Free Rembrandt's Ghost by Paul Christopher Page B

most likely get nothing but a blank stare, and for good reason: Mariveles has always been either in the middle of nowhere or at the gates of hell, depending on your point of view. The small coastal town lies at the entrance to Manila Bay on the northwestern arm of a jungle peninsula. The harbor is a deep-water anchorage clinging to the base of an immense, forest-covered volcanic cone. This mountain is usually wreathed in flirtatious mists, occasionally giving a glimpse of the summit as it waits patiently for better times to come again, as they had a few years previously for the mountain’s fiery brother, Mount Pinatubo, less than fifty miles away.
    Historically Mariveles was once a resting point for ships entering the bay and the famous Chinese pirate Li Ma Hong reportedly stopped there for food and water before attacking Manila in 1575. Under Ferdinand Marcos the town became the center of something called an “economic zone,” and the original fishing town was swept aside to make way for factories, docks, and official-looking government offices, most of which were now empty, and even a nuclear reactor, which they could never get to run. The grain terminal didn’t quite work out and neither did the “plastic city” manufacturing polyethylene sheets. Given Imelda Marcos’s infamous fetish, there was a certain irony in the fact that one of the few surviving factories manufactured Nike knockoffs. At the end of the day, if Mariveles was known for anything, it was as the place where the Bataan Death March began in 1942 and also as the place where the tennis balls for Wimbledon are manufactured. Though it’s supposedly a “first-class” city of seventy-five thousand or so, the real population is almost twice that, mostly unemployed and mostly living in slums on the far western side of the harbor and well outside the boundaries of the “economic zone.” It is a mixed-culture port town of immigrants fleeing even poorer places in the world and a place where hope is a commodity in shorter supply than jobs. The favorite recreation in Mariveles is the consumption of
shabu
, the Philippine version of methamphetamine, cooked up in enormous quantities in illegal, and violently explosive, drug microbreweries all over the hillside squatters’ ghettoes.
    From where he sat in the open-air beachside snack bar, Briney Hanson could see the old-fashioned cranes loading the
Batavia Queen
at the old Mariveles docks a little farther along the harbor. With berthing charges being what they were, Manila itself was far too rich for the old
Queen
’s blood and she was lucky to be picking up any cargo at all in Mariveles: banana chips and processed cassava meal for animal feed, which meant the
Queen
was going to stink all the way back down to Singapore.
    They’d off-load the banana chips there, pick up a load of electronics stuff, and then make a run up to Rangoon with the cassava meal. The last leg would involve taking the electronics stuff on to Madras, or Chennai as it was now called, for assembly into everything from car radios to talking teddy bears. After that, it was anyone’s guess. But right now Hanson and the
Queen
were still in Bataan.
    He took a swallow from his longneck liter bottle of Red Horse beer and swabbed a piece of “chicharon” pork crackling into the hot sauce on his plate. He forked up a mouthful of crunchy squid heads in rice and washed it all down with another hit of the strong, amber pilsner. Mariveles might have had the most corrupt municipal government in the Philippines—and that was saying something—but it had unbelievably good snacks.
    Hanson had spent the entire morning with his old friend Dr. Nemesio Zobel-Ayala, the local abortionist, Pratique officer for the docks, brother-in-law of the mayor, and all-round
mordida
man. Without kicking back to Ayala, you could be quarantined for a month, not allowed to off-load or on-load cargo, and even wind up getting beaten to a pulp if you even tried to step