And yet. And yet. Galloway was restless, dissatisfied.
Cruz mystified him more than a little. The Filipino had none of that unfocused curiosity of the foreign tourist in Los Angeles, the fatuous awe of Hollywood that brightens the eye, the charged looked of expectancy agitated by celluloid legends and dreams. No little maps to the Homes of the Stars protruded from his pockets, no camera hung round his neck. Cruz struck him as more purposeful than a common sightseer, as if he had some singular thing in mind. But what?
“Where did Freddie take you yesterday afternoon?”
“To the ocean.”
“Then he brought you back here?”
Cruz hesitated over this simple question. There were only two possible answers, neither of which involved any complexity as far as Galloway could see. But Cruz missed a beat for some unguessable reason. “No. Freddie said he had other business. I came back in a taxi. May I speak frankly?”
“Be my guest.”
“I fail to see the importance of your questions, Mr Galloway.” Cruz raised a hand as he spoke, touched the lid of his left eye. “If you suspect me of the murder of this woman – I am sorry, I forget the name – you should say so. Last night you said Freddie was responsible, but if for some reason you’ve changed your mind I think I have a right to be told. Otherwise, you know, I’d like to leave.”
Galloway stood up. The importance of your questions: how could he explain to Cruz or even to himself? Tiny disparities acted upon his mind as poison ivy to the skin. Perhaps the hungover brain was a big empty auditorium in which whispers were magnified into great rumbling echoes. Did you suspect Cruz of something? If Cruz and Freddie weren’t the old pals wee Freddie had said, then what were they doing together? What did they have in common? Chauffeur and passenger? Guide and tourist? Cruz neither looked nor sounded like a man who’d have a great deal in common with Freddie. You couldn’t see Cruz, quiet-mannered, rather proper, being very comfortable in a strip bar, surrounded by knockers and ass and spangle. Ray and Freddie had made an unlikely pair.
But so had Freddie and Ella. The whole business was fraught with incongruities.
Cruz looked at his watch again. “It seems to me everything comes down to the fact Freddie lied habitually, Mr Galloway. Such people are not unknown.”
Was that it then, Charlie? Was that the end of it? Freddie a psychopathic liar, Cruz an angelic teller of truths. Is that your little discrepancy explained away, boxed and buried? He felt suddenly depressed, empty of purpose, like a man who reels in his line and finds not a fish but a discarded tyre-iron or a hub-cap circa 1946 or a fragment of a downed satellite.
“Are we finished?” Cruz asked.
Before Charlie could respond, the elevator disgorged four Korean men rattling golf-bags and carrying bright, rolled umbrellas. They were followed by four caucasian hookers in tight shorts and black shades, lipsticked, well-built girls who clutched the men in the possessive way of expensive prostitutes who haven’t yet been paid for their comprehensive services. This crew created a noisy, energetic diversion and even as Galloway was distracted by them, Cruz shrugged and began to walk away. Although there was no sense of urgency or slyness in Cruz’s movement – perhaps he thought he’d been dismissed – Charlie started after him, brushing past the golfers and their perfumed girls. He collided with one of the men, whose bag fell over, releasing a half-dozen orange golf-balls that bounced across the floor. The Koreans and their girls found this hilarious. All eight laughed with the uncontrollable merriment of people sharing a funny acid trip.
Cruz was still heading along the lobby without looking back. Before he reached the door a lovely Filipina girl stepped into the hotel and greeted him with a cool, indifferent, LA flip of her hand. Like, hey. She was short and black-haired, her skin an enviable tint neither chocolate nor tan but a colour white American women basted long hours in the sun to achieve without ever getting it right. She wore a black silk shirt and baggy white pants in a carelessly rich manner, but her clothes didn’t conceal the firmness of her slender body. A looker, Charlie thought.
Cruz clasped a hand around her elbow and ushered her out through the glass doors. She seemed a little surprised by his decisiveness, as if she were unaccustomed to being manhandled.
Galloway considered it altogether an odd moment, like a bad rehearsal, a flaw in a director’s blocking. Girl walks in, Cruz grabs her, walks her out again immediately. Why the hurry? Some uncharacteristic moment of consternation on Cruz’s part? Maybe Raymond simply hadn’t wanted to go through the rigmarole of introducing the girl. Inscrutable Raymond, darkly purposeful, a loner.
Just who the hell are you, Ray?
Galloway went outside. He saw Cruz and the girl go across the parking-lot to a yellow VW convertible with the top down. The girl climbed behind the wheel, Cruz sat in the passenger seat. The car backed up. Charlie Galloway looked at the California licence-plate, then walked to his Toyota, which sat shimmering in the rich mixture of sunlight and pollution like a combustible extension of his hangover.
Before he reached his car his stomach had contrived to rise up into his mouth and, as if he’d been struck by lightning, he slumped to his knees beside the Toyota, where he retched drily, miserably, bringing up nothing save some sickly, thick saliva. A volcanic pain erupted in his head. He thought of a wandering thrombus clamped under his skullbone like a crab, creating the kind of pressure that made death seem a prospect to be welcomed by carnivals and calypsos.
Even when he managed to stand, he was unable to stop trembling. Under the white sky he stood shaking, deceived by the notion that the roar of passing traffic was a bizarre tide rattling down on a beach, and the squeak of brakes the squeal of outraged gannets, an illusion that had to be the harbinger of delirium tremens, but then the moment passed, and his head cleared somewhat, and he opened the car door with the relief of a man returned to reality after a trip down the fissures of his own dementia.
14
Larry Deets caught a shuttle from Washington and arrived at John F Kennedy Airport shortly after noon. It took almost two hours to reach Manhattan by cab because traffic had been diverted around the scene of a highway murder. Apparently an altercation had taken place between the drivers of two cars, which had resulted in a black family of three, each covered with a bloodstained sheet, lying dead on the shoulder of the road, and a caucasian man dying from a wound in his neck. Paramedics, streaked with blood, laboured to save his life while an hysterical black girl, a relative of the three dead, was furiously trying to attack the wounded man, but she was restrained by uniformed cops.
Two dented cars, one a station-wagon with a bumper-sticker saying Virginia is for Lovers, the other a rusted old Camaro, straddled the highway. Ambulances, police cars, sirens in the sunlight, a firetruck, broken glass and blood – all the elements of a tragedy Deets thought pointless, even as he realised how his life and ambition had anaesthetised him to any sense of horror at such slayings.
Washington had insulated him. The rest of America was as distant to him as another country, a land of suburb and prairie, dams and power plants, rivers with unpronounceable Indian names, men in baseball caps and women in hair-curlers, small ghostly mill-towns and great electric-orange cities you saw in the dark from airplanes. This second, shadowy America was good only for one thing. It would supply the numbers required to put Byron Truskett in the White House.
Deets got out of the cab in lower Manhattan. He went inside a small neighbourhood bar, a place called McGloan’s selling Guinness and Irish stew. The tavern was air-conditioned and dim. A few men and women sat on stools and concentrated with Celtic intensity on their pints of stout and shots of Bushmills. They paid no attention to Deets who, in a grey seersucker suit, was incongruous among T-shirts and jeans and coveralls. The Irish had a talent for absorbing the unlikely without comment; it came with their general delight in idiosyncrasy.
Deets wandered into the narrow dining area beyond the bar, where large booths looked murky under smoke-stained la
mpshades, and menus, soiled with brown sauce, curled in their plastic holders. He sat down, placed his briefcase on the table, waited. He had the back room to himself. He checked his watch. He was about forty minutes late and wondered if his contact had already gone. For a while he studied the Aer Lingus wall posters.
He ordered a Beck’s from the waitress, who was Welsh and spoke in the sing-song way of Harlech people. Irish bar, German beer, Welsh waitress and Deets himself, who was three-quarters Prussian, one-fifth Serbo-Croatian and a fraction Finn: the melting-pot frotheth. Deets had sometimes thought that the phenomenon of the deep genealogical curiosity that affected millions of Americans indicated trouble in the national psyche, a sense of something missed, similar to the ache people feel when they learn they’ve been adopted.
Five minutes passed, ten; somebody punched money into the jukebox and the room filled with the sound of an Irish tenor singing She Moved Through the Fair. Deets appreciated music about as much as he had dancing lessons at Arthur Murray’s. When the gods were handing out an appreciation of music they gave Deets something else instead, the gift of knowing whose coat-tails to ride to high places, the eye for the main chance – and he was damned if he was going to have it wrecked by anybody or anything.
He sipped the cold beer and thought resentfully about Byron, who’d gone ahead with his plan to put Laforge’s name in nomination, despite the information Deets had supplied about the errant behaviour of one Eugene Costain, a man under Billy’s command in the Philippines. A rumour, admittedly, but in Deets’s world you never got smoke unless there was fire somewhere. He’d gone to great lengths to unearth the material. But Truskett hadn’t acted prudently. At the very least he should have waited a few days before seeing the President, he should have weighed the implications of the rumour and perceived a possible danger in it and instructed Deets either to substantiate the story or demolish it, but Byron, like some panting, over-heated schoolkid, was thinking with his weenie. He was in an indecent hurry to satisfy Madame Laforge, which meant pleasing Monsieur Billy too.
He finished his beer. He hated the sense of his world hanging in delicate balance. He didn’t like to think the eight years he’d spent working with Truskett, encouraging and supporting the man’s ambition twenty-four goddam hours per goddam day, lying to Miriam, covering up the affair with La Laforge, juggling appointments, composing speeches, analysing strategy, sitting up late into the night and listening over bourbon to what Truskett would do if he ever reached the Oval Office, years of counselling and comforting and flattering, years of chasing his own dreams of glory and influence – he was terrified to think all this might be headed for the disposal chute if it turned out that Laforge had indeed been bad in the Philippines and the Senate found out.
He should have acted differently himself. He should have insisted that Truskett wait. He should have been adamant. Should should should. You could should yourself into an early grave.
Later today the announcement of Laforge’s nomination was going out into the world. The President considered the post of Director of the CIA too important to leave vacant, as it had been for all practical purposes during Sandy Bach’s protracted illness. So, with a decisiveness and speed unusual for him, he was calling a press conference at which he’d express his regrets over Bach’s death with lengthy platitudes and then introduce the nominee, as if to reassure a fretful nation that somebody was now at the helm of the great ship Intelligence.
The music on the jukebox stopped. The narrow gloomy bar was silent. How much longer could he sit here? A telephone rang in an ill-lit recess, somebody answered it quickly, a terse conversation took place. Deets eavesdropped some guff about a bet on a horse that was, ah to be sure, jaysus, a dead cert, then he picked up his briefcase to leave. A very fat man, blocking the sunlight, shuffled through the front door and made his way slowly into the back room.
“You Deets?”
Deets nodded.
“I came before, waited, then I figured a delay.” Sweating heavily, the fat man squeezed himself into a booth. His enormous stomach overhung the waist of his burgundy polyester pants. He wore white shoes and a pink and red striped shirt with sleeves rolled up to reveal huge arms at the end of which were small chubby white hands that didn’t quite belong. They resembled boiled squabs. The man’s black hair was wet from perspiration and he wheezed as he breathed through his mouth. Deets thought he had to be about three hundred pounds plus with a fifty-six waist.
Deets was offered a slack wet handshake that felt like a swampy armpit.
“Call me Gregory,” the man said. He had a rasping voice. It reminded Deets of the sound a kid made when his straw got to the bottom of a milkshake.
“I’d like some verification,” Deets said. “Some kind of ID.”
“You outta your mind? In a situation like this you don’t ask for stuff like that.”
“I don’t need mysteries,” Deets said. He opened the briefcase and took out an envelope to remind this blubber that a commercial transaction was going on, and that he, Deets, was calling the shots. He placed the envelope on the table and covered it with his hand.
The fat man smiled. He had little pointy teeth, as if they’d been filed down for maximum biting potential. “That the money?”
Deets said, “That’s the money. Ten grand.” He opened the envelope to display hundred dollar bills. The money was his own. He lived frugally and invested with prudence. He’d briefly considered skimming the cash from the Senator’s campaign fund, but larceny unsettled him.
“Nice,” said Gregory, and his eyebrows made an appreciative arc. With considerable grunting and twisting of the body, he produced a brown wallet from a hip pocket. A New York driver’s licence was flashed in front of Deets, who looked at it briefly; there were also Discover and Visa cards in the name of Gregory Redlinger.
“Fair enough?”
“I just like to make absolutely sure I’m talking to the right man,” Deets said.
“They could be forgeries, of course,” Redlinger said.
“Yeah, I’ll take your word they’re not.” Deets had no great regard for those nefarious individuals, such as Redlinger, who gathered around the edges of the intelligence community like dullards drawn to the lights of a passing carnival. He had an aversion to the way they loved to create an aura of mystery about themselves. They needed the reinforcement of believing in an exclusive club named Espionage, of which they were happy to be members on first-name terms with the doorman and the maître d’. It was pathetic, and it worked better when there had been a Cold War and America imagined itself imperilled by the penny-dreadful threat of an international Communist conspiracy. Now, much of the intrigue people like Redlinger enjoyed was either nostalgic or imagined, or at best played out in shabby Third World arenas. Spying, like vaudeville, had declined with the times.
The fat man flapped his shirt-collar to circulate air about his neck, and the movement sent a smell of sweat and yesterday’s cologne wafting toward Deets, who turned his face slightly away.
The fat man said, “What I hear is you need more information about a certain situation that occurred a few years ago in a faraway land to the east.”
The coy language! Deets said sharply, “I want facts. No hearsay. No faraway lands to the east crap. I can’t eat pie in the sky, friend. I like stuff that can be corroborated, if need be.”
“I dunno about that,” said Redlinger, sounding sulky and tugging at what turned out to be a small gold earring in his fleshy right lobe.
Deets sighed. “I don’t want to sit here and listen to some story you might just have made up, Gregory, because you have a burning need for the loot. I want truth and I want detail. I wouldn’t like to think I’m wasting time and money. You catch my drift?” Deets settled back in the booth.
Redlinger had ordered an appetizer of fried chicken pieces, which now arrived. They were shrouded in misshapen batter. He stuffed them into his mouth between words. “See, I don’t want my name dragged into a situation that could
turn out inconvenient for me if there was, you know, publicity. In my business, you need integrity. You don’t go shooting your mouth off. You got an image to maintain. I’m an indy con, my word’s gotta be money in the bank.”
“An indy what?”
“Independent contractor. I’m known and respected throughout the trade because I can keep a secret.” Wheezing, sucking air, the fat man finished his chicken, licked his fingers carefully one by one. “Which is why I got to be careful, know what I’m saying?”
Men like Redlinger always felt obliged to tell you how their word was their bond before they actually embarked on giving you information they’d probably sworn never to tell a living soul. Deets shut his eyes, thinking that Redlinger represented a step along a line of inquiry into Laforge which he’d begun weeks ago on his own initiative – an act, admittedly, of self-preservation – among fringe figures with tenuous connections to the CIA. Some of these were known to him through the activities of the Joint Select Committee on Intelligence, while others such as Redlinger were acquaintances of acquaintances of acquaintances, free-lancers who sold their services in distant countries, usually as couriers of one kind or another.
He’d reached Redlinger through learning about Gene Costain from a former State Department functionary, a man retired and mostly fishing his days away in Venezuela, an old Far East hand called Kelvin Wax, who’d known Costain the way expatriate Americans get to know each other in lonely tropical outposts, over scotch and soda and sharing outdated newspapers from home and musing about the Fall they were missing, the last gorgeous days of the baseball season, the crack of ball on bat and the glorious whiff of a hotdog, Indian summer, the first crisp snow that came soon after the melancholic flight of migratory geese.
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