Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  Charlie Galloway said, “My antenna’s up.”

  “The guy you saw in my car. Cruz. Cruz did it.” Freddie had crossed a river and burned the bridge at his back and now he had to keep going towards an outcome that was inevitable. Adyos, Galloway. Paalam. Blame Cruz, take the heat off yourself for a moment. Fucking inspiration! If he’d stuck a completely unknown name in front of Galloway as a candidate, what good would it have done? Galloway would immediately have dismissed it as a wholesale fiction designed to save Freddie’s ass. By placing a real person into consideration, Freddie, whose heart thumped in his chest like some trapped rabbit about to become escalopes du lapin, hoped to give the lie a tenuous connection to reality. Enough, at least, to distract Galloway for all the time it would take.

  Galloway looked incredulous. “Now why the hell would Cruz kill Ella?”

  Freddie shut his eyes. He imagined his hand on the Beretta. “Because she knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Why he’d come to America.”

  “And why has he come to America, Freddie?”

  Joaquin swallowed very hard. He had to get the gun. No two ways about it now. “The way I hear it, he’s gonna kill somebody. Some high-up. I don’t know who.” He stared at the fern. It had begun to wilt in the heat.

  “Fuck a duck,” Charlie Galloway remarked. “First you deny you were in Ella’s house. Then you say you were, but you didn’t kill her. Now you tell me somebody called Cruz did it. Not only that, he’s going to kill again. I’m reeling, my wee friend. I hear bagpipes and they’re all playing different tunes.”

  “I’m only telling you what I know,” Joaquin said in the manner of a man whose options are all about to expire. Talk more, Freddie. Keep it rolling. Keep the cop interested. Enthrall him. Then go for the whole goddam thing in one swift move. There was no way in the world Charlie Galloway could be allowed to walk out of here. You killed before. You can do it again. Easy. Madalî. Madálang.

  “I begged Cruz. Don’t do it. Don’t kill her. Nice lady, okay, she don’t deserve to die. But he went there last night and shot her, because she was gonna talk to you about what she knew. Now he’s gonna kill somebody else. I don’t know who. I don’t belong in any of this, Galloway. I wouldn’t kill Ella. Word of God. I liked her. I told you before. I respected her.”

  And on and on. Freddie was speaking like somebody on a diet of white crosses. Amphetaminic little sentences, spurts, a babbling that made Charlie Galloway wary. His English was becoming careless. He’d fallen into the Filipino habit of confusing his Vs and Bs. Give became gib, deserve deserb. Men who sprayed you with words in unending gibble-gabble like wee Freddie were desperate about something.

  Brenda said, “Whack!” and clocked a praying mantis with her rolled-up magazine. Half the bug was splattered to the wall. The other part adhered to the teeth of the person on People’s front cover, who happened to be Princess Anne. An odd conjunction, the choppers of English royalty and a battered insect, Galloway thought, then turned back to Freddie, who’d taken a step out on to the balcony during Brenda’s massacre of the mantis.

  “If I was you, I’d talk to Cruz,” Freddie said, and he bent to tend to a bedraggled plant in the corner of the tiny balcony. “This goddam weather’s killing everything, heh? Rain. We need rain, Galloway. Nothing grows, heh? Rain rain. Come again.”

  Eberything. Joaquin, a lover of plants? Kneeling, looking faintly demented, Freddie turned his face up with a small smile. It’s the smile, Galloway thought. Transparent, devious, apprehensive. Whatever’s going on, it’s in that bloody smile. Galloway flexed himself for something, anything.

  “She’s dying,” Joaquin said of the fern, and he turned away from Galloway to probe the roots with his fingertips. He sang tunelessly under his breath as he dug. Rain in Spain valls mainly on the plain …

  Galloway experienced one of those rare moments out of time, a kind of high in which you are aware of mortality and infinity at the same time, a second during which what rushes to your head isn’t blood but the intense sensation that your demise is imminent. Call it primeval instinct, a leftover reaction from your reptilian origins, the sense, say, of a pterodactyl screaming toward you for a very quick lunch. Call it the warning whisper of that passing angel who is the padrone of drunks.

  Charlie Galloway knew.

  The gun came out of the roots and Freddie half rose with the thing in his hand, even as Galloway’s leg was already moving through the air, foot aimed at Freddie’s face. The contact was agonising. Galloway felt a cartilaginous creak in the region of his ankle. Freddie Joaquin fired a single reflex shot which pierced the balcony immediately above and then, as the full power of Galloway’s foot struck him in the larynx, the little man gasped and slanted backward with such force that the lime-green front of the balcony gave way, torn from its rusted anchorage of bolts and screws.

  Freddie plunged out into the night, the white sheet resembling a great wing that might float him safely toward the ground, but then it came free rapidly from his body, flapping, rising upward like a misshapen parachute, while he plummeted down and down, faster, sucked by gravity, a roar of ineffable terror coming from him.

  Horrified, Galloway saw him drop, strike the diving-board head-first, then rise again several feet before tumbling into the centre of the pool, where his entrance shattered the surface of water and set the poolside women screaming. Brenda came rushing on to the balcony while Galloway watched the water begin to settle around the disturbance Freddie Joaquin had made.

  “Oh Jesus, Jesus,” she said over and over. She stared from the broken balcony at the sight of Freddie, diminished by distance, floating face down. Galloway put out a hand to draw the woman away from the edge of the balcony, but she swiped him across the face and he backed into the room. She stalked him, lashing out again and again, slapping at his upraised hands. Eventually he caught her wrists and held them, while she swayed and shut her eyes and streaks of mascara slid down her plump cheeks to the corners of her lips.

  “Jesus Jesus,” she kept saying.

  Galloway led her to an armchair, gently made her sit, then covered her with a blanket. She stared at him. He felt more than merely awkward under her unblinking gaze. He might have been a disgusting mutant, something gone awfully wrong in a genetics lab, an amoeba to be incinerated.

  “You fucking slimeball,” she said.

  It would do no good, he realised, to mention the fact that Freddie had pulled a gun on him. Truth was powerless against shock and grief. Silence was all he had.

  He stared at the open door. Buckled lime-green metal hung from the balcony. The gun was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it had gone with Freddie Joaquin and lay even now at the bottom of the pool. An expanse of white suddenly filled the dark beyond the balcony, a spectral thing drifting slowly downward. It took Charlie Galloway a moment before he realised it was Freddie’s sheet finally floating to earth.

  He watched the bedsheet float from his line of vision, a shroud falling from deep space.

  11

  Under ordinary circumstances Charlie Galloway couldn’t quite say what set him off drinking. He always claimed the reasons were so vague and various as to be indefinable, so why bother? Stress, glumness, a twitter of homesickness, even a good glow of well-being – how was he to pin down any single emotion or reaction as the one that launched him into that first drink, an orbit he took to with initial trepidation but whose trajectory, as it rose higher and his own afterburners dropped away, became one of light and glad recklessness? Watch Charlie glow! Observe the cinders! Up up and up into that place where the finite became uncharted and strange, and yet always familiar in some way, like seeing a very old photograph of your great-grandfather and recognizing in his ancient face the future architecture of your own.

  Usually Charlie knew only that he was a prisoner of his needs, no matter what resolution he’d made. It was plain and simple. Nothing to analyse. Now, though, leaning upon the bar of a small tavern of minimalist pretensions he’d f
ound on La Cienega, all he could think of was Freddie Joaquin drifting through space and time to his doom, a memory that pitched him into a depression worth at least one small glass of amber fluid.

  He ordered a malt whisky, set in front of him by a bartender who might have been pumping gasoline, so little respect did he have for the nectar in Charlie Galloway’s glass.

  “On the rocks?” the barman asked. He was handsome and unworldly, yet another aspiring actor in the ongoing dream that was Los Angeles.

  On the rocks, Charlie thought. A sacrilegious notion. He pulled the drink toward himself in a protective manner and the barman drifted elsewhere, muttering lines from Beckett’s Endgame in preparation for an audition the next day. The play was only community theatre in Sherman Oaks, the bartender had explained, but he had to grab whatever straws floated past on the river of fame. Otherwise, where was his identity? Like, he was only a stupid barman if he didn’t act, right?

  “But I feel too old, and too far, to form new habits.”

  I’ll drink to that, thought Charlie, and raised the glass to his mouth then set it down again without so much as a taste. The perfume, distilled perfection, bottled wonderment, magnetized him. The genie was roaring to be set free. Uncork me, Charlie. I won’t give you any trouble.

  The bartender, one hand flat on his chest in a thespian gesture, strolled back and forth. “Then one day, suddenly it ends, it changes. I don’t understand, it dies or it’s me. I don’t understand that either.” He paused. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Galloway pretended not to have heard the question. He peered inside his glass. He’d never seen liquid so golden and pure as that distilled from the cold clear waters of Speyside by alchemists. Grapes made plump by sun only gave you wine, and what was that but a polite lubricant during a meal? A fine malt was something else, a triumph of nature; its drinkers were disciples, druids. Even the bloody names on the bottles were mystic incantations. Tamdhu. Tullibardine. Lagavulin. Strong Scots names that made Chateau This and Cabernet That decidedly unimpressive, sweet little drinks for dilettantes.

  “This play’s so negative,” the barman said, glancing toward Galloway with an actor’s tilt of the head. Everything was posture, every facial movement an eight by ten glossy.

  Charlie was conscious of a faint ache in his ankle, a muscle wrenched during the encounter with Freddie. He had no heart to be drawn into a conversation with the bartender, so he carried his drink to a plastic cube that passed as a table. He set the glass down, pulled up a matching plastic chair and sat hunched, staring at the malt as if he were a gargoyle perched for eternity on a roof.

  Think before you drink. Good idea. He thought about Freddie in freefall. He thought about good-natured Ella and the bloodied sheet that covered her. He thought about Brenda’s tears flowing through her mascara. A catalogue of casualties. He lifted the glass toward his mouth, setting in motion a whole series of complex reactions. Should he drink? Could he take just one and then walk away a free man? How would his self-esteem be affected? Would his brain be insulted? Charlie, Charlie. Could a man not drink without this kind of self-interrogation, for the love of God?

  Still holding the drink halfway to his face, he closed his eyes. He’d waited at Joaquin’s apartment for the inevitable arrival of Duffy who, after questioning him loudly about his goddam raison d’être – the French was an odd touch, Galloway thought at the time – had called Paffett to complain about Charlie’s extracurricular activities, about the dire consequences of a suspended cop interfering in a fucking homicide case. Duffy had developed a fondness for speaking in italics, almost as if some invisible biographer were present whom he needed to impress. Loose talk was bruited about that Charlie, without provocation, had maybe tossed Joaquin off the balcony, but Kenneth Duffy saw no future in this line of inquiry, despite claims made by the hysterical Brenda, whom Duffy knew had a criminal record that included perjury. As a potential witness she had zero credibility. In any event, she had to be tranquillized. A physician came and shot her with liquid Valium and she flopped face-down on the bed. Charlie Galloway felt very sorry for her.

  He opened his eyes. He held the glass against his lips, the rim upon flesh. It was a matter now of centimetres. He looked at the neon clock behind the bar. Midnight. The hour of downfall. He calculated he’d gone without alcohol for approximately twenty-nine hours. Wasn’t that roughly an aphid’s lifespan?

  Don’t do this, Charlie. For God’s sake.

  But it’s only one little drink.

  Two long-legged, yellow-haired girls in fashionable summer rags sat on stools and prompted the barman when he faltered over his lines as he frequently did. Much laughter. An occasional squeal. The barman was in his element, having found an audience, better still, one without a brain and therefore no critical faculties. What a gas, Charlie Galloway thought –

  – and the malt whisky slipped over his lips and between his clenched teeth, propelled by a dynamic of its own, as if it were quicksilver now and not Macallan. He placed the suddenly empty glass on the table and stared at it in shock. Somewhere in his chest essence of Spey exploded.

  What in God’s name had he done?

  He locked both hands together, imagining he’d cuffed himself and couldn’t move, couldn’t signal to the barman for a second. He was paralysed. Disabled. A man in a wheelchair, victim of some wasting disease. But, lo, he contrived to raise one hand in a feeble gesture, a miracle really! See how the formerly catatonic can be cured by an act of faith! The small glass was refilled and highland waters, clearer than God’s eye, streamed through Charlie’s veins. He was home, though far from dry.

  His mind entered its razor-sharp phase. Thoughts came to him without impediment. Such as: he loved his wife more than anything, and when he’d finished his second glass he’d go in search of her. But this was followed quickly by another thought, that he’d failed Karen and himself, and their marriage, by drinking again. A morose moment, filled with the awful pibroch of self-accusation. Where do you go from here, Charlie Galloway?

  The barman was intoning, “I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.”

  I’ve seen it lit, Galloway thought. From very high places, I’ve watched it burn. He had a third Macallan in front of him now, compliments of the bartender. Galloway closed his eyes again, seeing once more Freddie Joaquin in graceless, screaming flight. And where did Freddie’s death leave him? Did it solve the killing of Ella Nazarena? What did it matter anyhow? That dear woman, his friend and fellow exile, was dead. And if Freddie was the killer, he too was dead.

  If.

  If, Mrs O’Grady of the primary school arithmetic class had been fond of saying, If is a very wee word with a very big meaning, boys and girls. He hadn’t remembered Mrs O’Grady’s narrow, skull-like face in years, her plain brown woollen cardigans and matching tam-o’-shanters and her high-bred, West-end, Presbyterian voice. Poor thing: her husband had run away with the strumpet who ran the ladies’ shoe department in the Co-operative near Govan Cross.

  If.

  How could he know now if Freddie had killed Ella? How could he take the mystery out of that? His quest, which had begun with the notion of repairing his dented spirit and finding Ella’s assassin, had apparently ended in impending drunkenness and defeat, the same old withered garden, the same dead roots crushed underfoot, the same dreary dissatisfaction and failure. Redemption, it seemed, was for other people. Charlie Galloway, once a bright boy primed for a decent life, was an ill-fated fungus.

  He picked up the glass, looked inside it. He’d guzzled the first two drams so quickly he was already beginning to feel their effects. He swallowed the third, asked for a fourth, cradled it quietly for a time, then shrugged and drank it. The boxcar effect, drink linked to drink, clank clank, the railway of doom.

  He slid the empty glass across the satiny plastic surface of the table and watched as one of the adorable young girls slipped down from her stool and, adjusting a skirt that was too short by hal
f a mile, did a heartbreaking strut toward the ladies’ room, smiling at Charlie with perfectly aligned white Californian teeth. She left in the air a musk that was sea-salt and tangerine peel. How beautiful and bright she seemed in motion, as though she were tracked by a series of tiny yellow lights or fireflies.

  He stood up. The floor had the feel of a trampoline. He no longer had the capacity of his youth. He walked to the bar, where he set down his empty glass. Did he want another? the barman asked.

  Galloway answered aye, one for the road might be in order. And now, inevitably, his voice was funny. His words had the ring of empty beercans rolling around in the back of a pick-up truck.

  The barman said, “You sure don’t let moss grow under your drinks, sir,” and poured a decent measure. Charlie Galloway, smiling politely though his heart was heavy with the weight of his own wretchedness, was aware of the girl coming back to join her friend at the other end of the bar. Both were astonishing beach-creatures, sirens blown out of the white surf of the night. They put him in mind of lost youth, inverted hour-glasses, a dead self.

  Charlie Galloway, formerly romantic, now rusty. Solitude was dread. He was a candidate for a private box number in the Friendship pages of certain magazines. Wanted: thirty-ish female bored by aqua-lunging and cross-country skiing. I am a white male, and an avid explorer of the further horizons of exotic sex.

  Dear Karen, come home to me. I love you. But I am flawed.

  He picked up his glass, turned it around in his hand. He concentrated very hard now. He couldn’t stay here forever. He had no time to observe girls young enough to be his daughters, nor to involve himself in conversations during which he’d be treated kindly at first, then patronized, then ignored, then ultimately dismissed as a fortyish drunk who’d never heard of Oingo Boingo or The Cramps and thought Bob Dylan the last word in music. He had things to do. Places to go. Salvation yet to seek.

  Consider Cruz.

  In the book according to Freddie, Cruz was the alleged killer. Cruz, meaning cross. What if Freddie was being truthful? What if Cruz, brown-skinned and so stunningly blue-eyed, was Ella’s killer? Charlie could make an inquiry of the man. He owed it to Ella and to himself. After all, how long would it take? The Palms wasn’t a long way from here, if indeed Cruz was registered there, which was something he could check by phone. He sniffed the strong perfume of his drink, suddenly remembering Freddie Joaquin’s panicky remark concerning Cruz’s further murderous intentions. How much truth was there in that? Or had Freddie tossed that one out like a smoke-bomb?