MacArthur's Ghost Page 23

  Very nicely done, Griffin thought. A trap well sprung. Not a fatal trap, a small snare, but very well done all the same.

  “That was an interview Mr. Lerner initiated. I just tagged along. I suggest you talk to Mr. Lerner.”

  “Mr. Lerner left the Philippines this morning. Luckily we were able to chat before he left. Mr. Lerner insisted it was a background interview. Harmless and historical. But we gather you stayed for a private session with Mr. Olmos.”

  “That was at Olmos’s request,” Griffin said. “Not mine.”

  “And?”

  “He sent a message to Colonel Harding. I haven’t had a chance to deliver it. Maybe I never will.”

  “What was that message?”

  “Something about how it was better to remember the way things—things and people—used to be.”

  “That was all?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are working on this book,” Cecilia Santos said. It was all she could manage not to call it “this so-called book.” “What is the . . . form of this book now? Do you have a typed manuscript? Handwritten notes? Have you used a tape recorder?”

  Christ, she despises me, Griffin thought. She looks at me, it’s as if she were checking symptoms: rash, chancres, discharges, pain in urinating. I’ll treat you, but I won’t touch you.

  “Notes,” Griffin answered. “Tapes too.”

  “That could be helpful to us,” she said. She glanced at Robinson for support.

  “There might be things he told you that could help us find him,” Robinson said. “Clues to his intentions, state of mind. Names of wartime associates. Even place-names. Things that mean nothing to you might mean a lot to someone else.”

  “I don’t think I can go for that,” Griffin said. “I can review the material myself. Tell me what you want, I’ll look for it. But I won’t show it to you and I won’t give it to you.”

  “Mr. Griffin?” It was Susan. His Susan! Remember me? Last night we fucked. This morning we made love. You paid for the room. I paid for the car.

  “Yes, Miss Hayes?”

  “We understand you have a relationship of trust and friendship with Colonel Harding . . .”

  “I’m glad you do,” he snapped.

  “. . . and if he were in danger, you would try to help him, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. If he were in danger, which I’m not convinced of,” Griffin said. “And if I found myself among others who wanted to help him. Which I’m also not convinced of . . .”

  “Phil? Miss Hayes?” Major Herrera handled himself well, Griffin thought. “We’re all on the same team, are we not? So I think we ought to play fair with Mr. Griffin. Put him in the picture.”

  Phil Robinson frowned. But Herrera ran right over him. “The picture,” he repeated.

  Robinson sighed, picked a manila envelope off his desk, and handed it to Griffin.

  “That’s an early copy,” Robinson said. “Tomorrow it’ll be in the newspapers, courtesy of the NPA.”

  It looked like another, much older photograph: two ranks of Filipinos, one kneeling, one standing, with guns and bolos. The same skinny fighters, the same staring faces that were in the forty-year-old picture Harding had given him for Christmas, and there, in much the same position he’d taken in the earlier photograph, there stood Colonel Harry Roberts Harding.

  “The NPA’s got him,” Robinson said. “The New People’s Army.”

  “Holy shit,” Eddie Richter exclaimed, shaking his head back and forth, so it was impossible to say whether he was measuring deep personal loss or counting free publicity for the movie. Griffin, meanwhile, kept staring at the picture. There were differences between the one he saw and the one he remembered. The guerrillas in the old picture wore peasant clothes, cotton shirts and trousers. The NPA wore jeans and running shoes and T-shirts that advertised NIKE, San Miguel, Dairy Queen. Another difference was in Harding himself. In the old photo, he was blank-faced, a stranger to the camera. Here—the more Griffin looked the surer he was—the old man might actually be smiling. Damn! Griffin exulted. He wanted a reunion. He wanted to break back into the past. That’s what it was all about. And it looks like he made it. You son of a bitch, you magician, you old fart. MacArthur’s Ghost indeed! I wish you’d taken me along! He caught himself, controlled his emotions, and turned to Robinson.

  “At least he’s not alone. That’s good.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I was worried about him. Slogging around in the mountains in the rain. He’s not the healthiest man in the world. There’s a medicine cabinet full of pills in his bathroom.”

  “Hey, Griffin,” Robinson burst out. “That’s not Outward Bound. That’s the New People’s Army.”

  “I still say it’s better he’s not alone.”

  “Now that you understand the situation,” Major Herrera said, “would you reconsider your position on your notes?”

  “All right,” Griffin said. “I give in. I’ll bring them over.”

  After that they left Griffin alone. They wondered about what Harding was up to; everything from murder to suicide, from sentimental journey to senile breakdown. They talked about how to manage the search and how to manage the press. And Griffin found himself remembering what Harding had told him. Something Harrison Wingfield had said forty years before. That the land doesn’t remember you. Neither do the people. Unless you make them.

  “That was brutal,” Charley Camper said as they stepped out on Roxas Boulevard.

  “You want a drink at the hotel, Charley? For that matter, you could stay the night. I’ve got his room . . .”

  “No. I’m going home. Come with me to my truck, will you?”

  They walked slowly along the sea wall. It was dusk now. A weak wind came in off the bay, fresh air’s small, doomed counterattack. There were people living among the rocks against the sea wall, as if the tide had dumped them there.

  “I’m going to look for him,” Griffin said. “I have a few ideas. He’s an orderly man. I figure—”

  “Stop right there.” Charley put a firm, friendly hand on his shoulder. “I don’t want to hear about it. The less I know, the better.”

  “I was thinking you’d go with me.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Charley, it’s the colonel.”

  “Can’t do it!” Charley cried. “I can’t afford no more problems. That embassy colored woman cleaned my plow!”

  “What did she do? Tell me!” Griffin’s anger flared. It wasn’t right for Susan to call Charley in and break him.

  “It wasn’t her fault. It’s my wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “You still don’t get it, do you? Carmen Pedroza Camper. A one-woman airlift. Of maids, go-go bands, chefs, chauffeurs. The IRS is on her case, and Customs and Immigration and Departments of Labor, State, and I don’t know what else. My little local girl, spreading her wings. I tried to tell you. I’m pussy-whipped, George. I’m beat.”

  Charley pulled out a burlap sack and started loading it with bananas, tomatoes, avocados, and a soft green fruit he said was sour sop.

  “Hey, that’s enough,” Griffin protested. “I’ll never eat it all.”

  “Take it,” Camper said. “There’s something special at the bottom. I said I’d get it to you. Now I kept my promise. And I’m out of it. So long, Griffin. I won’t be seeing you again.”

  “So long, Charley.”

  Driving out of the Aristocrat parking lot, waiting to turn onto Roxas Boulevard, Charley set off his wolf-whistle one last time. It was the saddest, loneliest sound in the world, Griffin thought.

  “Is this George Griffin?” The phone rang as he entered the room. It was long distance, fuzzy-voiced.

  “Yes.”

  “Hold the line, sir.”

  “George, it’s me. Lerner.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Guam.”

  “Guam! What on earth are you doing on Guam?”

  “They got me, George. They got me where I live.
I was trying to set up an interview with General Contreras. I went to army headquarters for a preliminary screening. They showed me some photographs they took. . . .”

  “Of us? In Tondo?”

  “No, George. Of me. Me and a couple of girls at the G-spot. Doing the nasty . . .”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Yes. They asked how I thought my . . .”

  There was a silence on the line, the waves and winds that blow around the world. The sounds of distance.

  “. . . how I thought my wife would like to see them.”

  “They would send the pictures if you didn’t leave? Is that it?”

  “No. They said they’d already sent them. They said it was a race between me and the postal system. They laughed. Maleman versus mailman. Clever. Major Herrera.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I’ll miss you.”

  “You know, when I was a kid, I used to read reporters’ books. Stuff by Quentin Reynolds, William Shirer, Lowell Thomas. Anything with a trench coat in it. It always bothered me; I never lived up to that. Till Manila. Then they nailed me. Watch it, George, they’ll nail you too.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “But I do. They got me. I’m smart. Smart as you are, George, though you don’t like to admit it. And I’ve been smart longer. Trouble with you is, you got cynical before you got experienced. You’re not tough enough. You react to things sensitively—like a writer and all that—but you don’t act on your own.”

  “I admit I’ll miss you, Clifford.”

  “You bet you will. Watch out for yourself.”

  The tape recorder was inside the produce bag Charley had given him. It was his spare tape recorder. Harding had asked to borrow it, just in case he thought of things while Griffin was away. Griffin turned on the machine and heard the silence he expected, blank reproachful tape, symbol of a job not done. Then he heard Harding’s voice: “It’s like in Florida . . .” He listened for half an hour. Then he made a decision Clifford Lerner would have liked. He acted. He acted on his own. He ran.

  Part Seven

  HARDING’S TAPE

  CHAPTER 36

  “It’s like in Florida. I’m sitting up in the middle of the night, when the rest of the world is sleeping. I used to just sit up, wondering if I would die sometime, pretty soon, and never get to come back here. I’d wonder if that was how it would be, letting life move me away from the heart of things till at the end I was so far away, and so far gone, I could only dream of going back.

  “By the time you listen to this, there’ll be a commotion going on. I suppose you’ll be feeling betrayed. Well, I want you to know that I meant what I said about how you and I make up a `we.’ And even though I’m going where you can’t come, I’m leaving this behind to give you more of the story, so that if I don’t make it out of the mountains and meet you where the war ended, you’ll still be able to keep your promise to finish, no matter what. In for the duration: remember?

  “In my life, there have been three men who mattered. Elbert Hubbard Harding was one. Harrison Wingfield was another. And the third was the man I saw in May 1942, squatting at the edge of the Candaba swamps, taking apart a captured Japanese machine gun. He was tall for a Filipino, five feet ten, and thin. He had thin arms and legs, a narrow face, and long bony fingers —I can see them now sliding across that captured Nambu. He was wearing sandals cut from tires and shorts cut from someone’s pants and a long-sleeved shirt that once belonged to the Philippine Constabulary. But the thing that struck me most about Juan Olmos was he didn’t give a damn about us. All of us go around thinking we are the center of the world, stars of the show, and this is a part Americans in the Philippines had gotten used to playing. When you walked into the middle of a group of Filipinos, they stopped talking among themselves, stopped what they were doing. You were the center of things. Your problem was top of the list, your schedule, your pleasure. But Olmos stayed right where he was, fussing with that gun. We weren’t all that important to him.

  “It wasn’t until Felipe—Flash—walked over and said something that he ever bothered to give us a glance. Flash motioned for me to come over. About time, I thought. I guessed we’d shake hands, share plans. I’d thank him for helping us out and commend him for the fine job he was doing. He’d be glad to hear that. He’d ask whether he could be of any further service. So I thought. But by the time I came over, Olmos had gotten up and walked away. That was all the welcome we got.

  “Well, we left the village behind and took a trail that went uphill, through meadows, through burned-off clearings planted with beans and sweet potatoes. Then we were in the rain forest, walking among chest-high ferns, under trees that blocked out the sky. We started passing sentries and people carrying sacks of rice, and once we had to step aside and open the trail for a column of armed men going downhill. They filed by without a word. At last, and not a moment too soon, we came to Olmos’s headquarters on top of Mount Arayat. There were tents and nipa huts and some other buildings that were wood and tin. There were supply sheds, meeting rooms, commissary, armory, hospital. There were blackboards, a printing press. It was quite an operation.

  “All the way up, they’d never stopped, they’d never even asked if we were tired. By the time we arrived, we were finished. Flash led us toward some nipa huts and a woman brought us some rice with bits of meat, goat meat, and then there was the doctor who cleaned Vernon Waters’ leg wound and rewrapped it and gave him some antibiotics. He didn’t say a word, though: it was as though someone had ordered the silent treatment.

  “I went out and sat on the steps of the nipa hut. No one was guarding us, but I knew that they were watching. Fair enough. I watched back. Even at night there was lots to see; sentries changing, a group of men coming up the mountain, and a meeting going on inside one of the wood-and-tin buildings. I couldn’t hear much, but from the way they took turns speaking, and from the way they stood, it looked like a sort of self-criticism session. Then Felipe stood up and gave what sounded like a lecture on world events, the fighting in the Pacific and Europe, plus what sounded like local news. He was quite a speaker, I could see, and I was interested in how Juan Olmos would follow an act like that. But then I saw that Juan Olmos wasn’t about to oblige. He wasn’t among the speakers or the listeners. I spotted him squatting by a fire, smoking, fussing with a gun. As soon as I saw him, he glanced up at me, stared. He looked right through me.

  “The next morning, Felipe Olmos woke me while it was still dark. His brother was about to leave, he said, and if I wanted to talk to him, now was the only time. I stumbled across the clearing, dipped my head in a barrel of rainwater, woke myself up, and waited while Flash went inside. A couple of guerrillas came out of the meeting room. Then it was my turn. Juan Olmos was sitting at a desk, eating lumps of sticky rice out of a soup bowl, eating with his fingers, taking on food like it was fuel.

  “ ‘My brother says you are good,’ he said. ‘Yes?’

  “I said I hoped I was, without knowing what that meant to him. I said I hoped that we could find our way to other groups of Americans, and get organized, and prepare for MacArthur’s return.

  “ ‘No Americans here,’ Olmos said. He got up and stretched, like an animal that’s been curled up sleeping. A stretch, a yawn, a shrug. ‘No Americans here.’

  “ ‘But we’ll be back,’ I said.

  “I’ve never gone around talking slogans, but there was something in Olmos that provoked them. The way he talked of Americans, he might have been talking about Indians. No Indians around here anymore. We chased them off. Try the mountains . . .

  “ ‘When the Americans come back, we’ll fight together,’ I said. And then I added two words I’d used before. They’d always worked. I said, ‘I promise.’

  “I can still see Juan Olmos standing there, giving me the same look his brother had given me in Baguio, only ten times harder: what kind of American are you?

  “ ‘I promise,’ I repeated. That was it.

  “The men Olmos provided�
��guides, guards, stretcher bearers —took us across Tarlac and Nueva Ecija. This was Huk-land. Every village was organized, food and weapons and hiding places, people to scout ahead of us when we walked, sentinels for when we slept. I’d never seen anything like it. And—I say this mostly in self-criticism—I’d never thought such a thing possible in the Philippines. I didn’t think they had it in them.

  “Eventually, we made contact with the guerrillas of the United States Armed Forces Far East (USAFFE) of northern Luzon, an organized network in contact with General MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia. The unit we found was holed up in a lumber mill outside of Baguio. I remember the morning we walked in. The way they looked at us. Not like stragglers, not like survivors, but as miracle men. Do you understand? They knew who I was.

  “How’d it happen? Some of it was Harrison Wingfield’s doing. He really talked us up, in Corregidor, later down in Australia. He beat the drum for us. And poor Meade had given us another kind of boost, shouting ‘MacArthur’s Ghosts’ when he shot up that film crew. So there you have it. America needed heroes, Japan wanted enemies, the Filipinos loved to talk, and bingo, we were famous. It should have been plural: MacArthur’s Ghosts. But Meade was dead, Sudul and Polshanski too, and Charley, well, he stayed Charley. He stayed put with the USAFFE boys. So it all came down to me. I was MacArthur’s Ghost. Singular. One and only.

  “Being an American, although a civilian, I had a connection with the USAFFE network on Luzon. Those are the stories everybody knows, the ones in the public domain, and mostly true. Stories about fighting off the Japanese patrols that boiled up into the mountains in October 1942. Or our raid into Manila, robbing medical supplies from a storehouse on the Pasig River, racing through town at night. Or cursing moonlight on the Lingayen Gulf, waiting for that first submarine to answer our signal light.

  “But there’s more. Griffin, by now maybe you know that the guerrilla effort wasn’t the heroic underground our movie will show. The wartime Philippines was a mess. The guerrillas fought the Japanese and they fought each other. Imagine the Civil War, the Indian wars, a Mafia showdown, the Russian Revolution, and the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Imagine them all at once. That should give you an idea. There were USAFFE outfits, there were landlord armies, there were gangs, bands, bandits, ROTC units, there were Huks, Moros, headhunters. And there was me.