Chapter 8 The Sinking City #2
“Flyovers. Railway viaducts. The embankments they built the railway viaducts on. And,” Hal said, “the ring roads around the malls, because they are all built up two feet for the drainage and the parking, and every single one of them connects to two arterials.”
Mina was quiet for a second.
“You are going to route us through mall car parks.”
“I am going to route us through mall car parks.”
They went through four.
It was not a triumph. He wanted that understood later, when Mang Rey’s people started telling the story with him in it, and he kept correcting them and they kept not listening.
It took five and a half hours to do twenty-five kilometers and there were three points at which he got it wrong.
The first was at a flooded underpass at ten to ten, which he did not enter, because he had been told about underpasses by a woman on the radio for ninety minutes and had built a rule.
But he sat at the mouth of it for four minutes watching a small silver sedan go in ahead of him, and watching the water come up the doors, and watching the driver realize, and then he had to sit there with the handbrake on while three men from a bus queue went in up to their chests and got the man out through the window, and he could not help because reversing the truck would have blocked the only lane and stranded eleven vehicles behind him.
That was the first thing Manila taught him. Sometimes the correct decision is to sit still and watch and be no use.
The second was on Espana, where he made a routing error that cost forty minutes and which was entirely his own fault, because he read the flood report as a depth map when the flood report is a depth-plus-queue map, and the road he chose was passable and had nine hundred vehicles already sitting on it, and he had optimized for the water and forgotten the people.
He sat in that for forty minutes, and Mina did not say one word about it, which he appreciated more than he could tell her.
The third was worse.
The checkpoint was at the top of a flyover in Santa Cruz and it was not a police checkpoint.
Hal saw the vehicles first, because he was looking at vehicles all day. Two dark pickups nose-out on the shoulder, both with the same aftermarket light bar, both clean in a city where nothing had been clean since Tuesday. Four men standing in the rain in black shells with no logo.
“Mina.”
“I see them.”
“Those are not.”
“They are not.” She had not moved. Her voice had gone completely flat and pleasant, which he had learned in five days meant the opposite of pleasant. “Do not slow down early. Come down like you are annoyed.”
Hal came down like he was annoyed, which required no acting.
One of the men stepped out and put a hand up. Hal stopped and put the window down four inches, and the rain came in.
Up close the man was maybe thirty, and he had a laminated card on a lanyard around his neck, and Hal’s whole spine went cold, because it was a plain black woven strap and it had a snap swivel at the bottom and this time there was a card on it.
“Morning po.” The man leaned down. He had an accent Hal could not place. “Where are you headed?”
“Tondo.” Hal put both hands on top of the wheel where they could be seen, which was a thing he had learned in Georgia for entirely different reasons. “North Harbor side. We are running goods in.”
“Whose goods?”
“Sagip Tubig.” Hal tipped his head at the door decal. “You want to see the back?”
That was Mina’s instruction from four in the morning and he had thought at the time it was insane. Offer the back. Offer it fast, offer it bored, and be irritated if they say no.
The man looked at Hal, and then past him at Mina, who was slumped in the passenger seat in a cheap rain shell with a cap down over her eyes and her sling under the shell so it read as a woman with her arms folded, asleep, and who did not stir.
“Open it.”
Hal got out into the rain and opened the back and stood there with his hands in his pockets while a man in a black shell put a torch on nine hundred kilos of rice.
He moved four sacks. He moved them from the top, which was the wrong place to move them from, and Hal, standing in the rain being cold and bored, understood with total clarity that this man had been told to look for two people and a laptop and had no idea how to search a load.
“Sardinas ba yan?”
“Sorry?”
“The cans.”
“Sardines and noodles. There is water in the front and there is a box of diapers.” Hal wiped his face. “Kuya, is this going to take long? Because the tide is at four and the ramp at the harbor gate goes under at about three thirty, and if I do not get in before that I am not getting in today.”
The man straightened up and looked at him.
That was the whole thing, right there, and Hal did not know it for another seven hours.
Because a man who was lying about being a relief driver would not have known about the ramp, and would not have been annoyed about the tide, and would not have said the time out loud with that specific weariness.
Hal knew about the ramp because he had spent forty minutes at three in the morning reading a tide table for a harbor he had never seen, on the grounds that you always read the tide table.
“Go,” the man said.
Then, as Hal reached for the door: “Hoy. Kuya.”
Hal turned around.
“The ramp,” the man said. “You are right about three thirty. It is three fifteen today, because of the surge. Go in on the fish port side.”
And he said it decently, the way one working man tells another a thing that will save him an hour, and went back to his pickup, and Hal stood in the rain for a second with the strangest feeling he had ever had in his life.
Hal put the sacks back the right way round, which took ninety seconds, and which he did because leaving a load wrong offended him, and got in and drove.
He got about four hundred meters.
“Pull over,” Mina said.
“What?”
“Anywhere. There. Behind the bus.”
He pulled in behind the bus and she was out of the cab before it stopped rolling, and she went around to the back of the truck, and Hal got there in time to watch her come up off the rear step with a small hard object in her fist and an expression he had not seen on her before.
She had found it inside the door frame, magnetic, the size of a matchbox.
“Was that.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When he moved the sacks.” Mina turned it over once, and then walked twelve paces to the railing of the flyover, and dropped it into the back of a passing dump truck full of gravel that was heading north, and came back.
“He was not searching the load. He was never searching the load. He was searching the load in order to have a reason to have his hands inside my vehicle.”
Hal stood in the rain with his heart going in his throat.
“So they know.”
“They know a relief truck went through Santa Cruz at eleven o’clock,” Mina said, “and in about forty minutes they are going to know it is on the North Luzon Expressway doing ninety, full of gravel.” She got back in. “Drive, baby. And do not take the ramp at the harbor gate.”
At a quarter past fourteen, on a stretch of Rizal Avenue where the water was at the top of the tires and moving, they came up behind a jeepney that had stopped in the middle of the road.
It had not broken down. Hal could hear it running. It had stopped because the driver had gotten out and was standing in thigh-deep water at the front bumper with his hands up, arguing with a man on a stalled motorcycle.
Traffic went around them, both sides, in a slow brown wake.
Hal put the truck in neutral and put his head out the window.
“Kuya! Ano ba?”
The jeepney driver turned around. He was about sixty and he was soaked through and he was extremely angry, and he pointed at the motorcycle, and then he pointed at his own vehicle, and then he said a long sentence in Tagalog of which Hal understood approximately none.
Mina leaned across him.
They went back and forth for maybe forty seconds. Then Mina sat back.
“The motorcycle is dead and it belongs to that man and it is the whole of his income,” she said.
“The jeepney driver has offered to push it to the LRT steps, which is the nearest high ground, and the motorcycle man has said no, because if he leaves it at the LRT steps it will be gone in an hour, and he would rather stand in the water with it.”
“For how long?”
“Until the water goes down. Which is tomorrow. Possibly Friday.”
Hal looked at the man standing chest-deep beside his motorcycle in the middle of Rizal Avenue.
“How much is a motorcycle?”
“Hal.”
“Not what it costs. What is it worth to him.” He was already unclipping his belt. “Is it a hundred thousand? Is it eighty?”
“About sixty-five thousand pesos and you are not going to.”
“Baby, we have got a winch.”
Mina stopped.
“We have got a winch,” Hal said again, “and a flatbed rack, and I have got about two hundred kilos of spare capacity behind the cab that I have been irritated about since four in the morning, and that man is going to stand in sewage until Friday for something I can pick up with a machine.”
There was a pause.
“It will cost us twenty minutes,” Mina said.
“It will cost us fourteen.”
It cost them twenty-six.