“Elias,” Isabel mutters under her breath. A scar cutting an eyebrow would make her more certain, but she can’t see it clearly from this distance.
He suddenly glances up, as if he has heard her thoughts. He continues staring, with that familiar somber expression she remembers from — how long has it been? — eighteen years ago. Isabel jerks away from the window. Not nervously, nor surreptitiously, but because the docent’s voice has startled her back to her surroundings.
It’s five o’clock, the docent says. Closing time. Only then does Isabel notice that the Casa Manila has gone all quiet.
She hurries out, hoping to find the man she thinks is Elias. A motorcycle engine zooms somewhere to her right and a horse pulling a calesa clip-clops to her left. She peers into the alley leading toward the barrio, but inside it’s pitch-black, the crush of shanties perpetually shutting out the sun. She guesses the people who reside there are used to living in the dark.
Elias is gone, of course. Elias, her father’s killer.
It couldn’t possibly have been Elias, of course it couldn’t, Isabel had protested at first, that day ten years ago back in Davao. Her mother had handed her the police report and declared flatly, “It was a DDS execution. And it was Elias who did it.”
Señor and Señora Jose Fabella, the report read, were getting out of their car in front of their residence when a lone gunman on a Honda Wave motorcycle had stopped two meters away and shot Señor Fabella several times, first in the side, then in the neck, twice in the head — in the middle of the forehead and in the right cheek — and then in the chest. Then the gunman took off. Señora Fabella, who was stepping out curbside, and the family driver, who was helping her, were left unharmed.
The police were sure the killer was Elias Raga, a.k.a. the Datu. The MO was that of the Davao Death Squad, or the DDS, of which the Datu was a well-known but elusive leader. One of the Fabellas’ servants had peered through the window when the shots rang out, and later told the cops that the gunman was wearing jeans and a black jacket; a baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes. The generic look of DDS killers. But what pointed to Elias as the prime and only suspect was that he knew more about the victim than any other DDS member. He had lived in the Fabella home for a few months at the age of thirteen. He knew Señor Fabella’s routine. And he was familiar enough with the gated Village to know how to get in and out of it without arousing suspicion.
Despite its humble name, the Village, where Isabel and her family lived, was the enclave of Davao’s richest families. There were about a hundred mansions, guarded by a private army that made regular rounds and kept strict tabs on every car, bike, and pedestrian entering and exiting through its steel gates. A church, a park, a school, tennis and basketball courts, and a swimming pool — all for the exclusive use of its residents — made up its hub. A thick cement wall ran along the Village’s whole perimeter, with glass shards embedded along its top.
The police report went on: Regrettably, none of the Village guards could be of any help in identifying the culprit. They had all vanished by the time the investigators had come — whether from fear of reprisal for their criminal negligence or fear of DDS execution if they testified was anyone’s guess. Or, it was just as likely that the Village guards were themselves in cahoots with the DDS. Anything, the report concluded, was possible.
It was the classic conclusion to any case involving the DDS.
Isabel didn’t believe it at first, not the part about her father’s brutal murder being a DDS execution. Everyone knew that the DDS was a vigilante group that targeted young delinquents — only small-scale drug dealers and petty thieves. But her father was a respectable member of the Davao community and in his midfifties when he was shot. And DDS killers always operated in twos, sometimes threes. This had been a solo operation. Yet Isabel finally had to concede that the killer might have been — probably was — Elias the Datu, DDS leader, carrying out his own personal mission.
While the DDS were killers, they did set limits; it was a sort of code of honor, and by breaking it, the Datu had turned himself into a DDS target. Everyone knew that too. Now Elias was on the run.
Señor Fabella’s coffin remained closed throughout the three-day wake and funeral. The widow wept intermittently during the wake and broke into a long wail as the coffin was lowered in the grave. No one saw Isabel weep.
More people are gathering in the streets now. There is a bustle of activity, the buzz of voices, the zooming of motorized tricycles. But the noises are more muted here than they would be in Extramuros, the real city just beyond the fortress walls. There seems to be a tacit agreement among everyone who comes here that this strained replica of nineteenth-century Spanish Manila should not only be respected but protected, because it is so brittle.
Most of the buildings here have been turned into offices or schools, so hardly anyone is a permanent resident in Intramuros anymore. Except the informal settlers. And the priests who run the churches, of which there are only two remaining, after American warplanes decimated this walled city with aerial bombs more than sixty years ago.
Just beside the slum is a school for seamen — seafarers, Isabel’s editor would assiduously write over her copy, because in their line of work, being precise, he would remind her, is a matter of life and death. The students are coming out in waves, a few pausing at the top of the stairs to light a cigarette, barring the way for the others behind them.
A woman emerges from the barrio’s dark alley. Isabel wonders if she is one of those who make a living at night. She wears a flowery dress, showing more of her slim legs than most Filipinas her age would dare, the area around her eyes painted with black and purple shadows, and her fuchsia lipstick spilling over the natural line of her lips to achieve the bee-stung look. She walks toward the school, where the young men are milling around outside.
Isabel thinks maybe this is the kind of woman who her husband — ex-husband, she corrects herself — had wanted her to be when he’d complained that sex with her was like thumbing through an encyclopedia — not just a volume of it, but a whole set. (A man with brains would find that exciting, she’d wanted to reply, but she was still trying to save the marriage then.)
The woman is now in the midst of the young men, who quickly part to get out of her arm’s reach, some scurrying back a few steps up the stairs again, the rest hopping off the curb onto the street. Still, they are more respectful than one would expect, because they aren’t hooting or heckling her. Instead they call out, “Hello, Ana!” and, “Nice dress, Ana!” She puts one hand on her hip and flicks her other at the men in dignified delight.
She is taller than all of them, even if she were to take off her shoes with the stiletto heels. She crosses the street toward Isabel, who is now pretending to read the Intramuros guidebook. Clearly the person named Ana relishes all the attention, because she could’ve crossed the street as soon as she’d emerged from the slum, instead of walking toward the young men first. It isn’t until she stops barely a foot away from Isabel to adjust her bra-line that Isabel notices the shadow beneath the thick makeup.
“Hi,” Isabel says, smiling, curious to hear the woman’s voice.
“Hello,” comes the husky reply. Ah.
Isabel was ten when Señora Fabella had come home from her charity work at the penal colony with Elias and his mother in tow. Elias’s father had been serving out a life sentence, which had been cut short by a bullet in the head. A guard, the local paper said, had mistaken him for a wild boar that had wandered into the inmates’ farm lots. Elias and his mother had been staying in the family quarters in the prison compound but now had nowhere to live. “The woman’s a good cook,” the prison chaplain had said to Señora Fabella. “And the boy’s no trouble. Quiet. Small for his age. Thirteen. But very bright.”