TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS had passed since Carlos Salas had seen Pio Balmaceda. Salas was now a success: a citizen of Manila with his own rooms, a bank account, a respectable job of no distinction. The war had left him with the stiff-shouldered stoop of an older man well past his fifties, but in Salas this looked formidable rather than weak. He was popular with the bar girls—who found him quiet and easy to accommodate—since getting married was out of the question. For a man of his means, he was careful with his appearance. His linen suit bagged at the knees. His shoes were well shined, but the toes angled upward.
Salas stood leaning on the back of a bench, looking street end to street end for a taxi. He was unfamiliar with this part of Manila. His head was heavy and his expression subdued, indicative of a general weariness of life. His features were more Chinese than Malay, but in Quiapo—Chinatown—this was not unusual. In fact, the preponderance of Chinese and Chinese mestizos is why he second-guessed himself when he first saw Balmaceda (who was not Chinese, but was easily taken as such) across the street, through the smudgy window of a restaurant.
Balmaceda was eating a siopao. He raised the bun to his mouth with small, ratlike hands. He nibbled at it, looking first to the right, then to the left. Salas leaned in closer (the street was not very wide), growing more convinced that it had to be Balmaceda. Salas abandoned his bench and crossed the street. He hid by a news vendor, shifting from one foot to the other to stop his back from seizing up, which it did when he stood for long periods of time.
This had to be Balmaceda tilting his head nervously from side to side as he ate, eyes ever alert to the possibility of a surprise, attack or otherwise. Salas remembered those awkward movements, remembered being bothered by them years earlier, when he and Balmaceda had spent long hours together. No doubt, Balmaceda’s foot would be tap-tapping away on the linoleum, communicating his anxiety in code. Salas decided to slip away without confronting him. He hadn’t seen Balmaceda in twenty-eight years, but it was more than this length of time that had kept them separate. Why would Salas approach him now? What would he say?
Halfway down the block Salas realized that he could have been wrong. What if it wasn’t Balmaceda? The man he had watched was fat and had a slovenly bearing. What if it was someone else? Chinese were often mistaken for Japanese. Salas continued down the street, but he could not outdistance his desire to know for sure. He remembered Balmaceda looping little circles of despair with his twitching hands. He remembered Balmaceda’s birdlike, sporadic gaze. The man’s weight gain could account for the blunting of features. His stooped frame as he bent over his food could simply be the result of the march of years, or the absence of a military lifestyle that required a certain erectness. Faces and bodies changed, but people kept their mannerisms for life.
Salas paused beneath a flashing sign that outlined the shape of a bucking steer. Poor lettering in the window promised women and steak. He stood there thinking, until the impatient proprietor swung open the door, releasing chilled, smoky air into the street. He smiled at Salas; one tooth was outlined in gold and looked like an empty picture frame. Dance music boomed behind him. Salas shook his head.
Salas decided he needed a second look. By the time he got to the restaurant, the possible Balmaceda was gone. Salas took a chair at the table where the man had been seated; the view of the city was grim—a pharmacy, a few taxis, a tree beneath which street children gathered, all grayed and weighted by the sooty air. The traffic light turned red and children lit into the stopped traffic, tapping the windows with empty cups, their faces somber and dirty. Then the light turned green and they returned to their tree, flitting back like sparrows. Dead flies with their legs neatly folded littered the inside of the window. Salas drummed his fingers on the greasy Formica tabletop. Was it or was it not Balmaceda? A man in a dirty apron came out from the kitchen to take his order. Salas ordered a Coke, just to be polite, then asked the waiter about the man who had occupied his seat. Was he a regular? The man in the dirty apron thought this through.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to eat?” he said.
“I’ll take one siopao,” said Salas.
“What kind?”
“Asado, I guess,” said Salas, although he wasn’t overly fond of it.
“Is that all?”
“Don’t get greedy,” Salas said. “It is, after all, a very small question.”
“Monday through Friday for lunch,” said the man. He returned a short while later with a small bottle of Coke and a steaming siopao.
“We have ice cream.”
“What kind?”
“Queso.”
Salas did not like cheese ice cream, but he figured this man had something to offer in addition to dessert. He stirred his ice cream, watching it pool into itself. The man in the apron looked closely into Salas’s face.
“You were standing across the street.”
“I was.”
The proprietor nodded, satisfied. He handed Salas a folded newspaper. “This newspaper terrified him,” he said.
Salas unfolded the newspaper. He gazed in disbelief at the front-page headline.
“He saw you watching him,” said the proprietor. “He ran out of here the moment you left.”
Salas returned to his apartment with the newspaper tucked neatly under his arm. He sat on his couch for close to half an hour with his right hand resting lightly on his brow before he finally unfolded the paper. The headline took up one half of the front page.
DISCOVERED BUDDHA ACTUALLY BRASS.
Brass. But this was impossible.
The newspapers had been running articles on the Buddha for weeks. An amateur treasure hunter, Rogelio Roxas, had unearthed the Buddha in Baguio, a city to the north, in a neglected tunnel of the Benguet mines. The cavern had been sealed with concrete, littered with human bones. This was the handiwork of the Japanese, who had looted every corner of Southeast Asia during the war. The gold had followed them to the Philippines. After the surrender in 1945, there had been many attempts to locate the hoard, the richness of which was impossible to calculate. The gold was said to be hidden beneath the streets of Manila, in the mountains of Baguio—even in the Nachi, a Japanese ship sunk in Manila Bay. This treasure had been labeled “Yamashita’s Gold.” Its existence was always disputed, shrouded in mystery—the stuff of legends and romantic idiocy. But Rogelio Roxas claimed to have found one of the caches. And he swore the Buddha was gold, hollow, and filled with jewels.
For a moment, Salas had no idea what to make of it. Brass? This confused him. Then he smiled, then he laughed. This was a puzzle, a deep, dark puzzle. The newspaper article went on to say that the statue was solid—which would make a jewel-filled cavity impossible. The statue was decidedly not Thai, but no possible origin was put forth. And this, yes, he understood. He understood Balmaceda’s fear, his not wanting to see him. And who knew what trouble Balmaceda was in? The origin of the brass Buddha was somewhere in the Philippines, probably Manila. Somewhere in this sullen city an artist in a windowless room sculpted, sprewed, and vented. He probably was laid out on the floor now with a bullet in his head. There was still black wax beneath his fingernails. The hair on his arms was singed from the casting. Brass indeed. Of course, it was a phony. Not even a copy. DISCOVERED BUDDHA ACTUALLY BRASS carried the subheading “There Is No Yamashita’s Gold Buried in the Philippines.”
Salas continued reading. Despite his disbelief, he could not put the paper down. Rogelio Roxas was said to have dug the Buddha out of the ground while on holiday in Baguio. The newspaper did not explain why Roxas was digging in this particular location, nor did it attempt to consider the profound implications of finding a Buddha in country overrun with Igorot headhunters and dominated by Roman Catholicism. Salas was amused. After all, the real Buddha was pure gold and definitely of Siamese design. He knew this for a fact, for he had seen it. The statue was twenty-eight inches tall and weighed about two thousand pounds. The head screwed off, opening a cavity filled with precious stones—sapphires and rubies—mostly uncut and definitely Thai.
The last time Salas and Balmaceda were together, Balmaceda was crying like a baby, squatting in a puddle deep enough to reach his ankles. They had been in the cave for a week. Their rice was rotten and the roof was too low to allow them to stand. The Japanese had been vanquished and now, robbed of the role of conqueror, Salas and Balmaceda found themselves living as primitives. There were bombs exploding all around, shaking dust into Salas’s eyes. But that wasn’t the worst. Salas couldn’t even decide what the best-case scenario would be. He had never considered being taken prisoner. His mind would not even shape that thought. He knew why officers turned to their daggers, although he didn’t believe the noble way out was necessarily noble. Sometimes killing oneself happened because of a lack of imagination. When an officer was stymied, he could always turn to Bushido, the warrior code, to guide him, and this code heartily endorsed seppuku. But what was the noble way for Salas? In his possession were the maps of the caves, the charts giving the location of the gold. He had orders to return the maps to the Japanese, so that when Japan eventually triumphed, they could retrieve their spoils. But lately, seeing his countrymen stacked like firewood, he had been having a hard time believing that the Japanese would necessarily triumph, even in the long years to come.
Living minute to minute was bad enough. Salas found Balmaceda repulsive. The two had not been friends in any real sense. They had passed time together, thrown into the same cramped circles by the necessities of war. Together, they had supervised the digging of subterranean vaults at Fort Santiago, an arduous task that had allowed Salas more than enough time to learn about his fellow officer. All Balmaceda read was military history: Alexander, Genghis, Attila—even Patton. He memorized battle strategies that he would never use; he held Hannibal’s elephants in rigid admiration and hoped to one day do something similar, if there were elephants handy. His mind ran along its well-greased runners. His hair grew in an even, thick black carpeting. He bit his nails when he thought no one was looking, and blamed his copious tears on the poor quality of air in the cave. His intention was to survive the war with Salas, then await orders.
“What if they’re all dead?” Salas asked.
“Who?”
“The men who would give you orders.” Salas rather liked the idea of no one outranking him, but this depressed Balmaceda. “If we live, you and I, we will be rich men,” Salas said, to cheer him up.
Balmaceda hadn’t considered that.
They made their pact shortly afterward. Salas volunteered to hide all the maps—after all, such documents were very incriminating. He could be hanged just for having them. Balmaceda agreed. Sometime in the distant future, the two would join together. Some man somewhere would have an order for Balmaceda, and Salas and he would follow it. They would assemble a team of engineers and language scholars to decipher the maps’ difficult coding. They would hire a team of workers to rival those of Cheops. Balmaceda would not move without Salas. Salas would not move without Balmaceda. Since until then the two men had been united in a similar cause, trust was irrelevant—betrayal unthinkable. Balmaceda drew his sword. He held it ceremoniously extended, which was awkward in their cramped quarters.
“What’s that for?” asked Salas.
“A blood pact,” he said.
Salas shook his head. “The war is over.” The sword tip trembled. “I think enough blood’s been shed.”
Balmaceda let the sword drop and wept.
A month after they parted, Salas realized that one of the maps was missing. He assumed that Balmaceda must have it. Salas noted this fact calmly, even thought it to be an accident.
Now, he realized that map must have led Rogelio Roxas to the gold Buddha.
In the months that followed the Japanese surrender, Salas had too much on his mind to be concerned with the location of one map or of Balmaceda. Being Japanese was no longer an option. To stay alive, he had to forget the maps, the gold, even himself. He had to realize that he would never see his family again, and that if he were lucky enough to reach his next birthday, it was because he had been the beneficiary of an unfair and capricious god. He had to invent himself as the least of all mankind, one who would not stand out, who was unworthy of any attention—positive or negative—and once he had achieved this barefoot, straw-hatted anonymity, he could consider himself lucky. It was time to grow accustomed to the different stars, a laughing destiny that was mutable and had tumbled him off his victor’s throne, stripped him of his garments, and delivered him—thick-tongued and thin-skinned—into the hands of barbarians.
Salas made his way to Manila as soon as he safely could. He thought living in a city would be safer and he was right. After the war, Manila was rebuilding itself, its people along with its streets. Losing oneself was easy. Not only that, but good help was hard to come by. Salas became a gardener, an expert on orchids and other flowering delights, and as he dug and potted, sprayed and tenderly wrapped the delicate blooms to the strong trunks of trees, he thought of the gold. All through the late forties and the fifties Salas longed to liberate the gold from its soft, loamy packing, to bring its brilliance back into the light of day. He thought of the tons of it, some in bars, the rest in jewels and works of art. Each brilliant bud recalled a more resplendent jewel, a tougher beauty, that was just waiting for its time to be liberated. The Cordillera Mountains, infested with headhunters, were also laced with the spoils of a brief and fallen empire. The cobbled streets of Intramuros delivered coded messages that would lead the informed hunter deep below the catacombs and caverns of the old city, whose wounds were slowly being stitched together with concrete and cinder block. Salas was obsessed with retrieval, but sometimes he wondered if this was more because of boredom than greed. The war had taught him about money and power.
Salas was for all intents and purposes a vassal, one of an army of houseboys, butlers, washerwomen, cooks, nannies, and maids. The garden sprawled out, intensely manicured in places, in others neglected with tangled vines on the wall and crumbling fountains overrun with toads. The main house had pillars like the White House and was a monument to fawning and bad taste. Salas only approached by the back door, which was unremarkable and less offensive to his aesthetic sensibility. He said little, which was blamed on his general lack of charm and his inability to speak good Tagalog; his employer and fellow employees assumed he had grown up speaking some Igorot dialect in Baguio. He shared a room with a ripe-smelling chauffeur and a house-boy. The houseboy had a guitar and the chauffeur had a drinking problem. This combination resulted in bad folk singing and loud renditions of movie pop songs. Sometimes there were girls outside the door to their room, sashaying back and forth on broad hips, their necks weighted down with cheap, heady blooms. Salas slept on a mat on the floor.
In the daylight, maids and washerwomen would slink back to work, their flowers dead, the bards of the evening revealed as the boors of the day. Salas worked with mister and pruning shears. His wards, the orchids, yawned lazily in his direction. He understood. Time passed slowly for him as well. Late at night, when his roommates had finally quieted, Salas would enter a deep meditative state. Below the earth’s gentle crust, the jewels and gold bars waited, like patient bulbs in an eternal early spring. “Let them sleep,” Salas whispered into the night, but what he really wished for was an end to his insomnia.
One particularly hot evening (the heat had sent him to his orchids for an evening misting) Salas noticed a bright light in the guardhouse. Salas stopped to watch. No doubt, something was wrong. No bulb or candle flame would beat so brilliantly against the walls. Suddenly the security guard darted out. He was burning, lit up, flaming, and his appearance was so stunning that Salas found it impossible to help him. The guard took three springing steps across the lawn. The flames whooped and snapped. He made it to the edge of the fountain, turned to Salas (who extended his mister to him), then disappeared, with a smoky hiss, into the lilies. It was as if the earth had swallowed him.
The following morning Salas found himself weighted by a dark mood. The other workers were all buzzing about the events of the previous night guard, of how Estanislaw, the security guard, had lit himself on fire.
“He was drunk,” said the chauffeur. “He was reading comic books using a candle. The bottle spilled and then he must have knocked the candle over trying to get the rum.”
“Is that all?” asked Salas.
“No,” said the chauffeur. “When they went into the guardhouse, they discovered the boss’s missing watch. The security guard has been stealing things.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Salas.
“They’re going to search our things, the maid heard the boss’s wife saying . . .”
“When?”
“After lunch.”
Salas packed his things. There was nothing to directly incriminate him. There was the good-luck scarf written over with Japanese characters, a gift from a well-meaning village, but he could easily argue that this had been lifted off a dead Japanese officer. He could conceal the information to the security box, where he had placed the maps for safekeeping, but the idea of having his belongings rifled through bothered him deeply. Any scrutiny did. Besides, he was now old. He had already wasted much of his life as a servant. This was a sign to move on. He passed Estanislaw—who was bandaged like a mummy, glumly being questioned by the boss’s eldest son—and caught a jeepney downtown.
Salas found work at a multinational corporation that made shampoo, soap, and toothpaste. He spoke Japanese and was, therefore, useful.
Salas awoke early on Saturday morning, the day after he had seen Balmaceda. Salas sent his servant, Fernando, a handsome boy with feet like a duck, to buy the paper and some pan de sal. Other than Salas’s eagerness for the paper, this was all routine. As Fernando descended the steps, he no doubt thought that Salas had started on his careful straight-edged shaving. After that, Salas would choose a short-sleeved shirt, find weekend socks to match, finish off with light trousers, then head in slippers for his small balcony to tend his small orchid garden. Fernando did not expect to be accosted on the steps when he returned. Standing in the dim light of the stairwell was a tall, dark-skinned man who, despite the heat and the shadowed light, was wearing sunglasses and a long-sleeved jacket and tie, American style.
“You work for Mr. Salas?” asked the man.
“Who wants to know?” asked Fernando.
“Just give him this. He will understand.”
Fernando accepted the envelope.
Salas had heard voices on the stairs. He was nervous and when he poked his head out of the doorway, he caught Fernando shaking the envelope, checking the seal.
“Who gave you that?” asked Salas. Fernando looked down the stairs in response. When Salas peered over the edge of the railing, the stairwell was empty. He heard the door clicking shut as someone left the building.
Salas ate his roll. The envelope was on the table; he regarded it as he chewed. He did not open it, nor did he unfold the paper. Fernando peeked around from the kitchen. Today Salas would send Fernando to the movies with five pesos in his pocket, for supposedly good behavior. And after that, Salas would tear open the envelope and find sixty thousand pesos in new bills.
There was no explanation for the gift. Salas could only guess. Clearly Balmaceda had recognized him and maybe Salas had been followed home. Who knew what group Balmaceda was running with? Probably someone wealthy and powerful. This gift said a number of things. It said, “We know who you are and that you have the other maps.” It said, “We have the resources to excavate the gold.” It said, “We will make you rich if you cooperate.”
Who were these benefactors? According to the papers of the previous week, Rogelio Roxas’s gold Buddha had been confiscated by members of the president’s family. The president. That would make sense. Salas thumbed the stack of money and its exquisite flutter made him giddy.
Salas headed straight for the tailor up the street who offered same-day service. It was still early. Who could blame him for wanting some new clothes? He ordered a suit, buff-colored linen, double breasted and fully lined, which was ready at six that evening. Salas dressed at the tailor’s and took his old clothes folded in a brown paper package tied with twine.
Salas’s shoes were brand-new but he decided to have them polished, just for the pleasure of it. The shoestand rose regally off the street, with metal platforms on which to set one’s shoes. He took the leftmost of the three seats, which were worked by three kneeling boys. Salas drummed his fingertips on the worn wood of the chair’s arm; this lightness was strange to him. He owed his joy to some whim of fate, which left him feeling both lucky and nervous. Beside him, a man ruffled the pages of a newspaper, reminding Salas he’d ignored the paper this morning, its offerings overshadowed by more immediate good news. The man snapped the paper down and looked at the boy who was coating his shoes with polish.
“Cordovan is not brown, you idiot,” he said. The boy quickly raised the polish tin, which clearly stated Cordovan on its lid. The boy returned to his work. Salas looked away before the man could see he had witnessed the mistake. The man harrumphed over his mustache (he was part Spanish, no doubt, to grow facial hair like that) and trained his eyes on Salas. “What do you make of it?”
Salas raised his eyebrows. Surely he could not be referring to the shoe polish.
“The Buddha, the gold Buddha,” he said.
Salas shrugged. “Is there something new about it in the paper?” he inquired casually.
“Fascinating,” the man said, “If you find such stuff fascinating, treasure hunting, gold and the like. Anyway this Mr. Roxas insists that the Buddha he dug up in Baguio is gold. Doesn’t know where this brass statue came from at all. Roxas claims that the president’s thugs stole the gold Buddha out of his house. That, of course, is not in the paper. I heard it, well, somewhere.” Here, the man stopped to consider his audience.
Salas was delighted that the man, obviously wealthy, was speaking with him. He attributed this to his new shoes and suit. “I feel certain the Buddha was gold,” Salas said. “You know, I’m sure, all about General Yamashita’s retreat.”
“Yes. Backwards out of Manila, and MacArthur advancing all the time. Yamashita finally stopped up around Baguio. He was executed, wasn’t he?”
Salas nodded. “Hanged. For war crimes.” And then he smiled. This was uncontrollable.
“There’s no doubt that he buried some gold up there,” continued his companion, “but how much? And why hasn’t it all been retrieved?”
“One hears rumors . . .” Salas checked his audience. The man was deeply interested. “They say that all the locations are booby-trapped. Bombs will detonate if the precise directions for retrieval are not followed.”
“Well then, how do you get the gold?”
“There are maps—specific engineering instructions for the retrieval. These maps are still in the possession of the Japanese.”
Salas nodded. “The maps are in an ancient Japanese dialect that has not been spoken for over a thousand years.”
“You don’t say.” The man smoothed his mustache. “Who did the work?”
“Work?”
“The digging.”
“Oh.” Salas grimaced, but quickly corrected his features. “POWs, I should think.”
“Wouldn’t they have spoken out?”
“Well yes, if they were alive. I’ve heard . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, nothing at all on that matter. Maybe they’re all dead.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.” Suddenly Salas felt weary. “But these are just rumors, of course. We know the Japanese looted all the way from Manchuria to Manila. No one will admit to having the money. Stories are created.”
“The money’s probably all back in Tokyo.”
“Or Switzerland. Who’s to say there’s any Yamashita’s Gold at all?”
“But if there was . . ., ho ho ho,” said the man. He flipped the paper so that Salas could see the front page. There was a picture of an innocuous, bespectacled man.
“Who is that?” Salas asked.
“That is Roxas. He’s speaking at Plaza Miranda on Saturday, at the Liberal Proclamation Rally, along with everyone else who has a problem with the president.”
“He should keep quiet,” Salas said.
“You’re right. He won’t live long with an attitude like that, not under this administration. What good is gold when you’re dead?”
Salas took a taxi, smiling to himself as he passed the crowded jeepney stop. What he needed was a new nightclub to match his new affluence, not this dive that he had been frequenting for the past ten years. No doubt, when he actually brought forth the maps, he would be a rich man. Sixty thousand pesos was fine as a gesture of goodwill, but a small amount nonetheless. He would worry about lifestyle changes later. The old nightclub had a measure of comfort that he appreciated in his own way, and besides, who better to appreciate the new wealth than someone who had seen the old poverty? He would ask for Lina, who was near forty and practically in retirement, but she had known him longest and she would be the most impressed. In fact, it was his desire to impress Lina that caused him to abandon the taxi and proceed on foot up the alley that led to the rear entrance to the club. He would tap on Lina’s window. She would be confused at first, but then she would see—new suit, new shoes . . .
Sneaking up on anyone is something that one should carefully consider. Sneaking up on a prostitute, even one near forty who is practically in retirement, is never a good idea, but Salas felt light and was therefore lightheaded. He walked up the side of the alley, with the tapping step of new soles. The shoulders of his suit were padded to make him look broad and strong, less stooped. How effective this actually was is not of importance, because Salas believed in his shoulders just as he believed in the faithfulness of the long-buried treasure. The gold was his, after all, had been his for twenty-eight years.
At first, Salas didn’t hear the other’s footfalls. The alley was deserted. His sobering thought was that his newfound prosperity had impressed someone else, someone who had followed him into the alley, which usually had a few inhabitants—tired women wringing out nylon hose, or their unwanted children busy in a coin-tossing game. Salas stopped behind a parked car, and as he’d predicted, the steps too stopped. In the reflection offered by the rear window of the car, he saw the outline of a man—tall and thin, and that was all because the light was poor and the window dirty. Slowly, he turned around.
Salas did not recognize the man because he did not want to. He registered that the man was unarmed and that he did not have a threatening demeanor. He wore loose trousers that had holes in the knees and were shredded at the cuffs. His shirt was filthy and the sleeves had been pulled from it. His eyes were quiet and questioning. He wore no shoes. At first Salas refused to recognize the man, but then he found his presence undeniable. This man was Dr. Santos, a civilian imprisoned in Fort Santiago whom Salas had known during the war.
Salas began to sweat, even though he felt suddenly cold. He forgot his errand, where he was. His mind folded in upon itself, and next thing he knew, he was stumbling into the chill of an expensive restaurant, having left the alley and run across a busy street. He was not damaged physically, although he had been narrowly missed by a number of cars and jeepneys. The waiter touched Salas’s elbow in a warm, yet polite way. He guided Salas to a chair.
“What has happened, sir?” asked the waiter.
Salas shook, unable to answer.
“Are you hurt?” The waiter gazed into Salas’s face. “Were you attacked?”
Salas nodded, although he knew this to be a lie. This was the closest he could come to describing the feeling he had, the terror that he had taken with him from the alley and into the restaurant.
“Shall I call the police?” The waiter knelt at Salas’s side and fanned him with a menu. Salas shook his head. How could he tell this man—or anyone—that he had seen a certain Dr. Santos, a man he had once met and seen one time afterward, whom he knew nothing of except that he was a skilled surgeon and that he was dead.
The waiter placed a drink in Salas’s shaking hands. He sipped it—a good scotch—and thanked the waiter for his solicitude.
“A gift, sir,” the waiter replied, “from Señor Ocampo. He would like for you to join him.”
Salas looked across the room. Señor Ocampo was the Spanish mestizo with whom he had chatted while having his shoes shined. The rest of the scotch was in a bottle on the table.
“I hear you were mugged,” said Ocampo. “It’s terrible, it is, but you know, this city, this country, has always been like this. It hasn’t gotten worse. A cesspool.”
“Then what they say about you mestizos is right,” replied Salas.
“And what is that?”
“Enough distance to see the problems in the Philippines and too much love for the country to ever leave.”
Ocampo laughed heartily. “My father was pure Spanish blood, third generation. His mother cried for a month when he said he was marrying a Filipina.” More hearty laughter followed. Ocampo poured Salas a generous glass. “I’m buying you dinner,” he said. “The thing to order here is lengua.”
Salas did not want to be alone and this Señor Ocampo was certainly good company. A few glasses of scotch had soothed Salas’s fear, although he still felt a nagging generalized wariness. Ocampo was in the sugar business. His wife and children lived on the island of Negros, in Bacolod, and while on business in Manila, Ocampo considered himself a bachelor.
“So what’s your story, Salas,” he said. “Who are your people?”
Salas laced his fingers together. He knew his history well.
“Mine is not a happy story,” he started. “I was born in Baguio in 1915. My father was a carpenter.”
“Same profession as Our Lord’s.”
Salas smiled. “Yes. There were eight of us children at one point. We had little money. There were only four of us still living at the start of the war.”
“How sad.”
“The Japanese finished us off.”
“Except for you, of course.”
Salas almost laughed. This was not the first time he’d forgotten to include himself among the number. “My mother died in childbirth. There was”—here Salas looked thoughtfully at his entwined hands—“a good deal of blood.” He looked up at Ocampo. “I found her. The baby miraculously survived. He was covered in hair. The local mystic said this was a good omen.”
“Ah, but the mystic was wrong,” said Ocampo with deep-felt sympathy.
“Wrong?”
“Well, yes. The child died in the war.”
“That’s right,” said Salas. “I mean, right in God’s eyes. We must accept his decisions.”
“You are a man of faith!” declared Ocampo.
“Well, I was raised by nuns—a Belgian order in Baguio. They taught me English, introduced me to books. She was a good woman.”
“She?”
“Sister, Sister Mary. She was a good nun although she had a drinking problem and . . . and a mustache. She also had a wimple.” Salas traced the wimple with his fingers extending out from his head.
In response, Ocampo stroked his mustache. “And where is she now?”
“The Japanese . . . Unspeakable, you know. Even though she was a nun . . .”
“And even though she had a mustache!” added Ocampo. Here they fell into awkward laughter, much controlled, yet impossible to completely suppress. “I’m sorry. I’m an insensitive drunken boor!” said Ocampo.
“No, no,” said Salas, patting the man on his arm. “She would have wanted it this way.”
“Ah.” Ocampo filled the glasses and raised his to clink with Salas’s. “To Sister Mary.”
The following morning, Salas was awakened by the ringing of the phone, but he did not answer. He was exhausted from the previous night. He had been tortured by bad dreams, nightmares brought on by scotch, and some mild form of hysteria activated by a change in life, or so Salas argued. A prisoner had come at him in his very bed, this bed, with the rumpled sheets. This skin-and-bones apparition had no head. He also had no shirt, and his bare chest revealed each rib in clear detail, a delicate vault of bones that arched above his flat belly. The navel was stretched open—then blinked: an eye in this unlikely location. He held a sword high above his shoulders. His belly-eye was trained on Salas. Salas counted his final seconds, and then he was back in Fort Santiago in the caves with Balmaceda. All kinds of prisoners were digging, Filipinos and Americans mostly. Balmaceda was making his way through the deep tunnel with a little silver mallet. The prisoners shifted soil to the scrape and scrape of shovels.
Balmaceda, on impulse, took the mallet and cracked it across a man’s skull. Instantly the man collapsed. None of the other prisoners seemed to notice. Salas went over. The man’s skull had split cleanly in two. Balmaceda separated the halves, like two hemispheres of a cracked almond. Balmaceda plunged his hand deep into the brain meat. When his hand came out, bloodied and trailing stringy gore, he held a stone. It was a ruby, uncut and blood red. Then Salas realized that the scar on his stomach had started dripping blood, then trickling. He covered the wound with his hands.
Salas dressed quickly. He had slept until noon. He looked at the table. The pan de sal and coffee were cold. Fernando was sulking by the kitchen door with a black eye.
“Why didn’t you answer the phone?”
“I just missed it. I’m sorry, sir,” said Fernando, whose sweat was still thick with coconut liquor.
Salas took a jeepney to Quiapo. He had the jeepney let him off around the corner from the restaurant where he had seen Balmaceda. He straightened his shirt and combed his hair in the reflection of a parlor window. On the front page of the paper was something about the Liberal Proclamation Rally at Plaza Miranda the following week, but this was dwarfed by a headline describing a restoration project in Intramuros that the first lady had decided to oversee. The engineering firm that had won the contract bid was Japanese.
“Sir, fifty centavos,” said the paper boy.
Salas gave him a five-peso bill.
The restaurant was busy on Sunday. Salas took the same seat by the window, wondering if Balmaceda would turn up, even though he usually only came during the week. No matter. Salas felt a solidarity sharing this seat. Hundreds of sparrows shot through the air. Salas had always hated the sparrows. They symbolized Manila to him—Manila, whose calcified lungs coughed up the little birds much as a consumptive coughed up blood. A waiter came to take his order.
“Where is the owner?” asked Salas.
“On Sunday, he is with his family,” said the waiter.
“Do you work here during the week?”
The waiter shook his head. He was a student at Santo Thomas. He had a scholarship. Salas participated wearily in this accidental conversation, wolfed down his siopao, nodded hastily as he got up from the table, pressing a tip into the student’s hand. He headed for the door, having momentarily forgotten the purpose of his visit.
Then, across the street, Salas saw Dr. Santos again. He was leaning with both hands on the back of the bench in exactly the same attitude Salas had on the day he sighted Balmaceda. Salas jumped into the street, this time confused into pursuit. A jeepney screeched to a stop, then was quickly bumped another half foot by a bus that had been following close behind. Salas was knocked down, although uninjured. He saw the back of the doctor’s head disappearing down the street, just slightly above that of the average-height man, but as he was now lying on the sidewalk, there was nothing he could do.
When Salas returned to his apartment, a soldier was standing in the hallway and his door was open. He paused at the top of the stairs. Fernando, who was at the end of the corridor watching, shrugged apologetically.
“What are you doing?” Salas inquired of the soldier.
The soldier raised his eyebrows, then hissed through the doorway to alert the others to Salas’s presence. A man in a nylon sport shirt and white slacks walked casually into the hallway. He was wearing dark, square sunglasses. His shirt was tight across his belly. His skin was dark, nut brown and shiny, even though he was not sweating. He smiled broadly.
“Do you like the apartment?” Salas asked.
“Who are you?” the man replied. He was holding a handful of mail that Salas had left on his desk unopened. It was open now. The man sorted through the envelopes. “Salas? Is that your name?”
“Carlos Salas.”
“And you are from . . .”
“Baguio.”
“Baguio?” Here the man laughed. “I do not think you are from Baguio.”
“I know what you’re looking for.” Salas walked past him and into the apartment, which had been thoroughly searched. Every drawer was overturned. The crash of papers reached him from the other room. A soldier who could not have been more than sixteen years old was slashing the underside of an upholstered chair. “They are not here.”
“Where are they?”
“I will give them to you, but not now, not here.”
“Where then? When?”
“Somewhere public.”
“Plaza Miranda,” the man said. “Saturday night. Nine-thirty.”
“The Liberal Proclamation Rally?” asked Salas.
“Why not?” said the man. “I have business there anyway.”
The man did not whistle to his men and leave. He set a chair upright and sat, then offered Salas a spot on the couch—the cushions were all slashed—across from him.
“How did you get the maps?” he asked.
Salas studied the man. He wondered how much he knew and which version of his past would be believed. “When the Japanese occupied Baguio, it was natural that they would need house help. I spoke a little Japanese—my father, a carpenter, was Japanese, although I was brought up Filipino. Catholic, of course.” The man responded to this with a smile. “I was in charge of keeping General Yamashita’s office. When Baguio was being liberated, there was chaos—many distractions. I stole the maps.”
“Alone?”
“No. Another servant helped me. His name is Pio Balmaceda.” Salas glanced up at the man. “I think you know him?”
“Yes. He is staying with us.” The man seemed satisfied. “I am sorry if we have inconvenienced you,” he said. When he reached the doorway, he turned to smile at Salas. “Your friend, Balmaceda, has already confessed to being Yoshimi Akihiro, a private in the Japanese army.”
But Salas had the last laugh. This man did not know everything. Balmaceda, or rather Yoshimi, was not in the Japanese army, but the navy. Yoshimi was not a private, but a commander, second in rank to a rear admiral. Salas knew because this was his rank. They had served together, side by side, with many men at their disposal.
• • •
On Salas’s twenty-eighth birthday, August 30, 1942, his appendix burst. He was in Manila at the time recovering from duty performed in the Solomon Islands. He had been in pain for a number of days. He thought he was suffering from an acute case of indigestion brought on by eating too much native food, which favored garlic and chili. When the appendix burst, the pain was intense to the degree that Salas could not scream—only moan. He moaned loudly for close to an hour before he finally managed to alert someone to his bedside. The Filipino servant was very distressed to see a superior bathed in sweat, shaking uncontrollably. He resisted the desire to run, finally crouching beside the bed so that Salas could whisper his condition into his ear, as best he could describe it.
“I am dying,” he said.
Perhaps it was the servant’s fear that he might somehow be held accountable for Salas’s death that made him suggest the Filipino surgeon, who was a prisoner at Fort Santiago. Of course, Salas (whose real name was Kamichi Ayao) would have preferred a Japanese doctor, but in retrospect the fact that none were immediately available probably saved his life: he did not need a leg sawed off nor a bullet tweezed from his buttocks. Salas remembered opening his eyes to see the doctor at his side. The doctor was thin from imprisonment. He had large, kind eyes. He palpated Salas’s stomach as gently as possible with hands that did not shake. Then he gave Salas a shot, and as he slowly faded from view whispered in his ear, “It is only the appendix. I have done this at least a hundred times.”
This reassurance is what was rooted in Salas’s mind. The doctor, Dr. Santos, was a prisoner. He had to do what was asked of him, without questioning. His life depended on Salas’s survival, but his words were said in kindness. Later, when Salas was recovering from the surgery, he found a scrap of paper concealed in the pocket of his shirt. The shirt had been laundered, but somehow the message—although badly faded—remained legible. It said, “My son is Arturo Santos in Fort Santiago.”
The doctor must have put it there.
How many messages were enclosed in this one? It is hard to say. Definitely “Please save my child,” or “You can return my favor,” or “I have hope when there was none.” At the time, feeling munificent, Salas actually had someone look Arturo Santos up. Yes, he was at Fort Santiago. He was eleven years old. And that’s all. What else could one learn about an eleven-year-old boy? That he was short? That he was thrilled by cars? That he used his sleeve in place of a handkerchief?
Salas was sure that he could have done something to ensure Arturo Santos’s survival, but war makes one negligent of lives, particularly those that are not useful in any way. The scar healed. Salas could tell women he’d received it in battle. Why not? He had earned it at the hands of the enemy.
Salas forgot about the doctor. He forgot about his son. Years passed. The battle was no longer offensive, and now the unthinkable—surrender—was being planned in detail. Yoshimi and he were in charge of supervising the burial of a cache of gold bullion, reportedly the spoils of Yamashita’s march down the Malay Peninsula. Salas remembered Yoshimi’s boots that morning. For the first time ever, there were smudges on the toes.
Digging had started on the caverns months earlier. Only a handful of officers knew what they were for. MacArthur was already in Manila. Perhaps MacArthur had expected the Japanese to throw up their hands in exasperation and start packing. Their presence in his old neighborhood infuriated him, but Salas and the other men were under orders. MacArthur began shelling Manila; the corpses—nearly all Filipinos—filled the streets. Dogs, who had not been seen to roam the city in months, suddenly appeared well fed.
Yoshimi (now Balmaceda) was coordinating with the engineer and—strangely enough—the language scholar, who had been instructed to translate the maps into an obscure Japanese dialect that had not been spoken for over a thousand years. The scholar was a tall, thin man with large watery eyes. His hands were large as well, and hung loosely on his wrists, as if they were a marionette’s. Salas couldn’t remember what the dialect was called, too obscure even for an educated man to be familiar with, but it was the bane of Yoshimi’s existence. There was no word for “mine,” “bomb,” or even “wire.” The treasure was to be booby-trapped by a complicated series of incendiary devices and explosives. The happy treasure hunter armed with nothing but a shovel would not get far; with a bulldozer he’d be blown sky high along with the surrounding city block. One needed the maps to have any success at all. In the end, the scholar translated that which was translatable—sometimes resorting to homonyms, sometimes approximating meanings. For example, since there was no word for “prisoner,” he substituted the word “slave.”
Salas was in charge of organizing the POWs into functioning work crews. Most of the men were sick, and in other circumstances probably would have been impossible to move. But the sound of shells exploding all over Manila gave these walking cadavers hope. “Dugout Doug” had actually returned, as promised, and they were not going to compromise their chances at freedom at such a close juncture. Americans, Australians, and Filipinos lined up side by side. The hollow look was gone. They shouldered their shovels in the war’s twilight, much as they’d borne arms at its start. Salas could feel the stifled excitement, the hope. He remembered an Australian soldier whose eyes actually twinkled in his gaunt face. His shirt had rotted to a comic effect: all that was left were the sleeves and the collar, held by a narrow strip of reinforced fabric that laced them together across his shoulders. As he passed Salas, entering the mouth of the hole, Salas heard his thought, “Last thing I’ll do for a Jap.” And it was.
The first day’s digging went without a hitch. All the prisoners were shot at the end of the day, as Salas had previously decided. The following day, one of the bombs went off, killing a Japanese officer. The engineer was furious, but didn’t explain his anger to anyone. He left to make another bomb, and the Japanese officers waited and waited. Three days they waited in Fort Santiago. The smell of rotting corpses lay over the entire city in a thick smog. Everyone was sick. MacArthur’s bombs exploded with the thud thud thud of a beating heart. Salas got used to it. Finally, the engineer corrected the problem and presented Yoshimi with a lovely bomb, but when Salas sent the POWs back down into the ground, the gas from the rotting corpses of the men he’d killed the first day made them ill, and they could not dig. Yoshimi pulled him aside. This was Salas’s responsibility. The prisoners were sitting in rows at the mouth of the hole. They looked at Salas with pouchy, alien eyes as if they too were admonishing him for failing to complete the work. At the end of one of the rows, carefully wrapping another man’s foot in a rag, was Dr. Santos.
Perhaps it was the fact that Salas hadn’t slept in over seventy-two hours, but the thought of facing that man bothered him deeply. He would rather have faced MacArthur. Salas was feeling unfamiliar pangs of guilt. He knew the war was lost, and now, no longer secure in the role of victorious naval commander, he had been considering his worth as a man. Salas watched unnoticed as the doctor wrapped the wound, which was badly infected—swollen a dark purple and wet with pus. The injured man, another Filipino, waved flies from his eyes in a passive way. He shook his head, which the doctor did not see. Salas took this to mean that he knew that tending his injury was hopeless, but still appreciated the doctor’s gesture. Then suddenly, without warning, the doctor looked up. Quickly, he averted his eyes, but Salas knew he had been recognized. From the pain in the doctor’s eyes, Salas also knew that his son had died.
• • •
Why had the doctor appeared to him? Salas pondered this thought. His years of living among Catholics had taught him something about notions of divine retribution. Maybe as long as Salas had lived the loneliest of lives, the most degraded of existences—someone living as someone else—the doctor had slept in death. But now, had Salas’s new hope awoken the doctor? Did he feel the need to remind Salas that despite his great wealth, he would never escape having allowed the death of an innocent child? This was unbelievable and stupid. Salas chastised himself for such thoughts, which came from living long years with sentimental and superstitious Filipinos. More likely, his tension had unhinged him, shaken up the ghost not from his burial place but from some dark corner of Salas’s mind. And in a way, hadn’t Salas even envied the doctor? Before, he had not admitted it, but the doctor’s deep love for his child was something that Salas had never known. Love in his life had always been superseded by duty and the need to survive.
Salas had the taxi drop him a couple of blocks from Plaza Miranda. He held a briefcase in his left hand, which contained the key to the safe deposit box and a piece of paper with the box’s location. All had been carefully arranged. Salas heard a singing in his ears that he hadn’t heard since the old days when, on the deck of a beautiful ship, he’d marked the time between heartbeats hoping the torpedo would miss, that the plane would be plucked from the sky. Now he was merely crossing a street. Salas smiled. He had always thought that singing was his concern for his men. Now he realized it was concern for himself. He took a seat on the park bench indicated in his instructions and began to wait. The figure agreed upon was five million pesos, which was but a fraction of the worth of the maps. Salas had agreed because the gold had become useless to him.
More and more he had been thinking of Señor Ocampo and his plantation on Negros. That was the life that Salas would now pursue. He would become a gentleman with land, serfs, and position. This briefcase that held the location of the maps was the last vestige of his Japanese identity. By ridding himself of it, he would be washed clean, truly born anew. He was older, but not old. Maybe he would even find a pleasant young woman to pass the time with. He pictured himself on a broad veranda with a clear view to the sea, the palm trees bowing gently in his direction. He sat at a table playing cards with this woman, who had her hair pulled up in a tidy bun. Maybe there would even be a child. Why not? A little round-faced boy with a perfect shelf of bangs falling right above his brow. Kamichi Ayao, once the naval commander, would now be Carlos Salas, the gentleman plantation owner.
Plaza Miranda was a large, tidy field of trim grass, worn to mud in places, and rimmed with trees. A stage was set at the southern end. An arc of high-backed wooden chairs awaited the invited guests. A crowd had already begun to gather around the stage—students mostly, it seemed, earnest in bell-bottom pants. Salas found them amusing, then realized that at that age, he had been in charge of a thousand men. He sighted a man across the park standing by a tree in studied nonchalance. He was wearing a jacket, although it was very hot. One of the president’s thugs, thought Salas. He looked around, wondering which of the liberal hopefuls was scheduled for execution. No one was on the stage except for a youthful man in jeans, who gave the microphone a few silent taps, then shrugged his shoulders to an invisible technician. Salas was halfheartedly searching for the technician when Balmaceda appeared almost magically by his side.
The years had not been kind to Balmaceda. He had never been handsome and now—at this proximity—Salas saw that he was yellowed and sick. Balmaceda gave Salas an almost imperceptible nod and the two men shook hands. Balmaceda sat down next to Salas. He rested a briefcase by the bench, which would be switched with Salas’s briefcase.
“Would you like to check the contents of my briefcase?” Salas said.
Balmaceda shook his head. He was fretting. Salas caught him looking at the man standing across the park. The man had his hand inside his jacket.
“Ayao, leave,” Balmaceda whispered. “You definitely will not leave with the money, but if you’re quick, you might leave with your life.”
Salas looked down at his shoes. “My name is Carlos Salas.”
Balmaceda looked over at his countryman in disbelief. He nodded again, so slight a motion that only one who knew him could read it as an intended gesture. Balmaceda got up, taking Salas’s briefcase with him. He did not seem to want to leave. In his eyes, Salas saw the years of loneliness and confusion that separated this meeting from their last. “You have found men to give you orders,” Salas ventured, half smiling. He actually meant it as a joke. Balmaceda took the insult silently, but presented his back to Salas. He left with small hurried steps.
Salas inched off the bench, but he was too tired to get up. Then he caught sight of a yellow balloon floating just above the heads of the crowd. Someone had tied the balloon firmly to the wrist of a little boy, whose large black eyes were fixed on it. The balloon bounced spiritedly, tugging at the string, a prisoner of the boy’s slender wrist. At this moment, the balloon rivaled the moon and the stars and all the orbs spinning and spitting in the deep blue folds of night. It captivated him as he had not been captivated in a very long time. Then the little boy was staring at him; his free arm was raised to point at Salas and his small mouth was open in a gesture of wonder. Salas saw the father grab the boy by the shoulders and begin to drag him away.
Salas wanted to protest, but he did not know why. He was feeling queer and the sound had drained from the landscape in a way that awed and terrified him. Something was wrong. Salas felt a throbbing pain in his abdomen, a pain he had not felt in years. Could this be his appendix? But his appendix was gone. This was merely the ghost of it. He patted his stomach and his hands came up covered in blood. The man in the jacket was standing a mere twenty feet away. Salas had been shot. Soon he would be dead and there was nothing he could do about it.
The blood poured out of his side and onto the packed mud around the bench. I am dying, he thought to himself. I am dying my second death. He looked at the awed faces of the crowd and raised his bloodied hands to them. “My name is Carlos Salas,” he whispered. But bullets had begun sputtering by the stage and then there was the explosion of grenades. The president’s thugs had started a massacre. The protesters were scattering to the far edges of the plaza, running from the rain of bullets. They did not care about rubies or gold. They did not care about the man dying by the park bench. And all around were parents gathering their children in protective arms, finding places to keep them safe.