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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG
“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times
“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ
“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail
“Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman
“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness
“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat
“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig
“A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo
“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka
Agents of Darkness
Campbell Armstrong
This book is dedicated to Rebecca; redefining love daily
We stand with you, sir … We love your adherence to democratic principle and to the democratic processes. And we will not leave you in isolation.
George Bush, Vice-President of the United States, in a public toast to Ferdinand Marcos, Manila, 1981
Guid sakes I’m in a dreidfu state
I’ll hae nae inklin sune
Gin I’m the drinker or the drink
The thistle or the mune.
Hugh MacDiarmid,
A Drunk Man Looks At A Thistle
The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
Mark Twain, January 1907
1
Eugene Costain stepped out of the Manila Hotel into a dusk as intimidatingly humid as the day had been. He had walked only a few yards past white-uniformed flunkies and security guards before his cotton shirt and lightweight pants were sticking to his skin. The air, which smelled of gasoline and swamp and sweetly decaying sewage, hung lifeless around him. On Manila Bay, where the dying sun glowed through the dirty muslin of pollution, five or six decrepit freighters were anchored with the stillness of coffin ships.
Costain moved out of the hotel compound, passing parked taxis and newspaper vendors and shadowy men who eyed him in an ambivalent way. Their looks might have been merely sullen or quietly resentful, even threatening. Costain wasn’t sure. He knew only that they made him feel so goddam caucasian and uncomfortable, a stranger in a city that wasn’t altogether strange to him. He’d been coming to Manila for more than five years now, drawn back again and again by an obsession that had nothing to do with the requirements of his business, and the uneasiness grew with each visit.
You imagine things, Costain. Increasingly you create your own little nightmares. More and more some small bird of guilt pecks at your skull. Did it come down to that in the end? Have the Philippines unglued you? He was no expert at surveying his inner terrain. He’d spent his life obeying the orders of other people, which was not conducive to mapping his own valleys and shorelines. The very idea of self-analysis caused him to smile as he moved past the green expanse of Rizal Park, where the unruffled shadows of dense trees concealed more figures – loafers, aimless strollers, lovers, watchers in the twilight.
A casual observer would not have noticed the smile because Gene Costain’s face barely altered when it expressed anything. The same observer might have seen nothing more than a slightly paunchy middle-aged American with thick grey hair brushed neatly back across his scalp. If he were really interested, the spectator might ascribe an innocuous profession to Costain, an actuary or a corporate accountant, say. Nobody could have guessed Costain’s occupation on the basis of his appearance alone, which was as bland as the look you might see on the faces of nice people scouting retirement homes in Palm Springs or Phoenix.
On Roxas Boulevard, where dusk was thickening finally to night, and dull streetlamps failed to illuminate the true dark of Manila, Costain gazed in the direction of the United States Embassy. Quiet now, save for the pathetic few that lingered outside its perimeter to be first in line for the next morning’s business, it was besieged daily by applicants for visas or Resident Alien cards, men and women who desperately hoped to escape the massive poverty of the Philippines and enter America the Beautiful, where at least there was a better class of barrio than you would find in Baclaran or Pasay or any other area of Metro Manila. The Embassy depressed Costain; he’d heard once that the waiting list for residency visas in the United States was forty years long. Forty goddam years! Apply at birth, you might stand a chance of leaving Manila in time for middle age in LA. Welcome to America.
Cars, trucks, crowded jeepneys – some tattooed with fire-spewing dragons and monsters, others adorned by madonnas and religious symbols – screamed past. The air was impossible. No breeze rose from the Bay. Costain wiped sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand just as the first of the night’s solicitors approached him, a well-spoken teenage boy with a sister to sell, very young, sir, very clean, a student. Always clean and always a student, Costain thought. What were all these clean students majoring in anyhow?
Costain dismissed the kid, who persisted the way they usually did in the bustling flesh markets of Manila. Somebody younger, sir? Somebody very young? Now there was a break in the traffic and Costain, sucking dank traffic fumes, crossed the Boulevard, assailed as soon as he reached the other side by beggars, undernourished women with babies in their arms, blind boys, barefoot children, creatures that shuffled or limped toward him as if he were a bug-light against which they would witlessly be zapped out of existence. Costain knew that if you stopped to hand two bits to some shoeless kid suddenly the whole gang devoured you. What you did was ignore the assembly and keep moving.
“Hindi, hindi,” he said, as he brushed past the supplicants. “Hindi, hindi,” with increasing emphasis.
He always remembered how Laforge had put it. The more you give them, the more they despise you. Don’t make the mistake of thinking charity buys affection, or kindness loyalty. It’s an error we Americans continue to make, usually on a very large scale. He had a brief image of Laforge, the delicate face that in a certain light appeared skeletal, the flesh too tensely drawn, the tanned hands, those courtly manners that were distant even as they hinted at the privileged possibility of some future friendship. Laforge, with his horses and his Bucks County estate and his lovely wife who smiled as graciously as a duchess on Dilaudid, awed Costain, whose experience of the American aristocracy was almost nonexistent. But what the hell could Laforge know about this kind of personal confrontation with panhandlers? He never came to the Philippines any more.
Costain freed himself from the beggars and moved along a narrow, grubby street grandly called United Nations Avenue. In the doorways of money-changing shops armed security guards studied the teeming streets and took the pulse of the place – tense men who played portable radios and sometimes shooed beggars away. Scarcely a business in this paranoid city didn’t employ at least one uniformed private guard for protection against robbers or members of the Bagong Hukbo ng Bayan, the Communist New People’s Army, which for years had been successfully infiltrating Manila from the outlying provinces.
Costain made a right turn on Del Pilar Street, the raucous heart of the Ermita
district, a crazy thoroughfare where suddenly the darkness was altered, fragmented by neon, splintered by the roar and thunder of rock music blasting out of strip joints and pick-up bars. He was accosted time and again by laughingly persistent girls in luminous mini-skirts who tried to drag him inside. Now and then a door would swing open and he’d see girls dancing under ultra-violet lights, and it was as if their white bikinis glowed with radiation. Beautiful brown girls, thumping music, the night was one great magic oyster open to him, but Costain had his own destination in mind.
He passed a bunch of Australian tourists, loud and horny, who had been boozing in one of the Aussie expatriate pubs where photographs of Queen Elizabeth hung prominently on a wall, a disappointed regal observer of how even American imperialism had failed.
Del Pilar Street, razored by flashing lights, had occasional dark blocks, and blackened alleys stretched indeterminately away on either side, perhaps to fade out in places where brick and flimsy tin had yielded to tropical decay and rot. The thick air was fishy, sickening. Somewhere a pipe had broken and stinking green water streamed underfoot. Costain, cursing, spotted it too late. His white canvas shoe absorbed the putrid liquid and squelched, goddamit, as he continued uncomfortably to walk.
Outside a shop selling religious icons, a ten- or eleven-year-old girl with the eyes and voice of a sad zombie said, “I go with you. I go with you,” and Costain skipped past her, somehow troubled by the encounter, which was not extraordinary by the standards of Ermita.
The night was wrong, he thought. The night did not have the best of vibes. That high of expectation and unbearable lust he always felt when he headed toward Mabini Street was off-centre, and he wasn’t sure why. The beggars had bothered him more than usual, the kid hooker with the sleepwalking manner skewed him, and now his right shoe was sodden with Christ knows what kind of toxic Filipino bacteria. He was getting little signals from somewhere, but he wasn’t sure what they meant.
He stopped moving, leaned against a wall, slid the wet shoe off and shook it irritably, thinking how he hated Manila sometimes because it was like some scabrous oriental version of a big Mexican city. Despite the occasional bamboo conceit of an hotel or café, a Spanish flavour dominated the architecture, especially in the formidable Catholic churches built during the four centuries of Spanish occupation. And the names in the phonebook, from Acosta to Zapata, strengthened the impression you’d wandered into a community largely Hispanic. But when you looked at the people you knew this was no clapped-out Central American burg because the faces you saw here were a mixture of Spanish and Chinese and Malay. These juxtapositions, genetic and architectural, still had an unsettling effect at times on Gene Costain, as if he were a man seriously jet-lagged by a flight from Mexico City to Manila.
He put his foot back in the uncomfortable shoe. On Mabini Street he turned right. He passed a vendor with a basket of balut, half-boiled duck eggs with the fetal birds, small beaks and feathers included, dead in the shell. Costain had tried one once, but he’d been obliged to spit the watery unborn duckling from his mouth. No thank you. His idea of a snack ran more to a Snickers bar.
Close to where Mabini intersected with Soldado Street, Costain stopped outside a three-storey building. Narrow and grubby, it had a variety of illuminated signs hanging from it. Ricardo Chiong, Immigration Lawyer, US Visas and Work Permits Specialist. Unwanted Hair Removal by Rosalita ‘Baby’ Nunez. The one Costain found particularly ironic advertised a 24-hour VD Clinic equipped to diagnose – in capital letters – VAGINITIS, CHLAMYDIA, HERPES, AIDS. If you thought you’d picked up something nasty in the neighbourhood, you popped in here to have your fears confirmed or dispelled. A consumer convenience.
Thinking chlamydia a somewhat poetic name for a venereal disease, one more suited to a pale, consumptive Victorian girl, Costain entered a narrow lobby lit by several unshaded lightbulbs. Paint peeled from the uneven walls. Plaster had crumbled and bare electrical wires hung from lathework. He glanced at the security guard in the dark blue uniform, who looked at him with a small smile. The guard had seen Costain here before and knew where the American was headed. For his part, Costain didn’t reciprocate this familiarity. He just kept moving toward the stairs.
The humidity forced him to pause. He ran his hand over his face and longed for a shaft of icy air-conditioning to slice through the clammy building. He climbed to the VD clinic, where a plump woman sat behind a desk and two young men, already gaunt with their disease, were slumped on a plastic sofa. A teenage girl was talking in Tagalog to the receptionist but she stopped when Costain appeared, and only resumed speaking as soon as he’d moved on, as if she had some terrible secret she didn’t want him to hear. Waste of time, sweetheart, he thought. His Tagalog was limited to a few tourist phrases, and even those he mispronounced.
Drained by the effort of the stairs, he reached the top floor. He fanned the air with an open hand, felt moisture collect at the back of his knees. There was nothing to breathe up here. Inside May’s room there would be an electric fan at least, because he’d given her a two-speed oscillating Black & Decker as a gift last time. Delighted, she’d plugged it into a scary-looking outlet and the blades immediately pushed hot air back and forth: it was hardly better than nothing.
Costain stepped across the landing. He didn’t knock on the door. He had already telephoned to say he was coming. Any company May might have had would be gone by this time. Costain always assumed his demands had priority over anything else she might be doing. After all, he practically supported her, sending money orders every two or three months, sometimes wiring cash directly into her account at the National Bank.
He pushed open the door, entered the half-dark room, smelled marijuana smoke. A candle burned beside the empty bed, across which a green spread had been neatly drawn. He passed the shelf where May kept her large collection of stuffed toy animals – giraffes, bears, bug-eyed frogs. Pressed upon the walls were cartoon decals Costain had given her, because they delighted her. Out of the flickering candlelight several of the Seven Dwarfs peered at him. It was not a room to wake in with a hangover.
This child-woman bit of May’s disconcerted him at times, but it excited him too. The bright enthusiasms, her unashamed lack of sophistication, the delightfully unexpected shyness she sometimes showed – all this thrilled Costain, whose wife was a scrawny woman in Poughkeepsie who bred cocker spaniels and spent much of her time poring over canine accessories catalogues, page after page advertising beef-flavoured rubber bones for teething pups, worm medications, and the very latest in doggie chic, plaid overcoats and suede bootees. Whatever sexual urge his wife had once possessed had been sublimated, God help her, in cocker spaniels. But Costain was in Poughkeepsie less and less these days, and who could blame his wife for going, so to speak, to the dogs?
“May?” he said. His waterlogged canvas shoe squeaked on the floorboards. He called the woman’s name a second time. The saucer in which the candle stood contained the remains of a joint covered in stalactites of melted wax.
Costain was touched for just a moment by a familiar sense of unease. He recognised it as the unnerving junction where ignorance of what lay in the dark changed and became the certainty of knowing something dangerous was nearby. He stood very still, holding his breath, hearing the roar of his own blood.
“Gene.”
A light went on in the tiny kitchen that adjoined the bedroom. Beyond the kitchen was a cubicle with a water-closet. Costain blinked, relieved by the sight of May in the kitchen doorway, but distressed by the way he’d felt fear, conjured it up out of nothing save an empty room and some shadows and the sound of his own voice. Getting old, sunshine. Losing your grip. You shouldn’t have come here like this, unarmed, unescorted.
But there was a flipside to these admonitions: how the hell could he possibly stay away from this lovely woman who stood watching him from the kitchen doorway? Self-denial wasn’t one of his virtues. Besides, she’d enriched his life, and brightened it, so that when he was trapped in
Poughkeepsie on a wintry day with the latest litter yapping from the heated kennels in the yard he could bring her face to his mind and taste her flesh in his memory, and he’d be warm in spite of leaden skies and endless snows. Either it was love or some insane, middle-aged obsession. Maybe there wasn’t any difference between the two. Costain didn’t stop to interrogate himself. He didn’t care.
She was wearing a sea-green satin robe that shimmered in the light. A small woman, with glossy hair so black it suggested some impenetrable midnight, she smiled the smile that electrified Gene Costain in his lonesome winters. Her dark eyes were slightly oriental in shape, her teeth improbably white. The colour of her skin was something he could never get quite right. Brown was mundane, and tan didn’t do it, and coffee was too dark. Even as he sought the correct word, her skin changed by candlelight anyway. All he knew was he’d never seen a more beautiful woman in his life.
“I thought you weren’t here,” he said.
She came across the floor, slid her arms round his waist, placed her cheek upon his chest. “But I am always here for you,” she said.
She had a sweet, high voice. Her English was sometimes very correct, sometimes lazily broken. Her hair was perfumed. Costain closed his eyes, drifting out on the scent. He slipped a hand inside her robe. Her breasts were smooth, lightly oiled by an aromatic lubricant she spread all across her body, a moisturiser with the taste of sandalwood.
“It has been a long time,” she said.
“Four months.” With his eyes still shut, Costain had the surprising little thought: I belong here. Eugene Costain, born 1935 in Watertown, New York, the only son of a stern Methodist minister, is at home in this small, wretched apartment above a VD Clinic on Mabini Street, Manila. The world turns in absurd ways. Sometimes he wondered what his wife would say if she found out about May. Probably nothing. She might tell one of her confidantes Oh, Gene’s got himself some young gook girl-friend, isn’t that rich? It’s like he’s a retarded adolescent or something. Erica wasn’t the confrontational kind. If she suffered, she’d do it quietly, thank you very much, and breed more cockers.
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