Read The Leper Spy for Free Online Page B

academy cadets and University of Santo Tomas students who couldn’t return to their home islands, forming what they called the Second Regular Division. Some of them were fourteen and fifteen years old. Their elders were nineteen. They had courage but no weapons. They went to the Ateneo, to the Jesuit fathers, and asked if they could use the ROTC weapons.
    â€œIf you have authority, we will give you the guns,” one of the fathers said. “Anyway, if the Japanese get these, they’ll use them against us.”
    Father Monaghan, who had taught many of the boys, felt the two-way pull of pity and pride. They were all so eager, and so naive.
    â€œWherever you are, know that back here we will be praying for you every day,” he told them.
    â€œYes, father,” one said. “We know you will.”
    And with that, a bunch of Catholic boys who had lied about their ages, who had left notes informing their mothers and fathers, boarded buses with rifles on their shoulders and began the long trip to Bataan to fight. As they left Manila, some of the boys began tocry. They were men enough to go to war, but they wept openly as their city burned in a blur outside the window.
    The Japanese warplanes continued screaming overhead, shelling the riverfront district and Intramuros, despite the surrender of the beautiful city. Convents and colleges erupted into rubble. Turned-up ships dotted the bay like tombstones. Knives of black smoke stabbed skyward. Everything burned. The piers, the oil depots of Pandacan, the port area. Those who could fled for the countryside. Those who couldn’t stayed inside, doors locked. The areas not blazing were deserted, empty black curtains drawn over the windows.
    When the sun slid down and the sky turned red, the casualties of the day’s raids began to arrive at the Ateneo, a trickle at first, then a flood. Father Monaghan saw men running and an ambulance with a busted windshield trailing behind them. He ran to help the driver, who jumped out and threw open the rear doors. Inside lay the wounded, covered in blood. Some were naked, for their clothing had been blown clean off their bodies. When the fathers had emptied the ambulance, the driver shouted, “The port area is filled with others like these and no one is there to pick them up.”
    â€œLet’s go,” Monaghan told him, climbing in.
    They raced to the Bureau of Printing, near the port, a temporary shelter that had taken a direct hit and was now ablaze. The priest found a pile of bodies at the door and a fire raging beyond. He snatched his sacred oils from his pocket and began anointing the dead.
    Placards rose in a place now shocked by abandonment. O PEN C ITY , the signs over Taft and Rizal Avenues declared. Manila’s gates were wide. The feared “yellow menace” would arrive any day. The men of Manila wondered how they’d be treated. The thought of how their wives and daughters would be treated brought them to tears. There were already whispers of the Rape of Nanking, in which brutal Japanese troops massacred and raped as many as threehundred thousand noncombatants during the country’s war with China. What would happen to the citizens of Manila?
    Looting broke out at the piers first, then moved uptown to the grocery stores. Anything of value—bread, sugar, rice, cracked wheat—disappeared from shelves. Pharmacies were hit, too, and medicine grew scarce.
    Carlos Romulo, a colonel on MacArthur’s staff, had been left behind to see that all of the headquarters’ personnel made the move to Corregidor. On New Year’s Eve, he drove down Dewey Boulevard to say good-bye to his wife, then headed for the pier to catch a boat for Corregidor. He stopped at the Manila Hotel, where MacArthur had enjoyed the penthouse in peacetime. As the city outside burned, a band played in the lobby and well-dressed guests slow danced into the last American morning.

 9 
HOBNAILED BOOTS
    T he