It is better to be a dead Chinese than a living Filipino.
—FILIPINO SAYING
Call it a hunch, but Sunday, April 29, seemed like the kind of day Manila would go completely insane. Last night’s crowd at EDSA had grown to a million and the Church of INC promised a few hundred thousand more by nightfall. Then there was the weather: 100 degrees at 10 A.M., with the humidity drenching me just crossing the street for a copy of the Daily Inquirer, whose banner headlines reinforced my premonition: “Lacson to EDSA III: ‘Victory Is Nearly Ours,’” read one; “Miriam Linked to Junta Plot,” read another.
As I threw down my 15 pesos for the paper, Jerome tweeted my cell. “The cows are gathering,” he said, demonstrating a talent for haiku I hadn’t heard before. “Be ready to go to EDSA.” I had a good idea what was up but never got to ask. He became sidetracked in an agitated conversation and then signed off with the usual, “Keep cell phone open.”
Back across Pedro Gil Street I felt the ground rumble, like the prelude to an earthquake, but worse. For the first time since I’d landed, the honking jeepneys fell silent as an armored military vehicle rolled by, 10 feet tall and wide as the street. Then came two camouflaged trucks loaded with soldiers wearing Wehrmacht helmets, tight fists high on their Armalites. I looked at the pedestrians on the corners. Even the watch sellers had lost their smiles as they gazed at the scary parade. These folks knew the signs, I thought, they’d lived through martial law. “There is now trouble,” the Palm Plaza’s old doorman sighed, looking after the roaring vehicles.
The coffee shop’s manager, Florian Noceda, was unsettled, too. “This frightens me,” she mumbled to the television in the piano bar. On the tube, Cardinal Sin was urging Catholics to assemble in front of the palace to defend the president against a march from EDSA. “It is immoral to grab power!” Sin warned the restless masa. Meanwhile, in the Mount Carmel Church in Quezon City, the woman the cardinal had helped to grab power led a rosary prayer for her presidency. “Thank you for not forgetting that praying was what made People Power successful,” Gloria Arroyo told the congregation. She might have added that having the armed forces on her side had helped, for force was now on her mind. At noon, when she received word that Lacson and a delegation of “coup plotters” were gathering at Estrada’s mansion, she went on TV and told the nation she was ordering her attack helicopters on red alert at Camp Aguinaldo, seconds away from the hordes at EDSA.
The most militant attendees at that North Greenhills meeting were Senators Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Gringo Honasan, and Ponce Enrile—three of the 11 who had voted against opening the envelope at Erap’s impeachment trial. According to an “intelligence report” leaked to the media days later, Lacson and the senators supported a million-man march on Malacañang at 2 A.M., with the goal being to force Arroyo to step down, return Erap to power, and resume the impeachment trial. Another group at the meeting, led by one of Estrada’s sons, J. V. Ejercito, objected, saying the march should focus on the hospital where Erap was in detention, thus avoiding a confrontation with Arroyo’s troops. Still another group, led by Estrada’s former executive secretary Edgardo Angara, opposed a march altogether, arguing that the militants’ demands would never be met and the affair would end in a slaughter of the demonstrators.
The meeting broke up at two in the afternoon without agreement, but five hours later the march appeared to be on, at least according to Jose Luis’s sources at EDSA. “We march at two in morning!” he declared above the cacophony by the food stalls after I’d picked him up at Roxas. “Only to make government listen! I am nonviolent man for masa, but if government shoot me I am ready to die! You tell Vicki,” he said, referring to his wife.
“You’re not gonna die over this,” I dismissed his fantasy. “You’re gonna come through it and find my man.”
Unfortunately, he was as unpreoccupied with the Paper Fan as Lacson, whose spirit now leapt into our midst with a Zen tweet. “The pasture is full,” Jerome told me over the phone. “He will be there at midnight. Go to stage. Say he want you up there.”
I decided to keep this encrypted intelligence from Jose, but discretion wasn’t necessary. When I turned around, my fixer was gone. It would be a week before I saw him again.
The only way to get to the EDSA stage was via a narrow stairway. It began to the left of the Virgin’s feet, but when I made my way over there at 11:30 I encountered thousands of the masa with the same idea. A forest of limbs reached skyward, as if ascension to the Virgin was step one on their climb to prosperity—or maybe to heaven. Beyond hoping for the impossible or the metaphysical, I don’t think a single one of them had a logical reason for enduring the struggle to get to those steps.
The wet heat at ground level was probably up around 130 degrees, and the carbon dioxide level was high. Yet people must have been reaching their goal because the mob was moving slowly forward, pulling me deeper into it even as I had second thoughts about this adventure. Then progress stopped, and the human current began backing up, squeezing me. An impatient force pushed from behind and suddenly the goal of everybody around me switched from getting to the Virgin to getting free of the crush. Women were shrieking that they couldn’t breathe and I felt panic in the air, as vivid as the smell of thousands of hot, packed bodies. Then came another tectonic surge from behind, my feet lifted off the ground, and I was carried sideways by a river of struggling humanity. Now I couldn’t breathe. I tried to get a handle on my fear, but this looked as bad as those mass tramplings at Mecca.
Luckily, the EDSA demonstration around the shrine, if not tightly directed, had some sturdy organization. Up ahead I saw a dozen burly gendarmes in yellow and red vests keeping control around the area where the crowd funneled to the steps. “Help me, I’m a journalist!” I screamed, waving my white pad and camera. “I’m here to meet Ping Lacson! We’re being crushed!”
They looked my way. Maybe they realized that as the only foreign reporter here I was the one to get their cause out to the world. Maybe they just recognized that they had a truly dangerous situation on their hands that had to be reversed. Whatever their motivation, they plunged in, grabbing collars and manhandling people, smartly turning bodies to face away from the stage, pushing at them and sparking a trend that redirected the flow of the crowd from the steps. Three of the men in vests then ushered me through the mob, fit me into the line of masa still ascending the steps, and finally escorted me to a segregated VIP section on the stage.
Roped off from the masa, I found myself suddenly cooled by large fans blowing upon seated dignitaries waiting their turn to speak. I thanked my saviors, then turned west and beheld a purgatorial view that caused my jaw to drop. Hundreds of thousands were draped over the cloverleafs like noodles, cheering on the crushed million below. “They hate the poor!!!” a former senator named Eva Kalaw screamed at them. The equivalent of a whole city responded in unison, launching a shock wave of sound that tickled my skin. “But eighty percent are poor!!!” Again the wave rolled over the stage, and I saw the “POOR IS POWER” banner sway like a sheet on a clothesline. “This means they hate their own country!”
The man translating Kalaw’s speech for me was Joel Naga, the former minister of Muslim affairs under Erap, now running for Congress. I shared a fear with him: given what I’d just gone through, if these folks ever marched and were fired on, thousands would die in the retreating stampede.
“Why is there no media here so they do not have to march to be heard?” he shouted in rhetorical reply. “Look around. A million people. How can they ignore this? Media must be paid to look away.”
“Well Net 25’s here,” I said.
“Net 25!” He waved an angry finger in the direction of Malacañang. “The National Communication Commission has cut their feed to Mindanao this morning. As of 11 A.M. they have phoned me this information. So it is censorship, blackout, martial law, which nobody dares to speak its name!”
Eva Kalaw concluded her speech with a ringing coda: “Gloria, Erap is your commander in chief, your loyalty is on the constitution, not yourself! Bumaba ka na! Bumaba ka na!” she set up a chant. Resign! Resign!
A female vocalist in spiked heels and tight jeans then took the mike and, backed by a rock band, led the crowd in what sounded like a patriotic song. With their palms waving in the air, the million below looked like enraptured evangelicals at a holy-roller stadium service. I asked Naga what the song was. “Faded Picture,” he told me, a pop tune that had nothing whatsoever to do with the politics at stake. Another reason the middle classes had contempt for EDSA Tres, I thought. To them this was a free concert for the publicly defecating masa rather than a sanctification of righteous revolution—as their own two EDSAs had been.
When he found out I was here to meet Lacson, Naga accompanied me to the front row of VIP seats, where he sat me down next to a woman named Bihing Octaviano. She was not a heavyweight politico, but a massage therapist who’d been invited to the inner circle as a first-aid attendant. She took my hand in greeting, detected anxiety, and gave my fingers a very effective two-minute decracking. Then she mopped my dripping brow with a striped hankie from her purse, and told me to keep it. I loved the way Filipinos sized me up and concluded what I really needed was a good hankie.
The crowd broke into another song, this time a politically appropriate one, “Philippines, My Love.” Streamers of toilet paper fell from the overpass into the bright white haze of klieg floodlights. Bihing dabbed her eyes with another hankie, weeping for her homeland and its jailed crook of a president. Someone launched a starburst rocket from the overpass, delighting the crowd but scaring the shit out of me. “Look there, speak with him!” Bihing said, pointing out a distinguished man with fine chiseled features who was giving an interview with Net 25. She told me his name was Vincent “Tito” Sotto III, one of the 11 senators who had voted “no” on opening Erap’s bank account. Pad in hand I approached him, but the Net 25 camera swung on me, and the reporter, finished with her last question, stepped between me and Tito and put a microphone in my face. “Can you tell us you name, where you from and why you are on stage now?” she asked.
“Is this live?”
“Yes, you are talking to the Philippine people.”
Oh shit, I thought. “Uh, well, I’m writing a book, in part on the Philippines, so naturally I’m very interested in the political events here. Excuse me,” I smiled, “I’ve got to do my own interview.”
I sidestepped her, but now Sotto was making his way to the other end of the stage. I followed after him and then gave it up as he disappeared into a clutch of important-looking men in barongs. The camera was still on me, however; indeed, I was the focus of two cameras, the reporter’s and one down below aiming up at me. The crowd cheered mightily. I looked out at them and understood why. I was standing all by myself in the middle of the stage by the empty mike, with a million sets of eyes on me, waiting for me to harangue them. If you can believe this, I felt a surge of anarchic power. All I had to do was grab that mike and shout, I am from Canada! We support you! We urge you to march on Malacañang! Right now, let’s go, onward to the palace!
A crew-cut tubby guy in a red golf shirt came up beside me and took the mike. The crowd went wild. I stepped back and sat down with the dignitaries again. “Who’s he?” I asked Bihing, as he launched into a passionate tirade in favor of freeing Erap and following the constitution.
“Erap’s son, J. V. Ejercito.”
Ah, yes, J. V.—“the moderate.” As J. V. ranted slogans, I became more and more irritated with the camera resting on me. I could just picture Steve watching TV in the back of a limo. “Fuck! I think I know that fucking guy!” I put my face behind my own camera, took some pictures of the crowd and J. V., and then hunched down writing notes. I looked at my watch. It was now getting on to 12:30. Where was Lacson? Dignitaries were blocking the breeze from the fans and the heat was overpowering. Out in the sea of humanity people were fainting. Every few minutes, hand over hand, the crowd passed up swooning women to the stage, where they were laid out and soaked with water bottles, restored to consciousness by Bihing’s neck-cracking technique, and led away. One never regained consciousness, however, and Bihing helped carry the near-dead woman offstage. Darn Jerome! I thought. I’m lucky I got up here alive. I tried phoning his cell and, by my phone’s screen, it looked like he answered; I shouted I was on the stage waiting for him and Ping, but I couldn’t hear a thing in reply.
To my left, just the other side of where Bihing had been, sat a refined-looking woman in rimless glasses named Santanina “Nina” Rasul, who was running for senator. Nina was just getting off her own cell phone and I moved into Bihing’s seat beside her. By then I’d become convinced that when it came to cell phones, there was something about Filipinos that made them uniquely adapted to handling a conversation in a deafening crowd. I wondered if I could trust her to call Jerome for me.
“They’re being worked to a frenzy,” I said. “I don’t know how they’ll channel all this energy and emotion. It seems to be building to a climax.”
“Yes, they are very excited now. They want justice. Because it has been taken from them.”
A middle-aged matron in a flowered dress and a red Erap cap suddenly leaned between us. “That is correct—we want justice for masa and for Erap!” she enunciated. She leaned back up, mopped her brow with a tissue and fanned her face with a pad.
I decided to tell Nina what was up. “I’m waiting here for Ping Lacson,” I said. “He was supposed to show up—” I looked at my watch “—an hour ago. Do you know if he’s coming?”
“Do you have a phone number to reach him?” she asked.
Go for it, I decided. I gave her my cell, and hit redial. As Nina listened, the woman in the red cap leaned down again: “I think Ping Lacson will be the next president. Your opinion is that too?”
“He’s a good man,” I said. “I’m on his side. I was supposed to meet him here tonight.”
This seemed to excite her. “Oh! I wanted also to interview him! How do you know him?”
“He’s a friend of a friend.”
I looked over at Nina. “One moment,” she said, hitting redial again.
The woman in the Erap hat said she was a journalist, too, for a Puwersa Ng Masa newspaper. She wrote her phone number and first name on my pad. “Gloria—like the president, but I am not a server for her!” she said. Then she asked if I had a card. While Nina talked to Jerome, I fumbled through the cards in my wallet. “The Palm Plaza!” Gloria exclaimed, looking at the hotel card I showed to cabdrivers. “My sister used work there. Do you like it?”
“Jerome say not happen tonight,” Nina interrupted, handing me back the phone. “He say to tell you he will call you in the morning. No more reason for you to stay. Tomorrow you speak with him.”
“Jerome?” Gloria asked, walking to the edge of the stage with me. “With PNP? What last name? Because I think I know him also. Does he say PNP will be with us tonight?”
I looked at the cell phone she had cocked in her hand. “I don’t know anything about that,” I said.
I tried not to think about it on the cab ride home, but something told me this Gloria gal was no pro-Erap journalist.
Manila did not go insane that night. Two hours after I left EDSA a few thousand people did make their way to Camp Crame, where they rallied and chanted: “Lusob Malacañang! Lusob Malacañang!” Attack Malacañang. But Erap’s son J. V. caught up with them there, climbed atop a car and declared through a bullhorn that an attack would be senseless. The checkpoint before the palace, known as the Mendiola Gate, was barricaded, and troops were in place waiting for them. The crowd milled around, sang the Philippine national anthem, and then dispersed back to the shrine.
The next morning, April 30, I awoke to see Arroyo at a news conference telling the nation she had thwarted last night’s coup plotters. “I wish they had tried it so I could crush them,” she said. This was followed by an announcement from NBI Chief Reynaldo Wycoco: Lacson, Defensor-Santiago, Honasan, and Enrile—all suspected of advocating the violent overthrow of the government—were being put under round-the-clock surveillance. The mainstream TV stations then reported that the Arroyo administration had summoned the executives of the Iglesia ni Cristo Church for a meeting. The INC execs left the meeting publicly vowing not to support a coup attempt against the president, and the head of INC, Minister Erano Manalo, went on to declare he was ordering his flock to pull out from the shrine. This was followed by an announcement by Net 25 that it was ending its 24-hour coverage of the demonstration. (“Net 25 returns to its well-deserved obscurity,” the Inquirer stated on its next front page.)
By the late afternoon, as I sat with Jerome in his office watching myself in replays of last night’s demonstration, we heard that the crowd at EDSA was shrinking by the hour. Malacañang reporters averred in stand-ups that last night had been the high-water mark of EDSA Tres. “Max-i-mum people, max-i-mum momentum,” said one, speculating that had they marched on the palace it might very well have been theirs, although at a terrible price. Now the masa were flooding home in disappointment and the security around Malacañang was being relaxed. “WHY POWER GRAB FAILED” ran the banner head of the Inquirer’s next edition.
To my mind, this meant it was back to business for me. Lacson, weighing his troubles with the “surveillance,” would see the benefits of returning his attention to my man. But when I broached this to Jerome, he disappointed me: “We wait yet. Things maybe not over. Keep cell phone open.”
You wait, I thought. I can’t afford it. At the Palm Plaza I wrote in my Day-timer: “Visit Wycoco at NBI.” Then I went for a jog up Roxas to the Jumbo and back, had a late supper of pecho chicken wings, took a sleeping pill at midnight, and set my alarm for seven.
The sleeping pill was a mistake.
“Turn on the TV!! Look at the TV!! It has started!!”
It was 4 A.M., May Day, and Jerome was on my cell. Armed with sticks and a few homemade shotguns, 30,000 young men had left EDSA at 1:30 on the six-mile march to Malacañang. They were now rocking the chains of the palace gates, having overrun three roadblocks with commandeered dump trucks and suffering only one dead in their ranks. My first thought was, If there’s only one dead, then the troops are letting them through. They might very well bring this off and plop Erap back in the president’s chair, with Lacson at his right hand, in charge of all the cops in the realm again.
“Take nothing with you,” Jerome advised. “Only cell phone for emergency.”
I dressed, grabbed a liter of water and my trusty hankies and went outside into the ungodly morning heat. “Malacañang!” I told the cabdriver in front of the hotel. He waved me away and tried to close his door. I jumped in anyway. “Just get me nearby. I don’t care if I have to walk a mile.” We were stopped on the Ermita side of the Ayala Bridge by a platoon of soldiers in battle dress who pointed Armalites at us. In the distance I could hear the sharp crackling of rifle fire and the more sonorous thumps of tear-gas launchers. Waves of cheers floated on the air, as if from a sporting event. Curiously, as soon as I held up my pad and said I was a reporter the soldiers waved us by, but my driver refused the invitation. “You want to die, that your business. I have family.”
Across the bridge, about a mile ahead in the smoky dawn, I came to a square at the corner of Legarda and Recto, massed with a crowd facing south towards the palace, half a mile away. When I got to their milling outskirts I saw the tree-lined Mendiola Boulevard solidly packed with leaping, dancing boys and young men. Several media vans were parked around the square, their windows smashed and their doors wide open. I wasn’t happy that there were no film crews around, nor that I was the only non-rioter in sight. A hundred maniacally laughing youngsters turned my way, calling “Hey Joe! Hey Joe!” Mustering a teacher’s air of authority, I pointed my cell phone at the oldest and told him I was a friend of Ping Lacson and that I was here to report back on the developments. The boy shook my hand with both of his, pointed south and said his comrades had some TV people and Cardinal Sin’s followers holed up in a building down Mendiola.
“What’s happening at the palace?”
“Somebody say we break through Gate Seven!” he screamed. “We are inside, everybody fucking her!” He meant the mob had broken through the main gate of Malacañang and were gang-raping Arroyo, but it was obvious he didn’t know what was going on at the front. Like his pares, the kid was shirtless, I could smell booze on his breath, and his eyes were jaundiced and bloodshot at the same time. From the way these masa were now jumping and howling for no reason, I knew they were all seriously messed up on shabu. They were the dregs of EDSA Tres, the last holdouts, the ones with nothing to lose but their lives, the least predictable and most dangerous.
As if I needed privacy to call Lacson, I got away from them by walking to the north side of a backhoe parked in the middle of the square. The city was constructing a Metrorail line up Recto and the backhoe was surrounded by tons of rubble. I figured that if the fighting moved back this way there would be a lot of rock throwing. I heard the crackle of rifle fire from the palace again and picked out a spot in an arcade farther north to take shelter. But, in fact, the momentum of the mob seemed to be going the other way: Tagalog screams for reinforcements sent the whole mass of kids running south, as if indeed their front ranks had broken through, and within minutes the square was nearly empty.
Stay here, I told myself. You’re not a news reporter. You’re on another story, and this isn’t it. Still, if Lacson, Miriam, and Gringo had allies among the palace defenders, and the masa were breaking through—would I really want to miss that?
I walked slowly down Mendiola until I could see the white palace up ahead. The closer I got to it, the more I realized I was entering a zone where the peril was immediate. The air was filled with acid fumes from the tear gas, the street underfoot littered with lost sandals and stones, and the masa in this sphere even crazier and more energized. As if marking the boundary, a boy lay flat on his back before an overturned barricade, his hands flung to his sides in a crucifixion pose, a pooled halo of bright blood around his head, running in rivulets over the dirt. I looked at the roofs but couldn’t see the snipers who had picked him off. I heard more rifle fire, and a few seconds later the mob in the middle of the street behind me became hysterical. Holding a fellow by all fours they carried out his limp, skinny body, blood spewing from the side of his neck and splashing on the cement as they raced him north to the square. I shouted for them to put pressure on the wound, and ran a few steps after them, then heard something that sounded like a spike hitting the pavement in front of me. I realized that if soldiers were firing live ammo in the air, those bullets were going up and coming down. That’s probably how the two kids had got it.
There was an arcade bordering the boulevard and I leapt for cover, stood alone behind a stanchion watching thousands of young men running this way and that on the street, waving Philippine flags, holding posters of Erap aloft, giving Malacañang the V sign and the fuck-you sign. Nobody was in charge, everybody was in charge, yelling adamant Tagalog orders with nobody listening. This way, they seemed to bellow in bloodcurdling shouts, get rocks, keep going, don’t stop, we’ll win. A few had sticks, some had stones, most were bare-handed, some barefoot. If the troops at Malacañang were standing firm, none of these guys had a chance.
I looked away from the palace, back to the relative quiet of the square. The sun was up and hot now. Atop a plinth stood a silhouetted statue of a kneeling anti-Marcos activist named Chino Roces, holding up a cross. I looked around at the dead boy and saw some kids lift his arms and begin dragging him in the direction of the square. His blood-soaked brains were visible through his hair. I gagged and brought up a mouthful of bile. My heart started to thump in a strange way and I leaned back against the cool of the concrete stanchion and drank half my water. I’ve never fainted in my life, but I was on the verge of it now.
The rifle fire stopped and the mob started forward again. “Go back to the square, idiot,” I said, right out loud. But the writer inside me protested that I should be there if Lacson descended from the sky in a chopper and this ended in victory for the masa. Maybe I would get invited into Malacañang to witness Erap’s restoration? I soaked my hankie, put it to my face, and left the safety of the overhang, following the tide of kids as they crossed over the flattened barricades of the Mendiola Gate. On the palace side I cut quickly to the right, away from the masa and against a wall, with the branches of the trees providing cover—I hoped. I wouldn’t know if the shelter failed me, would I?
Halted half a block before the wrought-iron gate to Malacañang, the front line of masa were pelting hundreds of uniformed police with stones. The cops sheltered beneath a black-and-blue carapace of shields, the stones thudding down on the stenciled word “PULIS” with the sound of soft-balls against a roof. The no-man’s-land between the two sides was drenched, probably from water cannon earlier that morning, plus strewn with more torn sandals and ricocheted stones. Behind the gates were thousands of milling soldiers in combat dress. There were also dozens of media guys on the south side of the action facing the crowd, or on the flanks of the cops, or on the palace side of the gates, or atop army vehicles. If this comes down to a bloodbath, I told myself, you’re on the wrong side of the faucet.
Nevertheless, the riot seemed to have reached a standoff, with a lot of dancing and obscene posturing on the half-naked mob side, and a general air of stoicism on the uniformed palace side. I was amazed at the restraint of the government forces. Then, on the other side of the gates, senior officers began blowing shrill whistles and barking orders. The soldiers ranked up, positioned arms, the gates opened inward and the Armed Forces of the Philippines began to crowd out, the police moving off to the flanks. A couple of APCs revved their engines, blowing gray smoke from their exhaust, and moved forward into no-man’s-land. In tight attack mode behind the armor, the troops were announcing that they meant business. I thought: If pro-Erap helicopters had been lined up to rescue this coup, they would have been here already. It wasn’t going to happen.
I ran north, back to my refuge under the arcade. I got there just as a fusillade of tear gas and rifle fire sent the crowd back up Mendiola after me. Suddenly there were as many people moving up the arcade as on the street. I began to get tossed around as the unreasonably happy mob ran by me, and I joined the general retreat until we got to a small PNP station, just this side of the Roces statue. Shouting “Fuck Gloria! Fuck Ramos!”, the kids smashed the locks with rocks, broke in and began mindlessly ransacking the place, throwing into the street chairs, notebooks, and a portrait of Arroyo, whom they pulverized with stones and sandals and then pretended to piss and shit on. Aware they could very likely turn on me next, I crossed to the north side of the square into the empty arcade I’d picked out, where I sheltered behind a pillar and got down on one knee and began writing notes. “Billboard above mayhem says, ‘HUMAN: Alternative Clothing & Lifestyle.’ Include for ironic contrast.”
On the other side of the square the mob was taking its celebratory wrath out on the parked vehicles, the object being, it seemed, to destroy as much as possible before the government forces arrived. A couple of kids beat open the gas cap to a media van, then organized a dozen of their friends to rock the van until it overturned with a crunch. They put a match to the draining fuel. There was an explosion that sent a shock wave of heat all the way to where I was crouched. A mushroom of red-and-black flame went higher than the top of the lifestyle billboard. With rubbish and wood the kids built a fire under the engine of another van. Then they turned on the backhoe and built a fire in the cab.
They were getting closer to me, a couple of kids yelling from 20 feet away, with debatable good cheer, “Hey Joe! Hey Joe!” I held my fists up to them in people power solidarity and offered a bright smile, clapping my hands above my head to urge them on. Still applauding their revolution like a strolling flamenco dancer, I crossed the edge of the square and retreated northeast up Legarda, where I took cover in a drugstore arcade, from which I had a tunnel scope of the action a block away.
The day’s most sustained explosion of gunfire and tear gas—which sounded like the opening of the Battle of the Somme down at the Mendiola Gate—came around an hour later. It lasted for several minutes, and in the relative quiet that followed the soldiers seemed to advance; at least, the masa now began arriving in the square by the thousands. They regrouped around the kneeling Roces and his crucifix, arming themselves with rocks and turning to face the army of the oligarchs, still out of my line of sight. For 10 minutes the mob held the square and the soldiers held their fire. Again I was amazed at the patience of the government. Then came a battallion’s worth of rifle shots, followed by the machine gun-sputtering of tear-gas explosions from the APCs. I heard the soldiers send up a disciplined roar of attack and the packed square of masa turned as one and began madly running from the assault. This time they kept running, up Recto, in the direction of Quiapo, leaving the square almost empty and at least three (that I could see) flat on the ground behind. The last of the fleeing rioters were replaced by the rolling armor and a streetwide phalanx of soldiers, who kept on their tail at a double-time trot, followed by the police carrying yellow steel barricades.
The cops sealed the square and Mendiola from all sides, carried away the dead and wounded, began spraying the vehicles with fire extinguishers. An old gent came out of the drugstore with a machete in one hand and a revolver in the other. He surveyed the smoking chaos up the street. “There is no hope for this country,” he said.
Maybe, I thought, but if this had been Cambodia or China, there would have been 700 dead, not, as it turned out, only seven.
At noon Arroyo declared Manila to be in a “State of Rebellion,” a neologism for a quasi state of martial law that allowed for warrantless arrests and indefinite detention without trial. The cops arrested Ponce Enrile in his Makati mansion, and Reynaldo Berroya was sent to hunt down 11 others, including Lacson. I phoned Jerome, who told me Lacson was on the run, “go to hiding, Berroya if catch could murder him.” Later that afternoon Miriam Defensor-Santiago appeared on television, posing with a gun at her Senate office desk, daring the authorities to try and arrest her. While all this was going on, the opposition coalition announced it was appealing the State of Rebellion decree to the Supreme Court, since there was no provision for one in the constitution. “This is an abnormality, a mask for an undeclared martial law,” said Edgardo Angara. Either declare martial law, he demanded (something unthinkable since the bad old Marcos era), or allow the opposition candidates to return to campaigning without fear of arrest.
At five in the afternoon I was awakened from a nap by a very forceful knock on the door. Four knocks, in fact, repeated twice, the second set vibrating my water bottle on my nightstand. I leapt up, knowing I had the “Do Not Disturb” flag out. Since this was a high-class place where the help obeyed the rules, I figured it was not the maid. It could have been Jerome, but even if he showed up here without warning he would have called from the lobby. “Mr. Terry Gould!” I heard, and there was no request in that announcement.
I went to the peephole. Two guys in barongs were looking at the floor, one tall with salt-and-pepper hair, the other short and balding. I was scared, but then again, as with Steve so long ago, if they wanted to do me they wouldn’t be knocking first. I cleared my throat. Out came the shield case, held up to the peephole. “Philippine Bureau of Immigration. Official business.”
“Just a minute, I’m on the phone with the U.S. ambassador now. ‘Uh, sir?’” I said, quite loudly. “‘There’s two guys from the BI at the door. Yeah, right, I don’t know, I was interviewing Ping Lacson, maybe that’s what it’s about. Okay, I’ll phone you back.’” I grabbed my money belt, took out my U.S. passport. Then I cursed myself for even thinking about letting them in. “I’ll meet you guys in the coffee shop.”
“We can tell you,” the tall one explained to me at a table downstairs in the lobby, handing me back my passport, “you are permitted to visit our country as a tourist—”
“A journalist,” I said.
“In whichever legal capacity you wish. Journalists are welcome. We are a free society. But you are not permitted to engage in activities with such people who are seditious or rebellious to good order, during this particular time.”
“It is already publicized,” said the short one, who seemed far less civilized than his partner. “The person you are associated with, Ping Lacson—he is engaged in activities which are suspected of coup plotting.”
“I was interviewing him for a book,” I said.
“That would be no problem, but our intelligence sources believe you are sympathetic, so to say, in a way to perhaps lend him assistance.”
I thought, Should I risk a bribe to get out of this? Against all odds, if they were straight cops they might throw me in jail on an attempt charge. On the other hand, I had things to do before being tossed out of the country, I definitely wanted to get back in, and a deportation order on my passport would be a major problem for me. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said, trying to figure a way out. “There’s gonna be big trouble with the U.S. embassy if you cause me trouble.”
The tall guy flipped his pad open on Anne Collins’s one-graph letter, the one about me being a travel writer. “Have you spoken with Ping since today by phone or otherwise?”
There it was. They weren’t here to deport me: giving me the squeeze to get Ping’s whereabouts was their mission, which didn’t rule out being taken to the dump in the trunk of their car and tortured to make me give up what I didn’t know. I said, “No contact with him today but—” I leaned forward. “I can get fired for giving you this information.” I hesitated. Then I told them in a whisper about my ultimate mission in the Philippines. I took out a copy of The Lifestyle and explained the lesbian group sex at swing clubs and that it was a big draw for cops who liked to watch. “If Ping’s a member of this orgiastic subculture, I’m gonna expose him for it in my book. That’s why I’m on his good side. You know he had that thing with Tina Monasterio? It’s my suspicion there was way more to that than made the movies. You can check out a club I’m investigating. The Lifestyle Swing Club Manila, Makati chapter.”
“What is the address of this place?” the short one asked.
“I calmed them down,” I told Jerome over the lobby phone, but he thought I was in bad trouble. At the very least, he said, they would toss my room when I was out. He said I should change hotels, that he was sending someone over in a car immediately. I thought of my strewn clothes upstairs. I was starved for sleep and farther off center from Steve than ever. The last thing I felt like doing was packing up and going underground. I told him I would carry everything of importance with me whenever I went out. I was going back to bed.
When he walked in the door the next morning, Jerome had forgotten all about moving me to another hotel. He went straight to the TV and turned the volume up. He explained Lacson might need to escape to Canada. He gave me the name of a Vancouver immigration lawyer, Peter Chapman, whom he would be hiring to represent Lacson. He wanted me to phone Chapman and fill him in on the situation, then testify on Lacson’s behalf in front of a refugee board. I agreed I would testify, knowing I could deflect the request by informing Chapman I would have to state the allegations about Lacson’s past as a torturer. But I didn’t tell Jerome that now. I still thought Ping would be of use to my mission if he wound up as president—the likelihood of which was very real in this crazy nation—and I wanted him to feel grateful to me.
Jerome punched his cell phone and handed it over. Lacson was on the other end, holed up in a safe house. He told me he hadn’t participated in any plot to violently overthrow the government. He was merely a politician whom they now wanted to arrest for exercising his legal right to oppose a government that had a questionable right to be in power. He asked me about the Canada option and, to save his life, I explained the grounds he should base his refugee claim on, which I promised I would convey to Chapman: he was an opposition politician charged with rebellion in order to keep him from winning a Senate seat; he couldn’t get a fair trial; the hunt for him was politically motivated and illegal; Berroya might shoot him if he tried to turn himself in. Ping thanked me profusely but then added, as I was hoping he would, that maybe flight would not be necessary. Arroyo’s proclamation was totally illegal, and if he made it through the next few days he would probably make it through the next few years.
The next day, in fact, the Supreme Court ordered Ponce Enrile released, and three days after that Arroyo rescinded her unconstitutional State of Rebellion decree. This was followed by an announcement from Malacañang that the hunt for Lacson was being called off, and that he could resume his senatorial campaign. In Manila he and Gringo Honasan were treated like returning heroes by their fans, and on May 14 they won their Senate seats.
The final tally gave the pro-Erap coalition six seats, the People’s Power Coalition seven. Overall, the PPC now had a tenuous one-seat majority in the 26-person Senate. None of which would be relevant to me until Lacson regained his influence with those in charge of Philippine law enforcement. Too long for me to wait now. Just after his arrest order was rescinded, the PNP and NBI announced they were still intent on pursuing their charges against him for mass murder, drug dealing, illegal detention, and wiretapping.
“You often don’t get good gossip so I’ll give you some,” I said to General Reynaldo Wycoco in his office at NBI headquarters. “I had a meeting with Sheila Coronel and I asked her who among Philippine law enforcement I could completely trust. And she said you.”
“Well, thank you very much!” he replied, shaking my hand with a firm, friendly grip.
He was a pleasant-faced, avuncular guy about my age, in a white barong, and he looked me straight in the eye, with no dark baggage behind his gaze. Which is what I expected. Sheila had told me he’d once headed the press office at the PNP, and so I would be spared the usual snarly suspicion of a top cop trying to figure out how I was going to sting him in the ass. In any case, his secretary had told him I had some important information for the NBI about organized crime. I’d got her attention by flashing the pictures taken of me arm in arm with Ping Lacson at the Golden Pearl restaurant.
Wycoco told me to have a seat at a conference table and introduced Moises B. Tamayo, the executive officer of the NBI’s Organized Crime Division. Opposite Moises sat a weaselly looking fellow whom nobody bothered to introduce by name. He had entered the anteroom while Moises and I sat waiting for the meeting to begin. At the time, I thought he was a janitor with a vending sideline; he had casually wandered in with a big box and then tried to sell Wycoco’s secretaries bottles of Chinese medicine that he said cured high blood pressure. Now that he was in the room with us, I figured he was a Confidential Agent—one of the 5,000 employed by the NBI, of which Steve, in all likelihood, was one. This did not thrill me.
“I’m an author with Random House and a contributing editor of a Canadian national magazine, and I specialize in Asian organized crime,” I began. “Particularly the 14K Triad.” I turned to Moises. “You’re familiar with them?”
“Of course, continue,” he said.
“So I’m here on a certain matter, but while exploring that certain matter I came across two things that I think you should pursue, in my opinion. You know the Isetan mall on Recto and Quezon?”
“Which area is that?” Moisies asked.
I presumed he didn’t understand my accent so I opened my street map.
Fifteen minutes later I’d filled them in on the flagrant deals going down on Recto and in the Muslim quarter, which seemed to be news to them. They asked me the name of my fixer, and were very understanding that I couldn’t give him up. (In fact, I’d run into Jose on Roxas five days after the May Day riot and put him on a ferry back to the Visayas. He’d lost a friend in the attack on Malacañang, but he himself had come through without a scratch.)
“So those are things that I discovered while I’m in town here,” I said. “The reason I’m in town—Now this is very sensitive. Please don’t link my name—”
“Oh yeah, yeah,” Wycoco and Moises said, dismissing the possibility as absurd. The weaselly one said nothing.
“Okay, one of the most long-standing wanted men in Canada is a 14K Triad official by the name of Steven Lik Man Wong.” I dug into my briefcase and took out my thick file folder, began dealing out the material. “Here are photos of him: this one was taken in 1992, in New York; these ones are of him when he was a kid, in 1985. You can see his tattoos—very intricate and distinctive. Here’s his Interpol sheet, with all his essentials.”
I waited as the three of them leaned forward over the pictures and wanted posters, shifting the sheets around. I studied their eyes. I didn’t detect any widening lids.
“Yes, please, go on,” Wycoco urged.
“Now, let me tell you his story,” I said. “Because it’s very interesting.”
I gave another long lecture, starting with my walking into his house on Clarendon Drive, progressing to his heroin bust, to his Negros caper with Abastillas, Sonny, and Guara, to his flight to Macau, his escape from there, his sojourn in Cambodia, and finally his return to Manila. “Now,” I concluded, “I must tell you something about him. Wherever he is, he affiliates himself with the police. In Hong Kong he would actually wear a Royal Hong Kong Police uniform, and go out on patrol with them. So I am fairly certain that he is affiliated in some manner with the police here, either as an informant or, under his assumed name, maybe even an officer.”
I stopped there, just short of crossing the Rubicon by bringing up the NBI.
“Okay!” Wycoco said, slapping his palm on the tabletop resolutely. “What we will do, we will talk to our own Interpol here, we will make some calls and reports, and then perhaps we will issue an alert report to the police if they have seen a guy like this. This will go out to our police forces.”
“I must say,” I cautioned, “he’s probably connected to corrupt officers.”
“So—we can also remove the corrupt officers!” Wycoco countered with a chuckle, probably thinking I was referring to the PNP.
I was insistent though. “General, the important thing is that they don’t tip him off. Because every time that he’s almost been caught, this procedure that you’re talking about has been followed. And somebody who is not trustworthy has told him—”
“We will definitely deal only with the commanders,” Wycoco said, trying to reassure me.
But he didn’t.
After all my fantasizing I desperately wanted to give up Steve’s alias—but that would be a wilder leap of faith than mentioning the NBI. Frankly, the nameless guy at the table, his eyes narrowed at me the whole time, scared the shit out of me. I was beginning to feel all this was a mistake. Would they really turn over one of their CAs? Or would they tell Steve, as Richard the swinger had warned, that Terry Gould’s on your tail, move on. And then I’d lose him again. Or worse: “Take care of him, you’re a valuable guy, we’ll understand.” Not that Wycoco or Moises would do such a thing—I sincerely trusted them—but this other guy might. He and I didn’t like each other. Or, rather, he didn’t like me.
Then again: “Wycoco, you can trust him up to a point—but who knows really?”
The fact was, I felt like I had one foot in the boat and one foot on the shore and I was just too unsure of the current to step in with both feet and hope for the best. So I remained where I was, off balance and half-assed. I didn’t know if I was making the right decision or the wrong decision. If I managed to get out of Manila alive, and Steve stayed here, maybe it would be the right decision. I still had Lacson in reserve, I told myself.
Wycoco, a busy man, said he had an appointment at Malacañang, posed for a picture for my scrapbook, and left in a hurry, leaving me alone with Moises and the silent one. Moises asked me where I was staying, but I demurred, saying I was leaving tomorrow—which was the truth. I gave him Inspector Paul Brown’s telephone number in Hong Kong and told him if he came across anything to let Brown know. “Please, my safety is at stake until I get out of here, so keep this confidential.” I looked at the weasel, who returned my gaze with blank rubbery eyes. Since hawking his blood pressure potions, the guy had not said one single word.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Moises said. “I will be reporting this matter to Interpol.”
Interpol, I thought. What good will Interpol do? They’re the ones who helped screw up the Macau arrest. You’re back where you started from.
I had one more place I wanted to visit before getting out of Dodge. On my map the huge, green trapezoid in the pink grid of streets was seven stops north of the NBI on the Metrorail. I got off at the Abad Santos station, just east of Tondo. It looked like a straight shot from the station to the green area, but down on street level I was soon lost in the worst squatter slum I’d seen in Manila. I followed a mud path between shanties, a sitting duck for the groups of shirtless teen boys seated on oil drums outside the cardboard lean-tos that served as their homes. They smiled lasciviously and called softly after me, “Hey Joe! Where you go?”
I could see a high whitewashed wall on a hill at the edge of the slum, but I kept entering alleys that ended in chicken-wire pens for pigs and goats, or else in tangles of salvaged trash—bald tires, balled-up electric wire, broken angle iron—impossible to climb over. By the time I found a path that led to the wall I had a covey of 20 naked giggling children on my tail, keeping up a refrain of “Hey Joe! Hey Joe!” I walked through litter-strewn tall grass along the base of the wall until I came to a pile of broken-up gypsum and stinking garbage from which fat rats with naked tails ran in every direction. I climbed the dump pile, jumped a ditch on its downward side, and emerged onto a normal-looking street with normal-looking people and jeepneys. I looked back. The kids stood on the top of the pile, waving goodbye, as if from behind an invisible barrier they dared not cross.
“Welcome to the City of the Living Dead,” an old Filipino gent greeted me at the red moongate that interrupted the white wall at the top of the street. “We also call it the Living City of the Dead, because the dead here have all the conveniences of life, ha ha ha!” His opening joke to every tourist, I guessed.
He was poorly dressed in a T-shirt with a faded Chinese logo, red shorts, and sandals. There was a bulge on his hip under his T-shirt and I wondered if I could trust him on the immaculate but deserted lanes ahead. With its mansions and palms the place looked very much like North Greenhills, but you never knew in Manila. “How much do you charge?” I asked.
“Three hundred pesos only, for the tour.”
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Jun Salvadore. I am approved by the Chinese Cemetery Association. The guard will tell you.” He held his hand out to a uniformed man in a kiosk. The man, sporting a sidearm, waved. “They have their own police force here. Because of the saying,” he chuckled.
“Which is that?”
“It is better to be a dead Chinese than a living Filipino, ha ha ha.”
As we walked up a street called Millionaire Row, lined on either side with two- and three-story concrete mausoleums, Jun launched into a formal lecture. The Chinese Cemetery, or City of the Living Dead, as Jun persisted in calling it, occupied 54 hectares, and held hundreds of mansion-sized tombs built since the mid-1950s. “These are all for Chinese capitalists,” he said. “Only Chinese, and very rich. This one here is for Don Gregario Lim, cost three million pesos.” He pointed to a gold-gated marble palace with a big dome and cupola atop the roof. With its arches, columns, and pediments the dead man’s resting place looked like a scaled-down Capitol building. “Inside, ceiling is gold-plated leaf from China, walls special marble from Italy, floor tiger white marble from Philippines. Every Sunday, early in the morning, the wife comes and brings flowers, food and drinks for his spirit. Because the dead give your business luck, your business boom.”
“What business was Don Gregario in?” I asked.
“Car accessories—luxury—for rich car.”
I asked if there were any Chinese gangsters buried here.
“Oh yes, a few famous,” he replied. “Lim Sing, the famous gambling lord, one. But the reputation—So they transfer him. He is now in China. Let us proceed.”
Some of the mansions, Jun said, were air-conditioned, most had toilets, showers, liquor bars, mah-jongg rooms, TVs, VCRs stocked with karaoke videos, bedrooms with alarm clocks, kitchens with refrigerators, dining rooms with silver service, and offices with Internet access. All of this was for the dead to use when they became bored with the entertainments of the underworld and were inclined to wander their mausoleum monuments for distraction.
Each street had a name, each mansion an address on the high security gates, and the lawns that bordered the white-painted curbs were kept mown to a putting-green polish by private caretakers. The Chinese Cemetery even had its own K-9 unit. The cruel-looking guard dogs wandered around the yards of the biggest mansions, staring at me through the gates with killer eyes.
“Where do poor Chinese get buried?” I asked.
“The poor are buried here, too, but in a wall, just ashes and bones from the crematorium, in a little hole they make.”
“How about the middle class?”
“They are in graves on the terrace below.” He pointed to where the land sloped down to the white wall that separated the City of the Living Dead from the squatter slum. “But only the rich in the mausoleums,” he said, as we strolled on. “You buy land for fifteen thousand per square meter for a twenty-five-year lease. To renew the lease you pay another fourteen hundred per square meter for twenty-five years. If you don’t have enough money to renew, they move the bones and sell mausoleum; somebody else move in.”
We stopped at a tall building with a Moorish facade, a black wrought-iron gate with gold-tipped points across its entrance. “This Tommy C. Pasqual Mausoleum, two million. Tommy C. Pasqual a movie producer, same for the Philippines as MGM, Warner Brothers. Inside you find expensive paintings from Europe. You can see inside, all decorations red. That is because red is a symbol of long life. But now is too late, ha ha ha! Let us proceed.”
We came to a kiln in an open central square. Jun said it was called the Sho Kim, a fireplace for burning money, to honor the spirit of the dead.
“They burn money here?” I asked, looking back at the squatter slum.
“Every Sunday, a ritual, for the spirit to have on the other side,” Jun replied. “And here is the Toti Kung altar, to burn the incense. So it fills the spirit world with sweet smells and riches.”
“While they watch Tommy C. Pasqual’s videos, I suppose,” I commented.
“With the mistresses,” he said, deadpan. “They also have them here with them, or wait for them to join.”
We stopped at the mausoleum to the onetime owner of the eponymous Ma Mon Luk restaurant, the most expensive in Quiapo. Along a wall at the back of the mausoleum’s courtyard hung a regally framed photo of old man Ma. On his right was a photo of his legal wife. On his left a photo of his mistress. “Chinese can have many wives if they are wealthy,” Jun said, “but Filipino have only wife, except only Joseph Estrada, he has many mistresses, ha ha.
“Here,” he went on. “This big tomb for a Chinese developer. His wife is the secretary of the Chinese Cemetery Association, employed at the cemetery. Her husband and his mistress is buried here, photo to the left of him. Mistress dead, but legal wife is alive.”
“I doubt she’s crazy about that arrangement,” I said.
Jun reserved comment.
After tours of the palatial resting places of Ching Ling, a former textile magnate, Cheng Tsui-jun, a cigarette and cigar king, and Dr. Don Vincente Dison, among the richest men in Manila until he’d been kidnapped and murdered when his wife wouldn’t pay a $100,000 ransom, I asked Jun if the cemetery secretary had some master list of everybody buried here.
“I think yes, she or owner, James Dy. President of both City of Living Dead and Chinese Hospital next door, it is just outside gate.”
“That’s smart,” I said. “He owns the hospital and the cemetery. Out the hospital gate and in the moongate.”
“First must stop at crematorium,” he cracked.
It was past five by then, and all the cemetery officials had gone home. I asked Jun if he’d ever run across a grave or mausoleum or hole in the wall for one Steven Lik Man Wong. He pursed his lips, thought a moment, asked me to repeat the name, then said, “This one I have never seen.”
“How about Joe Co?”
“Joe Co, Joe Co,” he said. “Buried here?”
“I don’t even know if he’s dead—but if this is where all the Chinese get buried, I just thought I’d check.”
He shrugged, smiled. “I do not know all the dead. But I think they know me, ha ha ha!”
I said goodbye to my Filipino Virgil, found the Metrorail without having to traverse the slum again, and got aboard the next train. Trundling over and through the hellish town, staring into the exhausted empty eyes of the rush-hour crowd in the cooking car, looking out over the putrid Pasig River to the smog that shrouded the once-beautiful bay, I almost began to cry. I didn’t know if it was because of the hopelessness of the Philippines or the hopelessness of ever catching Steve. It was both, I decided, because one went with the other. A career’s worth of leads had come to nothing because this side of the world was made to order for staying underground. Wasted years, wasted money, as if I’d burnt them up at the Sho Kim in the City of the Living Dead. Didn’t those rubber eyes in the NBI office communicate the score? To catch a dead man, I’d have to become one. I just didn’t have enough mishegoss for that.
Early the next morning, passing the Jumbo on the way to the airport, I spoke with James Dy’s assistant in charge of names at the cemetery. No Steven Lik Man Wong, no Joe Co buried on the premises, sorry, sorry. Moises Tamayo at the NBI had no news either. He’d just got in, but he’d be on it. “Through the proper channels” he would let Paul Brown in Hong Kong know if anything turned up.
My driver heard me use the words “Chinese gangster” and began to express his worldview. He was anti-syndicate and pro-Erap because Erap only stole from the syndicates, not the masa. They could keep Estrada in jail while they were in power, but Lacson would win the presidency in 2004, and then Erap would be out. Then there would be no more kotung, no more kidnapping. “Because I have faith, I believe in future. I do not believe in anything they say, this Mary Ong, or anybody who they get make lies.”
Mary Ong! I thought. The 14K chick! I forgot all about her!
As we swung off Roxas and onto Airport Avenue, I looked back over my shoulder at Manila.