Summary
Rat narrates a section of the story where he is “the leader.” Just after Gardo returns from the prison, police arrive at Behala. Rat, Raphael, and Gardo grab Rat’s money and run to a tourist area where kids live and beg on the streets. Rat cuts Raphael’s hair and sews the money into his shorts. They rent a room and hide out, knowing the pressure of police is closing in on them like the pre-typhoon winds hitting the city. One day, Gardo goes to the prison and waits for Marco outside. They talk and Marco asks for twenty thousand for Gabriel’s Bible. They only have two thousand.
Raphael suffers from nightmares. Gardo is paranoid. Rat fantasizes about finding the six million dollars. He eventually rides a garbage truck into Behala and jumps off behind the Mission School. He goes in through a window with bars he has already bent to fit his head; Rat has been sneaking in to steal about one hundred pesos from the safe every month. He knows the safe combination because Father Juilliard has it written in his day planner open on his desk. He finds twenty-three thousand in the safe and takes it all. The shame makes Rat ache. He lets Father Juilliard know who took the money by leaving a drawing of himself, signed with kisses. He appreciates everything they have done for him. Rat returns to the hideout and cuddles up close to Raphael while he sleeps.
Gardo takes over the story, saying they thought they would reimburse the school’s money once they found José Angelico’s stash. He goes to meet Marco at a tea-house in Chinatown, dressed in a new baseball cap that lets him blend in. He counts out the money for Marco, who then hands over the Bible. Gardo grabs it and makes a run for the kitchen, but Marco jumps up to stop him.
It sounds like more people are coming, so Gardo pulls out the sharpened hook he and all dumpsite boys carry. He slashes Marco’s face, hoping he takes out one of his traitorous eyes. He escapes, running past a police officer on the way out. He runs, then passes the Bible to Rat before separating. Gardo dodges traffic and ducks into a fish market, discarding his shirt as he does. At a canal he cuts his jeans into shorts and gives his shoes to a boy watching him.
Raphael narrates. The boys meet again in the early evening at their little box of a house. Rat goes out to get food while Raphael and Gardo light candles and consult the Bible. They know time is running out. It takes a while, but the boys figure out how to cross-reference the numbers from José Angelico’s letter to Gabriel with lines in the Bible. They decode the message: “Go to the map ref where we lay look for the brightest light my child.” They take out the map that had been with the key. They realize the prisoner number on the letter corresponds to lines on the map. They believe the fridge is buried in a graveyard in the center of the city.
That night Rat wakes to the sound of heavy footsteps in the house below them. He gets the others up and opens the escape hatch they previously cut into the roof. Someone calls to Gardo, saying he is Gardo’s cousin. Rat knows it’s a lie and quietly gets the boys to walk onto another roof. Soon there is the sound of police battering the door of the house, engines revving, and dogs barking. A cop on a ladder comes up and meets Rat’s eye. He reaches for his gun but can’t aim it before the boys disappear.
Raphael narrates, commenting on how they ran over rooftops until they reached the big abandoned building where the street kids squat. There are about a hundred of them living there, meaning the boys can blend in. Raphael says this fact saves them. They jump in through a window, Raphael nearly falling to the ground. They run down the stairs and the mass of kids moves with them. On the street, the police are baffled by the hoard. The boys jump in a taxi and tell the driver to take them to Naravo Graveyard. Raphael says half the city heads there on the Day of the Dead, so they won’t be alone. The boys are so happy to be alive that they sing along to the taxi radio on the way.
A man named Frederico Gonz narrates. He makes grave memorials. He explains that graves for the poor are concrete boxes just big enough for a coffin. The compartments are stacked sometimes twenty coffins high. He says he met José Angelico when his son died and made a gravestone marker for him. José Angelico came to Gonz to say his daughter had also died. Gonz didn’t suspect it was a lie.
The narrative is interrupted by newspaper stories about the theft of Zapanta’s money. The articles mention Zapanta’s notorious past as someone who increased duties on rice imports, ordered police to clear squatters camps to build his shopping complex, and campaigned for wider education while presiding over a dwindling education budget. A student newspaper calls him clearly corrupt for being a politician with millions of dollars kept in his house. They call for a revolution.
Analysis
The theme of duplicity arises again when Gabriel reveals that the numbers and symbols in José Angelico’s letter are a code that can be decrypted with his edition of the King James Bible. By using a code system, José Angelico has communicated vital information to his grandfather in a way that deceives anyone who might be working against them. Although Gabriel trusts Marco, the prison guard, to deliver the Bible to the boys at Behala, the guard turns out to be just as corrupt as the other officials in the system when he holds the book ransom.
To get the money to buy the Bible, Rat commits another act of duplicity against Father Juilliard and Olivia by breaking into the Mission School safe and stealing twenty thousand pesos. Despite Gardo upholding his end of the deal and showing up with the cash, Marco betrays Gardo’s trust by trying to hold him in the teahouse where they meet. The theme of violence enters the story when Gardo makes use of the sharpened hook he keeps on him for situations like this. After slashing Marco’s face, he escapes danger and passes the book off to Rat, thwarting the authorities once again.
At the hideout they are renting with Rat’s savings, the boys consult Gabriel’s Bible to crack the coded message in José Angelico’s letter. They deduce that the stolen money is at the cemetery; however, they sense the police closing in on them and realize that time is running out. Their intuition proves correct when the boys wake up to the police at the base of the house they’re staying in. Showing once again their street smarts, the boys escape through the roof and blend in with a hoard of other homeless kids squatting in a warehouse-like abandoned building nearby. Safe in the mass of other children, the boys find their way to a taxi and head for the graveyard.
The theme of duplicity arises again when Mr. Gonz, the grave memorial maker, narrates a short section of the book. He recounts how José Angelico fooled him into taking part in the theft of Zapanta’s stolen fortune. Having built a relationship over years, José Angelico asked Gonz to make a gravestone for Pia Dante, José Angelico’s daughter. However, as the reader will learn soon enough, Pia Dante wasn’t dead.
Mulligan builds on the themes of corruption and systemic oppression with the inclusion of newspaper articles about Senator Zapanta, the country’s vice-president. The scandals he has been involved in are relevant to the narrative because they affect the poor. As the staple food of the poor, rice having higher import duties will inevitably lead to starvation, while the displacement of squatters for a shopping complex shows a vicious disregard for people who don’t have homes. Read together, the articles paint a portrait of a hypocritical politician who uses the images of him helping poor people while simultaneously making an already unjust system worse.
