DEVIL’S KEEP Read online

  A woman was calling her name.

  “Marivic Valencia? You are Marivic, yes?”

  The woman stood a few feet away. She was about fifty years old. Slim and well dressed. Gold bangle earrings, too much makeup on a bony, pinched face. An overpowering perfume. Marivic recognized her as a matrona, a middle-aged woman with some money—a formidable type.

  “Yes,” Marivic said, and walked over to the woman. “Are you from Optimo?”

  “Were you expecting someone else?”

  At first this remark struck Marivic as abrupt, almost sarcastic. But the matrona cocked her head and waited for Marivic to speak, and Marivic realized that it was an actual question.

  “No,” Marivic said. “Only the representative from the agency.”

  “That’s me,” the woman said. “Do you have any other bags?”

  “Just this one.”

  The woman crooked a finger over one shoulder, summoning a man who stood waiting behind her. Late forties, hair shorn close to the scalp, stocky, face impassive. He stepped forward and reached for her bag, and Marivic saw that his face was badly pockmarked. His eyes were heavy lidded and unfriendly. He was terrifying without even seeming to try. Marivic stepped back involuntarily as he approached, and he took the bag and turned and began to walk away with it. The woman started after him.

  Marivic hesitated. This was all happening so suddenly. The woman stopped and looked back to Marivic and said, “Well? Aren’t you coming?”

  Marivic didn’t know what to say. Something here didn’t seem right.

  “What? Don’t tell me you’re scared. Yes, you are, you’re frightened,” the woman said. “I can tell.”

  Her tone wasn’t so abrupt now. She sounded almost kind.

  “I’m Magdalena Villegas,” she said. “You can call me Magda. That’s Totoy. We’re from the agency. You’re here for a job, yes? Come on, girl, it’s all right.”

  Marivic began to walk with her. The three of them passed quickly through the terminal, out onto the boulevard, to a dark Toyota van parked at the curb. Totoy put the bag in the back, opened the doors, and slid behind the wheel. Magdalena got in up front, and Marivic found herself alone in the backseat.

  Totoy started the engine and pulled out into the boulevard. He glanced back in the mirror. He was looking straight at her, Marivic realized, as if checking her. She caught something in his eyes that she didn’t like.

  Magdalena turned in her seat, looking back at Marivic.

  “You must be hungry,” she said. She held out a white paper bag. “Siopao,” she said. Steamed pork buns. “We picked them up just for you.”

  Marivic took the bag and opened it. Two plump buns, still warm. The scent of dough and sweet meat rose from the bag. Marivic realized that, yes, she was very hungry. She took one of the buns and tried to pass the bag back.

  “No, that’s for you,” Magda said. She opened a small insulated cooler between the front seats and gave Marivic a chilled orange drink in a carton. Marivic quickly ate the second siopao and drained the drink.

  “Is that better?” Magda said.

  Marivic nodded. She did feel better. She was relaxing now. Traffic was light, and they were cruising along the boulevard. Manila was clipping past the window, and Marivic knew that she should be getting her first good look at the city, but for some reason it didn’t seem to matter at this moment.

  Tomorrow, she thought, and she leaned back against the seat.

  They continued to drive through the city. Marivic wondered whether Totoy even knew where he was going. The route seemed aimless. Marivic tried to focus, examine what was happening, but she was suddenly so weary that she could barely keep her eyes open. Her head seemed thick.

  She was tired. So very tired. She lay back and closed her eyes.

  She dozed.

  She became aware of Magda and Totoy speaking to each other. The voices came to Marivic as if from the other end of a very large, empty room.

  “She’s awake,” Totoy said.

  “Not really.”

  “You didn’t put enough in.”

  “I did.”

  “Bullshit, she ate two. She should be out like a stone.”

  A small corner of Marivic’s mind was still awake. From the conversation up front, she understood that she had been drugged. Something in the food.

  She fought to stay conscious, hold off the encroaching darkness. A very loud shriek bored into her awareness from somewhere nearby. She forced her eyes half open and saw that the van was on a road beside an airport, an area with maintenance hangars and large jetliners parked on the pavement.

  The van was slowing. It stopped in a pool of excruciating bright light. They were at a checkpoint. Someone in a uniform was leaning out the open window of the guard station, examining a document that Totoy held out for inspection.

  Marivic tried to shout, to scream. No sound came. She couldn’t be sure that her mouth was even open. The guard bent and looked into the van. His face was just on the other side of the window, and he was looking directly at her. She tried to move, thrash, get his attention. But her body didn’t respond. Looking at her through the window, the guard saw only a sleepy girl.

  The guard handed the document to Totoy and waved him on. The van drove away, out of the light.

  They were inside the gate, driving slowly down a row of planes. But not jetliners: these were smaller planes, with propellers. In the van’s headlights, Marivic saw a man standing on the tarmac. A white man, a foreigner.

  Totoy stopped and got out. Marivic heard the foreigner speaking a rough kind of English, an accent that she didn’t know. The foreigner came around and opened the door beside Marivic’s seat. He leaned in, shone a flashlight into her eyes, took her pulse.

  He reached in, hooked his hands under her shoulders, and pulled her out. He stood her against the van, put an arm around her waist.

  “Okay. Now we walk.” Again the rough accent. “Not far; you can do it.“

  He urged her forward, the arm at her waist pushing her along. She managed to get one foot in front of the other for three or four wobbly steps, but then a leg crumpled and she collapsed. The foreigner caught her before she hit the pavement. He scooped her up and carried her in his arms.

  He was taking her to a small plane unlike anything she had seen before, with a strange, ungainly shape. A door opened where the wing joined the fuselage. A second foreigner came out, took Marivic, and lifted her and dragged her into the cabin.

  There were four seats, two and two. The second foreigner put her in one of the rear seats. He cinched a seat belt around her waist, then fastened several more Velcro straps: one at each upper arm, one at each wrist, one more that bound her ankles together. When he was done, he climbed up front, behind the control wheel.

  The other foreigner climbed in and sat beside Marivic. He shone a small light into her eyes, examining the pupils, and held the tips of two fingers against her neck, taking her pulse.

  The plane’s engine whined, coughed, and caught. It made a racket that filled the small cabin.

  In the seat beside Marivic, the foreigner opened a black leather satchel and removed an intravenous needle. He examined Marivic’s left forearm, found a vein, inserted the needle. He hung an IV drip bag from a hook above the window, connecting it by tubing to the needle.

  The plane was moving now, trundling along. Marivic knew that she was being taken away. She would be lost forever to her family. She thought of them in their little home in the village by the gulf. The image gave her a surge of energy, and she tried to rise out of the seat.

  But it was hopeless. The straps held her secure.

  She could feel the weariness overtaking her again, the effect of the drugs surging back, and this time she decided not to fight it. Sleep—even endless sleep, if it came to that—seemed preferable to the awful unknown that must be waiting for her at the end of this flight.

  Her eyes closed, her head sagged forward. She was completely unaware a few minutes later when the p
lane lifted off, rising into the humid air, banking over the water.

  The guard waved them through, and Totoy and Magda drove back along the airport access road.

  “Where’s her phone?” Totoy said.

  Magda hesitated before she answered: “She didn’t have one.”

  “They always have a phone.”

  “Not this one.”

  “Bullshit. You forgot to look, didn’t you?”

  “You forgot too.”

  “It’s not my job.”

  “Should we call them? They’re probably still on the ground.”

  “No,” Totoy said. “She isn’t in any shape to make calls. But get yourself together. You fuck up the dose, you forget the phone. One of these days, carelessness will bite you in the ass.”

  Go to hell, she wanted to say. But she held it back. She didn’t want to argue with him.

  She had the bracelet. It was cupped in her right hand, out of Totoy’s sight. He hadn’t noticed it on the girl’s wrist, and she wasn’t going to make a point of it now. They had an agreement to split the money from any valuables, and he would just want a piece of the proceeds.

  But there wouldn’t be any proceeds from this one, because she wasn’t going to sell it. Such a lovely piece on the arm of a teenage girl from the countryside—who would imagine such a thing? And with the correct initial “M,” as if it had been made for her. This was Providence at work for sure, and she wasn’t sharing it.

  She held her hand casually at her side, between the seat and the passenger door, feeling the delicious smoothness of the herringbone and the gems.

  She waited until Totoy reached the end of the access road, where it met city streets. Manila was an early-waking city, and traffic was picking up already. Totoy waited for an opening. As he concentrated on traffic, Magdalena opened her purse and pretended to search for something inside. When she knew that he wasn’t looking, she dropped the bracelet in.

  At that moment Totoy saw his spot. He mashed the accelerator and the van darted forward, and the van disappeared into the Monday-morning stream.

  Hours later, Marivic awoke fitfully from her drug stupor. Several times she drifted up toward the light of awareness, then sank back into oblivion, before she finally opened her eyes and forced herself into the present.

  She was alone in a small room—a cell, really—with four high walls of bare concrete block. Her clothes were gone: she was naked beneath a shapeless white hospital gown. A fan twirled overhead, hung from the rafters below a high ceiling of corrugated steel.

  In the room was a small table and a chair, and the cot where she lay. On the table, a plastic cup and a plastic water pitcher, a plastic dish with a meal of rice and sardines. On the floor at the foot of the bed was a metal chamber pot.

  No windows. One steel door with no knob, no handle. A single light fixture high on a wall, but no switch. Marivic rose from the cot and started toward the door, three steps away. But she was still woozy from the drugs. She lost her balance and lurched into the table. It banged hard against the wall.

  Marivic steadied herself.

  “Wilfredo, is that you?” called the voice of a young man, speaking Tagalog.

  Marivic was startled. The voice seemed to come from nowhere.

  The voice said, “Did you return, Fredo? Was it a trick? I’m so sorry.”

  Marivic looked up. The high walls were open at the top, a ventilation space about a foot high between the concrete block and the ceiling, covered by a wire-mesh grille. The voice was coming from the other side of the concrete wall.

  “I’m not Wilfredo. I’m Marivic.”

  “Oh! You’re new. Did you just get here? I heard a plane. Was that you?”

  Marivic’s last solid memory was sitting in the back of a van in Manila. But now she hazily recalled an aircraft engine’s drone in her ears, and half-opening her eyes to glimpse an airplane’s cockpit instruments. They were flying. Through the windscreen was the sea far below. The image seemed dreamlike, but she knew it was real.

  “Yes,” she said. “That was me. Who are you?”

  “Me, I’m Junior. Junior Peralta. From Vigan City.”

  Marivic took the last couple of steps toward the door, moving slowly to keep from getting dizzy once more. She placed her palm against the cool steel and pushed. The door didn’t budge.

  “I am a prisoner,” Marivic said, as much to herself as to the disembodied voice on the other side of the wall.

  “Yes. Me too.”

  “Were you kidnapped from Manila?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are we here?” Marivic said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know. Foreigners, that’s all. But it’s not so bad. There’s lots of food. And anyway, we’ll be leaving soon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Wilfredo told me. He figured it out. Fredo is very intelligent.”

  “Who is Fredo?”

  “He was in the place you’re in now. We talked all the time. He was here for almost one month, and he paid attention. He said they were getting ready to let him out, and then this morning they took him away, so I guess he must have been right. He really did leave after all.”

  “What makes you think he left?” Marivic said.

  “We’re on an island,” the voice said. “A small one. I didn’t see it, but Wilfredo said he got a good look when they brought him here. He said it’s small. You can probably walk around it in ten or fifteen minutes.”

  Another dreamlike image drifted up into Marivic’s consciousness. She was being lifted out of a boat. … No, it was the airplane, a plane that floated boatlike on the water, tied up at a dock. She was put into a motorized cart, bright green and yellow, and then driven up a hill toward a clump of concrete buildings among some coconut trees.

  That’s where I am now, she thought.

  And yes it seemed to be an island. Not a big one.

  “Think about it,” Junior said. “If Wilfredo is not here, where else can he be? He must have left.”

  Somewhere outside, an engine stuttered to life. It made a loud buzz that flowed in through the grille at the top of the outside wall and rattled around the concrete cell.

  The plane, Marivic thought.

  “The plane!” said Junior. “You see? Fredo must be leaving.”

  The buzz became louder and more insistent. It grew into a roar that reverberated off the concrete walls, reaching an angry pitch so loud that neither of them tried to talk.

  Then it began to recede. Gradually the sound diminished. Marivic knew that the plane was flying away. She imagined it climbing into the sky, disappearing. It had brought her here, and now it was leaving.

  The thought saddened her. She was lost. Truly.

  Junior and Marivic chatted for hours that day, each talking to a blank concrete wall, never seeing each other’s face. Junior was twenty-two years old, son of a fisherman, fourth in a family of eight. A poor family, he told Marivic. Junior didn’t like fishing. He was saving to buy a taxi. Junior’s story was the same as hers: a job offer from Optimo, a long bus ride, met at the terminal by the creepy matrona and the thug, the ride in a van, the offering of siopao…

  “That’s the last time I ever take siopao from a stranger,” Junior said.

  Before the end of that first day they had become friends. They talked about their homes and families, about school and neighbors. Marivic had never been to Vigan, but she could imagine the little house where Junior had grown up, and all the people who lived in it.

  Around nightfall, a key turned in the lock. Two men entered. Foreigners. They were a ridiculous pair: one slight and wiry, the other massive, so large that he had to bend his head in order to get through the door. Their faces were impassive. They didn’t make eye contact, didn’t even seem to notice her. One carried a tray with a bowl of food and a full pitcher of water. The other carried a clean chamber pot.

  Marivic tried to speak to them in English. She said,
“Where am I? Why am I here?”

  They didn’t say a word. They briskly switched out the chamber pot and the water pitcher, put the plate of food on the table, and took away the dirty dish with the leftover scraps of sardines and rice.

  “Talk to me!” Marivic said. “What’s going on? Say anything.”

  They left and locked the door behind them without acknowledging her presence, without even once meeting her eyes. Moments later they went into Junior’s room and performed the same small tasks. Marivic couldn’t see what was happening, but she recognized the sounds, the scraping of the dishes, the thunk of an empty chamber pot on the floor.

  “Don’t waste your breath,” Junior said when they were gone, his door locked shut. “They have nothing to say. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  They ate in silence. Marivic ate until she was full, then pushed the plate away and sat on the cot.

  A high-pitched trill drifted over the wall. It sounded at first like the call of a songbird. But Marivic knew that no bird sang the tune “My Heart Will Go On.”

  She said, “Junior! You have a flute? How?”

  The song stopped.

  He said, “No flute. It’s me. I am a whistler.”

  “Just you? Can’t be.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s me. Name a song. I know them all.”

  She thought for a moment. One of her favorite songs was a Tagalog ballad by Freddie Aguilar, the Filipino folksinger. “Anak” was the name of the song: “Child.” It had a lilting melody that soared and dipped—almost impossible to whistle, she imagined. She decided to test him.

  “ ‘Anak,’ ” she said.

  Seconds later, the first bar wafted in over the wall. Perfect tempo, perfect pitch.

  She squealed with delight.

  The melody stopped and he said, “Marivic, are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes, don’t stop!”

  He picked up right where he had left off.

  They passed the evening that way, Marivic throwing the names of songs over the wall, and Junior sending back a beautifully rendered melody. After a while the lights went out in the rooms. Junior and Marivic chatted for a while, until Junior got sleepy and said good night.