Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  Galloway sipped his club soda. His hand gripped the glass a little too tightly.

  Joaquin continued, “I told her a hundred times. Move to a better neighbourhood. With what? she asks. I’ll pay, that’s what I tell her. She was palalo … proud. She wouldn’t take my money. I proposed marriage. She says she needs time to think.”

  He reached for his drink, mango juice and rum. He glanced over the edge of his glass at Galloway. His dark brown eyes were suddenly wet. Why am I not touched? Galloway wondered. Why do I feel I’m being sold some fake grief? He knew what was disjointed here – this unenticing place and Joaquin’s seedy enthusiasm for Brenda, who had already stripped down to her bald pudendum, which suggested a small endangered creature cruelly exposed.

  “Where were you last night?” Galloway asked.

  “I stayed home. I watched TV. Wheel of Fortune. Hollywood Squares. I told all this to Lieutenant Duffy.”

  “You were alone all night?”

  “Sure, alone.”

  “You didn’t see Ella yesterday?”

  “I called her about seven. She said she was too fired to do anything, didn’t want to go out. Ikáw ang bahalá, I told her. It’s up to you. So I didn’t see her.”

  Galloway said, “She was anxious to talk to me, but I got to her house too late. Do you have any idea what she had to tell me?”

  Freddie Joaquin shook his sleek head. “No idea.”

  “Did she ever mention my name to you?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  The music stopped, the curtain fell. Brenda, pink and glistening, vanished. Before she did she blew a pouting kiss toward Joaquin, who pretended it was meant for someone else. He took a white silk handkerchief from his pants pocket and held it against his face. He blew his nose, a tromboning sound.

  “Good friend of yours?” Galloway asked.

  “We’ve, hey, you know, met.”

  “I could see where she’d help ease your grief, Freddie.” Galloway remembered the dogs suddenly. The memory was red and harsh. He had a sick sensation in his stomach. He looked at Joaquin and knew for certain that Freddie had been banging the blond stripper on a regular basis, perhaps even as he pursued his role as Ella Nazarena’s ‘beau’.

  A monogram adorned the corner of Joaquin’s handkerchief. FJ. The expensive hand-stitched initials, the man’s vanity, the relationship with the stripper – what had Ella seen in him? What had he seen in her? Galloway couldn’t get it fixed in his mind.

  “Maybe Ella mentioned Karen, my wife?”

  Freddie Joaquin shrugged. “Sometimes she talked, but I didn’t listen too close. You know how women are. You sit, you nod your head, yeah yeah. Maybe she mentioned your name. Maybe your wife’s. Look. I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  Galloway felt an odd disembodied dislike toward Freddie Joaquin; it had the texture of a cold shadow falling upon the back of his neck.

  On the stage a drunken overweight man in white T-shirt and droopy blue jeans was hamming a striptease, swivelling his hips as if he were burdened by a hula-hoop of solid lead. His cronies, gathered round a nearby table, hooted and clapped and whistled. The drunk, whose behaviour reminded Charlie Galloway of certain embarrassing exhibitions of his own, took off his shirt and tossed it in the air.

  Joaquin looked at his watch. “I have an appointment,” he said. “You have to excuse me.”

  Galloway put his hand on the man’s arm. “Did she have any enemies?”

  “Enemies? Ella?” Joaquin smiled. “I told you. She was a saint.”

  “Somebody didn’t think so. Somebody fired a gun into her skull.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  Freddie Joaquin stood up, but Galloway still clutched his wrist. “Don’t hold anything back from me, Freddie. If there’s something you know, tell me now. Don’t waste my time.”

  “If I knew something, you think I’d keep it to myself? I hear anything, cross my heart, you’ll be the first to know. Okay? I give my word.”

  Freddie Joaquin walked away from the table. I give my word. Galloway had the feeling that Freddie’s word wasn’t something you could take to the bank. It had no collateral. Despite the pin-striped suit, the silk handkerchief, the pearl tie-pin, Freddie was sleazy. Perhaps Ella Nazarena never saw this side to him. Maybe he was all flowers and charm to her, all smiles and little gold flashes. Mr Fidelity, the perfect suitor.

  Galloway pushed back his chair and stood up. He was beset by a feeling of uselessness. What could Freddie Joaquin tell him? What difference did it make if the man was a scumbag? How much simpler it would be to go to the bar and drink the rest of the day away and forget the death of Ella Nazarena and all your former resolve to change, which was too demanding. If you started drinking now, you wouldn’t be aware of the passage of time because the black windows concealed the outside world. You’d be encapsulated in whatever version of reality you chose. Since you didn’t like being the flaw known as Charlie Galloway, you could be anybody else you wanted, pretender to the ancient throne of Scotland, a laird slumming, anybody in the whole damn world.

  He reached the bar, paused. On stage the male stripper stepped out of his jeans, showing a pair of fat white thighs and floppy boxer shorts with a penguin design. His feet became entangled in the legs of his jeans and he fell over. Thudddd. Galloway considered this humiliating display a warning. He pushed the front door open.

  Outside, he watched Freddie Joaquin’s car, a big gunmetal Oldsmobile, back out of the parking-lot just a little too quickly. The bitter smell of rubber hung in the air as Charlie Galloway moved toward his Toyota.

  Where was Freddie going in such a godawful hurry?

  The voice on the telephone had directed Armando Teng to an old-fashioned diner on Venice Boulevard. Inside he ordered coffee and sat down at a table, unfolding yesterday’s copy of the Manila Bulletin, as he’d been instructed to do. Raising his face, feeling still the weight of a fatigue many hours of sleep hadn’t altogether lifted, he looked across the chromium-plated room.

  The United States of America, he thought. The country of his father’s birth. He had dreamed of this country in an embittered way for almost as long as he could remember. All through his childhood in Benguet Province his mother had talked about the American sailor who’d fathered him and then vanished without trace. Teng’s father, of whom no photograph existed, had apparently been tall and blue-eyed. Very handsome, his mother had said more than once. Magandang lalaki. You look like him sometimes. When she spoke of him her eyes always filled with tears, a tendency the young Teng had found irritating.

  Teng’s mother, Teresita, had met the American sailor in Olongapo City where she worked as a waitress in a restaurant. She wasn’t a whore. She was a naive seventeen-year-old from La Trinidad, a pretty girl who’d gone to Olongapo to find work. She fell in love and fantasised marriage, a life in far-off America, magic kingdom, Mickey Mouse. A house with a TV, a refrigerator, even a car in the driveway. All she knew was what she’d seen in magazine photographs or movies. She adored her sailor’s fine blond hair, his white skin and blue eyes. When she lay with him she thought she could hear an angel sing.

  It never occurred to her to question the sailor’s feelings. When they coupled passionately in the hotel room he rented for the purpose, she believed the intimacy was one of pure love, which inevitably led – as she well knew in her romantic young heart – to marriage. When she told her sailor she was pregnant, he didn’t seem distressed. He said he’d marry her. He even seemed happy at the prospect. They went to the hotel on Barretto Street and made love and later he kissed her goodbye. She never saw him again, never heard from him. He left her with an emptiness she’d never been able to fill.

  When she was five months pregnant she’d written a letter to the base commander at Subic Bay, asking the whereabouts of the father. She received no answer. Subsequent letters were ignored. After Armando was born, Teresita took more direct action. With the child in her arms she went to Subic, where she was passed from one indifferen
t officer to another, a demeaning process during which her courage, fragile at best in circumstances that overawed her, was lost entirely. She was a tiny thing and the base vast and unfriendly. Weeping, she was led in the end to a man who wore the dog-collar of a chaplain.

  The chaplain asked for information about the father, even if he knew there was no real point to it. The child’s father, protected by the US Navy whose policy was to transfer men who’d impregnated local girls but didn’t want to be daddies, would have been posted thousands of miles away. He went through the motions anyhow. Name? Place of birth in the United States? Teresita didn’t know the answer to the second question. The first, though, was easy.

  Her sailor was called Walter Cronkite. The chaplain looked away.

  Armando Teng was nine when he first realised, from reading a US newspaper, that his father had used a ridiculous nom d’amour. The knowledge outraged him and brought more unhappiness into a childhood already tainted by his blue-eyed appearance, which set him apart from his companions and made close friendships difficult. He was relentlessly teased and so turned, as many goaded children do, inward, detached from those around him. A skein of loneliness lay across his whole youth. He remembered lying awake in the dark and quietly castigating his mother for her indiscretion, her idiot trust in the sailor, her unshakable belief that he’d one day return. Fool! Didn’t Teresita know he was never coming back? She kept the faith the way one keeps a candle burning in a window for a dead love.

  Sometimes he imagined his father sharing a mean-spirited joke with his shipmates about the gullible young Filipina who believed he was really called Walter Cronkite. Simple-minded gook cunt. Would he say something like that? Would they all laugh? Yes.

  For years Teng hated his unknown father with a loathing so deep and frightening it seemed to stand darkly apart from himself. With the same intensity he also despised the country that had sent the blue-eyed sailor to the Philippines in the first place. What were Americans doing on Filipino soil? Why did they behave with such arrogance, as if the country belonged to them? Why did they impose themselves so? He could even remember in his early childhood listening to records of American Christmas carols in the shops of Baguio. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose … what did this rubbish mean to any Filipino? What was Jack Frost? What were reindeers in the snow? Teng couldn’t recall ever having seen a chestnut. American popular culture was duplicated in hamburger joints, beauty pageants, fashion, music, cinema. American icons – Presley, Rambo, even George Washington – were accepted into the fabric of a Filipino way of life becoming threadbare.

  The United States had controlled the Philippines for most of the twentieth century, replacing the Spanish with a different brand of colonialism, insidious, bloated with the rhetoric of progress. Hundreds of teachers arrived in the early years of the century from America, educational missionaries forced into miserably humid outposts where they underwent discomfort and dysentery and exotic diseases so that they might hastily supplant the Spanish language with English, and unselfishly ‘Christianise’ their little brown brothers – a guilty reaction, Teng thought, to the disastrous War of Filipino Independence, during which hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were killed by fine American boys from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio. (By the time the war was over in 1902, only eight hundred and eighty-three Americans had died. Teng always remembered this. 883. The number came in his mind to represent American supremacy over the Philippines. It assumed a significance almost supernatural.)

  Civilise, Christianise, Americanise. The words were interchangeable. The sentiment was always the same: America was the selfless bringer of gifts, the greatest of which was the Democratic Way of Life – a system that culminated in the person of Ferdinand Marcos.

  In his teens Teng flirted with various nationalist movements, many of which fell apart during the years of martial law imposed by this same Marcos, lover of democracy, keeper of the keys to freedom, buddy to one US President after another. But the nationalist groups splintered in a confusion of aspirations and acronyms; in the end all that linked them was the fact they detested America.

  When he was eighteen something happened to make Teng realise he’d squandered too much of his life in the wastelands of hatred. He fell quite unexpectedly in love. Love transformed him. It burned the chill out of his heart. He came to live in a state of awe and bewilderment, concussed by his own feelings. Love seemed to him a glorious, joyful sickness.

  He understood for the first time what his mother must have felt for her American sailor, and he absolved her for his paternity; he realised that where love led you had no choice but to follow. Consuming, fiery, sharp-edged, terrible, love involved a series of wondrous paradoxes – the resolution of which made absolutely no damned difference to the sensation. A leaf in a flood, swept carelessly away. You were reduced to that. Teng would not have thought it possible, the trembling pleasure, the obsession, the terror of heartbreak.

  The girl was called Marissa Orosa, a history student at the State University in La Trinidad, where Teng had enrolled to study economics. Small, with long dark hair she wore almost to her waist, she mesmerised him. She was beautiful. (How many lonely, frustrating nights did he spend trying to write poems to that beauty, for which he never had quite the words? He suffered the linguistic grief of all who love with passion and are struck dumb. Love, he understood, has no language, neither in Tagalog nor English nor any other tongue.)

  Marissa was both beautiful and political, the magnetic centre of a group of students working for an independent Philippines, a democracy, yes, but one that did not rely for its existence on the presence of the United States. Communism was no answer for her. She despised the New People’s Army; she was too independent, too high-spirited to accept the imposition of drab Maoism, which had been imported intact from China. As for Marcos, she held him in such low esteem she could hardly mention his name, and Imelda – well, Imelda was a joke, a bad joke, somebody Marissa impersonated, with startling precision, at parties. Teng had never before met a woman with her shrewd intelligence, her unexpected sense of fun.

  She regarded Teng’s adoration at first with curiosity, keeping him at a distance as if she were unwilling to make an emotional commitment. She had a degree to get. She was busy with politics. What time did she have for love? But his persistence charmed her, and the nervous way he behaved around her was touching. He had all the persuasive, sweet-natured clumsiness of a young man in the crucible of first love. How could she keep saying no to him?

  Teng sipped his coffee, closed his eyes. Marissa occupied the most raw area of his heart. It was a place he kept returning to, despite the pain. He wanted to remember her, he lovingly accumulated recollections of her, gathered up and stored each detail he could find – an expression, a motion of her head, the proud way she walked, the wind in her long hair the day they’d climbed the two hundred and twenty-five steps going up Mirador Hill to the Lourdes shrine in Baguio, how she’d lit a votive candle with her small hand cupped protectively round the flame – he preserved these memories, as if he truly believed that from a framework of bare bones he could reconstruct the woman.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a man who sat down at his table. Teng opened his eyes.

  “Mabúhay,” the man said.

  “Mabúhay.” The greeting was the one Teng expected, but he felt tension tighten inside him. Was this man the one? What if something had already gone wrong and this man had been sent to trap him? Mabúhay was a common Tagalog greeting; it was the next part that really counted, the connection of flesh.

  “Raymond Cruz?” The man smiled, holding out his hand for Teng to shake it.

  Teng did so slowly, relieved to find the handshake correct, the position and pressure of thumb exactly right. It was as Baltazar had said. A sign of flesh, almost masonic.

  “I’m Freddie Joaquin. Welcome to America.”

  Teng folded his copy of the Bulletin. The headline had to do with corruption in the Filipino gov
ernment, everyday news.

  Joaquin said, “Follow me.”

  They walked together out of the diner. Hot concrete burned through the thin soles of Teng’s shoes.

  “Is everything arranged?” he asked.

  Joaquin smiled. “Sure. When Freddie Joaquin runs something, he really runs it. Smooth sailing, my friend.”

  Armando Teng experienced one of those slowed-down, jet-lagged moments when sunlight seemed to dim, creating the impression that Joaquin had dwindled an inch or so. Then it passed and he felt fine again and everything was the way it had been before.

  “I booked you into a hotel. I’ll take you there now.”

  “Another hotel?”

  “In a hotel you have privacy. You can be anonymous. Where did you think you’d sleep?”

  Joe Baltazar hadn’t mentioned a second hotel. Teng had an uneasy sense of having no control over events; his destiny lay in the hands of Baltazar. He knew he couldn’t do everything himself – but why did he so dislike being forced to depend, at least some of the time, on others?

  Marissa. He’d depended on her. No, it was more than that, more than mere reliance. He’d lived for her. That was the best way to phrase it: he’d lived for her love. And now Marissa was gone and he felt as hollow as a gutted building. When she’d first died he thought a light had gone out inside him. Now he knew better. Far more than a simple light had been extinguished; all his wiring had short-circuited.

  He shook his head, fighting dizziness. Everything was going to be fine. Nothing would go wrong. What he experienced now was simply the stress of an eight thousand mile journey through seven or eight time zones. He followed Freddie Joaquin inside a darkened parking-garage across the street, where trapped heat and gasoline fumes and the scorched stench of overheated engines suggested one of the levels of hell.