Agents of Darkness Read online

  Your paternal grandfather is burIED in the GlasgOw Necropolis. He spent three YearS in jail for sTealing coPper from the roof of a cHurCh in Cowcaddens. I’m not sure I ever told you thaT. FamiLy history is the only history there is. Your lovINg father D Galloway.

  These inconsequential bulletins, strewn with mysterious capitals, always upset Galloway because the father he remembered and worshipped was a big man with focus and vitality, a self-educated Marxist, a gentleman, a bright-eyed singer of the old songs, a wit who could hold his drink with a dignity his son had not quite inherited. Humiliated by age, Daniel was forced now to live a glazed, sedentary life, false teeth in a bedside glass, sleeping-pills, starched sheets and bossy nurses and interminable games of draughts with other inmates. Once a week, got up in his navy blue Sunday suit and infused with downers, he was trotted off stiffly to the local Presbyterian church, an establishment he’d never been able to stomach. Too many constipated bastards, he always said. What the Presbyterian church needs is bloody cascara and a damn good shite. Now he wrote postcards in which he tampered with historic facts. So far as Charlie knew, his paternal grandfather had been lost at sea, and therefore could not have been buried in the Necropolis.

  Charlie Galloway remembered when his father had met Karen for the only time, five years ago in Glasgow just before the old man had begun his decline and Charlie’s marriage, after two terrific years, was still solvent, a going concern. The Scottish Honeymoon Period, he called it now. Galloway Senior and the young American beauty had taken to each other immediately. Dan had flirted with her, told old jokes and made them seem fresh, called her his ‘nut-brown maiden’, translated the guttural patois of Glasgow for her, dazzled her with charm, took her arm in bars and tea-rooms; a spellbinding performance. Once, in the darkened art-deco splendour of the Rogano restaurant in Exchange Place, he kissed the back of her hand and she laughed with the kind of delight she’d shown less and less in the years since.

  The whole trip had been a perfect little family episode, a treasure Charlie took out and polished at times. Alas. Now the old man was a half-note short of an octave, Karen was gone, and the past was a mildewed photo. What he felt roll through this Californian house was a tidal wave of loss of the kind that drove men to self-destruction.

  He got up from the kitchen table. In the living-room he dialled Justine Harper’s number. Her answering-machine clicked on. Her message was businesslike. After the beep Galloway asked Karen to call him, if she happened to be there. With tactful lack of detail, he mentioned the murder of Ella Nazarena, then hung up. His hands shook. Worse, something he couldn’t name trembled inside him, a hitherto unsuspected pulse or some new congregation of nerve-endings. He felt suddenly cold.

  Yielding to impulse, he explored the barren refrigerator, checked the places where he sometimes stashed booze – behind books, inside the laundry basket, under the kitchen sink with the Pledge and Joy and Limeaway. Thirty minutes of hard searching and nada. He must have pillaged his own secret caches at some other time, although he had no memory of having done so.

  He stood at the foot of the narrow stairway and looked up through gloomy shadows. The absences of the place settled all around him like falling snow. The house was still and in its stillness perfect, a framed painting Galloway observed like a man in a gallery who looks and wonders: Who lives in that house? Who leads a life there? Where do those stairs go?

  When he’d had enough of this he walked outside and stood under the avocado. He leaned against the trunk, felt something filmy flutter against his face, a web, a delicate insect, something.

  Family history is the only history there is, his father had written. That was all very well if you were lying in a rest-home in the somnolent Scottish countryside and your mind was wandering through the thickets of old blood relationships. But I have other concerns, Charlie Galloway thought. He looked across the dark canyon, hearing the omnipresent hum of Los Angeles as if it were a string plucked and doomed to vibrate endlessly, and he pondered murder. Who killed Ella Nazarena? Did a thief enter her house, had she surprised the robber? Was it that pointless old story? He had an ache in his heart thinking of the Filipina woman. You work hard all your damn life, you hurt nobody, and what do you get in the end? What is your reward? Behind his eyes the dull pain of the day’s alcohol was coming back to bother him.

  He wasn’t sure how long he stood beneath the avocado or whether he dozed in an upright position or drifted into some form of mental absenteeism, his head against the trunk. What startled him was the appearance of a car in the driveway and headlights flashing against his face, illuminating him as if he were a prowler in his own front yard. A door opened, an interior light blinked on and off, and Karen stepped out.

  The car was a late-model Mercedes, bright red with a soft white top, a Hollywood vehicle. As Karen came toward him the only thing he could think to ask was where she’d bought it, at which she laughed rather nervously, as if the idea of owning a Mercedes like this one was preposterous.

  “I borrowed it,” she said. She took his arm and led him toward the house. “It belongs to Justine.”

  Indoors, the light blinded Galloway. He was anxious and dry. He wondered if the whites of his eyes were pink. Karen wore a magnificent short skirt, a mini, which rose as she sat on the sofa. He’d dreamed of those legs a few nights ago. He’d dreamed he lay with his face propped against her inner thigh, a happy man, satisfied and contented and smugly sated with love.

  The skirt was brown suede, the blouse off-white. Some kind of Navajo necklace, silver and turquoise, hung against her breasts. Her hair was different. The last time he’d seen her it had been shoulder-length and full. Now, cut rather severely and shaped to her skull, it imparted a kind of boyishness he found very appealing. He wondered if there was any significance in this fact, something androgynous lurking in the recesses of his nature. With that small surge of pleasure imperfect people feel when they perceive a flaw in the otherwise flawless, he noticed she’d put on about three pounds around her waist, a consequence of the compulsive eating that afflicted her in times of stress. But she carried it well.

  “I came as soon as I got your message,” Karen said. She had one of those lovely pale faces that, when exposed to sun, becomes pinkly marbled. So she never ventured into direct sunlight, something she had in common with Charlie, who considered the sun overrated, of benefit only to plants and Californian loonies who lay on beaches in the inexplicable quest for discolouration.

  “I can’t believe Ella’s dead, I just can’t believe it.” She tilted her face against the back of the sofa, looked up at the ceiling. She was trim, small-breasted, splendid. The impression of fragility she usually emitted was blunted just a little by the few extra pounds on her. Galloway had the off-centre feeling that after seven years of marriage and three weeks of separation this was their first date, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Do you have any idea who killed her?” she asked.

  “She was shot, that’s all I know.” He wasn’t about to mention the dogs, that whole barbaric scene.

  “I saw her only this afternoon.” Karen had the awe in her voice of a person who has cancelled her reservation on a doomed flight. The shadow of tragedy, of tragic figures and possibilities, had touched her. She pressed the tips of her fingers against her eyes, which were damp. “It’s so hard to believe. She was a lovely woman, Charlie. I never met anybody more gentle.”

  “She wanted to talk to me about something,” Galloway said. “So I drove over there.”

  “You went to her house? You discovered the body?”

  Galloway sat on the sofa. He wanted to hold his wife’s hand. He was reluctant, a man checked by boundaries. What were the behavioural limitations imposed on an estranged husband anyway? Where did the wire-fence begin and end? How high were the watchtowers and would the guards shoot you if you made a wrong move?

  “I wish I hadn’t,” he said.

  Karen watched him with sympathy. “I can imagine.”

 
; No, you can’t. You can’t even begin. He got up from the sofa. “What the hell do you think she wanted to tell me?”

  Karen looked round the room briefly, as if like any absent wife she expected things to have changed since she’d gone, a vase moved, a rug shifted, perhaps even some breakage caused by a drunken Charlie Galloway.

  “Maybe she had a legal problem, Charlie.”

  “Then she’d see a lawyer.”

  “Or she was in some kind of trouble.”

  Galloway sat in an armchair. From this new perspective, Karen’s legs appeared longer. The lamplight laid a sheen across the material of her pantyhose. It was a crime, he thought. She goes around looking this way. She’s out there in the world looking this gorgeous, this edible. For whom? he wondered. The trouble with phantom lovers was how they always lived in halls of mirrors where they multiplied and pretty soon they were swarming all over your wife – the studs, the cool young dudes, of your imagination.

  “She had a beau,” Karen said. “Did you know that? She met him about two months ago. He was apparently very sweet to her. Gifts. Chocolates. Even proposed marriage.” Karen tried to smile through the remains of her tears. Galloway sensed that she wasn’t talking about Ella Nazarena’s boy-friend, but referring obliquely to some earlier, more romantic version of Charlie himself, bearer of candies and flowers, the man she’d married, the one who had become somehow lost with the awful passage of time. Damn, she always looked attractive with moist eyes, he thought. He wanted to get up and kiss her, but the six feet of ceramic-tiled floor that separated them might have been booby-trapped, landmined. He was paralysed by coyness and uncertainty.

  “Do you know his name?” he asked.

  “Freddie Something or other. I don’t remember the last name. It’ll come back to me. He’s a Filipino. He has his own barbershop. She was very impressed with that … Christ, I still can’t believe it! It makes me so goddam … I don’t know, enraged. There are times I hate this loathsome city and the fucking murderous freaks in it.” She ran her hands through her hair. From her purse she took out a Kleenex and buried her face in its folds a moment. “Are you interested in the beau? Is he a suspect?”

  “I don’t know the man, and I don’t suspect him of anything, but I wouldn’t mind talking to him,” Galloway said. The clock at the top of the stairs chimed twice. Was it two a.m. already? The day lay behind him like a series of episodes without a common link, as if each had been experienced by a man with recurring amnesia. He looked at Karen and what he felt was love, deep and yet troubled, a pool of very clear water distressed by a ruinous wind.

  “Except you’re not a cop for the next three months,” she said.

  “Um. Make that six.” And he told her about Paffett, the increased suspension, the clinic, his escape from the shackles of Dr Boscoe or Roscoe.

  She listened, gazing into his face in the open, searching way that was characteristic of her. There was no guile to Karen, no side. What you saw in her expression was all there was. She couldn’t hide surprise or disappointment. She couldn’t mask hurt or anger. It was an admirable quality that had first drawn Charlie Galloway to her. If his own life was a creaking house with many rooms and odd stairways leading up to concealed turrets or down into basements, a house of secret nooks and dark crannies, a boozer’s palace, then Karen’s was an open-plan ranch with as few walls as possible and a hundred skylights.

  “How are you going to live for six months?” she asked.

  “On a very sober budget.”

  “I’ll buy the budget part,” she said.

  “You don’t think I can stop drinking?”

  “Don’t let’s drag out that old one, Charlie. Not now.”

  “I’m on the wagon.” How fake it sounded. Even the way it resonated in his skull was an unconvincing echo.

  “Sure sure sure. The trouble with all the wagons you ever climbed on is they tend to have square wheels and don’t go anywhere. God knows, I’d love to have faith, Charlie. Really I would. But I’ve watched you ride wagons before. You always fall off. You should have stayed in the clinic.”

  This time is different, he thought. It was one of those thoughts best left unsaid. As soon as it flew from brain to mouth, then darted from mouth to world, it would sound as convincing as a plea for clemency from a serial murderer caught with a bloodied axe in hand.

  “You can’t have been on this new wagon for very long. You smell like a brewery.”

  “It was a recent decision,” he remarked.

  “Oh, screw it. I’m not going to nag, and I’m not going to whine. I’m not up for it and I don’t want to rehash old disappointments. They’re gone.”

  Karen became silent. She was in territory so familiar to her she could have traversed it blindfold, through swamps and quicksands and whirlpools. She could have navigated the crevices and scaled the cliffs without benefit of compass or rope. It was the country of Galloway’s good intentions, an allegedly fair land whose shoreline she’d seen only from afar, one that always had a way of receding no matter how hard Charlie tried to reach it. How pathetic of him to announce his umpteenth ascent to the wagon, as though it were a coronation; no vehicle could pull Charlie out of the bog unless he really wanted to be free – and sometimes she doubted that. It was as if, having become imprisoned by alcohol, he liked the stench of his private lock-up, the bars on his windows, the anaesthetising of his heart.

  It didn’t surprise her to learn he was close to losing his job. It was inevitable. There was always a sense of impending catastrophe when you lived with Charlie Galloway; it was like living under the shadow of a guillotine, and she was sick of waiting for the blade to come down. Love, she’d learned, was not adhesive enough to hold together the infrastructure of her marriage to him.

  Two or three times, in an attempt to understand Charlie’s compulsion and shore herself up with support, she’d attended Al-Anon meetings, well-intentioned gatherings invariably dominated either by tight-lipped whining women, whose pain lay visibly on their faces and who were in love with the sound of their own moaning, or the other kind, the vulnerable weepers who spoke in broken voices of broken marriages. Horror stories of violent husbands, guns, battered children, destroyed property – somehow these tales, although impossibly heart-rending, didn’t address the reason for her attendance, which was to gain an insight into Charlie’s problem and how to live with it. She heard a catalogue of problems, and never what she wanted – namely, solutions.

  For a time she’d entertained the notion that she was herself to blame in some way, but she’d rejected that. Why should she feel guilty? She hadn’t contributed to Charlie’s condition. She loved him. She hadn’t suffocated him or defused his ambitions or ruined his self-esteem.

  There was an escape artist inside him, a man whose only exit from the locked box of himself was alcohol. Karen knew that much. But what was that box and why was it locked? He suffered periods of homesickness and a melancholy that might have been peculiarly Celtic for all she knew, but how could these be reasons enough for his sickness? He sometimes referred to himself as an exile, as if that might explain everything – but sweet Christ, what was stopping him from going home to the country he professed so dearly to love, if that was all it might take to stop him from destroying himself? Under scrutiny each possible answer turned into a shallow excuse. Subsequently she’d given up trying to understand why Charlie drank; he did so, and that was as much a fact in her world as gravity. He’d drunk himself out of promotions that might have come his way, then later blamed his boozing on his lack of progress. He reversed the polarities of the world, like every drunk. He confused cause and effect.

  “Do you know how much is in our savings account?” she asked.

  He wasn’t sure.

  She said, “Eight thousand dollars and some change.”

  “Half of which is yours.”

  “I’m employed, remember. I don’t need the money. Why don’t you do yourself a good turn, Charlie? Why don’t you use some of the cash wis
ely and turn yourself over to another clinic for a few weeks?”

  This generosity touched Galloway, although the notion of a clinic had all the appeal of a funeral on Christmas Day. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “What is there to think about, Charlie? Do you imagine you can lick the problem alone?”

  “Problem,” he mumbled, as if this word was new to him. Whenever she referred to his ‘problem’ he became defensive, which was the sign for her to make some sharp reference to his denial. She spoke of denial as if it were a real place, an overgrown garden where he lived his life and was happy to hide and play amidst dense shrubbery and unshorn trees, a naked, pagan child worshipping his liquid god. He was fucking sick and tired of hearing about Bloody Denial. I drink, he thought. And I drink more than I should, and I admit it. But I can stop if I want to, without help, without clinics and quacks, without divine intervention. I can stop.

  “Problem, Charlie,” she said. “What other name would you give it?”

  She caught herself again and pulled back. For one thing, she couldn’t shake herself free from the horror of Ella Nazarena’s death, and so she didn’t have the energy for any kind of direct confrontation with Charlie on the subject of his drinking; these scenes were always repetitive in any case. For another, she had to remind herself that she no longer lived here, she’d moved out. That was the hard part. She missed him. She missed him on levels of which she’d never before been truly aware, as if she were descending the steps of her self. She wasn’t sorry to skip the crap – the broken engagements, the three-day binges when he’d vanish without a word, the slurred midnight phone-calls from some downtown bar where there always seemed to be shrill girls laughing in the background, the displays of public humiliation, the jokes he repeated in drunken amnesia.

  No. What she regretted was the absence of his tenderness, because at times he could be the most considerate of men, an unselfish lover. She craved the hours of his sobriety when they’d lie in each other’s arms and speak so softly of inconsequential matters in the secret language of lovers that they could hear their own heartbeats. The sweet privacy of their life together, the moments of wonder and intimacy, these she adored – and then, for no reason she could fathom, Charlie would introduce the destructive intruder into their home, his treacherously cheerful old friend alcohol, and everything would change, darken, and finally disintegrate.