Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  Finally he said, “Okay. I’ll nominate him, Byron. I’ll get behind him. I’ll make my announcement this very afternoon.”

  “Thank you, Mr President.” Before Sandy Bach is even cold, Truskett thought. McCune did business with a swashbuckler’s sensitivity.

  “Lemme warn you of something, Byron. I’ll pull the rug out from under him at the first sign of an indiscretion. Keep that in mind. My support goes only so far. If he’s a bad apple, he don’t go in my pie.”

  Truskett rose. He was no lover of the folksy imagery and grammar McCune occasionally endorsed.

  “Keep this in mind also, Senator,” said the President. “You’re standing on the same rug as your boy Billy.”

  Byron Truskett smiled, but neither McCune nor The Shadow returned the expression. In shade, they seemed to fuse together, as if some sinister trick of light had welded them into one entity – a moment of pure science fiction, and it left a vaguely disturbing impression on Byron Truskett that lingered long after he’d stepped from the Oval Office.

  Thomas Railsback took a telephone call from William Laforge at ten-fifteen a.m. in his Dallas home, which lay north of University Park and south of the Lyndon B Johnson Freeway, a good neighbourhood severed from the Northwood Country Club by the artery of the highway. Although there were some shade trees on the street, the sun had made an arid mockery of them. A few leaves, dead long before their time, had fallen from branches and lay listless on bone-dry lawns.

  Railsback’s study, a glass extension at the rear of his home, overlooked a half-acre of yellow bermuda grass. Four elm trees and a cedar fence marked the boundary of the property; in the centre of the lawn stood a small statue of a woman holding a cornucopia in her arms. Even the pears and grapes that flowed from this plaster horn seemed, to Railsback’s bleak eye, withered.

  He sat at a large laminated desk which held a computer terminal, a fax machine and a printer. He was conscious of his teenage daughter Holly padding barefoot along the hallway on her way to the kitchen. School was out for the summer, a state of affairs that always struck Railsback as slightly unnatural. He was so accustomed to having the house to himself at this time of day that his daughter seemed like an intruder, albeit one he adored – even if her lovely oval face always served as a painful reminder of his former wife, Eve, who had run away with some muscle-headed Popeye who worked a charter boat out of Savannah. Railsback looked at Holly and sometimes, no matter how he struggled, the resemblance caused old resentments to strut in front of him. It was a circus that had never quite left town.

  “I wanted you to be one of the first to know, Tom,” Laforge was saying. “I just heard I’m going to be nominated for Bach’s job.”

  Was Railsback supposed to act surprised? “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “And you were right.”

  “You’ll do a hell of a job,” Railsback said.

  “If I get it.”

  “You’ll get it.”

  “I appreciate your confidence, Tom.”

  There was a lull. Railsback had the distinct feeling that this news wasn’t the entire reason for the call. Something else lay in Laforge’s tone of voice, a touch of concern, whatever.

  “How are things deep in the heart of Texas, Tom?”

  “Everything’s just fine,” Railsback answered.

  “Nothing unusual? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  Of course. What else? Clearly Laforge was still chewing on the notion of an avenger from Benguet, an idea that in the hot, severe, frazzled light of a Dallas morning seemed even less realistic than it had done in the gloomy, humid woods of Bucks County.

  “Like I said, everything’s fine,” Railsback remarked. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Same old, same old.”

  “Do me a favour. Keep me posted, Tom. If anything strange happens, even if it seems only minor …”

  “Sure.” Strange, Railsback thought. Like how? How strange was strange? What was minor, what major? How did you quantify Laforge’s anxieties?

  “You think I worry too much, don’t you?”

  Yes, Railsback thought. “I didn’t say that.”

  Laforge was quiet for a few seconds, perhaps reflecting on the insincerity in Railsback’s answer. Then he laughed, a flat tinny sound reminiscent of a coin dropped inside a Salvation Army can. “You think I’m a fussbudget.”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “You didn’t have to, Tom. I see danger where none exists, isn’t that how you feel?”

  Jesus Christ. Exasperated, Railsback gazed out of the window. “Look. You’re this close to a job you always wanted, and quite naturally you’re stressed in case something goes wrong. That’s it. The rest is pure imagination.”

  “It’s just that something in the air is different, Tom. I can’t define it. It’s like a charge of electricity. You know that way the air changes when there’s about to be lightning. Still. Heavy. It’s like that.”

  “Try to relax,” Railsback said quietly. What else could he say? Take a trank, lie down for an hour? Forget all about this charge of fucking electricity nonsense?

  “Relax? Yes, you’re right. Of course you are.”

  “I’ll call if anything comes up. I’ll keep in touch.”

  “Do that, Tom. Please.”

  Railsback said goodbye and hung up the telephone. The way the air changes … The anxiety in Laforge’s voice had been unmistakable. Billy normally displayed no emotion at all, unless you counted a kind of smile that wasn’t really worth counting because it was ambivalent. Railsback had seen stress in him only once, and that was during the meeting in Bucks County the other day. Maybe it came down to this: tie game, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and Billy, walking to bat, victory within reach, didn’t have the nerve for the big moment any more. Some men just couldn’t cut it after a certain age.

  Or perhaps Billy was having bad dreams, dark visitations in the night. Railsback knew a thing or two about those, about the chills, the way old images resurfaced in spooky new forms. These dreams didn’t come often to him any more, but when they did they were always zingers, bloodcurdlers that woke him in fever, sheets glued to flesh, hair damp, strength depleted.

  Holly put her face round the door and blew a large pink sphere of bubble gum. She wore an old lightweight coat of Railsback’s, which swept the floor, and a strange thrift-shop hat, a 1930ish trilby pulled down over her forehead. Half-woman, half-child, nymph.

  She was fourteen and no longer a virgin, a fact she’d announced in a forthright manner only the day before. A part of Railsback thought rage and shotguns; another part conjured up detailed drawings of his daughter’s defloration, which had happened at the hands, so to speak, of a seventeen-year-old high-school drop-out who – O Christ, what else? – wrote poetry and loved the stars at night. No redneck parent, Railsback did his best to absorb this business in a way he considered enlightened. He’d sighed and hoped she’d had the good sense to take precautions against pregnancy and, these days, fatality.

  Her bubble-gum popped and the deflated structure clung like an exploded web to her cheeks and nose. She made no attempt to scrape it off. She asked, “Is it okay with you if I go to the Galleria and hang out later?”

  It was odd, Railsback thought, how his daughter – having shed her virginity, smoked pot and dropped acid, having in a sense grown up – could still ask permission to visit a shopping-mall. She had one foot in her childhood, the other God knows where.

  “You look ridiculous with that gum all over your face.”

  “It comes off.”

  Railsback stood up and walked across the polished pinewood floor to her. How long had it been since she’d had plump cheeks and chubby knees? She had her mother’s blue eyes and that same way of looking at you with her face turned just slightly to one side, as if some mischief was taking place that could either be innocent or harmful, and it was up to you to guess which. In Eve’s case, Railsback had figured wrongly.

  He placed a hand upon Holly’s arm. “You’ll
need money.” He took a couple of fives out of his wallet and gave them to her.

  She stuffed them in the pocket of the oversized coat. “I’ll be back around six for supper, okay? Listen, I’d kiss you, but you’d only get sticky and hate me forever. Later, pater, potater.”

  And she was gone, coat flapping, leaving behind the gibberish of adolescence. He watched her disappear along the corridor, then he went back to his desk. He sat still for a time, looking out at the statue, the trees, the cedar fence of the property that adjoined his. At various points along this fence he’d installed an electronic sensor system. Anyone climbing the fence would trigger an alarm inside his bedroom, where he kept a shotgun and a pistol. The front entrance of the house was protected by an invisible beam of light that, if broken, caused another set of alarms to ring. The windows were wired into the system. If anybody tried to force one open, not only would bells sound but floodlights immediately blaze around the house. It was a strong system, certainly enough to foil your average burglar.

  He heard Holly singing in the kitchen, although he couldn’t catch the words. A purity about her voice aroused that blind, unanalysable love of a father for his daughter, a fathomless, immutable feeling that isn’t menaced by passing years or enforced absences or the loss of a child’s innocence. It was so unexpected that when she stopped singing and the emotion withered away, he was left with a mild sense of displacement, almost a despair. In a few years she’d be gone from this house, perhaps, as he quietly hoped, to college, perhaps to do Europe in a van, if that’s what kids still did these days.

  He rose. It was almost time to drive to his office on the third floor of an old building overlooking the dreariness of the Trailways bus station downtown, a scene that always depressed him with its decrepit, aimless air. In his office he usually shut the venetian blinds and read the overnight dispatches from the intelligence operatives he ran inside Central America. That was his assignment these days, gathering and interpreting material from the men and women, some of them bogus priests and nuns affiliated with supposed ‘church missions’, under his command in Nicaragua and El Salvador. This information he analysed and sent by scrambled modem to the Office of Central American Analysis in Virginia. The material usually concerned reports of ordnance deliveries and guerrilla manoeuvres in rebel-held regions. Anything deemed inimical to American interests, anything, that is, of a left-wing nature, or hostile to the CIA, was relayed in detail. On occasion, Railsback was obliged to fly to Mexico City or Belize for personal meetings with staff members, but increasingly nowadays he managed to stay right where he was, at home with his daughter in Dallas. Which delighted him.

  He stepped into the corridor, where he looked in the direction of the kitchen. The door lay open, revealing the girl standing at the sink, peeling gum from her face as if it were a layer of skin ruined by over-exposure to sunlight. He watched for a moment, enjoying the role of unseen observer, then he turned away.

  Unhinged by the clarity of daylight, bewildered by the energy of his own motorised slipstream, Charlie Galloway drove down from the hills and through twisting canyon roads with an expression on his face of one demented. He had no way of ignoring the hangover, which periodically issued its own strident list of demands, as if it were a terrorist who had hijacked his body.

  1.Douse me with cold water.

  2.Feed me more aspirin.

  3.Put me back to bed.

  4.Free me with a couple of fast beers, sonofabitch, or I’ll squeeze your brain out through your earholes.

  On Sunset Boulevard morning traffic was tangled in smoky sunlight. Already the day was one of disconnections. Men drilling a great, meaningless hole in the concrete beneath traffic lights had caused a detour. A woman in an orange hard-hat directed traffic unsmilingly with purple tattooed hands, but everything was stalled. A dwarf-like vendor of puckered little apples weaved between motionless cars, and somebody in very black glasses tapped on Charlie’s window to panhandle a buck, which Galloway, always charitable, gave him. No sign of gratitude was shown. This was a world wherein the beggars were surly, always looking for bigger handouts. The man sniffed, then spat, and the distintegrating arc of his saliva sent tiny drops of moisture across Charlie’s windshield. Hollywood! Sunset Boulevard! Nine-thirty a.m., outside temperature ninety-two degrees, and already you’ve been touched for a buck, offered a doubtful second-hand apple, and spat upon! Was this some odd Third World dream? Had he somewhere crossed a borderline without seeing it? Or was America, a cumbersome giant with a sciatic creak and severe schizophrenia, disintegrating in front of his very eyes?

  Dying, he rolled down his window, but the syncopated roar of two pneumatic drills churning through cement made him shut it again. The hot air was thick with dust. He turned up the air-conditioning. His head absorbed without discrimination all the stimuli rocketing toward it. No editorial process was going on. The internal filter was fucked-up. When they were handing out afflictions, he wondered, why had he been given alcohol? Why wasn’t he a workaholic? A religious zealot? An obsessive wanker? Why had this particular weakness been implanted in him?

  Traffic moved. Stopped. Moved again. Galloway made a right turn, found himself in a sequence of sidestreets, assailed by white and yellow and pink apartment buildings that resembled fussy confections of the fake kind you sometimes saw in the windows of old pastry-shops, bleached by sun and covered with dust. Two junkies in tattered fatigues emerged from the bomb-shelter of their nightmare and wandered in the general direction of Galloway’s slow-moving car, as if they were intent on stopping him to squeeze a little dope money out of him, but something appeared to snap simultaneously in their synapses, perhaps a form of shared hallucination, and they veered off unexpectedly in another direction.

  The Palms Hotel came in view. Galloway parked the Toyota, then hurried out of the heat into the building. He was spared an elevator ride because Cruz was sitting in the lobby, a newspaper open in his lap and a small overnight bag on the floor between his feet. He had the restless look of a man waiting for somebody, absently tapping one foot on the carpet as he read. When he became aware of Charlie Galloway crossing the lobby toward him, he folded the newspaper and frowned, but this expression was brief and yielded to a smile that brought the strange blue eyes alive. Galloway had the feeling they weren’t Cruz’s eyes at all, but brightly-coloured contact lenses – another disconnected moment, nothing more.

  “I’m surprised to see you again so soon,” said Cruz, and looked at his wristwatch. “I was preparing to leave.”

  “Running out on me?” Charlie asked.

  Cruz laughed in his shallow way. “No. Nothing like that.”

  “I was under the impression you planned to stay here.”

  “I was obliged to change my mind,” Cruz remarked. “A simple budgetary matter. But I would have telephoned you, of course, as soon as I found new accommodation,” and he looked sincere, as if to deter any impression of subterfuge on his part.

  Galloway wondered why the notion of Cruz disappearing into the maze of Los Angeles troubled him. The Filipino had done some arithmetic and hadn’t been able to balance his books, so he was shuffling off elsewhere, which was surely all there was to this. But hadn’t Cruz called the Palms ‘cheap’ only last night? Okay, he was no grandmaster of the chequebook, which wasn’t a crime. You’re searching too hard, Charlie, turning over tiny stones, digging away, bare fingernails in the black earth, acting more from desperation than doggedness – and you don’t have a clue what you expect to find. Everything you do is grounded in desperation, both your own as well as that left you, like some unwanted legacy, by the babbling last words of Freddie Joaquin, by the mysterious, undelivered message of Ella Nazarena.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” he asked.

  “I haven’t decided,” Cruz answered. He discarded his newspaper on a coffee table, picked up his bag and clutched it under his arm. He was getting ready to go.

  “Do you know your way around this town? Have you been here bef
ore?”

  Cruz shook his head. “I have a good sense of direction, Mr Galloway.”

  “This is a very weird city, Ray, and you might end up in some undesirable neighbourhood.” Charlie made a small gesture of concern with his hand.

  “I appreciate your concern, Mr Galloway. I’ll be fine. Believe me.” Cruz smiled, shifting his bag from one hand to the other. “What can I do for you anyway?”

  Galloway sat down. “It’s nothing. Just a loose end I want to clarify, Ray.”

  Cruz glanced in the direction of the front doors, where the sun on glass suggested a photograph of an exploding nova. It was clear he expected somebody. Galloway wondered who.

  “It’s a small discrepancy, Ray. Something Freddie said.”

  “Freddie again,” Cruz remarked, more to himself than to Charlie Galloway. A note of slight annoyance entered his voice and a tiny agitated muscle pulsed in his jaw. For the first time Galloway had the feeling he caused this man some minor discomfort, which didn’t necessarily mean Cruz had any great secret to conceal; people were usually perturbed by the appearance of cops. But it was interesting to discover that Cruz’s external control had slight structural weaknesses, uncertainty at the heart of self-assurance.

  “According to Joaquin, you were one of his dearest old friends.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “Effusively. He gave me the impression you and he were like that,” and Galloway pressed his index and middle fingers together in a gesture of close bonding. “But last night, if I remember correctly, you told me you barely knew the man. You had ‘mutual acquaintances’ in your province. Wasn’t that what you said?”

  “Yes. That’s true. Why? Do you believe what Freddie told you?” Cruz asked, as if the possibility were preposterous.

  “I didn’t say I believed him,” Galloway remarked. “I was merely … intrigued by the difference between his version and yours.” He gazed for a time at Cruz, whose face registered the expression of someone offended. Freddie said one thing, Cruz another. How could you believe Freddie, who’d pulled a gun with the intention of killing you? Cruz hadn’t tried to shove a pistol in your face. Cruz was reasonable, articulate, personable if not quite successfully affable, a man who gave Galloway the impression of a constant undercurrent of loneliness that would always spoil his efforts at social ease. He was the one more deserving of belief. Freddie, on the other hand, seemed to have found truth a strange country, a hinterland with which he had merely a passing familiarity.