Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  He tightened his hold on the gun. The girl’s face was turned slightly away from him now. The window was a mere ten feet from the shrubbery. An unexpected breeze of some delicacy flitted across the night, enriching the dark with the perfume he’d smelled before. And then stillness returned, and silence.

  But the silence was brief, interrupted by the sound of a car coming along the street. Teng saw the headlights, heard the change of gears, and knew that this particular car was coming into the driveway. He saw it turn and move slowly toward the garage door which, remote controlled from inside the vehicle, was already opening soundlessly to reveal a large space lit by a fluorescent tube, a room of hammers and screwdrivers and wrenches hanging from pegboards, a workbench with a lathe, paint-cans in a tidy arrangement on a shelf. Teng levelled the gun.

  The car rolled toward the garage door. Teng stepped out of the greenery and he fired the shotgun twice through the driver’s window. Beyond surprise, beyond fear, beyond even the fragment of time it took in which to register any reaction, the man received both shots in the face, then slumped sideways. Was he the one? Teng wondered. Was he the man who had put a pistol between Marissa’s lips and pulled the trigger? Teng realised he felt nothing now, neither nervousness nor fear. What did it matter if this man was the killer or if the other, Costain, had actually fired the gun? They had been accomplices in destruction and so vengeance was allotted with scrupulous equality.

  The car kept going toward the open garage, where it scraped the right wall, bringing down shelves, tools, old coffee cans containing nails, bolts, screws. It moved sluggishly to the far wall, stopped there by oildrums and a pile of cinderblocks. A green plastic bag burst open against the car’s bumper, disgorging a bunch of old soft toys, bears, monkeys, battered dolls, the rejects of a child grown into her teenage years. They had an air of pathetic abandonment.

  Teng gazed at the house. The girl in the window had dropped the telephone and was screaming at him and pounding the pane with her fists. He raised the shotgun in her direction. Why should he kill this child? Why should her life be brutally ended? He stared at her stricken face, feeling an unexpected bond with her, a kinship; they were both fellow-travellers in a world of violence. He wished he could in some way console her. But what was there to say? This is the way it has to be? There are no other choices? Sympathy was useless. Words were sounds signifying nothing.

  He turned and ran toward Ko’s truck. But he carried the girl’s expression with him, a memory of her open-mouthed horror scorched into him. That she could quite possibly identify him was something he didn’t stop to consider, didn’t care about. All he wanted was distance between himself and the girl.

  He climbed hurriedly into the cab. “Drive. Just drive.”

  In the basement office of Byron Truskett’s Georgetown house Larry Deets gazed at the Senator, who sat morosely in a dark green leather armchair by the fireplace. On the mantelpiece were framed photographs of Byron and Miriam, two happy people in the sunshine, a big Winnebago in the background, mountains and fir trees: the travelling honeymoon couple, fishing-rods and floppy hats and the sheer simplicity of early marriage.

  The photographs were deceptive; even then, Truskett hadn’t been the innocent novice he appeared, because he was already well-versed in, and somewhat sullied by, the politics of the Iowa State legislature, where he’d served his political apprenticeship. Now, of course, these old pictures suggested a time of great purity, but that was only because Washington is to Iowa as snuff films are to soft-core porn; as death is to life.

  Truskett looked into the empty grate with the expression of a man who wishes it were cold enough outside to warrant burning a couple of logs, toasting a few marshmallows. Deets got up, paced, paused by the fireplace and leaned there in an unrelaxed way. “How do we know this character Redliner –”

  “Redlinger –”

  “How do we know he’s telling the truth?”

  “I ran a check of his background,” said Deets. “He has connections. He’s authentic.”

  “Authentic,” Truskett said, as if the very word annoyed him. The Senator had moments in which he yielded to the kind of petulance bred in the blood of the rich. He could sulk furiously.

  Deets remembered, for no good reason, the sleek black-haired senorita who had tried to teach him the mambo, and he slid one foot slickly across the tiled floor of the study in the manner of somebody involuntarily practising a dance step. It was called muscle memory. That’s what the senorita had tried to instill in him. Muskell memory, Meester Deetz! Thoughts of the dance teacher segued into an image of La Belle Laforge, the great Carolyn, who had brought Truskett to this sorry pass with some intimate shimmies of her own. Had Byron remained faithful to his devoted little wife, had he eschewed the prime beef that was Billy’s missus and kept his pickle in his pocket, then Truskett would never have thrown his weight behind Billy and none of this would have come about.

  Deets said, “Let’s look at the options, Senator. One. Billy comes through the nominations unblemished because nobody has found out about his – let’s say unacceptable behaviour. Two. Somebody does find out, and Billy is crucified, and you along with him as his prime booster. Don’t underestimate the gravity of that. We are not discussing some random ass-kicking in the boondocks of the Philippines, Senator. We’re looking at behaviour universally condemned by our allies everywhere. Torture isn’t an A-list word. The United States doesn’t approve of it. No more White House breakfasts. No invites to foreign embassies. No gala receptions. Say goodnight to your dreams.” And mine, Deets thought. He placed a pinky in his ear and shook it vigorously a second, as if already he heard the clamour on the Senate floor.

  Truskett said, “Even if the first option worked and Billy came through the nominations unscathed, it’s still a minefield. Six months, a year, down the road, your man Redlinger decides to drop a dime and sell his Filipino yarn to one of those hotshot investigative snipers on some goddam city desk – what then? The wall collapses. The crap hits the fan. And we’re covered in bricks and shit, Larry.”

  “True,” Deets said. If Laforge won the nomination and sat behind the big desk at Langley, there would always be Redlinger’s unpredictable shadow in the background somewhere. That kind of tension was unacceptable. “Okay,” he said. “Option three. Billy withdraws of his own free will.”

  “That’s about as likely to happen as Jimmy Carter getting his mug on Mount Rushmore, for Christ’s sake. Laforge wants this goddam job so badly he gets a hard-on when he thinks about it. What’s he going to do? Turn it down? Say thank you but no thank you? In a pig’s ass, Larry.”

  “You overlook the power of coercion, Senator. Go to Laforge. Tell him what you’ve learned. Explain his candidacy is down the tubes on account of his past indiscretions. Toss in the word heinous. That’s always a kicker. You turn up the heat and Billy, being smart, steps out of the kitchen. Too much pressure. He can’t take it. So he tells the President reasons of health, whatever. Sudden murmur in the heart. Angina politicalis.”

  Truskett shook his head. “You know how he’ll react to that, Larry? Denial. Plain. Simple. But very shrill denial. He’ll act like he’s just had a testicle severed. It’s his word against Redlinger’s. And who’s going to believe some grubby freelance spook? Billy, on the other hand, is a class act from top to bottom. He’s the closest thing to landed gentry there is in this Republic. Coercion isn’t going to work with him. Maybe with somebody else it would be a piece of cake, but not with him. He’s unreal, I swear to God.”

  “Try it,” Deets said.

  “No.”

  “It’s worth a shot. Talk to him. Persuade him.”

  Truskett, hearing an unusual persistence in his assistant’s voice, waved a hand dismissively. “It would be a total waste of time. Drop it.”

  Deets experienced a rush of frustration. His usually pale features flushed. A redness occurred along his hairline. “You know why you won’t try it?”

  “You’re going to tell me, I
suppose?”

  “Because your gonads have made a unilateral declaration of independence, that’s why.”

  “You are way out of fucking line, Deets.”

  Deets knew he’d overstepped the mark. He’d known it before the words were halfway out. The outburst, fired by all this menace to his ambition, left a vile taste in his mouth. He attempted a quick repair. “You’re right. Absolutely right. I take it back. I apologise from the bottom of my heart.”

  “From the bottom of what, Larry?” Truskett, sulking more darkly than ever, stared into the middle distance. He wasn’t going to absolve Deets immediately. Let him simmer a while, do him some good. Even Special Assistants were not indispensable despite the fact they sometimes considered themselves, as Deets did, kingmakers. They had no mandate to trespass on personal matters.

  “It’s this whole business, Senator. I’m jumpy. I’m not myself. I’m sorry.”

  Truskett watched Deets prowl the room back and forth, window to door, hands clasped behind his back. For a while there was the kind of silence that follows the demise of somebody believed to be in splendid health who drops dead in the middle of the street after playing three sets of squash, would you believe it? Poor bastard had everything to live for.

  In a quiet voice Deets said, “Consider this. Option Four. The Humble Pie Agenda. You go to McCune and tell him that in the light of new, shall we say, evidence, you no longer think Laforge a worthy candidate. You say you consider it ‘prudent’ that the President withdraw Billy’s name from nomination. And when McCune asks why – tell him there’s something fishy about Billy’s sex life. Make it up. Invent a lover. Preferably a boy. McCune hates faggots.”

  “How would that make me look, Larry?”

  “Flexible. A man who admits mistakes. A big man. All too human. Alas.” Deets smiled sadly. “Excellent qualities if you happen to be a priest on his way to a bishopric, but when you’re after the Oval Office, less than admirable. To be successful in politics you have to be intractable. The least desirable quality for a politician is overt flexibility because it makes him look indecisive. Wimpy. When did you ever hear a President or a Presidential hopeful admit to a mistake, for Christ’s sake? You’re above mistakes of judgement. You can’t afford to be wrong.”

  “By the same token, McCune wouldn’t be ecstatic about having to change his mind.”

  “With a mind like his, there isn’t much changing room anyhow,” said Deets. “But you won’t get anything from him in the future, we may be sure of that. No merry backslapping at the next convention. No words of praise. No commendation that you carry the Party’s banner into the Presidential fray.” Kiss it off, Deets thought. Everything, everything we worked for, lusted after.

  Truskett sighed, raised his hands in the air in a gesture of despondency, then let them flop back in his lap. A timid knock sounded at the door. It opened a little way and Miriam looked into the room, a tentative smile on her lips. Was she intruding? She wondered if she might make sandwiches since the midnight oil was obviously burning – deferential smile, a movement of the head akin to a curtsey, there was some nice cold beef they might enjoy. Truskett, who perceived his wife only dimly, declined the offer of food with a dismissive gesture. Deets, always pleasant to Miriam, turned her down more effusively. Miriam withdrew, closing the door quietly. A sad little mouse had come and gone, Deets thought.

  Truskett rose, stopped by the bookshelf where a framed photograph of Truskett Senior, who resembled a walrus, looked at him with prim Midwestern disapproval. It was the expression of a banker who sees no evidence of collateral for a loan. Truskett Senior had been fond of aphorisms, little verbal tonics. Even bruised grapes yield a little wine, son. Yeah, sure, sure. But what kind of wine, Pops? What kind of wine can I get out of these babies? How could he go to McCune and admit that a bad error of judgement had been made, that he was to blame? There had to be some other way.

  He considered Billy Laforge a moment and felt rage. The gentleman, squire of goddam Bucks County, horseman, every inch the country aristocrat – how was it feasible that this man could have become involved in something as squalid, as deplorable, as downright goddam sleazy, as the events in the Philippines Deets had described? Okay, so Laforge hadn’t been physically involved, but that was a damn fine hair too thin to split. It boiled down to the fact Laforge had been lax, blind, indifferent to human suffering, unmindful of the behaviour of his subordinates. There was a sense in which his contribution was even more terrible than if he’d pulled a trigger himself. He’d failed in an unsurpassingly dismal manner to keep brutality in check. And when he knew, he’d turned his face away and looked elsewhere. He’d committed that most ordinary, that most appalling crime: neglect.

  An exemplary life. Yes, Carolyn. Oh, yes. The man was a saint. Truskett slumped in his green leather chair and stretched out his long legs before the cheerless fireplace. I need another course of action, Pops. I need inspiration. Show me. He closed his eyes, remembered the showroom of Truskett Senior’s original funeral parlour in Cedar Rapids, the smell of fine wood, the dull glow of brass and the brightness of silver, the way a reel-to-reel played organ pieces, the muzak of grief. At the age of seven Byron had climbed inside one of the coffins just to get the feel of the thing, and he’d imagined the great heavy lid closing over him, slam, just like that, consigned to oblivion. You had to respect the sheer heft of death after that.

  He recalled the downstairs room where the morticians worked at prettifying corpses, injecting tints into dry veins so flesh would appear lifelike, applying makeup to faces in a clownish attempt to salvage expression from the expressionless, pomading hair, clipping fingernails. He remembered sharp chemical smells mixed with the stale aroma of dead flesh. On one occasion a putrefying body had been brought in from a forest where it had lain for many days and Truskett recollected that odour even now with a clarity that astounded him, rotten old pork, humus, moss, something gaseous, a terrible fart trapped in an airtight box for centuries. Larvae worked busily in the flesh, colonising the veins, gnawing and burrowing. When a layer of papery blue-black flesh was peeled away by a mortician’s knife an astonishingly busy cross-section of decay was revealed, dung beetles, worms, ants, slugs, spiders, a massive crawling and feasting, a hungry celebration at the decomposing heart of things.

  He opened his eyes and looked directly at Deets, who sat on the edge of the desk and swung one leg back and forth in an absent-minded way. Deets, you could see, was concentrating ferociously, his thoughts as busy as the larvae inside that putrefying corpse. A bright idea was needed. A means of salvation.

  Deets tilted his head to one side in the attitude of a man listening to something he alone hears. At precisely the same moment Byron Truskett had a lucid insight that caused his heart to rise up from gloom. In one of those rare alignments of rumination, the Senator and his aide had the same notion simultaneously, a mutual murderous dawning, as if what really fuelled their ambition were a cynicism so black and deep it was the grandfather of outright anarchy.

  Truskett gazed into the grate for a moment. “Tell me. Is anyone out there actually looking for this … alleged Filipino killer?”

  “Funny. I was just asking myself that very question.” Both men were again silent for a short time.

  Then Truskett said, “I am wondering …” He paused, gazing at Larry Deets in the fashion of men so familiar with one another that sometimes finished sentences were needless.

  “It could be very neat and tidy,” said Deets.

  “It could indeed,” Truskett remarked. “I would need to approach Hugo Fletcher, of course …”

  Deets assumed a little grin like a man trying on a radical new style of necktie. “How would you explain the details to him?”

  “Details? What details?” Truskett asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Larry.”

  And he winked, turning his face to the side the way William Laforge, in other circumstances, might have turned his.

  17

  Gallo
way, waiting with nervous impatience for Clarence Wylie to get in touch, spread the meagre pickings from his mailbox on the kitchen table. A picture postcard had come from his father. It depicted a slightly fogged view of the Finnieston Quay Crane in Glasgow at dusk. The sky in the background was lemon and fanciful, unlike anything ever seen above the city save by persons who spiked their milk with methylated spirits or hair lacquer: electric soup.

  Charlie studied the picture for a minute, noticing high-rise slabs beyond the enormous crane, the Cathcart Hills in the fuzzy distance – altogether a dour portrait, reminiscent of Gdansk shipyards. He flipped the card, examined the message, which was written in red ink.

  I never told you your sister Martha Had Quite A Serious drinking PROBlem that caused her delusions. She had a Brief Affair with a Pakistani chemist in the Gorbals, a TOTAL disaster. Keep in mind that what’s in the blood is in the BLOOD. Your Loving FATher

  Charlie had never had a sister. In senility Dan had taken to constructing a family tree rooted in imagination more than reality. It was a strange thing, the old man’s tapsalteerie recreation of the past. What’s in the blood is in the blood. Was he trying to convey a cryptic message? Galloway set the card aside. He already had more perplexity than he could deal with; if he started to analyse the old man’s utterances for even more … It didn’t bear thinking about.

  He examined the empty refrigerator. O bleakness. He filled a glass with cold water and ice, then stood at the window, drinking quickly. Karen was out there somewhere in the neon city, perhaps slinking with friend Justine through the sexy night places, the singles bars, a look of availability in her eye and a white mark where her wedding ring used to be. Galloway’s mind was all at once filled with ruined conjugal pictures, flaxen crumbs of a three-tier cake trodden into red carpeting, little bridal figures made of smashed frosting, a bouquet of roses stuffed in a trashcan. Memories of a wedding came down to that chaotic place where what might have been and what actually was formed a fork in the roadway, signs pointing the wrong way, travellers tearfully lost. He had to speak to her. Had to. Couldn’t let years of marriage blow themselves up. Couldn’t let her drift, just drift away.