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Chapter 67: Into the Mountain
They were on the road in eleven minutes.Rafi had never been so calm. It frightened him a little. He sat in the passenger seat of the lead car with the Ledger in a canvas satchel on his knees and Albert's letter folded in his breast pocket, watching the streetlights of Makati give way to black highway, and the thought came slow and clean and cold: *there is nothing left in me to be afraid of.*Beside him Domingo drove with both hands on the wheel. In the back, Gil Tolentino sat between Elias and Mateo with a radio headset on and his eyes closed, reciting corridors under his breath. Cristina sat on the far side, her mother's brass key on a ribbon around her neck. Ligaya had refused to be left. She sat with the sewing basket in her lap and the face of a woman about to enter a church.Bel was in the third car. Rafi had said no. Bel had said, "I'm going to get in the car, and you can have Domingo carry me out of it, and I will bite him." She had looked
Chapter 66: The List
By eight the next morning there were forty-one cars on the road outside the Ferrer estate, and the guards at the gate had stopped counting."Sir," Domingo said, over the radio, with the strained neutrality of a man describing weather in a foreign country. "It's the wedding guests."Rafi, who had not slept, put down his coffee. "All of them?""A hundred and sixty, give or take. They've come in their own cars. Some with drivers." A pause. "Mrs. Padernal is at the front. She's brought a suitcase."---They had learned in pieces. The champagne Grace's caterer had swapped out was tested by the Makati police lab on Monday, because Ronnie, with a broker's instinct for covering himself, had bottled a sample before the toast. The report came back Tuesday: lorazepam and a veterinary tranquilizer, enough to stop a horse. Cristina had gone to the news. She had said, in front of three cameras and her weeping mother, that her grandfather had meant
Chapter 65: The Man Who Came Back
They brought him in through the kitchen entrance, because the kitchen had no windows.Domingo walked behind with his pistol drawn and his face set like cement. Elias walked ahead. Gil Tolentino went between them with his hands zip-tied in front of him, his jacket black with dried blood under the arm, and when he saw the long scrubbed table under the lamp, he stopped as though he'd walked into glass."Sit," Domingo said.Gil sat.Rafi took the chair across from him. He had meant to speak at once. Instead he looked at the man for a long moment: the mustache gone ragged, the lip split, the wounded hurt look that Domingo had once called *earnest.* Six years of service. A trusted voice on the Ark radio. He seemed to have shrunk."You sold my friend's wife," Rafi said."Yes, sir.""You walked her out of my gate.""I did." Gil didn't look away. "I'm not going to tell you I was forced. I wasn't forced. I was given a choic
Chapter 64: The Ongpin Line
Miguel woke at nine o'clock the next morning with a bowl of champorado in front of him and no memory of the garden."I had a dream about a lady with a ring," he said, licking chocolate off his spoon. "She was singing, but she didn't have a mouth."Bel went white. Rafi, who had spent the night in a chair beside the bed, put a hand on her arm and said, with great calm, "Eat your breakfast, anak.""Is it a bad dream?""It's just a dream."Miguel looked at him with grave eight-year-old eyes, and went back to his champorado. Rafi felt the lie settle in his stomach like a stone.The number on the bunker wall read sixteen.---"The ring does not call Keepers," Antonio said.They had gathered in the study again, this time with the door locked and Domingo posted outside. The old man sat with his cane across his knees and a map of the Concord's family trees spread across the desk, brown at the edges, in a hand so old
Chapter 63: What Elena Held
He told her in the kitchen, because she asked for the kitchen.He had imagined, in the long hours of the nights before, a hundred ways this conversation might go. She would scream. She would faint. She would call him a liar and walk out and take her daughter with her. He had planned for all of them. He had not planned for a woman who sat down at Ligaya's scarred table, folded her hands, and said, "From the beginning. Don't soften it."So he did not soften it.He told her about the winter. About the freeze, and the dark, and the three weeks in her dining room. About the hunger that came in the second week, and what it did to the people who loved him. He told her about the knife, and the flashlight, and the chipped bowl. He told her what she had said to him, at the end, with the spoon in her hand. *Hush now. It'll be quick. Be a good boy.*He did not look away. It took twenty minutes.When he finished, Elena was quiet for a long time. O
Chapter 62: The Interest
Ligaya had not said a word for two hours.She sat in the bunker kitchen with her sewing basket on her lap and a cup of tea she hadn't touched, and at four in the morning she stood up, went to the shelf where the cooks kept their notebooks, and took down a thing Rafi had walked past a hundred times: a battered black ledger with a rubber band around it and a grease stain on the cover."It's Albert's," she said. "His recipe book. He kept it in my kitchen the last year, because he said nobody would think to look for secrets in a book about sinigang."Rafi took it. The first page was a recipe, in the cramped upright hand he knew. *Pork belly, 1 kilo. Tamarind, 12 pods.* The second was a recipe. So was the third. On the fourth, between a note about fish sauce and a note about rice, were columns of numbers."I never read it," Ligaya said. "I was told it was for the day you were ready.""Ready for what?""I don't know." She hesitated.
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