MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  “Elections every couple years. Carnival elections with 98 percent of the people pretending to choose which people from the other two percent get a chance to screw them for the next four years?”

  “A silly exercise. I admit it. But they’ve gotten attached to it. It’s a changing of the guard, that’s all.”

  “I can’t accept that. I made promises.”

  “You made promises no one can keep. Extravagant, foolish promises. Your friends are poison. You think they were fighting against the Japanese?”

  “I know they were. I was there. They were fighting when no one else was.”

  “They were fighting for themselves, fighting against authority and property and law. They’ll keep fighting. And I’m warning you: they won’t win. I’m warning you. As one American to another.”

  Harding shrugged.

  “As friend to friend.”

  Another shrug, love mingling with conviction, Harding’s resolve bending but not breaking.

  And old Wingfield. “I’m warning you . . . as a father to a son.” Contreras stood onstage, walked slowly to Harding’s side. Then, in a lost, lonely, little boy voice.

  “No.”

  “Yes!”

  “I’m tired,” Contreras said. He stepped past the table and parted some heavy drapes that covered the window. Outside, black had turned to gray. “Another morning.”

  “Was he really Harding’s father?” Griffin asked.

  “Who knows?” Contreras answered, yawning. “Or cares? He said he was. I think he felt he was. Perhaps he’d screwed the woman. Perhaps he was a desperate old man staking a claim. He was always staking claims.”

  “Jesus,” Griffin sighed. “Poor Harding.”

  “Hold it,” Cadillac Bill said. “That’s it? That’s the story?”

  “Not hardly, Cadillac Bill. I’m just warming up the audience. Now is star time.” Outside, he ordered them into the back of a truck that Major Herrera was set to drive. “Promises, promises,” Contreras sighed. “Colonel Harding made promises. Harrison Wingfield kept promises. And I perfected my English.”

  The last they saw of him, he was walking across the resort lawn, over a little bow bridge across a carp pond, toward a cottage on the edge of a new golf course. He was whistling. They heard the whistling, after the blindfolds slipped over their heads.

  They were at the end of a road that had twisted twenty miles, crossing streams, cutting around mountains the way a knife cuts into a perfectly peeled apple, so that the skin comes off in one, long, spiraling strip. They hadn’t seen the journey. They felt it, the way a condemned man feels every step that leads him to his execution. They felt the bumps and turns and splashes, they heard the slurp of mud, tasted clouds of dust, detected muted voices as they went past roadblocks, winced at the slap of branches against the jeep. And at the end, they smelled wood from campfires. They were led out of the truck. It drove away. Around them, men were talking. A firing squad forming up? Movements, whispers. They felt the sun; they were sweating. They were faint. Then there were hands on their shoulders, pushing them to the ground, to their knees, position for prayer or confession or beheading. At last, they felt a pistol against their temples, cool and metallic. They were that close. Then the blindfolds were yanked away.

  Squinting into sunlight, brushing away sweat, they saw a dozen men in semi-military uniforms, khaki pants, boots, odd uniform parts, guerrilla garb. T-shirts and motorcycle jackets, black with pink lettering. An army or a softball team? The lettering said: FUN BUNCH. Cadillac Bill gasped. “I think you found your ending, George.” Some were young, like the NPA. Others were Negrito-looking tribesmen, aborigines. Others were old, grizzled warriors, two-or three-time losers. One had a Mohican haircut. Another had a mouth of gold teeth. A third had painted his nails red. FUN BUNCH. And then a man came out of the woods, a tall, gaunt Filipino who walked directly toward them. He towered over them, appraising, and Griffin recognized the anger in his eyes, the anger that Harding had said was his fuel, his fire, his guiding light.

  “My name is Juan Olmos,” the man said.

  Part Ten

  HOW THE WAR ENDED

  CHAPTER 44

  Action!

  Tall and handsome, surrounded by men who loved him, MacArthur’s Ghost, Colonel Harry Roberts Harding, scanned Corregidor’s burned-off jungle and bombed-out buildings, the barracks, the post movie theater, the commandant’s residence. They had asked—no, they insisted—that he say a few words. So, while generals and politicians, guerrillas and soldiers, stood silent, and the only noise was the low whirring of newsreel cameras, the gaunt, awkward missionary boy who united and redeemed a conquered nation stepped forward with a Bible in his hands. Looking around, he could see old comrades like Charley Camper, who had been with him since the beginning, and true friends like Nestor Contreras, whom he’d met along the way, doughty fighters like Juan Olmos, sage counselors like Harrison Wingfield, living symbol of America’s return. And yes, somewhere in the ranks was the woman Harding had loved in the mountains, the passionate guerrillera. He saw them all. They were all together because he—the man who kept his promises—had brought them together. Other men had already spoken of history and patriotism, loyalty and sacrifice, the hallowed friendship between democratic nations, America and the Philippines. It was left to Harry Roberts Harding to find a simpler text.

  “To everything there is a season,” he intoned, “and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

  “A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

  “A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and . . .”

  It was clever of Palm Tree Productions to schedule its last day of filming on Corregidor. This was not the Corregidor that was starved and hammered to death in 1942; this was the Corregidor of 1944, recaptured in a brilliant airborne strike that seized the island in days. That was as it should have been. And there was MacArthur’s Ghost, as he should have been: the young hero in the hour of his glory.

  “Hey, George!” And here was Eddie Richter, smoking a cigar, wearing a blazing aloha shirt, his fingers tweaking Griffin’s earlobe. “So how’s the budding author?”

  “Blooming,” Griffin replied. “Are they ready?”

  “Ready as they’ll ever be, kid. Beaumont and Wingfield and Miss Fire and Ice. Also, that embassy woman. It’s a regular fan club.”

  “I want you there too.”

  “Hey, I don’t count. I’m a throw-in.”

  “You’re more than that, Eddie, a lot more,” Griffin said. “And you know it.”

  “Do I now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is what this high-level conference is all about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then. What are we waiting for?”

  CHAPTER 45

  “Hello, everybody,” Griffin began. “You hired me to accompany Colonel Harding on his return to the Philippines. And that’s what I did. I left him once when I shouldn’t have. And he left me. I’m sorry about that.”

  Beaumont nodded and ran a hand over a beefy forearm that was sunburned. Wingfield glanced over a clipboard full of invoices and plane tickets: both men were ready to leave. Whatever emotions had brought them here were gone. Cecilia Santos was staying, though for how much longer it was hard to say. Her departure was a certainty. So was the departure of Susan Hayes, outward and upward bound. An ambitious bunch.

  “And then there was the book. The book was a by-product. But it mattered to me. And after a while, I saw that it mattered to Colonel Harding too. He got me to do it his way, starting at the beginning, everything in order. He made me promise I’d finish it, a solemn oath. At the time I thought he was hamming it up. The speeches, the hints, the disappearance—it all smacked of self-dramatization. But he died. Maybe he was hamming it up then, too. Anyway, I’ve got this book under way. I thought you might be interested in how it ended, the last chapter, which is more or less the speech he never gave. It’s u
p to you. You can hear it now or you can wait for the book.”

  “I’d rather hear it than read it,” Wingfield said, glancing at Beaumont.

  “Sure,” Beaumont agreed. He stepped to the edge of the tent, opened the flap. They were wading through Ecclesiastes again, stopping at the same verse, like a needle stuck in a groove. Or —Griffin thought—history refusing to move on.

  “. . . a time to get and a time to lose,” MacArthur’s Ghost announced. “A time to keep silence and a time to speak.”

  First he gave them a cast of characters, Hollywood style. Their star was Harry Roberts Harding. They knew him, or they thought they did; at least they’d seen him, toward the end, so all that Griffin did was give them a sense of the younger Harding, the gawky, idealistic, lonely kid who built his reputation on keeping promises, reconciling opposites, holding things together. He hoped that the people he trusted and who trusted him would therefore trust each other. That was what it came to: a recipe for martyrdom, when you thought about it. Still, there were people who trusted him and no one else. Juan Olmos was one of them. Scourge of landlords, cops, soldiers, tax assessors, missionaries, foreigners, you name it. Yet he trusted Harry Roberts Harding enough to accompany him to Kiangen. You can spot Juan Olmos in some of the pictures they took the day Yamashita surrendered. Oh, there were lots of people crowding in front of the camera—it was a historic occasion—and Olmos moved, or got moved to the edge of things, shunted toward the margins, a tall, dark man with the angry stare of an Apache scout. He had reason to be angry, for it had already begun, the drift from patriotic resistance fighter to left-wing guerrilla to mountain bandit to ghost and bogeyman and legend. While other guerrilla groups were recognized and rewarded, the Huks were disarmed and discredited, hunted down; America had made the inconvenient discovery that many of the staunchest anti-Japanese guerrillas hadn’t fought the war to protect private property and foreign investments. So the hunt was on. And Harrison Wingfield, third in the cast of characters, was the master of the hunt.

  “My uncle,” Larry Wingfield volunteered. He didn’t want Griffin to think he’d been thrown off-balance.

  “A fabulous character,” Griffin said. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “How could I?” Wingfield fired back. He died . . . when? In 1950, I think. I was four.”

  “He died April 29, 1949,” Griffin said. “I’ll be getting to that.”

  “So?”

  “A fabulous character. I guess I said that. Remember how, in the histories of the Old West, they describe the advance of civilization? First the explorer, then the missionary, the fur trapper, the prospector, rancher, farmer, and so forth? Well, Harrison Wingfield was all of them. And more. Because when he found that Harding had developed a dangerous connection to the soon-to-be-outlawed Hukbalahap guerrillas, when he came to Kiangen and saw that this included a friendship with his personal enemy, Juan Olmos, and when Harding’s companion, an ambitious Filipino kid named Nestor Contreras, tipped him that Harding was in love with a Huk guerrilla . . .”

  Griffin paused for breath, and saw Beaumont glancing over at Wingfield, who shrugged as if to say, We’ve put up with extras who smile in the middle of battle scenes. We put up with bribes, commissions, water shortages, power outages, hookers, starlets, and paternity suits. We put up with Mrs. Marcos. We’ll handle this.

  “In love with a Huk guerrilla,” Griffin repeated. “That made him a traitor to nationality. To class. And to family. Because Wingfield—Uncle Harrison—was more than Uncle. In Harding’s case he was, or said he was, father.”

  Wingfield looked up in alarm, ready to let fly, but Beaumont intervened in the nick of time. He put a hand on Wingfield’s arm as if to say, I’ll handle this.

  “Well,” Beaumont said, “I guess we were making a home movie and we didn’t know it. Uncles and cousins all over the place. That’s damn interesting. But it doesn’t change anything, Griffin, does it?”

  “Maybe not,” Griffin said. “But I wasn’t finished. This was just the cast of characters. Harry Roberts Harding. Juan Olmos. Harrison Wingfield. Those are the leads. Now you’ve got the featured players. A bookish, talky intellectual named Felipe Olmos. An ambitious kid named Nestor Contreras. Featured players. Now a bit player. A cameo, short but pungent, by a fellow named Eddie Richter. Couldn’t have made it without him.”

  He patted his pocket, pulled out a manuscript that was the length of a long letter, written in longhand on Cadillac Bill’s “Make Love and War” stationery. “Here’s your ending . . .”

  CHAPTER 46

  “Are the reporters coming?” Harry Roberts Harding asked Nestor Contreras. It was August 17, 1945, and the two men were in a jeep headed down a mountain road to San Leandro, a town of no particular importance in the province of Nueva Ecija.

  “They said they were coming,” Connie replied.

  “You were supposed to confirm. You have to stay on those guys. I promised I’d bring reporters.”

  “Yes,” Connie answered. “I confirmed.”

  “Maybe we should wait for them,” Harding said, glancing back up the road to Kiangen. “Why don’t we stop and wait?”

  “They said they were coming,” Connie assured him. “I wouldn’t worry. Some of them left before we did.”

  “You saw? How many?”

  “Three jeeps full. They are probably waiting for us now in San Leandro.”

  “All right!” Harding exulted. “I was worried. You know what did it? What hooked them? The treasure! Yamashita’s treasure!”

  “Would you mind telling me?” Connie asked. “I’ve heard talk about it.”

  “Not at all.”

  As they drove, Harding told Contreras how he felt about Juan Olmos and the Huks from Mount Arayat. Sure, they were scary, a harsh, disciplined bunch who didn’t care what side of the law they walked on. Olmos wanted to stay in the mountains forever: Japanese or Americans, cops or landlords, foreign soldiers or domestic, it made no more difference to him than a change of season to a hunter, from duck to deer to rabbit. But Harding had decided it was time they came out of the mountains. He told Juan Olmos there had to be an end to fighting, time to lay down weapons—swords into plowshares—and place his hopes in a peaceful future. It was a future Harding promised to share; their fate would be his. He would be with them when they put down their guns—and he would see to it that it was an honorable ceremony, with medals, speeches, photographers, and press. They’d have the same pensions and benefits the more respectable (and lethargic) USAFFE units were claiming. He set it up: he was MacArthur’s Ghost. But Juan Olmos wanted more. He wanted some insurance. That was when Harding thought of Yamashita’s treasure. It was the sort of rumor that comes out of every war: czarist jewels, Napoleonic bullion. Harding’s inspiration was to take these wildfire reports and add something else. Blackmail. He concocted a rumor that, during those otherwise dreary, stalemated weeks around Kiangen, Olmos and his men had come into possession of another treasure: a list of names, from Yamashita himself, of all the Filipinos who had collaborated with the Japanese, all the well-heeled, high-rolling, self-protecting, self-perpetuating elite who were now insinuating themselves back into power. That would be Olmos’s insurance in time to come. Did it exist? Connie asked. Or was it as wishful as all the other treasures? Harding wouldn’t say. “They know who they are. And if they touch us . . . we’ll touch them. It’s already working. You see how the reporters reacted.”

  But there were no reporters that morning in San Leandro. There were three U.S. Army trucks in the square and a half dozen American soldiers, under the command of a Lieutenant Carpenter. There were also about a dozen Filipino soldiers attached to the USAFFE forces. Otherwise the place was empty.

  “Are you this Harry Roberts Harding?” Lieutenant Carpenter asked. “Where’s your guerrillas? We’re feeling stood up.”

  “They’ll be here,” Harding answered. “Where are the reporters? The photographers?”

  “I don’t know,” Carpenter said.

&
nbsp; “You said they left ahead of us,” Harding said to Connie. “Maybe they broke down.”

  “Then we’d have passed them on the road.”

  “Maybe they got lost.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Carpenter parroted. “I hear lots of maybes. Are they coming or do we have to go out and get them? It’s all the same to me.”

  “You go out looking for them,” Harding retorted, “and it won’t be all the same, I promise you. Wait. And if you get tired of waiting you can pass the time by praying. Pray that they come in to you.”

  Then, an hour or so later, a doughty, cocky little guy came strolling into town, a camera round his neck, a beard and mustache on his face, and the air of an outlaw scout who might be casing a ripe bank.

  “Who are you?” Carpenter challenged.

  “Eddie Richter, Jr. Airman.”

  “He’s with the Huks,” Harding explained.

  “You forget how to salute, Richter?”

  “Yes,” Eddie Richter answered calmly. “Where’s your party, Harding? Where’s the welcome committee?”

  “We’re ready.”

  “What about the guys from the papers? The photographers and all? They couldn’t make it?”

  “Are your guys coming or not?” Carpenter asked.

  “If I say so, they come,” Richter snapped. “And if I don’t say so, they don’t come.” He took in the square and didn’t like what was there, or what was missing. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “Tell them to come,” Harding said. “It’s all right. Tell them I said so.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s all right,” Harding repeated. “I’ll be here. No harm will come to them. I promise.”

  “You sure? This town doesn’t look so hot today.” He nodded at Carpenter. “And I don’t like the looks of him.”