Berserking Dreams: A Michael Stuart Mystery

By Brian Aldrich

Michael Stuart takes on his first homicide case. The local police Chief in Zamboanga, The Philippines, requests his help in solving the murder of a powerful plantation owner's son. He quickly finds himself in a tangle with his Peace Corps Supervisor, the expatriate community and the killer. Michael has dropped out of college to join President Kennedy's new Peace Corps. He has had only a few courses in Deviant Behavior and Criminal Justice. He is assigned to the Peace Corps on the island of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines. Logging, mining and plantations dominate the Post-War economy, and are still in the hands of powerful foreigners and members of the Filipino elite. The Moros, the name Filipinos apply to Moslem members of their country, are just beginning to organize to protect their traditional lands in the big southern island. Michael is learning about murder in the school of hard knocks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Aldrich
• Release date: May 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463167946

Brian Aldrich

Brian Aldrich started writing about beer for his blog Seacoast Beverage Lab in March of 2010. Along with his blog and craft beer podcast, Brian is the Beer Master at the Sheraton Portsmouth Harborside Hotel, providing guests with a unique craft beer experience. He lives in Newfields, New Hampshire, with his wife Lisa and dog Madison. Michael started his love for craft beer in 2011 after graduating from Endicott College with his master's in business administration. Co-host of the Seacoast Beverage Lab Podcast since 2012, Michael enjoys exploring all the craft beer world has to offer. Michael works in the beer, wine and spirits industry for a promotional products firm and lives in Salem, Massachusetts. Former Portsmouth Brewery head brewer Tod Mott opened Tributary Brewing Company in Kittery, Maine, in late 2013.

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BERSERKING DREAMS

A MICHAEL STUART MYSTERY

BRIAN C. ALDRICH

Copyright © 2019 Brian C. Aldrich

All rights reserved.

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Dedicated to my son Kent who was born in Zamboanga, but left before he had a chance to experience the romance of this ancient city.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1. Zamboanga

Chapter 2. Basilan Island

Chapter 3. Dark House

Chapter 4. Finding the Piece

Chapter 5. The Funeral

Chapter 6. Pillow Talk

Chapter 7. The Big, Wide World

Chapter 8. Party Time

Chapter 9. The Coconut Grove

Chapter 10. Acts of Redemption

Chapter 11. Another Warning

Chapter 12. The Lion Roars

Chapter 13. Marawi City

Chapter 14. No Entry

Chapter 15. Ride the Mountain

Chapter 16. The Lion’s Den

Chapter 17. Sold Down the River

Chapter 18. Home Sweet Home

Chapter 19. The Small World

Chapter 20. Berserker Dreams

Chapter 21. Case Closed

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PROLOGUE

The balance of the Kris felt good. It had been a long time since he held a sword in his hands, but all his muscles responded automatically to the weight. Best of all, the thrill was there. He felt his rage building as he crouched in ambush. Even the Moro outfit he wore felt familiar. How many times had he stood like this? Felt like this. Waiting for the Japs. The killings then had been so easy. So morally clean. Dirty Japs invading the country. Destroying all of his hard work. So clear and so easy. He felt the twinge in his guts. Not so easy this one. But necessary. He had lived with affront long enough. Eating at his soul. He couldn’t help but exorcize it with a killing.

Good Lord! Where was that man? He wasn’t used to the heat and the bugs anymore. He wiggled his toes. At least he wasn’t standing in rotting shoes. God, how he had hated that part of being a guerrilla. The clothes usually dried, but the shoes just rotted. A movement on the terrace! Damn! Damn! Damn! I want this to happen today. He had already spent two days waiting. His luck was going to run out for sure. The same hiding place three days in a row. He had been lucky so far. But again, it wasn’t wartime. No one was really looking for assassins. Ambush was confined to jungle roods where jeeps hauled the payroll. Not here outside a quiet plantation.

He tensed. His victim had just walked out onto the terrace and sat down. He contained his rising excitement. I’m going to take care of you, you bastard. Take care of myself at the same time. Then he saw the child. Running easily over to his father.

Shit! What to do now! He didn’t want to hurt the boy. Oh, no. Not the boy. He was too precious.

A voice from inside the house. The boy’s mother calling? The child turned and ran back toward the house. Quickly he stretched himself to full height, feeling the fatigued muscles pull as he did so. Then smoothly and ever so quietly he ran across the terrace. He watched as if in a trance as he slashed the Kris’s waved blade across the chest of the man in the chair. The blade also cut into the rattan of the patio chair the victim was sitting in. He watched as his back swing slashed through the jugglers running up the neck. He had to stop himself from giving another slashing stroke. It was all over. The victim’s body had rolled off the chair; his detached head leaving a bloody train as it bounced away across the terrace. He hadn’t felt a thing. He was in a trance. Then it was all over. Just like it used to be. Not like sex at all. Not better. Different. So different.

He crouched again and backed into the coffee bushes. Time to go, he thought to himself. Let the confusion cover his retreat. A few yards and he found the trail down to town. He wiped what little blood there was off the blade on a large leaf. Then he pushed the sword back into its scabbard. Just another Moro on his way to market.

Now I can get it all back, he thought to himself as he made his way silently down the hill towards the town. Now I can get it all back!

CHAPTER 1

ZAMBOANGA

The roar broke into my sleep like the monsoons returning early. The nipa house with its split bamboo floor did nothing to keep out the sound. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock: the French Fokker was arriving on its early morning flight from Manila. Time to get up. As I heated some water for shaving on the small kerosene stove in the kitchen, I watched the neighbor boys riding their water buffalo to the rice paddies on the other side of the Zamboanga airport. The larger of the two brothers prodded his animal with an aerial from one of the ancient American autos that plied the streets of this city at the end of the Philippine Islands.

It was not even seven o’clock and I was sweating already. Shaving was easy on such a moisturized face. I went over the schedule for the day in my head. After a quick breakfast of cold rice and a boiled egg in the small kitchen, I took my coffee into the living room, the office in this new Peace Corps station. The house had two bedrooms. One with a large double bed consisting of sheets of half inch plywood on legs and a kapok mattress purchased in the local market. The other bedroom was equally large but held three sets of bunk beds to accommodate the comings and goings of the various volunteers.

It was early February, 1964.John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated the previous November. King had yet to join him. The Peace Corps, which Kennedy had founded in 1961 to change the world, was just taking its baby steps. Little did I know? In fact, I didn’t know a thing. Especially about everything that was coming.

The greatest generation the world had ever known had defeated evil on two fronts: the Nazis and the Samurai. Marriages, we were to learn later, had reached their historical peak in longevity. Now it was time to carry on the fight to overcome evil. Our generation was to fight ignorance and poverty and the little evils that bedeviled mankind. I was on the frontlines. Director of the Peace Corps for Western Mindanao in the far away Philippines. The City is famous for its beautiful women, the product of centuries of racial mixing in this ancient island crossroads.

Little did I know?

No new volunteers arriving today, I thought to myself. No junketing Congressmen from home to entertain. No politicos from Manila to screw up the schedule with their lazy questions and inept attempts to pick up the female volunteers. Maybe I could get some reviews of the work accomplished by the many volunteers scattered through the barrios up and down the peninsula. I smiled to myself. Pleased at the thought of some uninterrupted time spent on Kennedy’s charges out trying to remake the world.

The sound of a revving engine out on the street caught my attention. Peering between the slats of the wooden jealousies, I saw an army jeep with two policemen. The one on the passenger side climbed out and made his way up the path to the house. The best laid plans… There was a loud knock on the door.

Can I help you? I said, as I opened the door.

Are you Michael Stuart?

Yes, that’s me. What is it?

Mr. Stuart, Police Chief Raul Zamora would like to talk to you. Pause. You met him at the reception for new Peace Corps Volunteers the Mayor held last month? Another pause.

Yes. Of course. My mind was racing over the faces from that meeting. There were so many and they still looked so much alike. Then the chemicals in my brain lit up. I remembered a short, stocky Filipino wearing a police commander’s cap, bill and all. Full uniform that hot afternoon. The rest were wearing their cool, embroidered Barong Tagalogs, the national formal dress.

Yes. Chief Zamora. How is the Chief? The English phrasing in their former American colony comes right out of the conversation books. Hello. How are you? My name is Peter. How do you like our country? It is actually deceiving. Listening to the conversations learned in the elementary school classrooms gives the impression that the speakers are simpletons. Nothing could be farther from the truth! These are the original boat people. Their ancestors came to these islands in their small boats or barangays from the Malay Peninsula on the mainland of Asia, and that is what they still call their communities. They are a complex people with a long and tortured history under the Chinese, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Americans and the Japanese. Survival in this multicultural history has been bred into the Filipino soul. Granted independence by the Americans after the collapse of the Japanese attempt at empire in Asia, they responded by putting most Americans on a pedestal.

I don’t feel comfortable being held up in the air so to speak. It violates that radical Scandinavian equality Minnesota is famous for. I was feeling that way now.

Mr. Stuart, the policeman continued, Chief Zamora would like to talk with you. It is somewhat urgent.

Yes. Of course I can, Michael replied. How soon would he like to meet me? knowing full well that my plans for the morning were shot.

He would like you to join him for breakfast. You may come with us now, the policeman replied.

Fine. Fine. Let me just get a few things first.

I went to the bedroom to get my wallet. Filipino time was very vague and generally late, by Western standards. Something very important must be on the Chief’s mind for him to want me to come right now. My feelings of anxiety began to build. I felt like swearing out loud! Just when I get a little bit ahead, something like this has to come up. Son-of-a-bitch! Worrying was a major part of this job. Mainly about the volunteers. Had something happened to one of them? Had the Chief received a call or a message from one of the barrios where a volunteer was located? There were no phones connecting Zamboanga with the interior of Mindanao. Only a few here in the City. Everyone used telegrams. Or a messenger could have come in by bus and reported a problem to the police station downtown—the only police station in the entire city.

I checked myself out in the bedroom mirror. Fine brown hair. Kept a little long to help it lie down. Pale skin nicely browned in the tropical sun. Light slacks and a loose shirt hiding a rounded, tightly muscled body. Six feet tall with the build of a high school wrestler (which I was) or a soccer player (which I was not). Brown eyes shining in a slightly longish face; sometimes glimmering with a smile, most of the time seriously solemn. The shape of the eyes hinted at some Laplander among my ancestors. A major concession to the tropics were the double-strap leather sandals I had picked up in San Francisco.

I worked up a good sweat just walking to the jeep. The young American seminary student and his wife waved as the police jeep drove up the road. They had been sent over from the States to work with a local labor union with a Protestant for a leader. I guess the churches, like the U.S. Government, are trying to bring the Pax Americana to Mindanao too, I thought to myself.

Mindanao, this big island far to the south of the country’s capital, Manila, was being opened up and emptied out by the logging and mining companies of the Manila elite. Christian Filipinos from the densely-peopled islands, like Luzon in the north, were flooding Mindanao, creating new farms, towns and institutions. The local Moros—as the followers of the Prophet Mohammed are called here—were being pushed to one side in the process. They had been able to protect their loosely federated kingdoms in the South during all the years of Spanish rule. But in little more than a generation, Western economies with an insatiable appetite for lumber and metals, had destroyed the basis of their economy. They had lived for centuries on what they could harvest from the sea and the surrounding rainforest. The collection of black coral, shark fins, mother-of-pearl shells, sea snails and trochus shells along with subsistence fishing, was now a declining basis of life. The mountain Moros traded gold dust, and a range of jungle products obtained from the pagan tribes occupying the higher elevations. Rattan, a jungle vine used for furniture, was widely available as a cash crop. Small plots of ground were cleared by the Mountain Moros and planted to corn or upland rice. Artisans worked in brass, using the lost wax method, gold and silver worked for jewelry, and extensive production of krises—swords—with elaborately carved handles and scabbards mostly for local consumption. Trading among the islands and down into Borneo and Indonesia was widespread, and could, like European practices of old, be turned into piracy when the need arose. Labor was in short supply, so slave raiding had occupied much of a successful ruler’s time. The Peace Corps had come to bring these benighted people—the Western view—into the Age of Aquarius.

Independence brought formal Christian control of the land from the capital in Manila, as well as a new political administration in which the old Moro aristocracy took the offices of senator, representatives and governor, standing in line for their share of the millions of dollars that flowed into the country at the end of the war against the Japanese. The emergence of the nation-state, and the related control over the use of force, swept away trading rights. Consequently, the local tribes had less and less to pay to their local datu or chief in tribute. Piracy, smuggling and banditry were becoming the norm. Most Moros, kept out of the school system by tradition and Catholic dominance, were reduced to working as stevedores or plantation labor.

Zamboanga, on the Straits at the tip of the peninsula, like the wattle hanging off the nose of the turkey formed by Mindanao drooping down to the islands of Sulu and Borneo, was an ancient trading center. The Basilan Strait controlled access to the Moro Gulf along the western side of the big island, and to Sarangani Strait at the southern tip of the island, which connected to the island chain leading to Indonesia. The island of Basilan, across the Strait, held one of the largest concentrations of Moros in the region. It was actually the end of a series of volcanic outpourings running in a arc up from the coast of Borneo. All of which was settled and controlled by various Moro groups in earlier times.

The breeze through the open jeep cooled my freshly shaven face. The asphalt road into town was a straight shot. This part of the city was built up with unpainted, brown-gray wooden houses, each one on stilts. Each house had only a second story. Wooden shutters, pulled closed at night, were the only window coverings. The yard below the house was bare dirt, swept clean daily. Cooking fires, fueled by coconut shell charcoal in five gallon kerosene cans, were built under the houses to keep the heat out of the house. The floors were split bamboo to let in the breezes. The roof was rusted sheets of tin. In every yard the large, green leaves of banana trees waved at the passing jeepneys.

The police jeep swerved in and out among the jeepneys clogging the road to the heart of the City. Men had already gotten their ride to work. Now the women were headed to the market down next to the pier. The night’s haul of fish would be littering the dock. The pigs and chickens which came in on the buses before dawn would be hung up, dripping with blood and covered with flies. I could see the women through the open backs of the jeepneys with their grocery baskets resting on the floor in front of them. They sat in their one-piece house dresses, giggling and chatting with one another.

The small picture over the dashboard of one of the jeepneys showed a tortured and bleeding Jesus. Chains with crosses and a rosary were draped over the picture. Mindanao, I thought to myself, was a bleeding island. All the resources of timber, iron, coal and copra, hemorrhaging away, leaving just the fly-specked carcass. These jeepneys were conversions of the American jeeps left over from the war with the Japanese. Two passengers could squeeze into the front seat next to the driver, being careful of the gearshift on the floor in the middle. In the covered back was a bench on each side. Excess passengers could hang off the running boards on either side in the front or across the back. The passenger compartment was partly open along the side. The body of the typical vehicle was generally decorated in a variety of brightly colored designs—each one different. A plastic cover dropped down and snapped into place during heavy rains, like the curtains on the old horse carriages sung about in Oklahoma!

The central part of the city was occupied by a large, square plaza typical of old Spanish towns. The side facing the Strait was split in half by the wide road to the pier. On the left side was the bulky old building containing the post office, city hall, the police station and telegraph office. On the right, the plaza was open to the sea. The catch of the day, large tuna and whatever else had been dragged up out of the sea, was spread across the cracked concrete. The block on the far right of the plaza contained the city market. Restaurants, clothing stores, small hotels in buildings up to three stories high lined the other two sides. Here the proprietors lived above their shops in buildings of cinder block and concrete. One of the policemen escorted me through the entrance of the largest of the restaurants. I was directed to a front table where a portly man in uniform was eating his breakfast. There were only a few customers, in ones and twos, scattered about at the tables this time of the morning.

Chief Zamora rose and shook my hand, keeping hold of it in the way that so many G.I.’s had misunderstood. This was a culture in which affection between men in public was considered appropriate. A male and a female holding hands and touching one another, however, was not. I felt somewhat embarrassed and quietly worked at freeing my hand.

The exchange of pleasantries went on forever. Peace Corps trainers had harped upon the need for Americans to relax and let others come to the point. Waiting just made me feel more anxious. What the hell has happened I wondered, trying to keep from interrupting the flow of the conversation.

The waiter was mixing a chocolate drink in a small crockery pitcher. I ordered a plate of rice and eggs at the insistence of the chief. Sometimes I wonder whether I had been in my right mind when I left college at the end of my junior year. President Kennedy had made it sound pretty important. Now Kennedy was dead. Killed by a crazy in Dallas. Here I was, halfway around the world in Zamboanga. Another one of those impulsive decisions that always gets me into trouble. Out of the frying pan into the fire! What a way to live.

As the small talk progressed, I realized that the police officer looked very tired. His khaki uniform looked as though it had been slept in. A contradiction there, I thought.

Yes, Chief Zamora was saying, I have a subject of some delicacy to discuss with you.

I sat up, my brain suddenly cleared of fog. I thought you might have, Chief Zamora, I replied. Is it about one of our volunteers?

The Chief smiled to himself, then shook his head. As I recall from our conversation last month, you are intending to pursue the study of criminology. Is that correct? The Chief sat back and began doctoring his large cup of cocoa. Lots