Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  With some little difficulty Charlie Galloway walked to where a telephone was situated, got the number of the Palms, then dialled it before he had time to let it slip-through the wreckage of his memory like a fish through a bum net. He’s gonna kill some high-up – wasn’t that what Freddie had said? Some high-up. In Freddie’s world, what exactly constituted a high-up anyhow? A man with a four-chair barbershop? A bigger car than Freddie’s? What?

  When the hotel operator answered, she confirmed that Cruz was a registered guest. Galloway hung up, started back toward the bar. The two blonde girls and the barman were huddled together, enjoying some quiet joke. Observing this comfortably pleasing moment, this lighthearted scene of Californian youth and beauty through the fine warmth induced by whisky, Galloway realized something he frequently forgot.

  He liked Americans.

  He enjoyed them. For the most part they were friendly, open where Europeans were closed, and for that reason more accessible. If he ever suspected their facility, if he ever perceived their quick intimacy as shallow and glib and at times even childlike, then he overlooked the fact in the bloom of this particular moment. He leaned against the bar, bought two Mexican beers for the girls, left a fine tip for the barman and, suffused with sufficient electricity to light a small city, he smiled and stepped out into the darkness. Only when he reached his car and unlocked it and sat behind the wheel did he feel shame and guilt return; and although both reactions were at some remove from him, he knew they would sooner or later gather speed and come rolling toward him like great, barbed tumbleweeds in a storm of dust. So much for possibilities. So much for fresh directions and a new life.

  In his small room on the top floor of the Palms, a chilly air-conditioned box, Armando Teng woke when he heard the knock at his door. He turned on the lamp, looked at his wristwatch. Twenty minutes before one a.m. He reached for his shirt and pants.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Galloway.”

  Teng said, “Wait, please,” and dressed quickly, even as he wondered why an agent of the Los Angeles Police Department should be calling at this time of night. He was very calm. He’d done nothing, he had nothing to hide. He opened the door after he’d buckled his belt and Galloway stepped inside the room. It was immediately apparent the man had been drinking. His step was uncertain, his eyes unfocused, the smile friendly in a glassy way. He wasn’t a dangerous drunk; he had no sense of menace about him, no vibration of violence. But he was having a problem aligning himself with his environment.

  He lurched carelessly against the dressing-table, spilling a waxen cup that contained the remains of Pepsi and ice. The liquid streamed over the wood surface, across the pages of the room-service menu, then dripped on the floor. Charlie Galloway caught the cup, set it upright a little too late, looking round the room without comment, as if the accident had never happened.

  “What can I do for you?” Teng asked. He put only a slight note of irritation in his voice. It was that of a man disturbed out of sleep, though not too angry about the fact. To play the game with a certain detachment, a lack of concern, was the best way. He couldn’t afford to show hostility to Galloway. He’d be vigilant but helpful.

  Galloway sat on the bed rather heavily. His San Diego Zoo T-shirt hung outside his pants at one side and he stuffed it back in with a quick stab of his hand, like a man holstering a revolver.

  “Freddie’s dead,” he said.

  “Dead? How?”

  “He had the misfortune to fall from a balcony.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  “He took it into his head to point a gun at me, the silly wee bugger. In the ensuing contretemps, he went over the edge. It was a bloody long fall.”

  “Why did he point a gun at you?” Teng asked. He detected for the first time an inflection in the agent’s speech that wasn’t American.

  “I suspect he wanted to win an argument,” Galloway remarked. “Is there anything here to drink?”

  Teng shook his head. “Room service stops at midnight.”

  Galloway sighed. “That’s a bloody bore.”

  Teng moved to an uncomfortable chair in the corner of the room and waited for Galloway to continue. Had he come here at this hour simply to relay news of Freddie Joaquin’s demise? No, there had to be more, and Teng sensed it. He’d wait. He’d say nothing unless it was in response to a question. Why volunteer anything? He observed Galloway closely, surprised by the man’s disarray, the chaotic hair, the casual clothing that struck him as undignified. But then he wondered if the appearance might be designed to lull him, to infuse him with a sense of superiority over Galloway and so put him off guard. For that matter, maybe the inebriation was an act too. You had to be wary of traps. He lived constantly with the possibility of exposure and capture, something he felt in the Philippines more than he did here. Nobody was looking for him in Los Angeles. In Manila, though, in that city of rumour and fear, the Constabulary by now would surely have a file on him, even if it were only a vague one. What did it matter if he was a long way from the Philippines? He couldn’t afford complacency, regardless of his location. He always had to stand guard against the possibility of a slip.

  “You don’t seem unduly perturbed by the sad news of Freddie’s demise,” Galloway remarked.

  Teng wondered how he was supposed to react. Freddie Joaquin meant nothing to him. How could he feign sorrow without a massive effort he didn’t have the energy for? “It’s terrible, of course,” was the best he could do.

  Charlie Galloway sat very still. He appeared to have become fused to the bed. His eyes scanned the room slowly. Teng followed the line of the man’s vision, although there wasn’t much to see. Some clothing, a Los Angeles Times, a passport issued by the Republic of the Philippines on the bedside table, a bottle of aspirin.

  “You’re the kind of man who keeps his feelings to himself, eh?”

  “Not always,” said Teng.

  “Can we safely say you’re not heartbroken, Ray?”

  Teng smiled with what he thought was sympathy, but he didn’t speak. He wasn’t sure he understood Galloway’s question, because of the man’s accent and the way he ran words together or dropped letters.

  Galloway noticed how light from the lamp created little oily slicks from the soda he’d managed to spill. He thought: Not what you’d call an auspicious entrance, squire. It might have been worse, it might have been the complete clown routine, waxy cup and soda and lamp to boot, the whole shebang upturned, then a trip on the rug and a great somersault across the narrow bed. He was no stranger to acrobatics. He shut his eyes a moment and sought a calm place in his mind, a clearing removed from all the mouldering stumps and dried bracken.

  “You mind if I use the bog?”

  “Bog?” Teng’s English was artificially correct, stilted at times, but it didn’t run to Scottish slang.

  “The wee boys’ room.” Galloway rose, went inside the bathroom, poured himself a glass of the most appalling water in the Western world. He rinsed, spat in the sink, looked at his face in the mirror. Spooked by his own image, which had the colour of an apparition in spirit photography, he pulled the little chain that killed the bathroom light. Limping slightly, he went back to the room where he sat on the bed and picked up the Filipino passport, whose pages he flicked. Raymond Cruz. In the pale red stamp of the United States Immigration Service, it was recorded that Raymond Cruz entered the country the day Ella Nazarena died.

  “What time did your plane get in?”

  “Seven. Seven-thirty. I’m not certain.”

  Ella had been murdered around ten, which gave Cruz more than enough time to get to her house from LAX. The problem was one of motive. Joaquin had made that off-the-wall claim about how Ella had died because she knew something concerning Cruz – how in God’s name had Ella come into possession of the kind of knowledge that would jeopardize her life anyway? She was an unlikely candidate for embroilment in a wild world of hazard and deadly information. Had she become enmeshed in some pecu
liarly Filipino situation, perhaps a feud, a grudge, something rooted in a culture of which Charlie had no experience? What had Ella been so anxious to relay to him?

  All speculation withered inside his head. I am out of my depth, he thought. As much a stranger to the circumstances behind Ella’s murder as Raymond Cruz must be to the United States. A couple of strangers, Charlie and Ray, just passing in the night, accidental companions in a foreign land.

  Galloway got up from the bed. “Were you and Freddie close?”

  Teng shook his head. “No. We had mutual acquaintances in our province, that’s all. But we didn’t know each other well.”

  Galloway sensed an odd shift he couldn’t altogether define, as if the world had slowed a micro-second and he was out of synch. “As a matter of interest, Ray, where were you around ten o’clock last night?”

  “In a motel room fast asleep.”

  “You remember the name of the place?”

  “The Mandalay Motor Lodge. Near the airport.”

  “You were alone?”

  “Yes. Why are you asking these questions?”

  “Before he died, Freddie made an accusation against you. Claimed you murdered a certain Ella Nazarena.”

  “I did what? Murdered who? I’ve never heard of this person.”

  “He was adamant.”

  “But it’s crazy.”

  “Crazy or not, that’s what he said.”

  “I don’t understand,” Teng said, looking puzzled.

  Galloway ran a hand across his dry lips, squeezing his face between thumb on the right, fingers on the left, as if his cheeks were lemons out of which he might wring that one last significant drop that will make a Vodka Collins perfect.

  “Freddie also said you intended to kill somebody else, Ray.”

  Teng laughed in surprise. “Then it’s obvious Freddie was an inveterate liar, Mr Galloway.”

  “Probably.” Galloway heard the drums in his head, his private Mau-Mau thirst ceremony. “I take it you don’t have plans to murder anybody?”

  Teng laughed again, a sound of restrained merriment, as if there were a curfew against fun, and he feared breaking it. “You may safely assume that.”

  “What line of work are you in, Ray?”

  “I teach school.”

  “And you’re here to do some sightseeing?”

  “Of course. Los Angeles. Hollywood … so many things to see.”

  Galloway thought something was missing, some phantom core he kept circling, only he wasn’t sure what. He wished he wasn’t drunk, even as he longed to immerse himself in an ocean of booze, where tides and trade winds would carry him to shorelines of wonderful chaos.

  “How long are you staying?”

  “Until my money runs out.”

  “And you’ll stay right here?”

  “It’s not expensive.”

  “I have to know where to find you … in case we need to talk again.”

  “Allow me a question, Mr Galloway. Do you actually believe I had anything to do with killing this woman?”

  Saying nothing, Galloway wandered across to the narrow window and looked down into the parking-lot. The simplest conclusion was that Freddie Joaquin, in an act of cowardice, had tried to stick the blame for the murder on Cruz, to shove it up somebody else’s arse and see if it fitted. And it hadn’t. The only peculiarity was that Freddie, for some reason, had gone on to make his second claim, evoking the death of what he’d called some high-up – why had he felt compelled to embellish? Why the extravagance? The trouble with liars – they inhabited a world incredibly complicated.

  “No,” Galloway said eventually. “I think Freddie did it.”

  “I’m relieved to hear you say so.”

  Galloway looked at Cruz. Was there in that blue-eyed look something hidden? Something so guarded it was impossible to reach? He had the faint but distinct impression that Cruz was concealing a vital matter, although nothing so straightforward as the murder of Ella Nazarena. Another thing altogether. There were depths to the Filipino, clouded lagoons you couldn’t see into, emotions masked by murky puffs of sand disturbed by formless creatures darting across the bottom of the water.

  You’re drunk, Charlie Galloway.

  He moved back across the room. He opened the door, stepped out into the corridor. Cruz watched him expressionlessly. Whatever it was that had slipped Galloway’s mind earlier remained mysterious. As he turned toward the elevator, conscious of Cruz closing the door of his room, the puzzle seemed to break loose from his brain and float away, something so trivial it did not deserve space in his head. The elevator plunged him down a shaft into the lobby, where a Japanese night-clerk looked at him as if he were an escapee from the Camp on Blood Island.

  “Where’s the nearest watering-hole?” Charlie asked. His T-shirt had come loose again, and dangled at his thigh.

  The young man, whose thick black hair was oddly cut in a modish style that suggested a hairdresser with a chamberpot, a carving-knife and three pounds of Dippity-Do, shook his head. “Watellinga-hall?”

  “Never mind,” and Charlie Galloway, who knew a few late spots, hurried out of the lobby, where icy air yielded to the dry gasoline-flavoured warmth of the night.

  Armando Teng watched Galloway, shirt flapping, cross the parking-lot, weaving between motionless cars. Sometimes, like a man trapped in a pinball machine, Galloway appeared to ricochet in the narrow passageways of automobiles, here, there, forward, backward, lurching as he moved. Then Teng lost sight of him in the darker recesses of the lot.

  He turned from the window, walked up and down the room, wondered at the desperation that had induced Freddie Joaquin to blame him for the murder of the Filipina. Had he been cornered, trapped, obliged to utter the first nonsense that had come to his mind? More an act of mindless despair than one of treachery? Had this same desperation led him to that other revelation-that Cruz had come to the United States to commit murder?

  Teng roamed back and forth. He paused near the bed, laid his forehead against the wall and stood motionless. Joaquin had known nothing, hadn’t been in a position to tell Galloway anything specific, therefore what point was there in worrying? Confronted by Galloway, Freddie – a man with little inner strength – had simply lost control. There was no more to it than that. Everyone had a point where they snapped. Freddie had reached his.

  Teng lay down on the bed. He’d reasoned it out, and perceived no personal danger to himself nor to his task: Galloway could establish no relationship between himself and the dead woman, because there hadn’t been one. The letter that might have been incriminating lay locked in a safe-deposit box.

  He should have been relaxed. Why wasn’t he?

  The strain of the task in front of him, the stress of shutting the past from his mind, an accumulation sometimes unbearable. He closed his eyes.

  He knew it was coming.

  It struck him as it sometimes did, out of nowhere. With no apparent connection to anything that had gone before, unless he counted the thin, even imaginary resemblance between Lizzie Honculada and Marissa. It came of its own fiery accord, the monster of memory. It locked his chest, seized his throat. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Turbulence beat against his brain.

  The field. The stand of trees. The moon in full ivory flight.

  He imagined the noise made by shackles, like so many coins being dropped again and again in the darkness. He imagined Marissa, chained to the others, shackles bruising her flesh. He saw her being pushed forward through the grass. Perhaps the moon vanished then. Perhaps the sky blackened. The stars went out. Certainly the stars went out. He had no doubt of that. He had relived Marissa’s death ten thousand times. And ten thousand times the stars had died.

  In his reconstruction he did not immediately feel the revolver shot through the mouth that had ended her life. No, he entered the house of his personal demonology the way he always did, by the front door, at the very threshold where two uniformed men of the Constabulary first seized Marissa from t
he streets of Bagnio and dragged her to a jeep and, handcuffing her, drove her to an isolated shack where Captain Deduro ‘interrogated’ her about her political alliances. Wasn’t she a member of the New People’s Army? Wasn’t she involved in an assassination plot against their beloved President Marcos? Why didn’t she admit it? What good was denial? He had proof, detailed evidence.

  He tore off her blouse and applied lit cigarettes to her nipples. When she screamed, when this smart, funny, innocent girl screamed, she was punched in the face by the gallant Captain. Half-conscious, her teeth and jaw broken, her lips split and bleeding, that lovely face already purple and disfigured by swelling – this punishment was evident from the decomposing horror found weeks after her burial beneath the long grass – she was driven up into the fields beyond La Trinidad where she was chained to a dozen others who had been rounded up the same night, under the same pretext of belonging to anti-Marcos groups.

  Like herself, the rest had already been tortured, burned with cigarettes or made to lie like human boards between two chairs spread five feet apart for hour after hour, a form of punishment known as the San Juanico Bridge, and when they slumped or tried to alter the positions of their aching bodies they were beaten with rifle-butts. One had been slashed repeatedly with knives and sharpened bamboo-sticks, another blinded, yet another had undergone falangas, the constant beating on the soles of the feet with wooden paddles. Another had been given the water treatment, bucket after bucket of water forced into mouth and nostrils until suffocation was almost reached. And Joe Baltazar, the only man to escape from the field that night, the only witness to events, the only one to slip away unseen, uncounted, covered by darkness, had had a lit candle held to his penis and staples fired from a staple-gun into his testicles.