Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  Charlie had received a personal thank-you note from John J Coleman, the titular Director of the FBI in Washington. There was a whisper, generated by Vanderwolf, that Charlie might make a good Fed himself in the fullness of time, if he should so choose that direction. The Bureau always needed good hard-working men. Something to keep in mind. Something to store.

  He was going places, this Charles D Galloway, formerly of Govan, Glasgow. He was in the land of opportunities where doors were being opened for him and he was stepping into other, brighter rooms, a promise enhanced when he met Karen at a colleague’s wedding reception and his heart was enriched by the suddenness of captivity. Her Americanness, that marvellous New World self-assurance coupled with a delightful, airy naiveté, a stray gene left over from hippy times, enchanted him. After marriage, which increased his already unlimited sense of his American future, he fully expected the thermometer of his achievement to go on climbing.

  But.

  But somehow quicksilver became frozen in the cylinder.

  He wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps he expected too much. Perhaps he’d risen too quickly and supposed the rest of his career would be a meteor. When it stalled and no further promotion came his way, he felt the grey shadow of disappointment fall across his life for the first time. Had he deceived himself all along, attributing some lucky breaks in a few important cases to a nonexistent talent for the vicissitudes of police work?

  For a while he entertained the idea that his career had come to a dead stop because of his failure to play the game of department politics, his inability to understand how the unwritten rules worked, to hear the drums that signalled who was advancing and who falling and where the real power lay. Maybe his face didn’t fit. Maybe he had the wrong friends and didn’t drink with the truly influential department characters. But he’d never cultivated people for his own ends, nor was he sure how to begin even if he wanted to. Smarmy wasn’t his line. If he had charm it came unforced. When he smiled it was because he felt like it. He couldn’t turn these things on and off. Whatever failings he might have, he was no fake.

  His job demanded that he spend time increasingly behind a desk. Stultified, he rarely hit the streets himself; instead, he sent a flow of eager young cops out in pursuit of criminals. Thousands of sheets of paper passed between his fingers. He became involved in departmental budget matters, fiscal concerns, dollars and cents. Burning the midnight oil, he turned into a kind of accountant, his soul dulled, his ambition blunted. His life became a paper nightmare. Where were the serial killers? The terrorist threats? Where was the bloody excitement? Why did his responsibilities keep him stuck to a desk? He yearned for the streets, the city, the shadows.

  He retreated, at first slowly, then with unintended acceleration, into drink, which provided a consolation of sorts. It reduced boredom, wiped out growing disillusionment, stamped your visa for entry to the land of the living. It took the disenchanting edge off the gradual realisation that perhaps you were going no further than the place you’d reached. This was all there was going to be. His star was seemingly a spent force by his fortieth birthday. Somebody knocks the ladder out from under you so you dangle forever in the one spot and when you look around suddenly you realise you’ve got a reputation as a man who has become too fond of his lunchtime drinkies and is therefore unreliable.

  This sorry perception of his stalemate inevitably led, over a few years, to a cynicism he wouldn’t have thought possible before. He saw younger cops join the force and he thought: Let them believe in justice. He felt stale and jaded, bruised by a discontent which spread beyond the department to the Republic itself. Gradually he began to see injustices wherever he looked. There were no blacks and whites in his world, no constants of truth, nothing cut and dried. What he once naively thought the fairest system yet devised turned out to be a monochromatic business administered by lawyers making deals and soliciting political favours, amoral men. In this galaxy, where illegitimacy reigned, politicians didn’t have constituents, they had rich ‘clients’, on whose behalf they finagled deals and chipped away at the public kitty; here judges were bought and sold and attorneys hacked the carcass of justice from breastbone to blindfold, and wealthy criminals bought freedom and walked the streets because the system had been ‘manipulated’ by advocates and magistrates.

  America, which he’d once considered so healthy, a land of good cheer and unbridled possibility, came to seem jaundiced. All the smiles were forced. All the laughter was canned. White paint peeled on picket fences, green meadows glowed at night with the fluorescence of radioactive waste, people didn’t have enough to eat in the hollers of Kentucky nor in the middle of Manhattan. The cities collapsed in callous ineptitude, farms fell to ruin, streets clogged with the homeless, the deranged, the deprived, the incurably sick. Bounteous America: it was a cracked bell-jar in which Charlie Galloway, God help him, had become trapped.

  Now he stepped out of the house and the sun burned on his head as if a furnace door had been left open. In the ravines, pollution formed a fine rust-coloured mist. It stung his eyes even before he reached his car and got inside. He turned the key in the ignition and switched on the air-conditioning unit before he’d travelled half a mile. He drove along a twisting road where no other traffic impeded his progress, then suddenly he was stuck in a main thoroughfare going down toward Sunset Boulevard. At a traffic signal, which had broken down, he was surrounded by Mercedes, Porsches, and a Bentley, all driven by impatient men on their way to power encounters with other impatient men.

  Galloway drummed the steering-wheel with his fingertips and wondered why, given his general condition, he stayed in these United States, why he hadn’t gone back to his native land. The question was complex. Karen, of course, was a major part of it; this was her country and she didn’t want to leave it. And he had no desire to be six thousand miles away from her, no matter the condition of their marriage.

  But there was more. Although he criticised Madam America’s blowsy makeup and her hypocrisies and how she tolerated injustices with barely a flutter of her fake eyelashes, there was some element of comfort in her soft, cushion-breasted embrace just the same. After all, he was a naturalised citizen, and she’d welcomed him inside her – how could he be so churlish as to feel ingratitude? But she puzzled him. She tantalised him. The more she teased, the harder he tried to understand her. The harder she was to understand, the more difficult it became to love her.

  Who was she really? Under her ambivalent trappings was there a heart of gold? Was she bag lady and dowager and whore simultaneously? She was secretive, yet he knew she waited to be discovered. She was always just around the next corner, a baffling shadow seen from the corner of his eye, a trace of laughter he heard echoing. He became convinced that some important element eluded him.

  Perhaps it was all so simple he had difficulty seeing it. Perhaps he no more belonged in America than he did in the LAPD. He was no organisation man. Too much disorder had penetrated his life. To be an American, to be a member of the LAPD, maybe you needed something he didn’t have – a sense, however loosely arranged, of being comfortably absorbed into the body that was the United States and its assorted institutions. You needed an extra gear in your motor, a tear duct attuned to the Star Spangled Banner, a history that involved roller-derbies, surfboards and Leave It to Beaver, all of which were beyond his experience.

  Once, during an evening of drinking when he’d mentioned this feeling to Karen, she had stared at him for a long time without speaking.

  Finally she’d said, “You’re not missing anything, honey.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve spent your entire life here. You know what’s going on.”

  “But there’s nothing going on, Charlie. I think you’re imagining things. You come to a new country and for years you feel out of tune. But it doesn’t mean there’s some great big secret everybody’s keeping from you. What you think you’re missing just doesn’t exist.”

  “It’s like this. They give you
a green card but they don’t give you a key.”

  “A key to what, Charlie? To what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the mystery.”

  She had held him then, he remembered that. She’d put her arms around him and rocked him slowly against her, loving and comforting him because she’d seen some tiny drunken distress in his eyes. He’d never felt that close to her before. He recalled the tenderness clearly. He remembered how her hair smelled and the way one of her earrings, an onyx half-moon, pressed into the flesh of his cheek.

  “Do you get this same feeling in your own country?” she’d asked.

  “Scotland’s easier to read. She’s like some crotchety old spinster who remembers her manners every now and again and offers you a cup of tea and a sliver of shortbread. She’s not hiding anything. When she speaks, it’s always in plain language. And her makeup’s simple. A wee touch of rouge, light lipstick, that’s it. Sensible clothes too.”

  “Tweeds.”

  “Tweeds and wellies.”

  “So why did you ever abandon this old dear in the first place?”

  “It was the land of no opportunity. Too small for me. Too obsessed with its own history. Too many people who were big fish in a very small pond. I wanted something else.”

  Something else. I never found it. Why not? Because it lacked definition? Because I didn’t know where to look?

  Traffic was moving again. He took a turn off the main drag and down through rich sidestreets. Signs reported that security was in place. Electronic eyes, lasers, arc-lights, boobytraps. Hollywood under siege.

  Galloway took the freeway to Inglewood. He missed the radio. The silence inside the Toyota emphasised the sense of isolation, the vague unease he always felt on the deranged freeway systems of Los Angeles, those mental asylums of motion.

  Freddie Joaquin’s barbershop was situated in a small plaza of the kind that proliferated throughout the city. A bakery, a pizza place, a beauty shop, a diet control centre, a locksmith, and Kwik-Kuts. An old-fashioned red and white pole hung outside Joaquin’s establishment.

  Galloway went inside. Two barbers in pale blue smocks smoked cigarettes. A radio played soft rock music, a kind of auditory syrup. The floor was littered with amputated locks and curls. There were no customers. One of the barbers, a Filipino with tinted glasses, stared at Galloway.

  “Hay-cut, sir?” he asked.

  Galloway shook his head. “I’m looking for Freddie Joaquin.”

  The small man removed his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve, then replaced them very deliberately. The other barber, also Filipino, had a ragged goatee. He blew out cigarette smoke, which was sucked up and destroyed by the large blades of the ceiling fan.

  “Freddie’s not here,” said the man in the glasses.

  “Know where I can find him?”

  The one with the wispy beard asked, “Who are you? What you want with him?”

  From his hip pocket Galloway fished out his ID, which by some administrative oversight hadn’t been taken away from him. The Filipino barbers were not impressed. They lit fresh cigarettes and stared at how stirred air pushed strands of hair around the floor in little vortices.

  “This got something to do with Freddie’s lady friend that was killed last night?” the one in glasses asked. The other barber tugged at his beard.

  “That’s right,” Galloway said.

  “He already talked to the cops first thing this morning. Then he says he’s taking the rest of the day off.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “I’ll tell you, as long as you don’t tell Freddie where you heard this. You understand me?” He walked to the door, pointed a finger, said Galloway should make a right at the stop light, drive four blocks east, make another right. There, halfway down the block, he’d find a place called Joolies. Joaquin would be inside.

  “You see Freddie, just remember his grief, okay? You treat him good.”

  “With kid gloves,” Galloway said.

  He walked to his car. The barber watched him from the doorway. It was one of those odd moments in which the intensity of heat seemed to have expanded space. The parking-lot appeared larger, the Toyota further away than he remembered, and there were no shadows, which heightened a general sense of unreality. When he got behind the wheel of his car he glanced back at Kwik-Kuts, but the doorway was empty now. The façade of windows in the plaza might have had nothing of substance behind them, as if each little shop were no more than a prop broiling in the stark light.

  When he found Joolies it turned out to be a bar with black windows and a sign advertising Girls Girls Girls Morning to Night. The front door squealed as he pushed it open. He stepped inside the darkness, which was that of a cave. Accustomed to sunlight, he could see nothing. He had an impression of shadowy figures, and heard music from a jukebox, but it was minutes before he felt enough confidence to move without bumping into anything.

  He went down a short flight of steps toward the bar. Emerging from the gloom, a young barman asked, “What can I do for you, friend?”

  Galloway longed for ice-cold beer. The inside of his mouth was dry. The chorus in his mind chanted its usual rallying cry. Beer beer beer! Charlie needs his beer! Give the bugger his suds!

  “Club soda,” he said.

  “Club soda, you got it.” A small sparkling bottle was produced, uncapped, and poured into a glass already filled with ice cubes. You never saw a really good barman make his moves. He was like a magician who pulled everything together at once. A half-moon of lime, conjured out of nowhere, floated on the bubbles.

  Galloway laid a five dollar bill on the counter. He looked around the large room. In one corner a stage, enclosed by a silver curtain, had been erected. The floor, which stretched away into deep shadows, had about two hundred tables, some of which were occupied. Your basic cosy pub, he thought. A place for intimate encounters. The music from the jukebox was suddenly loud and the shaft of air from the air conditioner like shaved ice.

  The curtain parted. An oriental girl stood there in panties and garter-belt and lacy bra beneath a pale yellow spotlight. She looked out at the customers with an expression which, with just a touch more conviction, might have passed as lethargy. She moved her hips, cupped her hands under her breasts, discarded her bra, slid her fingers inside her panties. The homogenised strip. Something seriously bland was taking place. The girl turned her back to the room and showed the cleft of her ass. Peekaboo! The curtain fell in place, the music stopped. Around the room there was some desultory clapping, which faded rapidly out.

  Galloway turned to the barman. “I’m looking for Freddie Joaquin. I’m told he might be here.” A strange place to be, he thought, if you’re working on some grief. On the other hand, maybe it was fine if distraction was your goal. But a familiar Presbyterian ghost in him doubted the propriety of it. You didn’t bring your fresh grief, if you had any, to a dump like this. You tended to it in a quiet place, in secrecy, behind drawn curtains.

  The barman, a friendly Filipino, nodded across the room. “He’s over there,” he said. “That table by the fire exit.”

  Galloway pushed the change from his five dollar bill toward the young man, then made his way across the floor. Freddie Joaquin sat alone.

  “You mind if I join you?”

  Joaquin looked up. “You a cop? I talked with cops this morning already.”

  Galloway sat down, sliding his ID toward Freddie Joaquin, who examined it without expression. “Like I said. I already talked with your colleagues.”

  Joaquin ran a hand across the surface of his slicked-down black hair. Dapper was the word that came into Galloway’s mind. Freddie, probably in his middle fifties, was about five feet two inches tall and wore an immaculate black and white pin-striped suit, a white silk shirt, a charcoal-coloured tie pierced by a pearl-headed pin. His feet were small, his black shoes as glossy as anything dipped in wet black wax. He had a broad nose, flat cheekbones, very white teeth, one of which was filled with a sliver of gold.


  Galloway’s first impression was that he couldn’t quite imagine this man actively courting Ella Nazarena, who’d been a rather unassuming woman with no particular interest in clothes or makeup. There was a discordant note here, an incongruity. Maybe they had in common an interest he could only guess at. Ballroom dancing, listening to music, how could he know?

  The curtain parted again. A big blond girl came out on stage. To scale her huge breasts for the sake of love, Galloway thought, would require ropes and grappling irons and a head for heights. Her excess flesh shuddered in soft rolls when she moved to the music.

  Freddie Joaquin said, “Her name’s Brenda. Takes a man’s mind off things.”

  “I’m glad your mind’s got somewhere to go,” said Galloway, unsettled by Joaquin’s concentration on the stripper. Didn’t he feel anything about the death of Mrs Nazarena? Or was he shellshocked? “Let’s talk about Ella, Freddie.”

  “Don’t be fooled by my presence in this joint,” Joaquin said, as if he intuited Galloway’s misgivings. “I feel grief for Ella right in here,” and he thumped his breastbone with his fist even as he continued to observe the stage. “Everything I know I told the cops already.”

  “I’m anxious for a replay. Tell me.”

  “She was a saint. She never hurt nobody. Who’d kill a woman like that?”

  “It appears robbery wasn’t the motive,” Galloway said. “So we can rule out a thief.”

  Joaquin made a gesture with his hand that seemed to suggest he and Galloway, being men of the world, could understand each other. “To guys like you and me, she was a poor woman. To a junkie, hey, maybe a different story. He looks at a TV and he sees his next fix. Know what I mean? There’s a struggle. He shoots her. He panics, then splits. Who knows?”