Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  He looked at Joaquin. “Who employs Galloway?”

  Joaquin told him.

  Teng said to himself, Calm, calm. “And why was he asking you questions?”

  Freddie Joaquin busied himself again, adjusting his rearview mirror, running his handkerchief over the steering-wheel as if it were dusty. “A woman was murdered,” he said quietly.

  “Who?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Answer my question.”

  Joaquin crumpled his handkerchief in the palm of his hand. “She was a cleaner. For years she’d been working in my shop couple times a week. She could have harmed you. Okay?”

  “How?”

  “She knew you were coming.”

  “How did she know that?”

  Joaquin said, “News from Benguet, her province. You know the way the grapevine works. She had a letter from a cousin in La Trinidad.”

  “What was this cousin’s name?”

  “Cara Panganiban. Sister of Leo.”

  Leo Panganiban had been one of the gunmen in the field the morning of Deduro’s assassination. A courageous man, Leo had one unforgivable fault; he liked to tell bloated tales of his own exploits when he’d had a few drinks. In an idle, beery moment, he might have hinted to Cara that something was happening in which he’d played a vital part, that he was privy to important information. Cara, in turn, could have written a letter to her cousin Ella Nazarena, relaying this news.

  It was all too likely. Teng well understood the elaborate system of family networks that formed the basis of Filipino society, the clans, the ancestral bonds, the responsibilities of blood. Cousins and second cousins, aunts and great-aunts, the close relative and the distant one – there was a consistency, an adhesion between all the members of a family, a tribal quality that persisted no matter how far the members might be scattered. Phone-calls, letters, postcards, gossip transmitted from a man in Ormoc City to his sister in Tacloban or his uncle in Catbalogan; news was precious, an antidote to the boredom of poverty, a form of song that filled the silences of despair, and it expanded the more it travelled. It became epic. People hungered for nuggets of information, tales, yarns, bulletins of deaths and marriages, divorces and blighted loves. Given this massive ebb and flow of gossip, secrecy could be maintained only with great difficulty, a fact about which Teng had always been concerned.

  “What did the letter say?”

  “Somebody was coming to the United States to avenge the gabi ng kamàtayan.”

  The night of death. That was how it had come to be known.

  There had been other such nights elsewhere in the Philippines, other horrors, but when Joaquin mentioned the gabi ng kamàtayan he referred only to one night, one specific darkness, one place.

  “Was I mentioned by name?” Teng asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What name?”

  Joaquin said, “As Armando Teng.”

  This information troubled Teng, who silently regarded the window of the convenience store, which advertised a Cherry Slurpee. The notion that his real name had come up was a source of concern to him. Again, he returned to the realisation that secrets, in a society clamouring for family information, were hard to keep. And if Freddie Joaquin knew Raymond Cruz was a pseudonym, a nom de guerre, how many others were also aware?

  “The woman was going to show the letter to Galloway,” Joaquin said.

  “And you believe he could have found me? You believe he could have discovered why I am here?”

  “Yes.”

  “The passport I carry indentifies me as Raymond Cruz. I’ve used dozens of different names over the last few years. How could Galloway have connected me with somebody called Teng?”

  The young man’s calm smile upset Joaquin, the graph of whose life had brought him from a dirt-floor grain-store in Tarlac to a barbershop in Inglewood. Freddie imbued the Los Angeles Police Department with omniscience. It was no backwater constabulary with one telephone, no handful of uniformed drunks with outdated rifles playing cards all day long in a corrugated tin shack somewhere in Ilocos Norte. No. The LAPD had computers and listening-devices and infra-red cameras and all kinds of high technology at its disposal. It was obvious Teng had absolutely no understanding of the vast resources Galloway could use. How difficult would it be for Galloway to make a connection between Teng and Cruz, and perhaps discover Teng’s reason for being in the United States? Cara Panganiban’s letter to Ella would have been enough to start a whole process rolling. Freddie wished with all his heart he’d never agreed in the first place to do a ‘small’ favour for Joe Baltazar, his brother-in-law, a man too easy to enrage, more than a little crazy. Back in the early days of Joe’s marriage to Freddie’s young sister, Joe had been fine, even-tempered, easy to get along with. But all that had changed.

  “The LAPD can make inquiries with the Philippines Constabulary. They’d dig and keep digging.”

  Teng remembered Freddie Joaquin’s phrase, smooth sailing. How inappropriate it seemed now. “And so the woman had to die, Freddie.”

  A bleak little expression crossed Freddie Joaquin’s face. “I couldn’t take the chance. I didn’t want her dead. But I didn’t want her to show that letter to Galloway. She kept changing her mind. One day she said she’d show it to him. The next day she wouldn’t. One day this, next day that. I told her it was nothing, gossip, ignore the goddam letter. I took her to dinner, I bought her flowers, I said I loved her. I even proposed marriage to her! If she was my wife, I thought, it would be easier for me to get the letter. But no, she decided she’d talk to Galloway anyway.”

  Teng said, “Perhaps she considered it her duty as a citizen of this great country.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, as if America were no more than a half-acre bounded by a tawdry convenience store, a few gas pumps gleaming in the sun, a parking-lot, a country where breakfast could be had for 99 cents.

  “Maybe,” Joaquin said.

  “Why didn’t you steal the letter?” Teng asked.

  “Steal it? She put it in a bank deposit box. How was I meant to steal it? Dynamite?”

  “It’s still in the bank?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Then it’s secure. Unless some bank clerk reads about the murder and makes the connection.”

  Joaquin said, “It’s in one of those big banks with thousands of deposit boxes so maybe nothing will happen until it’s time for the rental to be paid. When she doesn’t pay, then the safe will be opened. That could be months from now. There’s also the chance the cops might find out about the box, but I don’t think it’s likely unless they dig deep. I doubt they give a shit about the murder of a Filipina cleaning woman.”

  “Where did she keep the key?”

  “Who knows? She was always stashing things. She had hundreds of little boxes filled with cheap jewellery and souvenirs and holy things. I couldn’t find the key in any of them. She sure as hell didn’t wear it round her neck.”

  Armando Teng considered the letter a moment, then dismissed it as an abstraction, something sealed and locked inside a metal box. He did not think it a danger to him because he expected to complete his business and be gone again in a matter of days. It contributed an element he didn’t need, a certain extra source of anxiety, but he’d lived with worse. He told Freddie to drive.

  Joaquin continued along Santa Monica Boulevard. When they were a couple of blocks from the ocean, Teng asked, “Did you kill the woman yourself?”

  Freddie Joaquin made no reply for several minutes. The ocean, placid and blue, suggested a great sheet of neon under the brilliant sun. The boardwalk could be seen reaching out into the water like a primitive prosthetic arm. In the undulating heat the palm trees were reflections in funhouse mirrors.

  Joaquin parked the car and walked to a bench on the bluff overlooking the beach. Teng sat down beside him, stretching his long legs. Barely any breeze reached the palisades from the sands. The ocean might have been a thousand miles away and tideless, unaffected by gravity. />
  “What choice was there,” Freddie Joaquin said. He’d never killed before. Once, he’d wounded a man in a drunken dispute outside a café in Tarlac. This was different. In recollection, it seemed to him he looked at the murder of Ella from a point so high both victim and assassin were miniatures, meaningless little figures of clay surrounded by the tiny velvet Christs and microscopic plaster madonnas in Ella’s living-room. He suffered none of the remorse he’d anticipated. No darkness crowded his head. If there was anxiety it arose only from the possibility of discovery, not from the machinery of conscience. And if it happened that Galloway accused him for some reason, he knew he could deny to eternity the act of murder. It was a matter of convincing yourself you didn’t do it, you were elsewhere at the time. Besides, who saw you? You were innocent. A gospel truth.

  “Does Galloway suspect you?” Teng asked.

  “I don’t see how he could.” And yet Galloway had asked about a gun. Why?

  “Then you have nothing to worry about, do you?”

  Down on the sands beefy lifeguards played a game of volleyball. Teng observed them for a time, marvelling at their energy in the heat.

  “I couldn’t think of another way.” Joaquin stood up, raising one foot on the metal rail at the edge of the bluff. Nearby, a small boy in an LA Rams T-shirt peered through a pay telescope at the Pacific. Joaquin watched the kid a moment, then turned back to Teng, whose face was expressionless.

  “You did what you had to,” Teng said. “Unfortunate, of course. But now it’s finished.”

  Freddie Joaquin shrugged. A passing gull briefly threw a shadow across his face. “This is where I leave you.”

  “Leave me?”

  “Those are my instructions. Somebody else will meet you.”

  The idea of Joaquin’s departure made Teng feel unexpectedly isolated. For a moment he wondered what would happen if nobody showed up, if Joe Baltazar’s chain of ‘helpful people’ were broken and he was doomed to sit here alone. Helpful people. Ordinary people. While he’d been assembling his organisation, Joe couldn’t have foreseen that one of his ‘ordinary’ friends would commit murder.

  “Good luck,” Joaquin said.

  “Paalám.” Teng didn’t turn to watch Joaquin walk across the grass to his parked car. The little man had come into his life, then out again, a chapter closed, although with more incident than Teng liked.

  Alone, he watched the sands, the ocean, the white sails of small boats. A luxury yacht cruised about a mile from shore. Teng closed his eyes. The sun burned on his eyelids.

  For a second, he was possessed by the notion that his phantom father was nearby, a few streets away, perhaps even on the sands down there, perhaps a stroller walking the pathway along the bluff. It was such a strong sensation that Teng opened his eyes, half-expecting to see the man coming toward him. Ridiculous! How could he have recognised his father? The man might pass him on the street, or brush against him inside a store, and he’d never know. Dead or alive: even that basic distinction eluded him.

  A female jogger in tight silken blue shorts and red T-shirt pounded the pathway toward him. She had long black hair tied back in a rubber band. As she approached the bench she slowed. Bending, placing her hands on her knees for support even as she struggled to catch her breath, she looked at Teng curiously.

  “Raymond Cruz?” she asked, sweeping a stray strand of hair from her forehead. He raised his face.

  “Mabúhay,” she said, and reached out to shake his hand.

  9

  William Laforge turned the loaded revolver over and over in his hand before placing it carefully in the drawer of his bureau. It was a well-kept gun, frequently oiled. Although he was no aficionado of pistols, he knew how to use one. He liked the feel of the weapon, the sense of security it afforded him. He closed the drawer on it and thought: Nobody can touch me. Even if somebody means me harm, he will find me prepared.

  He walked to the window of his bedroom, which overlooked a sloping stretch of well-watered green lawn where a yellow and white parasol created shade above a picnic table and chairs. The lawn ended in a stand of brittle old beech trees. Laforge watched a squirrel pick at a crumb under the table and then, startled, scurry toward the trees. Perhaps the music Nick had been playing downstairs for the last hour had finally driven the creature off.

  Ever since the news of Alexander Bach’s death had been mentioned on one of those dramatic TV flashes the networks so love, the boy had been pointedly playing one Johann Sebastian Bach record after another. Now he was halfway through the Casals version of the Suites for Solo Cello. Laforge understood that the Bach marathon was the boy’s way of making some kind of comment, sarcastic, caustic, about the vacancy left by Sandy Bach’s demise, and Laforge’s own ambition to fill it. It was as if the kid were shouting over and over Bach’s dead, Bach’s dead, Bach’s dead.

  Carolyn, who had her own bedroom along the hallway, came in, dressed in a simple burgundy cotton dress. “Do we know exactly when he’s coming?” she asked. She was referring to Byron Truskett, whose aide Deets had telephoned a couple of hours ago.

  Laforge looked at his watch. “He should be here in about thirty minutes.”

  “Is there anything special we should do? Food? Drinks?”

  Laforge took his wife’s hand and pressed it between his own. Her skin was cool as usual. Her green eyes were frank and deep. Years ago he had thought of them as emerald: a young man’s fancy. Now they suggested an undiscovered gemstone, an older man’s whimsical description, ill-defined but somehow all the more precise for that. Young men nailed definitions to things. Older men, closer to mortality, resisted such limitations.

  “I can’t imagine,” he said. “He likes bourbon, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Carolyn sat in the window seat. “I wish Nick would change that music. I enjoy Bach as much as anyone, but there are limits.”

  “It’s his weird idea of fun.”

  “It’s not mine, William.” She shook her head, as if she were sad.

  Laforge saw how his wife’s cotton dress had risen above her knees and stayed there through a process of static electricity bonding skin to garment. The air-conditioning unlocked a sudden blast of cold air that made the fine hairs rise on the back of her arms.

  “Are there any surprises I should know about?” he asked.

  “None. Apparently if you come through the hearings unscathed, you’re a shoo-in. Isn’t that the expression? Nor must you have any lint in your navel. I quote.” She covered her smile with a hand, as if she were amused.

  “Last time I looked I saw none,” he said. “Did he stay with you long?”

  “Four hours, more or less,” she replied without turning. She was thinking that the picnic furniture needed a fresh coat of white paint. It was all this endless sunlight that had peeled the old paint. Everything was burning. The countryside. The cities. Everything.

  Laforge walked to the window. “You’ve never really talked much about him,” he said.

  “You’ve never really asked, William. What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever comes to your mind.”

  Downstairs, the sound of the cello seemed to fill all available physical space, as if the house itself had become one enormous speaker.

  “Byron has … stamina,” Carolyn said in a matter of fact way.

  “That hardly surprises me.”

  “He likes me to take him into my mouth, but not for long, because he comes too quickly.”

  Laforge, as though he were a chemist listening to the recitation of a formula, a sociologist hearing statistics reflecting a reality of which he has utterly no experience, waited for more. The sexual descriptions of Truskett and his wife didn’t thrill him; he wasn’t moved, as some men were, by accounts of a wife’s infidelity. He got no kick out of it. That would have been sick, kinky. Nor was he eaten by jealousy. It was merely interesting, and it gave him some knowledge about Truskett, but he was detached from the actuality, as though Carolyn were reading to him from a
work of fiction whose characters lived lives far removed from his own.

  “He likes it from behind,” she said. “I don’t mean anal intercourse, which isn’t my style. Once or twice he’s been rather surprisingly premature. He says I bewitch him. He says I have magic powers.”

  “Probably you do.”

  “He thinks so.”

  “How does he feel about making love to another man’s wife?”

  “I’d say he has absolutely no compunction about it. He neither thinks of you nor Miriam when he’s fucking me. You and she don’t exist. I think he has all the qualities – ambition, callous indifference and passion in equal measure – that will make him a fine President of the United States.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “I think he’d like to believe he’s in love with me.”

  Laforge was quiet for a moment. “Do you have feelings for him?”

  “You know me better than that, my dear.”

  In a tentative way, Laforge cupped one hand around his wife’s elbow. With this simple touch, he possessed her more completely than Truskett ever could. He possessed her frankness and her honesty, which was more than she ever gave anyone else. She was loyal to him in a way that transcended the banality of sexual infidelity. Truskett might penetrate her deeply but he could never find the source of her because she wasn’t there to be discovered by him. That part of her which belonged to Laforge, and to her marriage, that part beyond cunt, beyond the easy intimacies of flesh, was inviolate, a room she kept locked, her cell of privacy.

  The relationship between Laforge and his wife, which might have struck many as bizarre, was – at least to the Laforges – an uncomplicated arrangement, and had nothing to do with such outmoded notions as open marriages in which spouses were free to find other sexual partners; nor did it imply that Laforge sought vicarious thrills through Carolyn’s exploits, a situation he knew happened sometimes in jaded marriages. Their marriage was not remotely weary. If anything, the bond between them was stronger than it had been eighteen years ago at their wedding, because time had stripped the relationship of all pretence, all the subterfuge and pain that came from structuring a life on the flimsy scaffold of lies that characterised so many marriages.