“You’re right, I’m tense,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.” A dry apology, uttered quietly but he meant it. It was useless to let his resentments control him. The girl couldn’t help what she was, how she’d been formed. She could no more deny those forces than he could forget the background that had shaped him. He took his hand away from her and fumbled for his seat-belt buckle, embarrassed by his own gesture of companionship – or was the touch meant to be a truce? He wasn’t sure.
Lizzie looked out of the window. Dallas lay spread some thousands of feet below, like a balsa-wood scale-model of a city. Cruz’s touch had taken her off guard but it didn’t alter anything. In the right circumstances, maybe, just maybe, by moon or surf or candlelight, she could warm to him, but this was all speculation since he was about to split. And that would be an end to him. Which was well and good. You could practically smell danger and destruction on the guy. The gesture, though, had been a surprise, and not unpleasant. And now he’d actually apologised!
Teng said, “If you knew more about me, perhaps …” He left the sentence dangling. Candour wasn’t wise. To talk about himself openly would make him vulnerable.
Lizzie said, “I really don’t want to know, Ray. You. Your business. I like being kept in the dark, okay?”
“Yes. I understand.”
The plane landed smoothly in clear light. Beyond the air conditioned terminal heat shimmered everywhere, rising from the gloss of cars and buses, from molten concrete and glass, as if Dallas and Fort Worth were enormous smithies where thousands of furious hammers rose and fell on overheated anvils. A black car, driven by a uniformed man from a limousine service, picked Teng and Lizzie up and headed in the direction of downtown Dallas, where the temperature was one hundred and six degrees. The highway went through a landscape of monotonous flatness wherein suburbs and shopping-malls, bombarded by intolerable rays, suggested the shells of hermit gastropods. Flags, Texan and American, were motionless on high white poles. Rich suburbs and poorer ones lay close together in uncertain arrangements. Teng surveyed it all from the cool tinted darkness of the big car, surprised by the enormity and space of what he saw. Cities had always meant Manila to him, where the sky was crowded out either by high-rise buildings or massive pollution, and streets were traffic-choked boulevards or cramped pedestrian corridors. Here, though, was Texan bravura, a sky bigger than any he’d ever seen before, unblemished to infinity, and great flat highways running to God knows where. And then in the distance appeared the skyline of downtown, towers and turrets, black stone and pale, castles of crystal, a city struck out of dirt and raised upward to dominate the flatlands like a series of oversized oil-derricks. To Teng it had the substance of a vague dream, an unnatural city in a landscape dry and ravaged and far too bright.
The car entered downtown where the streets between the high-rise buildings were in shadow, suggesting gulleys. The driver parked in front of an old red-brick building, got out, held the back door open for his passengers. On the sidewalk Teng clutched his small canvas bag and sweated miserably. Lizzie told the driver to wait, then led Teng inside the building toward an elevator, which conveyed them rapidly and silently to the sixth floor.
“What is this place?” Teng asked.
“An American history lesson,” Lizzie replied.
The elevator opened. A ticket-desk and a turnstile lay ahead. Lizzie bought two tickets from a clerk. Teng followed uncertainly, his eyes as yet unaccustomed to the change from sunlight to shade. He stood in a large room filled with posters and television screens and for a second he was puzzled until he saw an enormous picture of John F Kennedy and, to his left, a glass cube inside which were boxes of books and a window. Between the boxes was a space where a man might hide. From the window, sealed in its own prism to keep the public away, Lee Harvey Oswald had allegedly fired the rifle that killed John F Kennedy in Dealey Plaza below.
Teng knew this piece of American history well because he’d learned about it at school, where the textbooks were written to persuade you that Kennedy was some kind of saint. Teng tried to imagine the gunman crouched by the sill, rifle in hand, while the caravan of official cars and police motorcycles went past outside. He tried to feel Oswald’s urgency, his apprehension, his state of mind. Was there uncertainty? Some last-minute indecision? Perhaps there was a high, a rush of conviction that took him beyond all doubt. Teng was familiar with that, the acceleration of the pulses, the pounding.
He stepped back from the display and walked past the various exhibits – photographs of Kennedy and his wife, TV consoles that played film of the assassination – to the other side of the room where Lizzie stood. She was looking down at Dealey Plaza, where the road ran past the grassy knoll, an insignificant rise in the land made notorious, even spooky, by history.
“Why are we in this place?” he asked.
“Because it’s where my father said to bring you, Ray. I’m doing my duty. Make sure you take him up to the sixth floor of the depository, he said. Well, here we are. Sixth floor. Okay?”
Teng watched a couple of Scandinavian tourists stroll past a large photograph that consisted of stills from film of the assassination. One blurred picture depicted Kennedy at the moment of a bullet’s impact, another Jacqueline Kennedy scrambling over the trunk of the big convertible. Why this place of all possible places? he wondered. Why this huge chamber of death and dismal recollection, this assassin’s room? If it was intentional irony on somebody’s part, he didn’t appreciate it. Meet Lee Harvey Oswald. Remember what becomes of assassins. To his left was a blow-up of the famous photograph in which Jack Ruby shoots Oswald, the victim’s contorted features filled with horror.
This place, this shrine to violence, was unnerving. Teng looked at Lizzie Honculada, who was still watching traffic go past in the Plaza. Any moment now she’d return to the car downstairs and he’d be alone again until the new contact turned up, the next in Baltazar’s chain of messengers. Why hadn’t there been a single contact only? Because it was safer when no one person knew everything. That was how Joe’s ruined mind worked. The generosity and amiability of his character before his torture had changed, yielding to a meanness of spirit; and his natural trust had deteriorated into a paranoia that made a labyrinth of his thinking.
Tired, overheated, Teng placed his face upon the warm pane of glass and closed his eyes.
“I should be going,” Lizzie said. “I have a plane to catch.”
He drew back from the window. He wanted to say something, he wasn’t sure what. He realised he didn’t want to be left alone. He blamed his mood on the room, which was riddled with currents of violence and conspiracy and murder. It was almost as though the place were a tiny heart, an American heart, and it beat with depressing arrhythmia in the core of this large Texan city, like a tempo still haunting after almost thirty years; and America danced yet to this erratic, violent measure, guns in glove boxes, missiles in silos, bases in reluctant colonies. There was never enough violence. How could there be? When you were addicted to a thing, how could there ever be enough of it? The gunfire that echoed through this room was the same as that which had rolled through the trees in the fields beyond La Trinidad. The very same. Violence, Teng thought, was useless except as the currency with which to pay old debts. When they were paid, you owed nobody and you had no more need of it.
“I don’t know what you’re here for, but I hope it works out for you,” Lizzie said, and she stepped away from him.
“I hope so,” Teng said quietly.
She turned, moved in the direction of the exit. She had a graceful way of walking. Her black hair was momentarily tossed by a current from an air-conditioning grill and it rose in gleaming disarray before falling back in place. Teng had the urge to go after her, not because she bore some fanciful resemblance to his dead love but because he dreaded the demons of isolation. He could stop her, talk to her: simple human intercourse. He’d smile and kindness might prevail.
He did nothing. He watched her go. His life wa
s empty because it had to be. He walked slowly round the room, moving to a corner where a TV screen was tucked away in shadow. It showed a black and white news report broadcast on the day of the assassination. The man reading it was Walter Cronkite.
Teng studied the worried features, the thinning hair, the small moustache. The voice was sonorous, heavy with dismay. The President is dead. He thought of his mother in a frayed hotel room in Olongapo, knees raised, legs spread for her American lover, her beloved Walter. He thought of Walter’s hands on his mother’s little breasts. How frail she was. She must have been crushed under the tall American’s body. He imagined he heard the American cry out, then roll away satisfied, reaching perhaps for a cigarette, a Lucky Strike, a Camel, on the bedside table. There might be a lamp making his mother’s eyes reflect light. Light and love. Dear Walter. She would wait for him pagputî ng uwàk. Until the raven turns white.
15
By six o’clock in the evening Charlie Galloway was in Santa Monica, driving through the quiet streets of a rich neighbourhood where large houses, rendered stark by sunlight, suggested abandonment, empty rooms, furniture covered by dust-sheets, grand pianos nobody played. Earlier, he had telephoned the Motor Vehicles Division of the State of California because it was the easiest game in town to get a name and address on the basis of a licence-plate number if you knew which buttons to push. A certain Elizabeth Honculada of Santa Monica popped out of the computer as the VW owner that had ferried Ray Cruz out of the Palms Hotel.
The address turned out to be an impressive house in the back streets of Santa Monica. He parked, walked through the welcoming shade of a leafy courtyard, rattled the brass parrot-head doorknocker a couple of times, but nobody answered. Fine. He’d wait. He had the time. He found a stone bench under a palm tree and sat down.
What did Elizabeth have in common with Ray Cruz? Where were they headed? Where in the great blistering scheme of things had they vanished? After they’d left the Palms, Galloway had gone looking for them too late. He’d prowled here and there, tooling fruitlessly up and down streets for such a long time he felt irrevocably trapped in the mysterious grids of Los Angeles and quite unable to find his way back to the place where he’d first begun.
It seemed to him now that the manner of Ray’s disappearance was just as important as the fact of it, the quiet way he’d decided to walk out of the hotel, then picking up speed when the girl had materialised, hustling her out across the parking-lot with less than his customary insouciance. It was hard to avoid the impression that the Filipino, packed and prepared, hoped to skip cleanly away and Galloway’s unexpected appearance had knocked the props out from under him. Why skip though? Why the haste? What had Ray done?
Charlie shut his eyes. His thirst was unslakeable and maddening, the kind that conjured oases out of still air. Now, with its usual intensity, came the crucifixion inside his head. The jeering Romans. The knock-knock of the hammer, the nail through the brain, the taste of vinegar at the back of the throat. Nearby, a sprinkler system hissed restfully.
He opened his eyes abruptly. Had he dozed? Must have. An hour had dissolved. It was five past seven suddenly and the shadows in the courtyard had stretched although the day was still wretched.
His bladder was under extreme pressure. A quick scan of the yard revealed one likely spot in which to relieve himself. He stepped behind a clump of assorted bushy plants, dwarf lemons, pomegranates, succulents of one kind or another, and unzipped his fly with the universally stealthy gesture of a man about to have a jimmy riddle on somebody else’s property. What was he supposed to do? Suffer? Explode? He aimed directly into the fleshy succulents, contented, ah, hearing the splatter of his own water drum upon thick, unflappable leaves.
He neither saw nor heard the girl who came across the courtyard. He was halfway through the process of emptying himself when she said, “Let me get you a towel and soap, why don’t you,” and he jumped in astonishment, his urine leaping in a dying arc, striking leaves and branches and backsplashing against his pants. He stuffed himself hurriedly inside his zipper, painfully snagging a stray pubic hair in the vicious little metal teeth.
“Look,” he began to say.
“Why look? I saw all I wanted to see. To be frank, I wasn’t impressed.”
Charlie Galloway felt lame. “I didn’t just wander in off the streets to use your courtyard, you know.”
“No? Somebody invited you?” she asked. “Can we expect more people to show up? Is this going to be a party?”
“This isn’t what it seems,” Galloway said.
“You mean there’s a subtext?”
“Look, I’m sorry. I was desperate. What the hell can I tell you?”
“Who are you anyway?” the girl asked, brushing a length of black hair from her face.
“Charles Galloway. Here,” and he dragged out his ID, which he passed under the girl’s eyes. Unhappy with the speed of his movement, she caught his wrist and studied the badge carefully before she released him.
“So. The LAPD is using my garden as a toilet. I’m honoured. You don’t look like my idea of a cop.”
Charlie knew what she meant. “Are you Elizabeth Honculada?”
The girl said she was. She plucked a leaf from one of the orange trees, crushed it between her fingers, and smelled the odour released by the fragments. “What can I do for you?” Charlie Galloway felt the moment of embarrassment pass. Now the idea of exerting some control over the situation occurred to him, but Ms Honculada was a toughie whose dark eyes were hard with resolve. Her Malay attractiveness could either be tender or determined, but it was only the latter Galloway saw. He ran a fingertip through the layer of sweat on his forehead and hoped the girl would suggest they go indoors, but she saw his discomfort and clearly enjoyed it so much she’d keep him outside and suffer.
“The man you were with today,” he began to say.
She interrupted fiercely. “What the hell has happened to civil liberties in this country? What makes you think you can come in here and pee all over my plants and ask me personal questions, Galloway? Is this the way our country works these days? Some new law got passed and I didn’t notice it? The Freedom to Piss Act? Listen, I’m bone-tired on account of this weather, so unless you got a real purpose being here, excuse me, I’m going indoors.”
Weariness overwhelmed Galloway. “You left the Palms Hotel with a man called Raymond Cruz this morning.”
“Raymond Cruz? Oh, yeah, right. You were in the parking-lot. I remember you. I thought you looked familiar.”
Galloway returned to the bench and sat down. He tried to recall everything he’d ever learned about the techniques of interviewing, but all that had slipped his mind – the logical arrangement of questions, one question supporting another, one step leading to the next in the sequential dance of interrogation. Gone. Flushed out of his head. What he had left wasn’t technique but scattered instinct, blunderbuss intuition. Sometimes he had the feeling he was shadow-boxing, an old pugilist now punchdrunk, clenching his fists every time a telephone rang. Ding! and off he went.
“Where did you take Cruz?”
“LAX.”
“And you left him there?”
“Right.”
“And he caught a plane?”
“I believe that’s the reason most people go to airports,” she said. She yawned at Charlie.
Galloway stared across the courtyard. The lengthening shadows turned purple, but they were hardly less warm than the areas the sun still penetrated. Dehydrated again, he had a moment when he saw himself in long-shot, and what he resembled most was one of those disgusting shrunken heads morbid people bring back from jungle towns.
“Do you know Cruz’s destination?”
“No.”
“You drove him to the airport and he didn’t tell you where he was going? What did you talk about during the ride?”
“The weather, Galloway. The climate,” and Elizabeth Honculada gestured toward the blue sky that created a rectangle above the courtya
rd.
“And he didn’t say where he was going?”
“Nope.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Believe what the hell you like. I’m going inside.” She stuck her hands deep in her pockets defiantly.
“Wait.” Galloway stood up. He infused his voice with a decisiveness he didn’t feel. “Sometimes people don’t tell their stories straight the first time and that puts me to a whole lot of bloody trouble. Now I’ll have to contact the airport, get the ticket people to check their passenger lists and then spend ages looking for Cruz’s name. I get pissed off, frankly. If people just told the truth straight off the bat I’d have some kind of personal life.”
The girl put one hand upon her chest. “My heart goes out to you.”
“Where did you leave him? What airline?”
“Delta. Or was it American. No, wait, it was Eastern. It might have been America West or Continental. I don’t remember.”
“Right at the crucial moment, most of the people I ever speak to get bloody amnesia. Why is that?”
“Something in the air affects them,” said the girl.
“The only thing in the air right now is the smell of manure.”
“No kidding? I was under the impression all along it was wee-wee. Silly me.”
Charlie Galloway thought that if Elizabeth Honculada were a wall, she’d be Aberdeen granite with sharp glass attachments and rolls of barbed-wire. “What’s your relationship with Cruz?”
Agents of Darkness Page 30