Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  “There’s nothing left,” she said, and her arms flopped at her sides in a gesture of resignation.

  His voice was a very strange whisper. “I can’t stand to hear you say that.”

  He listened to the kitchen door open. She went across the tiled floor of the living-room where she said something to Clarence Wylie. The front door closed quietly, a click of the latch, finality. He wanted to go after her, but there would have been a headlong quality of desperation in the move. She wasn’t coming back. She wasn’t coming back. Think about that before you go chasing after her in your underwear and socks.

  He sat down at the table and held his head between his hands. How long he remained in this position he had no way of measuring, nor was he able to evaluate exactly how he felt. The best you could say of a hangover was that it blunted your responses, took some of the sting out of your emotions. Of course you felt physically sick, confused, depressed, remorseful, clarty. But the upside of all this bleakness was a certain numbness that rendered the complex equations of the heart as difficult to grasp as infinity.

  His wife had just gone. She was never coming back. He loved her dearly. Therefore …

  Galloway’s Unfinished Theorem.

  At the age of forty-three, that well-known mathematician of the emotions, Charles Galloway, formerly of Govan, succumbed to death by disappointment, his life’s work incomplete.

  Clarence Wylie entered the room, sat at the table. He wore a white shirt that looked as crisp as the inside of a Winesap apple, and his dark necktie was unobtrusive.

  Say it, Clarence, Galloway thought. Say some word of consolation, some kindly phrase. Something like, “She spoke in the heat of the moment, Charlie. Things will improve, you’ll see. She doesn’t mean it.” But Clarence Wylie, who preferred silent sympathy to an idiot platitude, said nothing.

  Galloway got up from the table and poured hot water into his cup, then tossed in a spoonful of instant coffee granules, which he stirred in a manic way.

  “You’ll wear a hole right through that cup, Charlie,” said Clarence Wylie.

  Charlie went on stirring, stirring.

  “Sit down, Charlie. Drink the coffee.”

  Galloway returned to his chair. He didn’t want to talk. His hangover was giving out some weird visual vibrations and the air between himself and Clarence seemed to fill with oscillating lines. Each wave brought Galloway a flicker of pain directly behind the eyeballs.

  His brain was broken. He saw in the distance the jagged rainbow of the old Migraine Express. He rubbed the sides of his head. He was going to pass out. The room tilted one way. The ceiling dropped a few inches. The window came zooming toward him. In the sensory chaos of hangover inner damage was inestimable. Millions of braincells had been blitzed. Repair crews worked the main avenues but the side streets were still a disaster. Several zones had been sealed off entirely to prevent looting. Vandals stormed the various emporia that stocked memories, feelings, and reflexes. This was the ruined city inside Charlie’s head where what remained of the working gendarmerie was barely managing to hold back the attack of the great white slugs that burrowed through the suburbs of his cerebrum. Plump and sickening, tentacula upraised and quivering, they crawled behind Galloway’s eyeballs, creating hideous pressure.

  When his head cleared enough to see, he eyed Clarence Wylie curiously. “You’re still here then.”

  “I’ll leave if you want,” Clarence said in the manner of a man with no intention of going anywhere.

  Galloway stared unblinkingly at the sunlit window. On the sill two peaches left to ripen had rotted, and flies pecked at them, busily regurgitating their food before they could swallow. Probably they were breeding too, producing their charming children in condos bored out of the decayed fruit.

  “I heard about Ella Nazarena,” Clarence said quietly. “I understand how upset you must be.”

  Charlie could still hear the echo of Karen’s heels on tile. “I’m not over the moon about it, Clarence.”

  “I also heard about this … Joaquin incident.”

  “Christ. News travels.”

  “I got a call from Len Paffett.”

  “And what did Paffett want?”

  “He’s worried about you. Wants me to use my friendly influence to get you to cease and desist – his words, Charlie – from poking your nose into this murder. Otherwise …”

  “Otherwise?”

  “Dark hints were made. The legal process was mentioned. It didn’t sound good. Stay away, Charlie. Leave it alone. Why did you go to Joaquin’s apartment anyway?”

  “I had a tip he killed Ella.”

  “And you wanted to play cop.”

  “I don’t think that deserves a response, Clarence.”

  “Don’t sulk at me, Charlie. Don’t give me that protruding lower lip routine. You forget. I know you. I’ve held your head while you puked in more johns than I care to remember. I’ve listened to you babble for hours at a time. I’m an expert on Charles D Galloway and his travails.”

  “What a burden for you.”

  “At times,” Wylie said. “At times.” He tapped the table with his fingertips. “Joaquin denied the accusation?”

  “Sure.”

  “But you believe he killed Mrs Nazarena?”

  Charlie Galloway said, “An innocent man doesn’t usually pull a gun on you.”

  Wylie appeared to consider this for a time, but in a detached fashion, as if he were trying to remember a life before retirement. He said, “Listen. Do yourself some good. Take a vacation, Charlie. Get out of LA for a while. Stay out of trouble.”

  Galloway thought of Greyhound buses and terminals and destinations, and all this depressed him profoundly. People rode through roaring dark wastes to places with names like Blythe and Twentynine Palms and San Luis Obispo, communities of mysterious decrepitude. He thought of airplanes and the peculiarity of suspension at thirty thousand feet and how the brown, arid landscapes below were always crisscrossed with inexplicable lines suggestive of Peruvian enigmas. He wasn’t about to leap into the abyss of timetables and tickets and suitcases.

  Wylie said, “Go to San Diego. Go to Vegas. Anywhere. Just get away.”

  “I’ll think it over, Clarence.”

  A pain skipped through Charlie’s brain, reminding him of the ritual he’d have to go through that would diminish, if not entirely alleviate, the hangover. The long shower. The shave. Pints of cold water. Alka-Seltzer. Vitamins B and C. Then, later, some starchy food, pasta, which filled the cracks in the stomach like cement. These palliatives made it possible for you to drag yourself through the day.

  He sipped his lukewarm coffee. He wondered about Karen. Had she called for a taxi before leaving? Or had some friend, Justine, say, picked her up by prearrangement? He was afraid of life without her, the enduring emptiness of it all. He walked to the sink, filled a glass with water, swallowed quickly. He repeated the close. Slicks ran down his bare chest. He drew the back of a hand that still shook across his lips. He filled a third glass from the faucet. His ankle ached and he rearranged his position for relief. A spectacular bruise was located just above his right hip, blue-yellow, as picturesque as a small tropical parrot; he remembered colliding with the dressing-table in Raymond Cruz’s hotel room.

  This recollection spurred something else, but his memory, befogged now, was going nowhere. A mystery lurked in that pea-souper, as sinister as the shadow of Jack the Ripper, but he was damned if he could define it. Something to do with Cruz, with Joaquin, an account that didn’t balance. But what?

  What did it matter? He’d been banished, hounded by the forces of law and order. Wherever he went chaos stalked him.

  Ah, wasn’t that the siren song of his old companion in adversity, self-pity? Where the hell was his mettle? where his backbone? where the strength of character to clamber up out of this stinking pit and get on with a life? It’s a sair fecht. Right, but that wasn’t an excuse to lie down and roll over like some dying dog. So you stumbled, you fell face-f
irst into a pile of dung, but you didn’t just lie there, did you?

  Fuck, nooooo! You got up. You whistled. You tap-danced, even if your feet were killing you.

  He felt cold water run to the waist of his embarrassing plaid shorts. It was a time, he decided, for a strategy of limited optimism, rather than the disappearance Clarence Wylie advocated. Physical relocation was the same as drunkenness: both were forms of flight. Clarence meant well, but in this instance he was wrong.

  Descended from a long line of gritty Lowland Scots, hardy shipyard men who’d lived through the deprivations of the Great Depression when the yards lay silent and rainy and people were hungry, Galloway wasn’t going to be run out of his own damned home by anybody, nor was he about to accept Karen’s last speech as the closing of the curtain on their marriage. He dried himself vigorously with paper towels. He was a Man of the Clyde. He had a life to work out. Yes. He had a life to lead and problems to solve.

  “I’m a resilient bastard, Clarence,” he said. “Knock me down, I bounce back. It’s in my blood.”

  “And you just bounced back?”

  “The alternative, old son, is bloody despair.”

  Galloway’s had a look on his face of forced cheer. How long could he keep this up? Did he really believe in this brave new front? Or was this more of that pox self-deception? He crumpled damp paper towels in his hands and tossed them in the wastebasket, remembering that these particular towels were the only ones Ella ever used when she cleaned. Everything else, she’d say, is inferior and falls to pieces immediately, and she’d demonstrate how water made pulp of cheaper towels, as if she were doing a TV commercial. She’d loved American TV, which she looked at every day with fresh eyes, as if it had been invented overnight.

  Followed by Wylie, Galloway wandered into the living-room where his pants lay crumpled on the floor. He picked them up and asked, “Matter of curiosity, Clarence. If you were me, would you walk away from Ella’s death?”

  “I can’t answer that –”

  “Step in the bloody water, Clarence. Get your feet wet. Give it a try.”

  Clarence Wylie frowned. “What did the dead woman mean to you?”

  “She was a friend. I felt sorry for her. I think a lot of her life was pure shit, but she smiled through most of it, and I liked her for that. She minded her own business and she wasn’t judgemental. She didn’t need to die the way it happened, Clarence. Somebody shot her, and he’s out there in the streets right now. Does that answer your question?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t maybe me. Just get back to me with a reply, for Christ’s sake. Would you walk away from the whole thing? Would you let yourself be warned off by Paffett and that moron Duffy?”

  “I’d want to know what ‘the whole thing’ means, Charlie, what’s involved, I’d look deeply at my own motives –”

  “Fucking hell. When did you turn into an old woman, Clarence? When you retired? I asked a straight question –”

  “You’re a pain in the ass, Galloway.”

  “Lemme tell you, Clarence. I know what you’d do. I know exactly what you’d do. You’d stick with it, wouldn’t you? You’d see it through. You wouldn’t let some eedjits put you off, not if you were determined enough, and curious enough. Not you, Clarence. You might walk in the shadows, but you’d hang in there. Correct? Correct, eh?”

  “Maybe.”

  Charlie Galloway laughed.

  “I emphasise maybe,” Wylie said. “But not before I’d asked myself some damn tough questions first.”

  “Of course, Clarence. Damn tough. Self-examination and all that. Right?”

  “Piss off.”

  They walked together to the front door, a curious pair, the tousled dripping Scotsman in his tartan boxer shorts, the retired FBI agent in white shirt and navy blue well-creased slacks.

  Clarence said, “If you want my opinion, I don’t like the idea of you trespassing, which is always a risky business. But do what you have to, Charlie. Because that’s what you’ll do anyhow.”

  Charlie watched his friend walk to his parked car. The brilliant morning sun transformed his shirt from white to some unnamed colour beyond the spectrum, a phosphorence that burned itself on Galloway’s eyes.

  Charlie shut the door quickly, climbed the stairs to the bathroom where he turned on the shower and, while steam was building, he took two aspirin, a handful of multi-vitamin capsules, and a glass of Alka-Seltzer. Then he climbed inside the shower, adjusted the nozzle, making the stream of water sharper. With closed eyes, he turned his face directly into the jet, which pummelled and jabbed him. It would be two, maybe three days before he was himself again. Over the age of forty, restoration from drunkenness was a chore, a terrible price you paid for a few dark hours of merriment you couldn’t remember anyway when you woke up.

  There was, he knew, little logic in that, but alcohol and reason made unnatural bedfellows, which was why you never went to bars to discover and revere sages, and the only philosophers you ever encountered in the kind of pit-stops Charlie frequented dug ditches for a living, preferring to speak more of shovels and earth-moving equipment than of Socrates and Wittgenstein.

  He leaned against the tiled wall, enjoyed the pin-prick sensation of water on the surface of his skin. Then he stepped from the shower, wrapped himself in a towel, and walked back to the bedroom. He looked out at the small garden at the back of the house, where Karen had planted runner beans and begonias. Everything was in an advanced state of rot.

  He remembered now what it was that had been troubling him about Cruz, an anomaly so small it required a microscope to see it, but it nagged him anyway, touching him with a sense of dissatisfaction that normally he might have ignored. But he was not these days a busy man, even if he wished to remain a determined one. And when minor incongruities flowed around him like shoals of tiny fish, he had all the time in the world to step into the water, no matter how shallow or unruffled, for a closer look. He took a fresh shirt from the closet, a pair of slacks, non-plaid boxer shorts, and his LAPD identification.

  When you got right down to it, he had nothing much to lose and the leisure time in which to do it.

  For a long time Joe Baltazar had been moving from one cheap rooming-house to the next in various quarters of Manila. He left behind no obvious trail for anyone tracking him, even though he could never shake the sensation that somebody was close at hand. He’d spent some nights in Sampaloc, in a room occupied by three unemployed labourers from North Luzon, old Marcos loyalists who drank tuba and spoke bitterly of ‘the housewife’ Corazon Aquino. Baltazar pretended to sympathise with them, but most of the time he feigned sleep.

  After Sampaloc he’d crossed the Pasig River to the edge of Makati where he found a crummy little room, six feet by five, alongside the noisy South Highway which rumbled with traffic awra-awra, an unceasing thunder. Then he’d drifted into Malate, to one small room after another, some shared with strangers from different provinces. Baltazar was polite to these people but encouraged no intimacies. He lived inside himself. His smile was a hermit’s.

  He was convinced he could live safely only in this wayward manner. When you couldn’t predict your own moves, how could your enemies? He travelled dark streets, rarely saw sunlight. He lay in stifling uncooled rooms, and through open windows listened to the endless racket of life in the streets of Manila, jeepneys, roosters, street vendors. One moonless night he moved to a room over a restaurant in Chinatown where the smell of garlic filled the narrow staircase at all times. He suffered insomnia. On certain days the pain in his groin was so bad he could do nothing but walk back and forth, moaning quietly, eyes watering. It was an old pain, but when it recurred it was as acute as it had been on the night of its affliction. He wondered if it had some magical capacity to renew itself, like a tumour. Perhaps it would never leave him in peace until the enemies were dead. He stroked the cat’s eye amulet and often found a form of solace in this.

  He left Chinatown and had moved north toward Tondo,
believing the impossible maze of filthy alleys would afford him anonymity. Tondo was a blight, a plagued landscape of the worst poverty, shacks pressed against shacks, refuse piled in narrow alleyways where it stank and seethed and came alive in the monolithic heat. Poverty in Tondo was more than just the lack of money and hope; here it became something else, a mutant social form, a deplorable new order.

  He rented a room built out of corrugated tin from an old man who was also a moneylender. Prostitutes came to him to pawn their cheap jewellery for a few pesos. On the night after Teng’s departure from the Philippines, Baltazar, numbed by loneliness, had taken one of the girls to his room and tried to make love to her, but even brief penetration caused him distress and he had to withdraw and roll away from the girl, whose name was Epifania.

  After, the girl smoked a cigarette and dressed in silence. Then she sat down beside him and asked him who had hurt him this way, a question he didn’t answer. She placed a hand softly between his legs. He felt the tips of her fingers on the welts that would always give disfigured contours to his testicles. The gesture was so unexpectedly tender it moved him. He gave the girl one hundred pesos before she left. Later, he lay for a long time thinking of Teng, wondering how Teng would fare in the United States. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the young man, but nothing would come to him.

  The morning after the encounter with the girl, he left Tondo and went to Baclaran, to a pension house in a decaying sidestreet. His few possessions he carried in an old canvas bag. His room was on the top floor. Open fires were lit among abandoned buildings nearby and raw smoke billowed inside the house through shattered windows. He locked his door, lay down on the narrow bed, but even behind locked doors in disintegrating houses he felt no safety. When he looked from the window along the smoky street he thought he saw people waiting for him in doorways. And those lovers who passed holding hands – who was to say they were really lovers and not agents of the Constabulary keeping him under surveillance?

  He read and re-read old newspapers. He waited until darkness before leaving the house to walk to a nearby cafeteria for food, a quick, simple meal of pork and garlic rice. After he’d eaten he hurried back in the direction of his room. The streets filled him with fear, reminding him of a time when fear hadn’t been a word in his vocabulary, when he’d been bold and headstrong. Look at him now. What had he become? Depending on Teng for his revenge – what did that make him? A form of parasite, somebody who feasted off the bravery of another? He’d planned it all, of course, but that was merely a matter of joining the dots. That was nothing.