MacArthur's Ghost Page 26

  Meanwhile, there were sightings. A group of U.S. airmen out dirt-bike racing had given MacArthur’s Ghost a ride through Pampangas. An encampment of Rizalistas—worshipers of Jose Rizal—had seen him on the trail that led up Mount Arayat. A groundskeeper at the Philippines Military Academy in Baguio glimpsed him on the golf course at dawn. Down on Leyte, on Tacloban beach, a fisherman had seen Harding standing next to the life-size statue of MacArthur wading ashore. A busload of Canadian tourists were held up by gunmen near the Banaue rice terraces: they saw Harry Roberts Harding running things. There were more reports every day. And the last and least of them was this: that George Griffin, MacArthur’s Ghost’s ghost, had also disappeared. It was unclear why. It was increasingly unclear to Griffin himself.

  Griffin sat having coffee with Cadillac Bill, watching rain cascade off the roof, bounce off an already-full catchment barrel, splash to earth and begin the long, ill-advised journey to Manila Bay. Then there was a catlike scratching at the screen window: a bunch of kids were out there in the rain, a bunch of Cadillac’s playmates, vendors of bullets and bones.

  “Sir,” one of them said to Cadillac Bill, “you come.”

  “Not in this weather,” Cadillac Bill replied. He pointed up at the rain. “Too much. No go.”

  “Sir,” one of the kids insisted, a wide-eyed kid in a striped polo shirt and brown shorts, the leader of the pack. He reminded Griffin of the kid who had dogged him his first morning in Manila. There was an awful solemnity behind his playfulness. You felt he could watch a hanging and not be moved. Young Juan Olmos must have looked like that. The kid stayed right against the screen. Out in the rain. “Sir, you come.”

  “Insistent little bugger,” Cadillac Bill said.

  “Sir, you come.”

  “What you got?” Cadillac Bill asked.

  “Sir, I got a whole one.”

  “A whole one . . .” Cadillac Bill was impressed. “Whole one” was part of the morbid idiom he’d worked out with the kids who climbed into once-fortified caves or burnt-out tanks and came out to report what they had found, remnants and fragments for the most part, but sometimes a whole one, an intact, mint-condition, boots-to-helmet skeleton. “You sure you got a whole one?”

  “Yes, sir, I got.”

  “This better be good.” He glanced at Griffin. “You want to come? Maybe get a column out of it. If this book of yours don’t come off, you’ll be trading in columns.”

  “Oh, all right,” Griffin said. He’d turned down Cadillac Bill’s invitations all week long. At the end, he might as well go along, just once. Get a column out of it. Sure. Along with the sex queen at the fish fights and the dart man in Manila. And the burlap sack of bones. And the dog beating in Tondo, people living in culverts, hanging garbage bags out to dry like fish nets. Great stuff.

  It wasn’t the sort of rain you negotiated with. As soon as you stepped out, you were soaked. Some of the kids laughed at the rain, played in it. They turned grassy banks into playground slides. But the kid in the lead, the one who’d summoned them, wasn’t playing. He shushed the other kids away, scared them off, and led the two Americans toward the treasure—the “whole one”—he had found and was determined not to share. He took them out toward the war memorial, a forlorn place this morning, like a cemetery between funerals, with the rain spattering down on plastic flowers the Japanese had left behind.

  “You stay!” the kid commanded, pointing them toward the shelter of the main shrine. As soon as the Americans obeyed, he scooted out through the wooden memorial markers and disappeared in the woods.

  “Cadillac?”

  “Yeah, Mr. Griffin?”

  “I’m ready to leave Kiangen. After today.”

  “I’m not rushing you. Stay another week, it’s okay with me.”

  “I just get the feeling this story wasn’t meant to have an ending. Harding wanders into the mountains and becomes a ghost again. And that . . . that’s all she wrote. No ending.”

  “You think so?” Cadillac Bill sighted past Griffin, out across the grass. “Well, there’s your ending.”

  Beyond the markers, beyond the fields, a procession was winding its way out of the mountains, on the very trail that Yamashita had taken forty years before, a trail that ended on the gallows at Los Banos. And the man who accompanied him then on the trail was walking it again: Colonel Harry Roberts Harding, MacArthur’s Ghost.

  Griffin rushed down the monument steps. The NPA men were already fading back toward the mountains. Harding stood alone. He looked more gaunt and angular than ever. The bones showed through his face, a skull stirring to shed its mask of flesh. A white beard was on his face, a corpse’s stubble.

  “Colonel?” Harding had changed. “Colonel? It’s me.”

  “Hello, son.”

  They walked back to the village in the rain, Griffin holding the Colonel by the elbow, while behind him Cadillac Bill and the kid were still at it.

  “You give me one hundred pesos!”

  “For what? For that?”

  “Whole one! Mr. Cadillac!”

  “What good is he to me? What am I supposed to do with him? No helmet, no gun, no souvenir . . .”

  “Whole one!”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do . . .”

  The rains stayed all day. Nothing came up or down the mountain road. So after they sat Harding in a tub of hot water, after they handed him towels and wrapped him in blankets, fed him soup, tucked him in, Cadillac Bill and George Griffin sat up and watched him sleep. An unlikely pair of nurses, and an unlikely sickroom. MacArthur’s Ghost lay in Cadillac Bill’s bed, a pile of helmets and bayonets at the foot, a sack of bones at the head.

  “Guardian angels watch to keep,” Griffin reflected.

  “He looks like something I’d put in a corner of my museum,” Cadillac Bill said. “MacArthur’s Ghost resting on a field of honor.”

  “He’s not about to lead you to any treasure,” Griffin said. “You or me. I’m sorry about that.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Cadillac Bill said, his eyes on Colonel Harding. Vague and disoriented while awake, the old man wheezed and rattled when he slept. Once he had a coughing fit that sounded as though it would land his lungs in his lap. “There’s something buried there. Treasure or what, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing. Either he gets it or it gets him.”

  That night, Cadillac volunteered to sleep in the back of his car. Maybe it was the end of the rain that awakened Harding, the sudden silence. Or maybe it was moonlight that followed, a silvery flood that poured into the room, magnificent stuff, burnishing Cadillac Bill’s guns and bones.

  He was out on the porch, standing still, staring out at the mountains, the moon and stars. When Griffin came out to join him, he saw there were tears running down his face. He decided it was better not to speak. On the street below, Cadillac Bill’s car sat like a vehicle from another planet, its owner asleep inside. Leaves stirred slightly in the breeze, dipped in, dripping silver. Beyond them were the mountains, as though seen for the first time, like the imaginary mountains of a child’s sketchbook, range piled on range, no telling where the mountains ended and the clouds began.

  “A night like this,” Harding said, “you could go anywhere from here. You could go all the way forward or way way back. Look at those mountains. In 1945 I was in and out of these mountains all the time. Fighting, scouting, sitting in on the surrender negotiations, finally escorting Yamashita toward the American lines, me on one side of him, Juan Olmos and Connie on the other. And I remember how the Japs—the Shobu group —sixty thousand men who were trapped, didn’t want him to go with me. They cried. It was like we tore the heart right out of them. That’s what I heard a minute ago. Them crying.”

  CHAPTER 39

  There was no disputing that Colonel Harry Roberts Harding’s return to Manila was the climax of the most brilliant campaign Eddie Richter had ever seen. It was nothing Eddie took credit for; it wasn’t his doing. He was just glad that he was around
to see it and smart enough to appreciate a masterwork from beginning to end, from that first shrewdly awkward appearance at Corregidor, through those dangerous offhand remarks at Manila Memorial Cemetery, the against-odds triumph at the movie location in Baguio. All that was good in a conventional way, raising questions, stirring the pot, revving up the talk of war heroes, treasure, treason, “all that good stuff.” But then you got to the point where talent ended and genius took over: Harding’s disappearance, his capture by the NPA, and then his return to Manila, two days before scenes from MacArthur’s Ghost were to be screened on the final night of the Imelda Marcos Manila Film Festival! Jesus, that was beautiful. It transcended all those boundaries, those stubborn distinctions that drive a PR man crazy. It was local, it was national, it was international. It was news, it was entertainment, and best of all, it wasn’t over yet.

  Eddie had taken the call that Griffin made from somewhere along the road, two hours out of town. He made those hours count. Given two days, he’d have had film crews and banners outside the Manila Hotel, he’d have had the whole movie cast along the driveway, and a billboard that said “MAC’S BACK—THE MOVIE’S GOT ‘EM!” or something like that. But maybe short notice was just as well, because while Eddie was diligent, Harding was inspired. So Eddie contented himself with phone calls. Then he went over to the Manila Hotel, stood back, and watched it happen.

  It was terrific when you didn’t have to hire the hall and rent the band, hang bunting, plug in the applause sign, feed the press corps. You took a seat in that damned beautiful lobby and watched. At first, everything was normal: Jap tourists, Canadians, swimming trunks, whining kids. Then a sudden stir among the white-liveried security guards who frisked you as you entered, a manager appearing, conferring, sending one of the guards outside. The guard motioned for the taxis to back off a distance and so they did, slamming into reverse and playing “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” and the other songs the Manila taxis hummed when they backed up. Then, more taxis, reporters, and photographers. Let it be, let it be. Now the first film crews and that meant the usual intramural scrapping, wires, lights, people jostling for position. At last, jeeps and limousines, that Colonel Herrera from Contreras’s staff and the brown-skinned lollapalooza from the U.S. embassy, her and her boss, and the producers, Wingfield and Beaumont, and the ice queen, Cecilia Santos. What’s the program? Who’s in charge? Eddie made like a hotel dick, hiding behind a newspaper. Let it be, let it be. Now a few anticlimactic teases: a busload of nuns, puzzled by all the attention, and an English businessman heading upstairs for “Funch” with a pretty boy.

  And then, at last, the moment they’d been waiting for. Harding was incredible, pulling into that curving colonial driveway in a pink Caddy pimpmobile that had clear memories of Batista’s Havana, pulling in with the top down, some aloha-shirted Okie for a driver and George Griffin, budding author, in the front seat.

  “I’m back,” Harding told the microphones. He looked way past ripe, but he pulled himself together okay. “I took a walk in the country that I love. I met some people, refreshed some memories, that’s all.”

  “Did the NPA capture you?”

  “No. We met in the mountains. It seems we were on the same trail. I was climbing down a mountain and they were headed up it.”

  There was a peculiar silence after that. Had the colonel meant what he said? Was there a signal hiding in that stuff about the mountain?

  “I know my coming back here has raised a lot of questions,” Harding continued. “Some things, I’ll never know. Others, I’ve got sorted out. Tomorrow night, after the movie, maybe I’ll say a few words. And then I’ll go on home. Promise.”

  That’s great, Eddie thought, watching Harding and Griffin step into the hotel. Great! Always leave them wanting more. Wingfield was having kittens. Headed his way, too.

  “There you are, damn it,” Wingfield said.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Something wrong? Who are you working for, Eddie? I can’t even get upstairs to see him. No visitors, no calls. How’d this happen?”

  “What happened is terrific, from where I sit,” Richter said. “With the coverage you get tomorrow night, who needs advertising?”

  “Listen, Richter. Tomorrow night we’ve got a gala dinner and a screening of selected scenes, rough cut. We’ve got the president of the Philippines coming. We’ve got the First Lady and the whole fucking film festival. And our featured speaker, all of a sudden, is a senile, self-invited, self-promoting—”

  “He was a hero once,” Eddie interrupted. “Never forget that. He was a hero.”

  “Forty years ago! But now—”

  “Forty years is nothing,” Eddie Richter said. “Take it from me.”

  MacArthur’s Ghost was being difficult. As soon as they were in the MacArthur Suite together, as soon as Griffin suggested that maybe they should “go over” what Harding planned to say tomorrow night, the colonel waved him off.

  “It’s the most important part,” Griffin protested. “You can’t just wing it.”

  “I’m winging nothing, son,” Harding said. “I’ve made that speech a hundred times.”

  “Where?”

  “In here,” Harding said, pointing to his heart. “And here.” His head. “And here.” His stomach.

  “I’m not just asking for your sake, Colonel. I’m asking for me. I’ve got a book at stake here. I want to know how it ends.”

  “I think you know more than you realize,” Harding said. “You know.”

  “Just a rehearsal then.”

  “Damn it, I don’t need rehearsals!” Harding burst out angrily. It was the first time he’d lost his temper around Griffin. It surprised them both. He instantly caught himself. “Sorry, son.”

  “Me too.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? Don’t you see? When I came here I was hoping it would never get this far. Never come to where I had to stand up and—and say what I’m going to say. I thought something would happen to me. Someone would get me. I invited them. I exposed myself. I damn near begged them, and nobody obliged. I was a pain in the ass all right, but not worth capturing, not worth keeping. Not worth killing. Why kill a ghost? So I’m going to have to do what I dread. What terrifies me. Tomorrow night’s going to be the worst night of my life. And you don’t rehearse for something like that.”

  Griffin stared at the old man, who’d sunk into the same chair he’d been in when Griffin first came to call, when he was drinking beer with Charley Camper. Long ago. Before the war. He wanted to press him; he wanted to be ahead of the pack. But in the end, he backed off. Being ahead of the pack would also make him a part of it, a reporter among reporters, no more or less. Maybe that was what he should have been, from the start, but there was no changing now.

  “When’ll I see you?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow night. You go out tonight and have some fun. There’s that Imelda party for the film festival. Kick up your heels. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “And after that?”

  “All you want, if you want. I’ll sneak on home. But anywhere I was, I’d be happy to see you. It would be . . . my pleasure.”

  Weary as he was, he lifted himself out of the chair and offered his hand. “See you tomorrow, my friend.”

  CHAPTER 40

  The film festival gala Imelda Marcos decreed inside old Fort Santiago was a party to remember, and regret: Persepolis and Oscar night, Perle Mesta and Marie Antoinette. There were candy-striped tents overflowing with champagne, enough for an infinity of toasting, and enough cakes for a thousand weddings and—in barbecue pits that looked like mass cremations—a menagerie of cattle, pigs, and four-month-old calves, slowly turning. Griffin wandered from one display of conspicuous consumption to another. You could justify your presence only so far, saying that you were a writer, or a spectator, or even a judge. It was too fine a distinction; this was too gross a display. You were in the same place as everyone else, the politicians and cronies, the Malacanang matrons, the perfectl
y dressed Filipina touch-me-nots, the visiting movie distributors who staggered around with magnums of Dom Perignon in their hands and prawns in their mouths. Shoot them all, he thought. God will sort it out.

  “Hello, George.” He felt guilty being recognized. He didn’t want anyone at this party to know him. Then he saw that the person who knew him was Susan.

  “Hello,” Griffin responded.

  “That’s all?” she asked and he had to admire the puzzled look that crossed her face, as if she’d been snubbed, and the way she made a little joke of it, glancing over her dress as if there might be something wrong with what she was wearing when she perfectly well knew that what she wore worked as nicely as the body it covered. He had to admire that. And there was more: the way she moved from role to role, diplomat to lover and back again, diplomat to lover to betrayer. He could only be one thing at a time: MacArthur’s Ghost’s ghost. “What’s the matter, George?”

  “What’s the matter?” he repeated. “What could be the matter? Great party, open bar, plenty of food, balmy, tropical evening, marvelous, swinging people. Your perfect Faraway Place.”

  “I’ve been wondering about you, George,” she said.

  “I don’t know if I want you wondering, Susan. It scares me.”

  “Is that why you ran off? You were supposed to bring your tapes and papers to the Embassy. Next thing, you were gone.”

  “I got scared,” Griffin said. “Or smart.”

  “Scared?”

  “Of you. Your operation, Susan. The way you worked over poor Charley Camper. That bothered me. But that was just for openers. You were only warming up.”