Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  Now look at her. The years had rotted her. But she had Jesus, and the Holy Virgin, and she surrounded herself with saints. She was neither bitter nor lonely.

  She even had a gentleman caller, a widower named Freddie Joaquin from Tarlac Province. Freddie always wore highly-polished black shoes so that when he moved his feet were like two flashing mirrors reflecting everything. Freddie had recently spoken of marriage, but Ella couldn’t commit herself; she was half in love with the dead. Besides, Freddie wasn’t as reliable as she would have liked. Sometimes she caught him out in white lies, sometimes his excuses when he was late for a date weren’t always acceptable. Slippery. But kind to her. A small gift here, flowers there. She couldn’t deny his generosity, but marriage was something else.

  The telephone rang. It was Mrs Galloway. “Is Charlie there, Ella?” she asked.

  Ella said he was. But probably asleep.

  “Damn. I wanted to pick up some of my stuff.”

  “Tell me what you need. I’ll get it for you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No problem.”

  As she listened to Karen’s list of requirements, some clothing items, a few jewels, Mrs Nazarena drifted into a daydream in which the Galloways reconciled. She’d pray for them later. There was no marriage counsellor like God. And she’d remember to pray for herself at the same time.

  3

  Some nine thousand miles from Los Angeles, and twenty-four hours before Charlie Galloway escaped from the deprivations of the clinic, Captain Ramon Deduro and two of his men travelled through Baguio City in a Land Rover. The Captain rode alone in the back. All three men wore the uniform of the Philippines Constabulary and were armed. Bad-tempered because of the ungodly hour – the red dawn sun had only just begun to burn mist from golf-courses and ravines – each man was sullenly withdrawn. They gave the impression that they’d shoot without question the first person who irritated them.

  Captain Deduro, who had tubercular shadows under his eyes and the chagrined look of a man disappointed by his rank in life, scrutinised the street as the vehicle went down through the centre of the city. Baguio was quiet at this hour. The big public market on Magsaysay Avenue hadn’t opened and the stores and cafés on Session Road were shut. The air, unfouled as yet by traffic, was scented by tupalau and almaciga, the pines of the region. The sweet perfume reminded Deduro of a pleasant experience, although he wasn’t sure what – a darkened room with incense burning, a woman’s aromatic kiss, a talcumed breast in the palm of his stubby little hand. Something romantic: the Captain adored women. He closed his eyes, as if to focus on the exact nature of what the pines suggested, but another memory, specific and far less cheering, intruded.

  A few hours ago he’d lost 42,000 pesos at the roulette table in the Hyatt Terraces Hotel. In pursuit of the strangely elusive number thirty-three, he’d watched hundreds of pesos vanish at each maddening click of the tiny ball. With a gambler’s irrational conviction that sooner or later the fates would bestow upon him the malicious smile they reserved for the obsessed, he stalked thirty-three hour after hour. At three-thirty a.m. – this sinister configuration of threes didn’t escape him – he dropped his last hundred and rose blearily from the table.

  He was already in debt to various friends and moneylenders. His position in the Constabulary allowed him a certain licence when it came to repayment. After all, who would be idiot enough to pressure a Captain? But he didn’t like owing money because his political enemies would seize the fact and distort it, claiming that not only had he amassed gambling debts but had also taken bribes and abused his position. In the old days, the Marcos days, he might have ignored his carping critics. But now, under the watchful eye of Auntie Corey Aquino, you had to exercise some discretion, some care. These were not qualities that came to him naturally. He was more inclined to swagger and bravado.

  He’d left the casino and gone back to the house where he lived alone, a two-room cinderblock affair that clung to the side of one of the many hills of Baguio. Jerry-built like most of the housing in the city, it appeared to have been rooted to the ground in such a precarious fashion that any passing wind might blow it away. It hadn’t happened yet; it was as if the builder had negotiated a deal with gravity.

  Below Deduro’s house were buildings of even more questionable construction, shacks, hovels with corrugated metal roofs and tar-paper walls. An incalculable number of barefoot children lived in these dwellings and sent up a daily clamour. Sometimes when he looked from his bedroom window the Captain felt fortunate that he had the highest house on this particular hill, one that commanded a fine view over a landscape of pine and bougainvillaea, vegetable terraces and deep green valleys – which, if you chose to ignore, as Deduro did, the brittle ugliness of the shacks and the inexpensive laundry hung out to dry, was beautiful.

  He’d fed his guard-dog and reset the burglar alarm, then drawn the straw blinds in his bedroom. With his pistol under his pillow he lay for a restless hour pondering how to pay off his markers at the casino. Then he slept for another hour before the brisk sound of the telephone made him sit up. The caller, very apologetic about the inconvenience, had found a corpse in a field, obviously a police matter because of the bullet-wounds in the dead man’s head. Sleepily, Deduro had scribbled down directions in a notepad he kept on a bedside table.

  The caller said his name was Arturo Paz. Deduro agreed to meet him at the place where the corpse had been found. It was a damnable nuisance at this or any other hour of the day, but what could he do? In normal circumstances the matter would have been dealt with by the night officer, a churl called Sergeant Almenha, but he’d been sick, so he claimed, for the last few days, and calls were forwarded to Deduro’s number. If a murder had been committed, then it had to be investigated. And a corpse, if indeed one existed, could not be left to decay in a field …

  Deduro had dressed quickly while he considered the call, questioning it the way he did every piece of information that reached him. The times had made him cautious. Members of the Constabulary throughout the Republic were killed almost daily for their weapons by gun-hungry adherents of the New People’s Army, which Deduro considered far too grand a name to describe an undernourished assortment of Marxist fools, thugs and misguided peasants.

  But you couldn’t treat them lightly. Last month, in the adjoining province of Ilocos Sur, four Constabulary members and their families had been ambushed inside a church during Mass – an unthinkable sacrilege. You walked with great care these days and you developed eyes in the back of your head and you went nowhere, absolutely nowhere, without your weapons.

  Now Deduro stared at Magsaysay Avenue, along which the Land Rover travelled north. On either side of the street were fertiliser and seed supply stores, outlets stocked with cinderblocks and bags of cement, small general stores and drab cafeterias, blacksmiths, radiator shops. Mainly these were dim caverns with dirt floors. Ahead rose the enormous pagoda of the Bell Temple, whose stairways climbed the side of a steep hill where the sun hadn’t yet burned through the mist. The high tower of the Chinese temple was almost obscured from view, a ghostly thing.

  The driver turned on the radio. Deduro heard a man singing about country roads and mountains in West Virginia. The Captain hummed along with the tune. He accepted without question an American song coming out of a car radio in the Benguet Province of the Philippines. There was nothing even slightly incongruous in this for him. All his life he’d been conscious of Americans in his country. He’d worked alongside them on two or three occasions and admired the direct way they did things. They believed in their own worth and were consequently possessed by that clear-eyed righteousness of all true missionaries who, when they cannot convert infidels, prefer to eliminate them. He liked their culture, which they had exported with such vigour that forty-five years after Filipino independence English was still the official language of government in the country, and basketball – a far greater export than language, if you wanted Deduro’s opinion – the number one s
port.

  He also liked the American military bases in Clark and Subic Bay, especially the manner in which certain goods sometimes ‘strayed’ from these bases into his possession – automobile batteries, tyres, spare parts, for which he always found willing buyers. Perhaps a solution to his financial problems lay there. Later, he might make a call to one or another of his connections just to see whether something was scheduled, as the Americans put it, ‘to fall off a truck’.

  “Make it louder,” Deduro said. “I enjoy this song.”

  The driver, Gallines, a dark-complexioned man with Negritos blood, obeyed.

  As he listened to this anthem of a country he’d never known first-hand, Deduro fretted over his debts and continued to observe the landscape. The Land Rover passed the boundary between Baguio and the town of La Trinidad, and the pale green buildings of the State University slipped past. Nobody moved on the campus, where the shadows were long and deep.

  “Left,” Deduro said, consulting the directions he’d been given. “Did either of you ever hear of this Paz? The name familiar to you?”

  Gallines shook his head. In the passenger seat Sergeant Ocampo chewed on the confection called turrones de casoy and said he’d once known a Robert Paz in Manila, but that was fifteen years ago.

  The Land Rover entered a narrow unpaved street of shacks. A panicked pig scuttled in front of the vehicle and three hens half-flew on clumsy wings. Somewhere trash was burning with a vile smell, sending a choking pall of smoke through the open vehicle. Deduro coughed and the driver spluttered. Sergeant Ocampo flapped his hands at the dirty cloud.

  “Shit,” Deduro said. Somebody was always burning something, garbage, wood, old tyres. “Get us the hell away from here, Gallines.”

  The driver pressed his foot harder on the gas-pedal. Dust blew up in torrents from under the wheels and for a moment the Land Rover, itself no paragon of pollution control, was eclipsed by smoke and pulverised dirt, Then the vehicle pulled clear and the smoke drifted away behind it and the dust settled with gritty inevitability. Captain Deduro rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t shake his fatigue, which felt like an anchor he was obliged to drag around.

  The shacks ended and the street narrowed, fading out in a shallow ravine where sturdy weeds grew and an occasional flame tree, a bright survivor, managed to look faintly festive. The track rose gradually for several kilometres. There were no more homes. Here and there piles of cinderblock and wood lay strewn around as if efforts to build had been abandoned; or perhaps these were the ruins of houses flattened by typhoons. How could you tell? Captain Deduro didn’t like this place. He wasn’t fond of empty landscapes, especially those that came at you suddenly. He took his pistol out of its holster and laid it in his lap before he consulted the directions again.

  “Look for a fork in this road,” he said. “Bear right for about ten kilometres. That’s where this Paz will meet us.”

  The fork was found, the Land Rover turned right, the landscape became even quieter. Old bamboo tufts, some rotted by age and insect infestation, slanted along the path. They created a screen against the passage of sound. Silence and bamboo. Twenty-five kilometres from the commerce of Magsaysay Avenue and La Trinidad, and it was another world. Captain Deduro undid the safety catch on his gun.

  Gallines drove a little farther, then braked as a tall young man emerged from the bamboos, his slender arms raised in the air, palms turned out. He approached the Land Rover slowly.

  “Paz?” Deduro asked.

  “Yes.”

  Sergeant Ocampo stepped out of the vehicle and frisked the young man. “Clean,” the Sergeant said.

  Paz smiled, as if he had passed some test that was important only to the examiners. He had an uncommon face. His cheekbones were high in the oriental way, his skin light brown, but his other features were caucasianx – that straight, firm nose and small nostrils, those rather thin lips that suggested a slight cynicism more than any lack of generosity. The face, handsome enough, might have passed without much comment had it not been for the truly remarkable eyes, which seized Deduro’s attention. Round, long-lashed, the electric blue of a sky on a wintry day, they were astonishing, even unsettling, against the pigmentation of the skin. Deduro felt the surprise of a man startled in a drab landscape by an exotic bird. There was quite a blend of blood in this boy, he thought. He would have guessed a mother of mixed Malay-Spanish heritage, and a father either American or German, perhaps Australian, a mongrel.

  Deduro got out of the Land Rover, pistol in hand. “Okay. Where’s the corpse?”

  Paz looked expressionlessly at the gun. “This way,” and he pointed beyond the bamboo.

  “How did you happen to come across it?” Deduro asked. He had no intention of going anywhere with Paz until he’d asked questions.

  “I was walking –”

  “Walking where?”

  Paz said, “Nowhere special. For relaxation. Don’t you ever do that?”

  Deduro hadn’t risen this early to answer questions. “At this time of morning?”

  “I don’t sleep sometimes. I get restless. So I walk.”

  “Do you work?” Deduro asked.

  “Yes. I teach.”

  “And what do you teach?”

  “Arithmetic. English. History. Whatever I’m asked to do.”

  “Where?”

  “In the primary school in La Trinidad.”

  “Did you recognise the corpse?”

  “No.”

  Deduro had a mild sense of uncertainty. The young man’s answers were given without hesitation, but the Captain wasn’t sure he could read those unfamiliar blue eyes, which were untroubled and clear. Either Paz had nothing to conceal or else he was a fine actor.

  Deduro, accustomed to seeing in the most ordinary events shadows of unspeakable menace, glanced at Sergeant Ocampo. With his gun in hand, the Sergeant was already moving inquisitively toward the bamboo. Gallines had stepped out of the Land Rover, his FNC automatic rifle crossed upon his chest.

  The radio was still tuned to FM 94, the station with ‘the mellow touch’ in distant Manila: I’m sad to say, I’m on my way, Won’t be back for many a day …

  Deduro asked for identification. The young man took a wallet from the hip pocket of his blue jeans and handed it agreeably to the Captain. It contained a driver’s licence and a laminated card identifying Paz as an employee of the Benguet Province school district. Deduro studied these, then shut the wallet and gave it back.

  Everything appeared to be in order. A schoolteacher takes a walk in a secluded place, comes upon a body, calls the police – why should there be anything more to it than that? In a sharper frame of mind, less burdened with financial concerns, Deduro might have scrutinised with greater care the young man’s background, verified the authenticity of his ID cards. But he made a different decision.

  “Lead the way,” he said. Máuna ka sa akin.

  Paz went through the bamboo to a field filled with waist-high grass. A clump of thick trees stood about a quarter of a mile away on the western edge of the meadow. Beyond, a small green hill rose. Against its shoulder a solitary wisp of disintegrating mist hung. The sun was pink now behind the haze.

  Paz walked through the long stalks. Deduro was a dozen feet behind him. Ocampo and Gallines strolled a few yards on either side of the Captain, surveying the field. The tall grass had a furtive quality that made both men watchful.

  Paz stopped, looking toward the trees.

  “What’s the problem?” Deduro asked.

  “I’m trying to remember the exact spot,” said the young man, and he turned to the Captain with an expression that might have been one of frustration. Why were those blue eyes so shuttered?

  Then he moved again, pushing stalks aside as he continued. The dry grass whispered against his thighs. “It was very close to the trees,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you mark the place?” Deduro asked.

  “I didn’t think,” Paz replied calmly. “I literally stumbled across the thing. It
’s not the kind of sight that makes you react with any clarity, Captain. The smell was terrible. I wanted to hurry away.”

  Deduro, weary, could imagine more pleasant things than having to deal with a decomposing corpse before breakfast. He was a little out of breath. He smoked too much, burned the candle too often at both ends. He thought he could still hear the whir of the roulette wheel echo inside his head and knew that if he shut his eyes he’d see the croupier’s emotionless face and the fake smile of the pit boss, a greasy little man whose courtesy toward him was both endless and sycophantic.

  Paz was moving more quickly now. Deduro yawned and tried to keep up with him. It was a chore. Ocampo and Gallines, positioned behind him, had drifted about thirty yards from each other. They flattened the grass with every step, but the stalks sprung up again immediately.

  “Here,” Paz called out. He had stopped near the trees and was looking down at whatever lay concealed by the dense growth.

  Panting, Deduro reached the place.

  “Look,” Paz said, and he parted the stalks with his hands.

  The Captain couldn’t see what Paz was pointing out to him. A lizard scampered over his shoe and a spider, hanging by a strand of an unfinished web, curled into a protective ball. Where was the corpse?

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” Puzzled and uneasy, Deduro turned to the young man. He was about to press his pistol into Paz’s face and demand an explanation, but he didn’t get the chance.

  Gunfire, destroying the calm of the field, came from the trees. For a moment Deduro mistakenly attributed the sound to some natural phenomenon, an earthquake, the roar of thunder. But then he saw Sergeant Ocampo fall and vanish in the grass. At the same time Gallines cried aloud from a place beyond Deduro’s vision.