“Whatever you want.”
“Look, I’m a convicted felon with a commuted sentence, not a pardon. If I’d been convicted in the States, I couldn’t vote or serve on a jury or be elected President unless one of the states restored my civil rights —although the only civil right most felons in California want restored is their right to own a gun. But I was convicted in another country and I’m not sure what the law is, although I’m damn sure the American embassy isn’t going to bust its collective gut to supply me with a fresh passport or the piece of paper it gives felons who want to go home.”
“How come you weren’t deported?”
“That was part of the deal I cut—no deportation.”
“Okay. You need a passport. What else?”
“Clothes.”
“Get dressed and we’ll go across the street and take care of the passport photos. Then I’ll give you some money and you can buy what clothes you need while I go find you a passport.”
“You know how?”
“I know how.”
“Must’ve been quite a learning experience—hanging out with Otherguy for what—five years now?”
“About that.”
“How is he? Not that I give a damn.”
“As ever.”
“Why’d Artie and Durant send you to fetch me and not Otherguy?”
“Because Artie thinks I’m still stuck on you.”
“Are you?”
“What d’you think?”
“I hope not because I can’t give you anything but sex,” she said and then tacked on a perfectly neutral, “baby.”
“Maybe that’s all I want,” Stallings said.
Eleven
After his third taxi ride, Booth Stallings made his fourth telephone call, this time from the lobby of the Manila Hotel. It was answered on the first ring by yet another Filipino-accented voice, a woman’s, who told him the pickup would take place in exactly six minutes, one hundred meters south of the hotel on Roxas Boulevard. Stallings was there at 12:08 P.M. And a minute later was climbing into the rear seat of a 1974 Toyota sedan that had a young Filipino driver and failed air-conditioning.
Next to the driver was his equally young wife, girlfriend or even, Stallings suspected, the other half of a New Peoples Army hit squad, which the Filipinos, with their love of nicknames, had dubbed sparrow teams. The pair gave Stallings a sweltering, aimless and mostly silent tour of Manila that lasted exactly fifty-nine minutes.
Stallings was surprised, if not shocked, by how much the sprawling city had decayed since he was last there in early 1988 with Otherguy Overby during their attempt to make a financial comeback after their losses in the stock market crash of 1987.
It was only after Overby explained his scheme again and again, step by step, that Stallings had agreed to buy into the syndicate then being formed to search for the five or fifty or even one hundred tons of gold bullion that, according to legend, had been buried, booby-trapped and abandoned by General Yamashita Tomoyuki, the Tiger of Malaya, as his Japanese army retreated from Manila in the early months of 1945.
Stallings, who considered himself something of an authority on the Philippines, argued that Yamashita’s Gold, as it was called, hadn’t been buried by Yamashita at all, but by Iwabuchi Sanji, the tough and ruthless Japanese rear admiral who reoccupied Manila after Yamashita fled.
It was the admiral who had waged the bitter house-to-house battle for Manila, destroying the city in the process. And it was this last utterly senseless battle that had given Admiral Iwabuchi the time he needed to bury the gold bullion.
Otherguy Overby had listened patiently to Stallings’s lengthy recitation. When it was over, he asked, “You really believe the gold’s there, don’t you?”
“You don’t?”
“I believe other people believe it’s there,” Overby said, “just like I believe other people believe in immaculate conception. And that’s what we’re buying into, Booth—pure blind faith.”
After three gold bars with Japanese stampings were discovered a month later at the site of the digging just north of Manila, the syndicate shares soared and Overby and Stallings promptly dumped theirs, realizing an 800 percent profit even after taking into account the cost of the three gold bars Overby had bought, doctored and with which he had salted the digging.
The young woman in the front seat who, Stallings guessed, couldn’t have been more than 20 or 21, finally turned around and asked, “How do you like our deterioration?”
“Seems to be coming along nicely.”
“You have been to Manila before?”
Stallings said he had been there in 1945, 1986 and 1988.
She turned back to the driver and said, “He was here with MacArthur!” The driver shrugged,
