The Pull of Gravity

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The next night we employed our creep-watch procedure. If Rudy tried coming in, one of the door girls would engage him in conversation while another would slip inside and warn Isabel and me. If Rudy asked about Isabel, our greeter would tell him Isabel hadn’t come in and was still sick. I knew that probably wouldn’t stop him from checking, but if he did, Isabel would be safely hidden in the back room, and the rest of the girls would claim to not have seen her.

But Rudy didn’t show up that night, or the two nights that followed. I was beginning to think he had forgotten, and would return to the States without giving us a return visit.

I was both wrong and right.

It was Friday night and all hands were on deck. Our slow season was quickly approaching, but on this night we were full up. The liquor was flying off the bar, and the music was about as loud as I could stand it. As far as the crowd went, there wasn’t an empty chair. Over a dozen guys were standing around, drinking their beer and watching the show. We had over thirty-five girls working that night, not enough to go around, but enough to keep most of the customers happy.

That many people inside meant the temperature was making a fast path to boiling. I had the air conditioning cranked to full, but it wasn’t enough. On this occasion, outside was definitely cooler than in.

The girls started taking turns going out front to spend a few minutes with the door girls and cool off. I was tempted to do the same, but there was just too much crap for me to deal with. Everyone seemed to want to buy me a beer that night, which meant spending time talking and joking before moving on to the next group.

I think the last time I saw Isabel was around eleven thirty p.m. This wasn’t surprising; I hadn’t seen Cathy since about nine. It was just one of those nights when everyone was hustling-the waitresses constantly hauling drinks across the room, the dancers grinding to the full extent of their talents, and those sitting with the guys displaying as much affection and interest as money could buy-all of it in an effort to create that perfect experience for the customers, that aura of possibilities that drew them halfway around the world to the dirty streets of Angeles.

Around one a.m., I suddenly heard Cathy’s voice in my ear. “I need to talk to you.”

I was sitting with a group of businessmen from Hong Kong-displaced Brits, mostly-talking soccer. Not my favorite sport, but if you spent any time in Angeles, you couldn’t help learning more about it than you ever thought you would. I looked over my shoulder, and found Cathy standing there, grim-faced.

“Excuse me, guys. Back in a few.” I got up and followed Cathy into the back where the noise was several decibels lower.

Veta was there, but the moment she saw me, she looked down at the floor.

“What?” I asked, knowing something wasn’t right.

Cathy grabbed Veta by the arm, and said something to her in Tagalog. The harsh tone surprised me.

Veta cried out as Cathy’s fingers dug into her triceps. She mumbled something, then Cathy gave her a shake and told her in English, “Louder!”

“It’s my fault,” Veta said, still not meeting my eyes. I could see tears beginning to run down her cheeks and heard the fear in her voice.

“What’s your fault?” I had no idea what was going on. The worst I could conjure up was that Cathy had caught Veta trying to steal something, money maybe, or something that belonged to one of the girls.

“Isabel,” she said, then began sobbing uncontrollably.

The hair on the back of my neck began standing on end. “What about Isabel?”

“She’s with Rudy,” Veta managed.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

But Veta had slipped out of Cathy’s grasp and curled up on the floor. I looked at Cathy.

“Veta was outside getting some air,” Cathy explained. “Rudy came walking down the other side of the street, and when he see her, she say he call her over.” Cathy looked down at Veta, her face full of disgust. “Rudy tell her he just want to talk to Isabel, that he was sorry there was a misunderstanding. For five hundred pesos, Veta said she bring Isabel to him.”

Rage is an emotion I seldom feel, but it suddenly coursed through me so quickly it was all I could do to keep it from taking over. I reached down and pulled Veta to her feet. Through clenched teeth, I said, “You took her to him?”

“He only want to talk,” Veta said. “That’s what he tell me.”

“So you gave her to him?”

“I’m sorry,” she wailed. “I made a mistake.”

“No shit,” I said. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know. I just told her we were going for a walk. As soon as she saw him, she tried to run away, but he grabbed her. I ran away. I didn’t want him to hurt me, too.”

I looked over at Cathy. “Keep an eye on things,” I said.

I pushed Veta toward the bar. “Show me where you took her,” I said.

Though Fields Avenue was bright and lively and crowded, there were side streets and alleys where darkness took over. These were the places best avoided on those drunken walks back to the hotel. It was to one of these places that Veta led me.

“Here,” she said.

We had come down one of the less used side streets, but could still hear the cacophony of music blaring from a dozen bars only a block away. Veta had stopped beside the darkened entrance of an old building. At one time the place had been a bar called Tony’s Palace, but it had been closed over a year due to the lack of foot traffic.

There were a few scuff marks in the dirt sidewalk but other than that, there was no sign that anything had happened.

“You’re sure it was here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Sure.”

“Did he say where he was taking her?”

“I tell you, I run,” she said. “I don’t know where he taking her.”

“Do you know what hotel he’s staying at?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t tell me.”

“Not even that first night when he was buying you all those drinks?”

She thought about it for a moment, then said, “No. He didn’t say.”

I felt a moment of overwhelming helplessness. They could have been anywhere. He could have done anything to her, even killed her, then gotten on a plane and been back in the States before we even found her. I realized in a hurry I needed help.

Dragging Veta behind me, I raced back to The Lounge. I had one of the door girls go inside and get Cathy. The girls who remained stared at the emotional wreck that was Veta, wondering, I was sure, what was going on. But there was no way they were going to ask me. I was kind, gentle Papa Jay, so my reasons must have been good.

Cathy soon joined us, and I gave control of Veta over to her. “Don’t let her leave. I want her here so the police can talk to her.”

Veta started to cry again.

“Stop it,” I told her. “You have to face what you started. I know I don’t have to tell you this, but you don’t have a job here anymore. And when I get finished telling everyone what you’ve done, you won’t be able to get a job anywhere.” To Cathy, I said, “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I have to find her.”

She nodded, then hauled Veta back inside. The door girls, still silent, stared at me as I turned and began running down the street.

It took almost two hours to figure out where Rudy was staying. I’d found Manfred and Nicky playing pool at The Eight Ball, so with their help and a couple of understanding Angeles regulars, we canvassed the district trying to discover where Rudy and Isabel might be.

I thought for sure he was staying at the Las Palmas Hotel, so I went there first. But it was a no-go. Ditto at the Royal Suites, the Vista and The Pit Stop. One of the things that worried me was that we’d find his hotel, but they wouldn’t be there. Angeles was a big place. For that matter, Luzon was a big island. Still, he wasn’t a native, so I held on to the belief that he had to take her somewhere familiar.

At three thirty a.m., Manfred called me on my cell phone. “He’s staying at the MacArthur Inn,” he said. “The receptionist said he came in awhile ago with a girl who was so drunk, he basically had to carry her.”

The MacArthur was a five-minute trike ride from where I was. I told Manfred to grab a couple of the hotel security guards and break in. Even as we were talking, I waved over a trike and climbed in.

The driver, spurred on by my offer of two hundred pesos to drive like hell, did just that. We were there in under four minutes. I threw the money at him and raced inside.

The receptionist seemed to be expecting me, and before I could say anything, she was pointing toward her right. “Room 117.”

I followed her directions and continued running at top speed down a long hallway lined on either side by numbered doors. The door to 117 was open, but my momentum almost carried me past it. I was a hell of a lot of mass moving at speeds I hadn’t achieved in years. I caught hold of the jamb and barely kept from falling to the floor.

The lights in the room were on, so I was able to take everything in quickly. Manfred was there, crumpled against the wall, his arms wrapped around his stomach, groaning. Otherwise the room was empty.

I lumbered over to him, and kneeled down. I put a hand on his shoulder and gently shook him. His eyes remained closed for a moment before becoming slits. “Doc?”

“Jesus. What happened?” I asked.

He opened his eyes the rest of the way, then, with my help, sat up, back against the wall. “Receptionist gave me the key,” he said. “Found them in here. He had her. On the bed.” He grabbed my arm. “I was too late.”

“Where did they go?

“I don’t know. I tried to stop him, but that son of a bitch is strong.” He rubbed the side of his head. There was already a bruise forming there. “I guess he must have knocked me out.”

“What about the security guards?” I asked.

“Couldn’t find any. But I didn’t want to wait.”

“You gonna be okay?” I asked as I got to my feet.

“Yeah, yeah. Just go. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

I went back out into the hallway. If Rudy had taken her the way I’d come, the receptionist would have said something. So I turned the other way and ran. I burst through the door at the end of the hall, and found myself in a large courtyard surrounded on three sides by the different wings of the hotel and dominated by the MacArthur’s swimming pool. There were several empty tables scattered around, and some bushes lining the edge of the building, but I was alone. Across the courtyard there was a ten-foot-high wall, inset with a large wooden gate that I guessed led out to the street. Most of the hotels in Angeles were very concerned about security, so it was a fair bet the gate was usually closed. It wasn’t now.

I didn’t have enough energy to really sprint anymore, so I made my way to the gate as quickly as I could. Cautiously I passed through it and found myself in the dark, unpaved alley that ran behind the hotel. But there was enough light from nearby buildings for me to see I was still alone.

My desperation was reaching its peak. I had failed Isabel. I had promised to watch over her, and I had failed. I looked quickly toward each end of the alley. To my right was a walled-off dead end providing no obvious means of escape. But to my left was a street, paved and better lit. I jogged to it and found what I had both expected and feared.

Even at this late hour, you could always find an available trike. And parked across the street about half a block down were two trikes whose drivers were sitting near each other on the sidewalk in low conversation.

One of them stood up as I approached. “I give you ride,” he said.

“Did two people come by here a few minutes ago? A big guy? Lots of muscles. And a girl?”

“Sure,” the one still sitting on the sidewalk said.

“Did they take a trike?”

“You want a ride, mister?” the first guy asked.

I pulled out two fifty-peso notes and held one out to each of them. “Did they take a trike?”

“Sure,” the second one said.

“Do you know where they were going?”

They both shrugged and shook their heads.

“Damn it!” I looked up and down the street hoping for some clue, but there was nothing. I turned back to the trike drivers. “Which direction did they go?”

They talked amongst themselves for a moment, then the second one said, “Both.”

“He go that way,” the first one said, pointing to their left. “And she go that way.” He pointed to the right.

It took me a second to understand what they’d said.

The sun was coming up when I finally found her. She hadn’t gone back to The Lounge, and she hadn’t gone to her place, either. I guess she decided to go to the only place she thought she could find someone who would understand, and help her without a lot of other people getting involved.

I had to knock three separate times before Mariella finally opened the door.

“Papa Jay, I didn’t know it was you,” she said.

I pushed past her into the apartment. “Where is she?” I asked.

“She’s lying down in my room,” she said, closing the door.

“Is she okay?”

Mariella smiled. “Maybe in a little while. Right now she’s upset.”

“Did she tell you what happened?”

“I’m her cousin. She tells me everything.”

Exhaustion finally overtook me and I slumped onto Mariella’s couch. Her nice expensive couch, in an apartment filled with nice expensive things. I’d never been inside before, but looking around at the pictures on the wall and the dinette set and the vases of fresh flowers everywhere, I realized just how good she was at the money ko game.

“Can I get you something?” she asked. “Maybe a drink?”

“No. I want to talk to her.”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I just got her to calm down.”

From behind us, Isabel said, “It’s okay.”

We both turned. She was standing at the far end of the living room, next to an open door I presumed led to the bedroom.

“Come in here,” she told me, then disappeared through the open door.

I entered a moment later with Mariella right behind me. Isabel was sitting on a queen-size canopy bed done up in pinks and whites.

“Let me speak to him alone for a few minutes,” Isabel said to her cousin. Her voice was steady, and except for the distant look in her eyes, she seemed normal. Mariella hesitated, so Isabel added, “It’s okay.”

Mariella forced a smile, then went back into the living room.

“Close the door, please,” Isabel said to me.

I did as she asked. Once we were alone, the control she had been exerting over her body cracked, and she could no longer hold back her tears. I sat on the bed next to her, and started to put my arm around her shoulder.

“Don’t,” she said, stopping me. “I know you just want to help, but I…” She trailed off as her face twisted in pain, the memory of what Rudy had done still so very fresh in her mind.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to explain.”

Now that I was there with her, I wasn’t sure what to do. Unconsciously, she pulled her hair back behind her ear in a gesture she’d done a million times. Only this time, instead of revealing her soft, brown cheek, she uncovered a dark, ugly bruise on her jaw, nearly a twin to the one Manfred had received. She realized what I was looking at and started to cover the bruise again, but stopped herself in mid-movement, obviously thinking she couldn’t make me not see it.

“He hit me,” she said.

“Do you need a doctor?”

She touched her jaw. “It will be okay.”

“I don’t mean just for that.”

Her eyes moistened as she tried not to cry. “No,” she said. “No doctor.”

I sat next to her, not touching her, not saying anything. I couldn’t even imagine what she was going through. Anger? Fear? Guilt? All I really knew was that those were the emotions racing through me.

“You know what happened,” she said. A statement, not a question. “You know what I did with him.”

“You didn’t do anything with him,” I told her. “What happened-that was all his doing.”

“It’s the same thing.”

She stared at the carpet, her breathing uneven. I kept expecting her to start sobbing, but it never happened.

I shouldn’t have come, I thought. I should have left as soon as I knew she was with Mariella. There was nothing I could do for her that her cousin couldn’t handle and probably do better.

But no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t make myself get up. We sat there like that for what could have been twenty minutes or twenty hours. There was no time under the canopy of Mariella’s bed, there was only Isabel and me.

And I still didn’t know what to do.

I got very little sleep that day. At some point Cathy came and got me from Mariella’s, a minor miracle in itself, but that day, the past meant nothing. The police turned out to be more helpful than I expected. It wasn’t the first time a girl had been raped in Angeles, and I had heard stories of varying degrees of official assistance. Maybe it was because Manfred, a foreigner, had also been hurt.

The cops posted two officers at the MacArthur Inn in hopes that Rudy would return. But what they didn’t know at the time and only figured out later was that he had grabbed all his important stuff, including his passport and airplane ticket, right after he’d smashed his fist into Manfred’s face and hightailed it directly to Aquino International Airport in Manila. By the time the police finally sorted it out, Rudy was already back in the States. Which meant it was the end of it, because none of the Philippine authorities were motivated enough to make an international case over the rape of a bar girl.

As far as I know, Rudy never came back to Angeles. A good thing, too, since there were several girls who would have let him bar fine them, then cut off his balls once they were alone in his hotel room. If I had ever seen him again, I wouldn’t have bothered with his balls. I would have simply killed him.

But the sad truth was, there would come a day when most of the people who knew who he was and what he had done would be gone from Fields, and, if he wanted to, he could probably return then to abuse again.

Isabel stayed away from The Lounge for four days. When she returned, I took her in back and asked her if she was sure she wanted to start working again so soon.

“I’m fine, Papa,” she said. “Please don’t worry about me.”

I knew she wasn’t fine, and I also knew I was sitting on a stack of cash that Larry had sent which would allow her to stop working as long as she wanted. I even suggested she do just that, but she would have none of it.

“Have you told him what happened?” she asked. Her eyes were full of fear. This was apparently something she hadn’t considered before.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t even talked to him.”

“You are telling me the truth?”

I nodded and said yes.

“You must promise me something,” she said.

“What?”

“You must promise me you will never tell Larry about…” She paused. “About him.” It was as if she had spoken the most disgusting word that existed.

“Don’t you think he’d want to know?”

“I don’t want him to know. That should be enough.”

I looked into her eyes and saw that this meant everything to her. “Okay,” I said. “I won’t tell him anything.”

About a week later, Larry called and said that Isabel didn’t sound the same. He wondered if there was something bothering her. I wanted to tell him. He deserved to know. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would have blamed her. In fact, he would have probably hopped on the next plane to come and comfort her.

But I had promised Isabel I would say nothing, so I told him she was probably just missing him.

I wasn’t sure if it was the biggest lie I’d ever told, but it felt like the worst.