Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  A few yards from the cafeteria a cigarette vendor accosted him. Baltazar kept walking. He had to get back to his room. That was all he knew. The aimless crowds around him were illuminated only by sparse light falling from a few shop windows – a foreign exchange bureau, a turo turo restaurant, a fruit juice place. He smelled mango pulp and kalamansi. He kept going. Why was the cigarette vendor pursuing him? Baltazar turned to look. The vendor, who had a tray of Marlboro and Camel, grinned at him. Baltazar said he didn’t want cigarettes, didn’t need them. He turned a corner, found himself in a narrow unfamiliar alley. On either side of him were half-demolished houses in which squatters lived. Clouds of smoke thickened the darkness. Dense palm fronds, some strung with electricity cables, overhung the street. Beyond open doorways could be seen groups of people sitting at makeshift tables or squatting on old wood floors, smoking cigarettes, eating, drinking. Here and there black and white TVs showed a basketball game. Somebody plucked a chicken beneath a kerosene lamp. Feathers floated strangely in the blue-yellow light.

  Baltazar hurried even though the vendor had disappeared. The alley seemed narrower now, enclosed by a darkness deeper than before. He stopped, realising that he’d somehow lost his way. All this was unfamiliar to him. The alley. The buildings. The cigarette seller had upset him, that was what had happened. He’d allowed the man to spook him. Coward, he thought, turning back the way he’d come.

  He passed the open doorway of a sare-sare shop, from which emerged two men in shortsleeved barongs. More shadow than substance, they converged on him as if they meant to rob him. But they were not thieves. They were too well-dressed, they lacked the stealth of bandits.

  Baltazar understood. He knew what these men were. Alarmed, he moved sideways, thinking he might slip down a narrow lane that opened to his left. But it was busy with people crowded round a TV in somebody’s doorway. The commentator spoke in the hybrid language of Taglish.

  If he went into that lane, which was no more than four feet wide, Baltazar understood he’d be trapped in the throng. He turned this way, that way, indecisive, panicked, then he began to move back in the direction he’d first come to get away from the cigarette seller, deeper into the unfamiliar alley, into the chaos of lives openly lived in houses with neither doors nor windows nor decent roofs. Lovers, widows, babies, grandmothers, children – they were framed in the ruin of their circumstances, forlorn still lifes.

  Baltazar hurried, but he knew he wasn’t fit enough to outrun the two men following him. He stepped inside one of the shacks, knocking aside a doorway of corrugated tin, seeing it fall away from him and clatter against a table made of wooden crates around which sat two women – one old and toothless, the other a pretty teenage girl suckling a baby. The women cried out as Baltazar crashed into their flimsy little world. They moved aside for him, though not without protest, shouting at him as he strode across the room seeking an exit, a window, another door, any means of egress. But he should have known better. There was only one way into this hovel, only one way out. He had nowhere to run.

  He stood with his back to the wall, gazed at the two large men in the doorway. He noticed how the very fine embroidery of their shirts diverted attention from the pistols they wore holstered at their hips.

  13

  Richard McCune, the President of the United States, was a trim man who kept in shape playing badminton and doing ungainly butterfly strokes in the White House pool. He was not popular except among his natural constituency of right-wing blue-collar workers, supporters of TV ministries, and the Cro-Magnon good old boys who ran the Pentagon as if it were a Saturday morning hobbyists’ club. What the President had in common with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apart from a deficiency of social vision, was a devotion to military hardware and a fascination with each killing novelty that came from the drawing-boards of the architects of extreme destruction. New bombers, outer-space death systems, giant killer subs – one of which would have fed a million Appalachians or Mississippi Deltans for fifty years – enthralled him. His reading was dedicated to technological reports or high-tech thrillers, although little difference existed between these literary forms, since both were depopulated blueprints, rah-rah pamphlets for the ultimate mayhem. Reputedly the President was one of the few readers of these books who could go from cover to cover without moving his lips.

  Jews considered him a closet anti-semite, blacks a hooded racist. Liberals detested him because he represented the Worst Case American, the arrogant oinker who shook the hands of visiting heads of state with the disdainful look of a potentate who expects no mere contact of fingers but full genuflection, and who, when he travelled abroad, took his own chef, bottled Saratoga water and Nebraskan T-bones.

  Moderate right-wingers found him old-fashioned and naive. Journalists were disenchanted with him because his press conferences often fell apart in tantrums and he behaved like the kind of spoiled American Brat-President who doesn’t think freedom of the press has anything to do with him personally.

  Fashion writers mocked both him and the First Lady, calling them the Sultan and Sultana of L L Bean. At gala occasions the President and Mrs McCune were ridiculed; he for his bland, boxy tuxedos, Winona for what Mr Blackwell, in his annual assassination list, tartly called the ‘sequined nightmares that make her resemble a spangled Vegas act from the 1950s’.

  The President at times perceived the world as a major metropolis and himself as policeman on a lonely beat. Gun holstered, badge gleaming, he walked dark streets, warily scanning shadowy doorways, looking at lights in shop windows, listening, wondering where trouble would come from first. This vision of the world, inadequate as it was, reduced things to manageable proportions for him. He could invade this or that neighbourhood and kick ass, containing problems at their source.

  As a corollary to this simple concept, he believed in a strong, well-behaved America with streets where people weren’t mugged and little kids didn’t buy and sell narcotics in suburban shopping-malls. A sparkling clean, lemon-scented America, land of Tidybowl and Doublemint Gum and the Colt Peacemaker. The Republic, menaced as much from within as without, could not be allowed to go in a handbasket to hell because of crack-dealers and oddball terrorists and people from such outfits as the Posse Comitatus who didn’t believe in paying Federal income taxes.

  Richard McCune was the man Senator Byron Truskett had come to see. It was ten a.m. Eastern Time when Truskett entered the Oval Office, remembering immediately his encounter there, more than thirty years ago, with Dwight Eisenhower. A kindly man of overpowering blandness, Eisenhower had the mannerisms of an absent-minded uncle quick to hand out two bits to nephews and nieces whose names he always forgets. Ike had smiled, and patted young Truskett on the shoulder, and said something about the future of the nation being in good hands, yup yup yup. Cameras flashed, and young Truskett, anaesthetised by the fumes of power, was ushered out of the Oval Office, clutching his cheque.

  Dick McCune was no Eisenhower, no Daddy to the nation, but an acerbic bully who owed his ascent to two things – the total ineptitude of his opponent, a droopy little man in ill-fitting suits who won only in the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the fact that, despite the prairie bleakness of his heart, McCune had projected throughout his campaign an image of common-sense so acceptable to a slumbering America that he was voted into the White House by a margin only slightly smaller than the one received by Nixon over the doomed McGovern in 1972.

  Besides, McCune was silver-haired and photogenic and in the dank culverts of American politics how you photographed was a hundred times more important than whether you had a solitary policy you could call your own about anything. The electorate, bludgeoned by frantic TV images of Party conventions, preferred Dalmane or Valium to the democratic process.

  Now Truskett shook the President’s hand, which was always cold, no matter the weather. Truskett understood there was some circulatory problem. On McCune’s desk were three red-tagged manila folders, each stamped STATE, a framed picture of t
he President and Mrs McCune taken in the Rose Garden, and a rectangular blotter across which lay a badminton racket and shuttlecock.

  Truskett sat down at the President’s bidding. Behind the President stood Farley Kusik, Chief of White House Staff and known around town as the Shadow, because he never left McCune’s side. Kusik was a very tall, silent figure whose characteristic stance was that of stooped listener. His eyes were two small pools of black oil. He had a way of fiercely clutching his chin with his undertaker’s white fingers as he concentrated.

  “Byron,” said the President. “And how are we this very hot morning?”

  “Well enough, sir,” Truskett answered. He thought it a sorry state of affairs that such a mediocrity as McCune had risen to the Oval Office. One consequence of awful-ness at the top was the way in which everything else deteriorated from there on down, stratum after stratum of increasingly witless attachés, counsels, lawyers, assistants, deputies, secretaries, until you finally reached the mailroom where things were misdirected by hapless messengers.

  “Sorry to hear about Bach,” said the President.

  “He’ll be missed,” Truskett replied.

  “Indeed,” McCune said in that hollow, windy voice of his.

  Although Truskett and McCune belonged to the same political party, and subscribed to a shared patriotism, they stood far apart on certain basic issues, some highly emotional, like abortion, some both fiscal and emotional, like military expenditure; McCune opposed the former and ejaculated over the latter. On the other hand, Truskett thought vast quantities of money had to be directed away from the Pentagon to mend the chancres that festered in American society, although he didn’t favour the kind of laissez-faire programmes that had unglued the Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  The rich, middle, and working classes had to be protected from increased taxation; the destitute had to be raised up from despondency. Truskett still considered America the land of opportunity – God’s own apple, as it were – but more money had to be channelled into social programmes run by efficient specialists instead of well-intentioned amateurs. And there was only one place to get the kind of cash his ambitions demanded – the Pentagon, where military spending had reached surrealistic levels, as if all requisition forms were made out by the Three Stooges.

  Besides, the enemies of the United States at this stage of the twentieth century were mainly crazed dictators or banana republic Communists unable to directly menace the USA with the kind of warfare that justified the outrageous financial demands of the petulant coots running the Pentagon. The real threat to US security, Truskett thought, was terrorism, which could be countered more by strong intelligence than advanced weaponry.

  It was a time, he’d said in many speeches, for new ‘alignments’ among the various strata of society, a time for education, pride, an end to the humiliation of homelessness. He avoided such phrases as the ‘redistribution of wealth’ because in American politics you might as well slit your wrists in a public place as use such ‘radical’ talk. He implicated nobody in these speeches. He took huge pains to avoid criticism of McCune, for which the President, a beleaguered figure, was grateful. The speeches were little gems of moderation and at times even the light of kindness shone through. Some people in Truskett’s own party were wary of him; they thought he was peddling his own brand of snake-oil, Byron’s Presidential Panacea Elixir.

  “The file on Laforge,” said the President to Farley Kusik, who produced a charcoal-grey cardboard box that contained the history of William Laforge. “We’re prepared, you see. We did our homework.”

  “I can see that,” Truskett remarked.

  The President tapped the box with one finger. “And this is your boy, Byron?”

  “I consider him the best man for the job, sir. Far and away.”

  Farley Kusik, who always spoke in a clipped way, said, “Two strikes against him. One, Iran. Two, Marcos. Not squeaky-clean. Not squeaky-clean at all.”

  Truskett was prepared. “I don’t have to remind you, Farley, that both the Shah and Marcos were allies of the United States at the time when Billy Laforge was deployed in their countries.”

  “We’re well aware of this,” said the President.

  “Allow me to point out the fact that after the fall of Marcos, Laforge worked efficiently for Corazon Aquino’s administration.”

  “Point acknowledged,” Kusik said.

  “At every turn, Laforge has done everything his country asked, without complaint.”

  “Loyal,” said Farley Kusik. “No denying it. No denying it at all. Loyal as the day is long. Sun never sets on his patriotism.”

  “We might get some flak about the Shah connection,” McCune said, and tapped the box once again.

  “We can handle that, Mr President,” Truskett said. “There’s absolutely no evidence Laforge had anything to do with the Shah’s secret police. Knowing the man as I do, I believe his high professional and moral standards would prohibit him from acting in a way contrary to any reasonable man’s sense of decency.”

  “Ummm.” McCune picked up his badminton racket and swiped the birdie across the room where it struck the door and fluttered to the carpet. There was silence after this eccentric little outburst of energy, which seemed to deplete the President momentarily.

  In this silence, at some sub-level of awareness, a faint electronic hum was audible. Truskett understood the entire conversation was being taped, one of McCune’s Presidential whims.

  “Home life above reproach?” Kusik asked.

  “Indisputable.” said Truskett.

  “That counts,” said McCune, a great believer in conjugal virtues ever since Winona McCune had caught him, some twenty years ago, in a Ramada Inn bedroom with a seventeen-year-old political groupie’s face buried in his groin, and had threatened to have his balls for doorstops if such a thing ever happened again.

  The President went on, “Sandy Bach was sick for three long months. During that time, his office has been run by his deputy – whatsisname?”

  Kusik supplied it. “Jerry Slotten.”

  “Right. That’s the fella,” said McCune. “Now the way I see it, Slotten’s been doing a competent job, Senator. What’s wrong with giving it to him permanently?”

  Truskett had expected at least token resistance. The trick to winning lay in the right phrasing. “I’m not going to badmouth Jerry Slotten, Mr President. After Laforge, I’d say Slotten’s the next best choice. But Laforge has it over him in field experience. And I believe Laforge can get the numbers required for nomination.”

  “Possibly,” McCune said. “But Slotten’s been in the hot seat for three months, Senator. That counts for something.”

  “I’m not denying it,” Truskett said. He hesitated before his next utterance. His head was filled momentarily with an image of Carolyn Laforge – golden, wonderful. Do it for me, Byron. You can do anything you want. For me and to me. Eat me. Go down on me hard. Yes, he thought. Carolyn Laforge was a whole world of possibilities. “What worries me frankly is the risk of division, Mr President. I’ve counted some heads and I know Laforge can muster what he needs for his nomination.”

  “You mean you can muster, don’t you, Senator?” McCune asked. He knew Truskett coveted the Big Cheesecake, this office and all its trappings. He also knew that one day Truskett would probably get it, Rose Garden, swimming-pool, paper-shredders and all. McCune, halfway through his final term, had to be circumspect: a probable future President was someone you disregarded at your own peril. Although he didn’t much like Truskett, whom he thought a trumped-up young jackanapes he would have enjoyed seeing fall flat on his tush, he understood that in politics you were often obliged to choose between evils. You never knew when you might need, say, a favour in your old age. Retirement could be a chilly place. What did Ford do except play golf and give speeches? And Carter created a flimsy illusion of keeping busy with some Nice Guy projects. Ronnie Reagan was dragged out, blown up, dusted off, had his head dipped in black dye and was
sold to the Japanese for propaganda reasons. And Nixon was completely pathetic, a sad old liar seeking respectability. Screw all that: McCune wanted to keep busy even as he desired to be perceived as a man who had the President’s ear and offered smart counsel. He wanted to be the wise old owl of his party.

  Truskett smiled his modest smile. “My own contribution isn’t really significant, sir. I’ve recommended Laforge here and there and the response has been favourable. Now, with all due respect, if you place Slotten into consideration, I think you’ll find those supporters of Laforge unwilling to back Jerry – no matter how good a man he is. Either they’ll vote against him or they’ll abstain. Same difference in the end. A few will vote for him, of course. But you see the problem. The risk of division in the ranks is very real. It doesn’t reflect well on the Presidency if you send Slotten’s name up only to have it rejected.”

  “In other words, why not send the right man up in the first place,” said McCune.

  “Yes.”

  The President was quiet for a time before he asked, “You’ll walk the line for him, Byron?”

  Truskett nodded. “Of course.”

  “You’ll go to the wall?”

  “If necessary.”

  “I admire your conviction, Byron.”

  “In this case it’s not difficult.”

  McCune glanced at Farley Kusik. Something passed between them, some current that put Truskett in mind of the eye-contact made between a ventriloquist and his dummy. Who was ventriloquist and who dummy in this situation was unclear. McCune looked as pensive as he’d done on campaign lapel buttons.