TWENTY-FOUR
It must have been close to nine when I arrived home. The condo unit was quiet. Dark and empty. It wasn’t unusual. Clicking on the living room light, I called Setti’s name. When she didn’t answer, I could only surmise her return to the house in Greenheights. She still had family there—or so I continued to assume. Relatives who kept a cautious distance from our affair, but still insisted on being a part of Setti’s life.
I went to the kitchen and poured out some brandy. The cuffs were with me. The same guard who’d loaned out the VCD had shown no qualms about letting me borrow another fragment of memorabilia. I took the cuffs out of a plastic bag, placed them on the counter. That was when Setti called me into the bedroom.
Her voice came through the wall, faint, as if suffocated by the confines of a heavy casket. Or half-strangled ‘neath the fingers of a killing hand. Or trapped in the belly of a giant orca. Leaving the brandy, I went to investigate, knowing already what was bound to turn up.
Nothing. The bed was empty (this time with no outline of the recently fatigued). I checked the bathroom next. It was clean. The bathtub shined. A stack of towels, neatly folded, snoozed in a silver rack. But no Setti.
My concern was minimal. I believe I’ve already mentioned something like this happening. It might have been here at the condo or in Greenheights—that part I can’t remember. In either case, my spine barely tingled at all when, in the next moment, somebody slammed the bedroom door closed. I snapped around to look. From the bathroom I could see it—the dark, bald face of the door. The knob glowing, like a weak candle, by light from the window. I opened it and went back to the kitchen, there to sip my brandy. The cuffs were still on the counter. Both of them—props and spirits—provided an opportunity to brood, which I seized upon, if only for a minute.
Where was Setti tonight? Home at the dinner table, hearing light jokes from commiserating relatives? Or could there be another seat, in another realm, for her to occupy?
On a whim I went back to the bedroom, there to retrieve a digital camera from one of the drawers. Over the next few minutes I walked around the apartment taking pictures. I was only half-certain why at the time. The supernatural had hitherto never interested me very much. Now there, Gentle Reader, may lie a ridiculous claim, considering Lester’s Ghosts and all the places it had taken me and my crew. Undaunted, I cling to its steeply sloped terrain. I consider myself a man of logic and science. Reason by illumination of late night research in old libraries. I could not then accept the possibility of an actual ghost. For fun I took the pictures. A bit of folly before the dispassionate countenance of dread.
I may have even taken the time to examine the results, had it not been for the landline phone, which suddenly brayed from the corner. At last I grew fearful enough to jump. The camera dropped to the floor. Leaving it to what revelations it might contain, I grabbed my brandy. Then the receiver. This time I was able to hit upon, quite accurately, the name of the caller.
“Hello, Lopez,” I fairly drawled.
The return voice sounded surprised. “Fredo. How did you know it was me?”
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...”
“I get it,” Lopez cut me off.
“Another late-night phone call, Detective. This is becoming habitual.”
“Don’t feel like I’m being sycophantic. This call concerns the little incident at PTN, which I’m sure you’ll have no trouble remembering.”
“I don’t know, Detective,” I said, after having another swallow of brandy. “There are a lot of incidents at PTN.”
“You’ll be pleased to know that my case is nearly closed.” He paused. “Or wait. No you won’t.”
“Cryptic. What have you dug up this time? A picture of me with Pepsi Paloma?”
Now for whatever reason, that little comment struck a nerve with him. But who could blame me for feeling morbid that night? I was alone and part-drunk in an apartment full of slamming doors, disembodied voices. Anyway, Detective Lopez’s cool slipped.
“You sick pile of tae,” he said.
“Now now. No mud-slinging. Save that kind of stuff for your future senators.”
Another pause from the other end. I could almost feel Lopez fuming. Pleased with my deportment in a way that, perhaps, only a haunted member of the pseudo-inebriated can be, I capped off my drink.
“Fine,” the other said at last. “Who you are is who you are. But it just so happens that I do have a picture of you.”
“I hope you’re not sleeping with it next to your bed.”
“You’re bed’s going to be in prison. Or something close to it, once we confirm what’s in the photograph.”
“Whaddaya got, Dick Tracy?”
“You in a back room at PTN. Mulling about a table of test tubes. The CCTV didn’t capture your face, but the clothes you were wearing that day match. And then there’s your shoes. Hush Puppy loafers. Brown.”
“A lot of people wear Hush Puppies to the office,” I reminded him. Nevertheless my confidence had peaked, and was now on its way down. How was it these walls could be rising, like wrongfully murdered corpses from their graves, all about me, when I could retrieve no memory of the incident in question? My case was intangible. A mist of illustrations that would not hold.
“They do,” Lopez agreed. “But we’ll get you. It’s only a matter of time.”
“I’m not—”
But the line was buzzing in my ear. When Detective Lopez had first called me I hung up on him; tonight he returned the favor.
“Okay,” I said to no one at all. “Okay. It’s cool.”
“Fredo?”
My eyes shot across the room. There at the bedroom door stood Setti, wearing one of my t-shirts. She asked what was wrong before gliding over. Her face seemed to float in the gloom, gossamer, disembodied. A dream with a beating heart which would cease upon the presence of natural light.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I told her, my hands shaking, my smile clumsy.
She smiled back. Here I noticed again her incisors. They were far too long for the enframing mouth, the curling lips.
The lips drew closer. And then Setti kissed me. A kiss from my darling death. A breath from so deep down. Cold and distant. Warm and close. It was hard to tell anymore. A kiss from my darling death.
I called you the Rainbird. That isn’t you. It has never been you.
Somewhere in these pages I spoke of my final meeting with Oliver Madilim. I believe its subject had to do with a fight in a comfort room. Recollection performs a disservice. I was wrong. We had one meeting left. One final confrontation. The purpose being, of course, that little pair of handcuffs which weren’t really supposed to be handcuffs at all.
Another disservice in connection with the whole affair—Oliver’s cell phone number. When I dialed it, a polite female recording informed that the number was no longer...well, in service. I thanked the recording and ended the call. Was that ridiculous? You bet. At the time, though, I had yet to realize just how badly the matrix was failing. Proof of my ignorance may be established by what happened next. Adorned in a snappy vest and black leather dress boots, I was able to charm one of the pretty HR girls right out of her skirt (not literally), rendering her to this vulnerable state with the accompaniment of carefully chosen verbiage fortified by numerous, gushing compliments about her hair, which just so happened to have been re-styled of late. At this she surrendered—having no other choice, really—Oliver’s home landline number. Her blouse heaved as she wrote it down for me, and her lips were parted as if desperate for a swoon-inducing kiss.
“Thank you so much,” I said with engulfing warmth. Then I did kiss her, albeit not on the lips, as Setti most certainly would have known about it somehow. The HR girl let out a breath and told me it was no problem. Before leaving I performed for her my most distinguished bow, then turned to leave. I got as far as the Christmas tree before she began to giggle with her friends. It was the nervous, embarrassed giggle of a girl who’d been noticed by a man, and could now celebrate victory among her peers.
Oliver agreed to meet me on December first. Best guess, I’m thinking it was a Friday. The date isn’t necessarily integral, except that I’m trying to keep hold of the narrative here, for your own sake if not for mine. Is the time frame of this story important for you? Oh, never mind. Unless you’re willing to fly clear over to Trentinara, Italy and find me, your reply becomes victim to the wind, or the steam rising from a cup of coffee. I’ll not tax you further.
But wait. Something did indeed happen later that month. Something monumental. It concerns the network. You’ll know about it soon.
Oliver was not Allen. He outright refused to take a drink with me. Indeed, he may have refused to see me at all, except while still on the phone I mentioned the cuffs. They were now, I informed, under my possession. I had tried several times to activate the hidden release without success. Might this failure be of interest to him? Oliver agreed that it was quite interesting. He asked if he might examine the cuffs for himself, to which I replied that this was precisely the purpose of my call, and would he care to discuss the matter over a drink or two?
“Oh no,” he snipped. “Too cordial.”
“Very well. What did you have in mind?”
Oliver’s response was almost as interesting as the broken cuffs: “The Manila Aquarium,” he said. “Know it?”
I did indeed know it. And while the destination was a bit out of the way, I agreed to see him there. He provided the day and time, which brings us to now. Or rather yesterday, which had once been now. As I mentioned already, my account of Manila isn’t easy to keep track of.
The aquarium was newly built. Its gigantic parking lot—mostly empty—looked fresh and wet as Manila Bay, whose waters gleamed just beyond a display highly placed, ostentatious signage. A cabbie dropped me off at the entrance. The entrance fee was eight hundred pesos, which turned out to be something of a hack on the facility’s part, as I soon found that several of the exhibits, such as the Eagle Encounter and a performance by two killer whales, were yet to open. So far as Oliver was concerned this mattered not in the least. He had asked for us to meet on a plain, unassuming bench. The bench sat in front of a giant mermaid aquarium which looked about fifteen feet deep. Within swam three smiling ladies dressed in fishtail costumes. Their false fins, iridescent, clung tightly enough to appear genuine, while seashell cups just barely large enough to preserve modesty concealed their chests. Apparently the mermaids’ job was to dive to the bottom and wave happily at passers-by, this until the interval became too lengthy for a pair of female lungs to bear, at which point a brief look of discomfort would flit across her features, and she proceeded to swim up.
Oliver had gotten there before me. I recognized his long hair and lanky shoulders. He was seated on the bench, admiring the show. One of the mermaids blew him a bubbly kiss. Another had her palms to the glass so as to allow a family of three—man, woman, daughter—to admire this hitherto mythical creature. The daughter was particularly enamored. She couldn’t have been older than ten. Jumping and pointing, she expressed her joy using a number of Tagalog phrases that went a little too fast for my cognition. The mermaid waved and smiled whilst I, charmed by the little girl’s reaction, hovered back to watch. Eventually the mermaid began to run out of air. Her smile became tight. I watched her glance toward the surface, then back at the girl, who wasn’t getting the message. In a desperate gambit, the mermaid sent a goodbye wave through the glass. No joy. The awe-struck little girl simply did not want to leave. Suddenly mermaid’s naked diaphragm convulsed. The slender bones of her rib-cage lurched. She really needed to breathe.
“Fredo!” Oliver called.
He’d somehow detected my presence. His head was craned in my direction. I saw the little girl glance at us, and as soon as that happened, the mermaid shot up for air.
“I wonder if she’ll make it,” I said, approaching the man on the bench.
Oliver spared a look at the tank before turning back to me. “She’ll make it. The girls are trained for this sort of thing.”
I didn’t comment on that, though it seemed strange coming from him. He stood to afford a brief nod. His eyes, pressed into an expression of blurrily rendered enmity, were cold like always. But he had lost weight, and his clothes no longer fit the frame. The white dress shirt he wore looked baggy. It was tucked in crooked at a belt cinched to the maximum punch-hole. A pack of cigarettes hung from a breast pocket which had popped several stitches. Also, the collar was dirty.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
Oliver made a gesture at the bench. We both sat down to watch the girls for a bit. One of the girls smiled and blew me a kiss. A swatch of her long, dark hair fell over her eyes, creating the appearance of a sensu.
“So,” Oliver said, without looking at me.
“So,” I replied.
The sensu girl swam up for air, her tail swishing.
“It must take lots of practice to swim with one of those tails on,” came my next remark. Though it was me who had requested the appointment, I now found it odd to be sitting beside this man, here in this large, mostly empty chamber. One part of me wanted to simply pull the cuffs out of my laptop bag, which I had brought along, while another insisted that we keep sitting here until Oliver decided to end the charade.
“As I said,” I heard him answer, “they are trained.”
“Was Giselle trained?”
As soon as the words were out I regretted them. I thought they might trigger Oliver. Set him off. It didn’t happen. The man sitting next to me continued to sit, hands folded, knees knocked awkwardly together. His posture reminded me of another man—that one from the movie screen who ate chocolate on a park bench while his bus, far away, never arrived.
“Was she trained to swim with a tail?” Oliver said. “No. But she did know how to hold her breath.”
“Four minutes.”
“That’s right. Static,” he added, as if he already knew that Selli had not quite made it to four minutes on her final dive.
The mermaids were bored with us. They were swimming back and forth, looking for a different audience. One of them wriggled into an artificial hollow log and then out the other side.
“Have you timed any of these ladies?” I asked, waving a hand toward the glass.
Now Oliver deigned to look at me. “I’ve timed all of them,” he said, in a tone suggesting that my question was absurd. “The best any could do was ninety seconds.”
“That’s pretty good actually, considering the depth.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Would you like to see the cuffs now, Oliver?”
“Please.”
I unzipped my laptop bag. Oliver didn’t watch as I pulled the cuffs into the open and let them dangle from my grasp. The strands were closed on both sides. So far as I knew, that was the way they would stay. The prop did not come with keys.
“They malfunctioned,” I said. “The pawl pin jammed. That’s what killed her.”
Oliver held out his hand. He was still watching the mermaids, however. For whatever reason he didn’t wish to look at me. Perhaps my romance with Setti reminded him too much of what he’d once had with Giselle. Or maybe the man just hated my guts.
Nothing happened for really I don’t know how long. A matter of minutes to be sure. This I ascertained through the mermaids, who several times swam to the surface while Oliver fondled the cuffs. He was still watching the tank. His face, a white canvas, sheltered the goings-on within albeit I, rather morbidly, imagined him imagining. One of the mermaids had her slender wrist clasped in the prop; she was trapped. Oliver wasn’t thinking of that, though. It all belonged to me.
“Try to open them,” I urged.
He looked at me. “But you just told me they were broken.”
“I know. But—”
Oliver looked at the cuffs. His thumb slid over the plate, pressed...
And the hasp flipped neatly open.
Ah! Gentle Reader, do try to conjure my reaction!
“What?” I blubbered, unable to believe what I was seeing. “What?”
Oliver’s hands moved to the other hasp and opened that one, too.
“I don’t understand,” came my flabbergasted confession.
Oliver’s reaction seemed just as confused as my own—though for quite a different reason. “What’s not to understand?” he asked, as if the man sitting next to him were stupid. “It’s a movie prop.”
“But it didn’t work.”
“It works fine. You’re not supposed to press the pawl pin. You’re supposed to press the cheek rivet.”
He demonstrated the instruction by closing one of the strands again. Then he handed me the cuffs. “Cheek rivet,” he repeated.
I pressed the rivet. Out popped the strand. Now I tried the other strand, clicking it closed. With one press of that little plate nodule, it came right back open. A sense of anger and frustration began to rise through my chest. Had Giselle really died over this silly little oversight? This misunderstood contraption?
“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Why didn’t Giselle know?”
“Because, Fredo. No one told her. I changed the prop.”
“What?” Oliver was grinning at me. The corner of his mouth had turned upward to reveal a sharp, evil tooth. “You murdered her, Oliver? Is that what you’re saying?”
His head shook with the sad, slow regret of a man imprisoned. “I had to, Fredo. You and her both.”
At that moment there was some commotion inside the tank. I turned to see one of the mermaids stuck inside the artificial log. She was squirming and twisting, but her tail had snagged on something.
“Stop it!” Oliver snapped. “Right now!”
His eyes glared at me with utter hatred. Yes, that was the only word for it. He hated me.
“There’s been enough pain!”
I looked again at the girl just as she let out a scream of bubbles.
“She’s drowning!” I yelled.
And Oliver: “So let her go.”
The mermaid’s two friends had arrived on the scene. They were trying to get her loose. But whatever wanted her inside of that log, it meant to have her. She gave another lunge for the surface but failed.
“Do it, you ass,” I heard Oliver say.
I had no way of understanding what he meant. Was he suggesting I dive in the tank to save her? The girl’s terrified eyes were just about out of time. She’d clasped a hand over her lips, and at some point during the struggle, the shells over her breasts had come off to leave them fully exposed.
Unable to watch any longer, I picked up my bag and stood. Oliver growled something—what I have no idea to this day. I also remember thinking: If he grabs me for another fight, so be it.
Oliver didn’t grab me for another fight. Cuffs dangling from my fingers, I crossed the chamber without looking back. The exit lay just around the corner of some colorful advertisement. The ticket girl smiled and nodded. I nodded back.
“Thank you for coming, sir!” she called.
Did I say anything by way of reply? Yes, I believe I did. “You are very welcome, miss. Very welcome.”
The girl giggled, and I stepped outside, where the oppressive Manila sun had been patiently waiting to continue its tirade.