Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  “I will, I promise,” said Galloway, and he felt infinitely weary, as if he’d been born with a second-hand soul that had already done too much mileage under its first owner. “As soon as I know who’s responsible.”

  “Oh, I can tell you that, love,” Evelyn Thompson said in her muffled voice. “I can name Ella’s killer before you can sing Lloyd George Knew My Father.”

  10

  The girl’s name was Lizzie Honculada. Barefoot, she drove Teng in a yellow VW convertible to a house in a quiet back street no more than a mile from the palisades. She said nothing on the way, as if she were involved in Teng’s business reluctantly; the less she spoke the more distance she’d maintain. He glanced once or twice at her, thinking how her dark forceful eyes made her attractive. Released from the rubber band, her straight black hair flowed over her shoulders. Her brown calves were slender and firm. He assumed she was a second generation immigrant, perhaps even third. She drove with a confidence that came from belonging completely in one’s environment. An American.

  He envied her this facility. Increasingly he was losing touch with himself, confused by unfamiliar streets and signs and architecture, even by the scents in the air. He had no perception of how one street related to the next, one boulevard to another. He’d lost north and south; the planet might have tilted on its axis. This very strangeness made him ill at ease. He was also unhappy having to depend on people he didn’t know, like Joaquin and this Lizzie Honculada. He needed sleep now, he realised that. But when was he going to get the chance? Was he to be passed continually from one person to the next, trapped in the blueprint of Baltazar’s connections? He should have made his own arrangements, but how could he? Joe Baltazar, who had spent five years of his life in the United States as an illegal alien, was the one with all the associations in this country.

  He shut his eyes, drifted, dreaming for a moment he was in Manila and riding in dense, oily traffic along the smoky Epifanio de los Santos, EDSA, the street of the so-called People’s Revolution, Cory Aquino leading the masses in her yellow dress – yellow and bright, the colour of eventual disappointment – but then he was jolted back into awareness when the girl stopped the car outside a large white house surrounded by palm trees. It reminded him of the great houses in Forbes Park, except there were no uniformed gunmen standing guard to protect the wealthy, nothing save a small sign advertising an electronic security system.

  “Our stop,” she said.

  He followed her through an arched metal gate and across a courtyard which, though leafy and shaded, was insufferably hot. She opened a mahogany door, each panel of which depicted the martyred face of a saint cut by Filipino woodcarvers. Inside a vaulted white room where light was filtered by stained-glass windows, the girl led Teng down into a sunken sitting-room. The paintings on the walls were the works of Filipino artists, primitive seascapes, fishing villages; on shelves stood religious relics, antiques carved from wood that had darkened centuries ago.

  “Sit down if you like,” said the girl.

  Teng did so. What happened next? What role did the girl play in this business? She walked to the fireplace and sat cross-legged on a rug created in the brightly-striped Bontoc fashion of Northern Luzon. She was gazing at him with what he considered impolite curiosity. There was an independent quality to her. She didn’t give a damn what other people thought of her, Teng included.

  “Welcome to my home,” said a voice from behind Teng, who turned round in his chair to see a middle-aged man in white linen slacks and an expensive polo barong made from very fine piña, exquisitely stitched. The man introduced himself as James Honculada and held out his hand for Teng to shake.

  “Can I have Lizzie make you a drink?” He gestured toward the girl, who didn’t look happy at the idea of playing maid.

  Teng, wondering if they were father and daughter or husband and wife, declined.

  Honculada sat on the arm of a sofa. “At least tell me you’re hungry.”

  Teng said he wasn’t. Unable to hide his disappointment, Honculada remarked that he’d prepared a number of native dishes, tinola, utak-utak, taberac as a dessert. Since it was bad etiquette to refuse hospitality, Teng fought a wave of fatigue that rolled across him and amiably agreed to eat. The girl, with some slight reluctance, went out of the room to fetch the food.

  “How was Joe Baltazar when you last saw him?” Honculada asked. His English had hardly any trace of an accent.

  “He was fine. He’d had some minor eye surgery, but apart from that …” Teng set aside his impatience for the sake of this small talk, but his mind was elsewhere. What was planned for him? When was he supposed to fulfil his task? After Joaquin, was Honculada the one who’d point the way? Or was he merely another brick in Baltazar’s architecture?

  Honculada whispered, “My daughter doesn’t know why you’ve come here. So far as she’s concerned, you’re somebody on vacation, a friend of a friend. You’re passing through and we’re being helpful because you’re from my old barangay. The less she knows, the better for her.”

  Teng, wondering if Honculada, like Freddie Joaquin, knew Cruz was an assumed name, signalled his understanding just as the girl returned with a tray, which she set on a smoked glass coffee table. Teng spooned a small portion of the fish soup, tinola, and picked at the peppery utak-utak. He hardly touched dessert. His hosts joined him, but only the man appeared to have an appetite. The girl pushed the food around, as if it disgusted her. After eating, Honculada lit a cigarette.

  “Food from the old country is always a pleasure,” he said. “Here it’s hamburgers. Barbecued steaks. Fried chicken. Everything’s American, including my daughter, who was born in Los Angeles and is very proud of the fact. She went to Manila about five years ago when she was fifteen. Two hours later she wanted to come home. Hated it.”

  “It’s the pits,” the girl remarked. She made an ugly face, shuddering as she did so, as if she were remembering a horror movie that had scared her as a child.

  Teng despised the girl’s gesture, which implied a lack of sensitivity, a failure to understand the plight of the Philippines. But she was American, and as far as Teng was concerned all the Americans he’d met were self-absorbed. They had no curiosity about what lay beyond their own boundaries except as tourists, isolated from reality in buses and taxicabs and expensive hotels. They strutted the globe, driven by a lust to accumulate the indigenous artefacts of the Third World poor that became conversation pieces, dinner party fodder. Sweetie, the filthy little shop where we bought that adorable statue, you wouldn’t believe! There was meat covered with flies in a window and cow-dung everywhere. The way some people live.

  In Manila and Baguio Teng had seen Americans glide past like absentee landlords running a disapproving eye over how their property had been mismanaged. Or you saw old GIs in Bataan and Corregidor, half-drunk and embarrassingly sentimental, filled with self-delusion about their brave stand against the Japanese in the name of liberty – liberty for themselves, as it turned out, not for their Filipino allies who had made incalculable sacrifices in that same war. How many Americans realised that Manila was one of the four or five cities most destroyed in the whole Second World War? For that matter, how many knew where the Philippines were located? It was said of President McKinley, after the Americans liberated’ the country from the Spanish in 1898, that he had no idea where the islands were situated. Nothing, it seemed to Teng, had changed in that attitude since.

  He smiled politely at Lizzie and said, “Manila’s a poor city in a poor country. What can you expect?”

  “For starters, electricity that doesn’t keep going out. Clean rivers. Streetlights. Pollution control. No beggars. No child whores.”

  “And better shopping malls?” Teng asked. “Bigger discos?”

  “I hate being patronised.”

  “I’m only trying to point out that your expectations are coloured by your own experiences,” Teng said quietly. “You can’t go to the Philippines and expect to find America. Excuse me for s
aying so, but it’s naive and unrealistic.”

  “They try hard enough to be Americans over there,” Lizzie said defensively. She was clearly unaccustomed to men arguing with her. “They copy our music, our dances, our clothes, our whole style.”

  “Which you export with the same impressive vigour that accompanies all your enterprises,” Teng replied, a small barbed note in his voice. The girl’s superficiality irritated but did not surprise him. His impression was that Lizzie Honculada’s entire society was constructed on the basis of image, a country whose political leaders took as their only guide to international policy neither truth nor reason but narcissism.

  James Honculada said, “America has been kind to us. Look at this house. I worked hard in real estate, sure, but the opportunity was here to take. Under Marcos I had nothing, including hope. When I saw the direction his regime was taking I had no choice except to flee. So who can blame Lizzie for thinking the US is the only place on God’s planet? She wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else. She’s a true blue patriot.”

  “Does Mr Cruz see anything wrong with that?” Lizzie asked.

  Teng said, “Absolutely nothing. All good Americans believe in justice and liberty, don’t they? The eternal virtues.”

  Lizzie smiled at him with dazzling insincerity. “You can’t say anything without mocking, can you?”

  “Was I doing that?” Teng looked at one of the stained-glass panels. Sunlight, rearranged in red and yellow abstracts, slid softly into the room.

  “That’s how it sounded to me,” the girl said.

  “Then I apologise.”

  Lizzie Honculada looked unconvinced. “I don’t know if I accept your apology, Mr Cruz. It doesn’t have the right ring to it. In this country we expect an apology to have a certain tone.”

  “Then allow me to be sorry in my own language,” he answered. “Dinarandam ko. There. Is that the tone of remorse you desire?”

  “You’re a hell of an actor, I must say.”

  Teng inclined his head, an acknowledgement of her sarcasm. He fell silent. He didn’t have the energy to goad or be goaded.

  He observed the girl for a time, thinking how many times he’d seen faces similar to hers on the streets of Manila or Quezon City or Cebu, the same colour of skin, eyes of precisely that shape, hair just as black. The similarities were all superficial. Lizzie Honculada was the product of the USA, a country that reduced a person to bland unquestioning chauvinism. He’d seen it in Olongapo and Angeles City on the arrogant faces of the droves of short-haired young men, marines, tattooed sailors, flyers, who drank themselves into a mass stupor and tunelessly roared Born in the USA in bars and clubs where they treated every Filipina like a whore, and every Filipino like a menial, a steward. It was an attitude obviously drummed into their young skulls at schools. Home of the brave and free, land of the superior. Americans acted like people who had God’s telephone number.

  Teng looked at James Honculada. Was he any better than his daughter? Even if he did cling to some of the old things, such as the food and the shirt he wore, were they anything more than quaint to him, dead souvenirs of a world he’d left long ago? Teng experienced an inexplicable sadness he attributed to fatigue. He had to get out of this place and return to his hotel and lie down in darkness with his eyes shut.

  He looked at Lizzie Honculada and he was struck by the unthinkable: She resembles Marissa. He realised with a shock that this was where his sorrow lay, in this tiny resemblance, this almost imperceptible likeness. More than her speech, her American attitudes, her disdain, was this the reason she irritated him so much?

  He was chilled. He might have been immersed in cold water. His lungs flooded with frost. Momentarily he was unable to draw air into his body. Then the resemblance passed. He’d been mistaken. His myopic heart was too quick to forge a counterfeit reality. Would it always be this way?

  He looked at James Honculada and, thanking him for the food, said he wanted to return to his hotel, that he needed sleep.

  “Lizzie will be happy to drive you.”

  Armando Teng said it wouldn’t be necessary, he could take a taxi. The girl rattled her car keys, which were attached to a clear plastic cube in which a dead butterfly was entombed.

  “We wouldn’t hear of it,” Honculada said. He walked with Teng to the front door, where they shook hands. “You need sleep, Raymond. Tomorrow’s a busy day.”

  Teng looked at his host’s eyes, the whites of which were slightly yellow from too many cigarettes. His skin, puckered beneath the eyes, had a drawn quality.

  “What happens tomorrow?”

  “Lizzie escorts you to Dallas.”

  “Dallas?”

  Honculada smiled. “Dallas, Texas.”

  A certain tension touched Teng. He thought: the clockwork moves. The cogs turn. “Why do I need an escort?”

  “Because we don’t want you to get lost, Raymond.”

  “Yeah,” said Lizzie. “We wouldn’t want that to happen.”

  “I’d take you myself,” Honculada remarked. “But I have some urgent business tomorrow in San Francisco, and I can’t get out of it.”

  Teng stared at the girl. He wanted to say that he needed no guide, he could find his way to Dallas on his own, but he didn’t speak.

  “Take care,” Honculada said as he opened the front door. The courtyard was white and stifling. Teng stepped out of the house as if he were passing from one dream to the next. The girl moved behind him, keys rattling. Teng turned to thank Honculada for his hospitality but the big front door was already closed and the faces of the saints were all that stared back at him, inscrutable and, from his angle of vision, stripped of any holy dimension.

  “Where’s your hotel?” the girl asked. She wore very black sunglasses now.

  Teng had a bad moment in which he couldn’t remember the name of the place. Then it came back to him, and he told her. She stepped ahead of him, pushed open the arched metal gate. In the light of early evening the yellow Volkswagen was bright in a primordial way, like a colour newly discovered.

  Inside the car Teng’s fingertips collided with the smooth skin of the girl’s outer thigh, but she didn’t react. He drew his hand away, surprised by the softness of her flesh. She doesn’t look like Marissa, not even remotely. But her flesh felt the same to him, matching exactly the texture of Marissa’s skin, his memory of which was infallible. He gazed at the butterfly inside the cube, which swayed to the movement of the car as if the creature had been stirred from death and was trying to free itself from the transparent little coffin.

  “I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at ten,” the girl said. “Be ready.”

  Teng gazed at a row of storefronts in which could be seen the yellow reflection of the car.

  “I don’t know what you’re all about,” Lizzie Honculada added, when she braked at a stop light. “My guess is that you’re political in some way because my father, who has more money than sense, is always making donations to causes in the Philippines. He gives money to the nationalists. He gives to the churches. The poor. He gives to various political campaigns. Sometimes he helps people who turn up on our doorstep, like yourself. Except you didn’t exactly turn up, did you? There was some cloak and dagger about you.”

  She looked sideways at him. “The bottom line is I really don’t want to know why you’re here. I do my father a favour, I take you to Dallas, and that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned. Clear?”

  “Clear,” said Teng.

  Lizzie Honculada didn’t speak again until she reached the parking-lot of the Palms Hotel. She pushed her sunglasses up on to her head and looked at him.

  “Ten sharp.”

  Teng stepped out of the car. “Ten sharp,” he said. He walked away.

  “Hey, Cruz,” she called after him.

  He stopped, turned around.

  “Learn to hang loose. You’re in California now.” She dropped her sunglasses back in place, laughing as she spun the little car in a tight circle.

&nb
sp; After dark Charlie Galloway parked his Toyota behind a thirty-storey apartment building overlooking a section of the San Diego Freeway near Torrance. A late 1950s building of obscene ugliness, its boxlike balconies had all been painted a different colour, yellows, oranges, lime-greens, sky-blues. Seen from the distance, the block imposed a sense of apprehension because it suggested some form of psychiatric test, an evaluation in which you, the subject, were meant to respond to a random display of coloured cards, on which basis your personality was evaluated by persons in white coats.

  From a mile away, the place had made Charlie Galloway morose. He would have chosen sky-blue. What did that make him? An incurable melancholic? A soft-hearted romantic? A fool to be dabbling in any of this? When he stepped from the Toyota he skipped round the swimming-pool – a cracked affair of chlorinated water ringed by pale, globed lamps and deck-chairs in which sat two or three red-skinned middle-aged women who eyeballed him with the lackadaisical interest of the bored – and headed for the main doorway, glass, also cracked, made safe by silvery duct-tape in the shape of a St Andrew’s cross.

  He walked to the elevators. He pressed a button and was conveyed sluggishly upward. He stepped out on the twenty-seventh floor where many of the wall-lights lacked bulbs and those that emitted illumination did so only sparingly, creating a gothic effect, a corridor in a house of the damned or a lobby leading to the schizophrenic wing.

  Apartment 2724 had an imitation-wood number-plate fixed to the door. Charlie Galloway tried the handle. Locked as expected. Unless a deadbolt was in place, or a safety-chain, he could easily fiddle the Yale and gain entrance to the flat. It was old stuff, cop stuff, and he’d done it a hundred times before in an incarnation more pleasing to him than his present one.

  The trick was speed and silence and, that rarity for him, a steady hand. Think of this, Charlie, as delicate neurological surgery. Think of this lock as Einstein’s brain. He slipped from his wallet a hat-pin he’d bought at a junk shop an hour ago. A savage little instrument made of bright steel, it had a small plastic blueberry, a decoration, at one end. Inserting the point into the lock, he held the blueberry between thumb and index-finger and poked, then twisted, feeling the tip of the pin tangle with the locking mechanism. It was an ancient Yale, and perhaps had been forced before and never properly repaired, because it yielded with unexpected ease. Charlie nudged the door open about a half inch, seeing a darkened room beyond.