Agents of Darkness Page 3

  He finished his drink and pushed the glass toward the bartender, who refilled it with Bell’s. Charlie would have preferred an unblended scotch, but there was none to be had here. A few feet away a man in enormous bermuda shorts and a T-shirt that said The Future Lies In Plankton was talking to an emaciated young woman about the ‘greenhouse effect’. The woman agreed the world didn’t have much of a future because, hey, the handwriting was on the wall, right? The man plunged a hand into a silvery dish of peanuts and tossed one in the air, catching it in his open mouth. Crunching, he spoke knowledgeably of ozone layers and fossil fuels.

  Galloway finished his scotch in a swift motion, a practised tilt of the hand. All this doomsday talk bored the arse off him. He was an incurable optimist when it came to the survival of the species. It didn’t matter to him that the two gloomies at the bar would have accused him of whistling in the dark, he believed in endurance.

  Turning the empty glass in his fingers, he contemplated another shot. He’d reached that point where he could go either way. To stop now involved a complicated procedure of getting down from his stool and going out into that hot, skeletal street. It meant returning to life as he knew it, where his wife might or might not have surfaced. On the other hand, if he continued to drink he could feign a lack of interest in the demands of his life until he’d reached the point where he was no longer faking.

  Indecision froze him. He thought he could remain forever balanced on this velveteen stool, which was royal blue and very comfortable. But he couldn’t just sit with a dry glass, which was akin to trespass. He placed an elbow on the bar, propped his face upon the palm of his hand, caught an unwelcome glimpse of himself in the bar mirror. He had careless brown hair, a tangled ruin. His face, which sagged a little, was pale, and showed absolutely no evidence of California living. He had a vampire’s complexion. Crypts might have been his natural habitat. His eyes were a weary grey-green, the colour of a sunless sea. The crumpled cotton jacket and crushed linen pants suggested a man whose idea of style was whatever clothing lay closest to hand on waking. He wore scuffed sneakers with broken laces, no socks.

  “You ready?”

  Galloway looked at the barman, an ox with long Viking hair held back in a pony-tail, a nautical sort of bloke, his skin browned by yo-ho-ho days surfing or sailing. He made Galloway, who pushed the shot-glass forward to be filled, feel long-dead and worm-riddled.

  The door opened and a completely unacceptable square of horrifying sunlight brightened the bar. On the periphery of his vision Galloway was aware of a very familiar figure coming toward him. His instinct was to avoid any contact with the newcomer. Let us step inside the House of Alcoholic Retreat, Galloway thought. We will be safe there, beyond rational speech and logic. But he wasn’t drunk enough to pass himself off as totally chaotic. He didn’t quite have the key to his own humiliation yet, although it was nearby.

  “Charlie, Charlie,” the man said as he slid on to the stool next to Galloway, who realised he was expected to make a response, but a synapse popped almost at once and that part of his brain in which were stored simple social reactions underwent a slippage. A broken rudder: his brain was a beached boat.

  “This is disappointing,” Clarence Wylie said. One of his hands closed very tightly around Charlie’s wrist. Galloway thought that if his lungs were in that wrist he’d need a cylinder of oxygen right away. “What is this going to achieve, Charlie?”

  Clarence Wylie, who had retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation last year at the age of fifty-two, still affected the Bureau’s sartorial fashion: Mormon chic. The shirt was excruciatingly white and the dark necktie neatly knotted, like that of a man on a mission. He had about him the jowly, off-centre look of somebody who has balanced a telephone between shoulder and jaw for long periods of his life.

  Charlie Galloway had no immediate answer to Wylie’s question, about which he preferred not to think in any event. He reached for his drink, remembering that Clarence had worked directly for the monster called Vanderwolf, who’d built a private fiefdom inside the Bureau and encouraged his courtiers to jostle one another for his favours, which he dispensed in a miserly way. On the two occasions when Galloway had met Vanderwolf it had been in the great man’s office where the tan carpet perfectly matched the drapes and the three telephones aligned on the desk were the same colour as rug and curtains. Vanderwolf himself wore a dark brown suit, dark brown shoes. He had a hunter’s fondness for camouflage. If you narrowed your eyes, Galloway had thought, you probably wouldn’t see him at all except for his forehead, a massive crag across which both enormous silvery eyebrows had bushed together.

  The Wolf was a piece of work, Galloway thought. Mean-hearted, vicious, jealous of his terrain – which was the entire Western region of the FBI. That Clarence had survived his time under the man and retired with kindness and humanity intact was a marvel. Most of Vanderwolf’s graduates turned out badly, base little men with gnarled, oaken hearts.

  “You know goddam well you’re not supposed to be here, Charlie.”

  “Have you been spying on me?”

  Clarence Wylie had a sweet, rather sad little smile. “I went to the clinic to see how you were doing. They said you’d upped and left without so much as a farewell. I tracked you here. That’s all. I wasn’t spying. You know me better.”

  Galloway finished his drink, set the glass down, patted the back of Clarence’s hand. He’d reached a state where he felt a misty gratitude toward Wylie. About a half-mile back inside his tear-ducts moisture was gathering. In this malted moment of affection, Charlie thought Wylie was the dearest, kindest friend a man could ever have. He was the cream. The best. Primo. They’d known each other for years, Clarence and Charlie, Federal agent and Los Angeles cop, first tossed together in one of those usually awkward investigations where the Feds had been obliged to liaise with the LAPD in an affair involving an enormous quantity of narcotics.

  “Drink with me, Clarence,” and Charlie’s accent thickened from the polite, Scottish-flavoured speech he commonly used to the expansive vowels and rolling rrrs of his native Glasgow. Drrrink wi me, Claaarrrnz. Alcohol did this to him. It catapulted him back to his origins. It was the great sling-shot, the time-machine to the source. A few more drinks and he’d be damp-eyed and silly, oot the gemme as they used to say.

  “You know I don’t drink before dark, Charlie.”

  Galloway snorted. His small empty glass looked forlorn to him. Clarence Wylie stretched out a hand and locked his palm very firmly around Galloway’s elbow.

  “Come with me,” Wylie said. “Call it quits.”

  “I did five days, Clarence. I did fivefuckendays in that place without windows. Five and every one a bastard. I graduated, Clarence. I graduated with honours. And here I am.” He waved a hand around the bar, as if it were a club you could join only if you’d put in some quality time at clinics and drunk-tanks and black rooms where people screamed because they were being beaten by their dead parents, or eaten by oversized rodents, or because they heard their coffin being carried up the stairs by men with hobnailed boots.

  “You were meant to stay four weeks, Charlie. That’s what the doctor ordered. Four dry weeks. Then weekly follow-ups. You don’t exactly graduate from places like that. You don’t get a diploma. What they give you is a kind of daily reprieve, my friend.”

  Charlie Galloway swayed. Because of his recent abstinence the scotch had burned out his connections quicker than he’d anticipated. A mellow stage had been skipped, the plateau of easy serenity missed. Now he was on the glacier and could feel the slavering huskies yanking on the sled that would take him to the edge. He picked up his empty glass. Wylie plucked it from his fingers and set it down.

  “You don’t need any more, Charlie. Let’s get you out of here.”

  Galloway couldn’t find the energy for combat. He allowed himself to be led away from the bar. He wasn’t happy. The idea of the blistering white street paralysed him. He would be cauterised out there, reduced to prim
al substance. Shitlike glop on the pavement. Charles Douglas Galloway, scooped up and put in a Ziploc bag and sealed, his remains returned to their point of origin on Govan Road, Glasgow, if Govan Road still existed, if Glasgow still existed. And what if they did? Would anyone in the old street remember C D Galloway after fifteen years of exile?

  “That wanker at the clinic – Boscoe, Roscoe, whoever he was – asked me why I drink,” he said, more to stall the exit than to enrich Wylie’s store of knowledge. “Puffed-up wee bugger.”

  “And what did you tell him, Charlie?”

  “The truth, old son. Always the truth.”

  “And what’s the truth?” Wylie steered him gently toward the door.

  Galloway had one of those moments of strange lucidity, an ellipse in the path of drunkenness, in which he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t more vigorously protesting his situation. He wanted to stay in the bar. Here he was safe. Out there were people, situations to confront. Here he could postpone remorse until the dark hour when the law required the bar to shut.

  Wylie tugged the door open. The light scorched Galloway’s eyeballs. He saw nothing. The heat withered him. He hadn’t imagined the universe capable of such an unholy temperature. God was dead. Somebody else was stoking the furnace now. What other explanation could there be? He felt like a lit wax candle.

  “You were going to tell me the truth about why you drink, Charlie,” Wylie reminded him.

  “Aye, so I was, so I was. It’s deep, Clarence. Are you up for it?”

  “I’m listening,” Wylie said, in the manner of a man who has been in the same place too many times.

  His throat abruptly dry, Charlie Galloway said, “I drink because I like the taste of the bloody stuff.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, hell, that’s interesting,” was all Wylie said. They moved to the curb, where Wylie had parked a big brown Buick. He opened the passenger door for Galloway.

  “Of course, Clarence,” Galloway said as he ducked inside the vehicle and struck his head against the rearview mirror, causing a brilliant flash of reflected light, “I can quit any time.”

  “I bet you can,” Wylie remarked, and he thought of the nights he’d hunted Charlie down in some bar to drive him safely home, or the mornings he’d helped him through manic hangovers when Karen had taken one of her hikes away from her boozed-up husband. He thought of hours spent listening to Charlie ramble in the Sanskrit of the drunk about how he was going to change his world and do everything differently. Yeah o yeah. Clarence had heard it all. And at those times when he wondered why he continued to befriend the accursed Scotsman, Charlie would throw him a curve-ball, a surprise, an unexpected month of sobriety and charm and the prospect of better times – only to wreck it in a sudden binge, swept away on a storm of alcohol. God bless friendship, Clarence thought. The rough and the smooth. With Charlie Galloway, who at times had that innocent vulnerability of a small dog in the middle of a busy freeway, it was all too often the rough.

  Galloway had half-expected Clarence to whisk him back to the clinic which was situated in one of those plush sidestreets that adjoin Sunset Boulevard and dump him on Dr Boscoe’s doorstep. There would be lectures and Librium and shame. Instead, Wylie went another way, up and up into the hills above the canyons, where dense foliage tried to lock out the sunlight and houses, hidden by mossy trees, came briefly into view before disappearing again. After a while Galloway realised they were heading toward his own home, a 1930s two-bedroom place rented from a Syrian woman who ran a doubtful escort agency for elderly gentlemen.

  “You look like you need rest,” Wylie said.

  Rest? Rest was what you did when you were dead, for Christ’s sake. What Charlie Galloway wanted was for night to come and the neon signs of bars to sizzle in the hot dark and himself on a boozy prowl. He looked through the window. Fierce sunlight exploded among the trees. He squeezed the bridge of his nose because a headache had begun to form behind his eyes. It often happened when he was cut off in mid-drink. The only known cure was a fresh glass. Sobriety seemed as bleak to him as a teetotaller’s wake.

  The Buick continued to climb. The narrow streets, some barely lanes, twisted unexpectedly. Galloway looked down the way they’d come, into pale green-brown canyons, abysses that in wetter seasons were blue-black and luscious. Afloat in the trees were tiled rooftops, chimneypots, satellite dishes reflecting the burning sky. He shut his eyes. A pocket of nausea formed in his stomach and he was dizzy, but he knew this uneasy condition so well he wrestled it into submission with no great effort.

  “You feeling okay?” Wylie asked.

  “Never better.” He lied with aplomb.

  Wylie went into another bend, this one practically a right angle, and Galloway, whose ballast was all wrong, tilted to the side. He recognised this street and understood this turn because he’d negotiated it a thousand times in a variety of physical conditions, but still it surprised him.

  Wylie turned the Buick into a driveway and parked under an enormous avocado tree. Home. Home and hearth and heart. Charlie Galloway looked at the small white stucco house with the black wooden shutters. The doorway was arched, a Spanish touch, a bit of olé. It reminded him of a cantina he’d once visited in the Baja with Karen, Dos Equis beer and enchiladas and the smell of things endlessly frying in the same lard. How had so much love distilled itself in memories of refried beans and murderously hot peppers?

  Wylie came round the front of the car, opened the passenger door. Galloway stepped out without assistance. He wiped his damp palms on his pants and walked toward the house. According to the landlady, this tiny house had been rented for a month in the 1930s by an actress named Brenda Joyce, whose spurious claim to fame lay in the fact she’d appeared in some Tarzan movies of the late forties. The landlady was very proud of this connection with minor celebrity. And why not? This whole city celebrated celebrity. Millions were spent manufacturing that most perishable commodity of the American century, fame.

  As he reached in his pants pocket for his keys, Galloway saw the tiny bird at his feet. It lay upside-down against the door, stiff legs drawn in, claws bent, small pale eyes open. He stepped back with a shudder. Death on the doorstep.

  “Would you say this was an omen, Clarence?”

  Wylie bent, examined the bird. “I’d say it was a dead sparrow.”

  Galloway stared at the fuzzy little corpse, thinking how death made things shrink, stripped them of size and substance. A deid sparra. Already you could see the outline of the bird’s frail skeleton through lacklustre feathers. He was reminded suddenly of a canary he’d kept as a boy, a cheerful yellow thing that had sung all day long, passionately courting its own reflection in a mirror. It had chosen Christmas morning, 1952, to die of causes unknown. Charlie Galloway, aged seven, had risen early to catch Santa at his sly work, but instead had found the bird, far beyond song, at the bottom of its cage.

  Galloway’s father, a wag, a shipyard worker with a prizefighter’s nose, had tried to lift the gloom by suggesting they roast the canary for a Christmas snack. Make a nice change, he’d said. Probably very tasty, mmmmm. Wash the wee bugger down with ginger beer, eh?

  Galloway hadn’t thought about that Christmas in years. Now he couldn’t remember if they’d flushed the bird and gone on with the festivities, or if he’d spent the day moping in his room with the long window that overlooked the smirr clouding the River Clyde and the tangle of shipyard cranes that rose over Glasgow. Something in that rainy arrangement of cranes, those steel grids set against the sky, had suggested a mystery to Charlie, a design he could never fathom.

  He couldn’t even recollect the damn canary’s name. Alcohol and memory played in different leagues. When you drank, everything in the past had a gossamer quality. You reached for it and, whoops, it was gone, leaving only a broken web flapping against your face.

  “I wonder what killed it,” he said, looking at the sparrow.

  Clarence Wylie, k
ind to dead birds and drunks alike, nudged the dried-out creature gently with his foot on to the parched lawn. “Maybe it couldn’t find anything to drink,” he said.

  “It has my heartfelt sympathy.”

  Galloway turned the key in the lock. He entered the house reluctantly because there was sadness in these rooms. Lost love, he thought. But this was the city of illusions, and love, like fame, was another commodity with a limited shelf-life. Galloway didn’t want to believe that, not for a minute.

  The living-room was dark, the air stuffy. The furniture, chosen by Karen, was Southwestern, the colours pale pinks and turquoises and earth-tones. Navajo tapestries hung on the walls. Kachina dolls peered like autistic victims from shelves. The tiled floor was strewn with Indian rugs. There were many wicker baskets, some stuffed with magazines, some with cacti. What the room suggested to Galloway was an upscale wigwam. He’d never felt at home with all this stuff but he’d gone along with Karen’s decor because he loved her and love was sometimes a matter of blind compromise in the smallest of things. Should I hang this picture here, Charlie? Or here? Wherever pleases you, sweetheart.

  He experienced a longing for her so strong it burned into him as surely as acid spilled on his skin. He looked across the room to the doorway that led upstairs, hoping she might materialise there, but there were only shadows and emptiness. He crossed the floor, unlocked the shutters, parting them a few inches to allow a narrow slit of very bright light to penetrate the room.

  Followed by Wylie, Galloway went inside the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. A lonely Pabst beer, attached to a plastic six-pack collar, sat in the centre shelf. He reached for it and had it open before Wylie could react. He downed half of it in one swallow. Elixir.

  “Hey, no more booze, Charlie,” Wylie said, confiscating the can and pouring the liquid into the sink. “We’ll play it my way. First, take a shower while I make some coffee. Then you go lie down. You look like shit.”