Chapter 20 - Sweet Haven

ON the drive back into the city, she was positive she had said yes to an afternoon tryst. She supposed he was claiming a small advance on what the Pastors owed him for his help. Men had different ways of expressing their need. Some were up front. Others waited slyly until the air crackled with unreleased lust and it seemed stupid not to lean over in, say, taxicab or foyer, and crush her face against theirs. When things went wrong it was these kinds of men who retreated and let her take the blame. But she herself kept a small storehouse of tricks. She liked the ambiguous hug that drew mutual surges of blood. She never went for the mouth, only the soft, warm point below their cheekbones, the better to slide her own lips to earlobe or elsewhere, or to retreat forever with a chaste and pleasant smile.

They sped up the narrow, palm-flanked road that edged the bay. Every travel article about the city included a stock helicopter shot of this blue expanse. Joel kept up the conversation, telling her he had been a second-grader when he learned, from a nun, of the other Donostia, the city in Spain that the conquistadores and priests must have been thinking of when they weighed anchor, rechristening the heathens and their settlement. The real Donostia, the nun explained. Over thirty years later, he still mulled the meaning of that phrase.

The city was changing, she thought; she could barely recognize these roads that she had once traversed, with long-forgotten friends, on the back of a scooter, riding in the dust of cornfields and getting her Converse sneakers wet as they churned through streams that spilled right across the asphalt. Everywhere, houses had sprung up, and with them came the tricycle taxis parked by the roadside, the Toyota Tamaraws rigged up for passenger use; the vulcanizing shops staffed by skinny, shirtless men who moved around seemingly without aim. Joel stopped at a compound that looked embarrassingly like a small motel—four or five bungalows, their windows closed against the summer heat, a grille frame over the gate that read, “Villa Milagros.” There were weeds everywhere; the place looked neglected. He drove the jeep right in—an experienced patron apparently—and, producing a bunch of keys, unlocked one of the structures.

They were at the threshold of a one-room apartment. It had a weary, professional look: A toilet and shower to the right of the entrance, a closet to the left. The bed stood against one wall. It was the focal point of the small space. Behind it, a tall window with dusty glass jalousies. The ocher drapes gave the room the necessary touch of glamor. The foot of the bed faced a wall with an expansive mirror set in a stylish frame of iron bars and rivets. The bed itself was covered in a duvet of masculine tans and russets. There was an air-conditioning unit to one side of the window; it was dead now, unplugged, and the room was stifling. On the side opposite it was a mini-refrigerator, just large enough to stow a weekend’s supply of drinks.

“This isn’t where you live, is it?”

He shook his head, his smile sad and abstracted.

“Who owns it, then? A friend of yours? You pay him to use this place?”

She walked to the bed and lay down on the spread, knocking off her shoes, keeping her eyes on him. Joel did not touch her. He drew up the lone chair and sat with his elbows on his knees.

“This is where the videos were filmed.”

She froze, went dark with embarrassment. But her instinct for self-preservation kicked in. She remained where she was, as though all her life she had been in the habit of entering strange, suffocating rooms and artfully lying down supine. It was likely he had had no idea of her prior thoughts.

Then the realization struck her. He had taken her here, and he had had a key.

“Don’t get up,” Joel called. “Don’t leave. Not yet.”

“You’re one of them.”

“I am not. Whatever you think of me, however bad it looks, I am not. Trust me.”

“How can I? Talk to me. Why weren’t you more forthright? Why do you claim to help my daughter?”

“Be still,” he said. “Please be still. Let me talk. This was not the work of one boy, but of a barkada, a group of friends. Now one of them is trying to cooperate. With me. But the situation is tricky, as he has powerful backers.”

“Is this the Torres boy my mother told me about?”

“Yes,” he said, and sighed. “Your parents were present when we … interviewed … one of their victims.”

“Well, charge him, then!” she said, the residue of embarrassment sharpening her voice. “What are you afraid of? I can’t let you have Naia.”

He got up, as if to give himself time, and bending, plugged the air-conditioning unit into its outlet. The hum of the machine filled the room. Almost immediately the atmosphere became bearable. Joel came back to his seat.

“I know it is your prerogative, as her family, to decide. I know you want what’s best for her. But Narita, I brought you here because I want you to see how close we are to achieving something. That we have evidence, that we have hope that her testimony will put some people behind bars.”

She was not placated. “Well, if this is evidence, where’s your crime scene tape? Why can you come in and out like those pornographers did?”

He sighed. “It’s so complicated. This is Donostia. Things are not very formal around here.”

Narita rose, keeping a sharp eye on him. He was way out of line, and she couldn’t quite forgive herself. The air-conditioner thundered in its niche by the wall, blocking out all sounds from the outside. Climate-controlled, this would have been a pleasant and private place, anytime of the year. Any young girl would have been happy to hole up here for a few hours, away from the dust and heat and the aimlessness of Donostia. She was not in a position to condemn any girl for trying her luck with a young man she did not know.

The studio had a secret, underground quality, like an animal den. There were no books, or shelves for that matter, but there was a low, dusty table where a sizable television might have sat, or a complete entertainment system, or perhaps a computer for games. She took in the ceiling over the bed. She knew the adventures that ceilings could promise, from tales relayed to her in childhood. There were always crawl spaces between the paneling and the iron roof. Some means of trapping heat and conveying it away was crucial in a tropical climate. People stashed their fortunes overhead, as well as their bags of marijuana and shabu. Little boys trembled atop a beam, observing, through gaps in the plywood, the systematic slaughter of their families. Narita recalled a story she had heard in high school, from the boys she had smoked with behind the Practical Arts building—how they had climbed into the ceiling of an uncle’s house to spy on his concubine as the woman lay on the bed, ankles straining against the footboard, alone but for a blue dildo and Van Halen pounding out of the tape deck.

There was a light socket over the bed and it was empty.

“The camera came through there,” Joel said.

She had guessed that. Gemma and Diana had had no idea. The last place a human ever checked out was the space above its head. Even when lying supine, neither girl had ever imagined that her ruin might come from above. One or the other had, in the throes of pleasure, stared directly into that cold, probing lens.

“They must have stationed a man above the bed,” she said. “Who was that man?”

“Yes, above the bed.” He left the other question unanswered. “The ceiling is accessed through a hinged door. In the bathroom.”

Joel retrieved a wooden pole from a corner of the room. He poked at a couple of points in the dimness above the toilet bowl, and a square of board swung down. He went to the closet and emerged dragging a folded painter’s ladder, which he positioned carefully over the floor tiles. The ladder rocked. Narita mounted it, pausing nervously at every rung.

“There is a light switch to the right,” he offered.

She had never been inside a ceiling before. It was an oven. Tiny leaping specks greeted her hand as he reached for the switch. The bulb was weak and yellow. As she straightened up, she saw that she was on a gangway, wide enough to accommodate a man lying prone. Electric wires, thick with dust, disappeared over the panels. It was a hiding place, she realized, from one’s enemies, for stashing contraband. She edged over the planks, hunched over, flinching when her forehead brushed the sun-heated galvanized iron sheeting above her. Her toe brushed a ball of scurf: a rodents’ nest. As she inched forward, the electric bulb died without warning. She pulled out her mobile phone and navigated by the blue glow of the screen. A circle of brightness marked the empty light fixture. She took a deep breath and, leaning over, put an eye to the hole. Through it, she saw the earth-toned pattern of the spread. Insects assaulted her face, wriggling, chewing. They were fleas, drifts of them, in her ears, between her fingers, burrowing into her trousers.

“I’m sorry about the vermin,” Joel said, when she was safely down, her horror screeched out, her clothes brushed off. “I ought to have warned you. It’s the cats. They get in somehow.”

She tried to block out the memory of the flea attack. His eyes, he noted, flickered involuntarily to the region above her breast, which, like one eyelid and parts of her arms, felt hot and swollen.

She could not stay. The longer she remained, the more she became a participant in what had taken place here. In the span of a half hour, the room had become a familiar space; she recognized the bathroom door as the one Naia had emerged from, in her footage—glimpsed only for a second or so, but certainly the same one. The tawdriness oppressed her. A faint oily sweetness, an imprint of the men and women who had lain there, rose from the sheets. She was compromising the investigation by staying. She supposed it was his problem, primarily; he was with the impotent prosecution, but its failures affected them all.

“Why haven’t you filed charges against Torres?” she said. “He’s one of yours, isn’t he? You’re still looking for a fall guy.”

Joel was examining her carefully, weighing the risk of what he would say next. “JP Torres calls me uncle, but we’re barely related; I am a poor relation to the Fortuns, as you may already know.”

She waited.

“But JP … his mother and the mayor’s wife are sisters. What happens to him will have an impact on the mayor’s future happiness, I tell you.”

“So screw the mayor.”

“I serve at the pleasure of the mayor,” Joel said. “His family paid for my education, from Sweethaven to law school. I’m his man.” He considered this last statement. “I’m his boy.”

She felt sick. It was time to leave. She found her bag and let herself out the door. Behind her, she heard him switching off the lights and air-conditioner, like a good caretaker. She wanted to put distance between the two of them. If only a tricycle would happen by. But it was the wrong time of day; they were all downtown, or at the schools, where the first of the elementary school sections were letting out for the day.

Joel came up to her as though to beg an apology. She could hear his mobile phone ringing in one of his pockets, a maddening noise. Finally he pulled it out and answered. She scanned the road. She was aware of his breathing, long and measured, and his short bursts of speech. “Yah? When. Now? Okay.”

“What’s going on?”

“We have to leave now,” he told her. “I suppose you’ve seen a dead body before.”

THE young husband himself had raised the alarm. A hoarse and incessant keening from deep within their dingy home brought the neighbors on the run. Two men burst themselves through the barred doors, splitting wood and hurling the barrel bolt to the raw cement floor. They saw all they needed in an instant: just off the living room was the cubicle that housed the water-sealed toilet and shower, and in the doorway to this dank space the young man crouched, cradling his wife in his arms and begging forgiveness. The house filled with neighbors. In the frantic and curiously mute rush to see the body, someone remembered to call the police.

When the jeep stopped, it was at a point on the asphalt road beyond the airport, north of the city limits. The police jeep and the ambulance were already parked at the roadside; they must have arrived some minutes before.

Narita turned to her companion. He was looking at her, too. Something passed between them: an understanding, an imperative. Then they clambered down. A dirt track wound away from the asphalted highway, into a screen of coconut and banana trunks. It looked dry enough to negotiate on foot, not that they had a choice: there was no way a vehicle could get down the short embankment, let alone propel itself down that twisted rut of mud.

As they stood there, two men in civilian clothing appeared bearing a stretcher. A hospital sheet concealed the body that lay upon it. A motley group of neighbors formed a procession as the men came toward them, grunting as they hoisted their burden up the embankment, gingerly locating footholds on the cracked concrete steps. A branch of low-growing Bangkok frangipani caught a corner of the sheet, disclosing painted toenails, a pale narrow foot.

Her journalism had kept Narita within hotel ballrooms and mall boutiques: she had had no experience whatsoever with the raw dead, the dead with all organs intact, the dead minus flowers and makeup and expensive funeral dress. She stared at the girl’s foot, feeling nothing—no sympathy, no sense of outrage, only a clinical surprise at how lifelike that foot still looked, that it had neither suppurated nor withered in the span of an afternoon. And yet how inert it was. The stillness of that outline beneath the sheet—that was the part she could not accept. Huge black flies alighted on the rough cotton, rubbed their forelegs together in glee and flew off.

She drew back as the men loaded the dead girl into the ambulance. The crowd of neighbors followed them up the embankment, milling around the shoulder of the road. No one touched the stretcher; no one wept; not even the handful of women who were there, and it occurred to her that Gemma Bulauan, whoever she might have been, had been a newcomer without relations, a stranger in this neighborhood.

Narita picked her way down the track, past houses on stilts where animals rooted in the mud beneath. The house where the girl had died was a small one-story bungalow, with walls of unfinished hollow block and a rude porch of cracked red tile. The Palm Sunday crucifix on the door must have been tacked there for years. Joel stood in the doorway, talking to a policeman. She yearned, suddenly, for him to touch her, put an arm about my shoulder, make some silly little gesture to stake a claim.

He seemed to have forgotten about her, though. The policeman gave her a searching look.

“Media,” Joel said. The cop only nodded.

At their feet was a grimy mat of woven rags, and resting on this mat were two pairs of sandals, a man’s and a woman’s, misshapen and dusty, the woman’s studded with cheap beads.

The husband was still in the house. He looked about twenty-five: clean-skinned and healthy-limbed. If he had been blessed with a handsome face, there was no way of knowing, for his features were red and swollen from continuous weeping, and there was a crusted splotch on his forehead. He had doubled himself up against the wall, and as they ventured over the threshold, he began to moan and to bang his head against the concrete. The abrasion at his temple left a rust-colored imprint on the surface. He shook his head against the alighting flies.

“How did she die?” Narita muttered to the policeman.

“Asphyxiation.”

“What did she use? A belt? Clothesline?”

“She didn’t use anything,” the policeman said. “He choked the life out of her with his bare hands.”

The young husband brought his palms up to his face. There were handcuffs about his wrists.

On a table covered with a printed swatch of cotton, a few photos lay helter-skelter, half out of their gilt frames. In the struggle, something or someone had barreled into them. Narita pushed aside a pink soft toy and a copy of The Upper Room. The young couple smiled up at her in their wedding finery, a fine-looking barong tagalog and a limp satin dress, the neckline high to cover what imperfections there might have been on the woman’s skin.

Narita turned and walked out of the house, half-running, putting distance between herself and the place. The sun beat down on the pale blooms of orchids lashed to the coconut tree trunks. She told herself she did not know the girl, that it was not her concern. She was just a name and a dead foot and some grainy video footage that had kept her up half the night.

After a while, Joel found her. They stood there, not saying anything, brushing off insects. Around them a few teenagers hovered, waiting for something to happen, hoping a clue or two might be tossed their way, some hook to hang the next episode on. Finally he looked down at the mobile phone in her hand.

“Have you called your folks? Best that it come from you.”

She shook her head. “In due time. I don’t think I want to see or talk with anyone right now.”

“I have asked the police for pictures, in case you want them,” he said.

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t. I can’t play journalist with this; there’s a limit.”

Her head throbbed in the heat. She needed to lie down. “What happens now?”

“I’m going home,” he said. “Do you want to come with me?”