Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  Both men were quiet for a time, each remembering Costain in his own way. He was loyal, if not the brightest man around. But loyalty was what counted so far as Laforge was concerned. When you gave Costain an order, he’d always obeyed.

  Laforge stared into the woods again. How gloomy they were. How secretive. He turned his face away. Above, where a solitary bat flew without seeming purpose, the sky was hazy with the imprisoned heat of the day.

  Railsback said, “You didn’t bring me all this way just to tell me about Costain, did you?”

  “No.”

  Railsback lit a cigarette, a Carlton, which to him was like sucking air, but he was trying to cut down. He felt nervous, the result of many factors – the enigmatic call from Laforge, the death of Costain, and now this eerie sense of anticipation he experienced as he waited for the older man to say what was on his mind.

  Suddenly there was music from the distance, discordant and angry, the kind of music made by people who sang out against acid rain and oil spills and shaved their heads or wore their hair in lacquered spikes so that in silhouette they often looked like surreal versions of the Statue of Liberty. Eco-rock, it was called, electric and shrill. Laforge made a face.

  “My son’s music,” he said quietly. “I don’t pretend to understand his tastes. What we used to simple-mindedly call the generation gap has become something of a dark abyss these days.”

  Railsback, a single parent, looked sympathetic. He had a teenage daughter, a lovely child called Holly. He’d recently found marijuana seeds in her bedroom and a tiny plant in a window-box and Rizla rolling-papers inside a school textbook.

  “Let’s walk a little,” Laforge suggested.

  Tracked by the thudding music, both men moved down the road. A partridge flew up unexpectedly in front of them, a minor shock for Railsback.

  “Captain Deduro has been found murdered north of Baguio,” Laforge said.

  Railsback absorbed the news without great interest. It all seemed so far away both in time and space.

  “Now here’s what bothers me,” Laforge said. “I can’t help thinking of a certain connection between the deaths of Deduro and Costain, Tom.”

  Railsback stopped walking. He ran a fingertip round the base of his clammy neck. “The only possible connection is Benguet Province.”

  “Exactly,” Laforge said.

  “But there were no eyewitnesses.”

  “What if there were?”

  Railsback considered this a moment. He had a flurry of memories, none of which seemed to belong to him any more – flashlights piercing the dark, the quiet sound of chains, somebody crying in fear. No. There had been no spectators. He was sure of it. He thought he was sure of it. He said, “Because both men were in Benguet, it doesn’t follow they were killed for their part in that particular affair. Look, we know Deduro had been living on borrowed time. He was a target for the Communists long before the business in Benguet. He’d never exactly been Mr Popularity with the locals. As for Gene – any American connected with the Constabulary is at risk over there. A sparrow comes into Manila and kills Costain because he stands for something certain people hate.”

  Something certain people hate, Laforge thought. Railsback was being needlessly cryptic. The ‘certain people’ he referred to were the New People’s Army represented by one of their assassins, a ‘sparrow’. And the ‘something’ they hated was an American presence on Filipino soil, the military bases. The fact that the Americans were supported by the landowning class, who in turn ‘exploited’ the peasants, according to the Marxist jargon Laforge found so boringly doctrinaire, was where the true grievance lay. The rich got richer; the poor, having lived lives of unbearable hopelessness, died sooner. And somewhere in the jungles the Communists, masters of the drab dialectic of hatred, taught boys and girls how to strip down and rebuild rifles blindfolded in preparation for the Day of Reckoning.

  Laforge thought how regrettable it was that the desirable ideals of America – democracy, liberty, a free economy – were so difficult to export. It was a deplorable irony, of course, that the transplantation of solid American values, which he esteemed without question, often required the support of indigenous gangsters, such as that thief, the late Marcos. He may have milked the Filipino treasury and declared martial law to protect his presidency, he may have perceived himself as an emperor, and he was indisputably an unprincipled felon, but nevertheless his self-interest happened to coincide with the general American goal of limiting Communism in the Orient. That was still a vibrantly unpredictable threat to American interests which, according to Laforge’s patriotic logic, were also the interests of all the democracies of the world. Unless special care was taken, the Philippines had the ingredients to become another Cuba, one of which, thank you, was enough.

  As if to himself, Laforge said, “I’ve thought about Benguet often, Tom.”

  Railsback said nothing. He smoked his cigarette with a funereal look.

  “Sometimes circumstances force you to do something you wouldn’t normally do,” Laforge went on. “And sometimes you have to perform a distasteful act for the general good. You’re in a distant country, a remote place, the rules are different …”

  Railsback, who had no desire to linger in what was past and done and who sometimes smelled the rancid damp of the Philippines in his dreams, said, “Tell me this. Do you have any hard evidence of a connection between the deaths of Deduro and Costain? Do you have anything we can sink our teeth into? Sure, they were involved together in Benguet, but who knows that? And what happened at that godforsaken place was more than three years ago.”

  “Hard evidence, no.” Laforge closed his eyes a second. He looked like a man in uneasy repose. He had feelings, intuitions: the kind of evidence that might convince Railsback was another matter. “People who want revenge often spend years getting it, Tom. Sometimes they love to anticipate the taste. It’s almost as important as the act of vengeance itself. Imagine an eyewitness, say. He doesn’t even have to be connected with the NPA. He bides his time. He’s learned how to wait, because he understands the delicate beauty of patience.”

  The delicate beauty of patience. Railsback thought it an odd choice of phrase. He crushed his cigarette underfoot. “Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument there’s an agent of revenge and he knows the people responsible for what happened in Benguet. He’s got a list. He snuffs out two of the names on this list. Is that what you’re saying? You think I’m on the list and he’s going to come all the way to Texas for me.”

  “I wanted to discuss the possibility with you,” Laforge said. “I wanted you to be aware and to be careful. That’s all.”

  You could have told me all this on the goddam phone, Railsback thought. He said, “I’m always careful. Force of habit.”

  “Then be even more so, Tom. That’s all I ask.”

  Railsback smiled. “Nobody is going to get me in my own back yard. And I mean nobody.”

  Laforge looked up at the sky and wondered if he’d simply overreacted to the news of Costain’s death, if he’d imagined this theme of vengeance. But he’d always been suspicious of coincidences. Under scrutiny, more often than not they were seen to be part of a deliberate design. He’d always asked one question more than the next man because the answers he got never satisfied him. He couldn’t let this one go, this unholy trinity of Costain and Captain Deduro and Benguet Province. He didn’t buy easy concurrences. He had the feeling something dark lay out there in the landscape. A presence. Suddenly he realised he’d been expecting it for a long time. But he could explain none of this to Tom Railsback; it wasn’t the sort of stuff Railsback could bite into and savour. It wasn’t specific.

  Railsback said, “Even if there’s a remote possibility of a revenge situation, how can it touch you? You weren’t even there.”

  Laforge turned towards the house, saying nothing. The music, which had stopped for few minutes, cranked up again, incongruous in the rustic twilight. Laforge found it reassuring now. He was filled w
ith an awareness of failed love for his son; why hadn’t he worked harder to get close to him? Why was he so divided from Nick? The answer was simple enough. The boy’s music, the clothing, his derisive attitude to some of the things Laforge held dear – all this separated father from son. And then there were the strange little magazines Nick subscribed to, inky sheets trafficking in conspiracy nonsense and anti-American platitudes.

  Tell me one day, Dad, just so I can understand, why the hell you believe the United States of America has to poke its goddam nose into other people’s business. What makes you so sure we’ve found the right path and everybody else has to follow it or else? Do we have some God-given right to invade a country like Panama, say, because we don’t like the guy who runs it?

  He was naive, of course. At seventeen, how could Nick be otherwise? Laforge was touched by the peculiar sadness of loss, a poignant feeling that embarrassed him by its intensity.

  He shook Railsback’s hand when they walked back to the car.

  “You think you made a fool’s errand,” Laforge said.

  “No.”

  “You do understand my concern, Tom?”

  “Sure,” Railsback said. He climbed in behind the wheel. He wasn’t sure if he felt gratitude or pity. He’d never seen Laforge quite so – what was the word? Disturbed? Preoccupied? Uncool? He wondered if Laforge had it in him to go off the deep end one day. Maybe he spent too much time in the countryside imagining enemies and was becoming unglued. More likely he was worried about his record and the need to preserve the appearance of a clean sheet. He couldn’t afford to be touched by scandal, especially if he was the front-runner for Sandy Bach’s position. There would be congressional inquiries, floodlights turned on his life. Probably Benguet haunted him and he’d repressed his feelings about it. This killer, this hypothetical avenger – such a person was always possible, but Railsback thought it far more likely he was a phantom of Laforge’s conscience.

  He said, “Thanks for the warning.”

  “I hope it proves unnecessary.”

  “I think it will.” Railsback turned the key in the ignition. “But I appreciate your consideration. I really do.”

  “One tries to take care of one’s own,” Laforge said. “If I hear anything else, you’ll be the first to know. Obviously, I don’t want anything to come up, in view of …” He allowed his voice to fade off.

  “I understand.”

  Laforge watched the Ford go down the road. After it vanished, he listened to the vibration of the fading engine. He thought that Railsback’s argument against the notion of any connection between the two murders should have relaxed him. But it hadn’t. The uneasiness wasn’t going to dissolve so simply.

  He didn’t want to think that Benguet had been a moral lapse on his part, an error of judgement. Belief in the rightness of the United States justified anything – wasn’t that how the reasoning went? But you couldn’t always wrap democratic ideals in the flag and give them away as a present, because not everyone wanted the gift. Often there were no takers. They had to be shown how badly they needed American benefaction. There had to be a dog and pony show, strobe lights, some sleight of hand – and when the flash failed, perhaps coercion. Sometimes the flag got a little grubby, a little muddy. And bloody, even that.

  He climbed the wall to his own property, beset by the bizarre feeling that he was trespassing on what belonged to him. He stepped on to the bridge, pausing in the middle to gaze down at the creek. Clouded by the motion of water, his own reflection looked up at him, for all the world like a putrefying corpse below the surface.

  Armando Teng had managed to sleep only three shallow hours during the first leg of the flight from the Philippines to Honolulu. There were dreams, terrors, visitations, somewhere the whisper of Marissa’s voice. Before Honolulu he was jarred awake by the notion that she was standing over him and he had only to open his eyes to see her, but he found himself looking up, his expression one of disappointment, into a stewardess’s face. She smiled and told him he must fasten his seat-belt, the plane was about land in Hawaii.

  Between Hawaii and Los Angeles he failed to sleep at all.

  He had only hand luggage. He went through Customs and Immigration without incident, bearing a passport made out in the name of Raymond Cruz. He found a cab that took him to a motel whose address Joe Baltazar had given him. Located about three miles from LAX, it was a pale blue cinderblock building dating from an era of streamlined automobiles with sleek fins. He was given a ground-floor room, cramped, dark, a little shabby. A swamp cooler blew humid air. In his fatigue, he was aware of his surroundings only in a limited way. He drew the curtains and lay down on the bed. Somebody will call you, Baltazar had said. Teng noticed the beige plastic telephone on the bedside table, then closed his eyes. He slipped down into empty, satisfying sleep, pleasantly dreamless this time, as if the distressing currents that had troubled him on the plane were for the moment still.

  5

  Charlie Galloway lay down for a time and listened to Ella’s singing and the sound of the vacuum running, and he thought of Karen, whose image moved in the shadowy way of something trapped under a surface of thin ice. The telephone rang by the bed at five-thirty.

  Leonard Paffett was on the line. Galloway always felt like a truant boy facing the badly strained tolerance of his headmaster when he had to speak to his superior, even though Paffett was not an unkindly man. Indeed, he perceived himself as a sort of godfather to the men in his command. He went to their weddings, remembered the names of spouses and offspring, birthdays and anniversaries; he spent a lot of time making his subordinates as contented as they might be in a job whose requirements became daily more demanding in an underworld that turned on its axis with increasing viciousness.

  “Well, you’ve done it again, Charlie,” said Paffett in that soft voice which made everything seem like an understatement. “To nobody’s surprise, I might say. We’re not rolling our eyes downtown, Charlie. We’re not exactly aghast.”

  Galloway, thinking ‘aghast’ an odd word for a Captain in the LAPD to use, said nothing. What response was there to make in any event? You opened your mouth, you compounded your shame. Hide, Charlie. Scarper. Duck.

  “I hear the precinct’s running a book on how long you can stay sober, Charlie. I don’t approve of that kind of thing. But I find it a sad comment on your situation.”

  “Well,” was all Charlie could think to say after some quick rummaging in the cluttered drawers of his head, which squeaked noticeably as he opened and closed them.

  “I figured the clinic would help you, Charlie,” Paffett said. “I really did. It came highly recommended. Guy there’s had some remarkable results with … cases like yourself. Too bad. Too goddam bad. When you checked yourself out – an act I can’t possibly condone – he called me to say you’re in total denial, Charlie. Won’t face up to your problem. Won’t accept it. When you jump that hurdle, then you’ve got a chance. Maybe.”

  Charlie Galloway crossed his legs and his robe parted. Above his right knee-cap was a small pale blue pit of flesh less than a quarter-inch in diameter, the relic of a childhood disaster in which he’d ridden his tricycle into the pond in Elder Park in Govan, a reckless moment, a profound splash and a scattering of minnows – and now seemingly a harbinger of all such moments that lay ahead of him. Had the seeds of his future lain inside him some forty years ago? Had they begun even then, unseen in a dank cellar of his self, to sprout?

  “I’m genuinely saddened,” said Paffett. “I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you, but you gotta start thinking about turning your life around.”

  Turning one’s life around. How easy Paffett made that sound. Like moving a piece of furniture, opening a book, scratching your head.

  “Here’s what it comes down to, Charlie. I’m prolonging your suspension. Breaks my heart.”

  “Prolonging?” Charlie asked. His being seemed to shoot out of him, an arrow soaring across the sky. He panicked. “How long is prolonged?”<
br />
  “Six months,” Paffett said.

  “Gimme a break –”

  “You’ve had all the breaks going, Charlie. When the six months are up I make a reassessment. If I don’t get a clean bill of health from a physician that you’ve been off the sauce, you’re out permanently. It’s up to you. If you want to be a loser, be my guest. After that last incident …”

  Charlie flinched because he didn’t want to hear yet another description of what had come to be known in his private mythology as The African Disgrace. “Len, what if I went back to the clinic today?” he asked, hurrying to speak, grasping at whispery little straws, seeking some chink of charity in Leonard Paffett’s decision.

  “No. I’ve made the situation clear. Six months. After that, we’ll see.”

  “I’m a damn good cop, you know that –”

  “Used to be, Charlie. Past tense.”

  Fuck you! Was this what it came down to? Washed-up, asleep on parade, fly hanging open? The slovenly life. Abandonment. Former homicide detective drools in shabby retirement, spoonfed by charity workers. Charlie was quiet for a while. Then, infusing his voice with a confidence he pretended to feel, he said, “I can do six months without drinking. I can do that.”

  “You’re gonna have to show me, Charlie. Words don’t cut it.”

  Six months. Galloway remembered the fifth year of his marriage when he’d gone on the wagon for four dry seasons. Twelve abstemious months. Fifty-two weeks of club soda, with a dash of angostura bitters when he felt daring. Eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours of saintliness. He’d eaten enormous quantities of very rich ice-cream and put on twelve pounds during that very long year in the course of which he’d begun to see the world rather sharply. Things formerly blurred had come into focus, and he hadn’t always liked the fact. Six months. Why did the word ‘drudgery’ form in his head right then?

  “Len, I know I can do it,” he said brightly. “Watch me. Just watch me.”

  Paffett said, “I’m rooting for you. But you gotta get help, Charlie. Go to AA. Or see a therapist. And get your wife back while you’re at it. If she’ll come.” The Captain paused briefly. “Remember this, Charlie. Booze kills.”