Tree of Smoke (7 page)

The colonel’s entire card catalog system, over nineteen thousand entries ordered from the oldest to the latest, rested on four collapsible tables shoved against the wall either side of Skip’s bathroom door, over nineteen thousand three-by-five cards in a dozen narrow wooden drawers fashioned, the colonel had told him, in the physical plant facilities at the government’s Seafront compound in Manila. On the floor beneath the tables waited seven thirty-pound boxes of blank cards and two boxes full of thousands of eight-by-eleven photocopies, the same nineteen-thousand-card system in duplicate, four cards to a page. Skip’s main job, his basic task at this phase of his life, his purpose here in this big bedroom beside the tiny golf course, was to create a second catalog arranged by categories the colonel had devised, and then cross-reference the two. Sands had no secretary, no help—this was the colonel’s private intelligence library, his cache, his hidey-hole. He claimed to have accomplished all the photocopying by himself, claimed Skip was the only other person to have touched these mysteries.

The large guillotine-like paper cutter and the long, long ranks of the jars of glue. And the dozen card drawers, sturdy three-foot-long troughs like those in libraries, each with four digits stenciled across its face—

2242

—the colonel’s lucky number: February 2, 1942, the date of his escape from the hands of the Japanese.

He heard the colonel telling a story. His roar carried through the house while the others laughed. Sands felt in his uncle’s presence a shameful and girlish despair. How would he evolve into anyone as clear, as emphatic, as Colonel Francis Sands? Quite early on he’d recognized himself as weak and impressionable and had determined to find good heroes. John F. Kennedy had been one. Lincoln, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius…The colonel’s smile as he’d examined the gun—had the colonel known beforehand Skip was to receive this weapon? Sometimes the colonel had a way of smiling—irritating to Skip—a knowing play of his lips.

Long before he’d followed his uncle into intelligence—in fact, before the existence of the CIA—as a child, Skip had made of Francis Sands a personal legend. Francis lifted weights, he boxed, played football. A flier, a warrior, a spy.

In Bloomington that day nine years ago, the recruiter had asked, “Why do you want to join the Agency?”

“Because my uncle says he wants me as a colleague.”

The recruiter didn’t blink. As if he’d expected the response. “And who’s your uncle?”

“Francis Sands.”

Now the man blinked. “Not the colonel?”

“Yes. In the war he was a colonel.”

The second man said, “Once a colonel, always a colonel.”

He’d been a freshman then, eighteen years old. This move to Indiana University had been his first relocation since 1942, when, following his father’s death on the
Arizona
at Pearl Harbor, his newly widowed mother had brought him from San Diego, California, back to the plains of her beginnings, to Clements, Kansas, to spend the rest of his childhood with her in the quiet house, in the sadness that didn’t know what it was. She’d brought him home to Clements in early February, in precisely the month that her brother-in-law Francis Xavier, the captured Flying Tiger, made his escape over the side of a Japanese prisoner-of-war ship and into the China Sea.

On graduation Skip had accepted employment with the CIA, but even before training was returned to school to get a master’s in comparative literature at George Washington University, where he helped Nationalist Chinese exiles with their translations of essays, stories, and verse from the Communist mainland. The handful of journals publishing such pieces were funded almost entirely by the CIA. He got a monthly stipend from the World Literature Foundation, a CIA front.

At the mention of his uncle that day in 1955, both recruiters had smiled, and Skip smiled too, but only because they smiled. The second man said, “If you’re interested in a career with us, I think we can accommodate you.”

They’d certainly done so. And here before him stretched that career: nineteen thousand notes from interviews, almost none of them comprehensible to him—

—the last three letters designating the interrogator who’d made the entry. Skip had taken to adding notes of his own, quotations from his heroes—“Ask not what your country can do for you…”—on cards marked JFK, LINC, SOC, the thickest batch from the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius, messages the old Roman emperor, besieged and lonely at the edges of his empire, had written to himself in the second century after Christ:

As Skip approached the dining room, Pitchfork seemed to be hollering, “Hear, hear!”

They’d already been served a course of fish and rice. Skip took his place before an empty plate at the colonel’s left elbow, and the houseboy brought him his portion. They ate by the dim light from candelabras. When the power failed it hardly changed the atmosphere. The hum of air conditioners ceased in the wings, the fan in the parlor ceiling stopped its muttering and revolving.

Meanwhile, the colonel held forth, his fork mostly in the air, one hand gripping his tumbler as if pinning it to the table. He spoke in a Boston Irish accent overlaid by years on air force bases in Texas and Georgia. “Lansdale’s one true goal is to know the people, to learn from them. His efforts amount to art.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Pitchfork. “Completely irrelevant, but hear, hear!”

“Edward Lansdale is an exemplary human being,” the colonel said. “I say it without blushing.”

“And what has Lansdale got to do with the aswang or any of our other legends?” Eddie said.

“Let me say it again, and maybe you’ll hear me this time,” the colonel said. “Edward Lansdale’s overriding fascination is with the people themselves, with their songs, their stories, their legends. Whatever comes out of that fascination in the way of
intelligence
—do you get it?—it’s all by-product. God, that fish was skinny. Sebastian, where’s my little fish? Where did it go? Hey—are you giving him my fish?” The houseboy Sebastian at that very moment was offering Skip a second go at the platter of bangos. Skip knew this to be the colonel’s favorite. Had even the cook been warned of this visit? “Okay, I’ve landed a whale,” the colonel said, taking another helping. “I’ll postpone telling you my story about the aswang.”

Sebastian, unbidden, forked yet a third fish onto the colonel’s plate and headed for the kitchen, laughing to himself. Back there the staff talked loudly, happily. Around the colonel and his kidding, Filipinos grew giddy. His obvious affection for them had a way of driving them nuts. Eddie too. He’d unbuttoned his tunic and switched from ice water to Chardonnay. Skip could see the evening ending with phonograph records littering the polished floor and everybody doing the Limbo Rock, falling on their asses. Suddenly Eddie said, “I knew Ed Lansdale! I worked with him extensively!”

Had he? Eddie? Skip didn’t see how this could be true.

“Anders,” Skip asked Pitchfork, “what is the scientific name of this fish?”

“The bangos? It’s called milkfish. It spawns upriver, but lives in the sea. Chanos salmoneus.”

Eddie said, “Pitchfork speaks several languages.”

The bangos were tasty, troutlike, not at all fishy. AID had helped put in a hatchery at the bottom of the mountain. The colonel ate steadily and carefully, stripping the morsels of flesh from the tiny bones with his fork and washing them down with several whiskeys during the meal. His habits hadn’t changed: after five each evening he drank voluminously and without apology. The family’s not-quite-articulated assumption was that the Irish drank, but drinking before five was undisciplined and decadent, and patrician. “Tell us about the aswang. Give us a tall tale,” he said to Eddie.

“Well, all right,” Eddie agreed, once again assuming, Skip believed, some of the character of his Henry Higgins, “let’s see; once upon a time, which is how these things begin, there lived a brother and sister with their mother, who was in fact a widow following the death of the father in a tragic accident of some kind, I’m sorry I don’t remember what kind, but I’m sure it was heroic. I’m sorry you didn’t give me a warning to consult with my grandmother! But in any case I’ll try to remember the tale. Two young children, a brother and sister, and now I apologize once more, because it was a pair of orphans, both their parents had been killed, and it was not after all their mother, but their mother’s old aunt who was caring for them in a hut some distance from one of our villages in Luzon. Perhaps our own village of San Marcos, I’m certainly not ruling that out. The boy was strong and brave, the young girl was beautiful and kind. The great-aunt was—well, you can predict, I’m sure—she liked to torment the two fine children with too many tasks, too much harsh language, and blows with a broom to get them to hurry up. The brother and sister obeyed her without complaining, because in fact they were quite dutiful.

“The village had been happy a long time, but lately a curse had fallen, and a bloodthirsty aswang fed on the lambs, also upon the young goats, and worst of all it fed on the little children, and especially on the young girls like the sister. Sometimes the aswang was seen as an old woman, sometimes in the form of a gigantic boar with savage tusks, sometimes even as a lovely young child to lure the little ones into the shadows and suck their innocent blood. The people of the region were terrified, they failed to smile anymore, they stayed in the houses at night near their candles, they never went to the forest, to the jungle, to gather the avocados or any beneficial plants, or to hunt for meat. They gathered in the chapel of the village each afternoon to pray for the death of the aswang, but nothing helped, and, even, they were sometimes suddenly taken in a bloody murder while walking home from these prayers.

“Well, in the manner of these things, a saint appeared to the brother and sister, Saint Gabriel in the rags of a wanderer one day coming along in the jungle. He met the children at the well when they came to get some water, and he gave the boy a bow and a sack of arrows—what do you call that sack?”

“A quiver,” Pitchfork said.

“A quiver of arrows. That’s rather a beautiful phrase. He gave the lad a quiver of arrows and a very strong bow and charged him to stay all night in the granary at the bottom of the path, because there he would slay the aswang. Many cats gathered in the granary at night, one of whom was in fact the aswang, who assumed this form in order to camouflage. ‘But, sir, how will I know the aswang, because you haven’t given me arrows to shoot every cat?’ And Saint Gabriel said, ‘The aswang will not play with its rat when it catches one, it only tears the rat in pieces instantly and revels in its blood. When you see a cat do that, you must shoot him right away, because that one is the aswang. Of course, if you fail, I don’t have to inform you you’re going to feel yourself being torn apart by the fangs of the aswang, and it will drink your blood as you die.’

“‘I am not afraid,’ the boy said, ‘because I know you are Saint Gabriel in a disguise. I am not afraid, and with the help of the saints, I won’t fail.’

“When the boy returned to his home with these arrows and such, the aunt of his dead and departed mother was refusing to let him go out. She said he must sleep in his bed every night. She attacked him with her broom and confiscated his weapons and hid them in the thatch of the hut. But for the first time, the boy disobeyed his guardian and stole them back that night, and crept away to the granary with one candle, and waited in the shadows of the place, and I will assure you they were very eerie shadows! And silhouettes of rats scurrying among the shadows. And silhouettes of cats creeping everywhere, about three dozen. Which one would be the aswang? Let me just tell you that a pair of fangs glowed red in the night, the hiss of an aswang was heard, then the cry, and as a horrible visage leapt at his throat, the boy loosed an arrow and heard a thump when the creature fell back, and then a strangled moaning came, and then he heard the claws scraping as the wounded fiend dragged itself to protection somewhere. Surveying the scene, the young hero found the severed leg of a giant cat with deadly claws, the left foreleg, and his arrow was lodged through and through it.

“The young hero returned home, and his ugly old guardian scolded him. His sister was also awake. Great-Aunt served them tea and some rice. ‘Where did you go, brother?’ ‘I fought the aswang, sister, and I think I wounded it.’ And sister said, ‘Beloved Aunt, you too were absent in the night. Where were you?’

“‘I?’ said the beloved aunt. ‘No, I was here with you all night.’ But she served the tea quickly, and made her excuses to go lie down.

“Later that day the two children found the old woman hanging by her neck from the tree outside. Beneath her the blood pooled, dripping from the place where she was missing her left arm. Earlier, as she poured the tea, she had kept from them beneath her robe the sight of her severed arm, dripping her life’s blood, the poisonous blood of the aswang.

“It’s an old story,” Eddie said. “I’ve heard it many times. But the people believe it will happen, and now they believe it happened here, yesterday, this week. My God,” he said, pouring himself more Chardonnay, shaking the bottle upside down over his glass while his small audience applauded, “have I sat here talking and drinking an entire bottle?”

The colonel was already turning the screw in another cork. “You’ve got Irish in you, fella.” He raised a toast: “Today is the birthday of Commodore Anders Pitchfork. Salud!”

“Commodore?” Eddie said. “You’re joking!”