Quiapo was the home of religious fanatics, the poverty-stricken, and mobsters, with the wealthy and tourists mingling within as they searched for some of the best bargains in the city.
Manalo’s men separated at a street corner. Manalo hung back at a newsstand while the others went ahead at differing paces and directions. Best to arrive separately and inconspicuously.
They came to the open square surrounding Quiapo Church. The revered “Black Nazarene” waited behind lock and key for his bi-annual parade to greet the thousands upon thousands of hands seeking healing and blessings with a touch on the dark wood sculpture.
Two small barefooted girls ran toward Manalo with crucifix necklaces and rosaries outstretched in their hands. Their faces and dresses were smudged and black eyes pleaded more than words. He bent at the knees to feign interest in their wares and received a shy smile from the younger, who hid behind her sister’s faded skirt. As he made the exchange of coins to rosaries, he heard the footsteps for a dozen more children come quickly to surround him.
“Palimos po. Pangkain lang,” said the children, asking for a few coins to buy some food.
Yes, it had been a long while since he’d been in Manila; he’d forgotten the ramifications of charity. This was the world of democracy, he thought, as he tossed a handful into the air and left behind soft-cheeked children to scramble like dogs for the scraps. A Communist state would eliminate such oppression. It had worked in other countries for a time—and how desperately his people needed some leveling force among the classes.
He decided to take a longer route to the Korean restaurant that was their destination, and turned down an alley. It amazed him still how Manila could have such streets of poverty just blocks from cinemas and shopping malls.
Outside a run-down ago-go bar, women, used up from a depraved life, stood and waited for business. They smiled and called to him as he went by.
“Two hundred pesos,” an older woman said as she stepped in front of him. The makeup on her face did nothing to hide the hardness of her years.
“You sell your dignity for so little a price?” he said, smelling the stale cigarettes on her breath. “I’m sure men get what they pay for.”
She might have struck him, but her frame was light from malnutrition, and he pushed her back, moving around her and some emaciated dogs that rummaged through garbage on the street.
Across the way two young boys played naked in a puddle of water. They were near his twin daughters’ age. He wished to scoop them up from the squalor. Water on a street such as this could be infested with germs.
He shouldn’t have come this way. Once such sights might have incited him to the cause, the belief in a better world. Why couldn’t the people see that this was the result of “freedom”? No one cared for the poorest children or that the innocents paid the highest price so the wealthy could live in luxury.
Yet they were losing the battle. Nothing had changed for all the sacrifice of years. For his brother’s life. For his separation from Malaya and the children. For a thousand days of being alone. Worse, now the party had decided to collaborate with less than idealistic people. They called them “friends of the Communist brotherhood.” Friends simply meaning the country’s criminal elements. Was the enemy of your enemy really your friend?
Manalo had always despised working with these people, who were polar opposites of what their own purpose fought for. While the New People’s Army fought for justice and equality for the masses, these men were motivated by nothing other than their own greed. But working with them had been beneficial, Manalo had to admit.
For a moment, he couldn’t breathe—the air was thick with vehicle exhaust and thousands of carbon dioxide exhalations. His lungs burned, and he longed for the crisp air of the jungle.
After walking a few more streets, all crowded and bustling with people, Manalo began to feel confident that they weren’t being followed. No one knew they’d come to the city. He again stopped at a newsstand, this one at a street corner, and perused the papers above a tray of X-rated videos. Timeteo walked by without a glance or comment, sauntering down the alley to knock on a back door. By the time Manalo had paid for a newspaper, Timeteo had disappeared inside.
Manalo entered the Korean restaurant by the front door and found a small table in a corner. The menu perused, a San Mig ordered, he asked the young waitress, “Where is the CR?”
He left the newspaper and a few coins for the beer that had not yet arrived and pushed out his chair as if he’d be back soon. Then he headed through the kitchen toward the comfort room. Two young men glanced up from their work over steaming pots and a sizzling grill, while a girl chopping vegetables never looked his way. He moved beyond the bathroom to a door with bold words in Korean that he understood without translation to mean keep out. In the corner of a storage area, a large man whittled on a stick and didn’t meet his eye.
Manalo hesitated, put a hand to the door, and turned the knob. As the door opened, he knew instinctively he was entering an environment different from what the information relayed to him during transport had led him to expect. It was the vibrations he felt as the door opened, like a putrid smell coming from a crypt. His men marveled at Manalo’s foresight into a situation, not realizing it had been perfected by the need for survival—a defensive mechanism from early childhood. He could pick up his father’s joy or rage before he walked into the shack they called a home. His brother never did learn this art, and unless Manalo could warn him, Ricky often became a victim.
A slight hesitation with the door half-opened overwhelmed him. With fixed jaw, Manalo brought his hand to his waist where his .38 had become like another purposeful limb. He strode in with confidence and assessed that it was not danger that brewed in that dark back room, but fear.
In one dark corner he saw a bound figure, its hands and feet tied behind the back—clearly dead. The mouth was probably taped closed to keep screams from reaching the diners enjoying their Korean barbecue, but Manalo couldn’t be sure without showing that he’d noticed the body. The face was turned toward the dark corner anyway.
“What went wrong?” he asked.
A tall figure moved from the circle of men who’d been conversing in muffled tones when Manalo entered. To his right, Timeteo, Paco, and Frank leaned against the opposite wall with the look of hardened killers ready to do his bidding.
The tall guy was obviously the leader, though he crooked his neck down as though ashamed of his height. Manalo didn’t understand that. If he had height, he’d stretch up even taller, chin up, so that others would marvel at the view he must have of the world.
Tall Man cleared his throat. “We encountered a little problem. May bata kami, youthful and foolish. He’s new and too zealous to impress, especially when he heard our red friends were coming. You know the type. He got a little too excited in getting information. That’s him over there.”
Manalo took a few steps around a chair turned on its side, stepped over the blood streak that extended from the chair to the body, and motioned the kid toward him. He positioned him-self so the young man had to stand in the dead man’s blood. Ah, no pompous gaze now, he thought. The boy’s face was as white as a white man now, and Manalo thought how he and his men would laugh about it after this was over. But for now, none of it was humorous.
“What do you have for me?” Manalo demanded.
“Wala, nothing really.”
Manalo turned back to the tall man in charge of this band of wannabe rebels. “Is it recorded?” He had already noted the tape recorder on a table beneath the dangling lightbulb.
“Yes,” Tall Man said. “But we learned nothing of value.”
“And what is the chance we are compromised being here?”
“None.”
“None?” He stared hard at the man. “It is ignorance to believe there is a moment of time without danger. So what is the chance we are compromised?”
“Extremely low.”
“That is acceptable then. But you have nothing for me?” Manalo moved his eyes between the two of them.
“A lesson will be thought of,” the tall man said, glancing at the boy.
“Yes. Indeed it will.” Manalo felt their shudder and that of his comrades behind them. “You have placed my men in grave danger. There is a nationwide government manhunt on each of us. Out-standing warrants and rewards that have kept us from Manila for three years. And yet here we are, put into this position, because of what?”
No one answered.
“Because one of the friends of the brotherhood had important information for us. We were already en route to a mission when we were diverted to Manila to recover this important information. So. All of this, and you have nothing from this interrogation except a corpse that must be disposed of.”
The boy paled further than seemed possible as the gravity of his deeds set in. The leader nodded.
Addressing the tall man, Manalo said, “You will send the body to his family. Make it appear that this provincial boy just got mugged in the tough streets of Manila. Our brotherhood cannot be linked to this in any way. If your group is implicated, you cannot involve us.”
He paced a few steps in thought, moving toward the body. “On the second day of the wake, send an abuloy to the family—six months wages from the Red Bolos with our condolences and the promise to bring the killers to justice.”
The leader gave a short nod. The tension settled now, the young man stepped back and made an inconspicuous attempt to wipe the blood from the soles of his shoes.
“Let us listen to the tape.”
The quick glance between them did not go unnoticed by Manalo as the three of them went to the table. His intention was to shame this young man from ever displaying such a rash burst of pride again. Only a few bloodthirsty men were needed for their group, to do the jobs that Manalo didn’t want to infect others with. But it was his own stomach that churned in displeasure as the tape played, at the sounds of the young man shouting threats and torturing the prisoner.
“I’m only a driver,” the dead man said repeatedly, and nothing more.
When the tape ended, Manalo felt his head spin with weariness, though he clenched his jaw and kept his eyes steady and hard.
The leader defended the young man, for he was ultimately responsible. “The man was a drug dealer and an addict.”
“Will not his family look for him still, and cause us trouble? He was also a son and perhaps a brother.” Manalo felt his eyes drawn unwillingly to the corpse. The streak of blood was drying in a few places while the pool around the body inched wider like a thick crimson blanket growing around him.
He needed out of this room of death, a feeling that surprised him. He’d been in many such rooms; sometimes it was by his own hand that a body lay crumpled on the floor or dangled from a rope or stared with open eyes with a throat slashed wide like a scream from the neck. Nothing of joy came from such vile tasks, only abject necessity for something greater, a higher cause. The lines of good and evil, right and wrong, integrity and depravity were often smudged. He hoped that by his necessary sins, his sons might one day walk a path of clear integrity without constant questioning and regret.
“If he was only a dealer, only an addict, why was he questioned? And why bring me here?”
The leader and Manalo stared at one another. They were equals as leaders of their respective men, but Manalo was the superior man. A flicker in the eyes, and the leader was caught in the lie.
His words fumbled out in obvious fear. “This was the consensus from evidence we obtained.”
“Tell me the truth, or I will kill you.” Manalo spoke softly, enunciating carefully. Inwardly he seethed with anger that this low-level man, who wasn’t even a Communist but wished to partner with them, would dare to conspire with his men to cover up their mistake. “Who was the boy?”
“He’s not from here; he’s from Batangas.”
A vibration rose within Manalo, a foreboding . . . what was it? Batangas. It couldn’t be. “You picked him up down there?”
“No, we got him here, in Manila. He said he was searching for parts for a vehicle. They’d been following the car since—”
“What was his name?”
“Artur Tenio.”
A coldness swept through the room; Timeteo pulled away from the wall in surprise as if struck by it.
Timeteo walked forward. “Where was Artur Tenio from in the Batangas? Where was he from, exactly?”
The leader went to the table for the boy’s ID card. “Barangay Mahinahon.”
Timeteo and Manalo stared at each other. Timeteo looked ready to lunge. “Do you not know the men of Barangay Mahinahon?”
“We are recently from Mindanao, one year.”
Manalo turned from the others to the body and closed his eyes. There were definable turning-point moments in his life, four he could recall with clarity: his sixteenth birthday, when he had stepped over his unconscious mother and brother to put a pillow over the face of his sleeping father, ending a childhood of fear and making him a man; his brother’s death years later, which left him in mourning and with a leadership role to fill; the first time he made love to Malaya; and the birth of his first son—the only birth he was present for.
Perhaps this began several nights earlier when he’d seen the stag in the forest, but just as those past moments were known to him, Manalo knew this event meant something great. He’d not be going back to what had been before.
The leader had lost all composure now. “Boss, he is impetuous, a boy only.”
Manalo found himself standing above the face of the dead man. But he wasn’t a man at all. “He couldn’t be more than twenty. And he is related to Amang Tenio, either grandson, nephew, or cousin. Amang Tenio is more than a respected leader; he is a leg-end. You have endangered more than you know with your actions. Remain here.”
He turned and went for the door in the back of the room. Neon lights blinded him until his eyes adjusted. The metal door slammed shut; the men would be stunned by his abrupt departure. But that face of the dead boy, nose and jaw broken, blood covered . . .Barangay Mahinahon. His men were going to the mountains above the infamous “village of calmness” on the outskirts of Hacienda Esperanza. The boy was a driver, coming to Manila, looking for car parts. What did this all mean?
Superstitious by heritage and nature, Manalo fought to reject its grip on him. He believed in the Communist Party of the Philippines, not in signs and wonders and foreboding feelings. He believed in the people, in a cause, in a better tomorrow for future generations. God did not exist to him. God was as fanciful as his childhood dreams.
The bile rose to his throat. He leaned against a dumpster, sweat beading along his forehead. There was a dead dog in the corner; flies buzzed around it, and he held his breath to keep from catching the scent. Then he vomited beside the dumpster, emptying his stomach until there was nothing left.
“Kamusta?” Timeteo had followed him out.
Manalo rose slowly and wiped his mouth. “Must be something I ate.”
Timeteo laughed awkwardly and slapped him on the back, taking any shame from him. “Something finally cracked the stomach of steel, eh?”
“Yes, I think your wife’s dinner last night.”
Timeteo laughed harder. “If we had eaten my wife’s dinner last night, then that would do it.”
They both chuckled at that. Timeteo often jokingly referred to his favorite prostitute as his “wife,” though he hadn’t seen her in longer than Manalo could remember.
Their laughter died quickly, and Timeteo said, “We might have made war with a very unpleasant enemy. They will blame us even if the act came from the ‘friends’ of the Communists.”
“Yes.” Manalo’s mind was busy considering possible solutions. “We must proceed warily.”
He strode back to the building to knock, but noticed the door had caught on the latch. He swung it open to see the tall leader and another man huddled at the table, and several others gathered around the body in the corner. One spat and laughed, then turned with a grin that froze upon seeing Manalo in the doorway. It was the young man—a boy himself, really—who had killed the boy from Barangay Mahinahon.
Manalo strode the steps between them and smoothly pulled the knife from his belt. “We do not disrespect our dead,” he said as the blade entered the young man’s stomach, slicing through his liver and back out with such ease that Manalo was reminded how without even a thought, a man was so easily dead.
The other men jumped back as blood spurted from what looked like the splitting of an abdomen, they’d been so close.
The boy held his stomach, blood spilling between fingers, then went to his knees. His mouth gasped like a fish pulled from the water. Manalo thought of Timeteo’s desire to fish more in retirement. They would never get to retire.
The young man fell beside the corpse. Turning his head, he stared into the empty expression of his victim. It could take time, this young man’s death. Manalo thought to finish him, a cut to the heart or neck, but now it was too late. The brutality would turn the other men’s shocked fear to terror if he jumped on the kid for another blow, however merciful his intention.
The suffering was excruciating. The others stood staring at the young man dying on the ground. None moved to help him. The boy cried tears but not words.
Manalo knelt down and took off his jacket, pressing it into the boy’s wound. The boy gasped, and his body shook beneath Manalo’s hand. Warm blood quickly soaked through the material. And then the boy was dead.
Manalo stood in the silent room. He knew all eyes were staring at him, but he didn’t look toward any of them. “Do not let anything like this happen again. Discipline your men.”
“Yes, Comrade Manalo.”
“Take a photograph of your man there, and in two months’ time send it to the family of the boy at Barangay Mahinahon. Do not sign it from us, but make it evident without confession that we have done this for the innocent slaughter of their kin. It will not help, not really. A terrible mistake was made here today, and we may all pay for it. But do what I say nonetheless.”
Everything in its box, he thought. Organized mayhem.
Or perhaps nothing was organized at all, but all a form of mayhem.
Manalo and his men walked for a long while without speaking; then their spirits slowly roused and the mood eventually changed. They had participated in and seen too much death for it to cast lasting clouds over them.
They stopped for a Coke, and Manalo used the comfort room to wash his hands. He returned to hear Frank telling some animated story.
“Let’s go,” Manalo said.
“Back to the safe house?” Paco asked.
Manalo shook his head and slapped Paco’s back. “No, to see Bruce Willis and Die Hard 2.”