Chapter 14 The Current and the Truth #3
“Kuya, I knew that in Hall 3.” She turned her head so she could hear him properly.
“That was never my objection. I have met eleven of you and the ones who are lying are easy. You were not lying. You were doing arithmetic on people who were not in the room, and you were doing it correctly, and that is a completely different crime and it does not have a name yet.”
Hansel Brand looked at her for a long moment in the rain.
“Fenna will still get it,” he said. “Wolffe pushed it to eleven mirrors. Four years, a works council, a hospital in Bremerhaven. She will be twenty-three.”
“Yes.”
“So I was wrong about the four years.”
“You were wrong about the four years,” Mina agreed.
“That is going to be the thing,” said Hansel. “Not the rest of it. I have had two hours and I can already tell. It is going to be the four years.”
Simone arrived at ten past five in a borrowed pickup with the Santos phone in an evidence bag on the passenger seat and mud to her knees.
She walked up the port road past two hundred and eleven people under tarpaulins, most of them asleep, some of them not, and she stopped about halfway along, which nobody noticed except Luz Ramos, who noticed everything.
“Ma’am. Are you all right?”
“I am fine.”
“You are standing in the road.”
“Yes.” Agent Simone, forty-six, French-Singaporean, nine days in a steel box four kilometers from this exact stretch of asphalt, looked at a barangay eating rice on a road at five in the morning. “I have been running operations in this city for two years and I have never been here.”
Luz considered that.
“It is not a nice place, ma’am,” she said. “But you should have come.”
“Yes,” said Simone. “I should have come.”
High water came at one o’clock and went out again, and the culverts behind Isla Puting Bato took nothing from that building, and at twenty past two the North Harbor substation went under exactly as everybody had known it would and the whole district went dark, and it did not matter at all, because there was nobody left in the barangay to be dark.
They were all up on the port road, two meters up on fill, two hundred and eleven of them by Luz Ramos’s manifest, under tarpaulins, eating, in the rain, watching a livestream on nine hundred phones.
At about half past two, on the roof of a building she had been inside for nine hours, Mina Hermosa sat down on wet concrete beside a helicopter with a wire rope sling on its skid and stopped being able to do anything else.
Hal sat down next to her.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
“Baby,” Hal said eventually. “Your show does a segment called Sulat.”
“It does.”
“You read a letter on Tuesday from a lady in Tondo who wanted to know where the budget went.”
“Ate Josephine.”
“Yeah.” Hal put his head back against the parapet. “Mi reina, I have been thinking about this for about four minutes and I want to say it before I fall over. You answered her letter.”
Mina turned her head, on the side that could hear.
“On a Tuesday she asked a variety show where the money went,” Hal said, “and on a Saturday morning she got a complete answer, on national television, with names and account numbers and a signed risk register.”
“Hal.”
“Four days,” he said. “Baby, that is the fastest anybody in that barangay has ever gotten an answer to anything in their entire lives.”
And Mina Hermosa put her head on his shoulder on the roof of the Monolith, with one arm ruined and one ear gone and the storm finally starting to come apart overhead, and cried for the first time since 2019, when it had been on television and had not been real.
Hal did not say anything. He put his arm around her and looked out at the bay, where the cloud had started to break up in the east in a way that meant nothing yet but would by Tuesday, and let her.
After a while she said, into his shoulder, “Tita Baby is going to shout at me.”
“Baby, Tita Baby is going to hit you with a chair.”
“She said fourteen days.”
“She said fourteen days on Wednesday and it is Saturday, so you managed three, and one of those you spent in a ceiling.” Hal shifted so she could lean better. “You want to know the actual number?”
“What number?”
“Twenty-nine hours.” He tipped his head back.
“From when we lay on that rubble pile on Thursday night and you worked out the tide, to now. Twenty-nine hours, and in that time you got a man out of a hole nine meters underground, and thirty-one boats came out of a barangay that had nothing, and Luz moved two hundred and eleven people up a road, and Doctor Wolffe gave away the most valuable object in the world to seven universities, and Simone drove across the whole city in a typhoon to get a dead man’s phone off a dashboard. ”
Mina was quiet.
“And a nine-year-old counted the steps,” she said.
“And a nine-year-old counted the steps.”
The rain was easing. Down on the water the boats were coming in, one at a time, poling in the dark.
“Hal.”
“Yeah.”
“I am going to have to do a show on Monday.”
Hal Rivera started laughing and could not stop for some time.