The Mystery of Yamashita's Map

Chapter Eight

The street vendors and food sellers had packed up now and the only sound that could be heard was the lapping of the waves on the sides of the boats that gently bobbed up and down in the water. Lisa wandered along the dock. She had persuaded Fraser and her uncle not to come — not because she had something to hide or that she didn’t want their company but because she wanted to do this on her own. She wanted to contribute to this whole plan without having to answer to either of the two men. She casually picked up a stone from the ground and tossed it into the harbour. It made no sound.

Around her, occasionally, people chatted and walked. The docks were a strange place for a girl to be on her own at night but she knew them well and was not afraid, even when drunkards would push their way up to her and breathe nasty boozy propositions in her face. She just leaned back, waved them on and did not look back.

It was amazing how quiet the city seemed at this time of night. Of course, all of the noise was underground now, in clubs, in bars, in massage joints, in the many places where she was never allowed to go when she was growing up. She had not really wanted to but, somehow, the places we are kept from are always the places we want to go most of all. She thought about Joe. Was he in one of those places? Was that why she was here on her own when really she should be with someone else? Even a man would probably not have come on his own, or perhaps that was it, perhaps only a woman could come on her own to the dock and not expect to be attacked by a knife or gun.

She realised she barely remembered what Joe looked like. She remembered his hat and strange way of tapping his arm with his fingers but that was about it. She tried to visualise him but always failed. She wondered whether he would turn up. She wondered what type of life he must have, what type of man he must be, what type of lover he would make; rough and quick or slow and considerate. No, she corrected herself, this is a business deal and it must stay that way. She looked around and saw nothing. Only a cat moved between the barrels of fish heads, sniffing at the ground eager to find a meal or a bed for the night. Somehow the cat again reminded her of Joe. The light skimmed across Hong Kong bay, making the water look like an expanse of glimmering ink. The moon was high but crescent, giving everywhere a half light that was comforting and yet eerie at the same time. She heard a noise behind her and turned quickly. Joe stood, smiling. One of his eyes was clearly bruised and there was a faint trickle of blood oozing out of his mouth. ‘Ah, you made it then?’ he said with a smile. Lisa was shocked. ‘What happened to you?’ she asked. ‘Well, let’s say I ran into a spot of trouble today.’ ‘The same lot as last night?’

Joe laughed. ‘If it had been I would be talking to you from the bottom of the harbour. No, this was a new one, a boyfriend.’ He rubbed his cheek. ‘Never mess with the girl of a soldier. Jesus, those guys can hit.’ Lisa tugged at the bottom of her skirt and licked at the cloth. She raised it to Joe’s mouth and dabbed it, taking some of the blood away. ‘You’ll kill yourself before you take us to the Philippines.’ Joe backed off. ‘Ah, yes, I was meaning to talk to you about that.’

For a moment Lisa was taken aback. She had assumed that the deal was settled between them, that Joe was signed up to fly her, Fraser and her uncle to the Philippines. She could not bear to see her hopes dashed at this stage.

‘What is it?’ she asked with half-closed eyes, waiting for the worst.

‘Well,’ Joe looked sheepish. ‘Well, I am, as they say, grounded at the moment. My wings are currently sitting in a field at the pleasure of the Hong Kong police.’

Lisa dabbed his face a little more. ‘I know,’ she said.

‘You know?’

‘Yes, your cousin Lee told me.’

‘How the hell did you meet him?’

‘In a cab.’

Joe shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, I suppose you would. Well, it does complicate things.’

‘Not really. We just rent you another plane.’

Joe whistled through his teeth, grabbed Lisa by the shoulders and pushed her away. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You might have guessed that I’m not exactly law-abiding. I mean, I’m not going to get awarded the fair play award or anything. The mayor is not likely to offer me the contract of chief of police, but I know when I am in trouble and I smell trouble on you, honey. I think you reek of it.’

Lisa’s eyes fell.

‘I mean, you got money to rent a plane, but you got no money to rent a pilot. What is this?’

Lisa started. ‘Well, I need someone who can look after themselves, who wouldn’t be in a position to ask too many questions, who would do the job properly.’

‘In other words you need someone desperate.’

‘Yes, yes, perhaps. We need someone who is desperate enough to take on this job.’

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t tell you yet, not until you’re in.’

‘I’m not in until I know what it is.’

‘I can’t. Please, Joe, I can’t tell you.’

He turned to go. ‘Then there’s no deal.’

Lisa stood and watched him walk along the dock. His shoulders were hunched in the half moonlight and his hat was perched comically on his head. She couldn’t go through all this with someone else and besides in the little time she had known him she had come to like him, even though he was dirty and abrupt and maddeningly stubborn.

‘OK!’ she shouted after him. ‘OK, I’ll tell you what the plan is. I’ll tell you everything.’

Joe stopped, turned and inched his way back towards Lisa.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m listening.’

Lisa began. She told him about the girl and about her death, how they had traced the map to Amichi, how they had talked to Anderson and what had happened to Anderson in the basement of the university. She told him about Yamashita’s gold and the legend of the aswang and about her uncle’s visions and about all the strange things that had happened to him. Then she told him about how they had found his cousin and about how they had looked in virtually every cab in Hong Kong to find him, then how they had sat in the club until he had come in the night before.

When she had finished Joe sat, staring into the water. His face was a blank slate; his eyes stared straight ahead of him seeming to see something move in the water. In his head he was revisiting the cramped darkness of his dreams. While Lisa had been telling him about Yamashita’s gold, about the tunnels where it was buried, about the aswang and the strange visions of her uncle, Joe recalled his own dreams and the visions that they produced in his mind. He realised that they were calling to him; they were trying to tell him something, to make him go somewhere.

He shook his head. It wasn’t possible that he was having the same dreams as her uncle. It wasn’t possible that whoever was beckoning to him was also beckoning someone else. Joe could not believe it, he would not let himself believe it, it could not be happening. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. This cannot be happening, he told himself again, this is not real.

‘Have you spoken to your uncle about his dreams?’ Joe asked.

Lisa was taken by surprise. ‘Well, only in passing. He very rarely wants to speak about them. They scare him, I think.’

Joe gulped. He knew them too and he knew how frightening they could be. ‘Where is your uncle?’ he asked.

‘Back at his apartment, with Fraser. Ever since it was broken into I don’t like to leave him alone there.’

‘Can we go to him? I need to speak with him.’

‘Why, what’s wrong? You look as white as a sheet.’

‘I just need to speak to him.’

The night was folding around them like a blanket and the water lapped at the edges of the island. In the harbour something moved. Its eyes darted this way and that and its sinuous body changed shape again. In the dim light of the crescent moon the aswang strained each muscle of its form until it became something else, something more human, and it began to follow the two figures, the man in the cap and the pretty young woman, along the dockside. Each turn they made it turned too, each step they took it made too, but its feet made no sound on the damp concrete of the Hong Kong night.

Joe and Lisa walked to the professor’s apartment oblivious to the half shadow half man that followed them.

The light was on in the apartment and Lisa found the professor and Fraser playing cards in the bedroom. Fraser sat with a look of absolute horror on his face and the professor sat with a pile of what Lisa assumed was Fraser’s money in front of him and a smile on his face. Both of them jumped up as Joe entered the room.

The professor crossed immediately and shook Joe by the hand.

‘I am so glad we caught up with you, Joe,’ he said and shook his hand a little more.

Fraser was less enthusiastic and stood by the window with his hands in his pockets.

Joe said, ‘Professor, I need to talk to you about something, something that I think we might have in common.’

‘Sit,’ the professor said. ‘Sit down.’

‘Well, but I feel a little foolish talking to you about it in front of er… strangers.’

He nodded at Fraser and the professor answered, ‘Of course, of course. Fraser, will you go and make us some tea? Do you drink tea, Joe?’

‘Only when there is no whiskey.’

‘Well, I may have a little scotch left over from…’

‘Tea will be fine, thanks. Lisa, would you help him?’

Lisa screwed her nose up. Now she was being ordered around by Joe as well as Fraser and her uncle, but she desperately wanted this trip to go ahead and she was not going to spoil it due to a little thing like an ego. She groaned slightly and stormed out of the bedroom. Joe shut the door and sat down on the bed.

‘I have heard you have dreams, professor.’

The professor laughed. ‘We all dream, Joe.’

‘But I have heard you have specific dreams, special ones, particular ones.’

The professor looked concerned. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘There have been certain dreams lately that have, how shall we say, disturbed me.’

‘Describe them to me.’

‘Well, I am in a tunnel of some sort, yes, a tunnel. It’s black but I know it’s a tunnel because when I reach up I can feel the roof and its arched and cold and damp like earth. There is a musty smell and the smell of bad air. I know there is death there. I know there has been suffering and great pain but, no matter how badly I want to leave something pulls me along. I feel my feet moving even though I don’t want them to. It’s like something pulling me onwards, something that I cannot control.’

‘What then, professor, what happens then?’

‘Well, I see faces, faces of dead men, skulls some of them and they look at me as if to ask where I have been, why didn’t I come earlier. Oh, it’s so horrible there — the air is so thick it chokes me, I want to die, to expire, but I never do. No matter how much I want to I never lose consciousness. It’s like something is keeping me awake to do whatever it wants me to do.’

‘And what does it want you to do professor? What is it leading you on to do?’

‘It wants me to open the door, open the door in the wall. It’s an old wooden slatted door that looks as though it has not been opened for decades. I reach out my hand and I can see that it’s shaking. My fingers touch the door knob and I turn it… but then I usually wake up. I feel, though, I just feel as though I’m being called somewhere, that something is asking me to follow it, that something is pulling me somewhere.’

Joe was silent for a while. He sat with his hands in his lap looking at the professor.

‘What would you say,’ he said finally, ‘If I told you that

I had exactly the same dream and exactly the same feelings?’

The professor stared at him. ‘I’d say you were lying, Joe. Either that or we are both mad.’

‘Well, we must both be crazy, professor, because I’m not lying and I have exactly the same dream virtually every night, right down to the feel of the tunnel roof above my head.’

The professor got up and crossed over to the window. He looked down into the street below and thought he saw, just for a brief second, the figure of a man disappear before his eyes. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. He checked himself and reasoned that the night and the light play tricks on the eye when one is tired and afraid and he put the thought out of his head.

‘What does it mean, professor?’

‘I wish I could tell you, Joe, but I have no idea myself.’

‘You don’t think it has anything to do with this treasure, do you?’

The professor laughed. ‘Joe, I am a man of science, I can’t believe in such nonsense stories.’

Joe looked at him hard. ‘What are your real feelings?’

‘My real feelings are that we are both being told something by someone or something and all we need to do is listen and they will make sure we come out of it alive. Are you going to fly us?’

Joe thought. His mind was a whirl of different emotions and images, there were so many practical reasons why he should not do this stupid trip, why he should just pack up now and go: walk out of the door and never look back. However, there was the matter of the two guys who wanted to dance the fandango on his face and the police who were investigating him. There was also the opportunity of making some real money if this thing were to come off. He had heard about Yamashita’s gold, had also heard that it was a myth put about by the Philippine government to ensure that a steady stream of suckers would come knocking at their door looking for treasure. They survived on kickbacks and shady licences from your average workaday American now that the drug trade was gradually losing favour.

He thought of his plane. If nothing else this would get him flying again. He hadn’t flown for a number of months now and he missed it. He never thought he would say it but he actually missed being up in the air out of the way of everyone on the street who wanted him dead. He was never a romantic but, in the air, you were free, not quite as a bird perhaps, but freer than anything that walked on two legs on the ground. If this whole stupid trip came to nothing in the Philippines then he could always get his wings back and, as his father used to say to him, a man’s wings are his best friend.

Joe stared hard at the professor and held out his hand. ‘OK, professor, you got yourself a pilot.’

The two men shook hands. The door burst open and Lisa fell through it, rushing over to hug her uncle and then Joe. The professor stared intently at her. ‘I do hope you weren’t listening,’ he said to Lisa.

‘Do you want sugar in your tea, uncle?’ she replied.

Later that evening they sat around the table discussing the plan.

‘Of course,’ said Joe, ‘The main problem is how we get a plane to take us over there?’

‘I told you. We hire one,’ Lisa replied.

Joe shook his head. ‘To be brutally honest with you it might not be that easy. You see in order for us to be able to hire a plane I need to be insured and, well, since, I have had problems with the aviation authorities over here — well, they haven’t exactly been my best friends.’

‘Have you actually got a licence?’

Joe rubbed the back of his head. ‘Well, that all depends on what you call a licence.’

‘Usually it means a bit of paper that says you can fly a plane.’

‘Oh, yeah, well, I have one of those.’

‘Good, so what’s the problem?’

‘Well, it was kind of…’ Joe paused for a moment, ‘Taken momentarily, due to an unfortunate incident with a few kilograms of heroin. I mean, I’m still legal, technically, I just don’t have the bit of paper to prove it. The police do.’

‘Great!’ Fraser said, and slammed his hands on the table. ‘Where the hell did we get this guy?’

Joe looked at him angrily. ‘Look, do you want to fly the plane yourself, buddy? I know what this looks like but I didn’t know what I was carrying and I have suffered since, right? Now, when we’re out of Hong Kong air space, none of this matters any more. All I need to do is take off and we are virtually there.’

‘So how do we get a plane?’ Lisa asked.

‘Well, I’ve been thinking about that,’ Joe answered. ‘I say we just take my one.’

The group were stunned.

‘Yeah, we try to bribe the guard they have at the airfield. You know what Hong Kong cops are, right? We just waltz in, flash some money and take my plane right out of there.’

‘Just like that?’ asked Fraser.

‘Yes, just like that. Have you any better ideas?’

Fraser was quiet. He didn’t have any better ideas, just a gut feeling that this was one of the worst ones he had heard in a long time.

‘So when do we go?’ Joe asked.

Lisa shrugged. ‘Uncle?’

‘We have all we need,’ the professor said. ‘Next week?’

There was silence for a while as each of them contemplated what they were about to do.

‘We need things, uncle,’ said Lisa. ‘Provisions, permits maybe, and we need to organise food and tools.’

Her uncle waved her concerns away. ‘Yes, yes, I am sure you and Fraser can sort all of that out. You are excellent at logistics. Me, I need to decide what we need in terms of texts, books, maps, and so on. It would be best, I think, to be in and out as quickly as possible.’

Fraser started to speak. ‘How do we know what part of the Philippines to start looking in? I mean it’s a vast area and the map only shows local landmarks. We could theoretically be flying over Philippine airspace for months before we even saw anything that was remotely like the features on the map.’

‘He’s right, uncle,’ said Lisa. ‘Anderson was sure we would recognise the features once we flew over them but how do we even know we’re in the right area?’

The professor thought for a moment. ‘I’m thinking,’ he said, with his lips pursed. ‘I’m thinking.’

The other three looked at him. They watched as his skin became a little damper and his temples became a little redder. He closed his eyes and sat down squarely on the bed for what seemed like hours. Then, suddenly, as if waking from a dream, his face lit up with a smile, he got up from the bed and shuffled, quickly out of the door. A moment later he came back with a book in his hand.

‘I found this in the library last week, when you were researching the Japanese military, Lisa. It is a history of the army, written at the end of the war by a Dutchman of all things, Van Broek. It details that there was heavy fighting with the US army in the last months of war, especially on Mindanao and the islands around Mindanao. Here, here is the part: ‘The US army dedicated hundreds of men to pursue the Japanese army through the jungles of Mindanao. After three weeks of continuous attrition, many of those left alive were taken prisoner, relieved that they might be given rations and a dry bed again.’ There it is on page 67.’

Lisa continued reading, ‘Filipino soldiers had reported lots of activity in the Baguio City area on the main island of Luzon where Japanese troops were seen conducting some kind of excavations.’

The room was silent. Finally Fraser spoke up, ‘Professor, this is very interesting but I do not see how it helps our cause.’

The professor looked stunned. ‘You do not see? You do not see?’

‘I don’t see it either, professor,’ Joe said. ‘What’s it got to do with us?’

The professor sighed. ‘The islands around Mindanao. What interest had they for the Americans? Why did they pick these tiny islands among all the others to conduct a three-week war of attrition? They didn’t spend much time in Baguio. They must have suspected, no, they must have known that the gold was buried in, or near Mindanao. They were flying all over the Philippines at this point. I have no doubt in my mind that they would have sent a reconnaissance plane over that area to see what was going on.’

‘Yes, but they wouldn’t have found much out in the jungle… without a map. That’s it, uncle that must be it.’

Fraser was unsure. ‘Well, yes, I can see it’s a lead anyway.’

‘You’re a genius professor, do you know that? A damned genius. You’re right, I know it. Right, when do we go? I wanna get my plane back in the air as quick as possible.’

‘Well, as Lisa said, Joe, there are still provisions to be got and things to be finalised.’

The four of them moved to the living room and stood round the table. They looked at each other in awed silence, not knowing what to say or to do next. Outside, down the corridor someone waited for them to come out, someone who was all too human. He had a dark suit on that was splattered with blood — Anderson’s. He tapped his fingers on the wall and kicked at the ground while all the time keeping his eyes on the door and his mind on the job.

Suddenly he felt a tap on his shoulder and when he turned his mouth was covered by a perfumed hand that was covered in gold rings. There was a whisper.

‘Shhhhhh! Kono, you fool, it’s me, Tanaka.’

Kono relaxed and the hand was taken away from his mouth.

‘When did they go in there?’

‘About an hour ago.’

‘Have you listened at the door?’

‘No, I thought it best to stay here and wait for them.’

Tanaka patted the other man on the cheek. ‘Good, good. I want them followed, you hear me, wherever they go. I want you to stick with them.’

‘You can count on me, boss.’

‘Good, good.’ Tanaka turned to leave.

‘Er… boss?’ Kono said.

Tanaka sighed deeply and stopped. ‘Yes, what is it?’

‘You don’t believe in this, do you?’

‘In what?’

‘The gold? The buried gold?’

Tanaka inched closer to Kono, who was twice his size. ‘Would I have got you to kill the girl if I didn’t believe in it?’ he said venomously, the corners of his mouth forming a snarl and his eyes staring right through Kono.

‘No, boss, no, you wouldn’t have.’

Tanaka slapped Kono’s face. ‘You just keep your eyes open, yes? Leave the thinking and the believing to me. Don’t worry your ugly little head over it.’

He turned and headed down the corridor. When he was sure he couldn’t see him any more Kono poked his tongue out at the back of his boss before turning around again to fix his eyes solidly on the door.