“You’re correct, Senator.”
“I’ve received information from a source I can’t name that Eugene Costain, in association with the Philippines Constabulary, participated in an assault against Filipinos suspected of Communist affiliations. Worse, that this attack was unjustified and carried out against unarmed civilians with no Communist connections. Is that correct?”
Laforge shook his head fiercely. “Certainly not! Costain’s work was to instruct certain members of the intelligence wing of the Constabulary and the Armed Forces in information-gathering techniques. Infiltration. Night photography. Telephone taps. Methods of interrogation. He took his orders from me and I would never have approved his participation in anything of that sort. Quite the opposite. Believe me.”
“You’re saying my information is false?”
“It’s a slander.”
“You’re assuring me of this?”
“Yes, of course.” The blue sky shimmered in Laforge’s vision. A small cloud, turned by the sun to the colour of a penny, floated high over the trees. Where had Truskett gotten his story?
“Why would anyone supply this inaccurate material?” Truskett asked. “Why make this up?”
“If its original source is the Philippines, which I guess, it was done to discredit the US. Why else?”
Truskett was quiet for a very long time. He stroked the sides of his face in a pensive way. Laforge pictured him caressing Carolyn’s flesh in just that manner.
“All I want is your assurance that it’s completely untrue, Billy. If this Costain business comes up in the course of your nomination hearings, you have to be so convincing that you’ll have Senators on their knees begging your forgiveness. On the other hand, if this affair has any truth to it you can kiss off your chances of becoming the head honcho at Langley and spend the rest of your life breeding quarter-horses and playing gentleman farmer.”
“The story’s false. You have my word, Senator.” How easy it was to say such a thing, to recreate yourself and eliminate history. But it wasn’t easy to get beyond the words to a reality that substantiated them, because your life was a series of mildewed rooms through which the restless dead moved, damning you. He looked across the meadow toward the birch, beyond which the depleted creek ran, as if his beloved landscape might yield a means of exorcism, a clue to salvation. But it remained dry as kindling and silent as an empty well.
Carolyn appeared in the doorway of the house, a slim gold vision. She wore a full-length dress of some flimsy material through which could be seen the outline of her body. She walked in the direction of the picnic table as though sunlight had bestowed upon her a certain earthy divinity. The Senator, troubled by the information Deets had given him about Costain – where in God’s name had Deets dug up this sleaze anyhow? – had been pondering all the way from Washington the wisdom of placing Laforge’s name in front of the President. Mud, no matter how thin, had a way of sticking. But the appearance of Carolyn Laforge erased his uncertainty and uplifted his spirits: there was magic in Bucks County, a sorcery whose spell once again bewitched all sense out of him. He imagined her in his bed, the searing of flesh, the flash of the electric connection that wired him to the cosmos.
Besides, when you got right down to it, he had an instinct about William Laforge, whom he considered too much of a gentleman to fob anyone off with some barefaced lie. He believed the man. He believed Billy would stand up to the probe of any Senatorial proctologist. He was not someone who’d yield to pressure, that was apparent. He had dignity, reserves of strength, and the kind of obvious breeding that Truskett both admired and envied.
Looking at Laforge with the intensity of a man introducing a new bill, he said, “I accept your word, Billy. Tomorrow, I’ll put your name and my recommendation before the President.”
Laforge felt enormous relief, as if some earthquake had passed by in the next county, creating all manner of havoc but skipping his property altogether. Both men shook hands as Carolyn reached the table.
“Have I missed anything?” she asked.
She sat down and sun shone through the thin chiffon dress and Truskett realised, as she lowered herself and parted her legs, that she wore skimpy panties under the garment. The shadowy outline of her pubic hair was unmistakable. She sat very close to him. The urge to slide his palm under the dress was so intense he became erect. He turned to Billy and wondered if he’d noticed this lustful interest, but Laforge was looking idly elsewhere. Why couldn’t Billy take a walk or something? Why couldn’t he just fucking vanish?
Carolyn glanced deftly at Truskett’s groin, then smiled and said, “I have the strongest feeling that I am missing something of huge importance.”
By early evening Los Angeles was smogbound. You had to learn how to breathe the metallic stuff, Charlie Galloway thought, because it was the air of the future. Only those without vision covered their faces with scarves or handkerchiefs. Men such as himself, like astronauts brazenly tossing aside their masks on the moon, sucked the scum in anyway, and be damned. He wondered if all this powdered lead had hallucinogenic properties of a cumulative nature. Even now, say, was it lodged secretly in corners of human lungs, rooted like some silent tenant quietly growing, soon to flow from lung to heart and then along the Brain freeway to cause madness and wreckage? It explained some things, he thought. Such as the general lunacy of the Californian condition. The freeway snipers, the irascible armed drivers who shot fellow-travellers for trivial reasons, the serial killers who loved to leave clues for the cops, as if reality was a television show about to be cancelled and needing a boost in the ratings. It was that kind of world here. Things simply did not connect, unless you believed in some underlying disorder, a common malaise as yet undetected. And the leaden air, which gripped the vast city like a mailed fist, was as good an explanation as any for Charlie Galloway.
Even his own musings, Charlie thought, might themselves be the product of the poisons already coursing through his brain. How could you tell? How could you check your idea of reality against reality itself? He parked his car and thought Ah, fuck it, as he stepped out in the street where Ella Nazarena had lived. The thoughts weren’t worth pursuing. When you had no car radio to listen to, you tended to scan your own internal channels, and some of them were call-in shows where all the callers were mad and the man behind the microphone deranged.
He stepped from the car, locked it. This neighbourhood by daylight looked worse than at night, if such a thing were possible. Details, concealed by dark, were evident. Cracked cinderblock and broken roofs. Windows, smashed so often that apathy had replaced any need for glass, were hung with brown paper grocery bags. Fenced yards where old men, mainly of foreign origin – Central America, Eastern Europe, the Orient – sat on plastic lawn chairs and pretended with an air of defeat that they were somewhere else. Here and there a drug deal was transacted on a porch or the sidewalk in full view. Not that anyone cared. In this place you either dreamed as the old men did or flew away on the wings of your drug of choice, Crack, Ice, Ecstasy.
The dogs were absent. They would come out, he supposed, only after dark. As he stepped toward Ella’s house he was assailed by music from all directions – polkas, Mexican folk songs, salsa, punk rock. He stopped at Ella’s fence. The police had hung a length of wide orange tape, most of which had already been scribbled on with the cryptic names of gangs and symbols Galloway couldn’t begin to understand. He felt a strangeness here, alienation, a suspicion that cults proliferated, forms of voodoo and ancient amalgams of Catholicism and African gods, santeria, all of it commingled with the drug underground, that dark subculture of needles and pipes, passwords and violence. It was as if a very old God and a younger, much more hip Devil had come to an understanding in this neighbourhood, a kind of delicate, cracked-glass truce.
Charlie stepped over the tape, walked up on the porch, entered the house. Lieutenant Duffy was in the living-room, skimming the pages of Ella’s Bible as if he expected to find a stash of dollar bills. The bottle
of Gallo wine, still unopened, lay on the floor.
“Charlie Galloway,” said Duffy, lighting a cigarette from the butt of a former one. “Better late than never.”
“I got your message,” Galloway said. See me at the Nazarena house asap, was what Duffy had said into the answering-machine, his tone that of some minor emperor. Resentful, Charlie hadn’t hurried. He’d eaten a late lunch in Barney’s Beanery, browsed through Tower Records with the notion of buying Karen a gift of her favourite piece of music, a recording of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata. It was a cacophony to his ears, but its dark thunder made Karen swoon.
“Turned anything up yet, Duffy?”
Duffy said, “I had four homicides last night. This one doesn’t take priority. You know the score. I don’t have the manpower. Yadda yadda yadda. It’s an old song.”
“So,” Galloway said. “If nothing new’s happening, why did you ask me down here? I’ve got better things to do with my time, Duffy. I’ve got trees to trim. Dry earth to water. Sick wee flowers are dying even as we stand here and gab.”
“Always the joker,” Duffy said. “Always the office wag, huh, Galloway?”
“I like a smile now and then,” Galloway said, oppressed by the way this house echoed with violence. He wanted out. The simplicity of Ella’s life, reflected in the religious icons and artefacts and Goodwill furniture, created a tight sensation at the back of his throat. “It brightens the day.”
“Allow me to darken yours a little,” said Duffy, looking grim. “Two hours ago I had occasion to interview one Freddie Joaquin, the dead broad’s fiancé. Routine stuff. My men had already talked to him, and I was checking up on a couple of facts. Now Freddie happens to tell me you’ve been on his case, Galloway, which comes as a bit of a surprise to me, to say the least. You’re suspended! You don’t even have a fucking job! Paffett’s pissed off and I’m pissed off. You don’t have any rights! You don’t have any powers! Your juice is cut off, hotshot.”
Powers, thought Charlie. Powers were what comic-book characters had. Plastic Man wrapped himself like a giant condom round buildings and Superman could fly, for Christ’s sake. Duffy made it sound as if Charlie had run into a stray piece of kryptonite, or whatever it was that made The Man of Steel a wimp. A current of anger went through him and he clenched his fists in the pockets of his pants; he knew Duffy was correct and he felt diminished by his uselessness. Worthless dreamer, Charlie. What did you think you could achieve? With this bleak sensation came a familiar urge, a trumpet blast he’d heard many times before. He wondered where the nearest bar was situated. Go there forthwith. Travel the galaxies. Check out the stars. A great wheel of flint seemed to turn inside his head, grinding against the roof of the skull, throwing off sparks and small chips of bone. He felt faint. The word ‘seizure’ lit up in his mind like three-hundred watt bulbs. Were these withdrawal symptoms? Could he expect hallucinations, cold sweats, dread, the big brass band playing the music of doom inside the echo chambers of his eardrums? Swooning, dimming out, heart failure, a one-way raft-trip across the Styx. Measure me, Mr Undertaker, see that my wood suit fits. Give me an ungodly drunken send-off, the mourners reeking of Tennant’s and some fine old malt, a twenty-five-year-old Macallan or a sacred Dallas Dhu, the bottle covered in stour and webs. Give me a paid piper playing that most lachrymose of all Scottish tunes:
Bonnie Charlie’s noo awa,
Safely ower the friendly main,
Many a heart will break in twa,
Should he no’ come back again.
He gazed at the place where Ella Nazarena had lain. The cheap carpet was bloodstained. Christ, the violence of her death kept him earthbound, anchored him to this whole reality business that he’d taken such pains to avoid in the past. He knew his eyes were about to become embarrassingly moist and he turned his face away because the last thing he wanted was to hear Duffy scoff or come out with a snide remark, because Charlie was sure he’d deck the prat if he said something mindless, which was likely, given the cop’s stupidity and insensitivity.
Galloway walked to the door. As if some emotion were locked in his chest without possibility of release, he felt padlocked, tethered to a life he wanted to change. And yet he was being denied the chance by people like Duffy and Leonard Paffett. Frustrated, he stepped on to the porch and slammed the screendoor behind him.
Duffy, lighting a fresh cigarette, followed him out. “It also seems there’s been some bureaucratic oversight, Galloway. You returned your gun, for which we’re all enormously fucking grateful and relieved, but somebody forgot to ask you for your badge back. I’m authorised to do so now.”
“I left it at home.”
“Mind if I don’t believe you?”
“Are you saying you want to frisk me, Duffy?”
“In a word.”
Galloway clenched his hands, crossing his arms against his chest. He felt the raw need to do violence to Duffy. He was a mere pulse beat away from it. It would only require Duffy to touch him. Just once. The Lieutenant, who clearly didn’t like the wild look in Galloway’s eye, had had some unhappy experiences dealing with enraged persons. He spread his hands and shrugged, backing off and looking very uneasy.
“Drop the goddam thing off downtown toot sweet. Paffett’s orders. And stay the hell away from this. Also Paffett’s orders. Am I getting through to you?”
“I hear you.” He liked the way Duffy had retreated. It raised his spirits to know you could still menace somebody with a good hard man Glasgow look – even if it was only a coward and bully like Duffy.
“You get up my nose, Galloway,” Duffy said, by way of cutting the losses in his self-respect. “You’re a royal fuck-up.”
Duffy’s words stung. They should have floated overhead, leaving Charlie untouched, but they didn’t. He wasn’t immune to cruelty. He wanted to come back with a stinger of his own, but he drew a blank. He looked up at the sun which, obscured by smog, was a fierce disc, and strangely milky, as if it were about to metamorphose into the moon.
As Galloway stepped down from the porch and walked toward his car, he realised he had been sober for almost a day. Was that all? Maybe it was worth celebrating. Did you toast twenty-four hours of sobriety with a brimming glass? Think it over. There had to be a system of rewards because stone-cold, graveyard sobriety hadn’t been particularly attractive in itself, nor did it fill that indefinable part of him which was astonishingly empty. Where was the triumph in not drinking?
He thought of Karen and wondered what the consequences of calling her might be. Would she consent to see him, hold his hand, smooth away the wrinkles of their combined solitudes? Or would she be distant, her tone like that of an icicle with a voicebox?
He wasn’t going to chance it. He was in no mood for rejection. Drinkies, Charlie. The cocktail hour doth descend. Booze would jumpstart your stalled soul.
He took his keys from his pocket and was reaching for the door lock when somebody poked him in the spine with a hard object. Turning quickly, expecting to see a mugger with a gun, he found himself instead staring at the tip of a walking-stick wielded by a person in a World War Two gas-mask, an odd affair with a long proboscis and bug-eyes. For a moment he had no idea whether his assailant was male or female; it wore lime-green polyester pants and a floppy sky-blue shirt and, outside the gas mask, an eye-shade such as card-dealers sport. Even when a hoarse, aged voice emerged from behind all this cover, it was hard to reach a conclusion as to the person’s gender.
“Wotcher.” The accent was English, probably London’s East End. “This here’s a souvenir. Keeps the bloody smog out yer chest.” A spindly hand rose from polyester folds and tapped the gas-mask. “From the Blitz, sonny. Before yer time.”
Galloway, no longer amazed by the human shells the tides of America had tossed ashore, wondered what diverse pathways had brought this eccentric all the way from Shoreditch or Stepney to the cancerous armpit of Los Angeles. The circuitry of other lives seemed at times as random as rogue cells or signals received f
rom immeasurable stretches of space.
“You Ella’s chum?” the person asked. “The Scotchman?”
“That’s right,” said Galloway. “I’m the Scotsman.” He stared at the mask, possessed by the feeling he was having a chat with some creature as yet unclassified by zoologists. The walking-stick was raised and pressed very gently into his stomach.
“Then you’re Galloway.”
“That’s me.”
“The one what drinks.”
“The one what drinks, right.”
“Listen, sonny. Me and Ella were close. What we didn’t know about each other wasn’t worth knowing. We was like sisters. She mentioned she had a china from the old country.” The masked person stepped closer and the proboscis swayed like the trunk of a small elephant. “Name’s Thompson. Evelyn Thompson. Been here for sixty-five years. Used to be in the motion pictures. Before the talkies ruined the whole bloody thing for me. Couldn’t get rid of me accent, know what I mean? Had la-di-bloody-da elocution lessons, speech therapy, dialogue coaches, the lot. You name it, didn’t make a blind bit of difference. Can’t make a silk purse, dearie. Wasn’t no whatchermacaller. Liza Doolittle.”
Galloway was still wondering about the location of the nearest tavern. Beer frothed in his head, a cold one, frosted glass. The old woman, determined to detain him, offered him a hand, a brittle white shell he took politely.
“Ella was ever such a dear,” the woman said.
“I know.”
“They’re lovely people, them Filipinos. They got their faults, course. Well, who hasn’t, right?” Evelyn Thompson sniffed. “Whatcher got to do, Galloway, is catch the effin killer. Catch the sod and give him the bleedin’ chair.”
“It’s a job for the local police,” he said, a little shamed by the feebleness of his response.
“What the hell are you then? The bleedin’ fire brigade?”
“I told you –”
“My arse,” Evelyn Thompson said. “Get up off yer duff and pull that bloody killer in for some hard questions, dearie.”
Agents of Darkness Page 19