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Chapter 1

The Setting

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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