IX

I didn’t know what time it was or how much time was passing. We were now taking back roads and I had lost my map entirely. We were in a part of Manila where I had never been. The buildings were all one story, the road a strip of concrete with deep ditches on either side. A pack of dogs skittered across our path, the barking diminishing as we sped away. Chet would occasionally confer to ask Top Gun questions, usually inquiring if Top Gun had heard back from some person that I’d never heard of. The answers were either simple affirmatives or negatives. They were keeping me in the dark.

“Chet,” I said. “You told me you weren’t in business with Gumboc.”

He replied without hesitation. “Business is business. This is something else.”

“I don’t understand.”

Chet gave me a weary look. “It’s true. You don’t understand, and you won’t, because you think you’ve figured it out and aren’t willing to make the effort.”

“Inchoy is dead,” I said. “I want to know why. Maybe I was stupid to look for you, but Inchoy should still be alive. Some—” I wanted to say thug but couldn’t with Top Gun sitting there. “Some person killed him and you owe me a real explanation.”

“I owe you?” Chet’s face hardened and he shook his head, which I knew meant he was controlling his temper. For the first time, I saw how angry he was. He was blaming me. This was all my fault. “What’s this, Ting?” He had reached down to the console where the empty plastic bag from my soft drink was resting.

“It’s a bag. I bought a Mirinda to drink on the bus.”

“And who did you buy it from?”

“Some kid selling soft drinks.”

“And how old was he?”

“I don’t know. Twelve?”

“And he’s selling soft drinks now and has probably been working since he was eight. He should be in school, but he’s not. And you buy a drink from him and don’t even see him.” Chet put the plastic bag down. “Ting, if you are not the solution, then you are part of the problem. I am tired of being part of the problem.”

I said, “You wanted martial law.”

Chet composed himself. “I wanted the contract for the LRT and expansion of the highway system in the provinces. I wanted to cut through the red tape.”

“Gumboc is a murderer. He’s killed over ten thousand people and—”

“Ting, I know that,” Chet said. He had dropped his voice to a soothing level and was talking to me as if I were a child. “Gumboc would have won the next election anyway, maybe not in a landslide, but handily. So what harm has been done? He’s old and sick. Another couple of years, he’s dead, his party flames out because the infighting has already started. Again, we swing the other way. Next president’s probably your guy, Lijé, or someone like him. Someone who deals in the old ways, where nothing gets built and the wealth of the country is spread among the cronies.”

“You’re a crony,” I said. I didn’t mean it as an insult but merely to point out an irrefutable truth.

Chet gave a sad laugh and said, “But I will get my highways to the provinces, I will get the LRT, I will improve the traffic.”

I thought of the long lines snaking down the steps of the LRT terminals, of the hours we all spent stalled in the traffic, of the overflowing sewers that flooded the houses of the poor every time it rained. The LRT was, to Chet, a modern-day aqueduct, a source of employment for the many workers who would no longer have to go overseas and leave their families, who could now live cheaply outside the squalor of Manila’s poor neighborhoods. If the whole thing wasn’t so corrupt, it would have been admirable.

“But why did you involve Laird?”

“Involve Laird? This was his idea. He sold it to Rocco. The guy’s crazy, but he’s smart. Laird knew what the video would have to look like. That was easy. And then he just needed to find a head.”

I wondered how they had made it look like Laird or if the head had been decomposed, which would have been convenient. Or if they had simply found someone to sign some document saying that this head had been identified when it hadn’t.

I asked, “So whose head?”

“Ting,” said Chet. He looked hurt. “I’m a businessman. I don’t deal with that. But no one was killed.” Although I felt certain that he was not sure of this. Chet’s eyes flickered over to me, then returned to the road. “You remember when Batac declared martial law. There was the bomb that went off in Plaza Miranda.”

I said, “I was three, and you were five, so no.” But I knew the Plaza Miranda bombing had been a false flag, the whole thing arranged by Batac, who blamed it on the communists. We had all known it was Batac, but the power of his story had overwhelmed the truth.

“Do you know how many people died that day? Nine, one of them was a five-year-old. Ninety-five people were injured. This was an incident without bombs. No blood was shed.”

But blood had been shed. There had been the bomb in Baclaran Church, now conveniently forgotten or downgraded to collateral damage. Chet had blood on his hands, and so did I.

We were quiet for some time. The air-conditioning was on full blast and the joints of my arms were beginning to ache, reminding me that I was still alive. Chet was following my thoughts. He did blame me. He blamed me for my stupidity. In the great machine of his plan, there had been but one faulty circuit, and that had been me. Or his inability to control me. He was now blaming himself.

“And what will happen to Laird?” I said.

“The plan is that he goes to Shanghai for a few months. After that, who knows?”

“Is that still the plan?”

“Now you’re worried about him?” Chet laughed coldly. He had a harsh smile in his eyes and for the first time I saw the wrinkles forming. “He’s the one who said you were with Inchoy. He knew from your aunt. It’s his fault they’re looking for you.”

We pulled up to a gate that opened to an enclosure encircled by a chain-link fence. A wiry old man with his cap pulled low over his eyes undid a padlock, pulled the chain, and let us through. Another man in jeans and sunglasses stood at a distance, an Armalite held casually in his hands. There was a hangar of rusting iron, a gas tank, a corroded water tower that was standing at a tilt and looked ready to collapse. The area was paved with deteriorating concrete, broken by uneven earth and young trees that burst through its seams. A rooster ran across the busted tarmac, flapping its wings but unable to take flight. We sped along, bumping across the rutted terrain, heading—now I saw—to a four-seater plane, its propellers going, the grumble of its engine reaching through the tinted windows and air-conditioned hum of the car.

Chet pulled over by the plane. Top Gun shot out of the car and immediately began talking to a man in a leather jacket.

“Get your things,” said Chet. “We need to move quickly.”

I got out of the car, shouldering my backpack and tote bag. Chet grabbed my coat and nodded at it approvingly. “Good thing you have this,” he said. “It’s going to be cold.”

I put my bags down and let Chet help me into the coat. “Chet,” I said.

“What?”

“Where am I going?”

Chet looked around nervously. He put his hands on my shoulders. “You’re flying to Macau, then Hong Kong. Your flight to New York leaves early tomorrow. Gumboc thinks you left Baguio this morning, that you found a last-minute seat on the two p.m. Manila–Hong Kong flight. Records here will support that. Your aunt is also of the same opinion or is at least convincingly presenting the story.”

“But I was seen at the hotel—”

“Also taken care of.” No one had noticed me in the mayhem of Ambuklao Road. I was now a part of another story that would hold against the truth. Chet took an envelope that had been folded in the pocket of his shirt and handed it to me. I looked at it, realizing it was the itineraries, then shoved the envelope into my coat pocket.

Chet nodded a few times in a way that I knew was supposed to inspire confidence. Maybe he was composing some parting words, but the engines of the plane were growing louder. We were running out of time. Just then, my phone beeped with the signal that I knew meant it was a text from my husband. I ignored it.

“You’ll be fine,” Chet said. “We’ll just wait for things to quiet down. And then . . .”

“And then I come back?” I asked. I could feel a heaviness in my chest and I sensed immediately what it was, my heart, that quiet machine, and from its subtle ache, I knew that we were over. There was no future for us.

“Yeah. Just let me . . .”

“Let you fix things.”

Chet nodded. “You, Ting,” he said. He looked at me directly, accusingly. He was angry at himself, at his weakness. He said, “You.”

I stepped to Chet and he embraced me. I rested my head against his chest. I could feel him warm through the fabric of his shirt. I could hear his heart beating in there.

By the time we took off, Chet was already speeding away across the concrete, working hard to maximize the distance between us. My pilot was Chinese, as was the copilot, who spoke some English and seemed very excited at this opportunity to use it.

He asked me, “How was your day?”

“Very nice,” I replied. “Thank you for asking.”

Both my companions on that flight looked to be about twenty years old.

We left the ground shortly after that, hurled brutally into the sky as if tossed by some colossus. The engine screamed with effort as the plane shuddered upward, and even though the motor of the plane was deafening, beyond it I sensed an infinite silence. We were moving through an even darkness that made progress in any direction seem improbable, as if we had lifted off the earth and into a state of benign stasis from which we might never emerge.

When we had been aloft for some time, I took my phone from my bag. There were three messages from my husband.

The first said:

I cannot sign these papers.

The second said:

We need to talk.

The third said:

Christina, we both have done things that we regret.