Chapter 2 High Heels and Strobe Lights #3
“You are very tired,” she said, “and you have been awake for a day and a half, and I have a finale in six minutes, and I am wearing half of a costume.”
“That is all true.”
“So.”
“So,” Hal agreed, and drank the last of the coffee that no longer had any ice in it, and did not ask the question, and Mina watched him decide not to ask it, and understood that she had just spent something she was not going to get back.
“Come,” she said, and put her hand out. “Watch from the floor. Tess will let you stand by Camera 3 if you are charming, and you are, and it is the only place in the building where you can see the hydraulics work.”
She made the finale with forty seconds to spare, in the red, with the back restrung the way she had asked.
Afterward, in the dark at the edge of the floor while the audience filed out and the crew struck the game set, Tess found her and handed her a bottle of water and said, “Your guy is by the coffee.”
Hal was standing beside a folding table in a corridor full of cable, holding an iced coffee somebody had given him, being talked at by two members of the dance corps who had discovered he was six feet tall and did not speak Tagalog and had decided this was the funniest available situation.
He had his sleeves rolled. He was listening to them with total seriousness, nodding at the parts he could not possibly have followed.
He had, at some point in the last three hours, acquired a lanyard that said GUEST and was wearing it like a man who intended to keep it.
Mina stopped where she was and watched him for a second and a half, out of the light.
Then he saw her and his whole face changed, and she felt that land somewhere under the sternum, in the place where she kept the things that were actually hers.
“There she is,” Hal said. “Baby, you were incredible. What in God’s name was that gold thing?”
“Hydraulics.”
“There is a hydraulic system in the dress?”
“There is a hydraulic system in the dress.”
“Who maintains it?”
Mina put her forehead against his chest and laughed until her ribs hurt, and the dance corps girls screamed, and somewhere down the corridor Undersecretary Vicente Calderon was shaking hands with the head of the network and saying goodnight, and going home, with a phone in his jacket pocket that had been, for one hundred and eleven seconds that afternoon, an open book.
The car came at twenty to eight, and they had a table in Poblacion at half past, which Mina had booked in June.
Hal was asleep before they cleared the gate.
He went out sitting upright with the coffee cup still in his hand, thirty-two hours into a day that had started for him in a different hemisphere, and Mina took the cup off him and set it in the door well and did not wake him, because Poblacion was forty minutes away in this traffic and forty minutes was worth more to him right now than anything on a menu.
Then she put in one earpiece and turned her face to her own window.
“Go,” said Simone.
“I have it.”
“All of it?”
“One hundred and six seconds of it. Everything the handset had in local storage and whatever it had cached from the two accounts he does not think anybody knows about.” Mina watched the lights of the Ortigas towers go past, and the black water standing in the gutters, and a man asleep under a tarpaulin on the pedestrian bridge.
“It is going to be enormous and most of it is going to be photographs of his grandchildren.”
“It always is.” A pause, and the sound of Simone doing something with her hands, which she did constantly and which came down the line as a soft rhythmic knocking.
Somewhere out in the harbor, in a steel box stacked among nine thousand other steel boxes, a forty-six-year-old woman was drinking instant coffee and looking at four monitors. “How long before he notices.”
“He will not notice. There is no artifact. The device reports as a charger and it was a charger.”
“That is not what I asked. I asked how long before he notices.”
Mina was quiet.
“His man came into the room,” she said.
The knocking stopped.
“Say that again.”
“Calderon’s bodyguard came into Dressing Room 2 while I was in it.
I put him down with a scarf and stood him back up with a story about fight choreography and he took my hand and let me walk him to a rice cooker.
” She rolled her shoulder, testing it, and did not like what it told her.
“He is not going to report it. He would have to explain how a woman in a sports bra got behind him.”
“Mina.”
“I know.”
“He watched the doors.”
“I noticed that, yes.”
“A DPWH undersecretary at a noontime taping does not travel with a man who watches doors.” Simone’s voice had gone flat, which is what it did instead of rising. “Somebody has told him he is worth protecting. Which means somebody has told him he has something to protect.”
Out the window the flyover came up and the city dropped away underneath it, and away west and low in the dark was a district Mina could not see from the road and had photographed six weeks ago. Station 14. Intake screens dry and clean.
“Simone,” she said. “The letters come from there.”
“What?”
“Isla Puting Bato. We read one on the show today. A woman named Josephine, eight floods last year, up from four. She wanted to know where the budget went.” Mina turned the coffee cup around in her hand. “We have been treating this as a procurement case. Money going somewhere it should not.”
“It is a procurement case.”
“Then why does the money going somewhere it should not have a bodyguard who watches doors, and a pattern that happens to thirteen thousand people in Tondo, and why did it start in February.” Beside her Hal shifted in his sleep and his head came to rest against her shoulder, and Mina went still and lowered her voice to nothing.
“I want the SCADA logs off that phone image first. Not the banking. The logs.”
“The pumping stations.”
“Eleven, fourteen, and eighteen. Before anything else.”
A long pause on the line. Two seconds. Three.
“You are going to make my week very bad,” Simone said, “and you are going to be right, and I hate both of those things,” and hung up.
Mina took the earpiece out.
The city went by. On her left, forty stories of glass with every floor lit and nobody in them.
On her right, past the barrier, a neighborhood in the dark where somebody was cooking over a fire in a paint tin because the power had been out since Sunday, and where the rain, when it came, would come in through the floor.
She looked at that for a while.
Then she leaned her head against the head of the man asleep on her shoulder, who had crossed five time zones to watch her do her job and had asked, of the one costume in the building that could kill somebody, who maintains it, and let herself have four seconds of it.
Four seconds. Then she took out her other phone, the one nobody knew about, and started reading, and read all the way down Kalayaan with the screen tipped away from him, and put it out of sight thirty seconds before the car pulled up outside the restaurant, and had her face back on before the door opened.