By eleven o'clock, the private dining room of the Forbes Park clubhouse looked like the aftermath of a small, polite war.Domingo's men had taken the phones, every one, and laid them in a silver bread basket on the sideboard like offerings. Two guards lay on the carpet with medics kneeling over them, both breathing. A waiter wept quietly in a corner. Mrs. Aranzanso sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed on the middle distance, the way people sit in hospital corridors.Rafi stood by the window with the canvas bag against his chest. The Ledger inside it was warm. It had been warm for an hour."Sir." Domingo came up beside him, voice low. "Ambulance is here for Dela Fuente. His wrist is broken in two places. He keeps asking for his lawyer.""Let him ask. Send two of ours with him and tell the hospital he doesn't leave.""And the old man?"Rafi looked across the room.Anselmo Aranzanso sat in his wheelchair at the head of

The pot ticked as it cooled. Nobody in the kitchen moved."Ligaya," Elias said. He had set his spoon down in the blue bowl. "Tell me he's lying.""He isn't." Her voice was steady, but her fingers had closed on the edge of the counter. "He never lies about the things that hurt. That is the whole of his talent."Anselmo inclined his head, accepting the compliment like a bow."Then tell me," Rafi said.She did not sit. She looked at the two of them, the man she had fed at thirteen and the man she had fed for nine years, and for a moment she seemed to grow even smaller."Cebu, 1998," she said. "You know about the funeral, Antonio told you. He carried the left handle of that coffin and never knew there were rice sacks inside, and stones. Albert stood at the back of the church in a borrowed barong. When it was over, he came to the house and asked to speak with me alone." She breathed in. "He said, 'Ligaya, I need you to die.' The way another man asks for salt.""Why?" Elias asked."Because