“Maybe that’s all I want,” Stallings said.
Eleven
After his third taxi ride, Booth Stallings made his fourth telephone call, this time from the lobby of the Manila Hotel. It was answered on the first ring by yet another Filipino-accented voice, a woman’s, who told him the pickup would take place in exactly six minutes, one hundred meters south of the hotel on Roxas Boulevard. Stallings was there at 12:08 P.M. And a minute later was climbing into the rear seat of a 1974 Toyota sedan that had a young Filipino driver and failed air-conditioning.
Next to the driver was his equally young wife, girlfriend or even, Stallings suspected, the other half of a New Peoples Army hit squad, which the Filipinos, with their love of nicknames, had dubbed sparrow teams. The pair gave Stallings a sweltering, aimless and mostly silent tour of Manila that lasted exactly fifty-nine minutes.
Stallings was surprised, if not shocked, by how much the sprawling city had decayed since he was last there in early 1988 with Otherguy Overby during their attempt to make a financial comeback after their losses in the stock market crash of 1987.
It was only after Overby explained his scheme again and again, step by step, that Stallings had agreed to buy into the syndicate then being formed to search for the five or fifty or even one hundred tons of gold bullion that, according to legend, had been buried, booby-trapped and abandoned by General Yamashita Tomoyuki, the Tiger of Malaya, as his Japanese army retreated from Manila in the early months of 1945.
Stallings, who considered himself something of an authority on the Philippines, argued that Yamashita’s Gold, as it was called, hadn’t been buried by Yamashita at all, but by Iwabuchi Sanji, the tough and ruthless Japanese rear admiral who reoccupied Manila after Yamashita fled.
It was the admiral who had waged the bitter house-to-house battle for Manila, destroying the city in the process. And it was this last utterly senseless battle that had given Admiral Iwabuchi the time he needed to bury the gold bullion.
Otherguy Overby had listened patiently to Stallings’s lengthy recitation. When it was over, he asked, “You really believe the gold’s there, don’t you?”
“You don’t?”
“I believe other people believe it’s there,” Overby said, “just like I believe other people believe in immaculate conception. And that’s what we’re buying into, Booth — pure blind faith.”
After three gold bars with Japanese stampings were discovered a month later at the site of the digging just north of Manila, the syndicate shares soared and Overby and Stallings promptly dumped theirs, realizing an 800 percent profit even after taking into account the cost of the three gold bars Overby had bought, doctored and with which he had salted the digging.
The young woman in the front seat who, Stallings guessed, couldn’t have been more than 20 or 21, finally turned around and asked, “How do you like our deterioration?”
“Seems to be coming along nicely.”
“You have been to Manila before?”
Stallings said he had been there in 1945, 1986 and 1988.
She turned back to the driver and said, “He was here with MacArthur!” The driver shrugged, muttered something that sounded like “Who cares?” and honked at an errant motor scooter.
The aimless tour ended at a large one-story house on the very edge of a vast dismal slum. Built of concrete blocks, the house boasted a sharply pitched roof of corrugated iron that was half-covered by a magnificent bougainvillea. A crude stake-and-chickenwire fence surrounded the hard-packed dirt in front of the house and served as a pen for two goats, three ducks, six hens and a rooster.
After the Toyota came to a stop, the young woman again turned to say, “She’s waiting for you.”
Stallings said, “Thanks for the ride,” left the car, finally figured out how to open the gate, went through it, carefully fastened it behind him, walked to the open front door and knocked.
A muscular Filipino of 35 or so, wearing a faded Batman T-shirt, appeared and greeted Stallings with a scowl and a long hard stare that was finally ended by an abrupt nod, which Stallings interpreted to mean, “Well, now that you’re here, come on in.”
Inside, the man vanished through another door and Stallings found himself in a square room with two dozen folding metal chairs arranged in three rows in front of an old flattop wooden desk. In the center of the desk was a telephone. Around the four edges of the desktop were scores of closely spaced cigarette burns. Against a wall to the left of the desk stood a padlocked steel cabinet, the kind that holds office supplies, and just to its left was an aging Toshiba copier.
A round-faced woman in her mid-forties with graying hair sat behind the desk. She wore a large, loose-fitting cotton dress patterned with giant sunflowers. Despite the tentlike dress, Stallings decided she wasn’t nearly as heavy as she was when he had last seen her in Hong Kong five years ago.
“How are you, Minnie?”
Minnie Espiritu leaned back in her chair, studied him gravely, then smiled and said, “Sit down, Booth.”
Stallings chose one of the folding chairs in the front row. “You’ve taken some weight off,” he said. “Looks good.”
“The cancer took it off and I look like hell.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Why would you? They went in and cut and claim they got it all, but...” She shrugged.
“Anything I can—”
“Nothing,” she said, not allowing him to finish.
There was a short silence until Stallings said, “Those two kids gave me a tour. Everything’s falling apart, isn’t it?”
She sighed first, then nodded and said, “They traded Marcos-style graft for the Aquino brand and now everybody’s shocked that there’s not a damn bit of difference. Our economy’s a basket case but all we do is squabble with Washington over those lousy military bases. You know something, Booth? We slid from a third world country into a fourth world catastrophe, right down there with Bangladesh, and nobody’s noticed and nobody’s cared.”
“How goes the revolution, Minnie?”
“The Berlin Wall almost squashed it. But we’re still struggling. Somebody has to — although I sometimes think if it was really up to me, I’d sell it all to the Japanese and let ’em turn it into golf courses and whorehouses.”
She sighed again and lit a cigarette after first offering the pack to Stallings, who declined with a headshake. When the cigarette was lit, she blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “What d’you want, Booth?”
“A passport.”
“What kind?”
“U.S.”
“Who for?”
Stallings reached into the side pocket of his tan poplin jacket, brought out a passport-size color photograph, rose and placed it on the desk. “Remember her?” he asked as he sat back down.
Minnie Espiritu leaned forward to peer at the photograph of Georgia Blue. “Sure. Miss Hardcase of 1986. The ex-Secret Service lady. She crossed you guys and did five years here in Welfareville. Then she cut herself a deal with Cory’s opposition and they got her sentence commuted.”
Minnie Espiritu looked up at Stallings, gave him a smile that was almost a grin and asked, “Is this business, romance or a little of both?”
“I’m of an extremely forgiving nature.”
“You’re also a damned old fool,” she said, glared at her cigarette, dropped it on the concrete floor and ground it out with a shoe. She was still grinding at it when she said, “It’ll cost you five thousand U.S.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s my last price.”
“What’s the quality?”
“Perfect. We found ourselves a degenerate gambler in your embassy, bought up his markers and sold ’em back to him for ten virgin passport blanks. We can offer you something that looks like it just came out of Washington.”