MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  “What’s that?”

  “Showing your face in a place you used to be. Saying to the place, well, you’re still here, and so am I, so hello again and good-bye . . .”

  It was an extraordinary moment, Griffin felt, like a glimpse through water, choppy, sun-splashed water that suddenly calmed and opened to reveal what was sunk and lost below. And before he could fully observe it, let alone describe it, the moment was gone. Federovich was climbing aboard a tour bus.

  CHAPTER 6

  There were big doings on Corregidor this December morning. There were more boats coming across Manila Bay, an invasion flotilla, and there were helicopters, one of which had brought Eddie Richter to the island ahead of Griffin. Now he sat waiting behind the wheel of a war surplus jeep that was spattered red, white, and blue.

  “So how was the boat ride? Okay?”

  “Better than that.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t get you on the helicopter. You don’t work for us yet and there was something about insurance. Hop in.”

  “Is this thing safe?” Griffin asked, glancing at the rotted out flooring, which let him look down at the road.

  “Safe? It’s indestructible. Tell you something, George, once you’ve driven a jeep, everything else is near beer.”

  They raced down alleys that were cut through second-growth forest, brushy saplings that took over when the original jungle had been bombed and burned. There were shadowy side trails leading to concrete bunkers, rusting warehouses, gun emplacements. There were bombed-out barracks, shattered concrete dangling from twisted metal rods, like broken fingers pointing accusations at the sky. There was Malinta Tunnel, once MacArthur’s headquarters, but Eddie had no time for history. He slammed to a halt on the other side of the tunnel and rushed George through a yard swarming with the people and equipment, the odd combination of chaos and punctilio that marks a film crew. At the rear of the yard, some people were sitting at a picnic table on a grassy knoll.

  “Well, here he is,” Eddie announced. “Introductions are in order. You know George. I told you all about him. Now—”

  “I’ll take care of this,” someone interrupted. He was a burly, Texas-looking fellow, an athlete gone to seed with beer and barbecue. “My name is Hugh Beaumont. I’m from Houston. I have a couple little businesses there. Drilling equipment and such. This here’s Larry Wingfield . . .”

  A tall, blond fraternity boy, readying a blackball. He seemed at home on Corregidor, though he was way too young to be a veteran.

  “Larry lives in Pacific Palisades, California, and here, and Hong Kong. He’s a lawyer, the kind that never shows his face in court. He specializes in movie financing. There’s lots more. His family—”

  “Let’s not waste any more of Mr. Griffin’s time,” Wingfield interrupted, but it sounded like he was the one who didn’t want to waste his time: on Griffin.

  “And this—saving best for last—is Cecilia Santos.” A Filipina princess, no doubt about it, well turned out in white puffy pantaloons and blouse, and a wide red sash around her tiny waist. Last night’s women were local products in a crowded local market. Cecilia Santos was private stock, wrapped in tissue, marked for export.

  “Miss Santos is our liaison with the Philippine government,” Beaumont said. “And with some local investors. What we have here is a coproduction, a partnership. Has Eddie put you in the picture yet, what we’re doing here?”

  “I thought I’d leave that for you,” Eddie said.

  “Okay. Larry and I have a connection with a World War Two guerrilla outfit headed by Colonel Harry Roberts Harding, who was known as ‘MacArthur’s Ghost.’ Maybe you’ve heard about him.”

  “I think so,” Griffin said. “First the war, now the movie?”

  “That’s it, yes. But don’t think it’s just a bunch of buddies getting sentimental. Hell, we are sentimental. And we’ve all got other ways of making money. But this is a go project. We expect to spend a lot and make a lot. And do some good besides.”

  “The script?”

  “That’s all taken care of,” Wingfield said. “A fast-paced adventure with lots of action, mystery, romance. And something else. Patriotism. We’re going back to a time when America stood for something.”

  “I see,” Griffin said. “So . . . a World War Two movie set here in the islands . . . and patriotic.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Wingfield said. “It’s been done before. All those bloody epics Hollywood turned out during and right after the war. Bataan. Back to Bataan. An American Guerrilla in the Philippines. Blood and guts and old glory. It’s the kind of thing that got unfashionable during the sixties. We were the villains then. But there’s a new spirit in America. We’re winners again. We like winning. It’s terrific being Number One. We’re tired of flagellating ourselves. Tired of apologizing for what we’ve done, or tried to do. That’s the spirit of the country and that’s the spirit of the film. That’s the spirit, too, of everyone who’s on board this project.”

  “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves with Mr. Griffin?” Cecilia Santos interrupted.

  “I reckon we are,” Beaumont seconded.

  “Sorry,” Wingfield said. “It’s just that what we don’t need around this project is cynicism.”

  “The thing of it is,” Beaumont said, “the key part is the role of Colonel Harry Roberts Harding, MacArthur’s Ghost. Now after the war, Harry Harding kind of disappeared.”

  “Until now,” Wingfield resumed. “We had to look for him. In this business you never know. He might have come back at us after the movie was in the can.”

  “Come back?” Griffin asked. “You mean that you were afraid he’d sue you?”

  “It’s happened before,” Wingfield said. “This is a movie after all. Not a documentary. So we take liberties.”

  “Our hero has to get in someone’s pants,” Beaumont said, blushing when he remembered Cecilia Santos was sitting at the table. She was unperturbed.

  “Our concern was that he might object to these necessary . . . infidelities . . . in the script, that he’d embarrass us . . . so we looked,” Wingfield said. “But he hadn’t kept in touch with anyone we knew. We tried the Veterans Administration. Veterans groups. We placed ads in newspapers and magazines. I’ll be frank. Whether or not we found him, we wanted to be able to demonstrate that we had made a good-faith effort, what in law is known as ‘diligent search.’ “

  “You’d have just as soon not found him, I take it,” Griffin said.

  “Well, anyway we did,” Beaumont said. “Eddie found him down in Florida. Owned a motel. We sent Eddie down to talk to him.”

  “He wanted in,” Wingfield said. “He wanted to come back here, he said he’d been thinking about it. He wanted to knock around some, look up old places, old faces. That’s how he put it. Old places, old faces. The money part was easy: a flat fee in exchange for a legal release, plus a point in the profits of the film. He took what we offered him. But he wanted to be here. We’re going to have him on our hands a while and that’s a problem.”

  “Why?” Griffin asked.

  “It’s like this,” Beaumont explained. “He was a tremendous man. No film could tell the half of it. But we don’t want him sitting around a movie set for two months. That’s asking for trouble.”

  “That’s where I come in,” Eddie Richter said. “My idea was maybe we could turn a minus into a plus. We’d find us a writer to accompany Colonel Harding as he visits old haunts, wartime comrades, movie locations. His story was never told.”

  “And,” Beaumont added, “if we’re right in thinking that the time has come for a stand-up-and-be-proud movie like this, then the time is also right for a book that would tie in with the movie. So that’s pretty much it.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t be too flattered,” Wingfield warned. “My nomination was William Manchester. He’s unavailable though.”

  “I was thinking about Richard Tregaskis myself,” Hugh Beaumont said. “Wrote Guadalcan
al Diary. Only he’s dead.”

  “I’m your third choice, then?”

  “Well . . .” Beaumont hesitated, glanced at Eddie. “Should I tell him?”

  “Go ahead. Sure.”

  “We were thinking about Eddie for this job. Only he says we need a real writer.”

  Griffin looked at Eddie. He couldn’t help wondering how it happened that the same man who’d gotten him into newspaper work years before should rescue him from newspapers now.

  “Thanks, Eddie.”

  “Does that mean you’re interested?” asked Beaumont.

  “I could be.”

  “He’s wondering about the money,” Wingfield announced. “Forgive me,” Griffin said. “It’s part of the new spirit in the land. How much?”

  “It’s simple,” said Wingfield. “You travel with Colonel Harding at our expense. All expenses—reasonable expenses—we pick up. Whatever you write, you write. And whatever it makes, you keep.”

  “Could be a best seller, what with the movie coming out,” Hugh Beaumont said.

  “Two hundred dollars a day for sixty days,” Griffin responded.

  “What’s that?” asked Wingfield.

  “My fee.”

  “I think we can settle this right here and now,” Larry Wingfield said, with the tone of a man who had heard just about enough. “Would you mind taking a stroll, Mr. Griffin? Thanks. Won’t take long.”

  “Thank you,” Griffin answered. He walked away from the table, through the lot, out to the road, and found himself confronting Malinta Tunnel. Looking back, he could see the film people in conference. He didn’t want to be seen hovering eagerly around the edges. He stepped into the tunnel.

  This was MacArthur’s fortified stronghold, the innermost keep of the first great American defeat. It was a short tunnel, 1,400 feet, so that you were always aware of the light outside. That must have been a paradox: it was supposed to make you feel good, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. But here in Malinta it must have been the other way around, knowing that the enemy owned the world outside, the sky and the sea and the green mountains, the whole day lit world. Griffin walked the tunnel, studying the laterals that branched off from either side. Some had ceased to exist: a pile of rock and broken concrete marked where entrances had been. Others were still in place, dark burrows where generals and politicians, nurses and wounded, all the detritus of a lost cause, had assembled. MacArthur’s ghosts.

  There were people at one end of the tunnel. Griffin walked toward them, until he heard them speaking Japanese. He stood there and savored the moment, fear and irony together. They were tourists posing with their guide, taking turns photographing each other, still in uniform: white short-sleeved shirts, dark suits with boxy trousers and flapping jackets. They carried their cameras like weapons and the ground around them was littered with discarded Polaroid sheets, like so much spent ammunition.

  “Hey, George.” Eddie had come up behind him.

  “Why do you think they come back?” George asked.

  “I don’t know. Couple thousand of them died in here when we retook the island. Blew themselves up.”

  “They come back for the same reason we do. Because this is where they got their asses kicked.”

  “Could be,” Eddie said. “Could be.” George was disappointed he hadn’t been asked to defend his statement. He felt he was onto something. Victories were clichés. Everything about them was conventional: the rhetoric, the statuary, the hagiography, the literature and music. Victories were temporary. Defeats lasted forever. And that was why, if you had a defeat in your life, and you survived, you kept coming back to it, picking at the memory, because the memory picked at you. You would never let go of it.

  “. . . made it harder on yourself,” Eddie was saying. “You hurt yourself with Wingfield. He says you’re a ‘media smart-ass.’ “

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you really?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want to go back to your regular work?”

  “No,” Griffin said. He couldn’t face it: more Faraway Places and Backyard Adventures. And it bothered him that he might have missed out; odd, after all the years of waiting, of telling himself he’d be ready when his chance came, he hadn’t been ready at all, because he wasn’t the person he had been when he started waiting.

  “Here,” Eddie said. “The script. The cast. The shooting schedule. I’m your guardian angel, kid. You start right away.”

  “Right away?”

  “What do you think we’re doing here? Harry Roberts Harding is due at noon.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Happiness, Griffin liked to say, was a sometime thing. And—he liked to add—it had been some time since he’d been happy. But on Corregidor, the few hours before Harding came, he was as happy as he’d been in years. It had something to do with his new job, with beginnings and endings he sensed in himself. And something to do with Eddie Richter, his guardian angel. And it had a lot to do with the jeep, the rusted-out red-white-and-blue wonder with which Griffin spent two glorious hours conquering Corregidor. Speed, liberty, and good roads: what couldn’t they cure?

  The island had three levels. Shore level was “Bottomside.” “Middleside” was next. “Topside” was the crown of the island, a high, grassy plateau. Battles had ended there. So did tours, among the ruins of the American headquarters: a colonial-looking stone building, the command post MacArthur had abandoned when he burrowed into Malinta Tunnel, and the nearby parade grounds, where the American flag had flown and fallen. On a bluff overlooking the sea was the Pacific War Memorial, a marble arcade that listed all the battles and campaigns of the war; out beyond was the Pacific itself, mute witness to all of it, and when Griffin stood there he had a nice feeling for the continuity of things, the linkage of then and now, the connection between those battles, which were names carved in stone, and that ocean down below: this was where they touched.

  He lingered at the memorial until the place started filling up with tour groups. Harry Roberts Harding’s return was something of an event, it seemed, not only for the American vets, and the small contingent of Japanese, but for dozens of Filipino veterans also. They had their own style. Whatever they had been, they still were, in bits and pieces of old uniforms, shirts, jackets, caps, medals. How odd it was! The Americans had rushed, willy-nilly, into peacetime. The Japanese marched off into civilian life, trading one uniform for another. But the Filipinos held on to what they had been: fighters, soldiers. Griffin passed among the veterans looking for Walter Federovich. He wanted him to know that the man who wrote columns that Vera Federovich clipped out of her Sunday supplement was becoming something else. But Federovich was nowhere to be seen. Griffin retreated to the Topside Barracks, the massive mile-long ruin. He stepped inside, through broken plaster, over rusted pipes and pools of water. Geckos ran for cover in vines that reached through windows. He walked up one flight of steps, then another, and out onto what was left of the roof. He sat down and pulled out the script that Eddie had given him.

  “MacArthur’s Ghost” was the title. As for the rest: three Americans, a polo-playing upper-class rogue, a sardonic, streetwise bartender, and a southern missionary’s son meet and compete and romp through the streets, playing fields, clubs, and plantations of sleepy, charming prewar Manila. These three—the rich boy, the poor boy, and the choirboy—live and love and brawl, but their lives lack purpose. The Japanese attack. Purpose is amply provided. The fall of Manila, the disaster of Bataan. The siege and surrender of Corregidor. While thousands of comrades are marched into captivity, the three Americans decide to fight behind enemy lines. What adventures! With polo horses from a Manila country club, they lead a cavalry charge against a Japanese camp. They forage on Bataan for abandoned weapons and ammunition. They stage daring raids in occupied Manila. They contend with Japanese, with Filipino collaborators, with loyal villagers, and they become known as MacArthur’s Ghosts. They prepare for MacArthur’s return, but their campaigns don’t end
with the liberation of Manila. The love of a woman held captive by the Japanese, the desire to avenge a massacred village, the rumor of a treasure hoard of gold—Yamashita’s gold—draw them into the northern mountains of Luzon, into the final Japanese redoubt, where the woman is rescued, the dead are avenged, the treasure found—and lost. Sequel anyone?

  So that was it: a patriotic stand-up-and-be-counted movie that was going to make money and do good; Griffin was convinced it would do both, or either, or neither. It might be a hackneyed clunker or it might be a shrewd mélange of wartime action and romance, with more than a touch of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He’d seen—and paid to see—lots worse, and some of what he’d paid to see he’d liked. Who knew? It might even be a classic American movie.

  The movie people were at the edge of the parade ground, with the veterans—a couple of hundred by now—behind them. Americans, Filipinos, Japanese.

  “Well, I guess you read the script,” Hugh Beaumont said.

  “Yes sir, I did,” Griffin answered manfully.

  “Come on now, what’d you think of it?”

  “Well, I don’t know how to put it exactly . . .”

  “Then put it approximately,” Wingfield prodded him, “and we’ll take it from there.”

  “Well . . .” Griffin looked around, as if he feared being overheard. Everybody was listening, Beaumont, Cecilia Santos, Wingfield. Even Eddie.

  “It’s a pisser,” he said.

  “A pisser?”

  “You heard me.”

  “A pisser?” Beaumont asked.

  “What does that mean?” Cecilia Santos asked. “A pisser?”

  Suddenly, Beaumont was laughing, clapping him on the shoulder. They were all laughing. No doubt about it, everyone seemed to agree, it was a pisser. They were still laughing when they saw the helicopter circling overhead, its shadow crossing over them, once and once again: MacArthur’s Ghost returning.

  As soon as the helicopter landed, a military band launched into “Halls of Montezuma.” The veterans of three nations stood at salute. The helicopter door opened and two men stood there, each urging the other to go first. “You go.” “No, you.” “Please.” “No, I insist.” It went on that way, an amusing little tableau, till the men agreed to squeeze through the door together and, awkward as it might be, walk down the steps side by side, arm in arm, the tall, spindly, red-haired American who was Harry Roberts Harding and the genial, suave, aging Filipino who was Ferdinand Marcos.