Chapter 4 The Rain Begins to Bite #2
He looked at her for a moment over the cupboard door with an expression of such uncomplicated grief on behalf of the pan that Mina had to put her face in her hands.
He made it work with kidney beans, chorizo from a Spanish deli in Salcedo that had delivered in the rain for a price he described as an outrage against God, and a sofrito he built from scratch out of ingredients he kept holding up and asking her to identify.
“What is this one.”
“Siling haba.”
“Is it hot?”
“Not really.”
“Mina.”
“It is a little hot.”
“Baby, I am asking as a professional.”
He cooked for most of the morning. He did it with the total absorption of a man doing the one thing in the building he understood end to end, and Mina sat on the counter with her feet on a drawer handle and watched him and did not open her laptop once, and afterward she would think of that as the last ordinary hour.
While the sofrito was going she went into the second bedroom and shut the door and called Simone, and stood with her back against it.
“Tell me you slept,” Simone said.
“Tell me you have the banking.”
“I have four hundred pages of a Vanuatu nominee structure and a headache, and it is going to take me two more days, and you were right about the logs, and I am not going to say that again so enjoy it.” Paper moving. “Talk to me about the numbers.”
“Nine minutes to ninety on the start delay. Override threshold up four hundred millimeters. Alarms rerouted to the contractor.” Mina heard her own voice go flat and let it.
“Simone, it is not sabotage. That is what I have been getting wrong since three in the morning. Sabotage is a thing you do to a machine. This is a thing you do to a document.”
“Which is worse.”
“Which is worse, because it survives an audit.” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Somebody could go and stand at Station 14 today, in the rain, and watch it not pump, and go back to the office and pull the record, and the record would tell them the station is healthy and the water is below threshold, and they would believe the record. Because the record is not lying. The record has been made true.”
Simone was quiet for a second.
“Bantay Serbisyo Solutions,” she said. “Registered in October twenty-twenty. Three directors, all of whom are also directors of nine other things, and one of whom is Calderon’s wife’s brother, which is so lazy I am insulted on your behalf.”
“How much did they bill?”
“For the three change orders? Four hundred and eleven thousand pesos.”
Mina laughed. It was not a good laugh.
“Seven thousand dollars,” she said.
“Seven thousand dollars.”
“They drowned Tondo for seven thousand dollars.”
“No,” Simone said. “They did the paperwork for seven thousand dollars. Somebody paid a great deal more than that to have the paperwork exist, and that somebody is what I am reading four hundred pages of a Vanuatu nominee structure to find, so let me work.” A pause. “Mina. Where is he?”
“In my kitchen making rice.”
“Does he know?”
“He knows something.”
“That is the worst available condition,” Simone said, “for both of you,” and hung up.
Mina stood with her back to the door for a moment longer.
Then she opened the tracker on her second phone and tried, for the fourth time since four in the morning, to raise the barangay office in Isla Puting Bato.
It rang out. It had rung out at four twenty and at five and at six forty.
The number was on the show’s own contact sheet, because the show had called it in February to verify a letter about a school, and it was the same number, and nobody was answering it, at eleven in the morning, on a Wednesday, in a barangay where the water was coming.
She wrote the name JOSEPHINE on a piece of paper, and under it 14, and put it in her pocket, and went back out to the kitchen and asked Hal what siling haba was for.
The apartment emptied at eight. Meding hugged Hal at the door, once, hard, in a way that Hal found touching and that Mina found unbearable, and then the van went down and the staff went with it and the forty-first floor got very quiet.
“They all go for storms?” Hal said, watching the elevator numbers.
“They all go for storms.”
“That’s decent of you.”
“Mm,” Mina said.
They ate at twelve, standing up, out of the pan, because the table was covered in Mina’s second laptop and fourteen printed pages of parameter tables that Hal had glanced at once and had not asked about.
He had not asked about anything since Poblacion.
She was aware of him not asking. It occupied the room like a third person.
She had run it six different ways during the night, in the gaps between parameter tables, the way you do.
There was the version where she told him nothing, put him on a plane on Sunday week, and had eleven months of voice memos and one very good seventeen days, and let him go on believing he had been in love with an actress.
That version was clean and it was available and she had used a version of it twice before, in Bacolod and once in Vienna, and both times it had worked exactly as designed and both times she had gotten into the car afterward and sat there.
There was the version where she told him a smaller true thing.
That she consulted for an international body.
That there was a case, that it was financial, that it was boring, that people occasionally got interested in her because of who she knew.
That version had the advantage of being sixty percent accurate and the disadvantage that Hal Rivera had spent nine years listening to people give him sixty percent accurate accounts of where a truck was.
And there was the version where she told him.
Mina had thought about that one for a long time at about four thirty in the morning, with three change orders open on the screen in front of her.
Because here was the thing nobody in the Taskforce would ever say out loud.
The reason you did not tell them was not tradecraft.
Tradecraft was the reason you gave. The actual reason was that the moment you told a person what you were, you handed them a lever, and you would spend the rest of the relationship watching to see whether they were going to pull it, and no amount of love survived being watched like that.
Simone had told her that in Singapore in a bar in 2022 and Mina had written it down.
And then there was this morning, and Malabon on a screen, and four hundred millimeters, and a man in her kitchen holding up a chili pepper and asking, as a professional, whether it was hot.
He had said he would spend one question a day and he had spent yesterday’s in the car and it was now a new day and he had been awake for four hours and had not spent this one, and Mina understood with total clarity that he was saving it, and that he was going to spend it well, and that she had until he did.
“This is extremely good,” she said.
“It’s fine. It’s not right. The gandules matter and the beans are wrong and the sofrito needs ají dulce, which does not exist here, which I have made my peace with.” Hal chased a piece of chorizo around the pan. “My abuela would have thrown this off a balcony.”
“I would eat it off the ground.”
“That is the nicest thing anybody has said to me in this country.”
Mina reached over with the remote and turned the television on to have something in the room that was not the parameter tables.
Which is how she came to be holding a fork in her right hand and standing in her own kitchen when Undersecretary Vicente Calderon appeared on the noon news, in a dry studio, in a barong the color of weak tea.
He was very good. That was what she had never been able to make foreigners understand about men like this.
They are not stupid and they are not clumsy and they do not look like villains.
Calderon sat forward with his forearms on his knees and his hands clasped loose, which is the posture of a man who is about to tell you a hard truth, and he said that the Department was on full alert, and that every available pumping asset in the National Capital Region was operational, and that he had personally instructed his people that no request from any local government unit was to wait for paperwork.
“Ang tubig ay hindi naghihintay,” he said. Water does not wait.
He said that he understood the frustration of our kababayan in the low-lying areas, and that he wanted to say to them directly, from the heart, that they had not been forgotten.
The broadcast cut away from him to a live feed from Malabon.
It was thigh deep. A woman was walking a child through it with a plastic basin held on her head containing, as far as Mina could tell, a rice cooker and a school bag.
Behind her a man was up on a roof with a rope.
The camera panned and found a barangay hall with the water lapping at its second step and eleven people sitting on the stairs above it, waiting, not doing anything, because there was nothing to do.
Then it cut back to the studio, where Undersecretary Calderon was nodding gravely at what he had just seen.
Mina realized she had put the fork down.
She realized, further, that she had put it down some time ago, and that Hal had stopped eating, and that Hal was not looking at the television.
He was looking at her.
“Baby,” he said.
He said it quietly and he did not put anything into it.
“Baby, I want to spend today’s.”
Mina turned around.
He had set his own fork down at some point. He was standing on the other side of the island in a t-shirt with his hair still flat on one side, and there was nothing on his face except that he was paying attention, which was somehow much worse than anger would have been.