Free Out on the Rim by Ross Thomas

said.

    â€œFor a second there I thought you coulda been one of the Japs that might’ve known my daddy and—aw hell, you know what I thought.”
    â€œSure.”
    The man turned as if to give the Death March memorial one last look. “Well, what the fuck, I don’t even remember him anyhow.”
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    Wu stopped for a late lunch at a resort called Agoo Playa that offered a fine black-sand beach facing the South China Sea and enough luxury rooms to sleep 140 guests. The town of Agoo in La Union province was near the foot of the Cordillera Mountains in northern Luzon and almost as far north as Baguio itself.
    Wu assumed the hotel-resort had been built by the Marcos government, or by some of the ex-President’s closer cronies. He sat, the lone guest in a dining room that would seat eighty, and ordered a beer and the seafood salad from one of the five young waiters who hovered close by. When the beer came, Wu asked, “How many guests do you have?”
    â€œIn the rooms?” the young waiter said.
    Wu nodded.
    â€œFour.”
    â€œThink business will pick up?”
    The waiter shrugged. “When it gets hot.”
    â€œIt’s hot now.”
    â€œHotter,” the waiter said.
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    Wu’s last stop before Baguio was the Marcos Park clubhouse that served an eighteen-hole golf course. He had a cup of coffee and admired the empty golf links and the nearly empty clubhouse. He was high in the mountains now and the temperature had dropped from 90 degrees to the mid-70s. The course below looked green, tough and inviting, and Wu thought it a shame nobody was playing.

    When he finished his coffee Wu went out on the stone verandah and gazed up at the great stone head of Ferdinand Marcos who glowered down at him. He had seen pictures of the head before, perched up on its own mountain, but had never been able to get a fix on its true size. He now guessed it was either five or six stories tall.
    Next to Wu was the only other tourist—a fiftyish man who was using a pair of binoculars to inspect the Marcos head. Still gazing through the binoculars, the man said, “Look at that, will you?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe nose,” the man said in his New Zealand accent.
    Wu looked at the Marcos nose with its flared nostrils. He could just make out two small figures, suspended by ropes as they swung from the left stone eyebrow toward the nose. One of the figures was carrying something white.
    â€œWhat’re they doing?” Wu said.
    â€œHere. Take a look.” The man handed him the binoculars. As Wu put them up to his eyes and adjusted the focus, the man said, “Unless I miss my guess, those kids’re shoving a booger right up the old boy’s nose.”
    The binoculars came into focus. “Maybe it’s dynamite,” Wu said.
    â€œMmm,” said the man from New Zealand. “Didn’t think of that, did I?”
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    Artie Wu sometimes estimated that fifty percent of the Filipinos he met had been to San Francisco. And of those who had, one hundred percent always insisted the California city reminded them of Baguio.
    He didn’t buy the similarity. Both cities had hills and cool, even chilly, weather, but Baguio always reminded Artie Wu of some southern U.S. piney woods town during a spring cold snap. Asheville, maybe.
    Still, Baguio deserved its Summer Capital title because all Manila had once migrated there when the hot season began in March. All
Manila meant the President, the Cabinet, select members of the National Assembly, the generals, the press, the new and old rich—and the swarm of civil servants and hangers-on who followed in their wake. Durant had once called Baguio the place where “the elite meet to eat and fuck up the country.”
    But that year the President was spending a hot March in Manila, trying to nail her country back together. As Wu drove past the presidential summer residence (where some kind