Robert Jones - Blood Tide

“I still don’t like it,” the commodore said. “The Brits have a saying, Billy. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. This is a very strong once.”

TWENTY

Curt came down the esplanade with Brillo at heel. It was dark now, and the cobbles glinted under weak lamplight. Rock music blared from a few honky-tonks and from the transistors in the open-air barter stalls. Turbaned old Tausuqs glowered at him and fingered their cutlery. The dimly lighted pawn shops, packed with all manner of goods from ship’s clocks to golf clubs, seemed empty of life, save for the inevitable Chinese pawnbroker who inevitably beckoned with a wide, warm smile.

He wants a piece of somebody, Curt thought. So do I, but different. We all do. The commodore’s right—no streetwalkers in this town. He passed another pawnshop with golf clubs in the window. Golf clubs? The nearest course was probably no closer than Zambo or Davao.

A mongrel came down a side alley and trotted over stiff-legged to check out Brillo.

“Easy, boy.” Brillo would break its neck with one snap. That might piss off some bolo-man, and they’d both be shish kebab. Brillo looked up at him with a cutting, pissed-off look of his own. Curt saw a stairway leading up the bluff toward the cathedral. Might as well check it out. No Tausuqs up there. They climbed. Down in a workyard lighted by torches, Curt saw carpenters planing and chiseling away at what looked like three very large wooden crosses. They worked solemnly, with none of the chatter and laughter Filipinos bring to most jobs. The wood shavings smelled musky, almost like incense, as the breeze spun their odor up to him. Church music played softly from a transistor—Gregorian chants.

No music sounded from the cathedral when they reached it, just the mutter of old women praying their penances in the rearmost pews, and the occasional growl of a priest in the one working confessional. It was dark in there. Red candlelight, the stale smell of holy water and the distant seafront. Christ hung bleeding and twisted from crosses all over the walls, the same long, black-bearded agonized face at every turning, like that of crazed dopers Curt had seen as they checked out after an inadvertent hot shot. Or a planned one, for that matter. He winced at the sight of the realistic thorns on Christ’s crown, feeling again his own experience of them on the commo’s mad bird hunt. Never again, if he could help it.

An old woman in black shuffled out of the confessional, her face as doleful as Christ’s, except for the lack of a beard—she had only a white, potato-sprout mustache. Another woman got up to go into the box, and Curt recognized Rosalinda, the commo’s housekeeper. A bit long in the tooth, he thought, but sexy in a hot, smutty way. Maybe he ought to stick around and buy her a drink down in town when she came out. Maybe he could give her some more ammunition for her next confession.

Padre Cotinho sat behind the confessional screen, sipping something from his chalice. Rosalinda sniffed—tuba asesina, the wicked local toddy that was said to corrode the brain more than absinthe. What are the Jesuits coming to? Not long ago they were like other priests, righteous supporters of the status quo and whatever regime was in power. Then suddenly they were out on the streets with the opposition coalition, Bayan, the enemies of Macoy Marcos, the movement that had brought Cory Aquino to power. Even priests had been salvaged by the Marcos goon squads—that is, they’d achieved salvation by knife, gun, or electrode. Their bodies would be found along with those of suspected Communists, New People’s Army sympathizers, election workers, and anyone who took part in Aquino’s Laban campaign, the bodies smoldering on Smoky Mountain, that giant garbage dump in Manila’s Tondo section, where the poor scavenged their miserable livings. Most of the salvage victims were beheaded, the women raped for good measure, usually beforehand. Laban was a Tagalog word meaning “battle” or “fight.” Rosalinda was fighting still. So was Padre Cotinho.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said. “The Milikan hijacker Hughes showed up today. In fact, he’s at the back of the cathedral right now. I saw him just as I entered the confessional.”

“Did he follow you?” The priest’s voice was husky with assassin’s rum.

“I don’t think so. He probably just wandered up from town to look around.”

“You’re sure it’s the right man?”

“Look for yourself, Padre.”

The priest rose quickly and leaned out the back of the screens. He was quiet and steady enough on his feet despite the chalice.

“Yes, the very one,” he said. “I photographed him in Zamboanga the day he met with Torres. Bueno . Effredio and his lady friend will be here soon, and the seafighters from Tawitawi with their boats. What else?”

“Hughes has the big dog with him, the one you mentioned. With him even now, in church.” She laughed quietly. Rum and killer dogs in San Lázaro’s holy of holies. “Torres went aboard to search the sailboat this afternoon while the commodore took Hughes out hunting on Balbal. The dog trapped Torres in the cabin. If only he’d torn him apart and eaten him.”

“In time, cornpañera . What did Torres find in the boat?”

“He made many photographs with the small camera. Some were photographs of photographs themselves. Of the girl of Effredio and her father. I saw three pictures. The father wore the uniform of a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy. Boatswain’s mate. He looked, how do they say, salty?”

“Good,” Padre Cotinho said. “He may prove of more value than we thought.”

“Orders, Padre?”

“For your penance, my child, get close to this Hughes man. Whatever you need to do. You are practiced in those arts. Get him to anchor the sailboat out in the harbor, away from the fast-boat basin. Suggest it might make your rendezvous with him less publicly embarrassing to you. Study the boat carefully. Disarm all weapons—break firing pins, defuse hand grenades, even dull the edges of his knives when you cook for him. Make friends, if you can, with the dog. When we move, we don’t want any alarms in the night. Again, if you have something important to tell me before your next confession, attend the early mass and leave a message in your missal. I will find it and return it to you. Now go in peace, my child, and Christ be with you.”

As she rose, she saw him lift the chalice.

Curt took her the first time less than a hundred meters from the cathedral, on the wet grass beside a crypt in the graveyard. He was easy. She had smiled, taken his hand as they walked into the dark, leaned against his shoulder, tickled his palm with her middle finger in the universal let’s-fuck manner, then led him grinning ear to ear down the pathway to the tombs. His urgency was that of a schoolboy.

“How long has it been since you’ve had a woman?” she asked him as he slumped, finished, onto her belly.

“Too damned long.”

“But there are many in the Philippines.”

“Not so’s I could find them,” he said. “All the ones I tried were hung with the same gear I’ve got. What do you call them? Benny boys?”

“Yes.” She laughed. “Very bad for business, in my former profession. Unfair competition.”

“Especially to the prospective buyer,” Curt said. They both laughed. “How much do I owe you?”

“Why, nothing!” she yelped. Offended pride was the ticket. “I am a proper working woman now, with a salary. I am the commodore’s private secretary.” She turned her hips and shrugged him off onto the grass. It was wet and cold on your back down there. She rose huffily and straightened her dress, then stuffed her panties into her handbag. She felt his come creep down her leg like a cold garden slug. The dog was watching her from the darkness. Unsmiling. She waited, rather than walking off in pretended outrage.