Teng. The unfamiliarity of the name, the strange brittle quality to it, underlined Charlie Galloway’s general puzzlement. What did he know of Filipinos? What did he know about the Philippines except that the Americans kept bases there and Corazon Aquino was the stressed-out President and that the women were said to be as beautiful as the country was impoverished? He ransacked his slender depository of knowledge, lamenting his own ignorance. He’d heard of the loveliness of the landscape from Ella Nazarena, and she’d once or twice shown him photographs of smiling people standing outside a bamboo and cinderblock house – her family in Baguio – but that was it. You could draw a black heavy line right there. End of entry.
The merrymakers from Acapulco had broken open party favours and were blowing reedy sounds from tubes of silver paper. The blonde, weary at last, was sprawled in her seat, long legs dangling into the aisle, high-heeled shoes hanging off her feet. Charlie shut his eyes, dozed for a while. He woke abruptly, dry, baffled by his whereabouts and why his ears were filled with the drone of engines. Then it came back to him and he wondered if it might be possible to parachute out somewhere over the heartland and forget he’d ever undertaken this idiot journey. Down and down, held in place by harness and a mushroom of strong cloth, drifting slowly to the warm earth, hitting Main Street, Buckhannon, West Virginia, or God knows where. There he’d assume another name, find a room, a quiet job as a clerk in a grocery store and live a life of rewarding anonymity – there would be peace, and a picket fence, and sobriety, and Karen would come back and maybe they’d have a kid, it wasn’t too late, and Charlie could learn to raise it, changing diapers, singing lullabies, staring lovingly at the child while it slept. It would be a plump kid, healthy, a delight. They’d take it to Scotland and show it to Dan and it wouldn’t matter a damn if the old fella was deranged. Charlie would say, “Here’s your grandson, Dad,” and maybe the old man’s eyes would fill with tears.
“This is your captain speaking, ladies and gentlemen.”
Charlie listened.
“We’ll be on the ground at Philadelphia International Airport in about thirty minutes. The temperature in Philly is ninety-four degrees, folks. Another hot one.”
Charlie walked to the lavatory. He slid the lock in place, the light came on. He urinated in a nervous, trickling way, his bladder coy. Then he washed his hands, and ran wet fingers through his hair to smooth back an unruly tuft. After that, he dropped the lid of the toilet in place and sat down, thinking, thinking.
Okay. He’d come this far. Incontrovertible fact. What could he do now? Fly back to the West Coast immediately and write this trip off as a boozer’s delusion? That was the easy way. Besides, the Bureau probably had Teng in custody already. Then why worry? Where was the problem in getting off the plane in Philly and just turning right around? No sweat. Nothing to reproach himself for. He wasn’t a hero after all.
So, Charlie. Disembark in Philly. Have a cup of coffee, a sandwich, then take the next flight back to Los Angeles. Screw the coffee. Have a beer. And then what?
What do you do in Los Angeles? In the city of death, in those hard sunlit streets where shadows of palm were thrown on pastel stucco, what do you do? Drive past the place where Ella was killed, maybe. Wonder what it was she wanted to tell you but never got the chance? Remember her corpse, the bloody sheet? Perhaps ride the freeway alongside the tall building from which Freddie Joaquin took his last plunge? Keep trying to hunt down Karen? It was endless, round and round; in Los Angeles he would become a man trapped on a circular sightseeing tour of his own recent history, a prospect of hell and sunshine. That’s how LA would be, and he knew it.
He stood up, unlocked the door, walked back down the aisle to his seat. The plane tilted a few degrees and an empty miniature margarita bottle rolled along the floor, stopping at Charlie Galloway’s foot. He reached down, picked it up, closed the palm of his hand round it.
A few rows in front of him the blonde’s legs still dangled in the aisle. One of her high-heeled shoes slid from a foot and clattered to the floor, but she made no move to retrieve it. In a very weary manner she sang two words – yes – La cucaracha. The tone of her voice had changed now, all effervescence having escaped. She mouthed the words in the manner of one coming down from a high.
Somewhere inside the plane a party favour farted once miserably, more squeak than thunder.
Galloway changed the position of the overhead nozzle so that cold air hit him directly in the face. Poised in a difficult, slippery place between retreat and advance, an old life or a new route, he felt as if the familiar huskies that hauled his sled were warring with one another, going off in a dozen different directions at the same time – and he was dumb to command them otherwise.
He knew what he ought to do. He knew which way the huskies should be made to run. But the reins, which had made the palms of his hands raw and bloody, kept slipping, slipping away from him.
I am out of control, he thought.
Under the noonday sun Laforge walked as far as the old bridge. He wore a floppy fisherman’s hat to keep the light from his eyes. The scent of cigarette smoke, so alien here, drifted toward him. He heard the crackle and hiss of a walkie-talkie. From the ferns that grew densely along the banks of the creek a man in a green shirt emerged and gazed at Laforge without expression. He wore a pistol in a shoulder-holster; under one arm he carried a rifle. His walkie-talkie was strapped to his hip.
Laforge smiled in his patrician fashion. He introduced himself. The guard, a muscular figure who wore an abbreviated moustache, said that he recognized Mr Laforge from the photographs the security team had been given. A short silence followed these introductory remarks while Laforge ransacked his mind for something to say – a witticism, a throwaway joke, anything to suggest he lived on the same planet as everyone else. How did people handle cocktail parties, for God’s sake? He could talk of the weather, he supposed, or say how poor the fishing had been this year, small talk. He said nothing. Why was it so damned hard to make trivial conversation?
The guard’s walkie-talkie croaked and he slid it from his hip and raised it to his mouth. “Vespa here,” he said. “Over.”
Vespa, Laforge thought. Was that a code name?
Out of the hideous static he heard Vespa’s communicant say, “How is it down there?”
Vespa said it was fine, turning away from Laforge slightly as he spoke, as if trade secrets were at stake here. Laforge understood that men like Vespa and his colleagues were accustomed to concealment and stealth. They spoke a different language from everyone else. They looked at a clump of shrubbery and saw, not leaves, stalks, roots, but the potential for menace. Vespa attached the instrument to his belt again and looked at Laforge.
“Everything okay?” Laforge asked.
The man smiled. He had small yellow teeth. “Just the way we like it, sir.”
Laforge made a gesture of approval. He stared down into the stream, where thin froth floated through reeds and a spent match, presumably tossed into the weak current by one of the security men, drifted. Water beetles buzzed the surface, skimming back and forth.
The bridge creaked. Laforge raised his face toward it. A second man stood there, armed as Vespa was. Unlike Vespa, he was dressed in a brown shirt and slacks. Green, brown, Laforge thought. Earth tones. Camouflage. Laforge lifted a hand in greeting and the man on the bridge, tall, powerful, with the kind of face that disappeared into broad shoulders with no apparent neck, returned the gesture without much enthusiasm.
The man stepped off the bridge and drew Vespa aside and they conversed some yards away in whispers, while Laforge felt curiously uncomfortable, as though he did not belong on his own property. The muscular man in brown clothes glanced at Laforge once during the inaudible conversation with Vespa, but the dark eyes pierced Billy as if he weren’t there at all.
Laforge moved away quietly. He knew that these men had come from the Office of Security at Langley, but what he couldn’t understand was why they whispered so. When they a
ddressed him they were polite, of course, but he was just a job to them. A body. An object to protect.
He took off his hat, which he thought made him look pretty silly anyway. It was a countryman’s hat, rustic, shapeless, the kind to which you expect to see attached fishing-flies and hooks, perhaps small enamel badges attesting to membership in this fishing club or that. There was nothing distinguished about the headgear. Sunlight screamed down through the branches of trees and burned his scalp and sweat ran into his eyes. He was apprehensive, as if the sun had singled him out for personal abuse. And the guards – why had they unsettled him?
He was still upset by Railsback, that was what it all came down to. He was trying not to think of Tom dead. It should have been easy. He was accustomed to the suppression of unpleasantries. He had a talent for introducing light into dark landscapes, a swift brushstroke of amnesia – and lo! the stormclouds rolled away.
No. It was more than Tom Railsback, and he knew it. He didn’t want to think about it. Why did he need to remember Benguet now? The memory lay in a remote drawer of his brain where, undisturbed, it had gathered dust. Every so often the drawer, as though touched by a tremor of sorts, seemed to slide open and a mildewed scent rose from within, an offensive, sickly smell that came and went, leaving in its silent passage a vague feeling of doom.
He moved across the meadow as quickly as he could. Distorted by light, the two security vehicles parked close to the house appeared to have fused together, melted by the sun then forged in an unnatural way, a weird sculpture in the landscape. Everything shimmered. The ground reflected heat in rays that gave the grass an oceanic effect, as though a soft tide ran through the stalks. For a second Laforge felt he was walking under water, a sensation emphasised by how much he perspired. His shirt stuck to his flesh, his pants to his thighs.
He reached the house finally but didn’t go inside at once. He saw the door of the van open. A man stepped out. A cheerful figure, unlike the pair by the stream, he came toward Laforge with a confident stride, a hand extended for the future Director of the CIA to shake. He had a bright reliable face, tanned like Laforge’s, a large, good-natured mouth; you could imagine this man, who introduced himself as Ted Arganbright, telling jokes at parties, being the life and soul of things, guardian of the barbecue pit.
“I hope all this isn’t too disruptive, sir,” he said.
“No, not at all,” Laforge remarked.
“We don’t like to take chances so we tend to poke around all over the place,” Arganbright said. “If we get in your hair, you just shout.”
“No, really, everything’s fine. Your men are unobtrusive.”
Arganbright looked up at the sky briefly. “Some of them are a bit on the grouchy side. It’s the job. It makes them testy at times. It’s a great quality as far as your safety’s concerned, of course. It means they’re vigilant.” And he said this last word proudly.
“Of course.”
Arganbright had threadlike red veins in his big cheeks. “You’re in good hands, sir.”
“I know that,” said Laforge, and he stepped toward the house, disturbed still. The memory of Benguet wasn’t fading. Persistent, it wasn’t going to be defied admission.
In the kitchen, he poured a little mineral water into a glass, gazed from the window in time to see Arganbright pause by the car, lower his face to speak to the two overheated men inside, then return to the van. What had they talked about? Laforge watched the van door open then close with a certain finality that made him feel, not the security Arganbright had emphasised, but a sense of aloneness, as if he’d been abandoned all at once in a precarious position. Which was a stupid notion, considering the amount of security on the estate. And yet. He drank the water, set down the glass on the table. Click. The sound irritated him. The memory was a migraine, he thought. You could always feel it coming but there was nothing you could do.
The telephone rang. Thankful for the interruption, Laforge picked up the receiver quickly. Byron Truskett was on the other end of the line.
“I intended to call you earlier, Billy,” said Truskett. “But I’ve been busy with this and that. You know how it goes.”
Laforge said he understood.
“Congratulations!” Truskett sounded enthusiastic. “I’m sure the hearings will be a breeze.”
“I appreciate your optimism,” said Laforge. “And your support.”
Truskett emitted a brief little laugh, a way of saying Think nothing of it. “I’ve been talking with my colleagues, Billy. Sort of taking an informal head-count. The numbers are looking very good. Very good indeed.”
“I’m happy to hear that.”
“So how does it feel to be surrounded by security forces?”
“It’s rather strange.”
“They’ll take great care of you.”
“I’m sure they will.”
“You better believe it. You’re an important man. I’ll be in touch.”
“Thanks for calling.”
Laforge set the receiver down. He stood in the window and he had the thought I am vulnerable. Here, standing in this window, I am vulnerable, a target of whoever killed Railsback and Costain and Deduro. When darkness fell across the estate, what did the security men do then? How well could they protect him on a moonless night? Did they have arc-lights? Did they flood the property with great white lamps? Did they see what lingered behind every dark tree or bush? Did they have radar inside the van? Could they truly stop a determined assassin, somebody driven by a hatred beyond understanding, somebody made cunning by the demands of vengeance?
He stepped back from the window. He found it difficult to breathe for a moment. It was in his head again, that field in Benguet. He remembered how he’d assigned Gene Costain and Tom Railsback to assist Captain Deduro in training his men in the task of capturing ‘Communist insurgents’ in the hills beyond La Trinidad. He remembered the reports he had received from Costain and Railsback after the event, the typed sheets of which no copies were ever made, the terse description of events.
Subject, male, age middle 50s, resisted arrest, tortured by members of the Constabulary, executed.
Subject, female, age approximately 23, resisted arrest, tortured, executed.
Subject, male, resisted arrest, tortured, executed.
Subject etcetera etcetera.
These flat statements of fact were all the more graphic for their lack of detail, as if the absence of particulars rendered them concrete and terrible. That girl, for instance, aged ‘approximately’ twenty-three – what did she long for, what did she dream? She was a featureless entity in a dark field, and yet this being with no face tormented Laforge more than if he had known her name and age and desires.
He opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, swinging the door back and forth as though it were a fan. Chilled air blew softly upon his face. But he sweated anyway. He put a finger between collar and neck, closing his eyes and swaying a little, a man made dizzy by a memory so wretched he hardly dared claim it as his own. The buzz in his head was louder.
He couldn’t get away from it. It returned when he least needed it, the only entrapment in his life from which he hadn’t found some means of escape or compromise. He could displace it to a certain degree, sure. He could addle it, scramble it, upset its chronology, alter a detail or two. Sometimes he succeeded in attributing the experience to an imaginary other, somebody else who’d gone that night to the field above La Trinidad. Not himself but a stranger who moved in the sweltering dark Philippine night, unseen, hidden from the view of Costain and Railsback, invisible to the Constabulary, a mere passer-by who had stopped to look.
And what had he seen, this other man? Silhouetted, shackled prisoners, some screaming, others begging to be spared, were led across the grass to the place where they were shot, a dozen or more people gunned directly in their skulls – this is what he’d seen. And what had drawn him there from the safety of Baguio City and his suite at the Hyatt, what lurid interest had compelled him to dr
ive in a dark car to La Trinidad long after he’d despatched Costain and Railsback? What malady had seized him and locked him into the overwhelming need to witness death and destruction?
He’d stood in the dark, detached, hypnotised by monstrosity, the unseen spectator at a bloodletting, a man imprisoned by his own absorption with savagery. He’d stood motionless, feeling absolutely nothing, wanting to feel, wishing he could experience outrage and emerge from the night and put a stop to the massacre, but he was restricted by a sense of inevitability, by the fact he hadn’t the urge to act.
He wanted to see people die. He wanted to watch. He was fascinated by slaughter. He had no idea what the price of admission might ultimately be, but he stayed, and he watched, and he felt nothing when the pistols went off – not with the sharpness he expected but rather quiet explosions. When the silence came afterwards, the enormity of it was appalling, and it jolted him back to self-consciousness, to incredulity, as if what he’d seen had been a shadow-play upon a screen, a kind of bloody masquerade, a brutal puppetry.
He closed the freezer door, pressing his face against it. His eyes were damp. He raised his fingertips to them, remembering now his confrontation with Railsback and Costain the next day in Manila, how calmly reasonable he had been, failing to mention his own silent presence. He justified the behaviour of his subordinates by placing it inside a framework that made torture and murder to some degree acceptable, comprehensible. After all, the Communists were armed and bloodthirsty. They killed without asking questions. After all, US assistance had been pledged to Marcos to fight the insurgents. A foreign country, a strange environment, an American commitment, men lost their nerve and behaved atypically; the excuses went on and on, you could conjure them out of the thinnest air. And you, Laforge, you shredded the reports. You destroyed the documentation. You obliterated the records. And then you closed that drawer in your brain, locked it, tossed the key away, and for most of the time contrived to forget.
Agents of Darkness Page 38
