Ghosts of Manila (13 page)

The presidential campaign had revealed that Miriam Santiago had an alleged history of psychiatric instability. Despite the glaring sanity evidenced by her having called a congressman ‘fungus face’ she herself had been given one of the nicknames cheerily bestowed on the afflicted. It happened to be Brenda (for ‘bren-damage’), but might just as easily have been Rita (for ‘retard’). In the circumstances Vic considered that this, in its way, was a form of voting. As a keen student of the foreign English language press he had long assumed that the choice of the name ‘Andy Capp’ to describe the common man’s dimmest strip-cartoon exemplar was no accident. It so happened there was a Rita familiar to everyone in the
Chronicle
building who mopped and mowed harmlessly about the area, his face split by a huge grin as he begged for coins and capered a few steps. He was generally treated with cheer and kindness, given small change and applauded ironically. Several of Vic’s colleagues, including his own secretary Cindy, were convinced that giving Rita a 2-peso coin brought them luck. It certainly brought Rita his survival. Vic supposed this was how it had been in Europe back in the days when idiots were considered as having been touched by God, and therefore holy. Presumably modern public health provisions and state medicine had put paid to them or kept them hidden from view, poleaxed with drugs and with their affliction given one of those names which implied that somebody somewhere
knew all about it. He wondered if vampires had also disappeared from the advanced West or whether they still crouched in unexpected places under an assumed identity.

I
NSP. DINGCA
was himself moving through haunted weather these days. He presumed one had first to reach a certain age to allow for a build-up of the general wastage that life offered and of which one was willy-nilly a spectator, until such time as one became a ghost for somebody else. That seemed to be the deal. Babs was now a ghost, of course. Dingca was glad he had heard nothing to suggest that the entertainer had died specifically for being an informer, that he himself was directly responsible. He was thankful too that he hadn’t mired Babs still further, as so many cops did their ‘kids’ and ‘assets’ by using them to funnel back onto the street part of whatever drug hauls they confiscated and which they could spare from their own habits. Dingca had always paid Babs in cash. True, he was also funneling back money which had fallen into the police’s hands by one route or another: payoffs,
tong,
recovered unmarked loot. Still, he had played Babs straight and had been left with a heavy heart but a cleanish conscience.

These days other ghosts were joining Babs’s. They popped into his mind at irregular intervals, stepping out of a building as he drove past, sitting in familiar offices with unfamiliar occupants, leaning on tables in bars and restaurants. They were the unresting: those whose lives had been emptied out by injustice, casually, as one might tip up a bowl of waste water. They were forced to swill about the earth, their thin voices calling endlessly for redress. Other cops saw and heard them too, he had learned from gab-sessions with Sergeant Macawili; but old Bryan had retired last year and gone off to live with his daughter in
Malolos, Bulacan. On the one occasion Dingca and a couple of others had driven up to see him (a trip marked by a near-fatal blowout at Meycauayan) they had found him almost speechless with emphysema.

What they had in common, these ghosts, was that he still felt bad about them in some way even though it was not obviously a simple matter of his own conscience. There were plenty of episodes he regretted deeply but which were not particularly haunting. It couldn’t be denied there were unpleasant things to be done in the line of duty. Yet here was a mystery. In his career he had met many killers, not all crazed and quite a few in uniform, and knew absolutely about himself that he was not one of them. He did kill, however. He had seldom had to fire his gun in self-defence, but salvage was another matter. It was not really an issue of conscience for most cops, he knew, and nor was it for himself. There were certain animals who had roamed the streets long enough, wearing their gang tattooes like medals won in a war against civilisation. Left alone, they bred. They needed steady culling. As far as Dingca was concerned it was a kind of moral affirmation in the face of bribed judges and porous jails. Salvaging was seldom done by a cop working alone unless it was an especially private matter; it reinforced a comradeship which was equally affirmative. Some cops elected simply to be Out. The ones who were In all the way usually made quicker progress up through the ranks. Offhand, Dingca could hardly recall a single individual in whose death he had participated. It was not until someone brought up a name that he was occasionally able to brush the cobwebs away from a face or a scene.

All that killing had produced only one ghost for Rio Dingca, and quite unaccountably at that. It was the ghost of an expression he had glimpsed when they had gone one night to a house in Grace Park following a tip-off. The man they were after – his name still eluded Rio – was a specialist in armed robbery who had started at the age of sixteen by throwing fuming nitric acid into the faces of late-night jeepney passengers. His first attack had blinded a woman and disfigured her sleeping children and netted him 37 pesos. From this he had graduated, via a very lucrative tourist bus heist, to the daring holdup in broad daylight of an unmarked police jeep doing an emergency security run, a strongbox delivery from bank to bank. It was an inside job. In the unmarked jeep were three policemen in street clothes, including the driver. Two were sitting with Armalites across
their knees, a fatal mistake when quick action was needed, especially for the one hunched up beneath the low hood in the back. The jeep was crawling along Padre Faura towards the lights on Mabini, in the heart of the tourist belt. The streets were crowded with lunchtime pedestrians, office workers from government buildings and nurses from the General Hospital nearby. The man chose his moment with care, weaving up from behind on an aged Kawasaki 100. As the jeep drew level with the corner of Bocobo the motorcyclist came up on the inside, shot dead the policeman in the front seat and then the driver before turning to deal with the one in the back who was barely starting to react. The motorcyclist fired again and hit him in the thigh, which galvanised the policeman into bringing up the Armalite in a blind frenzy, squeezing the trigger even before he could aim, hitting the already lifeless body of his comrade in front and dissolving the jeep’s windscreen into a white hail of crystals until the muzzle caught on a headrest. This time the motorcyclist shot him cleanly between the eyes. He dumped the Kawasaki on its side, ran around the jeep and hauled the driver out onto the road. So far it had all taken eight seconds and pedestrians were only just beginning to realise what was going on. As the dead driver’s foot came off the clutch the jeep stalled with a bang. Coolly the man climbed in, restarted the engine, swung right and, bumping over the Kawasaki’s front wheel, tore up Bocobo against the one-way traffic stream, swerving on and off the pavements, with two dead bodies and a strongbox. It had all been so cold and fast and well informed that it made the headlines of the evening papers. Next morning the heavier editorials talked about war on the streets and how the police were often a more fatal medicine than the disease they were intended to cure. Right from the start it was assumed that the robber was himself a cop, which incensed only those policemen who were sure he wasn’t. Their righteous anger turned sour when it emerged that the tip-off had almost certainly come from a bank guard who was indeed a moonlighting cop.

Leaving aside the one-year-old infant hit in the head by a stray bullet, one of the dead was a colleague of Dingca’s. When months later they learned the motorcyclist was to be found in southern Grace Park, four of them went there one night without it even occurring to them to pay a courtesy call on Station 2. They went in front and back, flushed out some elderly women watching Raven on TV, and found their man
asleep in a curtained-off alcove. He was alone and, incredibly, unarmed. He sat up on the mat, turtle-lidded in the glow of the 20w bulb, a nineteen-year-old youth wearing a Batman T-shirt and a cotton blanket. His mouth said ‘Oh’, even as his brain was tearing itself free of the dream which still held his face in the slack innocence of a child. And this was the expression which was to haunt Dingca as they all shot him: the eyes turned to him in soft wonderment as if he were watching a miracle, an ordinary event which without warning had leapfrogged over credibility and was waiting on the other side for him to catch up. They had found no gun under his pillow or, indeed, anywhere in the house, but had brought one for him just in case and pressed it unfired into his dead hand. For a couple of days Rio was convinced they had killed the wrong man but then the lab reports came through: fingerprints which tallied with those on the police jeep’s steering wheel and matched the ones on an empty acid bottle.

After all, then, justice had been done; but in being done had left behind this ghost, this lost soul of an expression which, like the Cheshire cat’s grin, hung in the air without even much of a face to go with it and lacking any sort of name. ‘We’ll meet again next time around,’ it said to Rio, not with the promise of vengeance but with the hopeful conviction that both would somehow have shaken themselves a little more free of sheer muddle and stupidity and waste. From it alone had sprung Rio’s certainty that in shooting the expression’s owner they had somehow missed the true villain who would carry on flitting before them, leaping free of each host seconds ahead of their bullets and leaving behind an innocent husk. And so the world went, trundling along on its wheels of pain, trailing behind it an exhausted wistfulness which did no good at all to ageing cops.

That was a single rare instance of a Dingca ghost which had no business to be there. A far more public ghost haunted him as well as thousands of other Manileños. It was no single figure but a composite, boiling tirelessly up from the edge of the bay whenever he drove past the Yacht Club on Roxas and saw the Cultural Center of the Philippines, showpiece of the Marcoses’ New Society. That particular building merely exhaled the breath of the famous old cronies Imelda had wooed into performing, the Margot Fonteyns and Van Cliburns of the international concert hall. It was the other building tucked far away behind it on the edge of the tongue of reclaimed land where the
ghosts hovered of those who had died in its construction. Dingca remembered the sequence of events indelibly since they were tangled up in his own police career.

In those days there had effectively been two national police forces. One was the Philippine Constabulary (established earlier in the century by the Americans), the other the Integrated National Police, itself an amalgam of local police forces. The PC had always been closely tied to the Army. Its use against communist guerrillas and in enforcing the 1972 Martial Law decree had left it quasi-military in terms of training and orientation. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination could the PC have been described as a civilian force. From 1974 that role was filled by the INP, widely considered a poor cousin saddled with the dumb domestic cop jobs: tracing stolen vehicles, breaking dog-napping rings, directing traffic and tagging the bodies left by the PC after bank raids. It was as a humble PO2 in the INP that in the Seventies Rio Dingca had worked out of Station 5 in Ermita.

By 1975 Martial Law’s promise of discipline and law enforcement was visibly crumbling beneath corruption of such size and weight it could only have proceeded at the bidding – or with the indulgence – of Malacañang Palace. Views differed as to which of the incumbent First Couple was more to blame. A bonanza of unsecured ‘behest’ loans to the Marcoses’ business friends was awarded by order and drawn on public funds. Prestige construction projects abounded in the better-heeled areas of Manila, were completed, were burnt down for the insurance money, were re-started. Meanwhile, the ordinary policing of Ermita became a serious cop’s private minefield. Merely stopping the wrong vehicle for a traffic violation might cost one’s badge, investigating the legality of a night club one’s life. So smile benignly at the foreign pedophiles as they waddled about town with rented children in tow. Wish other tourists luck as they gambled in illegal dens. Sell them the various substances they were looking for before someone else did. Pretend not to know that men with bulbous fraternity rings drove in from middle class suburbs to a particular bar on M.H. del Pilar in order to drink, but also at some lost point in the small hours to pay a large sum of money, troop down into a hidden basement and watch truly terrible things (In or Out?). Each day turn so many blind eyes one’s head became a single cataract bestowing the same milky opacity in every direction. The frustration of it
compounded by guilt at what was constantly seen but denied vision, known but withheld from knowledge, and all for the sake of a bare living wage, had made it easy for Rio and his comrades to take the law into their own hands from time to time, just as the country’s rulers did lawlessness. Extra-judicial deaths were a way of fighting back. In those days by no means all the bodies lying in Rizal Park at night were fornicating or sleeping. In those days Intramuros was jammed solid with parked trucks laden with goods pilfered from the nearby Port area, some of them with corpses at the wheel. In those days Rio was a newly married man and Sita was pregnant with Eunice. It was no time to be changing his job. Be canny, he told himself. Coconut trees kept their heads by bending with the typhoon, and typhoons eventually blew themselves out. (He was, as has been observed, a man of banal precept.)

In the late Seventies Imelda Marcos, rejoicing in her role as Governor of Manila, fell ever more deeply into the grip of her ‘edifice complex’, the earliest symptoms of which had resulted in the Cultural Center in 1969. Eighty percent of that building’s $8.5m cost had gone on kickbacks. People praised it for its architecture, her for her patriotic vision. By 1981, casting around for the international status symbols Manila might be thought to lack, she decided that Cannes had had it all its own way for too long and with far less impressive sunsets than Manila Bay’s. Thus the Manila International Film Festival was hastily conceived and even more hastily born in the shape of the Film Center, designed as MIFF’s screening complex. It was a rush job, like many of Imelda’s grand projects. The contractors were given a bare seven months to put up from scratch a seven-storey Parthenon-style building the size of a shopping mall. The project was given top priority and Imelda’s personal supervision.

It was also given the services of PO2 Gregorio Dingca, ordered to keep the narrow foreshore road clear of unnecessary traffic so that dump trucks and delivery vehicles could come and go unhindered. Lighters of especially white sand stripped from a provincial beach appeared over the horizon. Projects all over Metro Manila came to a halt as cement was diverted to the Film Center. Over 5,000 labourers worked, ate and slept on the site in the traditional way of men who have come to the capital from afar and move from site to site, steadily building themselves out of a succession of temporary homes. They
built by day and they built by night under arc lamps, sleeping in shifts on sheets of cardboard as hods and hoppers manoeuvred among them.

Rio himself was on night shift when at 2.35 am on November 17th 1981, a day he was not going to forget, the top storey fell through. Work had proceeded so quickly that the concrete had not been allowed sufficient time to cure before the weight of another floor was added. This, together with skimpy bracing and underpinning, provoked a domino-like collapse of much of the structure into the main viewing theatre where a hundred day-shift workers were asleep. An immense tonnage of freshly poured cement, concrete and girders slammed down, together with workmen toppled from their collapsing scaffolds. A nightmarish rescue operation then began. As news of the disaster spread locally, people gathered to help. The new floor lay like a lumpy quilt over the ones below it with a series of jagged caverns beneath. The concrete was still so wet in places that workers had become embedded in it. Men dug frantically with shovels and hands to reach those trapped, uncovering here a leg, there the back of a head. Like them, Dingca was himself daubed with cement; his holster was caked with it, his boots weighed a ton. Even twenty-four hours after the collapse they were still pulling men alive out of air pockets and stairwells.