Chapter 24 - Sweet Haven

THE peal of a phone, very close to her head, woke Narita, and in that unfamiliar darkness, dominated by the hum of air-conditioning, she had no idea where she was. When she reached out foggily to silence the instrument, she touched the man. He was firm and warm, and at the contact with his skin she sighed and tried to snuggle closer. She felt him leave her side. He had taken the call, his voice terse; he was already in a world to which she was barred. The door opened and closed behind him. She rolled over, tugging the blanket around her shoulders. The air-conditioner shut down with a thump, and in the quiet, she thought she heard a siren in the distance: a fire engine or an ambulance.

As a child, she fell asleep to the wail of the alarm from the firehouse, a most comforting noise, for it told her that the day had ended and it was time for all fathers to come home, time to lock the doors and slam the shutters to, time to light the mosquito coils and crawl into bed. The siren hurtled up over the darkened city every night for years, for there was Martial Law, and the sound signaled the start of the curfew hours: woe to anyone stumbling into some police constabulary officer in the darkness.

She might have slept a few minutes or so, because the next thing she knew the overhead light was on and Joel was bending, fully dressed, over her.

“Bad news.”

The rush of powerful vehicles made her heart thud. The sound was coming from the main road not far from his home.

“What’s going on?”

“Villa Milagros is burning.”

They let themselves out of the house and boarded the jeep. Toads leapt in consternation away from their headlights. The roads were empty; the night’s quota of drunks had yet to get behind the wheel of their cars, and the rest of the world was fast asleep. Life was suspended at that hour. They barreled through the empty marketplace, taking a route through the center of town.

“Did your team get to document the unit?” she called to him over the rush of the wind.

She didn’t catch his reply.

The flames had been quenched by the time they got to the compound, but the air, as they approached, bore the acrid stench of carbonized wood. It was impossible to drive all the way to the gate, with three fire trucks taking up most of the street, and in addition there were police jeeps and a thick crowd of neighbors and gawkers, amazingly alert for the hour. A skinny man and his wife slipped past the jeep, muttering, lugging a bundle of what seemed to be clothes wrapped up in a bedsheet. Across the street, it looked like a garage sale was in progress. Three electric fans, a television, a set of monobloc chairs and more sheet-wrapped bundles stood on the sidewalk, ready to be whisked out of harm’s way, and guarded from thieves by a sleepy-looking teenage boy. “Of course, the fire trucks got here after it was all over,” she heard the woman say to her companion. “A waste of time, getting us out of bed like that,” he groused back.

“You should be thankful the fire didn’t get your house,” Joel snapped at them. It was his City Hall persona, coming to the fore at last.

The crowd wasn’t thinning in the least. In fact, motorcycles were arriving, discharging their curious riders in twos and threes. Young men, young girls, even a sleepy child or two. “Anybody dead?” they said, to no one in particular as they sauntered past, and in the streetlights they seemed to be grinning, ghoulish, desperate for excitement. The night wind changed direction, rewarding them with the stench of smoke and a wave of black ash.

Narita stumbled after Joel. The fire trucks had turned the side of the road into muck that sucked the shoes right off her feet. Joel had reached the gates to the compound by the time a man in uniform stopped him; another took Narita not too gently by the arm: members of the public not allowed. She could have flashed this fellow the press pass that she always carried in her bag, but in case he knew something about Naia, she didn’t want any questions about her surname. Through the ironwork fence she peered at the unfamiliar buildings: they were still standing, and it was hard to tell, through the darkness and still-rising smoke, which had burned and which were intact.

“Was it the Torres unit?” she said to the uniformed man who had accosted her.

“We know nothing about that,” he said, in dismissal. It shut her up. One fire truck, the one manned by the Chinese community volunteers, was still at work; the predawn wind, when it turned, sent stray droplets into their faces, through the belches of smoke. At last, her eyes tearing up, she called to Joel, who was still talking to the police, that she was heading back to the jeep. She wrote about flowers and cuisine for a living, not this. The real reporters were arriving anyway, with their cameras and floodlights, looking bored and sleepy as they held their mobile phones under the cops’ noses to collect a quote or two.

So that was it, she thought, the scene of the crime all gone. She didn’t care to know who had set the fire. It didn’t matter. Some hired hand, some houseboy. JP would have left Donostia already, would be in Manila, or Bacolod, Hong Kong, possibly even America. She had come to Donostia to perform a simple act of rescue.

What would she send to her boss? She had never written a police report, let alone a crime feature. She had no photographs, except those that Joel might remember to share with her, images of a dead girl with a blackened tongue, a boy pulping his head against the wall. She thought she might document the fire scene, what remained of it, on her mobile phone. When she pulled the phone out of her bag, she saw her daughter had been trying to reach her for the better part of the night. WHERE ARE YOU? Naia had thumbed out. PLEASE CALL THE HOUSE. And then: ARE LOLO AND LOLA WITH YOU? THEY’RE NOT BACK. And: ARE YOU WITH THE LAWYER? ARE YOU COMING HOME?

But replying seemed out of the question; Naia would surely be asleep by now. There was a faint flush of blue on the horizon; within minutes the predawn light would reveal the blackened shell of the house; the avid expressions of the bystanders; her own tired, guilty form huddled in the front seat of the jeep. Joel was out in the road, talking, fairly shouting, to one of the firemen, who gesticulated furiously, as if to rid himself of blame. A police jeep arrived; one of the fire trucks churned past, back to the station, the men in the cab grinning, talking about something that seemed totally unrelated to the scene at hand.

Joel was a mess, shirt wet, the bottom of his trousers smeared with mud. In a short while, as the remains cooled, he would be covered in ash. He was staying, she thought. This was his world; now his life in the next few days would consist of salvaging what he could from the ashes of the case, and she would be superfluous, if not a dismal reminder of the job he had to do. She lifted her mobile phone to call him; amid the noise of engines and the crowd, she heard his own phone ring somewhere on his person, a tiny and contained sound. She saw his mouth work, saw him reach into his pocket and check the name and number as it flashed on his screen. His hand moved and abruptly the call was disengaged, the burring on her own phone silenced. She saw all this but still she stood there some moments more, a disbelieving grin frozen to her face, until he looked her way and their eyes met. He did not react, and she did not call to him. She turned around and began to walk, her eyes smarting from the smoke.