The Blue Afternoon

He left the path and made his way through the wood towards the screen of cogal bushes that marked the perimeter of the archery butts. He had found a position that gave him a good view of the field and of the track that led from the Palace and San Miguel, up which carriages had come. He settled himself down in his hiding place, his back against the seamed trunk of an acacia tree, and prepared to wait.

The grass field was fully sunlit and the first flies were begi

He called to mind her face, that first day he saw her; called to mind the way the quiver strap had defined her breasts – quite full and large, he thought now, larger and rounder than A

The old thin-chested man in a frayed knee-length baro stood about twenty feet away, staring in amazement at him through a gap in the trees, frozen in the attitude of picking up a fallen branch, a small bundle of firewood under his other arm.

Carriscant clawed himself to his feet, aghast, doubling over simultaneously, covering himself.

The old man smiled warmly at him, showing his few remaining betel-stained teeth and said something in Tagalog, chuckling.

Carriscant thrashed his way through the undergrowth to the path. He heard the old man calling after him and somehow his delighted words penetrated the howling screeching mortification that reverberated in his head.

'It's only human, my son!' The old man was shouting after him in Tagalog. 'Don't feel shame, it's only human!'

THE BRIDGE AT SANTA MESA

A

Cariscant sat up abruptly, oddly embarrassed to find his wife in his study. She wore a woollen robe pulled tightly around her and her hair was uncombed and tousled. She let the mosquito net drop and stepped back uncertainly from the divan bed as if she too suddenly felt the shame of being confronted by their unorthodox sleeping arrangements.

'What man?' Carriscant said, peering at her through the gauzy muslin. 'Pantaleon?'

'An American. He says it's very urgent.'

Carriscant dressed quickly and went through to the living room. Paton Bobby stood in the middle of the carpet, dressed in uniform, wearing a full-length cloak. Nervous servants peered, big-eyed, from doorways.

'I'm sorry, Carriscant,' Bobby said. 'Wieland can't be found. There's been another killing.'

Just beyond Santa Mesa, a poor, mean hamlet two miles east of Manila, a stone bridge crossed the San Juan river. The carriage – Bobby driving, Carriscant beside him-rumbled across its cobblestones and stopped with a gentle lurch. It was 3 o'clock in the morning. Down below them, by the water's edge, Carriscant could see half a dozen American soldiers, some holding lanterns.

Carriscant slithered down the grassy bank behind Bobby who was handed a hooded lantern by one of the soldiers. 'It's under the bridge,' Bobby said flatly, swinging the beam in that direction. Carriscant followed its unwavering path cautiously, the ground damp and marshy beneath his feet, a reek of decay and human excrement filling his nostrils.

The body of the man had been propped against the stone supports of the bridge's first arch, almost as if it had sat down there for a rest and had fallen into a doze. It still had trousers and boots but there was no trace of the rest of the uniform. This time cause of death was immediately apparent: a single blow from a bolo delivered to the top of the head, splitting it like a melon. The entire torso was soaked in treacly, dried blood, which had flowed from the head wound and, Carriscant saw, with a lurch of shock in his chest, as he crouched down to examine it, from a more torn and unstitched version of the inverted L-shaped wound that had disfigured Ephraim Ward's corpse. About two feet of intestine, ragged and frayed, had been dragged from the belly, probably by river rats. The right hand and forearm were missing, severed neatly at the elbow.

'Found at midnight,' Bobby said, his voice reverberating beneath the vault of the bridge. 'He was on furlough. Last seen last night at 10.30 p.m. in a Sampaloc bar.'

'Just over twenty-four hours… Sampaloc's only a mile or so from here. He's a soldier?'

'Corporal Maximilian Braun. German spelling.'

'I can't examine him here. Let's get him back to the hospital.'

There was the sound of wheels echoing on the roadway above their heads and soon they were joined, to Carriscant's vague surprise, by the young colonel, Sieverance, who greeted them both with due solemnity.

'Christ's blood, what a stench there is down here! What do they dump in these rivers?' He leant forward carefully, like a man peering over a parapet on a high building and spat fastidiously on the ground. He held his handkerchief to his nose as he talked. 'Governor Taft wants a full report,' Sieverance said, explaining his presence. He took off his hat and scratched his head vigorously, nervously. He was bleary-eyed and the tuft of hair he inadvertently left standing made him look absurdly young and vulnerable, Carriscant thought.

'I'm most grateful to you again, Dr Carriscant,' he said. 'We did eventually locate Dr Wieland but he's incapable of conducting any sort of investigation. He couldn't even investigate the whereabouts of his boots when I tracked him down.'

A stretcher was called for and Corporal Braun's body was carried carefully up the river bank and loaded on to Bobby's carriage. A tarpaulin was thrown over it and Bobby and Carriscant, with Sieverance close behind, made their way back through the darkened, silent city to the San Jeronimo. Porters unloaded the body, placed it on a wooden gurney, and the three men followed its monotone rumble along gloomy corridors to the morgue. The door was locked; the porter's key did not fit, neither did Carriscant's. The sister on duty was summoned and she explained that Dr Cruz had had the lock changed and the only key was in his care.

Carriscant managed to control his anger somehow and instructed the porters to take the body into his operating theatre and strip and wash it. In the meantime he, Bobby and Sieverance drank a cup of hot tea laced with rum in his consulting rooms.