Cryptonomicon (106 page)

They get into their first serious firefight about half an hour later, against a platoon of Nipponese Air Force troops holed up in a stone bank at the vee formed by a couple of intersecting avenues. Lieutenant Morales comes up with an extremely complicated plan that involves breaking up into three smaller groups. Morales takes three men forward into the cover of a large fountain that sits in the middle of the square. There, they are immediately trapped by heavy fire from the Nipponese. They squat and huddle behind the shelter of the fountain for about a quarter of an hour, at
which point an artillery shell glides in from the north, a black pellet easing downwards in a flawless parabolic trajectory, and scores a direct hit on the fountain. It turns out to be a high-explosive shell, which does not blow up until it hits something—the fountain, in this case. The padre gives Lieutenant Morales and his men last rites from a safe distance of a hundred yards or so, which is as good a place as any, since there is nothing left of their physical bodies.

Bobby Shaftoe is voted new squad leader by acclamation. He leads them around the square, giving the whole intersection a wide berth. Way up north somewhere, one of The General’s batteries is doggedly trying to zero in on that fucking bank, blowing up half the neighborhood in the process. A Piper Cub banks overhead doing lazy figure-eights, offering suggestions over the radio: “Almost there—a little to the left—no, too far—now bring it in a little bit.”

It takes Shaftoe’s group a whole day to make another mile’s progress towards Malate. They could get there in no time by simply running up the middle of major streets, but the artillery fire is coming in heavier and heavier as they head north. Worse, much of it consists of antipersonnel rounds with radar proximity fuses that blow up while they’re still several yards above the ground, the better to spray shrapnel all over the place. The air bursts look like the splayed foliage of burned coconut palms.

Shaftoe sees no point in getting them all killed. So they take it a block at a time, sprinting one by one from doorway to doorway, and scouting the buildings with great care in case there are any Nips lying in wait to shoot at them from the windows. When that happens, they have to hunker down, scout the place out, count windows and doors, make guesses about the building’s floor plan, send men out to check various lines of sight. Usually, it is not really difficult to root the Nips out of these buildings, but it is time-consuming.

They hole up in a half-burned apartment building around sunset, and take turns getting a couple of hours’ sleep. Then they push on through the night, when the artillery fire is less intense. Bobby Shaftoe gets the whole remaining squad, nine men including the padre, into Malate
at about four in the morning. By the time dawn breaks, they have reached the street where the Altamiras live, or lived. They arrive just in time to see the entire apartment block being systematically blasted into rubble by round after high-explosive round.

No one runs out of it; no cries or screams can be heard in between the explosions. The place is empty.

They break down the barricaded door of a drugstore across the street and have a chat with the sole living occupants: a seventy-five-year-old woman and a six-year-old boy. The Nipponese came through the neighborhood a couple of days ago, she says, heading north, in the direction of Intramuros. They herded the women and children out of the buildings and marched them in one direction. They pulled out all of the men, and the boys over a certain age, and marched them off in another. She and her grandson escaped by hiding in a cupboard.

Shaftoe and his squad emerge from the drugstore onto the street, leaving the padre behind to grease some heavenly skids. Fifteen seconds later, two of them are killed by shrapnel from an antipersonnel round that detonates above the street nearby. The remainder of the squad backs right into a group of marauding Nipponese stragglers coming around the corner, and a completely insane close-quarters firefight ensues. They have the Nips heavily outgunned, but half of Shaftoe’s men are too stunned to fight. They are accustomed to the jungle. Some of them have never been to the city before, even in peacetime, and they just stand there gaping. Shaftoe ducks into a doorway and begins to make a fantastic amount of noise with his trench broom. The Nips start throwing grenades around like firecrackers, doing as much damage to themselves as to the Huks. The engagement is ridiculously confused, and doesn’t really end until another artillery round comes in, kills several of the Nips, and leaves the rest so stunned that Shaftoe is able to walk out in the open and dispatch them with shots from his Colt.

They drag two of their wounded into the drugstore and leave them there. One other man is dead. They are down to five fighting men and one increasingly busy padre. Their firefight has brought down another barrage of antipersonnel
artillery, and so the best they can do for the rest of the day is find a basement to hide in, and try to get some sleep.

Shaftoe sleeps hardly at all, and so when night falls he takes a couple of benzedrine tablets, shoots a bit of morphine to take the edge off, and leads his squad out into the streets. The next neighborhood to the north is called Ermita. It has a lot of hotels. After Ermita is Rizal Park. The walls of Intramuros rise up from Rizal Park’s northern edge. After Intramuros is the Pasig River, and MacArthur’s on the far side of the Pasig. So if Shaftoe’s son and the rest of the Altamiras are still alive, they have to be somewhere in the couple of miles between here and Fort Santiago on the near bank of the Pasig.

Shortly after they cross into the neighborhood of Ermita, they happen upon a stream of blood trickling out of a doorway, across the sidewalk, into the gutter. They kick down the door of the building and discover that its ground floor is filled with the corpses of Filipino men—several dozen in all. All of them have been bayoneted. One is still alive. Shaftoe and the Huks carry him out onto the sidewalk and begin looking for some place to put him while the padre circulates through the building, touching each corpse briefly and muttering something in Latin. When he comes out, he is bloody up to the knees.

“Any women? Children?” Shaftoe asks him. The padre shakes his head no.

They are only a few blocks from the Philippine General Hospital, so they carry the wounded man in that direction. Coming around the corner they see that the hospital’s buildings have been half destroyed by MacArthur’s artillery, and the grounds are covered with human beings laid out on sheets. Then they realize that the men circulating around the area, carrying rifles, are Nipponese troops. A couple of shots are fired in their direction. They have to duck into an alley and set the wounded man down. A few moments later, a trio of Nipponese soldiers appears in hot pursuit. Shaftoe has had enough time to think this one through, so he lets them get a good few paces into the alley. Then he and the Huks kill them silently, with blades. By the time reinforcements have been sent out after them, Shaftoe and his group have disappeared
into the alleyways of Ermita, which in many places are running red with the blood of slaughtered Filipino men and boys.

“S
OMEONE IS TRYING TO SEND YOU A MESSAGE,”
A
T
torney Alejandro says, scant minutes into his first interview with his new client.

Randy’s ready for it. “Why does everyone here have these incredibly cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don’t you people have e-mail?”

The Philippines are one of those countries where “Attorney” is used as a title, like “Doctor.” Attorney Alejandro has a backswept grey pompadour that gets a little curly down around the nape of his neck which, as he probably well knows, makes him look distinguished in a nineteenth-century-statesman kind of way. He smokes a lot, which bothers Randy hardly a bit since he has been in places, for a couple of days, where everyone smokes. You don’t even need to bother with cigarettes and matches in a jail. Just breathe, and you get the equivalent of one or two packs a day worth of slightly pre-owned tar and nicotine.

Attorney Alejandro decides to act as if Randy has never made this last comment. He attends to a bit of business with his cigarette. If he wants that cigarette up and burning between his lips, he can make it happen without even moving his hands; suddenly it’s just there, as if he had been hiding it, already lit, inside his mouth. But if he needs to introduce a caesura into the conversation, he can turn the selection, preparation, and ignition of a cigarette into something that in terms of solemn ritual is just this side of the
cha-no-yu
. It must knock ’em dead in the courtroom. Randy’s feeling better already.

“What do you suppose the message is? That they are capable of killing me if they want to? Because I already know that. I mean, shit! How much does it cost to have a man killed in Manila?”

Attorney Alejandro frowns fiercely. He has taken this question the wrong way: as a suggestion that he is the kind of guy who would know such a thing. Of course, given that he was personally recommended by Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, he probably is just precisely that kind of guy, but it is probably rude to aver this. “Your imagination is running wild,” he says. “You have blown the death penalty aspect of this thing all out of proportion.” As Attorney Alejandro probably expected, this display of blitheness renders Randy speechless long enough for him to execute another bit of patter with a cigarette and a stainless-steel lighter encrusted with military regalia. Attorney Alejandro has mentioned, twice, that he was a colonel in the Army and lived for years in the States. “We reinstated the death penalty in ’95 after a hiatus of ten years approximately.” The word approximately crackles and explodes from his mouth like a spark from a Tesla coil. Filipinos enunciate better than Americans and they know it.

Randy and Alejandro are meeting in a high, narrow room somewhere in between the jail and the courtroom in Makati. A prison guard loitered in the room with them for a few minutes, hunched over with sheepishness, leaving only when Attorney Alejandro went over and spoke to him in low, fatherly tones and pressed something into his hand. There is an open window, and the sound of honking horns comes through it from the street two stories below. Randy’s half expecting Doug Shaftoe and his comrades to rappel down from the roof and enter suddenly in glittering and screaming cloaks of broken window-glass and extract Randy while Attorney Alejandro heaves his bulk against this half-ton nara table and uses it to block the door shut.

Coming up with fantasies like this one helps to break the tedium of being in jail, and probably does a lot to explain Randy’s jailmates’ taste in videos, which they cannot actually watch but which they talk about incessantly in a mixture of English and Tagalog that he now almost understands. The videos, or rather the lack of them, has given rise to some kind of retrograde media-evolution phenomenon: an oral storytelling rooted in videos that these guys once saw. A particularly affecting description of, for example, Stallone in
Rambo III
cauterizing his abdominal bullet wound by igniting
a torn-open rifle cartridge and shooting gunpowder-flames through it will plunge all of the men into several moments of reverent awe. It is about the only quiet time Randy gets now, and he has consequently begun cooking up a new plan: he will exploit his Californian provenance by asserting that he has seen martial-arts films that have not yet been bootlegged to the streets of Manila, and narrate them in terms so eloquent that the entire jailhouse will for a few minutes become a place of monastic contemplation, like the idealized Third-World prison that Randy wishes he were in. Randy read
Papillon
cover-to-cover a couple of times when he was a kid and has always imagined Third-World prisons as places of supreme and noble isolation: steep tropical sunlight setting the humid and smoky air aglow as it slants in over iron bars close-set in thick masonry walls. Sweaty, shirtless steppenwolves prowling back and forth in their cells, brooding about where it all went wrong. Prison journals furtively scribbled on cigarette papers.

Instead, the jail where they’ve been keeping Randy is just a really crowded urban society where some of the people cannot actually leave. Everyone there is extremely young except for Randy and an ever-rotating population of drunks. It makes him feel old. If he sees one more video-addled boy strutting around in a bootleg “Hard Rock Cafe” t-shirt and fronting hand gestures from American gangsta rappers, he may actually have to become a murderer.

Attorney Alejandro says, rhetorically, “Why ‘Death to Drug Smugglers’?” Randy hasn’t asked why, but Attorney Alejandro wants to share something with him about why. “The Americans were very angry that some people in this part of the world persisted in selling them the drugs that they want so very badly.”

“Sorry. What can I say? We suck. I know we suck.”

“And so as a gesture of friendship between our peoples, we instituted the death penalty. The law specified two, and only two, methods of execution,” Attorney Alejandro continues, “the gas chamber and the electric chair. As you can see, we took our lead—in this as in many other things, some wise and some foolish—from the Americans. Now, at the time, we did not have a gas chamber anywhere in the Philippines.
A study was made. Plans were drawn up. Do you have any idea what is involved in constructing a proper gas chamber?” Attorney Alejandro now goes off on a fairly lengthy riff, but Randy finds it hard to concentrate until something in Attorney Alejandro’s tone tells him that a coda is approaching. “ . . . prison service said, ‘How can you expect us to construct this space-age facility when we have not even the funds to purchase rat poison for the overcrowded prisons we already have?’ As you can see they were just whining for more funding. You see?” Attorney Alejandro raises his eyebrows significantly and sucks in his cheeks, as he reduces a good two or three centimeters of a Marlboro to ash. That he feels it necessary to explain the underlying motivations of the prison service so baldly seems to imply that his estimate of Randy’s intelligence is none too favorable, which given the way he was arrested at the airport might be fair enough. “So this left only the electric chair. But do you know what happened to the electric chair?”

“I can’t imagine,” Randy says.

“It burned. Faulty wiring. So we had no way to kill people.” All of a sudden Attorney Alejandro, who has betrayed no amusement thus far, remembers to laugh. It is perfunctory, and by the time Randy has bestirred himself to show a little polite amusement, it’s over and Alejandro’s back to being serious. “But Filipinos are highly adaptable.

“Once again,” Attorney Alejandro says, “we looked to America. Our friend, our patron, our big brother. You are familiar with the expression
Ninong
? Of course you are, I forget you have spent a whole lotta time here.” Randy is always impressed by the mixture of love, hate, hope, disappointment, admiration, and derision that Filipinos express towards America. Having actually been a part of the United States at one point, they can take digs at it in a way that’s usually reserved for lifelong U.S. citizens. The failure of the United States to protect them from Nippon after Pearl Harbor is still the most important thing that ever happened to them. Probably just slightly more important than MacArthur’s return to the country a few years later. If that doesn’t inculcate a love-hate relationship…

“The Americans,” Attorney Alejandro continues, “were
also reeling under the expense of executing people and having embarrassments with their electric chairs. Maybe they should have jobbed it out.”

“Pardon me?” Randy says. He gets the idea that Attorney Alejandro is just checking to see if he’s awake.

“Jobbed it out. To the Nipponese. Gone to Sony or Panasonic or one of those guys and said (now reverting to a perfect American-yokel accent), ‘We just love the VCRs that y’all’ve been sellin’ us—why don’t you make an electric chair that actually works?’ Which the Nips would have done—it is the kind of thing they would excel at—and then after they sold Americans all of the electric chairs they needed, we could have purchased some factory seconds at cut-rate.” Whenever Filipinos slag America in earshot of an American, they usually try to follow it up with some really vile observations about the Nipponese, just to put everything in perspective.

“Where are we going with this?” Randy says.

“Please forgive my digression. The Americans had gone over to executing prisoners by lethal injection. And so we have once again decided to take a cue from them. Why didn’t we just hang people? We have plenty of rope—this is where rope comes from, you know—”

“Yes.”

“—or shoot them? We have plenty of guns. But no, the congress wanted to be modern like Uncle Sam, and so lethal injection it was. But then we sent a delegation to see how the Americans lethally injected people, and you know what they reported when they came back?”

“It takes all kinds of special equipment.”

“It takes all kinds of special equipment, and a special room. This room has not yet been constructed. So, you know how many people we have on death row now?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“More than two hundred and fifty. Even if the room were built tomorrow, most of them could not be executed, because it is illegal to carry out the execution until one year has passed since the final appeal.”

“Well, wait a minute! If you’ve lost your final appeal, then why wait a whole year?”

Attorney Alejandro shrugs.

“In America, they usually do the final appeal while the prisoner is lying strapped to the table with the needle in his arm.”

“Maybe they wait in case there is a miracle during that year. We are a very religious people—even some of the death row prisoners are very religious. But they are now begging to be executed. They cannot stand the wait any longer!” Attorney Alejandro laughs and slaps the table. “Now, Randy, all of these two hundred and fifty people are poor. All of them.” He stops significantly.

“I hear you,” Randy says. “Did you know that my net worth is less than zero, by the way?”

“Yes, but you are rich in friends and connections.” Attorney Alejandro starts frisking himself. A picture of a fresh pack of Marlboros appears over his head in a little thought-balloon. “I recently received a telephone call from a friend of yours in Seattle.”

“Chester?”

“Yes, he’s the one. He has money.”

“You could say that.”

“Chester is seeking ways to put his financial resources to work on your behalf. He feels frustrated and unsure of himself because while his resources are quite significant, he does not know the fine points of how to wield them in the context of the Philippine judicial system.”

“That’s him all over. Is there any chance that you might be able to give him some pointers?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Let me ask you this,” Randy says. “I understand that financial resources, wielded properly, could free me. But what if some rich person wanted to use his money to send me to death row?”

This one stops Attorney Alejandro dead for a minute. “There are more efficient ways for a wealthy person to kill someone. For the reasons I have described, a would-be assassin would first look somewhere outside of the Philippine capital-punishment apparatus. That is why, in my opinion as your lawyer, what is really going on here is that—”

“Someone is trying to send me a message.”

“Exactly. You see, now you are beginning to understand.”

“Well, I’m wondering if you could give me a ballpark estimate of how long I’m going to be locked up. I mean, do you want me to plead to a lesser charge and then serve a few years?”

Attorney Alejandro looks pained and scoffs. He doesn’t deign to answer.

“I didn’t think so,” says Randy. “But at what point in these proceedings do you imagine I could get out? I mean, they refused to release me on bail.”

“Of course! You are charged with a capital crime! Even though everyone knows it is a joke, proper respect must be shown.”

“They pulled the planted drugs out of my bag—there are a million witnesses. It was a drug, right?”

“Malaysian heroin. Very pure,” Attorney Alejandro says admiringly.

“So there are all of these people who can testify that a sack of heroin was found in my luggage. That would seem to complicate the job of getting me out of jail.”

“We can probably get it dismissed before an actual trial is launched, by pointing out flaws in the evidence,” Attorney Alejandro says. Something in his tone of voice, and the way he’s staring out the window, suggests this is the first time he’s actually thought about how he’s going to specifically attack this problem. “Perhaps a baggage handler at NAIA will step forward and testify that he saw a shadowy figure planting the drugs in your bag.”