“If you are going to fight the Spanish,” says Wu, “surely there will be wounded. I can offer you an excellent deal on medicinal herbs—”
“I’m not authorized to buy opium.” Diosdado stands to leave. “Thank you for your time.” At least this one did not promise like the Japanese, promise and never deliver. Only Dr. Sun, the Chinese revolutionist, actually sent them weapons, but the boat foundered in a typhoon and all was lost.
“So very sorry to disappoint you,” smiles Wu from his throne of crates.
“We carry one foreign power on our back,” Diosdado says in Cantonese as he bows goodbye, “while China opens her legs for a dozen.”
The streets west of Central Market are packed with the usual swarm of humanity, the only relief from the noisy mass of them an occasional unobstructed glimpse up to the slope of Victoria Peak, where the humanity thins out and the British and the wealthiest of the Chinese merchant kings have built their palaces. It is green up there, with unfouled air to breathe, quiet. Diosdado’s rickshaw boy grunts as he trots up a slight incline, weaving them through vegetable stalls and charm-sellers, past an oversized British official sitting pinkly on a pallet borne by four sweating lackeys hustling in the opposite direction. A pair of carriages rattle by, full of wealthy Chinese heading to the Happy Valley racecourse, shouting out joyously as they go.
A city built on trade, thinks Diosdado, with the soul of a whore.
Junta activities in Hongkong emanate from the two houses on Morrison Hill Road in Wanchai. Don Felipe Agoncillo lives in the smaller one with his family and whoever spills over from the other. Diosdado calls to the boy when they reach the house, steps down, and reluctantly parts with a few coins. There is, of course, no more money from Don Nicasio, and the Junta can only spare a tiny stipend for its exiled patriots. But it wouldn’t do to arrive soaked in perspiration from the climb, not with the General back from Singapore.
It is Señora Agoncillo herself who answers the door, beautiful and gracious.
“Our young linguist,” she says, smiling and stepping back to allow him passage. “You must come out of the heat.”
He is ushered to the study, where members of the Junta and a few of the exiled government stand around a table, frowning over a drawing.
“I understand why the sun has a face,” says one, “but shouldn’t it be smiling?”
“In a Masonic triangle—”
“Just a triangle—”
“All triangles are Masonic. You can’t avoid the association.”
“The three points of the triangle represent Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”
“The French—”
“The French have nothing to do with us.”
“I thought the three stars—”
“They represent Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao—”
“Wonderful. Mindanao. Why not a half-moon and a scimitar?”
“The moros are Filipinos, whatever their beliefs.”
“And the rays emanating—”
“Eight rays, eight provinces that rose in ’96—”
“You make eight?”
“Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Manila, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, and Tarlac.”
“You allow a more generous definition of revolt than I.”
“Blue and red, like the flag of independent Cuba.”
“You’re forgetting the white triangle.”
“Red, white, and blue—”
“Symbolic,” says the slender, large-eyed man who has been sitting quietly at the head of the table, “of our hopeful friendship with the United States.” He smiles shyly. “Or at least that’s what I told their Consul in Singapore.”
The men laugh. Diosdado has never seen the General in person before. He seems too slender, too gentle a man to be the strongman of Cavite, who outfought and then outfoxed the Spanish cazadores, who had the grit to order the execution of the Bonifacios and risk tearing the movement apart.
“He suggested that we have a new banner, to rally the people.”
The voice is soft, seemingly without irony. He didn’t order the executions, Diosdado corrects himself, he merely allowed them to happen.
“Do you trust them?” asks Mascardo.
“The hulls of their Great White Fleet have been painted gray for battle and they have been asked by the British, in the interests of neutrality, to leave the harbor. We can only hope that they are trustworthy.” The General turns and looks directly at Diosdado. “And what do you think, Argus?” He indicates the drawing. “About my design?”
The men of the Junta all turn toward Diosdado. He is speechless at first, that the General would recognize him, would know his code name, would ask his opinion.
“We are a complex nation,” he answers in Tagalog. “We deserve a complex flag.”
The General laughs. “You went to see the Hong man?”
Diosdado nods. “Not a single rifle.”
Malvar, who sent him on the mission, scowls, but the General’s expression does not alter.
“No matter,” he says. “The Americans have promised to sell us as many as we need.”
“When?” asks Riego de Dios.
“We are to wait here for their summons,” says the General.
“Our people are already fighting in the Ilocos.”
“There is little else to entertain oneself with in the Ilocos,” says Alejan-drino, and the men laugh again.
The General turns back to Diosdado. “We will be waiting here for the summons,” he says, “but you, young man, are to go immediately to Manila.”
Diosdado takes a deep breath, trying to appear unfazed by the order. Manila. He has been condemned there as a traitor, drawings of him, poorly rendered, circulated by the guardia. He thought he might never see the city again.
“And what is my mission?”
The General smiles. “To wait for our American brothers,” he says, “and embrace them when they step ashore.”
THE CLOUD CITY
Leadville is a wound festering between the Mosquito Range and the Wasatch Mountains, a high-plains sprawl of new-built structures surrounded by treeless hills pocked with diggings, hills that at closer look are only piles of tailings excreted from the holes men have torn into the earth. Blasted rock spews from tipple chutes into ore cars that rattle and slam down tramways behind coal-devouring engines, wooden headhouse towers marking the mine portals where hoist cables screech lowering men crammed in steel cages down tomb-dark vertical shafts, tongues of candles flickering on their hats, oil lanterns in hand, dropping with stomach-shifting speed past the played-out silver, the abandoned tunnels, past Level Three, Level Four, Level Five, down four hundred feet more sucking air hammered into the ground by a compressor, Level Eight, Level Nine, then thunk to bedrock and the door clanging open and the men spilling out into the main chamber to face a half-dozen galleries. The newest of these, the rawest, leads back a thousand feet, only half that distance with track on the floor. At the end of it, in the nervous light of three candles, Hod braces himself in a narrow fissure and rams a seventy-five-pound stoper drill straight up into the stony roof above him, rock dust filling the crevice, filling his nose his mouth his lungs, ear-shattering trip-hammer roar as he drives the cutting bit into hardrock a thousand strokes per minute, vibration coursing through his chest down his backbone and out through his legs into the rock he is wedged in, muscles of his arms taut cables pushing the drill steel up, up, every part of him straining and concentrated on the shoot-hole above till Cap Stover reaches up to swat his leg. Time to change bits.
Sudden quiet.
Hanging rock dust.