“Business associates,” Amy explains dryly. Her body language says that she wants to get away from Randy and back to work.
“Thanks for the tour,” Randy says. “One question.”
Amy raises her eyebrows, trying to look patient.
“How much of Semper Marine’s revenue derives from treasure hunting?”
“This month? This year? The last ten years? Over the lifetime of the company?” Amy says.
“Whatever.”
“That kind of income is sporadic,” Amy says. “Glory was paid for, and then some, by pottery that we recovered from a junk. But some years we get all of our revenue from jobs like this one.”
“In other words, boring jobs that suck?” Randy says. He just blurts it out. Normally he controls his tongue a little better. But shaving off his beard has blurred his ego boundaries, or something.
He’s expecting her to laugh or at least wink a him, but she takes it very seriously. She has a pretty good poker face. “Think of it as making license plates,” she says.
“So you guys are basically a bunch of treasure hunters,” Randy says. “You just make license plates to stabilize your cash flow.”
“Call us treasure hunters if you like,” Amy says. “Why are you in business, Randy?” She turns around and stalks out of the place.
Randy’s still watching her go when he hears Ernesto cursing under his breath, not so much angry as astonished. Glory is swinging around the tip of Corregidor’s tail now and the entire southern side of the island is becoming visible for the first time. The last mile or so of the tail curves around to form a semicircular bay. Anchored in the center of this bay is a white ship that Randy identifies, at first, as a small ocean liner with rakish and wicked lines. Then he sees the name painted on its stern: RUI FALEIRO—SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA.
Randy goes and stands next to Ernesto and they stare at the white ship for a while. Randy has heard about it, and Ernesto, like everyone else in the Philippines, knows about it. But seeing it is another thing entirely. A helicopter sits on its afterdeck like a toy. A dagger-shaped muscle boat hangs from a davit, ready for use as a dinghy. A brown-skinned man in a gleaming white uniform can be seen polishing a brass rail.
“Rui Faleiro was Magellan’s cosmographer,” Randy says.
“Cosmographer?”
“The brains of the operation,” Randy says, tapping his head.
“He came here with Magellan?” Ernesto asks.
In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.
“When Magellan set out on his ship, Faleiro stayed behind in Seville,” Randy says. “He went crazy.”
“You know a lot about Magallanes, eh?” Ernesto says.
“No,” Randy says, “I know a lot about the Dentist.”
“Don’t talk to the Dentist. Ever. Not about anything. Not even tech stuff. Any technical question he asks you is just a stalking horse for some business tactic that is as far beyond your comprehension as Gödel’s Proof would be to Daffy Duck.”
Avi told Randy this spontaneously one evening, as they were tucking into dinner at a restaurant in downtown Makati. Avi refuses to discuss anything important within a mile of the Manila Hotel because he thinks every room, and every table, is under surveillance.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Randy said.
“Hey,” Avi said, “I’m just trying to stake out my turf here—justify my existence in this project. I’ll handle the business stuff.”
“You’re not being a little paranoid?”
“Listen. The Dentist has at least a billion dollars of his own, and another ten billion under management—half the fucking orthodontists in Southern California retired at age forty because he dectupled their IRAs in the space of two or three years. You don’t achieve those kinds of results by being a nice guy.”
“Maybe he just got lucky.”
“He did get lucky. But that doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy. My point is that he put that money into investments that were extremely risky. He played Russian roulette with his investors’ life savings, keeping them in the dark. I mean, this guy would invest in a Mindanao kidnapping ring if it gave a good rate of return.”
“Does he understand that he was lucky, I wonder?”
“That’s my question. I’m guessing no. I think he considers himself to be an instrument of Divine Providence, like Douglas MacArthur.”
Rui Faleiro is the pride of Seattle’s superyacht industry, which has been burgeoning, ever so discreetly, of late. Randy gleaned a few facts about it from a marketing brochure that was published before the Dentist actually bought the ship. So he knows that the helicopter and the speedboat came included in the purchase price, which has never been divulged. The vessel contains, among other things, ten tons of marble. The master bedroom suite contains full his and hers bathrooms lined with black marble and pink marble respectively, so that the Dentist and the Diva don’t have to fight over sink space when they are primping for a big event in the yacht’s grand ballroom.
“The Dentist?” Ernesto says.
“Kepler. Doctor Kepler,” Randy says. “In the States, some people call him the Dentist.” People in the high-tech industry.
Ernesto nods knowingly. “A man like that could have had any woman in the world,” he says. “But he picked a Filipina.”
“Yes,” Randy says cautiously.
“In the States, do people know the story of Victoria Vigo?”
“I must tell you that she is not as famous in the States as she is here.”
“Of course.”
“But some of her songs were very popular. Many people know that she came from great poverty.”
“Do people in the States know about Smoky Mountain? The garbage dump in Tondo, where children hunt for food?”
“Some of them do. It will be very famous when the movie about Victoria Vigo’s life shows on television.”
Ernesto nods, seemingly satisfied. Everyone here knows that a movie about the Diva’s life is being made, starring herself. They generally don’t know that it’s a vanity project, financed by the Dentist, and that it will be aired only on cable television in the middle of the night.
But they probably know that it will leave out all the good parts.
“As far as the Dentist is concerned,” Avi said, “our advantage is that, when it comes to the Philippines, he will be predictable. Tame. Even docile.” He smiles cryptically.
“How so?”
“Victoria Vigo whored her way up out of Smoky Mountain, right?”
“Well, there seems to be a lot of nudging and winking to that effect, but I’ve never heard anyone come out and say it before,” Randy said, glancing around nervously.
“Believe me, it’s the only way she could have gotten out of there. Pimping arrangements were handled by the Bolobolos. This is a group from Northern Luzon that was brought into power along with Marcos. They run that part of town—police, organized crime, local politics, you name it. Consequently, they own her—they have photographs, videos from the days when she was an underage prostitute and porn film starlet.”
Randy shook his head in disgust and amazement. “How the hell do you get this information?”
“Never mind. Believe me, in some circles it’s as well known as the value of pi.”
“Not my circles.”
“Anyway, the point is that her interests are aligned with the Bolobolos and always will be. And the Dentist is always going to obediently do whatever his wife tells him to.”
“Can you really assume that?” Randy said. “He’s a tough guy. He probably has a lot more money and power than the Bolobolos. He can do whatever he wants.”
“But he won’t,” Avi says, smiling that little smile again. “He’ll do what his wife tells him to.”
“How do you know that?”
“Look,” Avi said, “Kepler is a major control freak?
??just like most powerful, rich men. Right?”
“Right.”
“If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does that translate into?”
“I hope I’ll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman.”
“Wrong!” Avi said. “Sex is more complicated than that, Randy. Sex is a place where people’s repressed desires come out. People get most turned on when their innermost secrets are revealed—”
“Shit! Kepler’s a masochist?”
“He is such a fucking masochist that he was famous for it. At least in the Southeast Asian sex industry. Pimps and Madams in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shenzhen, Manila, they all had files on him—they knew exactly what he wanted. And that’s how he met Victoria Vigo. He was in Manila, see, working on the FiliTel deal. Spent a lot of time here, staying in a hotel that’s owned, and bugged, by the Bolobolos. They studied his mating habits like entomologists watching the reproductive habits of ants. They groomed Victoria Vigo—their ace, their bombshell, their sexual Terminator—to give Kepler exactly what Kepler wanted. Then they sent her into his life like a guided fucking missile and pow! true love.”
“You’d think he would have been suspicious, or something. I’m surprised he’d get that involved with a whore.”
“He didn’t know she was a whore! That’s the beauty of the plan! The Bolobolos set her up with a fake identity as a concierge at Kepler’s hotel! A demure Catholic school girl! It starts with her getting him tickets to a play, and inside of a year, he’s chained to his bed on that fucking mega-yacht of his with strap marks on his ass, and she’s standing over him with a wedding ring on her finger the size of a headlamp, the hundred and thirty-eighth richest woman in the world.”
“Hundred and twenty-fifth,” Randy corrected him, “Fili-Tel stock has been on a bull run lately.”
Randy spends the next days trying not to run into the Dentist. He stays at a small private inn up on the top of the island, eating continental breakfast every morning with an assortment of American and Nipponese war veterans who have come here with their wives to (Randy supposes) deal with emotional issues a millon times more profound than anything Randy’s ever had to contend with. The Rui Faleiro is nothing if not conspicuous, and Randy can get a pretty good idea of whether the Dentist is aboard it by watching the movements of the helicopter and the speedboat.
When he thinks it’s safe, he goes down to the beach below the microwave antenna and watches Amy’s divers work on the cable installation. Some of them are working out in the surf zone, bolting sections of cast-iron pipe around the cable. Some are working a couple of miles offshore, coordinating with a barge that is injecting the cable directly into the muddy seafloor with a giant, cleaver-like appendage.
The shore end of the cable runs into a new reinforced-concrete building set back about a hundred meters from the high-tide level. It is basically just a big room filled with batteries, generators, air-conditioning units, and racks of electronic equipment. The software running on that equipment is Randy’s responsibility, and so he spends most of his time in that building, staring into a computer screen and typing. From there, transmission lines run up the hill to the microwave tower.
The other end is being extended out towards a buoy that is bobbing in the South China Sea a few kilometers away. Attached to that buoy is the end of the North Luzon Coastal Festoon, a cable, owned by FiliTel, that runs up the coast of the island. If you follow it far enough you reach a building at the northern tip of the island, where a big cable from Taiwan comes in. Taiwan, in turn, is heavily webbed into the world submarine cable network; it is easy and cheap to get data into or out of Taiwan.
There is only one gap left in the private chain of transmission that Epiphyte and FiliTel are trying to establish from Taiwan to downtown Manila, and that gap gets narrower by the day, as the cable barge grinds its way towards the buoy.
When it finally gets there, Rui Faleiro weighs anchor and glides out to meet it. The helicopter and the speedboat, and a flotilla of hired boats, go into action ferrying dignitaries and media crews out from Manila. Avi shows up carrying two fresh tuxedos from a tailor shop in Shanghai (“All those famous Hong Kong tailors were refugees from Shanghai”). He and Randy tear off the tissue paper, put them on, and then ride in an un-air-conditioned jeepney down the hill to the dock, where Glory awaits them.
Two hours later, Randy gets to lay eyes on the Dentist and the Diva for the first time ever—in the grand ballroom of the Rui Faleiro. To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude.
The one thing that is special about this party is that two tar-covered cables, each about the thickness of a baseball bat, are running up onto the quarterdeck. If you go to the rail and look down you can see them disappear into the brine. The cable ends meet on a tabletop in the middle of the deck, where a technician, flown in from Hong Kong and duded up in a tuxedo, sits with a box of tools, working on the splice. He is also working on a big hangover, but that is fine with Randy since he knows that it’s all fake—the cables are just scraps, their loose ends trailing in the water alongside the yacht. The real splice was performed yesterday and is already lying on the bottom of the sea with bits running through it.
There is another man on the quarterdeck, mostly staring at Bata’an and Corregidor but also keeping an eye on Randy. The moment Randy notices him, this man nods, as if checking something off a list in his head, stands up, walks over, and joins him. He is wearing a very ornate uniform, the U.S. Navy equivalent of black tie. He is mostly bald, and what hair he does have is battleship grey, and shorn to a length of perhaps five millimeters. As he walks toward Randy, several Filipinos watch him with obvious curiosity.
“Randy,” he says. Medals clink together as he grips Randy’s right hand and shakes it. He looks to be around fifty, but he has the skin of an eighty-year-old Bedouin. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest, and many of them are red and yellow, which are colors that Randy vaguely associates with Vietnam. Above his pocket is a little plastic nameplate reading, SHAFTOE. “Don’t be deceived, Randy,” says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, “I’m not on active duty. Retired eons ago. But I’m still entitled to wear this uniform. And it’s a hell of a lot easier than going out and trying to find a tuxedo that fits me.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Pleasure’s mine. Where’d you get yours, by the way?”
“My tuxedo?”
“Yeah.”
“My partner had it made.”
“Your business partner, or your sexual partner?”
“My business partner. At the moment, I am without a sexual partner.”
Doug Shaftoe nods impassively. “It is telling that you have not obtained one in Manila. As our host did, for example.”
Randy looks into the ballroom at Victoria Vigo, who, if she were any more radiant, would cause paint to peel from the walls and windowpanes to sag like caramel.
“I guess I’m just shy, or something,” Randy says.
“Are you too shy to listen to a business proposition?”
“Not at all.”
“My daughter asserts that you and our host might lay some more cables around here in coming years.”
“In business, people rarely plan to do a thing only once,” Randy says. “It messes up the spreadsheets.”
“You are aware, by now, that the water in this area is shallow.”
“Yeah.”
“You know that cables cannot be laid in shallow water without extremely detailed, high-resolution sidescan sonar surveys.”
“Yes.”
“I would like to perform those surveys for you, Randy.”
“I see.”
“No, I don’t think you do see. But I want you to see, and so I’m going to explain it.”
“Okay,” Randy says. “Should I bring my partner out?”
“The concept I am about to convey
to you is very simple and does not require two first-rate minds in order to process it,” Doug Shaftoe says.
“Okay. What is the concept?”
“The detailed survey will be just chock-full of new information about what is on the floor of the ocean in this part of the world. Some of that information might be valuable. More valuable than you imagine.”
“Ah,” Randy says. “You mean that it might be the kind of thing that your company knows how to capitalize on.”
“That’s right,” says Doug Shaftoe. “Now, if you hire one of my competitors to perform your survey, and they stumble on this kind of information, they will not tell you about it. They will exploit it themselves. You will not know that they have found anything and you will not profit from it. But if you hire Semper Marine Services, I will tell you about whatever I find, and I will cut you and your company in on a share of any proceeds.”
“Hmmmm,” Randy says. He is trying to figure out how to do a poker face, but he knows that Shaftoe sees right through him.
“On one condition,” Doug Shaftoe says.
“I suspected there might be a condition.”
“Every hook that’s worth a damn has a barb. This is the barb.”
“What is it?” Randy asks.
“We keep it a secret from that son of a bitch,” Doug Shaftoe says, jerking his thumb at Hubert Kepler. “Because if the Dentist finds out, then he and the Bolobolos will just split the entire thing up between them and we’ll see nothing. There’s even a chance we would end up dead.”
“Well, the being dead part is something that we will certainly have to think about,” Randy says, “but I will convey your proposal to my partner.”
TUBE
* * *
WATERHOUSE AND A FEW DOZEN STRANGERS ARE standing and sitting in an extraordinarily long, narrow room that rocks from side to side. The room is lined with windows but no light comes into them, only sound: a great deal of rumbling, rattling, and screeching. Everyone is pensive and silent, as if they were sitting in church waiting for the service to kick off.