Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  The Captain, too slow to absorb events, experienced a fatal moment of indecision. The gunfire continued from the trees and Gallines went on screaming while Paz, moving with quick grace, struck Deduro across the larynx, a savage, chopping gesture that caused the Captain to choke. Half-conscious, senses disengaged, he dropped his pistol and was struck again, this time in the fibrous place where neck meets shoulder. The pain was vile, intolerable. He went down on his knees, intuitively groping for the fallen pistol as he was hit sharply in the back of the neck. Something yielded in his spine.

  He felt distanced from himself, narcotised. The pain that throbbed through him had transported him inside a world of silence. The pinkish tint of the day was strange and dreamy, like something seen through glass the colour of salmon flesh. He may have passed out. He wasn’t sure. He became aware of the young man slapping his face. He tried to cover himself but somehow his hands had been cuffed behind his back and now he understood that Paz was forcing him to kneel – a position of submission Deduro found intolerable. Paz had Deduro’s own pistol in his fist.

  “You intend to shoot me?” Deduro asked quietly. He had never been a cowardly man. He had his flaws, but a lack of courage wasn’t one of them. He’d always imagined facing death unflinchingly when it came. It was the ultimate act of machismo, this contempt for the last darkness. But he hadn’t expected to confront his demise on this particular morning, and he cursed his own carelessness for hurrying here half-awake and preoccupied.

  “I hate being on my goddam knees,” he said. He was impressively calm, even in pain and danger. He realised that three or four armed men stood directly behind him. They wore bandannas, dark shirts, khaki pants. He wondered why he hadn’t already been shot like Ocampo and Gallines. For what purpose had he been handcuffed and kept alive?

  “I’m the corpse in the field, I assume. Is that the joke?”

  Paz said, “Only if you find it funny.” He was quiet for a moment. “Don’t you recognise this place?”

  “Should I?”

  “Have a good look. You’re not here by accident.”

  Deduro gazed in the direction of the hill. The cloud of mist had disintegrated. The sun floated higher. Was there something familiar about that hill? Even vaguely? What the hell did it matter anyway?

  He said, “One field is the same as another to me.” There was a snarl of defiance in his voice; it concealed the pain that squeezed his spine.

  “This one’s different,” Paz said. “Of course, it was dark the last time you were here. Barely any moon.”

  “I’ve never been here in my life.”

  “Think harder. Take your time.”

  Deduro stared past the young man. He was defenceless, resigned to the idea of death. There was no notion of struggle, no prospect of fight and escape. He would die here in this wretched field, which for some reason he was supposed to remember. Why? What purpose could he possibly have had for visiting this dreary place?

  “Has it come back to you yet?” Paz asked.

  It dawned then on Deduro. There was no sudden flash of recognition, merely a quiet memory. He recalled a quarter moon sailing behind the hill and the rotted bamboo and how black and silent the landscape became after all the harshness had gone out of it. He remembered a sense of accomplishment.

  “Yes,” he said. “It comes back.”

  “I had a feeling it might.” Paz looked toward the hill. “I wanted you to know why you have to die. I wanted you to remember what happened here.”

  Deduro was afraid of nothing. He regretted nothing. It was important for Paz, if that was the boy’s true name, to understand the quality of the man he was about to kill.

  “I remember it fondly,” the Captain said, and smiled. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  The smile enraged the young man. He raised the pistol to Deduro’s face and his hand shook with anger. He thought how it took time and pain to keep fading memories alive, how it needed enormous transfusions of hatred to nourish and maintain the urge for what he considered justice. But it could be done, if you had the will for it. He remembered Eugene Costain momentarily. The image of the overweight American dying was fragile glass that shattered when the gun in his hand exploded and Deduro fell forward. Briefly, the field held the echo of the gunshot, then released it as it might a vapour.

  After dark Joe Baltazar drove through the sidestreets of Paranaque, the clutter of crumbling apartment houses and tiny shops, pedestrians who roamed defiantly in front of his car, staring into his headlights as though challenging him. Lovers with arms linked, sauntering boys, groups of elderly men and women – they moved with total disregard for his vehicle. Manilenos generally had the impertinent swagger of people who own the streets, and Baltazar, who came from Benguet Province, had always instinctively disliked them. They thought they were better than anyone else, more sophisticated, tougher. He leaned on his horn time and again, usually with no effect.

  The streets became narrower. Small apartment houses were concealed by palms and iron fences against which tangled greenery and vines grew uncontrolled. Baltazar finally parked, locked the doors of the Subaru. He passed under a heavy canopy of palms, pushed open an iron gateway which left a deposit of rust flakes on his hand. He slowly climbed a flight of wooden steps to the upper floor of a concrete apartment house only some three years old but already showing signs of tropical fatigue. A weak light from a window overhead illuminated cracks in the steps; a large furry spider scuttled over Baltazar’s shoe and he shivered.

  On the top step he paused. The pain between his legs was a constant, sometimes dull, occasionally severe. He never took anodynes of any kind. He wanted the distress as it was, clear and hard in his brain, a souvenir of terror. From his right pocket he removed a small plastic cube in which lay a cat’s yellow eye, and he rubbed it because lately he’d come to believe in a form of magic, the power of the amulet, the anting-anting, to cure ills. The eye, cut from a cat he’d killed himself, caught the light from the window and seemed momentarily to be infused with life.

  But the pain persisted. Tonight there was either no magic or else it had all been used up. Baltazar sighed, put the talisman away and looked out across the darkness. A faint breeze blew the acrid smell of the Paranaque River toward him. He had mixed feelings about Teng going to America. A part of him experienced regret that he wasn’t doing the work himself, but since he was practically a cripple, since he could barely walk without flame scorching his nerve-endings, how efficient could he be? He’d restricted himself to planning, drawing on his knowledge of the United States and his old connections there, old friends who could be trusted. Even if they were inexperienced in this kind of situation, at least they were loyal, and they weren’t being asked to do anything that could endanger them. Besides, why would he want to see the United States again? He’d rather breathe the rancid air of Paranaque than go back. He’d rather die.

  He knocked on the door at the top of the stairs. A voice told him to step in. He entered a narrow kitchen, poorly lit and smelling of seafood. On a table the discarded shells of shrimps created a transparent little mountain. Lobster claws had been cracked and tossed aside, lying in disarray like the detached armour of unearthly creatures. Fat Gregory Redlinger, digging meat out of a claw, looked up at Baltazar and wiped his hands on his T-shirt, which had the logo of the Northern Arizona University Lumberjacks. Immense, his eyes very tiny, his big cheeks dimpled in a way that suggested a maleficent cherub, Redlinger raised the corner of his T-shirt to his lips and belched with incongruous gentility, one plump little hand lifted to purple lips.

  Baltazar sat at the table and watched the American push aside his plate. A Harley-Davidson motorcycle was propped against the wall, leaking oil on spread newspapers. Gregory didn’t leave the bike outside because it would have been stolen within thirty seconds, so he hauled it up the stairs whenever he’d ridden it. On the wall a calendar bearing the legend Snap-On Tools hung aslant. A curvaceous girl in a swimsuit looked somewhat disdainfully down in
to the kitchen, as if she’d assessed both the fat man and the half-crippled Filipino and found them undesirables.

  “Is it done?” Gregory asked.

  Baltazar said yes, Teng had telephoned from Baguio, it was done.

  “Poor old Costain and now Deduro,” said Fat Gregory. “It comes to us all, Joe, baby. You can’t avoid the fucking reaper. Swoop. One quick flash of the scythe in the dark and you’re yesterday’s tortilla. Out of goddam commission permanent-lee.”

  Baltazar sometimes had problems with the American’s slang and speech rhythms. He watched Gregory clasp his fat little hands in a praying gesture. “Let us observe a moment of silencio for the departed.”

  A Filipina woman of about twenty-five appeared and leaned against the door-jamb. She angrily crossed her arms. She was called Amora. She lived with the American in a state of constant discord, a condition both parties appeared, perhaps perversely, to enjoy. Baltazar thought she was very pretty when she smiled, which wasn’t often.

  “Eat. Make pig of yourself. Blow up. One day you just boom explode! Then I scrape you from the floors. Eat eat eat.” Amora threw up her hands, a dramatic rendition of despair. “Gihigúgma ko ikáw. Fat bastard.”

  Baltazar recognised the Cebuano dialect Amora used. Even as she insulted Gregory, she professed her love for him. In the intricacies of the relationship, abuse and proclamations of love ran together like dogs. Baltazar, who’d had no success with any of his three wives, didn’t understand this alliance of war and tenderness between the American and his woman.

  “She wants me to diet, Joe. Wants me to shed one hundred and fifty pounds. That’s like a whole goddam person! Come here, o pretty one.” Gregory held out his arms and the woman stepped into the embrace. The fat man slid his hand under her skirt from the back and she laughed as she knocked it away, then she skipped out of the room, singing to herself, all rage spent as abruptly as it had arisen.

  “Adorable little cunt, I do swear.” Redlinger looked at Baltazar. “Where were we?”

  “The departed.”

  “Ah. Yeah. Deduro, hell, I don’t give a shit about. Costain, now, you couldn’t ask for a better friend. Sweet guy. But pussywhipped from way back. What a weakness.” Gregory flexed his thick arms, stretching the T-shirt. He belched once again, as daintily as before. “Did he fight?”

  “I have no details, Gregory.”

  “Pity. I wouldn’t have objected to some graphic stuff.”

  Baltazar had one of those moments in which a tide of distrust rose inside him and he was powerless against it. He had the feeling Fat Gregory was playing a game with him, that somewhere along the way the American was going to prove too costly. After all, Costain had been Gregory’s friend, but the fat man had pointed the finger at Costain anyway, as if friendship was something you sucked dry then tossed aside, a husk, a rind, useless. I know who was involved and I know where you can find them. Fat Gregory had backed this claim with detail he could only have learned from somebody present that very night in the field beyond La Trinidad. Lay some bread on me and all will be revealed, Jovitoe baby. How could someone so mercenary be trusted? Yet without Gregory’s information, expensive as it was, nothing could have been achieved, and Baltazar knew that. He could never have learned the names of the Americans from anyone else. Gregory was both curse and blessing.

  Baltazar shut his eyes. He had a bad moment. A darkness invaded his head. He knew this fog. He couldn’t think straight when it came. He put his hand in his pocket and covered the cat’s eye with his clenched fist, longing for magic to cure him of these attacks. Sometimes he imagined whispers, shapes in corners, men following him along the street. Once, he’d heard his name called on Pedro Gil Street, but saw nobody when he looked around. On an especially lonely night, in a room at the Ryokan Pension House, he imagined he heard somebody say his name over the radio, not once, but twice – and he’d panicked, straddling that fearful terrain between reality and what the mind threw out from its deepest places.

  Gregory asked, “When will your man leave?”

  “Soon.” In fact Teng had left the Philippines more than twelve hours ago, but Baltazar wasn’t about to impart this information to the fat man.

  “Soon, huh? No date?”

  “For reasons of security –”

  “Security! Okay. Shut me out, Joe. I don’t need to know your plans. No skin off my proboscis. You send Teng whenever you like.” Gregory feigned, or seemed to, an expression of hurt. “So don’t trust me. I told you who the three Americans were, and I told you where they could be found. I went out on a limb for you, friend. So what? You need to settle some scores of your own, far out, fine with me. Just pay me my balance and we’re through.”

  Baltazar took money from his hip pocket. It was folded in rubber bands. He wanted to get out of here, out into the air, away from Fat Gregory’s oppressive presence. Gregory counted the bills, which were American. They totalled five thousand dollars in hundreds.

  “You think Teng is up to the task, Joe?”

  “I know so.” When the fog lifted, what took its place was a depression so terrible Baltazar’s head seemed to fill with lead.

  “I hope he is,” Gregory said. “Tell you what I hear. And this I throw in as a freebie. Gratis. For one night only, no charge. Mr Kindness.” Gregory spotted a piece of crabmeat on the table and swooped on it, scooping it up into his mouth. “Uhhh. Fuck me sideways! Crab’s made of rubber.”

  The fat man spat the offending gob of crustacean into the palm of his hand. “Anyway. What I hear about our friend Laforge is he’s been earmarked for something big. New job, Joe. Nothing less than head honcho. If this comes about, then he’s gonna have a guard or two. No easy target then. Put that in your pipe.”

  “I will,” Baltazar said.

  “Let me phrase it another way. You better send Teng soon. Like real soon. Like yesterday.”

  “Thanks for the information.” Baltazar opened the door, gazed into the darkness. The bad time had passed. He felt easy again, almost weightless.

  Gregory said, “Hey, sweet dreams, my man.”

  4

  The publication party at the J W Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington was held in honour of a book called An American’s Heart, by Senator Byron Truskett of Iowa, Chairman of the Joint Select Committee on Intelligence. The book was of a kind familiar to observers of the American political scene, a rags to riches fable appealing to those who believed poverty no obstacle to political achievement in the Republic, that it was easier for a poor man to become the President of the United States than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Byron Truskett’s book fudged the truth for the sake of this myth. For example, his father was referred to in the first chapter as ‘a simple undertaker’, though in reality Truskett Senior owned a chain of funeral parlours throughout the Midwest and had enlarged his fortune building tract houses for the lower-middle classes. I box ’em in life, and I box ’em in death, the old man used to say. Byron Truskett also claimed in chapter five to have worked his way through Northwestern University delivering pizzas, but he actually owned the pizza shop, a gift to him from Truskett Senior, who needed some tax write-offs.

  The book also failed to mention Truskett Senior’s vision for his son, a deliberate lapse necessitated by a need to appear modest and not some clawed griffin of hideous ambition. Truskett Senior had instilled in Byron the notion that he might one day become the President of the United States. There was no relentless drilling involved, no daily indoctrination, no sense of a father ramming his own failed ambitions into his son’s brain. Rather, it was done with quiet persistence: anybody can do anything he sets his mind to in these United States, boy, so you aim as high as you care to. It was a joyful awakening to the unlimited possibilities the great store-window of the Republic had to offer. I can be the President, Byron Truskett told himself. I can be anything I choose. And if the book didn’t mention the fact, nevertheless Truskett Senior had given his son something precious, a manifest desti
ny all his own, an alignment with the possibilities of history. It helped, of course, that young Truskett, having won a junior achiever’s award in a prestigious national competition in 1958, had received his citation and a cheque for $1,000 from Eisenhower himself inside the Oval Office. He had liked the room as a visitor. How much more might he like it as a long-term tenant? If inside Byron’s head there had existed a compass, its needle would never have wavered.

  Truth, then, was a matter of degree in Truskett’s auto-hagiography, gently shaded here, turned on its side there, yet always close enough to genuine events to make the book defendable, if anyone bothered to assault it. Nobody did. Reviews were deferential, written for the most part by friends of Truskett, and sales were brisk because many Americans, who thought Truskett had a sensitive finger on the sometimes inaccessible pulse of the nation, were interested in what the Senator had to say. Whatever the book’s merits, the party was a huge success, attended by five hundred people all speaking at once in voices made bright by martinis or champagne.

  Truskett, a big man with the shoulders of a weight-lifter, had a concentrated way of looking at other people that made them feel important. He makes you think you’re the most interesting thing in his life, his constituents often said about him. He possessed that gift as precious to a politician as votes: the common touch. When he shook a hand he didn’t withdraw at once, as if fearful of infection, the way some pols did. He’d perfected ‘the wrap’, in which he grasped firmly with his right hand while his left covered the handshake. An extra touch of warmth and intimacy; people remembered such things. He pumped flesh with the same cheer that Truskett Senior had crated the stuff and buried it. Flesh, dead or alive, was Truskett business.

  He moved among guests, gripped the hands of fellow Senators and, where familiarity allowed it, bussed their wives, exchanged barbed little jokes with this or that columnist or lobbyist, picked at a canapé here, a drumstick there, and balanced a champagne cocktail high in his left hand. He was stalked by the PR lady from the publishing company, a sharp little Australian woman called Callie Cousins who had a whole gang of journalists wanting to interview the Senator, because he was generally held to be an unusual American phenomenon: an intelligent conservative. He was considered a comer, a strong Presidential possibility down the line, if not at the next election then four years later. Truskett had no intention, however, of patiently waiting the years away. He wanted to occupy the White House by his forty-fifth birthday, if only to give the finger, with firm vigour, to those fogies and superannuated ninnies around Washington who said he was too young for the Big Job, too immature, needed more seasoning. Seasoning! The precedent set by Jack Kennedy had been conveniently overlooked by Truskett’s enemies, simpering men who envied him his popularity.