Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Four months is too long. Why you no come before?”

  “Business,” he said.

  “Funny business, huh?”

  Some time ago he’d made up a story about how he sold securities to rich Filipino businessmen and tried to explain this occupation to her, but because she hadn’t grasped the notion at once she lost interest, as he’d known she would. Abstractions eluded and bored her. Although she was at least twenty-two – she liked to lie about her age, varying it anywhere from seventeen to twenty-five – she had the attention span of a fifth-grader. Only when it came to real money, folding money, or new clothes, a certain shade of lipstick or what music was current, did she focus as well as anyone he knew. And whenever she read gossip magazines in Tagalog she could become as absorbed as Karl Marx in the reading-room of the British Museum.

  “Jesus, it’s hot,” he said. “Where’s the fan?”

  “Fan broken. No good.” She shook her head, made a small gesture of resignation with one hand.

  “There was a guarantee,” Costain said, but he didn’t pursue this line. It was just a fact of life here: nothing electrical seemed to work for very long. Humidity devoured appliances. Sudden blackouts in the wake of typhoons blew circuits. Daily there were brown-outs unexplained by the power company. A cassette player he’d given May a year ago had died five months later and now lay unused among the pile of soft toys.

  Costain drew her to the bed, where he sat down. May stood before him, watching him untie the knotted cord of her robe. She had a kind of detached curiosity in her expression, as if she’d never seen anyone do this before and wondered where it would lead. He parted the robe, pressed his face against her belly. She touched his cheek with her thin fingers. He loved the feel of her small hands on his skin.

  “I undress you now,” she said. “I make you relax. I give you my guarantee.”

  Costain, gratefully kicking off his shoes, sat back. May unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it back from his shoulders. His lust astonished him. At an age when many men were spooked by the long sombre slope that led to Epitaph Avenue, Eugene Costain had been reborn, not in some Methodist fervour of his late father’s making, but in a fever of desire. Here was as close to any form of heaven as he was going to get.

  She unzipped his pants, slid them from his legs along with his underwear. She punched him lightly in the stomach and laughed. “You must exercise.”

  “You’re all the exercise I need, baby,” he said. He was aflame with malarial intensity.

  “Yeah, I exercise you all right.” She stepped away from him. From the pocket of her robe she took out a small plastic packet containing a condom. She insisted on one. She opened it with her teeth, removed the prophylactic, let the wrapper drift to the floor. She knelt beside the bed, caressed him for a while, took him inside her mouth. She had a way of making a funnel of her tongue that detonated little landmines throughout Costain’s brain, blitzing him. When she took her face away she shrugged her shoulders so that her robe slipped from her body as she rolled the condom very slowly over his penis. She straddled him. He looked up into her eyes when he entered her.

  There. The night was no longer out of balance. Everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be. Closing his eyes, he was lost inside her. It was another world, safer and sweeter than what lay in the streets. He was rocketed up through unexplored strata of himself, higher and higher, shooting through his own private planetarium.

  May Quirante, who had the palms of her hands placed upon Costain’s chest as she rocked her body upon his, turned her head to the side and nodded. The tall, slender figure in the kitchen doorway, a young man in black jeans and black T-shirt, stepped into the bedroom. He moved as if all his life had been given to the craft of silence. His handsome brown face was lit momentarily by the candle, and his blue eyes flashed before they were obscured again as he approached the bed. Gene Costain, riding his own comet, was unaware of the intruder. He was going up and up, yessir, yessir, ooo yes, moaning while he rose directly into the molten centre of the sun.

  The young man stood over the blissful Costain. He looked at May, who rode the American harder. Costain, approaching the red-hot core of himself, groaned now. The young man held a butterfly knife. He opened it with quiet expertise. There was a second when the twin blades reflected the guttering flame, the same second in which Eugene Costain crashed through the roof of his personal galaxy and roared with astonishment and love, the same savage second when May Quirante rolled away from Costain, who opened his eyes in time to see the knife glow in its sharp, senseless descent.

  Costain was sliced neatly and deeply from gullet to navel. He tried to sit up, at first more puzzled than pained. He saw May at the foot of the bed. With her mouth open she watched him raise his face. Something here was beyond understanding, Costain thought. He blinked, failed to rise, dropped back again. His head tilted from the edge of the bed so what he saw of the room was upside-down, Grumpy and Bashful inverted, all the soft toys floating in defiance of gravity. And there was the stranger, the other, who stood above Costain’s head like a pallbearer looking down sadly at a corpse displayed in an obscene open casket.

  My killer, Costain thought. He gathered all the broken strands of himself together and made a mighty effort to get up, but his heart was punctured, a useless sponge in his chest. He managed to lift a hand in the air and raise his face one last time. The room dimmed, then his head rolled to the side, his cheek pressed into the bloodsoaked silk bedspread.

  “I liked him,” May Quirante said quietly. “He was good to me.”

  The killer cleaned the blades of his knife in the folds of silk, then snapped the instrument shut and pocketed it. “Take what you find in his wallet,” he said. “When that’s gone, you’ll have to look after yourself. I’m sure you know how.”

  “Why did I allow this?” she asked. “Why?”

  “You allowed nothing. You had no choice. Do you want me to tell you the truth about your American friend? Do you want to hear that story all over again?”

  May Quirante looked down at Eugene Costain. The sight of kamatayan, death, sickened her. “Once was enough,” she replied. Her eyes filled with tears, which she fought back because she was unaccustomed to crying. Besides, she didn’t know what she grieved more – the loss of Eugene Costain’s life or his financial assistance. Or was there some other emotion she had no experience in defining?

  “Someone will come for the body,” the young man said.

  He rode in an overcrowded jeepney along Roxas Boulevard, past restaurants and coffee-shops, night clubs, large hotels like the Silahis and the Admiral. Here and there stood black gutted buildings overgrown with foliage where the homeless found shelter under thin sheets of corrugated tin or slats of cardboard. To his right was Imelda Marcos’s monumental legacy to the people of Manila, the Cultural Center beside the Bay, built with funds provided twenty years ago by the Lyndon Johnson administration. Having raised political expediency to an experimental art form, a dadaism in which all things are permissible and opposites coexist, the Americans had cheerfully contributed to such grandiose notions of the Marcoses as concert halls and theatres, but apparently saw no anomaly in the fact that while Van Cliburn played Beethoven on one side of the street many thousands of Filipinos on the other had nothing to eat and nowhere to live.

  The young man, whose name was Armando Teng although he used a variety of pseudonyms, no longer allowed such inequities to anger him. The poverty, for example, had become so commonplace that its existence intruded on his attention like the thin voices of some chorus too far away to hear. This was neither complacency nor acceptance on his part: far from it. But if he was to do what he demanded of himself and finish what had already been started, then he couldn’t afford to become trapped in the quicksands of particular feelings.

  The cost of his detachment was high. Often, he was compelled to walk away from situations in which his instincts told him he should act, or tune out of his mind tragedies he saw every day on the st
reets. He forced himself to ignore the searing contrasts created by social injustice – acres of unspeakable hovels in the district of Tondo where more than a million people lived in massed hopelessness while the rich led opulent lives in the fortressed mansions of Forbes Park; the miserable shantytowns that clung to the banks of the Pasig River a few miles from the Manila Polo Club where the young men of moneyed families rode priceless ponies with harsh indifference to the city bleeding around them. All this, which had once angered and depressed Teng, had become no more than a background blur to his main purpose. Consequently, he lived as if his heart was a shuttered house into which only a chosen amount of light was filtered.

  Night obscured Manila Bay. Bright Chinese lanterns, indicating some form of festivity for guests, burned in the grounds of the Philippine Plaza Hotel. The jeepney roared, starting, stopping, swerving in and out of traffic. The driver, a man tattooed with hook-billed birds and snakes, had a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Frequently he’d hawk up phlegm and spit into the traffic with the extravagance expected of a jeepney driver, which was a profession for men who thought themselves hard. When he wasn’t spitting, he sang pop songs in a fair voice.

  Teng got out of the crowded vehicle on Taft Avenue. Forever circumspect, slipping through the darkest streets, he found a taxi that took him past the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to the suburb of Paranaque. People strolled back and forth on the narrow, main thoroughfare. Sare-sare shops and cheap restaurants were lit, but they glowed only dimly. There was darkness within darkness here, layered and secretive, as if the real source of the night were inaccessible.

  On Diego Cera Avenue Teng paid off the driver then walked three blocks before he stopped. He pretended to look in the window of a junk shop. A strip of neon illuminated an array of dusty spark-plugs, ancient batteries, oily black metal cylinders with no apparent function.

  When he was satisfied he hadn’t been followed, he walked until he reached the Church of the Bamboo Organ in Las Pinas. He crossed the courtyard where several cars were parked. None was the one he wanted. Because he didn’t like the notion of loitering without purpose, possibly drawing attention to himself, he went inside the church.

  He moved toward the back pews, noticing that the holy water fonts were dry and encrusted with salt. Electric fans blew through the musty air. Worshippers, some nursing fretful children, were still lingering hours after the religious service had been performed. Built on a gallery overhead was the nineteenth-century organ that had given the church its name. Bamboo pipes, each meticulously cut to a different length, stretched up into the shadows. A slow hymn was being played, a wistful thing Teng couldn’t name but which suggested wind whining through caves. A baby cried, men and women gossiped, a mongrel shuffled near Teng’s feet.

  Teng looked toward the altar and the glassy-eyed icons erected there, a display of holy suffering meant to reassure a needy congregation that the burden of their pain was shared by saints and martyrs. Suffering, Teng thought: the essential condition of a visa into paradise. He had no time for this notion. Why couldn’t there be justice in this lifetime? Why did you have to wait? He had neither the patience for, nor any belief in, the afterlife, like the devotees around him. The old Spanish friars had done their work well in the Philippines, leaving behind an entrenched legacy of Roman Catholic superstition that during certain holy days rose to insanity. Fanatics, in imitation of Christ, had themselves crucified in public display.

  He was aware of a man sitting down beside him. Teng, showing no sign of recognition, rose and went out into the courtyard, where he lit the third of the five cigarettes he allowed himself every day. The other man followed almost at once. He was middle-aged and short and had skin like cracked morocco. He wore a short-sleeved barong made out of pina. His right eye, from which some parasitic larva had been surgically removed the day before, was bloodshot. As he walked toward a parked Subaru he did so in the deliberate way of a man who finds walking painful. Teng got into the car on the passenger side. Jovitoe ‘Joe’ Baltazar climbed behind the wheel.

  “I’m told you left the girl alive, Armando.” When he spoke, Baltazar cracked his knuckles in an agitated way and restlessly scanned the parking-lot.

  Teng smoked his cigarette a moment. “Why not? Why would I want to kill her?”

  “She knows your face.”

  Teng looked through the fronds of a palm tree at a pallid streetlamp. He was not going to let himself be swayed or irritated by Baltazar, who had a cavalier attitude toward spilling blood that Teng did not share. Before you killed, you had to have good cause. You had to have the fire for it.

  “Even if she wanted to, she’s too afraid to speak,” Teng said.

  “Can you count on that, Armando?”

  Teng flicked his cigarette away. It floated in the direction of the church. “She’s not my enemy.”

  “But she can point a finger at you.” Baltazar shook his head in disapproval of what he obviously considered a strange flaw in Teng, this occasional benevolence, this mercy. An eyewitness was just another adversary. So you cleaned up. You closed the eyes, you sealed the mouth. You made sure.

  Teng said, “Costain was the only target in the room. The girl doesn’t deserve to die.”

  “She was the American’s whore, Armando.”

  “The country’s filled with whores taking American money.” Teng remembered how the girl had sat astride the naked man. Watching from the kitchen, he’d been unexpectedly aroused by that roundness of hip and shadow of breast, the way her glossy hair fell forward against her face as she made love to Costain. It had been a long time since Teng had enjoyed any kind of intimacy with a woman. Months? Years? Time had collapsed around him, and he couldn’t track its disintegration. He knew clocks, and punctuality, but he had no way of measuring real time, the time of the heart. He had loved once. The memory was a cinder, still too hot to touch.

  Baltazar rubbed his bloodshot eye furiously. “I can get somebody else to deal with her.”

  “No,” Teng said. He stared through the windshield at the church. The organ was silent, the night hushed and motionless. “She doesn’t know my name. She doesn’t know where to find me. After Baguio, I’ll be out of the country anyway.”

  Baltazar sighed. Momentarily he worried about the things that might go wrong in the northern city of Baguio before Teng even left the Philippines, but he said nothing. He never liked arguing with the younger man, whose stubbornness was as rigid as a wall. He unlocked the glove compartment and took out an envelope. He held it firmly a moment, as if he were undecided about giving it to Teng, as if he wanted to raise some last minute objection. But then he passed it over, with some relic of reluctance still.

  “Everything you need is inside. Passport. Money,” Baltazar said. “People will meet you in America. Helpful people. But understand this, Armando, they’re not professionals. They’re ordinary people and this isn’t the kind of thing they do every day. What counts is they’re on your side.”

  Not professionals. Teng thought that if he’d developed skills in the craft of killing it was because circumstances had forced him, not because he had some notion of himself as a professional assassin. He hadn’t started out with violence and hatred inside; once, the idea of murder would have been anathema to him, mortal sin. He placed the envelope in his lap without opening it. He closed his hands over it. He saw the interior of the church grow darker as candles began to die, and he had the odd sensation that the sputtering flames were inside his head. They didn’t exist in the external world. It was a strange moment, as if a sudden fall from the adrenalin high of killing the American had muddled his sense of reality and now he was slowing down, sailing toward the dark tunnel of sleep. He was conscious too of distances, the miles he had still to cover, the three men who were yet to die.

  Baltazar said, “If everything goes well in Baguio …” Then he paused and looked uncertainly at Teng.

  “Baguio’s the easy part,” Teng said. “What could possibly go wrong?”

/>   Baltazar’s little shrug suggested that the potential hazards were too many to name. His world was a place of a million sinewy cracks, each concealing some hidden risk. “Your leniency concerns me,” he said.

  “Leniency?”

  “You didn’t kill the girl. What would you call that?”

  Teng smiled, a rare, bright expression. “Economy of style.”

  He got out of the little car, slammed the door shut, and looked at Baltazar through the open window. The smile was already gone and the eyes were lifeless. Baltazar wondered fretfully if he’d ever see the young man again. He was about to wish Teng good luck, but Armando didn’t believe in such a thing. You manufactured your own fortune. Bad luck was the excuse of fools.

  Baltazar extended his hand and the young man shook it, and they parted without another word.

  2

  On the hottest recorded June day in the history of Los Angeles County Charlie Galloway, suspended from both duty and reality, sat in a dark air-conditioned bar on Wilshire and watched traffic pass like hallucinations in the glare of the afternoon light. He ran a fingertip around the rim of his shot-glass and turned away from the window. If you looked at the street long enough you could imagine all that concentrated heat seeping through the walls, forcing itself inside the ducts of the cooling-system and turning this pleasant oasis arid.

  On TV somebody with a purple face was blethering about the weather. The continental United States had become one great hot dry mass. Cities had imposed restrictions on the use of electricity, water shortages had become commonplace, elderly people were dropping dead. Temperatures, as the announcer said in the melodramatic parlance of his profession, ‘soared’. Records are being broken all the way from Brownsville, Texas, to Hibbing, Minnesota. There was talk of pressure fronts, but Galloway blanked it out. He had a pressure front moving through the centre of his own head, and he didn’t much like it.