Chapter 9 - Sweet Haven

THE lawyer Joel was not what might be called old money, though he bore an esteemed family name. He wasn’t from the branch of the Fortuns that had sent upstanding men to the National Assembly or to the cabinets of presidents past. In Donostia, there were Fortuns kawayan and cemento—Fortuns of bamboo and Fortuns of cement. The cement Fortuns had built the mansions by the waterfront promenade that had been downgraded to restaurants and bars. Most of the cementos had kept their money but now resided in the gated communities of Manila. The bamboo Fortuns were sons off the left testicle, born in thatch-roof huts, scattered here and there. But Joel had gone to the best law school in Manila, on a scholarship financed by a local politician. He had acquitted himself well enough at the bar examinations and found work as a legal researcher at a decent-size law firm in Makati. The pay had compensated for the monotony. There had been a woman, sleek and well bred, whom he had endeavored in vain to satisfy; they had lived at an enviable address; he had driven a late-model car. He himself wondered why he had chosen to come back and slum it at city hall, for no matter what honors he brought home, people would always mention his origins when his back was turned.

He had been conscious for days of being watched. The stalker was a gallant cavalier, a young man in sunglasses atop a dirt-track motorcycle, in jeans and a muscle T-shirt. Sometimes the T-shirt was white; sometimes it was black. The sunglasses never left the face.

He couldn’t remember when he had seen the stalker first. Donostia was rife with mounted Don Juans, all younger than he—he felt ancient, and could not be bothered to tell them apart.

The stalker hung around in the rearview mirror of his jeep. At night he was a yellow headlight that time and again came blindingly close, then receded, peeling away at an intersection or disappearing behind a procession of tricycle taxis.

A few days into this surveillance, Joel came home, to a bungalow so new that parts of it still smelled of fresh cement, and, trembling, turned on all the lights, tested the doors to see if anyone lurked behind them, stomped over to his bedroom. From the bottom of the wardrobe, beneath an unused pair of Florsheim shoes, he drew out the felt-lined case that contained his father’s gun. For a long time he crouched there, staring at the gleaming metal and the row of cartridges—not touching them, only looking. How the hell was he supposed to defend himself with it? He had never carried a gun. He put the weapon back, where it had lain all these months since his return.

He occupied an air-conditioned office at City Hall now, with mock-velvet drapes and a mahogany desk as large as an altar. There he had constant company. The notary publics and secretaries, a whole pool of them, were in the habit of dropping by to chat, seeking his exalted opinions. He was so new, not more than three months in office. Refined to their eyes, Manila-soft yet worldly wise. It did not seem possible he could screw up. The clerks served him coffee and confections of sticky rice.

He had built a home in one of the newer subdivisions, formerly a farm and just a fifteen-minute drive to his office: he had intended it for retirement, but removed as he was from the life he had built in the capital, it would have to do. He made it a point to drive the jeep that had once been his father’s, to maintain a low profile and remind himself of where he had come from. He felt completely alone, going through the silent house, turning off the lights, ruing the absence of a wife and children—loved ones to call the authorities in case of his disappearance. There was only a senile dog, and a houseboy. His fingers stole over to the mobile phone in his pocket. This, he thought, was the one true means of civil defense. In the event of his murder, yeah, sure, he would notify the authorities himself.

On Friday, two days after the mayor’s investigators had met at the police station, he took the jeep to the outskirts of town, to a neighborhood where the houses were of bamboo and wood and held off the ground by stilts. Swarthy pigs rooted happily in the shadows underneath them. Where the path broadened out to become a tiny square, stood a pump marking an artesian well, and he slowed his step, negotiating earth slippery with laundry detergent. In his wake, he collected children—two, three, four; tattered, underpantsless—who neither spoke nor smiled. Once, twice, he stopped to ask directions—“Do you know a couple called Bulauan? Gemma and Tristan? Which one is their home?”

At last he found himself before a little bungalow, its walls of raw hollow block, its door decorated by a crucifix woven from a palm frond. It was not the kind of place he would associate with a young woman with bottle-blond hair. The door did not open no matter how loud and long he called “Maayo,” politely offering his well-wishes to those who dwelt within.

The wooden jalousies were shut firmly against probing eyes, but from inside the house a radio played, on and on.

“Gemma?” Joel called, and hammered on the door.

“Oh, they’re home,” a neighbor said from behind him. “Try a little louder.”

Joel did. The jalousies next to the door opened an inch or so. He saw a pair of eyes—irises fierce and black, the whites bloodshot.

A man’s voice told him his wife was out.

Joel persisted, fighting to control his anger. Gemma had sent him a string of text messages. She had said he would find her at this house. She would not be out; she had no money, no means of getting anywhere. Her husband had burned her clothes.

The woman spoke then. She was all right, she called softly to Joel through the wood. She sounded as though she was just inside the door, pressed to its very surface.

“This is a matter between man and wife,” her husband snarled. “I have friends. With the police. The military. Now leave.”

Joel had no choice but to obey, stomping angrily past the knot of men and women who had gathered behind him. Blind, abstracted, he crossed the road and sat for a span of time in his jeep, starting the motor only when he realized that the neighbors and the urchins with the naked buttocks had made their way over the rutted path and were now within touching distance of the jeep. Behind him, another engine spurted to life. The stalker had been waiting, parked beyond the overhang of a sari-sari store. The motorcycle winged past his vehicle, the rider casting him a long, meaningful glance. Bastard, Joel thought, and gave chase.

They left the city limits and sped up as they gained the national road, setting a course, it seemed, for Usurbil, the next town. The landscape consisted of coconut palms on their left, sugarcane and mountains on their right. From time to time, between the loose palisade of trunks, he caught glimpses of water—not the blazing summer sea but something sullen and gray that heaved seaweed and rotting timber upon the volcanic black sand.

The motorcycle took one of the unpaved roads that meandered past nipa groves and huts and half-naked children until it terminated in a public beach. Joel’s wheels hit sand. The bike was nowhere to be seen. His heart racing, he parked the jeep where the ground was firmer, bought himself a San Miguel at a nipa-roof refreshment stand, and settled down on a bamboo bench to wait.

A pair of Nike sneakers appeared in the black sand before his own. A new odor overrode that of rot and wet bamboo—a blend of cigarettes and menthol candy, of sweat and designer cologne.

“Winston Lights, two,” the newcomer said. Accepting a few coins, the old woman minding the store handed over a couple of cigarettes from one of the open packs on the counter.

The stalker chose the bench opposite Joel. He took off his sunglasses.

“JP Torres,” Joel said in realization.

“Uncle,” the stalker said. “You’ve got to help me.”

“I THOUGHT you’d forgotten,” the stalker went on. “I am Juan Pablo, the son of Pedro and Auring. We have the white house by the plaza in Monroy. Tito, all this time you acted as if you didn’t recognize me.”

But he hadn’t, Joel thought. He honestly hadn’t. There’d been something familiar about the face in his rearview, but time had erased that face from his memories—this boy whom he’d seen only at Christmases and fiestas some twenty years before. Joel could remember a fetching youngster whose Spanish blood emerged in the curly hair and huge, long-lashed eyes, eyes that bore a false melancholy. Youngest child of a faded mestiza, following four disappointing girls. At age seven, he’d been lighting cigarettes for his older cousins; at age eight his father had put him behind the handlebars of a motorcycle and given him his first exhilarating lesson.

“You changed. I knew you by your nickname. Pabling.”

That name had been bestowed by the boy’s own father. In Donostia slang, it meant “Playboy.” Pabling. JP. Two images—the wispy little boy sucking eagerly on a cigarette until the tip flared to life; the motorcycle rider, superlatively cool. Two images, irreconcilable.

“That was long ago.”

“What do you want?”

“Tito Joel, I know you are a good man. You’ve been driving around town for more than a week, talking to people. You even interrogated that crazy woman down at the station, with all the police watching, so I heard.”

“Say what you mean,” said Joel.

“Tito, you are diligence itself. Yet you haven’t come after me. You have asked no questions. Why?”

Joel felt fear in his bowels.

“I’ve been biding my time. That is all,” he said, knowing how weak his excuse sounded. “Sure, they pointed to you—Diana Rosales, and that poor Bulauan creature back there. But there is nothing in the final video that identifies you. You know that. We can’t see your face. There are no scars, no tattoos on your skin.”

But JP was not listening, or did not believe him. “I know I can count on you,” he repeated. “Because you’re giving me a chance. You know we are family.”

“What do you want?” Joel said.

The young man reached into a pocket of his jeans and pulled out a mobile phone.

“Here,” he said. “I have been getting these. Three just last night.”

Gingerly, Joel took the phone, avoiding contact with JP’s fingers. He squinted at the screen: Tang na mo hayop ka we just warn 4 u b redy ur life only cost 5thou

There were more messages, in a similar vein: threats on JP’s life tapped out in the same patois. There was no point in tracking them. They would have been sent from an anonymous prepaid number. He handed the phone back.

“It’s the families of those girls,” said JP. “You know what kind of people they are. They’re brutes. They’re peasants. They live by the machete. You are powerful, Tito, you are even closer to the mayor than my father could ever be.”

No, thought Joel, he could not escape the curse of family after all, not in Donostia or its satellite sugarcane towns. How could he respond, except to order another drink and contemplate the smooth sun-browned face, the soft moustache, the wince and frown as the boy drew on his cigarette? Fine hair covered the lean arms. Every move was self-conscious, theatrical; JP was the hero in his private Western.

“You brought this on yourself,” said Joel. “What do you want, police protection?”

JP gave no sign that he had heard. He sat there, a corner of his mouth deepening, head bobbing as though in time to some private rock anthem. Then he said, “Tito, how are your hectares in Usurbil? Have you kept the bank away this year?”

A reference to a debt of gratitude Joel’s insolvent father had owed the Torreses. He’d known it would come up soon enough: emotional blackmail. He knew Pabling’s family and their heirs would continue to collect on that debt well into the next fifty years.

Joel was on the defensive—from now on his moves would consist of parrying and giving ground. My father is dead. Leave him out of it, he could have said, but JP would not have understood. How could you reason with such a deeply ingrained sense of entitlement? JP would have chuckled softly in his face. In the middle of his third bottle of beer, he could no longer stand the young man’s crafty appraisal, or the soft stream of flattery from the nicotine-stained lips. My Tito is a lawyer now, with a degree from the best school in the country. My Tito Joel knows how to get his sad cousin out of this mess. He paid the storekeeper and walked away before the startled old woman could hand him back the change. It was not a tip and not a bribe, simply an offering, so that in future, should she remember this meeting upon the bamboo benches of her stand, and recognize one man as the lawyer from the mayor’s office and the other as the amateur pornographer, she might be discreet.

He strode to the water’s edge, knowing that JP would follow.

“I cannot save you,” he said.

“You need me,” the younger man said. “You know you can’t arrest me. Our mayor would sooner die than have his favorite nephew thrown into jail.” He snickered to show he had made a joke. “But you have to come up with something soon. You know the Bisaya mind. People will think you’ve been taking bribes. And you’ll start getting messages like these.”

He tapped the phone in his pocket.

“Are you finished?” said Joel.

“I wasn’t working alone,” JP grinned. “You think me, a poor unemployed farmer’s son, would have come up with enough money to print all those DVDs? The family name is really all a Fortun has.”

You son of a bitch, Joel thought.

JP regarded him with a sly look. “Who handles all the business in this world? Not the Kachilas. Not anymore.”

“You tell me.”

“The Chinese,” JP said with a measure of triumph.

Joel’s heart sank. He thought of the economic power that rivaled that of the mestizo planters. The Chinese community, businessmen all, in their high-walled homes, their warehouses and granaries protected by four stories’ worth of masonry.

“Supposing I tell you about an old friend. Harrison Co. A friend ever since I got kicked out of Immaculate Conception and they put me in Sacred Heart. Harrison, who manages an Internet shop for his mother.”

Joel knew the Cos, all right. The family owned a huge appliance shop in Santo Domingo.

“Harrison has proven to be no friend in time of need,” JP said. “I run to him, and he closes the doors of their house in my face.”

The tide was going out, Joel noted bitterly, and exposing a depressing surface of muck that seemed to stretch all the way to the next island.

“How about it, Tito? We give these Chinese a taste of the law. They think they can run Donostia from their dingy little hardware stores in the market.”

“Enough!” he said.

“I can help you,” the young man pressed. “I’ll bring you to the house that we rigged up.”

Joel sighed. As though this had been the sign he’d been waiting for, JP laughed softly and put his sunglasses back on.

“Why are you doing this?” Joel said.

The young man faced him with a wide and meaningless grin. “My conscience, Uncle. I can’t sleep at night. I want to do the right thing.”