Agents of Darkness Read online

  After a while you can’t go on. You can take only so much. Anything else is masochism. You trade the pain of life with Charlie for the ache of loneliness and you hope the exchange is favourable. All at once she wanted to go to him and hold his face between her hands and look into his eyes for some small sign that he might be serious this time about sobriety. She didn’t want to take the risk; she’d see the same old eagerness, once upon a time so convincing, and in the end always disappointing. And she didn’t want to be persuaded by the rhetoric of old expressions, decayed promises.

  She stood up, smoothed her short skirt down. “I’m going now, Charlie. I’m tired.”

  “Why don’t you stay here?” he asked.

  “I wish you hadn’t asked that.”

  “There’s a comfortable bed upstairs.”

  “I remember the bed, Charlie. I know it’s comfortable. But I’m in no mood to be pressured. Ella Nazarena was murdered today and that makes me sick to my heart. I’m on a very short fuse right now.”

  “I get lonely,” he said.

  “You’re not the only one.”

  “We could get lonely together.”

  “Give it up,” she said. She went toward the door and he tracked her.

  “I want to save our marriage,” he said. “Or is it too late for that?” He experienced a touch of fear, wondering if he really wanted a straight answer to his question.

  “You want a hint, Charlie? If you’d like to save this marriage, start by saving yourself.” She kissed his cheek, then turned away.

  The screen door swung open and shut, clicking back and forth a couple of times in its frame. Karen walked toward the Mercedes. Charlie Galloway, his face pressed upon the fine mesh of the screen where several winged insects had become trapped, watched her get into the car, which she did with the rare grace of a woman who knew how to wear a mini-skirt. He heard the engine, saw the headlights burn among the avocado leaves where a surprised, electric-eyed raccoon scampered up the trunk. Beyond, the flying moon speeded through the sky.

  Start by saving yourself, he thought. Wasn’t he already trying? Hadn’t he already pledged himself to that end?

  He turned off all the lights and lay on the living-room sofa, the fabric of which had trapped something of Karen’s scent. He fell asleep shortly after the upstairs clock struck two-thirty. He dreamed of Ella Nazarena and dogs.

  Carolyn Laforge bathed in her Washington hotel suite then wrapped herself in a beige terry robe with the hotel’s monogram. She walked into the bedroom, leaving wet footprints behind her in the thick carpet. She undid the robe and let it fall away from her body.

  Byron Truskett never failed to be overwhelmed by her beauty. A bewitching process had taken place, a spell cast, his heart sawn in half. But it was a risky business this wizardry, because there was always the chance of discovery. And in the cold light of day, in the frost of law offices and divorce courts, of scandal and remorse, none of the sorcery would mean a goddam thing. For now, though, you laid back and enjoyed the spectacle because it plain perplexed you and took your breath away.

  “You make the bedsheet look like a tent,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed and laid her fingertips on what was figuratively the tentpole.

  Truskett reached for her wrist. Desire was not the word. Lust was inadequate. He was rock-hard. He knew she’d only have to whisper Fuck me, Byron in his ear and he’d come, he’d lose it even before he was inside her. It had happened last time and they’d laughed about it. The premature ejaculation was something unexpected, a sign of her magic that she could transport him all the way back to the embarrassment of youth. He told her once about the power she had over him, ascribing it to witchcraft. The idea she could arouse this man without even trying pleased her immensely.

  “I like being a witch,” she’d said at the time.

  She slid her hand under the sheet and held him. With the tips of her fingers she delineated the blood-swollen veins of his cock. She watched how he tilted his head back and the way his lips parted. He was in a place beyond speech. His eyes were open but they weren’t seeing anything. They seemed to be tuned to an inner vista which no one else could look upon. She drew the sheet back. He was enormous.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “Just be very still.”

  Byron Truskett, stripped of his political power, was obedient.

  She worked her hips slowly. She slid him into her. She licked his neck from throat to chin. She stroked the firm flesh of his buttocks, then her hand wandered around the curve, reaching under his scrotum, the pleasure spot, the crux of his sensitivity – and there, with her flautist’s fingers, she played her devastating tune on him. He came with such noise she had to clap her palm over his open mouth and he shuddered so violently she thought he’d fall to pieces. She felt his semen flood warmly inside her, a sweet sensation but no more than that, nothing that made her feel as if she’d been touched where she lived. She couldn’t love this man the way she loved William; there had never been any question of that.

  Truskett was quiet for a very long time. According to the rules by which Washington governed the country, fucking was just another form of negotiation, another political instrument, something that was infinitely more pleasurable than the chore of trying to pass new legislation. And fucking had the advantage of never getting bogged down in committee. Truskett knew all this. He was a realist who understood how the game was played.

  But as he placed his arm across her body he thought how easy it would be to toss everything aside in one act of romantic foolishness and fall in love – God, how he could tumble – with Carolyn Laforge. He examined her golden hair upon the pillow, noticing how each filament consisted of a variety of colours which depended on your angle of perception and the reflection of the bedside lamp. He took a strand and laced it between his fingers. He studied the marvel of her jaw, the fine bone that created a frame for the fabulous mouth. He could watch that mouth all the livelong day.

  “Are you well-fucked, Senator?”

  “Well and truly.”

  “When does your wife expect you?”

  Another of her baffling tricks was the way she could make Miriam vanish entirely from the cabinet of his conscience. He looked at his wristwatch. It was almost three-thirty a.m.

  “Soon,” he said.

  “You come and you go.”

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  “Then stay.”

  Truskett pressed his lips to her bare shoulder. “I adore you.”

  “You have a wife, Senator. A dear friend of mine.”

  “And you a husband.”

  “True.” She turned her face toward Truskett. “And I’m ambitious for him. Unfortunately, he isn’t always his own best advocate. Sometimes he needs me to speak on his behalf.”

  “Speak? Is that what you do?”

  “Among other things.”

  This was no longer a bedroom. This was the bargaining table now, the bottom line. Truskett said, “I can’t give guarantees. It’s not that kind of situation. You know that.”

  “I don’t remember ever mentioning guarantees, Byron. I’m not that naive. We’re talking about your support. Your wholehearted, unequivocal support. I want to know you’ll go all the way for him. I want that much. I need to know you’ll shed some blood for him if you have to. He deserves this position. He’s worked damn hard for this country. Nobody else has anything like his experience. His loyalty is beyond question.”

  “His loyalty’s not at issue,” Truskett said. “I’ll do anything in my power, but I can only take him so far. I can’t walk that last mile with him, Carolyn. He has to come through a Senate scrutiny smelling like a new-born baby. He has to be so pure you’d want him to hear your confession. If there’s a trace, a smidgeon, of lint in his navel, he’s lost.”

  Carolyn sat upright, pushing her hair away from the sides of her face. “William has nothing to hide, Byron. Absolutely nothing.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Truskett said.

&nbs
p; “His life has been exemplary.”

  Truskett looked up at the ceiling and thought: An exemplary life. Who had ever known that fabled creature, ridden that winged horse? An exemplary life was what saints were supposed to lead, and Laforge could not have come this far unscathed. A good man, definitely, and politically sound so far as Truskett was concerned – otherwise he would never have considered Laforge a viable candidate to place before the President as a future Director of the CIA. But Truskett knew that sainthood was given only to a few, and nobody in his experience had ever been canonised for government service. It was lamentable but realistic to say that running the United States did not call for unselfish angels, boy scouts, do-gooders, bleeding hearts. The men who operated the vast conglomerate known as America had more in common with Roto-rooter technicians than cherubs of virtue. They sucked drains clear of filth and unclogged pipes of coagulated scum so that the murky waters of government could keep flowing. ‘Washington’ and ‘exemplary life’ were opposites and could not coexist.

  Truskett knew there had to be some flaws in Billy Laforge’s past. What he dearly hoped was that they were small and manageable, unlikely to cause embarrassment. If they were, he was sure he could swing the nomination Billy’s way. But Truskett also realised that something more important than Laforge’s nomination was involved – namely, his own reputation. He couldn’t champion Laforge’s candidacy in the White House if there was the slightest chance of Billy’s shit flying into the blades of the public fan. The President of the United States, a man who was arrogantly unapproachable at times, treated unpleasant truths as gatecrashers at his private party, unticketed louts in need of a flogging.

  Carolyn stretched her arms. “Do we go another round, Senator?”

  Truskett was filled with well-being.

  “Are you hard or do I have to work on you?” she asked.

  “I’m getting there,” Truskett remarked.

  She rolled on her stomach. Fine golden hair, barely noticeable, grew the length of her spine. Truskett kissed her neck, back, buttocks, thinking how sweet she tasted.

  “Take me from behind,” she said.

  There is bliss and there is bliss, the Senator thought. But this, dear crucified Christ, this is bliss.

  7

  At ten-thirty a.m. Charlie Galloway, stiff from having slept on the sofa, telephoned Karen at her office.

  “Did you remember the name of Ella’s boyfriend?” he asked.

  “It’s Freddie Joaquin,” she said. She pronounced it Hwa-keen. She’d taken Spanish in her freshman year at UCLA, where she’d continually changed her major, from philosophy to sociology to business administration, in the quest, as fashionable then as now, for self-definition. “I don’t know where he has his shop, though.”

  Galloway fumbled around, found a pencil and a sheet of paper. “Can you spell Hwa-keen for me?”

  “As in San Joaquin Valley. I don’t see what difference it makes to you anyway. You can’t get involved.”

  Charlie Galloway admitted as much, but only in a half-hearted manner. He thought of the dogs. The small house in the wretched street. The terrible pattern of dried blood on a sheet. He was already involved, with or without official sanction. How could he not be? Ella Nazarena was dead. A friend was dead. Was he supposed to stand back and shake his head sadly, resigning himself to this dreadful fact? Was he expected to do nothing? Karen surely knew better, but she changed the subject in a rather heavy-handed way, as if she didn’t want to hear a single word about misadventures and potential disasters in Charlie Galloway’s future.

  She said, “On the off-chance you’re interested, I found the name of a good treatment centre. It’s run by somebody called Oakleigh, an ex-priest who used to be a substance-abuser. I’ll give you the phone-number.”

  Substance-abuser. A whole new vocabulary had been invented by those whose lucrative industry it was to cure people of their ‘dysfunctions’. You couldn’t be a doper or a drunk any more. No, that was too simple. You were a substance-abuser, you were chemically dependent; and, God help you, if you drank and drugged together you were said to be ‘cross-addicted’.

  Dutifully he wrote down the number, wondering how Karen had found it. He imagined her asking around among her colleagues for a place where her estranged husband might get his scattered act together.

  “Stay out of trouble, Charlie.”

  “I plan on it.”

  “And call Oakleigh. Please. They say he’s terrific.”

  “I’ll think it over.” He told her he loved her, then hung up.

  A former priest, he thought. Excommunicated for cocaine in the sacristy? A shot of Wild Turkey in the old communion wine? Crack concealed in the vestments?

  Charlie made instant coffee and drank it standing by the sink. He parted the slatted blind with a finger, then recoiled at once from the fiery sun that already had the city locked in its bright shackle. It was going to be another grinding doomsday, impossible to move and breathe without effort. California was frying again.

  He finished his coffee, went upstairs, found clean lightweight pants and a T-shirt on the back of which a large gibbon glowered. Karen had bought the shirt from a vendor outside San Diego Zoo a year ago and had given it to Charlie without comment. He’d never worn it until now. The message, the monkey on his back, hadn’t endeared him to the garment. Today he didn’t care. Today, sunny and infernal, was his new beginning, his genesis. Today he’d stay sober.

  Somehow.

  Downstairs, he checked the yellow pages under Barbers. Freddie Joaquin was listed as the proprietor of a place called Kwik-Kuts, ‘established 1976’, which in Californian terms made it practically an historic enterprise. Kwik-Kuts had a tiny box to itself in the middle of the page. The location was given as Inglewood, a neighbourhood east of the San Diego Freeway. Galloway scribbled the address on the same piece of paper as he’d written Joaquin’s name.

  He studied the information a moment, as if simple perusal might yield a practical insight. His feelings for Ella Nazarena notwithstanding, was he just trying to find busy work for himself, on the principle that if you were occupied the devil couldn’t get you? But if that was all, why didn’t he do something easy, like prune the avocado tree or water the long-dead flowers behind the house?

  Better still, why didn’t he turn himself over to this Oakleigh character and ask to be exorcised? A couple of sober weeks with the former priest might amass him sufficient points to engineer Karen’s return, and just for a moment he was tempted to dial the man’s number. He’d only have to behave himself for a short period of time under Oakleigh’s watchful eye and it would be Homecoming Day and brass bands up here in the hills and all would be well, all heavenly, the house would burn with old love rekindled.

  But for how long, Charlie? How long before The Demented Other moved in and Karen out again? No, running off to some ex-priest wasn’t Galloway’s answer any more than clipping leaves from a dry tree. He was going to have to reach more deeply inside himself to find a place of integrity and character, a reservoir that hadn’t evaporated altogether, if such a core still existed.

  Yesterday, when he’d drunkenly come up with the idea of a salvage operation to raise himself out of the rut of his being, he’d fully expected it to pass into oblivion with sobriety. All his inebriated notions tended to scurry away, frightened mice in the brassy light of day. But this one hadn’t faded at all; even stranger, it had no hollow, counterfeit ring to it. Nor was he deriding himself as he usually did when the ruin of some grandiose scheme, concocted in his cups, rumbled through the accusatory Greek chorus of a hangover. No matter how hard he listened he couldn’t hear the familiar chiding of self-mockery. You, Charlie? Sober? Har, hardy har, pull the other one. He was possessed by an unexpected sense of self, as if he’d been delineated by a thick dark edge, like a character in a drawing. He sensed possibilities, fresh directions, huge difficulties.

  It was as if the murder of Ella Nazarena were a window through which he could see another v
ersion of himself. That younger Charlie, unaffected by booze, the fresh-faced Glasgow policeman who’d come to the United States fifteen years ago and risen to the rank of Lieutenant in the LAPD, that optimistic lad who’d perceived the world as a black and white place, justice here, injustice over there, two separate bundles, clean-cut and uncluttered because truth was without ambiguities.

  He’d made an impression in the LAPD, distinguishing himself in a newsworthy homicide case, one of those gruesome multiple killings seemingly patented by the State of California. A whole family, husband and wife, grannie and three kids, had been tortured and bludgeoned in a fine house on Mulholland Drive, and Charlie, assisted by doggedness and the unshackled optimism of all young men in pursuit of an ideal, had unearthed the clues that led to the killer, who turned out to be – what else? – a Satanist of sorts, an acid-head with a demonic view of the inequities of the world, somebody who had read Aleister Crowley and Karl Marx and had gotten them mixed-up in what was left of his brain.

  Charlie Galloway, Lone Ranger.

  Later, working with the Narcotics division, Charlie had rendered immeasurable service to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in two complicated cases involving corruption and cocaine, conspiracies of greed and blood that stretched from South America to Hollywood and points east, dragging in their zigzag paths a well-greased Californian judge, a dozen airline employees, several Mr Bigs of the LA blow scene, dealers, couriers, and assorted flunkies. Tons of toot were confiscated, its street value estimated by the popular press at many tens of millions of dollars. Success! A promotion within the Department! Newspaper stories! Handshakes with chill-fisted, chill-eyed Vanderwolf. A cryptic conversation with the mysterious, powerful Hugo Fletcher, the invisible man who was the Assistant Director of the FBI. Charlie couldn’t remember the talk, only Fletcher’s awesome quiet emission of authority, which erected a magical aura around the man. You just knew that Hugo Fletcher, who worried even Vanderwolf, understood the inner workings of the Republic; he grasped the complexities of the machine, the engine-room, which levers to pull. You wouldn’t want to make Hugo your enemy.