Moondogs - Alexander Yates [63]
“This ends today,” Reynato says, in an inspiring tone of voice. But no sooner has he spoken than his cell phone hollers madly. Charlie Fuentes requests his presence at a rally by the port, and tomorrow, at a town hall meeting all the way out in Zamboanga. He did promise, after all. Reynato hangs up, looking dour. “This ends shortly,” he says. Lorenzo and Racha and Elvis cheer. The bender is reinstated.
For days on end Efrem lingers in the plush safehouse while his fellow bruhos, unsupervised by Reynato, stretch long nights of boozing into mornings spent retching up their sins out the open hotel window. They bring home girls, and whores, and new friends who invariably become enemies by dawn and find themselves on the losing ends of elaborate fistfights. Lorenzo orders meals on rolling trays and sends them hurtling downstairs when the food is unsatisfactory or too meager. Elvis watches dirty videos on a VCR annexed from the front desk and twice defended from terrorized bellhops charged with recovering it. Racha, bleary with drink, stares into the bathroom mirror for hours, sometimes shouting in fright and anger, other times exclaiming, “It really isn’t that bad.”
Efrem doesn’t participate in this fun—as they describe it. He spends his days seated at the foot of Racha’s unmade bed, casting his long gaze out the open window. Though Reynato left him with no explicit orders, he keeps watch on the shabu dealers, emptying bottles of eyedrops into his hardening pupils, hoping to see something that will be of use when the time finally comes to arrest them. Elvis and Racha let him be, avoiding him almost instinctively. But Lorenzo mocks him, drunk or sober. “How did we ever manage a stakeout before we got this magic Muslim?” he asks no one in particular. “You guys remember all those hours with binoculars? Always having to hole up close by to the baddies, usually a shit nest with no air-con? Like the fucking dark ages! I bet you know all about the dark ages, don’t you, Mohammed? Growing up in some Basilan backwater, and all.”
Efrem ignores Lorenzo as best he can, concentrating on the task at hand. He spies on the distant dealers, reporting the domestic minutia of their lives into a little tape recorder. They have a cat that is well cared for. They are loving gardeners. They enjoy sugary drinks. In the afternoons they take naps on either side of a girl bound at the wrists and ankles with synthetic rope.
IT’S A FULL WEEK before the aggravating routine ends. Reynato returns from the campaign trail, appearing in the doorway of their safehouse suite with to-go coffees and a bottle of aspirin. Efrem has already taken up his watchful perch at the foot of the unmade bed, and Reynato looks at him with such pride and approval that Efrem feels as though his full lungs have crystallized. He helps Reynato apply heavy makeup and a fake beard, and then watches as he heads across town to meet the dealers. In a sting one week delayed, Reynato begs the twins to sell him millions of pesos worth of their finest shabu. Efrem presses his back against Racha’s bed and shoulders his Tingin, just in case the meeting goes awry. Racha, draped across a stack of dingy pillows, pays Efrem no mind. He whittles foot-calluses with a penknife, collecting the skin in a neat pile on the nightstand. Neither of them speak.
The discussion between Reynato and the dealers gets animated and Efrem wishes, as he often does, that he could read lips. One of the dealers gets up, walks around the table and sits down again. The other does the same. Reynato writes