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Nguyen Tran Le had turned purple with rage. He fumbled under his shirt and drew out a small silver pistol. He pointed it, shaking, at Captain Tho, and the wide man ducked as the bullet whistled past. Nguyen Tran Le fired again.

  Captain Tho pulled the carbine from under the mat and shot Nguyen Tran Le in the throat. The monkey screamed louder.

  The rearmost fast boat suddenly shot forward and came up alongside. A My stood in the cockpit, a tall blond man turning gray, with the look of an officer about him. He wore a billed blue cap covered with gold leaf and a short-sleeved khaki shirt. Light glinted on odd, lozenge-shaped scars around his biceps.

  “Goddamn it, Billy, what the fuck’s all the shooting? I told you once, I told you a hundred times—fuckin’ ammo don’t grow on trees!”

  “Not our shooting, Commodore,” the wide man yelled back. “One of the passengers took a pop at the captain here, and the captain popped him back.”

  “Well, goddamn it—”

  Just then the monkey let out a horrific scream. She squatted on the cross yard and crapped in her hand, then threw the handful at the My in the gold hat. It hit him on the shirtfront.

  “Waste that monkey!”

  The wide man drew his pistol and shot the monkey out of the crosstrees. She fell heavily onto the deck, still screaming. A tiny bloody monkey head popped out between her legs. The wide man shot her again.

  Captain Tho fired the carbine from his hip. His bullet knocked the wide man’s head sideways, and the captain saw the groove it had left along his cheek, blood dripping suddenly from the wide man’s torn ear. The wide man shot him in the face. Then he emptied the pistol into Captain Tho’s head.

  The My in the fast boat threw up his hands in exasperation. He threw his hat on deck.

  “All right then,” he said. “Waste the fucking lot of them.”

  * * *

  An hour later, and some twenty miles north of San Lázaro, Curt Hughes saw the smoke from the burning junk pall over the horizon. His dog stood on the cabin roof, growling toward the smoke. Curt wondered what it was. None of his business whatever. He was headed north toward Manila.

  “Probably just those nasty pirates, Brillo,” he said to the dog. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar.”

  Too damned hot around here, he thought. On his chart he circled San Lázaro in red pencil, then wrote beside it, “Bad news.”

  The Seamark ran north on the wind toward Manila.

  THIRTEEN

  In addition to Venganza’s deck log, Miranda kept a personal log of each day’s major developments, along with her ongoing impressions and speculations. She’d developed this habit in her earliest days at sea, when she discovered that if they found her scribbling in a book during her off hours, her hornier shipmates would leave her alone. But journals are addictive, and even when she became master of her own vessel, she kept it up. She wrote in ink so she wouldn’t be tempted by personal historical revisionism at some later date; she struck through her errors or those words she suddenly wanted to amend with a single line, ship’s-log fashion, so that the original remained legible. She wrote in a long, green-covered logbook of the sort used by mariners for ages now, brass-bound at the corners and authoritative in its heft.

  An excerpt:

  Underway 0620, Honolulu to Philippines, rhumb lines via Majuro in the Marshalls. Trades steady, NE to ENE; seas moderate. Having Effredio aboard is a great boon. Not only cuts the work- and watch-load by a third—more than a third, thanks to his energy—but gives me someone to talk to, a mooring line to my past. Says Curt has left Palawan—friends of Freddie’s saw him briefly in Manila talking to some air force officer, other friends spotted Seamark later in Zamboanga, on Mindanao. Freddie sent his friend Padre Cotinho down there to watch him. Freddie’s sister, who works for Pan Am in Manila, cut him a free ticket to Honolulu, where he knew I must stop to replenish stores. Freddie well connected.

  Shot noon sun—made good 48 miles since departure, solid 8½ knots—just before brief squall blew down from N. Reefed main and mizzen. Venganza heeled sharply to first gusts but kicked up her heels when I payed her off a point to leeward. Good seaboat. I love the sound of a wooden boat in a storm. She flexes like a strong man’s dick. Rain felt good—collected 20 gallons in wooden casks from leech of sails. Next time we see one coming must remember to bring dirty wash topside and do some laundry. Hate a smelly seabag.

  Dad still fit and clear-eyed following the Rum Bottle Test. Can’t call him Dad anymore. He’s a hand like any other. Will call him Culdee or Boats henceforth. He’s been civil enough to Freddie so far but watches him like a seahawk. Checking him out. Saw him testing knots on Freddie’s reef points when the rain hit, later watching the compass over Freddie’s shoulder while he had the helm. Freddie knows what’s up. Without looking back he said, “She keeks, Boats, don’t she? Leetle beet, anyway.” Culdee just grunted and went forward.

  Checked caulking after the squall. No oakum spewed. Rance still hiding for fear of the Stranger. Saw his beady eyes peering at me from sea stores in the lazaret when I went forward to check for leaks. Warned Freddie not to kill him if he shows during his watch.

  Shot evening stars—51 mi. made good since noon. At this rate we’ll reach the P.I. in three weeks. (Don’t count your landfalls before you raise them.)

  Fresh mahimahi for the evening meal, the fish caught on trolling line by Freddie just as I was about to open a can of beef. A good omen?

  Culdee’s ghosts began to surface as they passed the entrance to Pearl Harbor. In the old days, when you cleared the dogleg at the inland end, the first thing you saw was the hulk of the old Arizona rising out of the dirty blue water. Now there was a museum there, he knew, shining white in the sunlight and dwarfing the sunken battlewagon. He didn’t want to see it. Years ago he’d served in a destroyer with a mustang—an ex-gunner’s mate elevated to officer grade by the war—who’d been in the Arizona back then. He’d been part of her company for eight years, since leaving boot camp. He was on leave, heading back to the States, when the Japs attacked on December 7, 1941. The ship that was taking him Stateside turned right around and steamed back.

  Dan—that was the mustang’s name—was a qualified navy hard-hat diver. He had to dive into the hull of his own dead ship. There were twelve hundred bodies in there, shipmates. “Some of them I knew when I found their bodies,” Dan said one night on the mid-watch. “Some I didn’t know. Some you really couldn’t tell either way.”

  The images came back to Culdee when the Venganza shot past the entrance and broke toward the open sea—the darkness there in the ripped hull, weak light from waterproof lamps, and brighter stabs of light from the acetylene torches cutting through warped bulkheads; fish darting in and out of the light; torn bodies floating, stuck like balloons to the overheads by the gas generated within them by death, some of the faces clear and recognizable—pale, slack-jawed, vaguely surprised by how easily it had taken them—others bitter at the knowledge, and others already eaten by fish; bits of old shipmates drifting here and there, arms sunk by the weight of a wristwatch, a Negro mess boy buried by the spill of blue-rimmed crockery that fell from the wardroom pantry shelves, and enginemen boiled the color of shrimp by the high-pressure steam of burst pipes. Dan had taken him clear through the Arizona that night, stem to stern, main deck to keelson, on the midwatch.

  “After a while it wasn’t so bad,” Dan had said. “I’d pull one down off the overhead and say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s Horns Gearhardt, whose old lady run off with the shoe clerk in Shit City.’ Or, ‘that’s Old Chief Merriman, the practical joker,’ and I’d remember the night we pulled liberty down in Tijuana and let the bulls loose from their pens behind the bullring up there on the hill and they charged down through T-town and chased all the whores ahead of them down the Avenida de la Revolución. But then I found my best buddy’s head—Mike Powers, another gunner. How it got down there from the number one turret where he was a gun captain, don’t ask me. It had rolled into a corner by the ruptured boiler
. I couldn’t send it topside with the rest of the body parts, not my best friend. I picked it up and put it into the boiler. As far as I know, it’s down there still.”

  “Why’d you do that?” Culdee had asked after a while.

  Dan laughed, briefly and bitterly. “I knew his immoral soul was for sure in hell. I guess I figured the boiler of a sunken battleship was the closest thing to that for the rest of him.”

  Sea stories. The old navy had a million of them.

  FOURTEEN

  Curt tied off the Avon to a cleat at the head of the pier and walked toward the harbormaster’s office. The wind was down and big, blue-black rain clouds were piling over the mountains to the east. He turned and looked out to the Seamark, where she rolled sluggishly at anchor. Will one hook be enough if it comes on to blow? Maybe he should run back out and drop the other anchor. But the holding ground seemed good—thick mud and sand. To hell with it. She looks nice out there in her new blue hull paint and yawl rig. Her new name shone in gold on the transom—Sea Witch. Memories of Miranda.

  He could see the dog standing on the wheelhouse. Please release me, let me go. . . . It was the first night in port after the long run up from Palawan. But Curt didn’t trust the harbormaster. He didn’t trust the harbor. He surely didn’t trust the Philippines. The whole place breathed a kind of ball-stomping menace—the heat, the tattered palms, shit and oil on the water, the dead-meat stink of flowers mixed with wood smoke and burning garbage and traffic exhaust. It’s like Colombia all over again, or Panama, or Jamaica. Better to leave Brillo aboard to guard the boat. He might even get a chance to bite someone—his favorite sport.

  There was a kid in the harbormaster’s office, lying back in a rickety card chair and scratching his balls through his cutoff Levi’s. He kept on scratching while he stared up blankly at Curt. It was as if Curt had walked into the boy’s bedroom and caught him jacking off. He wasn’t about to be interrupted.

  “Can I use the phone?”

  “Five peso,” the kid said. He smiled wide. Filipinos smiled a lot.

  Curt gave him five pee. He thumbed through the metro Manila phone book on the desk and dialed a number on a wall phone that looked as though it had been used to beat a carabao to death.

  “Military Air Transport,” said a chirpy voice that sounded almost American.

  “Major Chalmers, please.”

  “Who calling Major Chalmer, please?”

  “Tell him it’s Mr. Curtis. Jim Curtis from, uh, Phisohex in Barranquilla.”

  “You call long distance, please?”

  “No, I’m here in Manila, please.”

  “Just a moment, please?”

  Curt flipped a Filipino Marlboro from the pack in his shirt pocket—awful smokes, they burned as hot and fast as a firecracker fuse. He lighted it with a nicked old Zippo, one of the chrome jobs that clanked when you snapped back the lid. The paint was nearly worn off the etching of a battleship on the lighter’s front: the USS Wisconsin BB-64. It was an old lighter of Miranda’s, or rather her dad’s. Miranda was a good chick. Damn shame to fuck her over that way. Still, chicks are cheap.

  “Mr. Curtis? Major Chalmer busy right now, please. He would call you soon. Where is your number?”

  “How long will that be?”

  “I’m sorry, please, we don’t know already?”

  Curt looked across the road. Beyond the whizzing traffic there was a neon sign on a low, tin-roofed stucco building: BE-BOP-A-LULA BAR & GRILL. He looked up the number in the phone book and gave it to the Please voice. He still wasn’t sure whether it was a boy or a girl.

  “Where is that, please?”

  “Ermita, I think. Near the yacht basin there.”

  “Major Chalmer will call you certainly I think, Mr. Curtis, please.”

  The kid in the chair was still scratching. By now he’d gotten half a hard-on under the denim, fat as a Polish sausage. How’s it comin’, kid? Mostly by hand.

  All the waitresses and most of the hookers in the Be-Bop-a-Lula Bar & Grill were wearing red jeans. Very tight red jeans. It was cool in the bar, dark and funky with the smell of stale beer and tropical dry rot, all blended by the big wood-bladed whap-whap fans on the ceiling. The bar was real wood, too—rich, dark, fine-grained wood with a lot of oil rubbed into it. Philippine mahogany, right? Right. The Filipino bartender had very square shoulders under a faggoty embroidered shirt and scars like thick white worms around his eyes, the kind of scars fighters or kick-boxers get. His grin was about as wide as his shoulders.

  “What’ll it be, Joe?”

  “I’m new in town. What’s your good beer?”

  “San Mig. Made right here in Manila-by-da-Sea. MacArthur’s old brewery, hey? San Miguel. Old Dugout Doug. He mighty rich guy.”

  “Gimme a San Mig, then.” Curt looked at the glasses standing upside down on a shelf behind the bar. A cockroach about the size of a Havana cigar was crawling over them. “No glass.”

  But it was good beer, all right. Curt nodded his approval to the bartender.

  “How’s come all the ladies are wearing red pants?”

  “From da song, Joe. You know da song?” He sang it in a wobbly falsetto, grinning. “‘She da gal in da red blue jeans, Be-bop-a-lula she ma queen.’ Someting like dat.”

  “Yeah, sure, I can dig it. They work for the bar. But what about the ones in skirts?”

  The bartender laughed. “You try one in skirts, Joe, you find out quick enough.”

  He spun away like a karateka—pow pow kick pow—and battled his way down the duckboards laughing.

  It was a challenge.

  Curt sipped his beer and sized up the girls. Cute, the lot of them—some in a darkish, peppery Mexican way, some longer-boned and darker still, with a hint of Africa in their frizzy hair, others delicate, hollow-boned like birds, almost flat-chested but not quite—tiger-eyed Asia in babydoll faces. Buy me one of those, Mommy.

  He nodded to one in a slinky black dragon-lady skirt. She smiled, tiger-eyed, sultry, and snaked her way to the barstool with a fanny waggle that was bound to leave her in a wheelchair with lumbar arthritis by the time she reached twenty.

  “Hi, Joe,” she said in a throaty voice. Eyes up from under, lashes like spider legs—what you’d find in a load of bananas. “You wanna good time? Buy me a drink.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Carlotta, but you can call me Lotta.” She leaned back and licked her lips, slow and juicy, eyes locked with Curt’s. “Lotta Tung. I’m Eurasian girl, you know?”

  Curt laughed and bought her a drink—bar Coke and two ice cubes, eighty pee. That was four bucks American, twice as much as the San Mig. Ah, well. He gave her a Marlboro and lighted it with Miranda’s dad’s Zippo. She dragged deep, leaned back again, and started blowing smoke rings—red lips, wet tongue, perfect circles. The famous Tung Sisters. You find them in every bar, all over the world.

  “Hey, Joe, you wanna dance? Come on, let’s dance.”

  They went over to the jukebox in the far, dark corner. It was an old Wurlitzer, like from the fall of Corregidor, all pulsing pastel lights, throbbing round curves. Curt handed Lotta a fistful of change and leaned over her shoulder while she made her selections. Bent over, she pushed back against him and worked a slow, hot, silky fanny waggle against his crotch. The juke was a time machine—a monument to the fifties—Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Platters, Dion and the Belmonts, Ritchie Valens, the Chantels. Lotta picked something slow—Patsy Cline, “I Love You So Much It Hurts Me.” She turned and smiled. “Or, Who Put the Sand in the Vaseline?’” Lotta laughed . . .

  They danced in the dark corner, belly to belly. Or rather, Curt’s dick against Lotta’s belly—she was tall for a Filipina, but still pretty short. In the light of the jukebox her lipstick looked almost black. She stared up at him breathing hard, moaning, doing her tongue number. She picked the wrong song, Curt thought. Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater” would have been more like it. It was all so false, it was alm
ost true. He wanted to laugh and get out of there, but his dick’d been at sea too long, it had a mind of its own.

  He glommed Lotta Tung’s left tit. A falsie! Wait a minute—Asian girls are notorious for that. Titless wonders, but they make up for it in other respects. He slid the hand down over her butt. Real enough at that end. She was breathing harder, panting—another minute and she’d hyperventilate, or die of terminal dry throat. Curt grabbed at her pussy. She pulled away with a gasp before he could touch her.

  “Hey, Joe, no! We go back here.” She pulled him toward a doorway beside the juke. “I’m hot! I suck you off, right?”

  Curt pulled back on her hand, slammed her against the juke. He socked his hand between her legs.

  Jesus Christ! There was a cock and balls under the dragon-lady skirt!

  “Tah-dah!” A spotlight from the bar flashed on the two of them. The bartender was laughing his ass off. Everyone in the bar was looking and laughing—GIs, airmen, hookers, B-girls, sailors, Flips in business suits and those faggy embroidered shirts. . . . Lotta Tung was laughing, too, in a much deeper voice than before. In the light it was easy to see she was a guy—five-o’clock shadow on the upper lip, a frigging tent pole under the skirt.

  “I tole you, Joe!” the bartender yelled. “Da ones in da skirts, hey? Dat’s da famous Pilipino Benny boys, Joe! Welcome to Manila, where da sun never sets and da cock always crows!”

  Curt blasted out of there in a hurry.

  It was dark now and raining like a bastard—the rain of the thousand fire hoses. Curt had been soaked in it from Haiti to Hawaii. It falleth on the just and the unjust alike, he mused, absolving all sins, cooling all passions. He danced in place, soaked and laughing. The traffic roared past unbroken, throwing oil spray as high as the Be-Bop’s thundering roof. Then a car peeled out of the mainstream and splashed to a halt in front of him. A white man’s face leaned out the back window. It was Phil Chalmers.

  “Pile in!”