Greg's new book
December 16, 2011
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CHAPTER 1
Davao, Philippines, Sunday afternoon, February 2, 2003
Steve
bounded up the outside stairs, unlocked his kitchen door and faced
Julius hunched in front of the refrigerator glowering like an angry
wife. Meooow! When he bent to scoop him up, Julius scampered through the
dining room and stopped at the top of the inside stairs. He glared at
Steve’s lumbering feet with impatience. Julius wanted him downstairs.
The dining room air conditioner kicked on and blew cool air across
Steve’s damp swim briefs, but intuition chilled him more. Things
happened upstairs. Pots boiled over. Cooking oil smoked. Lavatories
flooded. Human lapses did not happen downstairs, yet something down
there required his attention, a varmint too big for Julius to handle on
his own.
Julius waited until Steve came within arm’s length before scurrying
down the stairs. He stopped at the bottom and stared through the open
door to the maid’s room, a room appended to the rear of the house.
Steve’s maid did not live in. After his employer allowed him to work
from his home, he used the room for his office. Amina did too.
Steve stood at the threshold. The office looked normal, yet it was
not. Something—sunlight, aroma, humidity, vapors—felt corrupted. Then he
saw it. One of the windows peeped open a crack. Neither he nor Amina
opened them, had never unlocked them. Someone had entered their space.
As he listened and waited, he prepared to pounce, braced to slam the
heel of his hand under the intruder’s nose a few millimeters short of
fatal, because killing someone upsets tranquility. Prepare, watch,
listen and wait, wait for the scumbag to come out of hiding.
The art of waiting is a struggle against the fear that nothing will
happen. Disappointment crept up. Steve stepped inside and saw the
bathroom door ajar. They kept it closed because with a cracked sewer
pipe the toilet sometimes stank. He planted his left foot and kicked the
door’s upper panel with his right. The wood split. Half the panel fell
when the door slammed against the wall and rebounded. Julius scurried up
the stairs.
Steve flipped on the bathroom light and whipped aside the shower
curtain. His improvised darkroom—he still shot film
occasionally—appeared undisturbed.
“Shit,” he hissed, “my cameras.”
He strode out, yanked open the wardrobe and looked over six thousand
dollars worth of photo gear. It seemed untouched, everything in its
place, his pistol too, mummified in its oily rag. A greater fear
displaced the rush of gratitude. Breaking and entering without looting, a
more sinister motive—something worth more than six grand.
Inspecting the windowsill and the floor beneath, Steve flushed with
anger—no broken glass. He raised the bamboo blind. A swirl of paint
flecks surrounded the unlocked latch. The burglar had had inside help.
Then he smiled, thinking the window had jammed and foiled the
treachery—the reason nothing had been stolen. To be sure, he slipped his
fingers into the crack and lifted.
The window opened.
He spun around and eyed his desk. The disarray of papers did not
alarm him. With Amina out of town, he had labored until late the night
before on his Apex fertilizer solicitation. Afterwards, he had spent an
hour or so scribbling ideas on how they might persuade Amina’s family to
accept their relationship. He stared at the yellow legal tablet with
his scrawled notes. A translucent stain splotched the top sheet. He felt
it. It was dry, not damp, oily, or sticky. He had not done that.
Someone had gotten in. He peered through the office door and listened
but could hear nothing over the whir of the room air conditioners.
Looking over his desk again, he saw that his laptop appeared
lopsided. When he lifted it, he spotted an access plate lying on the
desk. He turned over the computer and cussed. The hard drive was
missing.
With clenched teeth, he eased open the desk drawer, first exposing
pens and pencils in the tray, then the clutter beyond—homeless parts, a 9
mm short cartridge, mementos and leftovers—the jumble of stuff he
rifled through from time to time. It was impossible to determine if the
thief had. He pulled on the drawer and smiled at the stack of diskettes.
Fearful that his old laptop would crash and burn, as Amina’s had, he
backed it up every Friday night, updated its last will and testament.
The diskettes contained all his work except for the analysis of the
fertilizer bids, and they had all of Amina’s files, her “homework,” huge
databases he could not know about because Apex threatened to terminate
him if he got involved in Filipino politics. Even so, he had let Amina
use his computer until they got around to buying her a new one, and had
procrastinated. He poked the diskettes. Some contained a mixture of
Amina’s stuff and his. What’s in your files, Amina? Who's after you? The burglar knew. Steve supposed the thief had long gone, but he had to make certain.
He went out onto the stairwell. The wood creaked. The sound pinged
off the barren tile floor of the huge living room, unfurnished except
for the sofa at the rear where they watched CNN, and his photographs
hanging on the walls. The room looked bleak, like a photo gallery
without customers. He peered across the empty expanse to the
sliding-glass front door. The latch was horizontal. The burglar had not
gone out the front in plain view of the guard at the gate, no surprise
there. Racing upstairs, he checked the two unused bedrooms, then the
master bedroom and bath before yanking aside the blind beside their bed.
The compound looked empty as far as he could see.
He went outside to search the compound that Apex leased for its
expatriate employees. A twelve-foot high concrete wall with a solid
steel gate surrounded them. Steve and Amina lived in the second of four
houses in a row, flanked by the Van Der Zees nearest the gate and Brenda
on the other side. The fourth house, the guesthouse, had been vacant
for a while. An armed guard manned the gate, feminized it perhaps. The
Only Ladies Security Agency, a group of thirty-something petite women,
had kept delinquents out—until now.
Outside the compound, shacks squatted amidst bushes under towering
coconut trees, but the plot inside had been bulldozed level—no trees,
mounds or gullies, the few shrubs scrawny—no place to hide. Their row of
homes with white roofs and outsized eaves to provide shade from the
blistering Philippine sun looked like gigantic mushrooms that had
spawned on an oasis of grass.
Naked but for his swim briefs, the heat felt good after the canned
air inside, although without a breeze, the humidity clutched his skin.
Except for the room air-conditioners buzzing and groaning, the houses
seemed to be dozing between chores, waiting for their occupants to
return. That was typical for Sundays if the weather was nice. The thief
had chosen the perfect time, but he had not come through the gate. The
guards allowed no one into the compound unless a resident approved their
visit.
Looking around for anything strange, Steve ambled to the rear of his
house. Underneath the office window he saw gouges in the grass and the
impression of a boot heel. Cracked paint around the window sash
evidenced the burglar’s struggle to pry it open. Steve felt ill with a
sour stomach and clammy skin, as if some diseased son-of-a-bitch had
given him the flu. He walked toward the rear of the compound, inspecting
the wall, shrubbery and grass. In the back corner by the guesthouse, he
found a trampled bush, scuffmarks on the wall and deep scratches near
the top where the bastard came over with a grapple.
Steve trudged back to his house under the weight of certain trouble.
Apex lawyers enjoined its foreign employees from getting involved in
Filipino politics, yet he slept with a dissident who worked for the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front. As if that weren’t joining enough, some of
his backup diskettes had both his and Amina’s files. He had to report
the theft to Apex Davao. Haradji, chief of security, would come. The
bald-headed snoop would take his backup for critical executive review
because with nothing else taken it appeared the thief had come for
Apex’s secrets. And when the critical executives discovered an MILF
subversive had been using a company computer, there would be no more
enjoining, no more job, no company house, company paid utilities or
company truck. That would end his dumb procrastinating. It had been near
three months since Amina’s computer had crashed. It was not someone’s
flu; his dilly-dallying had made him sick.
If Julius had not alarmed him, he would have had a beer and a shower
before going to the office and that’s what he would do, act as if he
had nothing to hide. He needed time. He had to wait for Gerrit Van Der
Zee to come home and use his computer to scrub his backup clean of
dissidence. What dissidence, he wondered. Amina prepared legal documents
for the MILF negotiators seeking autonomy over Moro ancestral lands.
And she campaigned to get Moro women a role in the peace talks. She did
not need huge databases for those tasks.
While he showered, Steve tried to figure the theft. Someone had paid
his maid to unlock the window, and if not her, one of the guards. The
thief intended to copy files, not his, he held no secrets, but he had to
take the hard drive because the old laptop used diskettes, not CDs. He
came for Amina’s files, her personal stuff; he violated her.
Steve thought of Rita, violated, raped, sodomized. Blood surged from
his toes to brain. His head throbbed. He thrust his fist at the shower
wall but snapped back his arm as his knuckles pecked the tile. Nearly
two decades had passed since he near killed Rita’s stepfather. They had
sent him to the Benedictine military school for that. The monks made him
pray for his own deliverance and the salvation of assholes. That
quenched his anger. He perfected the art of not connecting, celebrated
life at arm’s length, always stopping a millimeter short of getting
involved in someone else’s issues—his chicken soup recipe for serenity.
Now someone spilled his soup and he had forgotten how to pray. He might
never get the lid back on the pot.
Steve
looked out the window at the Van Der Zee’s carport. Gerrit’s truck was
still not there, but he phoned anyway hoping Isabela might be home.
“Casa Gerrit.”
Steve sighed. “Hi, Profesora. Is Gerrit around? I need a favor.”
“Gerrit went downtown but he’ll be back soon. Come on over.”
Steve
sorted through his backup and put several diskettes in his pocket along
with some blanks. He tore off the first several pages from the yellow
legal pad, stuffed them into a manila envelope and filed it with his
personal papers. No matter the mysterious splotch on his notes might be
DNA-laden drool. He did not want the company to know about his troubles
with his lover’s family. Then he called security at Apex Davao and
reported the burglary to the duty clerk.
Through the front doors, Steve saw Isabela sprawled on the living
room carpet reading a book. Margreet, her eighteen-month old daughter,
slept on a blanket beside her. He tapped on the glass. Isabela got up
and slid the door open.
“Hola,” she whispered. “Come on in.” She put her finger to her lips. “Margreet’s napping. You want a beer.”
“Sure, thanks.”
As Isabela climbed the stairs to the kitchen, Steve wrestled his
eyes away from the curves of her perfect behind to look elsewhere. The
four houses had identical floor plans, but unlike Steve’s bleak living
room, the Van Der Zee’s looked like a library. Gerrit, a Dutch
agronomist, had row upon row of tomes about bugs and plant diseases.
Isabela, a Moche Indian from Northern Peru and a professor of history,
had scores of texts about the colonization of indigenous peoples, her
specialty. When Apex moved Gerrit from Peru to the Philippines, Isabela
began to study the Moro-Spanish wars that lasted more than three
centuries. She joined Amina’s campaign for the Moro cause. Listening to
Isabela and Amina discuss history, Steve felt as if he was taking a
graduate course in discontent, but he did not get involved.
Isabela returned with a bottle of San Miguel and a glass of chicha,
her homemade Peruvian concoction of fermented corn, a somewhat sour
joy-juice. She handed the beer to Steve and sat on the floor. Steve sat
close by so they could talk without disturbing Margreet,
“How is Amina doing at the MILF conference?”
“She can’t call me until tomorrow when she gets to Manila.”
“What’s she going to do in Manila?”
“On Tuesday, the Islamic Studies Institute has a symposium on women.
She’s giving a presentation about Moro women as the traditional
negotiators in settling blood feuds and her arguments for their being
involved in the peace talks.”
“She’s a determined woman.”
“Yep. Hey, do you know how to interrogate a cat?”
Isabela smiled. “What’s Julius done this time?”
“Someone broke into my house. Julius is the only witness.”
“Que!” Isabela straightened and glanced at Margreet. “When? How’d he get in?”
Steve shrugged. “Sometime between ten and four while I was swimming
at the Insular Hotel. He came over the back wall by the guesthouse.”
Isabela looked at her daughter again, leaned close to Steve and whispered. “How’d he get in the house?”
“He climbed through my office window. Someone unlocked it.”
“Do you think Posey did it?”
Steve did not want to accuse his maid, although she had been acting
skittish lately. “Can’t tell how long it’s been unlocked, could be
someone else, a workman maybe or one—”
His cell phone vibrated. He plucked it from his shirt pocket. “Steve
here…Hi Haradji…Yeah, came over the back wall and took my hard drive,
nothing else. He ignored a fortune in camera equipment.” Steve waited.
“Well, he could have swiped a beer, but I don’t think he left my
office….Okay, I’ll tell the guard to wait.” Steve clicked off and
worried that he had called security too soon. If Haradji arrived before
Gerrit returned, there would be bad problems.
“What’s Haradji going to do?”
“He’ll be over to interrogate the guard after he has a chat with Stillwell.”
“What’s the general manager got to do with this?”
“Stillwell is going to think that one of the company’s competitors
is behind the burglary.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He
frowned and gazed at Isabela.
“What’s the matter?”
“Haradji
will be questioning you and Gerrit. You know Amina uses my computer. I
don’t want Haradji to know that. Let’s keep Amina out of this.”
“No problem,” she whispered. “I know nothing. I’ve nothing to tell
Haradji, and neither does Gerrit. Gerrit doesn’t like him.”
Margreet stirred as they heard the guard opening the gate. Isabela
picked up her daughter and they went to look out the front door. When a
pickup truck pulled inside, Steve exhaled. “Good, it’s Gerrit. I need to
use his computer.”
Gerrit watched Steve transfer files and delete the originals. “Those are Amina’s files, aren’t they?”
Steve nodded.
“What’s in them?”
“I don’t know.” He turned and looked at Gerrit. “I didn’t want to know for fear I’d be getting involved in the insurgency.”
“Now you’re involved, I’d say.”
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