1993 - The Blue Afternoon (14 page)

He rolled the boy over again, and reached for his scalpel, about to pull back once more the curtains on the body’s baffling fragile treasures. He had read recently of certain American doctors who were recommending the use of rubber gloves during operations—he could practically hear Cruz’s incredulous scoffing. Even he, Salvador Carriscant, proud herald of all that was new in medicine, had some doubts about that course of action—what would happen to your ‘touch’, the magic of the surgeon’s gift? That unique combination, as he had heard it expressed, of a lacemaker’s fingers and a seaman’s grip? What was the point of honing a skill if you then wilfully smothered it in rubber? It was like those Arab princesses hidden behind black veils. Why should a beautiful woman not bestow…

And he thought of the American woman again, of course. Hardly an hour seemed to go by these days without her coming, unbidden, to mind. Something about the quality of her gaze, the geometry of her face, her odd colouring, had acted upon him with fiercesome, uncompromising effectiveness. Never before, never before…Like an inert liquid galvanised into crazy effervescence by a strange catalyst. And here she was, in his city…This was what unmanned him: he felt that curious weakness come upon him again, flowing out from some new gland in the base of his spine and spreading through his body like a tree.

He set down his scalpel with a rattle, and bracing his arms, hung his head over the boy’s pale ruined corpse. Jesus Christ, he said in unfamiliar prayer, heaven help me.

“Salvador, what’s wrong?” Pantaleon stepped into the room, anxious, concerned to find him this way.

“I’m fine, fine,” he said straightening. “Just a little tired, I think.” He put the scalpel down. “This can wait.”

He turned. Pantaleon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

“What is it?” Carriscant said. “Can I have a discreet word?”

Carriscant had one of the hospital porters drive him down to the docks where the quays on both banks of the Pasig were as clotted as ever with shipping—steamships, square—and lateen-rigged schooners, junks and ferry boats, fat shallow-draught paddle steamers that could negotiate the silty reaches of the river upstream and the great wallowing cascos, barges cum houseboats, homes for the river’s transient population, moored four or five deep along the wharves. He was happy to be out of the hospital, quite content to do this favour for Pantaleon, as it gave him an opportunity both to compose himself and also scrutinise every European and American he saw in the passing carriages in the fervid hope of glimpsing that pale freckled face again and feeling the cool gaze of those candid brown eyes…

The carriage pulled up at the foot of a narrow lane, Calle Crespo in Quiapo, where it seemed every second shop was a tinsmith’s and the air vibrated dully with the sound of hammers on galvanised iron. As he descended Carriscant saw a new illuminated advertisement across the junction: coney island shooting gallery—clearly the Americans were here to stay. At number 89, Crespo, he found the sign he was looking for: between ‘Sam. M. Goodforth, marine surveyor’ and ‘Pablo Eulegio, hat cleaner’ was his destination—‘Udo Leys, tobacco merchant’.

After Annaliese’s father, Gerhardt Leys, and her sister had returned to Germany her uncle Udo had stayed on and had stoically watched the family fortunes remorselessly decline. Carriscant climbed the stairs and pushed open the office door. There was no secretary in the vestibule and in the office itself Udo was nowhere to be seen. The walls were lined with empty glass humidors and extravagant posters for Manila cigars. In the 1870
s
and 1880
s
the brothers had had the field more or less to themselves. Now there were eight cigar and cigarette factories in Manila alone: no-one needed to buy from Udo Leys any longer and he had been obliged to diversify, operating an opportunistic import-export business, waiting for a need to manifest itself and then racing desperately to supply it, whether it was bicycles or perfume, cattle feed or fancy goods. The last time Carriscant had seen him, Udo had told him in a conspiratorial whisper that he had seventy-five upright pianos in a warehouse in Tondo. “Think of all those new American schools,” he said, his voice ripe with the allure of profit, “all those assembly rooms…Who will play the
Stars and Stripes
? They’ll be gone within a week.” Carriscant smiled, remembering the old man’s impregnable conviction, and wandered to the window. The noise here was infernal: in the courtyard below ten men were making buckets.

He turned at the sound of a door opening and saw Udo emerge from a small cupboard at the rear of the office carrying a chamber pot, the buttons on his flies still undone. He looked unwell, a stout, compressed old man with a florid, noduled face and a small ungroomed bristling moustache that looked as if it were trying to grow in four directions simultaneously.

“Ah, Salvador, my boy, what a pleasant surprise,” he said. “One second and I’m with you.”

He limped to the window, opened it and flung the contents of the chamber pot over the bucket makers. The hammering never faltered.

Udo shrugged. “Those shit bastards are meant to stop at lunchtime, but who cares?” He spoke English with a marked German accent. Carriscant shook his extended left hand as the right still clutched the chamber pot: he was fond of the old man but Annaliese liked to keep contact to a minimum. Udo set the pot on the desk and wiped some drops of moisture off his fingers on to the blotter. He opened a drawer and offered Carriscant a cigar, which he declined.

Udo waggled his plump fingers over the display, selected a cigar and rolled it sensuously under his veined and bulbous nose.

“La Flor de la Isabella,” he said, wistfully. “As good as the finest Havana. Have I ever told you that?”

“Emphatically,” Carriscant said. “How are the pianos going?”

“Slowly. Did I tell you I was opening a laundry?”

They speculated a while on the inevitable success of this venture before Carriscant told him why he had called. A friend, he said, had ordered a piece of industrial machinery from France and he needed it shipped to Manila, but with discretion. This friend was concerned that as a Filipino he might not be permitted to import such a component.

“What is it?” Udo asked. “A Howitzer?”

“An engine. It’s…it’s a special kind of engine. For a type of automobile.”

“Is he building a motor car? Very shrewd. I saw one the other day, down here at the docks. Astonishing. German, of course.”

“Something like that. And he can’t afford to pay the duty.”

Udo assured him that the whole matter was very straightforward. It might cost a little extra but he knew many agreeable ships’ captains and many shipping firms who would be happy to oblige. If the engine could be conveyed to Hong Kong then from that point forward the maximum discretion could be assured.

Udo limped to the top of the stairs to see Carriscant off.

“What’s wrong, Udo?”

“Gout, or something. My leg’s changing colour. Turning blue.”

“Come to the hospital, I’ll have a look at it.”

“You’ll have it off, more likely.” He looked at him dolefully. “No disrespect, Salvador, but I don’t trust you lot.”

He called down the stairs: “How’s Annaliese?”

“Ah…Well. Very well.”

“I’d love to see her again.”

“Of course, Udo. Very soon. Thanks for your help.”

Paton Bobby’s office was on the second floor of the Ayuntamiento, Manila’s town hall, a huge over-decorated coral and white building on the Plaza Mayor, adjacent to the cathedral. Bobby sat behind his desk, out of uniform, wearing a light tweed suit and a bow tie. The effect was surprising: as if the burly law officer had turned into a university professor or music teacher. From his chair Carriscant could see one of the cathedral’s domed towers with a seagull sitting preening itself on the top of the surmounting cross. Bobby was informing him of the series of unsatisfactory interviews he had undertaken with the men of Ephraim Ward’s platoon: it seemed unlikely now, he reluctantly concluded, that Ward had been murdered by a fellow soldier.

The gull hunched itself into the air and soared off beyond the frame of the window. “Somebody got him, though. He left his post and somebody fucking got him.”

Carriscant shifted in his seat: Ephraim Ward’s fate seemed remote from him now.

“He definitely wasn’t shot, was he? Someone couldn’t have gouged out a bullet? You thought he was stabbed, right?” Bobby scratched his skull through his thin hair with the end of a pencil.

“I’m sure. By the way, Cruz has still not returned the heart. The liver, but not the heart.” Carriscant closed his eyes briefly and tried to set his tone of voice to neutral. “My wife,” he began slowly, “my wife met an American woman at one of her church functions the other night but she’s completely forgotten her name. A young woman, late twenties, tall, freckled with reddish brown hair. Apparently”

“Jesus, Carriscant, do you know how many American women there are out here now? Wives, nurses, missionaries, teachers…Must be hundreds.”

“I told her. She wanted me to ask all the same…” He paused. “Perhaps she has a position of authority, some rank. She mentioned the Malacanan Palace. Some sporting club?”

Bobby thought. “Reddish hair, you say. Quite a striking woman?”

“Yes. I mean, as far as I can gather.”

“Now you mention it, it sounds rather like Miss Caspar. What’s her name? Unusual…Yeah, Miss Rudolfa Caspar. Rudolfa, that’s it.”

“Miss?”

“Headmistress of the Gerlinger school. The new one in Binondo.”

“Thank you, I’ll tell my wife.”

The conversation returned once again to Ward’s murder, Carriscant suggesting it could be any criminal from the Tondo slums, Bobby reluctant to concede it might be as random as that. They walked to the door and Bobby followed him on to the wide marble landing above the main staircase.

“But why dump him miles away?” Bobby was saying. “Why not leave him where he fell?”

A uniformed man walked by, stopped and turned. “Hello, Bobby,” he said. “Any news?”

Bobby introduced him to Carriscant—a Colonel Sieverance. He had a pleasant, boyish face and a thin moustache, a little patchy. If that was the best quality bristle your face could produce, Carriscant thought, then it would be better to go clean-shaven. Colonel Sieverance seemed remarkably young to hold such an elevated rank, and there was something familiar about him too, Carriscant thought…Perhaps they had met before, somewhere.

“Ward used to be in the colonel’s regiment,” Bobby explained. “Dr Carriscant examined the body—he has been most helpful.”

Sieverance smiled, he had an engaging, enthusiastic manner, not in the least warlike or military, Carriscant thought. “A doctor?” he said, gladly. “Are you a physician, sir?”

“—I’m a surgeon, I’m afraid.”

“Damn. Why can’t the US army hire a decent physician?” He grinned ruefully. “Thought you’d made my day. Nice to see you. So long, Bobby.”

“He’s on the Governor’s staff, now,” Bobby said, watching Sieverance stride off down a corridor. “Agreeable fellow.”

T
he fish are jumping,” Pantaleon said, “time to dig for worms.”

Carriscant cut into the flesh of the loin. It was pulpy and oedematous, which made him worried. The man on the operating table, a money-changer from Binondo, had been one of Cruz’s patients who had returned to the hospital after being discharged, complaining of pains in his abdomen and of a cloudiness in his urine. Carriscant cut through the integument and separated the muscles. He paused while the nurses swabbed and sponged.

“What did Cruz do with this fellow, Panta?” he asked.

Pantaleon checked his notes. “He thought it might be malaria, or else—you’ll like this—
obstinate constipation
.”

“Good God.”

“He applied a hot fomentation over iodide of potash. Look, you can see the remains of the blistering.”

Carriscant felt disgusted. “You know, sometimes I feel we might as well be living in caves fighting dinosaurs. This man’s dying of perinephritis and Cruz is smearing ointments on him to blister his skin.”

“Don’t forget the morphia given as a suppository.”

“You’re joking!”

“And a diet of beef tea.”

Carriscant laughed loudly, joined by his theatre nurses. You had to laugh, he supposed. If people knew what misplaced trust in their physicians subjected them to…

The incision was held apart by retractors and Carriscant looked at the exposed organ. What he could see of it was an unhealthy grey, there was a lot of fat and fibrous tissue obscuring much of the surface. He inserted his finger into the cavity, feeling between the kidney and the diaphragm. There was a spurt of pus that spattered on to his sleeve. He smelt its farinaceous sweetness, noting that it was a brackish green in colour. He had found the abscess, about the size of a tangerine, he guessed.

“How’s the new project going?” he asked Pantaleon as he stitched the wall of the abscess cavity to the lip of the wound.

“Very well. I must say the standard of local carpentry is astonishing. They’ll make anything.”

“I know.” Carriscant pulled away with his fingers loose sloughs of cellular tissue and shook them off into a bowl. “I remember having some marquetry replaced by a fellow who lived in Tondo. Just a little shack really. This stuff had been done in Japan. When he’d finished you couldn’t tell the difference.”

“You should see the propeller blades, exquisite. How much longer? Pulse is a bit thready.”

“Five minutes…Dressing forceps, Nurse.”

Carriscant pulled away more of the adipose tissue. “Depends if there’s a fistula, I suppose.” He felt with his finger. “Don’t think so.”

“I hope to have all the panels done by next week.”

“Really? Fast work…Lot of suppuration here.”

He washed out the abscess cavity with a solution of carbolic acid and inserted a drainage tube. He had found out where the Gerlinger school was, where the American woman worked. Bad idea to wait there while the children were studying. Later in the day perhaps. He closed up the wound with some sutures. One of the nurses laid a large wadding of soaked cotton wool over the wound.