“Involved in ‘something’ isn’t overwhelmingly helpful, Charlie.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
“What was Joaquin’s allegation specifically?”
“That Cruz had come here to kill somebody.”
“Who?”
Too many questions, too few answers. Galloway sensed an imbalance in the world; questions came faster than answers could be supplied. “I don’t fucking know who. I was hoping you could help me with that one.”
Clarence Wylie said, “I wish your marriage was in better shape. Karen’s a wonderful woman. If you could get her back –”
“Aw, Jesus, Clarence. Is that what you think this is all about? I pull something off, and maybe Karen’s going to come back to home and hearth? She’s gone, for God’s sake. You were there. You heard the last post. I’m doing this for me! For C Galloway. I mean, look,” and Charlie held out his shaking hand. “I’m a mess. I admit it. And this hand’s only the outside, Clarence. You should see it from inside. Even my mind’s bloodshot. The only thing I’ve got going is this Raymond Cruz business, and I don’t even know what it is, or if it’s anything at all. Give me a wee bit of direction. That’s all I’m asking. I’m damned if I’ll beg, Clarence. You won’t see me rattling the old tin can at you. I’m down, squire, but I’m not out.”
Wylie was quiet for a while. He picked up his cup and finished his coffee while Charlie added one last lump to the pillar of cubes. Clarence’s face was tense. He wondered why he allowed Charlie to get to him this way. Christ, what was the basis for this friendship? It wasn’t as if Charlie had saved his life, hauled him out of a burning building, dragged him from quick-sands. He didn’t owe Charlie. So why hadn’t he let Galloway just drift out of his private orbit years ago? One answer presented itself, but Clarence didn’t want to accept it – the idea that Charlie Galloway introduced an element of uncertainty into a life that was nice, a life pleasantly humdrum, that to befriend Charlie was to accept a certain unpredictability into one’s world, an edge, a glimpse of the abyss. Was that part of it? Vicarious thrills? Clarence didn’t care for this particular boulevard of self-dissection. For one thing, it led to the conclusion that his own life was dull – which was far from the truth. Happily married to a woman he loved to distraction, he considered the moments of his life, even in retirement, well-filled. So why did he need a flake like Charlie? Why would anybody in his right mind need Charlie? Christian kindness? Brotherly love? Blessed are the drunkards for they need a whole lot of goddam help. It was probably very simple when you got right down to it. He liked the man. He liked him very much. Why analyse that? Why lose yourself in wandering round in the maze of your own feelings, looking for meaning? You didn’t always get to choose your friends. Sometimes you just stumbled into them, or, in certain cases, over them. What the hell.
Clarence put his cup down. “Raymond Cruz, you say.”
“According to his passport.”
“A Philippines passport?” Clarence asked.
“Right.”
“You know anything else about him?”
“I can describe him.”
“Fine.”
Charlie did so.
Clarence had taken out a small black notebook. He wrote with a Parker fountain-pen on which his initials were inscribed.
Galloway suddenly remembered the girl’s name and said it aloud.
“Where does this Elizabeth Honculada live, Charlie?”
Galloway had that information scrawled on the back of a crumpled slip of paper. He removed it from his pocket and slid it across the table to Wylie.
“Good neighbourhood,” said Clarence as he wrote. He shut the notebook. He stared at Galloway a moment, feeling a familiar bond with the Scotsman, as if this particular situation reminded him of the occasion when they’d first worked together years ago, the young LAPD cop and the older Fed, a team, a damn good team. Despite remarks to the contrary, Clarence missed the action at times. “I’ll see what there is. You go home. Don’t drink. Just wait. You’ll hear from me.”
“When?”
“Give me a few hours. But don’t hold your breath, Charlie. I don’t know what a retired agent can still do. I don’t know if I can find my way around Vanderwolf’s security. I don’t know if he’s changed the system, altered the passwords.”
“I want to thank you,” Charlie said.
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
“I was being grateful in a general kind of way, Clarence.”
Clarence Wylie smiled and walked out, leaving Galloway alone with the mirrors and the infinite reflections of his face. Somewhere in that plethora of images, he felt, was the real Charles Galloway; all the rest were counterfeits, rogues, rapscallions and piss-artists.
16
It was almost dark when Holly Railsback punched the five-digit code into the electronic pad that unlocked the front door. She stepped inside the house, closed the door firmly behind her and pushed the button that activated the alarm system. Her father’s need for security, she thought, bordered on the wacko. He was preoccupied with switches and floodlights. She knew he worked for the federal government in a capacity that was highly – what was his word? – sensitive, but she thought he took things a little too far at times. This house had to be almost as bad as Fort Knox. She sometimes wondered what it would be like to see the world through her father’s eyes and just maybe understand his obsessive need for a citadel, but it eluded her. She was an easygoing girl and her dad’s siege mentality bugged her.
He was a nice man, and all her friends considered him cool, but there was a side to him they never saw, a spacy aspect, those times when he’d get a faraway look in his eye and drift off God knows where. When he was in flux he had this real strange habit of chewing the inside of his mouth, as if an invisible plug of tobacco were hidden in his cheek.
She loved him, but he sure had a distracted side to him.
She kicked her shoes up in the air and caught them on the way down. Then she flopped on the sofa. A hard day at the Galleria tired a girl out. She’d bought a new CD of a band called Violent Femmes, but she didn’t feel like playing it right then. She just wanted to zone out before her father came home. He was due in about twenty minutes. She stretched her arms, yawned. After a few minutes she became restless, wandered the room, paused by the big bay windows that faced the darkening street. She reached for the cord that would draw the drapes.
Halfway down the block, beneath the overhang of a tree, a white pick-up truck was parked a little way from the nearest streetlamp. She looked at it absently. In this neighbourhood trucks weren’t commonplace unless they belonged to landscapers or pest-control outfits or plumbers. Almost everybody around here drove European or Japanese cars, although you sometimes saw the occasional Cadillac. Through failing light she thought there were two men in the cab of the truck but she wasn’t sure.
She was about to close the drapes when the telephone rang and she walked across the room to answer it. It was Graham Bisby, the seventeen-year-old light of her life, her deflowerer. He’d just written a new poem proclaiming her radical beauty. He had a velvet way with words. Would she like to hear him recite it? You bet, oh God, she’d die to hear it.
“If you were treacherous to me,” he recited. “My heart would be a slaughterhouse. I held your hand at Six Flags Over Texas. And I knew then I loved you.”
Seduced by his voice, she shut her eyes and quite forgot about the curtains.
The man who wore the Stetson hat and cowboy shirt with fluted pockets was called Johnny Ko, a Manileño who had lived in Dallas for fifteen years and now considered himself a native, a lover of rodeos and country music and Tony Lama snakeskin boots, a pair of which he wore when he’d met Armando Teng on the sixth floor of the old book-depository building. They’d walked to Ko’s pick-up truck and, to pass time, driven through downtown Dallas where Teng noticed a crowd of rather bedraggled people outside the blood plasma centre on Elm Street. Past the West End Historical area where a par
t of old Dallas was preserved, past the upmarket restaurants, Ko drove out by Turtle Creek where enormous houses overlooked a stream muddied by nightfall and depleted by drought.
The cassette deck in the truck played Merle Haggard and Tammy Wynette and Tanya Tucker. Ko, who drummed his fingers on the steering-wheel in time to the music, pointed out this building or that with the pride of a true Texan. He mouthed facts and figures attesting to the state’s size and its preponderance of colossi – this freeway took x years to build and used y number of men, that building is the largest convention centre in the USA, there’s the tallest flagpole in the state.
They drove the endless flat freeways out past Love Field and Texas Stadium, then north through darkness to Farmer’s Branch where Ko headed west on the LBJ Freeway, talking all the while about how great a country this was, and how readily he’d been accepted and his hand-crafted leather goods business had prospered. Of course, he missed the old country, and his family, he wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression, no way, he was a Filipino first and foremost. He missed the lechon, the suckling-pig, in Baclaran, the action on Ayala Avenue, the crowded streets of Chinatown. He missed the atmosphere, hard though it was to define.
Teng, who felt the tension of a man travelling with no visa toward a border crossing, watched the lights of passing suburbs and barely listened to Ko’s anthem of praise. He thought Ko, with his Chinese blood, looked all wrong in a Stetson and cowboy shirt and the garish yellow- and wine-coloured boots. He’d sold himself to America, like James Honculada. And how many others? The ironic thing was how people like Ko and Honculada imagined they were free members of a free society. They counted their money and watched their bank balances grow and paid their taxes to feed the US machine, but never once did they stop to ponder the illusory nature of their liberty. A country that enslaved others could never itself be free – but, blinded by cash, befuddled by possessions, big houses and automobiles, Honculada and Ko failed to understand this, or chose not to care.
Teng shut his eyes. Now Johnny Ko talked about how he used to be a movie extra in Manila and how close he’d been to Joe Baltazar, his best friend from way back, they’d been like brothers, no, more like twins, in the days when Joe had hung around the movie studios looking for carpentry work. When Joe had been in the United States in the late 1970s, Ko had found him a small apartment in Arlington and a job digging ditches, even though Baltazar had no green card, not even temporary legal status.
“He never did take to the States,” Ko remarked. “It’s a whole other way of life. Either you want what it has to offer or you don’t. And Joe didn’t. He didn’t get along with Texans. Had trouble with English. But I think what really bugged him was the immigration bit. Undocumented workers got to keep one step ahead of the migra. Naturally he was jumpy. When they finally caught up with him, he’d been here three years, most of them miserable for him. Deportation was like a relief, you know? Considering what happened to him when he went back home, I guess he wished he’d stayed here.”
Ko was mercifully silent for a couple of miles after he came off the freeway system into a network of lamplit suburban streets, where darkness imposed itself on pleasant houses and a sense of comfort, even complacency, prevailed. Teng gazed at the frowning madonna hanging from the rearview mirror.
“This guy you want,” Ko said. “Now he’s not always predictable, you unnerstand. I been watching him for a few weeks. He works in an office downtown but he drives home always a different route. He gets home usually, say, between seven-thirty and eight. My understanding is his house is wired like the fucking utility company. You can’t get in. So you have to act like real fast, and take him just before he gets his car in the garage. If he gets inside the garage, forget it.”
Teng considered this a moment. “Is he armed?”
“My bet is he’s carrying.”
Ko slowed his truck at a four-way stop sign. He took the opportunity to change the tape from Merle Haggard to The Flying Burrito Brothers. More quiet streets, more soft lamps barely penetrating the dark. “Check under the seat,” said Ko.
Teng reached down. He found a pump-action sawn-off shotgun on the floor. He raised it up, set it in his lap.
“Walk in fast. Get as close as you can. Pow,” Ko said. “What am I telling you this for anyway, eh? You know how to use a gun.”
“Yes,” Teng said.
“With that gun,” Ko said, “you can blow a man clear into the next county. Or the next world, hah-heh.”
Teng studied the houses that went past. Fragile archipelagos of light. Illuminated windows. TV screens. Plants flourished in pots or hung from ceilings in macramé slings. The gun he held in his lap threatened the orderly nature of all this. These quiet streets would echo to the roar of the blunted weapon. A woman might look up from a letter she was writing, or a man raise his face from a newspaper. A kid splayed on a rug might turn from the TV and ask What was that? and somebody would say Backfire, I guess, and then in the newspapers next morning they’d know differently. Teng saw a man on a stepladder hang a picture on a white wall. A snapshot, an icon that passed out of existence as Ko’s truck kept rolling, perhaps something unreal, imagined, dreamed up by Teng, who felt his brain kick into some higher level of perception, that hard place where anticipation and dread were both companions and jailers.
I am afraid, he thought.
Johnny Ko whistled annoyingly.
“Don’t,” Teng said.
“Yeah. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking, kaibigan.”
Teng tapped the stock of the shotgun. He remembered what Joe Baltazar had said. There were at least two Americans that night, Armando. And one of them shot Marissa. One of them shot her in the mouth. Teng froze these words out of his mind. He was propelled now by an abstract sense of hatred, something pure, but in the process of distillation detached from its original source, from the particulars of a dead girl in a black field, a girl he loved. But what did he know of love now? He understood only the shotgun in his lap.
He placed his palms under the weapon, raising it up from his lap and feeling the deadliness of its weight. Then he put it back down against his legs. Why was there no comfort to be had from the feel of the weapon? Why no security? His fear was like a tide in his blood, rushing, roaring in his ears, the violent whisper you heard in sea-shells sometimes. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes. Remember. Remember, he told himself. Why you are here. Why you have come all this way.
He was conscious of Ko steering the truck from one street to another, a route the Filipino cowboy had clearly travelled many times before because the streetsigns were mainly unreadable in the dark. And then Ko stopped the truck and cut the engine. Teng stared up into a street-lamp, the globe of which glowed with uncertainty, as if the dark were too much for it. The light cast a peculiar shadow, reminiscent of an abnormal hand, through the branches of a tree and on to the sidewalk.
“That’s the house,” Ko said. “You see the bushes there. By the driveway.”
Teng saw not only the shrubbery but also the bright light that burned in the front window of the house.
“You might think different,” Ko said. “But when I checked this place out, it looked to me you could hide yourself pretty damn good in the bushes. It’s the only weak spot in the whole set-up. See, the guy has to drive his car past the shrubs to his garage. You step out. You got the gun …”
Teng was hypnotised by the white window, the rectangle of light that carved a slice out of the dark. Somebody moved in the room beyond.
“Who else lives there?” he asked.
“The guy’s daughter,” Ko said.
Teng, who had somehow imagined an empty house, said nothing. He put the sawn-off gun inside his pants, against the outer thigh. He closed one hand round the grip. Ko looked at the luminous digital clock on his dash.
“Go now,” he said.
Teng opened the passenger door and stepped down. The night had a perfume to it, the scent of an unfamiliar blossom that surprised him. He walk
ed across the street, drawn to the phosphorescent window. The shotgun pressed against his flesh and he altered the rhythm of his movement. He paused once, turned to look back at the truck, and wondered why he half-expected it to take off. Good people, was what Baltazar had said. Not professionals, but they’re on your side. He saw Ko’s face in shadow through the windshield. He’s on my side, Teng thought. Don’t forget that. He’s with me.
He kept moving. When he reached the driveway of the house he crouched in the shrubbery, removing the shotgun from his pants and holding it ready. He had a bad moment, similar to the feeling in Los Angeles when he’d hurried away from Galloway; he wanted to get up and walk out on this before it was too late. What good was another death? It didn’t bring equality. And revenge was merely a passing satisfaction, a momentary sweetness that dissolved in your mouth as quickly as chocolate.
No. You’ve come all this way to bury your dead. You don’t walk out on a funeral. You do it. He gazed at the light from the window, seeing a shadow pass back and forth and then crystallise in the shape of a pretty young girl who held a telephone to her ear, and she was smiling in a dazzling, impossibly youthful way, the kind of radiant look that belonged in only one time of your life, and that was when you first discovered love, because you never smiled like that again no matter how often or how well you loved afterwards. You retrained your face, practised control. You pretended and dissembled and took less risks with your heart. But for this one splendid fraction of time you loved unconditionally, like the girl in the window, who was clearly listening to a boy-friend’s adoration of her. Teng was touched more than he wanted to be. Had Marissa looked that way when she’d listened to his own declarations of love? Dear God, he couldn’t remember, it faded, it dissolved.
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