Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  According to Wax, Costain had once talked in a vague way about an incident that had happened in the Philippines during the last few months of the Marcos regime, an event Gene appeared to take in his stride but one Wax thought might have depressing implications if the whole story were told. Some Filipinos, suspected of anti-Marcos activity, had been mistakenly arrested and deprived of their basic human rights. A few, it seemed, had been beaten. Of course, Wax remarked, you had to read between the lines when Gene spoke because he liked to play his cards close to the chest and when he told you a story he never told you everything because he’d been trained that way. He’d been a stickler about observing discretion in professional matters, although he’d screwed up his personal life, said the angler, by having his nuts well-oiled by some beautiful number in Manila. For heaven’s sake, even Gene’s wife up in Poughkeepsie had known about the little chickadee in Manila!

  Over cocktails the night before last at the Colonnade Room in downtown DC, Wax had brought up the name of Gregory Redlinger as the man most likely to know the whole truth about Costain’s tale. Redlinger and Costain had been close for years. Gregory knew more about Gene than Gene had known about himself. He also understood the Philippines as well as any American, but he’d need a little grease to talk. Was Deets prepared to pay? You bet your ass he was. A phone number was scribbled on the back of a coaster and slipped across the table to Deets. And Wax, winking, had gone out into the draggy heat of a Washington night and back to the draggy heat of Venezuela to catch fish.

  “I want to know exactly what happened in Benguet,” Deets said.

  “Well now,” said Redlinger. “Let’s start with what you already know and go from there.”

  Deets said, “According to my information, Costain was instrumental in rounding up Communist suspects in the Province.”

  The fat man’s eyes closed. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “I don’t follow,” Deets said.

  “You did say rounding up, right?”

  “Right.”

  “We’re not talking rounding up, Deets. Ha! We’re not talking some picnic situation where somebody swipes an extra drumstick and gets his wrist smacked. Rounding up! I like that. I like that one. Jesus Kay-ryst.” Redlinger opened his eyes, which reminded Deets of the fakes a taxidermist might use when he readied a dead rodent for posterity.

  “Deets, Deets.” The fat man leaned across the table as far as he could. “Gene was one of my oldest buddies. He confided in me. He told me shit I didn’t want to hear. You know what I’m saying? So when you sit down here and talk to me about ‘rounding up’ I have to laugh. What we’ve got here is fucking cold-blooded murder, Deets.”

  Deets was quiet for a moment during which he heard his heart as surely as a grandfather clock. The fat man laughed, a coarse hiccup. Eh-heh eh-heh eh-heh. He couldn’t get over the phrase ‘rounding-up’ and he said it quietly to himself a couple of times as he laughed.

  “Listen. They took maybe a dozen of our little brown brothers and sisters up into the hills after the local Constabulary had had their fun and they blew them away. See what I’m saying? After the sport, da-drum de-dum, the coop de grass.”

  “You’re not making this clear, Redlinger. Spell it out for me.”

  “Oh, you’re slow, Deets. Torture. With a capital T. Electricity where it causes the most pain. Some of the old water stuff. The bridge treatment, very unpleasant. They used some of the Flips as ashtrays. Sticks. Bats. Needles. Broken glass. Whatever causes pain. Now this ain’t pleasant to the ear, especially to a guy behind a desk all day. But what do you know about the real world, Deets? Games is what you know. Whose buttons to push. Whose ass to kiss. You don’t know shit about what really goes on.”

  Deets said, “The idea of torture doesn’t faze me, Gregory.”

  “Christ, you’re a tough guy. I’m impressed.” The fat man smiled, or so it seemed. His lips moved and cavernous dimples appeared in his cheeks. “You don’t know torture from toothache, Deets. Ever seen a torture victim? It’s like a light goes out. They don’t sleep. They have nightmares. Long after the bones mend and the bruises go and the wounds fade, they’re basket-cases. They never make it back all the way. Fucking twilight zone.”

  Deets chose to ignore the fat man’s taunt; he wasn’t interested in diversions. “Who instigated the torture?”

  “Instigated?” Redlinger shook his head as if he couldn’t believe this Deets and the words the guy came up with. “You don’t instigate, Deets. Something just kinda happens, and sometimes it gets out of hand, and it grows, and before you know it you’re overboard. You’ve gone too far and you can’t go back to where you were before. You get me?”

  Deets nodded his head slowly. “Was Costain involved in the torture?”

  Redlinger was quiet for a while. Somebody put a coin in the jukebox and then it was Bing Crosby singing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. “Let’s say he didn’t stop it. Let’s say, maybe, he could’ve told the Constabulary to ease off. On the other hand, maybe he got into the spirit of the thing and did some things himself that weren’t righteous. But you gotta get a perspective, Deets. The times were fucking evil. Marcos wanted examples made of the Commies. And sometimes mistakes happened and the wrong saps got it. Gene had to bury some evidence, if you see what I’m saying.”

  Deets was quiet a moment. “What part did Laforge play?”

  “Bashful Billy?” the fat man asked. “So far as I know, he sent the orders down. He was Marcos’s pipeline. That’s why he went to the Philippines in the first place. To shape up the Constabulary where it needed it. Which was practically everywhere.”

  “Did he know there was torture?”

  “What do you think? He’d have to be blind and deaf.”

  “Did he know about Costain’s role in the killings?”

  “Listen. The night you’re talking about, there were two of our guys in Benguet. Gene Costain one. And a guy called Tom Railsback. He’s still with the agency. Works out of Dallas. Both these guys took orders directly from Billy. What does that mean exactly? Did Billy order the deaths? Did he say Turn your face to the side and act unconcerned if you happen to see some torture, guys? Who the fuck knows? Billy was in charge. Billy’s responsible even if he didn’t pull the trigger himself. Sure he knew people had been tortured and he knew people were shot and buried. He could have reported it. He could have reprimanded his men. He didn’t. So what does that tell you?”

  “Everything,” Deets said quietly.

  Redlinger looked at the envelope. Drops of sweat rolled from his hair. “Take a thing like My Lai, Deets. Guys get out of hand. Carried away. Basically decent guys who happen to be on a rollercoaster ride. Blood rushes to their heads because that’s what blood does. It’s over in thirty seconds. Then they laugh like they’re really nervous. Then they don’t say anything for days. Then they stuff it. And that’s where it stays. Stuffed. In a deep-down place.”

  “Did Costain tell you all this?”

  “It’s the kind of thing a guy likes to get off his chest, I’d say. Sure he told me. You think I made it up?” Redlinger reached out and snatched the envelope from Deets in a move of surprising agility. “I think I just earned this.”

  “Is there anything else I should know?”

  Redlinger redistributed his weight. The naugahyde beneath him farted quietly. “I go to the Philippines three, four times a year. I’m in touch with what’s going on. It’s still possible to be an American over there if you keep a low profile. I rent an apartment in Paranaque, which is liveable. So people know me. I’m the fat American who’s kind to the barefoot kids. That’s who I am, Deets. Santa. I sit down with the locals and we eat boiled rice together. They’re nice people and they accept me.”

  “So?” Deets asked.

  “I sometimes hear fascinating stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Look. Is this Laforge important to you?”

  “In what way?”

  “They say he’s going to get the
nod for Bach’s job.”

  Deets said, “Maybe.”

  “And that means a lot to you?”

  Deets made an ambiguous gesture with his hand.

  The fat man looked sly. “See, I might have some other information for you, Deets. I mean, if you’re interested in Laforge …”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It ain’t that simple,” said Redlinger. “You gotta understand my business, man. You want what I got, you pay some more.” The fat man shrugged, the gesture of a trader who regrets market forces – but, Jeez, what can he do about them? There was a whiff of the bazaar about Redlinger.

  “Uh-huh,” Deets said. “There’s no more money, Gregory.”

  “Well, that’s too bad.” Gregory began to slide out of the booth.

  “I don’t see it quite that way,” Deets said. “In your shoes I wouldn’t be in any great hurry to flee, my chubby amigo.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you tell me anything else you know, and you tell it for free this time. I’ve been generous. But the coffers are empty, Gregory. The well is dry. You’re out of luck.”

  “And you’re outta your skull, Deets. You must live on another planet. Nothing gets you nothing.”

  Deets smiled at the fat man and grabbed his wrist. “Not this time. Just sit down.”

  “What the fuck.” Gregory pulled his arm free and, looking sullen, sat reluctantly.

  “That’s better. Now satisfy my curiosity on a couple of things. Tell me how it’s possible for a man to avoid filing Federal income-tax returns for the last eight years. I’d like to know your secret, Greg. What moron wants to pay taxes anyhow?”

  Gregory blinked slowly. “I got a hotshot accountant.”

  “Sure you do. Okay, let’s try this one. Clue me in on how a man on parole for peddling pornographic videotapes of Filipino children performing unnatural acts manages to flit so freely between hemispheres. Your parole officer know about your globe-trotting?”

  Gregory sighed. “You done your homework, Deets.”

  “Force of habit. I was an A student.”

  “Hey-ho. It was worth a try. Nothing to lose, huh? You might have laid some more bread on me.”

  “Count yourself lucky you got what you got, Gregory. Now talk. I’m all ears.”

  Redlinger looked thoughtful, as if he were still trying to concoct a scheme to force further payments out of Deets, a con, some fiscal acupuncture. Eventually he forced a small flabby smile of resignation. “Jeez. You got your act down sweet, Deets. You look like a DC bozo and come on like a fucking gangster. Okay. There’s a guy just arrived in this country. Name of Teng, which sure as shit wouldn’t be what it said on his passport. He came in through Los Angeles. He’s here to hit Laforge. Soon.”

  “Hit as in …?”

  “Hit as in,” said the fat man.

  “How do you know this?”

  “A stoopid question, Deets. You don’t believe me, watch the papers. Especially the Dallas ones. Look for the murder of Tom Railsback. Then if you still don’t believe me, sit back and wait for Laforge to get his too.”

  Deets watched the man struggle out of the booth, a battle between flesh and formica. For a second Redlinger appeared to have lost and he swayed a little, as if he were about to be sucked back down into his seat, but he prevailed and shuffled toward the door, wheezing miserably with every small step he took.

  Deets didn’t move for a while.

  On the flight to Dallas, Lizzie Honculada said nothing for a long time, affected as she was by the dour manner of her travelling companion, who sat in the aisle seat, flipping the pages of the airlines magazine faster than he could possibly read. When he got to the end he started at the beginning again. Snap snap snap. Somewhere over New Mexico she politely asked him to stop, and he turned his blue eyes on her as if in a pinch he’d crack her head open without further consideration. She thought they should have been lovely eyes, but they were too … elsewhere. Coldly attractive, okay, if you went in for that sort of faraway look, which she always associated with zealots, raving men wandering in deserts, seeing things and talking to snakes and coming back to tell people about bliss. Besides, a small light of contempt lay beneath the blue, like a lamp beyond opaque glass.

  He’d been more than usually distant since the hotel in Los Angeles, when he’d hurried her across the parking-lot and told her to drive. She’d looked back to see a dishevelled character walking after them, but then the man vanished. All the way to the airport her passenger kept turning round, afraid of being followed.

  “Who was he?” she asked.

  Snap snap with the magazine.

  “God,” she said. “Quit it. Quit.”

  Teng rolled the magazine into a tube and tapped it on his knee.

  “Who was the guy back at the hotel?” she asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “For nobody he sure had an effect on you.”

  Armando Teng looked out into the blue magnificence of the late morning, the cloudless stretch of sky that suggested a great limpid lagoon in which you might simply float. Sunlight came back off the silver wing of the plane, blinding. The vibration of the engines coursed through him, churning his stomach, and the girl annoyed him. But these were superficial – what really bothered him was Galloway. He tried to remember what Freddie had said about the omniscience of the LAPD – surely a superstitious exaggeration – and he wondered what Charlie Galloway knew, if indeed he knew anything. The chances were good that he didn’t, otherwise Teng wouldn’t be flying to Dallas without hindrance. But he couldn’t shake the feeling Galloway was on to something, and it nagged at him. Three or four times on the way to the airport he thought he saw Galloway’s car behind; even now he imagined the cop was sitting some rows back and watching. Turn and look, he thought. But he wouldn’t give in to the impulse.

  “I don’t want to know,” Lizzie Honculada said. “Forget I even asked, okay?”

  Teng stared along the aisle at the stewardess, a slender blond plumping up pillows for an old lady. He’d never flown first-class before and the indulgence troubled him. You were pampered here, and fawned over by the servile blond, and the drinks came in real glass, not styrofoam. He felt trapped in what seemed to him a flying cylinder of privilege. Lizzie Honculada looked perfectly at ease. She probably never travelled any other way. She was spoiled, buffered against the real world, and even now lost in the glossy fashion magazine that lay across her lap, brightly coloured pages of gaunt, unsmiling women in clothes that cost an extraordinary amount of money. How simple her life had to be, how lacking in substance. What to wear. What colour of lipstick. Such strenuous philosophical inquiries.

  Teng felt rage flare up in his head. But what was the point of directing it at the girl? He was angry because he’d lost control in Los Angeles and allowed Galloway under his skin. He should never have turned and walked away – that was the behaviour of a person with something to hide. How could it fail to alert Galloway to the notion that Raymond Cruz wasn’t the simple tourist he claimed to be? But what could Galloway conceivably know? Okay, so Freddie had run off at the mouth. He’d become a talkative gossip, a daldalero. But it wasn’t possible Galloway could have believed him. No, no. You worry too much. You’re in a strange country and you’re nervous. You see things that don’t exist. The secret is to relax. Wasn’t that what Lizzie Honculada had told him yesterday? Hang loose.

  How did you learn to do that? How did you set aside your purpose, even for a moment, and pretend you were carefree and easygoing? He was tight, coiled, muscles stiff. It was what hatred did. It locked you in. Your flesh was a coffin. You thought of nothing but revenge and it consumed you.

  “I wish you’d stop tapping,” Lizzie said.

  He opened his eyes. The magazine was going up and down, down up, on his thigh. He hadn’t been aware of it. He stuffed the thing into the seat pouch and tried to smile.

  “Did anybody ever tell you your face really changes when you smile?” Lizzie asked.

/>   Marissa – the very name seemed to chime delicately in his head – had said once he had the kind of smile that could charm flowers out of the earth, if he learned how to use it. Why in the name of God had she died? Why hadn’t he been the one tortured and shot that terrible night? He had a deep black reservoir of guilt. On the day of her death he’d been in Manila to look for a rare book, something that didn’t matter a damn in the long run. He could have postponed the trip and stayed with her and maybe they wouldn’t have taken her away. But no, he’d gone to Manila, browsed in the Solidaridad Book Shop on Padre Faura Street and then he’d walked along Mabini Street to a restaurant, whittling time away until the departure of his bus back to Baguio in the late afternoon. He’d reached Baguio shortly after midnight.

  By then she was already dead.

  The sound of the engines changed now, the modulation from major key to minor that accompanies descent. Lizzie closed her magazine. Her fingernails were painted a shade of red and she wore two rings, one of which had rubies matching her nails.

  “We’re coming down,” she said.

  Teng was quiet for a moment. “Then where?”

  “I have instructions to take you to a certain place. And that’s the end of the road for me, thank God. I’m not what you’d call thrilled to be here. It’s not like I don’t have things to do.”

  “Painting your nails,” Teng said. “Choosing your rings.”

  “Up yours too.”

  Teng crumpled a napkin in his fist and said nothing.

  “I never met anybody as tense as you, Cruz. You give uptight new dimensions. The sooner you’re off my hands, terrific, fabulous, I’m out of here.”

  Teng felt the fuselage shiver and heard objects slither in overhead compartments as the aircraft dropped into a pocket of turbulence. A sense of alarm went through him and he touched the back of the girl’s hand very lightly, as if the shudder of the plane and Lizzie’s outburst had combined to unsettle him and he needed the touch of another person – perhaps to calm him, perhaps to offset the isolation that accompanied him with the constancy of a big sad dog. Then the plane trembled again and the Fasten Seat Belts sign flashed on and off and the big aircraft took on the pall of a skyborn deathtrap. The tremors reminded Teng of the fragility of human life, how easily the skin of this flying whale might peel away and send people out into the finality of the great blue spaces.