, used him as a kind of traveling exhibit: see how the New Society reconciles and absorbs its former enemies. For years he’d been traveling the lecture circuit, detailing his disillusionment with communism, his discovery of Jesus. It was sad, about the revolution he led. Not for today, not for tomorrow. Also: not for yesterday.