Cape Engaño, Chapter 2(2)

Cape Engaño, Chapter 2(2)




THE WORLD WRENCHED from its hinges. Dr. Mikkis Madamba had groped for the description along the uneasy ride, and here it was, self-evident, as the grinning cowboy, wired brilliant, rolled the squealing iron gate open for his car.

Past the guardhouse, the electrified wire and the attack dogs of his own sector, distraught families in their best dress had pursued the last pedicabs rolling out. The faces of the children, sullenly fighting to stay moveless as their mothers jerked them this way then that, were hard and streaked. Their wilted plastic dolls tremored like epileptics. Subterraneans and Creeks had crawled onto the streets, and the early revelers, still dripping in the foul juice of their habitation, were making noisome bonfires of discarded tires: angry wreaths blooming with billows of black.

Like a door, the afternoon suddenly banged shut. The man glanced at the rear-view mirror to see the driver’s green glasses up quickly at him. The intermittent booming, rounder and fuller than the firecrackers, was recognizably ordnance, heavy ordnance. Above the filigree of the joy rockets, machine-gun tracers made long orange arcs in the smoky sky. Every once in a while, a .223 off to God-knows-where singed the air. The world unhinged, the guardian of the door zonked. Appropriately, this was the night of the New Year. The cowboys were going to spray the town red.

Yes, There’ll be a hot time in the Old Town tonight!

The man on the wheel, called Kato, stuck his thumb up at the reeling cowboy and eased the car along the steep driveway. Many vehicles were parked along its length, including two armored trucks leashed to the stand-by generators, already rumbling in operation. Large spotlights on elevated girders were trained at the villa from the lawn, so the megaron loomed larger and brighter even. The other drivers, mouths deep in their supper pails, turned to watch the car and wave.

Kato, who seldom removed his wasp-green cyclist's glasses, hopped out to open the rear door. Dr. Mikkis Madamba, Regional Representative, closed his eyes, curled his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and slowly tried to soften and breathe away the tension bunches clenched from foot to face. It was Old Three Hundred who taught him the breathing sequence, the movements, and the nonsense syllables recited to the dance. "It takes away the fear. It makes you calm," Old Three Hundred explained. Old Three Hundred, who would, by now, be dead. Dead with his gaming cronies, those softly gleaning Orientals at the fan tan club in Flushing, where Old Three Hundred used to take him - "Surrender me your money already, you packers! I can't packing lose! I have my good luck here, my anting-anting," he would announce to a welcome of many dialects, a rolling crinkle of eyes and metal teeth - to sit silent and obedient, sipping citron-scented tea, watching the groupers in the food tanks unravel their fins. They lost touch. One day Mikkis did not need him anymore, then the old man was no longer there. Mikkis did not visit, did not call, though sometimes he knew Old Three Hundred was one short block away, sprawled on the curb, propped up against the mailbox, merrily waving his paper-bagged fifth at the passing prowls. One day Mikkis simply turned the corner and let it go with the fast, chill wind. He then opened his eyes to Kato's luminescent glasses and blew out the last, silent ki-yay! of the exercise.


IT WAS THIS time of year, on that prophetically botched practicum in southern Egypt, that Mikkis was first allowed his ten minutes to anywhere. He signified he wanted to greet Ina in New York. When his turn came he was seated in front of the big monitor as the technicians set the dials. While Mikkis waited the earphones relayed Christmas carols. "Standby," the voice broke into the music and the jingle bells, "here she comes." Then his mother rose to the surface of the screen, resolved into colors, into movement, sound. She was artfully poised beside a studio fireplace with a real fire going - still the lovely woman. Mikkis imagined she framed the shot herself - it was a trans-Atlantic broadcast, after all - and perhaps draped some of her superfine stocking net over the camera lens to soften and make her elegant, high-style features younger.

"You're looking very well, Ina," Mikkis began. She had refused to lift her face, knowing no doubt how wonderfully well certain faces aged. Still her skin was drying closer to her bones, to line an early hint of the contours of her skull.

"You also," she said, and surveyed her audience.

She nodded beautifully at his pleasantries. Then, sensing he was eating up the time with prattle, she cut in to deliver her spiel to all, using her son as focus, in her luxurious, raspy voice, her well-versed off-Broadway phrasing, with unexpected pauses yawning suddenly between words, for the goodwill to come pouring into the spaces. As the rest of the station stood to applaud, Mikkis shook his head in affectionate admiration. Ina was an excellent actress: much too good for the commercials that were her - and for a long time, their - bread-and-butter. She did all the civic centers, all the little theaters, retirement homes and playhouses from Barber's Point to Bangor. She did the occasional feature or television film - playing Orientals, native Americans, Latinas, blacks. She was quite popular for the long-running Lincoln-Ford series where she was an abrasive Atlanta grandmother who knew everything about cars.

When Mikkis was a child, she towed him along in her rush for readings and auditions. It seemed to him then they were always running after time: chasing after busses and trains, rushing to meet appointments, schedules. Up elevators and ramps, their heels tattooing up and down the subway stairs. But she never forgot to leap momentarily out of the race, to look him in the face and create with her booming smile, a garden stillness. "Cheer up, baby," she would say and pinch his nose. "Cheer up!" Then she would bound onstage - coltish, tomboyish, incandescent - and declare, "Hi! I'm Lumen Madamba from the Philippines!"

But then, as now, she had absolutely no idea how to close. To Mikkis' embarrassment Ina asked the entire station to link hands in Christmas prayer, the singing of "Silent Night", including the dutiful service staff, all Muslims.

No, she never quite got the hang of the exit. At the end, Ina wanted to go on: the character poised for the light a flickering minute or two longer, a second longer, bowed for the applause, her heart heaving happily beneath the sequins. She had spells of painless clarity, when she would rush through detailed instructions and insist that Mikkis write them down. Once, she stopped to say, "I want to see another Christmas. I want you to give me my grandchildren!" She was playing spoiled child, and if she had been able, she would have stomped her slippered foot. Or given time, she would have demonstrated her versatility by doing several variations using exactly the same lines. Something TV sentimental, something kooky, something anguished and absurd from revived existentialist drama, fashionable again.

Mikkis did not know what to say, so he said, "Let it go, Ina. Let it go. You've had a good, good life."

He could have sworn he heard his palm on her face, for she reeled back, struck. "Oh, what do you know about life? A good life?" Her eyes brimmed over, and she turned away. "What do you know?"

Even now, even now, what do I know? Stepping idly into an empty elevator stall where the presence that wore her scent had ascended and gone, the voice and the cello that begins Villa-Lobos' Brasilieras for Bach, the smell of cinnamon or of newly-spread Sunday papers, or at the coffee shop in the morning, watching the hurrying umbrellas unfurl for the spring rain - Mikkis winced to suddenly remember. It was not guilt anymore, that was a long time healed over, but something like the lingering shame of presumption. Her pain alternated with numbness, and this she sometimes appeared to dread even more than the pain. Not to feel was to be dead. At the onset of those anesthetic episodes she would plant her thumb on the call button, hoarsely pleading for the nurse to pinch, to knead and pound at her bone-thin limbs, at the bone itself, for some ghost of sensation.

"We are not permitted, you know," Emma the nurse told Mikkis, tucking the ends of her short brown hair into her cap. "The doctors will know."

Night into dawn, Mikkis and Emma would watch Ina slip into sullen hollows of sadness. Into spaces where all that seemed to remain was the terror in her eyes. There would be random turns of self-protective bias, her reflexes functioning, but already disengaged from the arteries of need. Mikkis would accept the water cup and hold on to Emma's hand, and she would move forward to let him lean lightly on her breasts.

"Please," said Mikkis. "You must do something."

"Bruja!" Ina coughed suddenly. "Get your fucking hooks off my baby!"


They had walked the five blocks to Emma's apartment. She pressed at him from behind, kissed his ear and said, "This I can do." She kneaded the muscles of his shoulders and back. He was so tired, he could have gone instantly to sleep, but he forced himself back to critical attention, though she was in the shower for what seemed a long time. She came out to dry herself in front of him. She was big-boned and beginning to thicken in the buttocks and thighs. There was a noticeable darkening around her belly, above the brown pubic bush, and he imagined the coloration a childbearing mark. He avoided her mouth, so she, knowing, whispered she was healthy. He lay on his back and she rolled the condom down and mounted him. And it was only when she retreated below, her tongue barely perceptible on the skin of his belly, breathing small winds that briefly warmed the trace of her mouth, did she begin to sob.

"What?" he asked.

"Believe me," she giggled uncontrollably, "it did not cross my mind…"

"What?"

"We're Filipinos…" she bit her lip to keep her laughter low, and gave up. She fell on her back, convulsed. In the soft darkness, her eyes shone in tears of mirth.

He gathered the sheets about him. "I guess."

He had half-imagined she was Latina, though she was so fair. Her accent was Nebraska flat, where the framed diploma announced she had colleged. It was a big deal for some, Mikkis knew. Himself, he had always assumed something screwy about everybody else. In their case, old relatives in Flushing cackling up holy babel while cooking something secret, maybe criminal, during those hateful gatherings and holidays. He hated it when even Ina would dig in with relish, the sour fruit in vinegar, the innards, the blood dishes, the foul tidbits, the sauces noisome in ferment and rot. With the other horrified children near tears, Mikkis would try to force down the quarter-pounder, upon which the stink had settled. The old relatives perfumed the air thickly with Glade, because the stench disturbed the neighbors into calling the police.

It was at Ina's instigation that the old relatives had driven half-a-day upstate and back to get the young goat and smuggle it up the apartment. She wanted to concoct comfort treats for an uncle by vague affinity, just released from the loony bin. The uncle, young Mikkis heard, had been kidnapped by jungle Indians in Guatemala somewhere, had snapped and had tried to kill himself and others. Going into the bathroom to pee, Mikkis blundered on the kid hanging by a plastic rope from the showerhead, with torrents of blood and vinegar pooling in the bathtub. Old Three Hundred was sleeping off a drunk so the others did the job themselves. They wanted to show Old Three Hundred they could do it. The animal was butchered awkwardly, as it fought, jumping and kicking as it strangled itself. The relatives wanted the fresh blood in a basin, but the knife thrust to the throat brought on an unexpected torrent of bawling, bleating and feces. The relatives must have stabbed the goat a hundred times to quiet it. Then there was the anxious hour - everybody softly cackling! - listening for the police sirens, waiting to be deported.

Emma said, "We… smell different, you know what I mean. You know, under the soap, the perfume. Unlike anybody else." Then, brightly: "We smell better!" Mikkis was suddenly annoyed, unreasonably jealous and she sensed it. She took his hand to her breast again and said, "Don't be angry. Please don't be angry." He sniffed under her chin, her armpit. He breathed over her thick-haired cunt deeply, managed a small, hot whiff of her anus. But the difference was personal, as he knew. She was very fair, perhaps bleached. The brown hair was dyed.



IT WAS EMMA who found the deathwatcher in Newark and brought her back on the train. The girl carried her belongings, her dolls and rock-star posters in a tote bag from the toy store. She scraped her boot heels on the edge of the landing before entering. She was thirteen years old, and had arrived as a servant and companion to a rich Visayan lady, who came to die among her many, many children scattered all over America. When, word-of-mouth, the news of the deathwatcher spread, the girl discovered she could make big money almost every day of the year just by watching over her countryfolk transition to the other side. She was called Benny - Divinidad was the name on the passport - and she sat intense and sleepless on her watch, holding still the hands of the emptying old women and the alcoholic pensioners in the sure vise of certainty and connection, as they eased on. When they did, the girl too would be gone. She never came to the wakes or the funerals. The dead, Benny said, never disturbed her.

"This is not what I meant at all," Mikkis complained. "You know this is not what I meant."

"Listen," said Emma fiercely. "I don't know what else to do. She cries. Your mother goddamn cries all the time. The medication does not help. You know the sedatives don't help her. They help you more than they help her."

Mikkis turned to go. Emma touched his arm and said, "I'm sorry. Give it a chance. Sometimes it helps. All the hospitals use them. All of them have hotlines to these mumbo-jumbo people. You know, fakirs, voodoo. Anyway she's as close to authentic as you can get. So shut up. Sometimes it helps, believe me."

It was a thing the women of her family had always done. Benny's mother, her mother's mother before her. A family penance, a devotion, it was explained. As her mother deftly guided Benny’s hands on the wooden loom, she invested the little girl with the benedictions and the prayers, the nonsense vowels - the vowels of power and comfort dragged long and repeated over and over again like the lowing of calves in the grey evening - and the gestures, and the spun cotton threads patiently metamorphosed into the patterned cloth of another time.

But Benny had not gone into the cave, though the plot of land above it, from where the visitants from all the towns and islands used to begin their annual descent, had belonged - her mother claimed - to their family. Her mother claimed it was a great grandmother and her wild, strong sons who received approval from the spirits there. The great grandmother and her sons came by dugout canoe across the rough strait, out of the old fields now planted to cruel cane and corrupted beyond remembrance, fleeing famine and conscription, and rumors of enchantment and possession. The great grandmother honored the spirits of the new land with sacrifices and songs, and was allowed a wide swath of wilderness between two rivers and the sea to burn for clearing. Then the great grandmother walked a full day along the coast to town, silencing the yapping dogs that met her with a mad look and a pointed finger, to the finely wrinkled, tiny Chinawoman sitting on her blue-and-white jar of treasure, who loaned, against the great grandmother's mark, the implements, the animals, the seed-corn from the trading store.

For a while the family almost prospered there, on their patch of green amidst the harsh dust of drought. They had good corn, with big ivory kernels grinning within the brown beards. They had sugar melons, bitter melons, watermelons, guavas and star-apples, gourds and squashes. Feeding deer and wild pigs had to be chased away from the jackfruit and the lychee trees that fruited low on their trunks. The rivers had catfish, mudfish, frogs, lizards and eels. There were fruit doves, pasture doves, rails and snipes. They ate well enough, so the stories began again to be whispered about. How the great grandmother blessed the fields with her menstrual blood. How she lay with unseen lovers on the furrowed ground, at dawn on the day of the seeding of the corn. It was even said that the great grandmother bartered a witching spell for a child - the lot's runt - of the remontados, to be decorated, then hacked open to summon the long-awaited, sudden rain.

The guards bound the great grandmother and took her on the trail to town. Along the way, the guards reported, she jumped into the river and drowned. It was days before they found her body, face down in the sea, broken by the river rocks and the rafts of mountain trees that had escorted her downstream. When they poled her out, her tattooed arms had swollen over her fetters. Her naked legs were clenched apart, as if she birthed the swarm of blue crabs there emerging.

The wild, strong sons understood this magic was the doing of the finely wrinkled, tiny Chinawoman, who applied to take possession of the farm in default of the unredeemed seed, the animals and the implements. The wild, strong sons refused the offer to become tenants, claiming they were freemen, timawa, and that the debt had been paid many times over through the years. So instead the wild, strong sons burned the huts, the granaries, the dry corn stalks. They butchered the carabao, the hogs, the turkeys and the chickens to honor the woodland spirits, and held a feast for all the relatives and the neighbors before they fled to join the remontados in the mountain.

One moonless night the wild, strong sons sneaked back into town and stole the finely wrinkled, tiny Chinawoman away in a sack. At their mountain hideout they commanded her - as she valued whatever remained of her wretched, thieving life - to lay for them one single basin-full of gold, in recompense for all the misfortune she had caused them. But the Chinawoman was tough and mean, and refused for weeks to go. She bit and clawed and tried to kick at them with her deformed, black feet. Spitting and cursing, she ate the boiled corn and the pullet eggs, slurped the water flavored with citrons and brown sugar, but she refused to go. Among themselves, the wild, strong sons despaired. "She will eat up everything," they said, and agreed to kill her and take the loss. This she may have heard, for she finally went, groaning murder in the bushes. "It's shit!" the wild, strong sons ruefully recognized, fingering the few bloodstained turds, hard as pebbles, knocking about the bottom of the basin. "We're lucky we did not step on it!"

That plot of land, like all the land around, was titled, fenced, planted to cane. It became part of the great farm, a farm larger than a kingdom, long before Benny's own mother was born. The small cove and the cliff were developed with Japanese partners, who built cottages, a diving facility, a golf course and a skeet range. But Benny's mother spoke of the cave often, her eyes fired by the oil lamp and the awesome image she breathed. The tiny entrance lay among the boulders where the sheer cliff crashed into the sea. It was gained only when the tide was low, through a suffocating tunnel scarcely larger than the body of a man, that suddenly rose into a cold upper chamber that was wide and high as the night sky. As you lifted the torches you could discern the niches on the cave wall, and within, the slack-jawed dead in their hundreds, among their tools and pots, crumpled in the sleeping posture of the unborn. Once, traveling by boat to the next town, Benny's mother showed her the cliff, careful to use only her head and her pursed mouth to point. The outrigger pump-boat skirted an exaggerated distance from the shore, as the constabulary and the guards had orders to keep the local people away, and a fisherman had been killed by tourists shooting sharks from one of the yachts anchored in the cove. On top of the cliff, the developers had raised a complex of receiving dishes and antennae, a tall, concrete cross, a statue of the Buddha in meditation.

To the deathwatcher, for the first time since delirium, Ina began to speak phrases in the island languages. "Oh, but I know that cave," Ina whispered, delighted, rising weakly from the bed into the Greek conceit.

"The dead," Ina saluted, sensing her spectral consort suddenly attentive about her. “The dead!” Her hand on the bedside table found her discarded spoon, and she began to ring the water glass, feebly as from faraway, but approaching surely, so that the girl straightened her dress to rise in salutation. All the bells and the flutes, the wind-whistle fifes, the hunting-horns and the bullroarers were sounding in the joy of the torches.


"Oh, the dead! The pure, oracular dead here wombed.
Mynthos of the serpents scatters the bones in shivers,
Casts each lot. Their empty eyes behold tomorrow.
A wind of bats exhales from the mountain's mouth.
Beware! Beware! Hold fast the earth, refuse to be reborn!"


Benny clapped her hands softly as Ina bowed and slumped back on the pillows, panting. "You are so good," Benny gushed, helping Ina take a sip of water from the glass. "I wish I had seen you on stage! You're a rock star!"

Ina moved her face from the napkin Benny was holding to dry her mouth. She said, "My own grandmother told me almost the same story." Then, lowering her voice, "Maybe the same story. Maybe we are relatives. Maybe you should marry my son. You go marry my son. Make it your Christian duty to save him from that ugly, cruel bruja."

Once, Mikkis and Emma entered the room to see the girl rocking Ina's grey, sleeping head. "Sleep my darling baby," the girl was crooning, "Mother is not far away…"



MIKKIS WAS BACK in Africa when Ina finally died. One of her theater friends wrote him how she would have loved the ceremony, the thanksgiving mass and the cremation. Everything perfect, with impeccable sensitivity and taste. He gauged the wind and slowly scattered the envelope of her ashes on the surface of the Turkana, in older maps still labeled Lake Rudolf. "My mother," Mikkis explained to the boatman coughing politely in the spray of dust.

"Bomama," the boatman waved his gnarled hand over the muddy water in acknowledgement, his head, his eyebrows grey with ash. "Bomama. Our mother."

Mikkis lay drinking his duty-free whiskey on the station cot that smelt faintly of illicit love and insecticide. A white jeep rolled dustily into the compound, driven by one of the interpreters. In the back seat, arms around the two whores, was the Minister-In-Charge. He too, in his impeccably tailored European suit and diamonds in his fingers, glimmered lavishly by starlight. Seeing Mikkis on the doorway of the guest cottage, the Minister gently backhanded the suit a few times, then waved.

"'Alo, monsieur," the Minister baritoned deeply, dangerous, releasing the dust and the whores to the sudden stillness. "Bonsoir!"

"Do not forget to wear your rubbers," commanded Mikkis sternly, saluting back by touching the whiskey glass to his brow.

The Minister froze, and then unlocked. "But of course," he rumbled, deep as drums, through his pitiless teeth. "Je suis un table!"

Mikkis listened to the laughter from the Minister's cottage, laughter that melded into screams, and the whip whistling into flesh over and over again, like startled flights of harvest birds. "Je suis un table! Je suis un table!" The whores cried like foghorns. The picture flashbulbs from the cottage lightened his room like a storm. Inexplicably, Mikkis began crying for his father, whom he never met. He strained to decipher the watermark glyphs on the high ceiling. He listened to the faintly echoing commotion as the last wild lions mauled the crocodiles on the shores of the lake. The bone-diggers in their battery-lit tents listened also, then resumed brushing off the stone of time from the bits of bone whence all of them had sprung. Ina and the deathwatcher, Old Three Hundred, the Minister and the whores. And though he had as a boy promised her he'd never be frightened of her ghost, in Mikkis' dream his mother tried to take him down with her as she sank unblinking beneath the surface of the primordial lake, with the algae beginning to bloom profusely on her and her ashen bed.

At the Center, Mikkis watched the line of cadaverous Africans who stank like tin cans of evaporated milk a week in the sun, and thought it quite remarkable - ironic, fair - that life could not be bought. Everyone, without exception, allowed only one. If there had been a way he knew he could have picked up a few for Ina at a bargain from this line. He could see it in their eyes. They were suffering life, they had made the decision, and it was ending soon. Surely, if life could be bought, here, this foul, fly-scourged, vermin-eaten row of the diseased and starving, their dirty plastic jugs and begging bowls by rote uplifted, at the edge of the lake where man was born - this was the supermarket.

Consultant on Population Development was his title, his first disastrous encounter with the multi-national, inter-agency bureaucracies. He landed with his planeload of condoms and pills, his Pleasurable Techniques of Contraception leaflets printed, somehow, in Portuguese. On the ground he found old-fashioned cholera, dysentery, TB, STD, malnutrition and war doing quite well without his help, thank you, in reducing the human density table of the Sudan. Reading the laminated ID card pinned on his jacket, they made him dump the leaflets and the contraceptives in the relief warehouse and whisked him to the refugee feeding center, to the clinic. He debated when to admit that the "Dr." was of the archeology of Greece. It had been a light-hearted college resolution to always use the title overseas, as doctors were preferentially treated everywhere, and nurses put out.

Scouting, Mikkis shared coffee and muffins with the unpromising, haggard Filipina nurses. Then, masked, noosed with a borrowed stethoscope, he walked into the crowded ward. He was blindsided by a steaming wall of stink. They were hemorrhaging into the soiled sheets from all their orifices, drooling liquid and sadness through their resigned, red eyes. Blood seeped under the loose skin from the rot within, to congeal in dead-black patches. To his horror, the dying stretched their bony fingers out to touch him, asking - said the embarrassed, giggling interpreter - for a little more life.

Immediately, Mikkis rushed to the clinic administrator, a Benedictine nun for confession. Her steely-eyed Teutonic fury slowly waned into disappointment and resignation - and when she glanced out of the window, into wrinkled webs of hysterical laughter. As the two of them watched, the people around the clinic made foodfires of his Portuguese leaflets - quickly foraged from the warehouse - munched critically on fistfuls of his synthetic progesterone pills, and the starving children made breath balloons of his planeload of prophylactics.

"You have brought us," the nun shrieked, "food, fuel, toys!"

Mikkis took that as absolution.



WHICH WAS HOW the Count's megaron was decorated, with a dazzle of balloons that seemed, by the spotlights and the torches, to lift it higher above the central command region, prostrate below, exploding randomly in pustules and the tire-fires of the Subterraneans. For a while Mikkis paused there, pretending to admire the balloons and the body-in-state, but that was when, briefly, he allowed the thought that he should turn away and run. As fast and far away as he could. From the corner of his eye he saw the lights of his car zigzag away then around as Kato maneuvered to confront the cowboy of the gate with the car's ramming grill. Parada tulisan, Kato had explained: the car angled and aimed at the opening, prepared for the quick, emergency exit. But his nervous feet took Mikkis unexpectedly into the glare where they collected the raffle stub from his invitation and the Count's bare-chested, softly nattering servants trained the cameras on him.

The Count himself, who had to shake his great, perspiring head mightily to find his guest's name, greeted him with a huge embrace. "Dr. Madamba - Mikkis - how good of you to come!" This evening's surprise was the gold doubloon for the eyepatch. The eyepatches changed, and the eye beneath. It depended on the portents of the day, or the theme of the occasion.

"Come now," said Mikkis Madamba, hearing a hint of his mother's seductive, theatrical rasp in his own voice. Wishing he had not quit drinking, he added, "Come later."

"Ho-ho!" intoned the Count, in mock shock, pointing. "Well done! Well done!" The Count excused himself heartily, and with the servants and the cameras turned away to the next arrival, a political commentator with a popular midnight show.

The cameras were the Count's long-running prank. He had cameras in every corner of the villa. Regular visitors had learned to expect the delivery of a tape soon after whatever celebration. Before the water ran out the tape may show them hurled fully clothed by earlier guests to the pool, to trash about the jumping floats of flowers and candles. It may show them wiping the seat of the toilet bowl before squatting down, or making out with one another in the rooms, in the garden pavilions, or in the lawn. Or the tape would show them passed out on the chairs, the floors. Sometimes the tape would contain a full hour of themselves unconscious, their eyes half-open, their heavy chests straining irregularly under that party's load of alcohol and drugs, groaning, farting loudly and often, with thick strands of spit or vomit dribbling from their mouths.

But the shabby, rag-tag group, called the Diplomatics, kept coming back to the Count's. Mikkis circled them slowly, keeping himself close to wall, nodding. Except for some of the military attaches, none had the remotest real connection with the embassies. They were, most of them, freebooters, stringers for the fly-by-night commercial houses. They had commissioned off the reconditioned machinery: second and often third-hand busses and trucks that had worked it seemed all the rest of south Asia, the obsolete computer systems, the power barges, the bulldozers and helicopter gunships. They had dealt in condemned bulk pharmaceuticals and surgical implements. And they stayed on in the confusion, with no more prospects nor destinations, no product presentation kits nor samples. No representation. They now spoke in the re-issued colloquialisms of cowboy-and-indian movies. They had, they said, "turned injun!" Those with local wives and families they called "squawmen" and the breeds - the children of the squawmen - swayed shyly, their backs against the work calluses on their mothers' knees, like a ring of fawns.

There were the freelancers, in their drab, multi-pocketed, foreign correspondent vests, pretending to interview the commanders. They ran a modest black-market - among themselves in the main - in drugs, in small arms and accessories. Where they dug up the stuff, nobody knew. Ice and acid, dung mushrooms, digitalis. Or hideout China, Danao and Afghan guns painstakingly handmade in imitation of Walthers, Roth-Steyrs, Astras and Stars. And green ammunition that had not been in manufacture for a hundred years.

There, lithe as dancers, were the ronin, young thugs in black silks who covered their exploration for meats and veggies as involved searches for the stragglers of ancient adventurism. The ronin, they claimed, were searching for the great grandchildren of the jungle samurai, a generation sweetened with tropical tenderness. The silken thugs did not have far to look, for the children and their mothers encamped in long lines leading to the verification centers. Those the ronin claimed as their own they bathed and deloused, and boated off in troops, boys and girls in white paper caps decorated with the red sun, singing, waving their tiny flags, Sayonara, Japanese good-bye.


There were the beer-bar owners, already rowdy, who brought the truckload of boys and girls with up-to-the-instant health certificates for the regular shows and the raffle. There were the Count's numerous business partners from his days on the south China coast - "llamas cortas," the Count winked - whose bosses on the topmost rungs of the ladder supervised the movement of veggies and meats. The cortas ran the cover companies: the printing presses, the luxury car dealership, the film studio. They sat with the party girls, the prettiest prostitutes being launched into careers in the movies, with their newly uplifted bosoms and behinds, their straightened teeth and noses.

"Mosey up, doctor," called one of the squawmen from the boneheap. "The natives are fucking restless."

"You got it," answered Mikkis. There were two or three empty liquor bottles on the table. Mikkis popped a piece of roast into his mouth and was surprised at how his saliva seemed to hiss around the meat.

"Party!" grunted Nestor, one of the disheveled older men, garrulous in drink. His contribution to the festivities was to read - while the Count sobbed into his handkerchief - something obscure and sweet from Recto or Rizal or Nick Joaquin. He collected his honorarium in whiskey, and stumbled about the middle of the floor, pugnacious in nausea and need, while the others milled earnestly at the verge of the lights. Directors and ministers in trembling threadbare, as the wives - sweating in their short, flowered Caribbean skirts - fanged the anaconda of the conga. Ta-ta-ta, who? Ta-ta-ta, who? they inquired in dread. The Diplomatics grasped the Caribs from behind, cupping their breasts, thrusting their hard-ons onto the flowers.

"Is he coming?" Mikkis, for want of something to say, yelled into Nestor's ear.

"Count sort of implies that every time," laughed Caramba, the voice of the midnight. "It's the intimidation factor."

"No, he's coming," Nestor insisted, hotly.

"They tell he's very sick. They say he's dead," one of the freelancers volunteered.

"Shhh!"

"They say the north sector has negotiated another contract. He's very mad."

"No," Caramba agreed. "They do not share, and he cannot collect. Maybe they funnel up a little, every once in a while, for appearances sake. But certainly nothing like before. I do not think he insists anymore on verification."

"How can he?" Nestor asked. "It's another country."

This is another country, Mikkis thought.

"But seriously," said Caramba, "you ask the Count for a copy. He has one, I'm sure. You have to see it for yourselves. They have armored vehicles. Sure, most of them they welded up themselves and decorated like jeepneys. You know, nickel plated horses and carabao. Multi-colored antennae. Buntings and ribbons. Giant speakers booming. And those cowboys are on some really heavy stuff!"

"I can imagine," Mikkis laughed.

"But they have big guns," Caramba continued. "Really big guns. Cannons, rocket launchers. Flags. All kinds of goddamn flags and uniforms. They run the games. They bring in the ships. They distribute the veggies and meats. Some people are getting very rich!"

On cue they looked up to see the Count approaching.




THEY ALL KNEW how the Count made his wealth. Meat and vegetables became prophetic foreknowledge, became bullion and jewels, turned into the coinage and currencies acceptable to the trader barons of the China coast - and to the vague speculares, Confucian and communist, in the mist behind. Almost to a man, or woman, they came to loiter around the Count's table for change to fall. They knew the Count had warehouses stuffed bursting with staples, and also hoarded delicacies from another time. When generous he would send his guests off with baskets of food, a drum of diesel fuel, generator parts, solar watches, Swiss knives. His alliances with the successful commanders stretched back - well maintained well-greased connections. Each was compadre, each mistress comadre. And the meat and the veggies moved. It was whispered that the Count and his protectors had island rancherias and plantations all over, and large factories churning out killer synthetics.

The Count had based himself in Manila long, but nobody except the maintenants and fellow gourmets in the deep holes knew of him then. He was not a mere count either, but an authentic marquis. Marques de Ispegui was his hereditary title, won and confirmed in bitter war by his foredoomed, bloodthirsty forebears. Though outsiders themselves, they were relentless against the surly tribes of the regions and the colonies, and the last military Ispegui soldiered far past the end, into court martial and disgrace. He was beaten, the Marquis spat out in scorn, not by the enemies of his adopted, beloved Spain, but by his own murderous protégés. Right at the hour of victory, and from behind. The Count's own impoverished father later returned to Manila, determined to break the curse and drink himself to death, on the desperate rumor that rightfully inherited property may there be claimed. But the Count's father found the partnerships dissolved through outrageous forgeries and the collusion of the ministers. Where the companies and the factories remained, the stocks had been watered down to almost nothing. Where the lawyers saw opportunities to recover, the Count's father found it impossible to deliver the grease required to ease the long, legal process along.

But up a maze of narrow, spit-stained stairs, through rusted iron gates protected by guards wielding heavy ceremonial swords, the Count's father finally found the finely wrinkled, tiny Chinawoman sitting on her blue-and-white jar of treasure distracted and uncooperative. You do not look like the Marquis at all, she may have judged disapprovingly, for her head shook side to side. The Marquis was a beautiful man. A beautiful, manly man.

"He said," began the Count's father, then coughed to catch the tremor in his throat, "to come to you if ever I needed help here."

The guards received his worn manila envelope bulging with papers and drew out the brittle, yellow documents for her. She brought the papers up to her face to examine and sniff - the faded inks, the dusty wax on which the vainglorious seals and rubrics were impressed - shaking her head and snarling softly at each page.

Her terms, relayed in whisper to the guards, so outraged the Count's father that the veins in his temples and jaw began to boom. He would have leapt across the room to break her bony neck, but the guards knew, and signaled with their swords they knew.

The Count's father stayed at a boarding house for single, elderly Europeans, and to pay his rent he rode the huge beer truck on its route, counting bottles and cases, and writing down how many of the empties were broken. On his days off he would make his round of the lawyers, the ministries, the trading houses. To his dismay he found even the titled solares sequestered by pintados, who made their rude encampments right up the crumbled walls of the city, as they had in the time of Simon de Anda, when pintados of the palm marshes and the llanos of the north came to aid the besieged of Manila. As before, they appeared intoxicated and entranced, bearing battle swords and shields, bows and spears. But these savages owed the Spanish no loyalty or friendship, and the Count's father had to escape in his taxi through a hail of arrows and stones.

"Rosal! You murdered Rosal!" the pintados screamed.

"No, they do not like your kind around here," commiserated the taxi-driver, grinning. “You’re lucky those windows don’t open anymore.”

"No, your Excellency, they do not like us here," agreed the mad priest, who was taking the Count's father on a tour of the conquistador graves within the church. "Begging your indulgence, I personally think they have every right to dislike us. We mistreated and continue to mistreat them much."

So this is where we threw them, the Count's father glanced up sharply. Here is where we have always thrown them.

"From even the poorest," continued the mad priest, hurrying now, for he had sensed the visitor's sudden scorn, "we continue to exact - well - not quite the tithe, but the tribute. The wave of change waits on the wisdom of our superiors. The Pope himself commanded us to divest ourselves of our banks, of the solares we rent out - slumlords that we are - where the poor crowd in misery and destitution. We wait. That was many decades ago, when the Pope's word was law. We ourselves are vowed to patience, and are comforted, where the poor apparently are not."

"To lie here, so far from home…" said the Count's father glumly. "Among their enemies."

"The tombs are empty," chuckled the mad priest. "Where they are, only God knows. The English and their mercenaries ransacked the graves for treasure, threw away the bones."

"Terrible."

"I myself think it does not matter that much. The Indians fought a magnificent rear-guard action, covering the retreat of those who did not want to surrender. Yielding up their lives to buy them time."

"Their women are all prostitutes. So are all their children," said the taxi-driver seductively. Ferrying the tormented through the night for so long had sharpened the taxi-driver's sense of when to lightly lean against the final ounce of hesitation. Sometimes he could even apprehend the nature of the need before it was stutteringly confessed. So it was when the Count's father asked the taxi-driver to arrange a visit with the pintados in the night. "They are all prostitutes, and their children too," the taxi-driver repeated.

They parked the battered taxicab under the huge ficus tree that twisted from the wall of the city. While the driver parleyed with the savages, the Count’s father perspired inside the cab and drank from his flat bottle of rum. For all his anger of the English, he allowed himself a large swallow in their honor. One dram of rum per day per English soldier - that was how they won the world! One dram of rum per day per redcoat! If only the Spanish fueled their own troops on sweet, sweet rum! Things would have turned out so differently! Arriba, Rhum Caña! Tumbando, Rhum Caña!

The taxi driver returned with two grinning pintados smoking cigarettes and embracing themselves. The Count’s father opened the cab door and was stabbed by the sharp stink of their bodies.

The roots of the great tree separated into rooms and cubicles roofed with cardboard and tarp. Each cubicle was lit with a beer bottle with a rag for a wick. So this is where the bottles go, the Count’s father recognized, as he sat on the salvaged mattress. The savages led the solemn, rancid little girl in, all skin and bones under the thin T-shirt.

Her face was animal-dumb, the angles sharp and wrong. But when she lifted her shirt over her head, her eyes on him were frank and brazen. Keeping her arms up, she made one full turn for him to see the tiny breasts with the swollen nipples, the boy-buttocks, the bony ankleted leg, the sparse fuzz in her armpits and belly. When he turned her again with his palm, her skin was hot and completely dry.

Afterwards he held the little girl’s throat, the size of his wrist. The Count’s father felt her pulse mocking there, and began slowly to squeeze. Feeling her sudden jerk of alarm and her tiny fingers clawing at his arms, he released her and fell back on the pallet weeping, vomiting warmly on himself. Aloft, above the smoky soot and the heedless tears, in the moist breeze of the evening, two dim figures fluttered slowly into the desperate light. Among the ficus leaves was the Virgin and her Child.

Bloodless, he bolted upright, doomed. But it was only the tatters of a cinema advertisement, painted on the canvas roofing, the figures arranged in imitation of a long vanished Murillo. Still, for an instant the Count’s father knew it was – miracle of miracles! - the Murillo itself, faded away and begrimed by war and the centuries, the castaway queen and her son among the painted savages, with the great primitive tree for castle and for church.




BEFORE THE FATHER finally croaked he married the Manila courtesan who bore the Count. The family seat was north of Valcarlos, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. La Manileña and the boy-heir arrived there with the certificates and the court orders to be stiffly informed all that remained were the few hectares planted to apple trees in brown blight, the farmhouse, the cider sill and a small annual pension. Royally, she pulled down her dark glasses and the magistrate lurched back two steps, for the revealed La Manileña had three eyes. The left eye had two blacks, the smaller one actually a congealed purple, if there was anyone in the mountain bold enough to stare. She then picked up the apple from the table arrangement, and cut it lengthwise in half with a knife. Triumphantly, she lifted the half at the magistrate to display the seal: at the apple's core, a five-pointed star. The magistrate, pale and trembling, clutched desperately at his bounding heart.

Using old bordello contacts, La Manileña supplemented their resources by smuggling Filipinos through Barcelona into France, into Sweden. Her nurses and servants muled methamphetamine across the mountain, guided past the checkpoints and the border guards by the young Count on his racing bicycle.

The young Count was one of the few aristocrats strong enough to ride on the training team of the legendary ONCE peloton. A merry caravan of cars followed, bearing the ladies and the champagne. The high Colombians supplied the stimulants, and on their advise the Count had his blood drained, the blood oxygenated, then injected back before the races.

La Manileña gave the apple orchard over to pasture the horses, retaining a fifth for the cider, that shortly became famous as a country prophylactic, gratefully called the witch's brew. She refurbished the farmhouse in Mexican rancho chic. It was turquoise, silver and whitewashed stone, encircled by large American cacti, and featured displays of life-sized saints and charro saddles. Ruben Balbenta flew over from Munich for the house blessing, to perform for the retired old whores and their husbands, lost in the homeland, after the factories and farms in the islands were taken over by the llamas cortas, their erstwhile partners.

The young Count was away racing the L’Enfer du Nord when the civil guard surrounded the farmhouse. They called on her to surrender, but La Manileña refused a long, drawn-out death in prison. It is said she reviewed her legal papers, the financial statements and the will while the civil guard deployed around the house. When she was finished she removed her reading glasses, brushed her hair back, and came through the front door firing.

She left many debts: blood, cash, consigned merchandise. So the young Count took over La Manileña’s affairs: running her refugees and mules, making the payoffs to the politicians, the gangs and the guards. His prodigious fondness for meats and veggies brought him to the catacombs, where underground business financed the shadowy Etruscans. To force the release of a small account held in escrow, to pay for gaming debts, to pay for the pick of the litter newly landed from Russia or Asia or Africa, the Count arranged for the Etruscans to stage his own abduction. This they performed at the opening gate of the Vuelta de San Sebastian. Two black Citroens rammed the rail to cut ahead of the Count’s bicycle, sending him soaring over the handlebars and into the track. The live television broadcast showed masked men running from the Citroens, waving their sub-machineguns, to pick him up and throw him into one of the cars.

The Etruscans proceeded to do variations on the operation. They asked the Count to lure other racing aristocrats – solvent royalty the next time – to be taken for ransom. But the guardia civil turned the Count around by slicing the lid off his left eye and using the naked eyeball for an ashtray. The skin about the eye squirted tears and blood to quench the burn, twitched desperately to close. The police boats headed off the power launches making for the open sea and the Panamanian freighter anchored there. The Etruscans then abandoned the boats. The guardia civil started shooting the drowning Etruscans. The fifty k’s disappeared.

The Count must have impressed someone important, perhaps even one the secret speculares, for they flew him to the Orient, to manage first one, then a fleet of glittering gambling junks anchored off the China coast where nightly, black-tie patrons on souped-up powerboats raced the patrol launches of the warlords. It was said that a famous Vietnamese pirate attempted to raise his protection percentage on the Count’s fleet, and that the Count lured the pirate aboard his junk and there killed him. The body the junk’s cook filleted into strips to bait skipjack tuna and wahoo.

In the old news videos you could make the Count’s figure in the background. Two hundred pounds lighter maybe – slim enough to stuff into a small Citroen’s trunk – while the victorious commanders toasted freedom and the peace.




MIKKIS ASKED FOR a large glass of quinine water, with plenty of ice. Then, glass in hand, he set out for the unpleasant ritual of circumnavigation. Half-way round, he had to swallow repeatedly and fight the impulse to head straight for the buffet table. Beef, real butter, canned asparagus. He hurried behind the signatories, the directors and the ministers, took a stool and gripped tightly at the bar, beside Sybilla Cumana, the fortune teller.

“Happy New Year, doctor,” said Sybilla, stirring her drink with her long, blue fingernails. She had been a popular favorite with the movie people and the political ladies, and had once advised the very powerful, who paid her well and ensconced her in a great house.

“Thank you,” Mikkis said with all the pleasantness he could command. “And to you also.” Her patrons were long gone, but not because they were not warned. Months before she sensed the knives over their heads, and told them. But, as was their way, they were selective in what among her stories they believed.

Mikkis glanced up at long mirror that ran above the bar, felt her straighten with him, and saw her reflected there, upside down. Just as he thought the words she startled him by saying “The witch of Endor,” softly, laughing. She looked up to confront herself. Beneath the Cambodian frost of runes and waves, the face was swollen and lumped with gin. “I amuse myself by counting those who catch the allusion.”

“And how many?”

“Just you.”

“Well,” Mikkis said, straining to catch someone in the distance to hail him away. “What say the stars?”

“About you?”

“No, no,” protested Mikkis in spite of himself. “In general.”

They both laughed loudly. Sybilla patted his hand, and left her hand over his. “It really scares you, doesn’t it?” At a party like this, she had spread the cards out for him and told him he was to be married very soon. The next week he was.

“Are we ever going to get out of this mess?” he asked after a while.


She signaled for another gin-and-tonic before saying, “You get the memos. You attend the briefings. You don’t need cards to know.”

“Tell me anyway,” said Mikkis, tapping for his refill.

“It’s going to get worse.”

From the yard, so it felt, came a large explosion. The wave shook the villa, rattled the chandeliers and set them swinging, and threw Sybilla into Mikkis’ stool. Immediately, the commanders were on their feet, calling for their aides and their radios. “Call them now,” said Gil Ruiz – the most famous of them all – striding up to the window and slapping aside the billowing curtains and the smoke. The commander was in his usual Sulu costume: black silk shirt, balloon pantaloons with tight leggings tucked into high cavalry books.

Mikkis helped Sybilla to her feet, then sat her down. “Why do you stay, then,” he asked her, with the hint of a taunt. “It would be easy enough to leave, I would think, with your connections.”

“A bomb!”

“Mortar!”

Por Dios y por santo!

The fortune teller laughed and signaled the bartender to replace the drink she spilled. “You are teasing me again, doctor. Why aren’t you trying to get out yourself? We both know you can’t run away from these things. Your Greeks found that out long ago.”

Mikkis shook his head in admiration. After all this time, someone somewhere was holding on to his dossier. Well good luck to you too, he smiled grimly, a lot of good that’ll do.

And now she laughed. “But I can tell you about yourself…” she said.

“Don’t we need cards for that?”


"Save the mockery, doctor. You are scared! Just look at your drink!"
He glanced down without thinking to see the glass of quinine water vibrating wildly and the ice-flakes zipping to melt. "Fear and heat." Mikkis looked up to meet her victorious smile. She said, "You are going on a journey. With someone wise."

"A journey," Mikkis snorted.

"A long journey. Over dangerous ground."

"God," said Mikkis. "Who's got the gas?"

"Francesca," named the fortune-teller, over his shoulder.

"The Witch of Endor has a visitant," said Francesca.

"Ah!" said Sybilla Cumana, shaking her head. "You two should get married."




FRANCESCA DE KEYSER, RADIANT as ever, drew forward to be kissed. "Mix," she breathed, "Mix…"

Reflexively, he slipped the tip of his tongue between her opened lips. She drew back very slightly.

Mikkis said, "Happy New Year, Chez."

Her eyes had that trained, sleepy sparkle. Her breasts surged under the sheer black blouse. "How's life?" she said.

How that used to disconcert him! But Mikkis was prepared this time. "Okay," he said. "How's business?"

Francesca stepped back one, surveyed him with sincere amusement. "Mix, Mix…" she taunted gently, drawing herself up to the bar where the bartender slid her bourbon-and-water across. They scarcely noticed when Sybilla Cumana vacated her corner and headed for the main room.

"I did not know you were in town," Mikkis began.

"Just came in. From Bangkok. You know Papa insists we Christmas together."

"Vacation?"

"No," Francesca shook her head daintily. "I was working."

"Another fuck film," he blurted without meaning to.

Francesca leaned over to kiss him again. This time he licked quickly inside her mouth, tasting lipstick and bourbon. "Grow up, Mix," she sighed brightly. "I'll catch you later. Papa asks about you. Go and visit him sometime. He's going and may remember to leave you something nice."

Mikkis first saw her on screen, astride the bounding blond man. She was harrying him to a vicious gallop, savaging him with a quirt, and when he arched up to come, she deftly lifted herself and withdrew his length from her glistening pubis. She shook it as it gushed sprays of semen and the camera closed in on her face, straight zoom, her mouth, where her clenched teeth drew blood from her dewy lower lip.

"I didn't see the cut," said one of the Diplomatics, bug-eyed. "That's blood." They were drinking in the screening room studio of one of the Count's partners, the movie producer Susumkorda, whose name had been stretched into multi-syllables to approximate something faintly Latin.

"She enjoys her work, doesn't she?"

"Or," laughed Mikkis, "she may be an actress."




MIKKIS MET HER RIGHT here, at the Count's. The water had failed again, and even the Count's huge pool was dry: siphoned off into the emergency tanks, filtered, chlorinated, stored. But the decorator had arranged the usual floats of flowers and candles in the floor of the empty pool. Mikkis walked across to where Francesca de Keyser held loud court. He elbowed his way in, caught her hand in mid-flight and said, "May I take you for a walk around the lake?"

She smiled to search his face, said "Yes", reached around his offered arm and jammed her rich breasts against his side.

"And who are you?" she asked.

She was surprised he was American. Mikkis said that his parents were Filipino, but himself he was a New York fellow. She told him she was an actress for the international films, but she knew he knew that already. She said her father was the sculptor, the national treasure. She herself painted, secret and private watercolors. Now, she acted, but in time she wanted to produce and direct meaningful films, serious and boring films. Mikkis told her of summering in Michigan, in the farm area north of Detroit where Muhammad Ali had his retreat. He told her of Ina, the Greeks, of Old Three Hundred, of being captured by terrorists in the Sudan, and of the German nun.

So they walked, circling the pool twenty times or more, talking and laughing and touching. After a while, the other guests noticed and then the Count led them in clapping their hands and singing. Mikkis scarcely heard, though Francesca paused to lift her hand and smile. The applause circled the empty pool in waves, the dead candles there and the orchids.

Later, after the dancing and singing, Francesca confessed she had a little too much to drink, and would Mikkis be so kind and drive her home. The Count, smiling, said she would take care of her car, a completely re-built second-edition Mustang.

But once inside his vehicle, the blue flag flying over its hood, the woman drew herself apart, pressing herself quietly against the door. As they drove through the dark streets, Mikkis would glance at her silhouette. Once he tried to reach for music, but she stayed him with a soft shake of her head. He saw the hard glint of her teeth hard at her lip. Finally she said, "I hope you do not think me a tease, or something, but may I please be taken home?"

"Sure," Mikkis said thickly. He was surprised he was not disappointed at all. Oddly, he felt relieved. "Point me the way."

Though the curfew sirens had long blown, his headlights lit on the moving shine of the plastic balloons on the faces of the Creek and Subterraneans scurrying among the rubble. Some nights the cowboys patrolling on their war-jeeps would test their night-vision riflescopes by firing at them. There had been dawns when Mikkis would be on the road early enough to catch the salvage wagons and the prisoners loading them up. The Diplomatics said the commanders had a factory for the disassembly and packing of the spare parts: hearts, kidneys, corneas - for the lower end of the east European market.

Mikkis turned into the hot beam of the checkpoint and applied the brakes. She lurched forward in inertia, and he brought his arm up to keep her from the dashboard. Her breast flowed into his hand, stayed. The reeking cowboy beamed a light into the cab.

"Turn the thing down," said Mikkis. He had been taught the authority voice was the first line of defense. "What is it?"

The cowboy lit Francesca, Mikkis' hand still on her breast.

"Doctor ambassador," grinned the cowboy, eyes drug-bright, the sweat running down his face. "We're sorry. There's an alert out. Bombs. Assassins. Luchandos."

Paltugan-a! From behind the light his companions called, Paltugan-a!

But the cowboy waved his companions down, saluted the car, conducted the barricade up. He waved the car through with his rifle, finger on the trigger, and Mikkis winced at the sight of the dark bore momentarily centered on him.

"Luchandos?" said Francesca.

"There aren't Luchandos anymore," Mikkis said, sure.

Francesca directed him through a labyrinth of sidestreets, and then they were running up a winding road Mikkis did not remember. At the top of the knoll she asked him to stop the car. When he flicked off the lights and killed the engine, a great silence came with the darkness. Outside the car there was a wind that carried the hint of things burning. They lay on the grass and faced the far, faint stars. She lit a marijuana cigarette, but did not volunteer to share.

For a long time they lay there, while the world rustled around them and the wind brought them burnt wisps of former things, fluttering down like mayflies, and the scent of ashes.

Mikkis said, "Maybe we should have gone to my place…"

Francesca said, "Shut up."

She kissed as politely as a gracious host, tasting his face and giving compliment with small, deep exhalations. The perfume on her neck and breasts left a thin coat on his tongue. She was thickly wet and open, but refused his head or his hands. He went slowly, counting, and chuckled loudly once at the foolishness of being on strange, itchy grass, with the insects, the cowboys, the Subterraneans and Creeks, and his pants pulled down to his knees. At three hundred precisely he let it go, and she received him generously, with a perfectly performed sucking spasm and a shudder. He pulled up his pants quickly, looked at his watch.

He thought she slept, but then Mikkis heard her softly almost sing: "Ursus, Signus, Cassiopeia the Chair…"

Then she laughed, very distant suddenly, among relations. "Draco, Perseus, Arcturus…" Under her quiet voice he heard something like music.
And when he opened his eyes once more, nervous for the time and the Cowboys, he saw her slim arms upraised, fair against the night, her fingers pointing joyfully into the glittering chasm she - they - were stumbling onto.

"Regulus, Capella, Polaris of the North…"

Francesca rolled away from him, and after a while her breathing regulated into calm. But when Mikkis placed his jacket over her, she spoke. "If you want to marry me," she muttered dreamily, slurred, "you'll have to ask my father."

And in the day he did.




UNDER THE BURNISHED lead of the dawn sky the de Keyser house by the sea seemed surrounded by a cemetery. The wide, sandy yard was lined by rows of rough-hewn gravestones in vague order. Farthest from the house were the simple rectangular slabs, elaborating into sun-discs, flowers and crosses. Right by the sprawl of the house and the workshop, like a palace guard, were the cherubs, the grieving mothers, the loose-hipped archangels resting on their swords and lances. The Maestro, long awake, was limping absently among the markers.

Francesca said, "That's his business. Making gravestones."

"And how's business, do you know?" Mikkis smiled.

"Not good, I imagine," Francesca smiled back. "After all, who's got the bread?"

Even after she greeted and kissed him, the Maestro did not recognize her. He seemed to take them for admirers, for the idle curious, perhaps prospective customers. "You walk heavily, young people," the old man stammered, shy at having to repeat the sales spiel. "But you carry your grieving well. How may I be of service?" Francesca laughed in affectionate delight.

It was minutes before his face brightened to apprehend. Francesca explained that no, it wasn't the onset of senility. The Maestro claimed he had the moments long as he could remember, when he was temporarily lost to enchantment. When he was younger, it caused him discomfort and some terrifying adventures, but he learned to deal with it and make it a joke by the time he grew into a man. The Maestro's happy explanation was that he carried a curse. That in his youth he had been lost at sea and had floundered up the pavilion of the sea-queen, who loved him and lamed him, and who waited, disconsolate, for him still in the caverns of the ocean.

Mikkis was introduced an international diplomat with important medical responsibilities, and as an expert in Greek antiquities. With a quizzical frown, the Maestro asked, "Where are you from, Dr. Madamba?"

Mikkis said New York.

"But before New York?" the Maestro insisted.

"My mother's family was originally from Cagayan, Maestro. My father was Caviteño."

"Cagayan, yes," beamed the old man. "Surely you must be related to Lumen Madamba."

"I am her son," Mikkis said, suddenly flushed.

"Look at that!" the Maestro laughed. "How wonderful! Lumen Madamba. Now, that's the actress! But Chez wouldn't know." He glanced brightly at his daughter, on the phone now to the Count's house, giving directions where to deliver her car.

Chez, Mikkis smiled. She walked towards them and clasped his hand.

"We saw your mother on stage," continued the Maestro. "In fact, in New York. A production of Chekov. Irina Nikolayevna, if I recall correctly. She was wonderful. She just cut through the experimental claptrap and delivered with marvelous sympathy and presence. Chekov, I imagine, would have agreed. I hope the lady is well."

"She's dead. She's close to five years dead."

"Terrible, terrible, " said the Maestro, leading them toward the house with his cane. "And very young. Much younger than me, anyway. I'm so sorry." Then he remembered. "Lumen Madamba's son. I went to school with - oh, I don't know how you are related - an uncle of yours."

With his cane, the Maestro tapped them to their places on the breakfast table that overlooked the sea. Francesca leaned over to blow on Mikkis' ear. "I know - oh, I know - where this is leading to. It will turn out that you and Papa are relatives. That we are cousins."

The Maestro asked, "What time did you come in?"

"Early, Papa, " Francesca's eyes twinkled happily. "Early."

There was salt fish, tomatoes, garlic, and last night's leftover soup of chicken, young fruit and chili leaves.

"I believe his name was Rabago," continued the Maestro. "An engineer. A cousin of your father, I think."

Only then did Mikkis remember that distant uncle's name, for whom the goat was butchered. "Yes, of course. He came to visit us when I was a boy."

"In New York?"

"In New York, yes sir. I remember he was very sick. Then he died."

The Maestro said, "I hope I'm not being insensitive to remember. This does not embarrass you, of course?"

"Whoa! What's this?" giggled Francesca, hand on his knee. "A scandal!"

"No, no longer, Maestro," Mikkis replied. "That was a long time ago. They are all dead now." All that time, no one had ever referred to his parents. To Francesca, he said, " The family secret. I understand it was in the gossip columns. I could tell you, but I know so little. I was a boy, and my tidbits aren't at all juicy."

"This boy's father was the hero," the Maestro told Francesca, suddenly serious. He clapped Mikkis' back and asked, "Do you still have family here?"

"I believe so, Maestro. But I have not really looked. My mother and my father were not married."

"I'm shocked!" laughed Francesca.

Her car, driven by one of the Count's servants, wheeled into the yard. Francesca stood up to shower, and returned to offer him the taste of toothpaste and mouthwash.

Before he could protest she said, "Be friends. Talk to Papa. I'll see you in a while." They returned her wave and the Mustang screeched away in a sandy cloud.




AFTERWARDS THEY FOLLOWED the workmen filing into their places. The old man held Mikkis' arm and walked him through the shop. "For as long as the dead," beamed the Maestro, "do not bury the dead, we have some usefulness and an income." But the workmen sat and idled. Aside from a pair of small white gravestones, it seemed there wasn't much to do.

Mikkis and the Maestro came out of the door that lead to the beach and walked on. Streaks of black oil lined the sand. Returning fishermen lifted their small catch for sale. "Sometimes," the old man continued, turning the fishes and the crabs over in his rough, scarred hands, "it still disturbs me though. As if, somehow, we take advantage of the bereaved. An advantage quite close to contempt. Of their foolishness and sentimentality. Their despairing messages, the going-away tokens and gifts. Their guilt and fear." He smiled and struck Mikkis' lightly on the center of the chest. "But you are," the old man said, striking again, "by definition, a despoiler of graves and must know these things much better than us."

Mikkis laughed, light-headed in sleeplessness. "Truth is it has been a long while since I poked around the cemeteries."

"A pity," commiserated the Maestro. "There's much to learn among the dead!"

"That was the theory," Mikkis agreed, "and the practice. Maybe it still is. I was a squeamish gravedigger. Maybe that's why I drifted off to here."

For a while the old man stared vacantly at the fishes and the crabs, their shells and the gills smeared with oily slime. Then he said, "Good stone."

He said, "Good stone is the hardest thing we can commonly afford. Good, hard stone against time and guilt, is it not so? Myself, if I had the choice, I would choose to rot in the branches of some dead tree, in the air and the seasons, you know. Like the burials of the old Negrillos and Zambals. With the great birds - may there be great birds! - and the insects cleaning you to your bones…"

"Like Picasso cleaning the fish with his mouth."

"Exactly!" the Maestro said happily. "Picasso, that old buzzard! To decompose, to burn. To be sundered to the elements. To be returned anonymously to God knows whence we came. That was what Rizal wanted, did he not? Well Rizal did not get his wish and neither will I."

"No, he didn't," Mikkis said.

"That's what Francesca threatens. A state funeral with bands and speeches. Perhaps an honor guard of soldiers. The President even, though the malicious say he is no longer there. But ministers and directors certainly. And generals and commanders. She says dying is for the living, and of course she is right. So I surrender. I say, do with me as you will. I shall be beyond caring."

They walked on. The Maestro handed Mikkis the bundle of fishes and crabs. He then squatted gingerly down to pick up a ball of soft pitch, then another, until he had a handful. He began to shape the mass into a turgid penis, arched hard, veins popping. "We eat it, Dr. Madamba. First, traces. Then in ever larger portions. Filth. Oil. The venom in the mussels and the clams. Some organism dormant from the beginning of the world that we had roused by our reckless need to exist, to breed. To call attention to ourselves. It will kill us soon enough, I guess. But the preview is horrible. Horrible pain before merciful paralysis. What does the rest of the world survive on?"

The old man leaned himself up with his cane. "That was what we were taught, were we not? We were taught we came into this dominance because, much more than anything else, we adapt spectacularly to change. Well, as usual, we are adapting. Adapting even to this … thing. Perhaps, " the Maestro laughed with mischief, threatened the smiling children by waving the black penis from his crotch, "we are evolving…"

The Maestro heaved the penis into the sea. After turning the catch over to the workmen for cooking, he led Mikkis up the house again, and parted the sailcloth curtain on the large room that was his studio. It was a jumble of large, unhewn stones and rocks, that seemed to have fallen carelessly from some sky, and among them, the forms becoming. On the side of one wall was a series: the nude Francesca metamorphosing up each station, from clay infant into a magnificent Venus in bronze, that filled Mikkis with unease. The Venus appeared at first sight to be classically realistic, but Mikkis frowned to note it had in places been stretched off slightly, just enough to disconcert.

"You like sculpture, Dr. Madamba," said the Maestro, coming at Mikkis silently from behind.

"It's Mikkis, sir, yes sir, " said Mikkis. Regaining himself he added, "But some things still frighten me a bit. I'm more comfortable with the easier things, the lighter things. I mean the whimsical pieces, the jokes."

"Ah, yes, " said the Maestro. "A typically Filipino response. Of course you are not offended that I forget and call you Filipino."

"No Maestro," Mikkis said, feeling his face redden. "Of course not. I am Filipino as everybody else."

"Yes, good. Well, I too like the abstractions, the constructions. The wit, the novelty, the plasticity of the new materials. But I couldn't understand, couldn't love them enough to work them. I am first to admit it is a weakness, perhaps a personal failure. But we are what we are. There were many who hooted when they gave me the prize. I was, I am, a throwback I guess. That's what they said I was: a modernist."

Nervously, Mikkis joined the Maestro in laughter. The old man cleared his throat and continued. " Oh well, " he harrumped, "that's another matter altogether, isn't it? You, I imagine, first encountered those overbearing mausoleum pieces - there in the yard - you must sort of bow your head to. So why not? Most of them are awful, awful! Well they serve, or served, their purpose. But we are evolving, are we not?"

The Maestro laughed again, louder. But when he spoke again, his voice was almost serious. "It wasn't always that way with us, you know. We were like everybody else in that particular anthropological stage. A stage that for us lasted long. Very long. Almost to our, I mean, my own time. Our old people lived quite healthily among statuary. You know: all the three dimensions, then perhaps more. Those full-breasted, wide-hipped goddesses. The totem animals. The guardians of the boats and the granaries. Those old, squat lordlings with their voyaging finery and their spears."

"I," said Mikkis, hesitant, "have seen things I was instantly comfortable with."

"Aha, the Greeks!" said the Maestro, pointing. "I know what you mean. You know our Rizal once wrote a letter - very proper, very polite - but clearly disappointed at how the Greeks he met looked. Not at all like the stone Hellenes of the museums. Rizal's Greeks would be, what? Albanians, Magyars, Romanys…"

"Turks," added Mikkis.

"Turks!" the Maestro roared. "As Nick Joaquin used to say, tan turco-turco!"

After a while Mikkis confessed. "It was sculpture that lead me to the Greeks."

"Explain?"

"I may have been ten-eleven. I walked into the Greek room at the Met. In the corner was an Aphrodite in white marble…"

"Headless, armless. Sliced somewhere above her knees," said the Maestro, removing his spectacles and rubbing them with the hem of his shirt. "The Ananaitha of Delos."

"You know the piece."


"I know her of course. Of course. But you go on." The Maestro replaced the glasses on the bridge of his nose. He was brown, burly, Indian.

Mikkis scanned about for some clue to the source of Francesca's Italianate beauty. There were no pictures of the old man's wife in the room, far as he could see. He said, "I do not know what it was. I mean I was just looking. Mind clean. No desire. But I rose in salute. Ten years old, in salute."

"In worship!" roared the Maestro, whooping, coughing, tapping Mikkis with his cane. "In worship! A worshipper! You'll do well for a son-in-law!"




WHEN IT BECAME clear the Maestro would insist on lunch Mikkis phoned his office. The old man's boat was moored fore and aft to a makeshift pier of coconut timber and bamboo, and there the workmen set up the meal. The wind had fallen and the Maestro, agile despite the limp, monkey-swung from the pier to the deck. His arms remained strong from the chiseling and hammering, Mikkis reasoned, as he took them for steadiness and balance.

Unidentifiable things in various stages of rot floated against the boat. Though the tide was out and the sea shallow, Mikkis could not make out the bottom. There was a small formica table nailed to the fore-deck, under a wide shade of woven thatch. Bright, tiny pinlights arched on to the table and the deck through the shade, flowing like constellations.

The two men ate the lunch of the fishes and the crabs. The meat tasted faintly of fuel. Great green flies buzzed about their faces. The Maestro ate methodically, eating his fishes bone clean, pulling each whisker-thin barb through his pressed lips for the last of the meat, then depositing the soft bones into the upturned carapace of the crab. Afterwards he collected the mess, his and Mikkis', and hurled it into the sea. He moistened a towel in seawater and cleaned the table top.

The old man brought up a bottle and glasses. "Are you are drinking man, doctor?" he asked, wiping the inside of the glasses with the same towel he used to clean the table.

"Not like before," Mikkis answered. "I can no longer take as much. What is it?"

From his pants pocket the Maestro drew a Tanto knife, the single-bladed fighting variety. He pried the blade out and cut himself a sliver from the mast to pick his teeth. The bits he picked he swallowed. "Don't worry about it," he admonished. "We learn to eat anything, don't we? We learn to drink anything."

It was brandy of the river palm, roughly distilled, and it stung Mikkis into tears.

"Don't cry, doctor," grinned the Maestro, clapping his back. "It's early and there's time enough later to be maudlin. It's not that bad, is it?"

"No, no," cried Mikkis. "It's actually rather good. I'm not used to it, that's what."

The old man flicked the black sun shades over his eyeglasses. "Ergot," he declared, drinking heartily.

"Sir?"

"This is ergot," whispered the Maestro, regarding his empty glass through the black lenses. "Or, more precisely the thing that makes you crazy drinking this stuff is ergot. At least that's what they assured me, a long time ago. Perhaps they said it to ease me into the kinship circle. Out of generosity. To make me comfortable in their company. They said what they ate and what I drank was the same. Acid. Ferment. Ergot."

"Ergotine," said Mikkis, "is deadly poison."

"So it is," the old man smiled sweetly, "so it is. We found out. We did. They insisted there was a trick to it. A secret, proven sequence. Whenever someone went insane or died they said the poor sap never bothered to learn the routine. Didn't know how. You had to know how. If you knew how, they said you got a free pass. They said black flies made small mounds of ergot to feed the wanderer."

"Manna," said Mikkis, breathing the heavy, wet air frantically.

"Exactly! A precise, minute amount to scour the mind. The tiny pinch of poison to take you slightly past the door. And you had a little time. Sometimes enough to let your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. So you could watch out for relatives and friends. Or celebrities!"

"This they believed?"

"Or perhaps they pretended. They said you had to believe certain things to make substance from hallucination," said the Maestro sadly.

Mikkis said, "To make nourishment of hallucination."

"As we are doing."

After a while, the Maestro fetched and opened another bottle. The wind cooled and the sun prepared to set. Along the shore the house lamps were lit. The words in the grumbling conversation of the workmen came to them singly, blown off sequence and sense by the rising wind. The boat began to roll, thumping against the pier, over the thick water that stank of corruption and bitumen.

When next he spoke the old man's voice had pitched up against the wind. "In our youth," he screamed, "it was fashionable to declare yourself. To declare your intention to solace the world. Save the world. Comfort the nature of the world, that was what I think they said. I, I thought them naive. Stupid. Sentimental. Arrogant in their ignorance. Save the world, indeed!"

One of the workmen lifted himself on deck with a battery lamp, but the Maestro waved him away back to the darkness. "What presumption!" he snorted, tottering over to the side of the boat. The old man gauged the wind, then proceeded to urinate over the side. He left his pants unbuttoned, his penis crumpled among the gray hair.

"Who knows the nature of the world?" the old man panted as he sat. To Mikkis surprise the Maestro appeared to masturbate, gently shaking the soft penis. "I had no idea then, and I haven't learned anything since. What I know is that it is the height of impertinence to second-guess God's intention. To say, as you might to a bond-servant or hireling, your work is finished. You are dismissed. This is the Sabbath and you are free! Go away, I make you free!"

"I did not think of it that way," Mikkis said, suddenly laughing.

"Aha!," cried the Maestro, as if he had won a wager. "How many species large and small have died to bring us here and now. Two drunks here and now, how many?"

"Since when?"

"Since the beginning of time of course, you idiot!" the Maestro boomed triumphantly to the sea.

"I don't know. I don't know. In the millions, I guess…"

"In the hundreds of billions! In the thousands of billions! Not mere cities or continents but worlds! Worlds and universes! All gone," the old man declared, lifting a hand to the sky. "All gone!"

Mikkis began to laugh, and he didn't know why.

"Whirlwind, cancer, volcanoes! Killed off by environments that alter, that change. Killed off by asteroids a hundred miles across!"

Mikkis felt the acid spurting from the pit of his stomach and lurched for the railing, but was late. He spat out the hot mouthful of soggy rice and gagged on the long, thick strands of sticky saliva.

"God the shaper," the old man whispered, one hand outstretched, feeling about him like a blind man. "God the shaper. Insomniac, manic, delirious! Stumbling around with his turpentine rag, erasing all. Or almost all. In malice, leaving a smudge, a stain. Begin again!"

The old man was quiet for a while, breathing. Then he said, "And here's what: surely there is no way to exclude the human species from the rest of them. Surely you can see that human madness, like the wind, is also a natural force."

"Madness and sadness both."

The limp penis never stood, but it appeared that the Maestro came, for he shuddered and sighed. He wiped his hands against his pants. He reached for the tin of water and seemed to wash himself. He threw the water into the sea. Mikkis ducked the wind-borne spray, sick and stone-cold sober.

"What was it, doctor, that Michelangelo said?" and here the old man beamed drunkenly. "The form that lives within the matter?"

From far inland a few joy rockets were fleetingly reflected on the Maestro's glasses. Somewhere deep in the ocean something large and powerful stirred and the boat tossed heavily. The old man caught the mast and savored the slow, sullen swell, nodding his head as if he had been verified. "The form within the matter. The purpose within. God the shaper is whittling off, chiseling off, sanding off everything superfluous. The no-longer necessary…"

"Necessary for what?"

"Aha," clapped the Maestro. "We will not know, will we? We will not live long enough to know…"

The rocking of the boat finally delivered Mikkis into the small dizziness that announces the meditative state. He rolled his tongue onto the roof of his mouth, closed his eyes, and began to breathe his mantra. Little tremors moved through his muscles. He breathed out trouble, illness and confusion. He breathed in peace and power, cupping them below his navel before gradually releasing them aloft into his heart, his mind. He began to lift and he let himself go, sundered into long, soft bursts of fine-whiskered, wind-borne seeds.

When he opened his eyes the Maestro's face was barely a foot away. He had removed his dark glasses. Almost lost in the old man's burly fist was the knife, the killing blade glinting.

The Maestro, lips curled back like a bear or lion in mid-charge, placed the tip of the knife on Mikkis' throat and whispered, "I know why you are here. I know why you've come back. I know who sent you."

Good God, thought Mikkis, moving gingerly back against the knife, please tell me if you know!

From the shadows the workmen gently pinioned the old man's shoulders. One of them deftly pried the Tanto from his hand. They lay him carefully down on the deck, now compliant as an infant, and soothed him with moist cleaning towels. The old man whimpered. To Mikkis the workmen said, " He's like this sometimes. He gets lost. But he wouldn't harm anybody. He won't remember when he wakes up. Don't worry about it."

When Francesca arrived she had the workmen roll the Maestro off the deck and into a hammock. They were bearing the old man home when he awoke momentarily, lucid, and made out Mikkis following by lantern light. "Doctor, " he called. "Evil is a force of nature also."

"What was that about?" asked Francesca, kissing Mikkis, her perfume dissipating the chaos and the dark.




NOW THE FLURRY OF servants clued Mikkis that the entertainment was about to commence. Mikkis wandered hurriedly through the corridors, testing the knobs on the doors, but the bathrooms were all locked. The door that opened was a small, darkened library or reading room, and the tossing, bare chested conga lady on the desktop, rising towards the flung door, reined hard on Commander Gil Ruiz' fez and hair. The commander withdrew the bronze lela from the trashing flowers and turned, but Mikkis had stepped back and closed the door.

Mikkis rushed to the side garden and found a wide-leafed night plant in the shadowed nook. He then slowly worked his way under the large lamps, near to the stage where the band mikes were set up. His chair was right behind the Count's, who sat between two commanders. An aide scurried up to them and saluted. The aide said, "The captain of the battery says one of his cowboys mixed a live shell with the blanks by mistake. I have placed them both on report."

"Bullshit these drunks," said Gil Ruiz, dismissing the aide with a wave. He turned to see Mikkis and winked.

"I swear," said the other commander, "I don't think we should take it anymore. They're shameless and greedy, and will not honor arrangements!"

"They will deny everything too. We have no proof, the judges say. No proof except if we take the ship."

"It is a big ocean," said the Count, glancing at Mikkis.

"A very big ocean," the commander agreed, grinning. "Sometimes I wish we could go up there and give them the trashing they are begging for."

Once, Mikkis was told, the old regional command of the Llanos allowed a consortium of Pampango and Vietnamese money the use of a condemned cement mine and its loading pier. But the consortium second leased the mine to another party with international resources. The phantoms delivered, so they say, perhaps a thousand container vans. The central command would not have been the wiser but for the earthquake that ran quite unexpectedly through the fault. The badly sealed containers broke in the eruption and leaked the color-coded warning smoke. For days the children of the plains danced in delight at the awesome, sky-full rainbow of blazing oranges and reds that descended slowly on them. Those whole enough to head south were slaughtered by civilian militias at the wire on the river. Still, enough may have survived to start the outrageous popular legend of the Zambals, who roamed the gray, arid plain, and whose pale, pustuled corpses sometimes floated down the river.

"You're not going to trash anybody," laughed the Count.

"No, we won't," agreed Gil Ruiz. "Not if we can help it."

"We are like that," said the other commander, "that's all. We lack the killer thirst of, say, those Indonesians. My God, those Indonesians! Or the Indo-Chinese. Or the Chinese for that matter. It embarrasses me sometimes. Put a bunch of us together, some veggies and meats, and suddenly we are cousins!"

They all laughed.

The Count leaned over and asked, "Explain that, Nestor."

Hunched over, desperate, Nestor gathered himself and began, "We are island Indians." But he had lost the Count and the commanders. "This is the nature of island Indians," Nestor said aloud. His hopeful eyes lit on Mikkis. But Mikkis turned away too.

Exactly on the hour the Count rose, picked up one of the mikes, rapped it vigorously to quiet the applauding house, coughed and intoned, "Thank you, thank you!"

Take-it-off! Take-it-off!

"My dear friends, my dear, dear friends!"

The guests took up the cry: Take-it-off! Take-it-off!

The Count shook his perspiring head seductively.

The band swung into a honky-tonk strip joint prelude, and the Count, feigning modesty began to dance, the sway of his great hips accented by the laughter, the drums and the cymbals.

Take-it-off!

The Count reached behind his head and slowly undid the gold chain that held the eye patch. Under the coin, bottomless darkness. The crowd roared.

After taking many bows the Count spoke to the microphone again. He said, "Despite our many difficulties, together we greet the New Year again. Let us raise our glasses in the hope that this year may be better!"

The guests and the servants shouted in assent, banged the tables, clanged their knives against the plates. Then Nestor, drunk as a dog, was pushed up by two servants into the mike. The servants played to the audience by rubbing up against him, cupping his crotch and humping his unsteady legs. But the Count stilled the laughter with an upraised arm. He then sat before the stage, bowed his head with a large handkerchief under his face. His huge shoulders shook as Nestor recited.

From the darkness
Of Time's black abyss
I rise, I rise!

I am the New Year
Come this hour to govern,
The New Year this hour to govern…


Soon the winners of the raffles were announced, Mikkis among them. He ate his two heaping platefuls quickly, hardly pausing to chew, as the music and the screams decibeled louder off the ceilings and the walls and onto his throbbing brain. Many of the guests were moving back to the food tables, but for Mikkis it was nearly time to go.

"I know, I know," the Count leaned back, acting a disappointment. "You are the wholesome, archaic Greek - progenitors of the Spartan - with no taste for our Latin debaucheries. Ah, but you're new and will come over in time. Aristotle supped quite heartily with the Macedonian, as you know. Veggies and meats! This may have been a night for epiphanies, for conversion. Anyway I have sent your gifts, and your prizes, to your car. I also found some parcels that belong to you. Books, magazines, some tapes and some discs."

"Well, thank you," said Mikkis, shaking the Count's huge hand. But he was not too new to know not to ask where and how the Count found his mail.

Francesca de Keyser came over to kiss him good-night. Briefly, Mikkis considered asking her to spend the night. By the sudden sparkle of her eyes Mikkis saw she knew. "Happy New Year," she said. "Go and visit Papa one of these days."

The headlights and the yellow beams on his car were lit, the engine running, the small blue flag up on the long hood. On the back seat, the two young women were smoking. "Your raffle prizes," Kato explained.

They were both breeds: one dark, one fair.

"You want them?"

Kato smiled under the wasp-green cyclist's glasses. Mikkis slid into the front passenger seat. Kato said, "Your other gifts are in the trunk. We have solar batteries, some Perrier water, a food basket. And your mail's there too."

"What are your names?" Mikkis turned to ask the breeds as Kato waved to the cowboy manning the gate.

"I'm M'aya. She's Nami-it. Those are stage names only." They giggled.

Kato slowed for the bank of bulbs in the middle of the street, but kept the engine rev roaring with the clutch. He flicked the auxiliary backlights on, then leaned forward and drew the pistol from the holster on the small of his back. He slid the gun butt forward between his legs, the slide secured under his thigh. Mikkis drew his own pistol from the spring-loaded devise concealed beneath the glove compartment and scanned behind the slowing car. Both guns were on Condition One, cocked-and-locked, as they had drilled. But the drunken cowboys in the checkpoint knew the car, the flag, and waved them on.

A hundred yards past the checkpoint a high velocity rifle round cracked over the car. On both sides of the street, the mounds of garbage and the bags were instantly transformed into running, jabbering clumps of Subterraneans and Creeks. The cowboys flicked the switches into full auto. Cannon and machineguns fired in volume. By the dash clock, Mikkis saw it was almost midnight.

Yes, there'll be a hot time in Manila tonight!

Past the sector guardhouse and the dogs, Kato flicked on the radio and punched the code sequence. He was back in good spirits as they came up to the house crackling under the joy rockets and the din of the explosions. All the security lights, powered by the solar rechargeables were on. As the gate swung open, Mikkis could sense the big machinegun on the roof trained on them. Over the radio, Caramba was on board - on tape? - beginning dawn watch, La Diane.

Mikkis and the breeds sat in the car - motor running, power beams lit -and talked softly as Kato disarmed the booby traps, unlocked the door, cleared downstairs and upstairs. He then proceeded around the house to shut off the auxiliary power. Mikkis waved the breeds in, quiet for a change but briefly, as Kato armed the traps again.

The women followed Mikkis into the upstairs bedroom. The fair one loaded a disc into the player and the dark one began to dance to the music.

Mikkis felt suddenly exhausted, and coughed long after a lungful of breath. He tossed the mail packages on the bed. Where does the Count get them? He stood and rummaged about the bathroom closet for the testing kit. He folded two of the papers and watched them spit daintily into the tubes.

M'aya. Nami-it. Both blue. Both safe.

Mikkis flushed the tubes down the bowl. He walked to the machine and pushed in the disc. The dark one danced beside him and said, "We want to smoke. May we smoke?"

Mikkis said, "Sure. Go ahead." They produced the sticks from their wallet and lit up. He sniffed as the rough smoke seethed around his tongue.

The color bars on the monitor faded into the face of beautiful black woman who smiled at him and began to speak. Mikkis lip-read her Merry Christmas. But the audio line was connected into the music output, and the woman on the screen appeared to move her mouth in sync with the old, honky-tonk bar song.

When he comes round
Will he kiss you
Warm as in the days before
And will he say his love forever
As if forever were today…

The fair one had found his nipple and was clicking on it with a wide warm tongue, her bright hair, perfume and smoke, bobbing up and down under his frightened face.

Will he say his love forever
As if forever were today…

Who are you? Mikkis inquired of the woman on the screen. The dark one, already naked, came from behind and unzipped him swiftly. He drew back as the teeth passed. She reached within where he was becoming hard. Who are you? he repeated.

Time enough tomorrow to find out.