Agents of Darkness Read online

  “I don’t think that’s your business.”

  “Just once I’d like an answer, Elizabeth.”

  “Just once I’d like to think you deserve one, Charles.”

  Galloway experienced a familiar desperation. He had a brief unlikely notion that he might reach out and snatch the girl’s purse and rummage through its contents, possibly finding receipts for an airline ticket, or some form of evidence he could consider hard, something definite. Right now he was getting nowhere. He looked at the sky, blue yielding to a darker blue, then he gazed at Elizabeth Honculada, wondering what would get past her defences. A wrecking-ball, wirecutters, blowtorch, demolition instruments he didn’t have.

  “Who is Cruz?” he asked. “Old family friend from the provinces? Is that it? You were showing him round, eh? Is that the story? Or is it something else altogether? You and Cruz have a thing going. Is that a fair assumption?”

  The girl looked at him with an expression of disdain. “Your time’s up. I don’t have to answer your questions. I’m calling my lawyer, Galloway.”

  Lawyers, always lawyers, incubi ascending from hell with new ordinances tucked beneath their sulphuric wings. Galloway was frustrated by the girl, by everything. “Call your damn lawyer,” he said, and his voice rose. “Tell him you harboured a man I suspect of being involved in a murder. Tell him you were instrumental in transporting a possible felon.”

  “You’re bullshitting me, Galloway.”

  Galloway smiled secretively and leaned upon the trunk of a tree. He folded his arms. A cat slunk across the courtyard, black and shiny, regarding the little human drama before him with feline indifference. A broken-winged robin shivered under a bush, awaiting extinction.

  Elizabeth Honculada said, “Okay. I’ll buy a ticket. Who did he allegedly murder?”

  “A woman here in LA.”

  “And you’ve got proof?”

  “I’m that close,” Galloway said. It was bluff, and he enjoyed it, all the more so since it briefly deflated Miss Honculada. It was a contest now of Charlie’s rusted will against the girl’s, his ruse pitted against her stubbornness. She was staring at him, assessing him, testing his depths. He could almost feel her litmus paper dipped in his bloodstream.

  She smiled and shook her head in amusement. “Galloway, you’re so full of shit it’s a wonder your eyes aren’t brown.” She moved past him toward the front door, where she turned back. “Let me say it one more time for the record. I took Ray Cruz to the airport. I dropped him off. The end.”

  Galloway sighed. “Have it your way. I’ll start checking the airlines. I might get lucky right away. You never know. Unless Cruz used an assumed name, of course. On the other hand, maybe you paid for his ticket. And just maybe” – here he raised a finger in the air, a joker approaching the punchline – “you even bought it for him with your own credit-card. After all, he told me he was short of money.”

  “And just maybe,” the girl said, “I didn’t even go to the airport at all.” She gave Galloway the kind of look that might poison wells, then unlocked the large, impressive door and stepped inside the house. Galloway walked across the courtyard and through the metal gate to the street, which was empty and secretive, a Californian pop-art painting of arched doorways and palms and orange trees, hypnogenetic in the razzle-dazzle light. An outrageous squeal caused him to look back and he saw the black cat emerge from the shrubbery with a dying bird shuddering in its jaws.

  He had all kinds of sympathy for that bird.

  Carolyn Laforge, short-sighted, too vain to wear spectacles, had to narrow her eyes to watch the television picture in her hotel room. She lay on her stomach, face propped in her hands. On the floor was a tray that had recently been sent up by room service. A half-eaten smoked-salmon sandwich, a bottle of Chablis, and a slice of melon, barely nibbled, lay in disarray. She gazed at the TV picture, which depicted a commercial for a disposable feminine douche called Summer’s Eve, available in different fragrances.

  “I hope you never use that stuff,” Byron Truskett said. He lay alongside her, one bare leg set across her spine.

  “Why?” Carolyn asked.

  “It might spoil the taste of you.”

  Carolyn said, “I understand douches destroy natural bacteria.”

  The Senator, far removed from bacterial notions, had on his face the satisfied smile of a man whose leaves have just been raked in no uncertain terms. He was the cheerful proprietor, one languid leg bonding him to the woman, imprisoning her on the large bed of this hotel in Alexandria, Virginia.

  Earlier today, in the Oval Office, all the old desires had come back to him with renewed intensity, magnifying that unequivocal sense of destiny he’d first felt many years before. He would run this country, goddamit. He’d make this nation work again, by God! No more stupid police actions, no more global interference, no more bully-boy in the schoolyard of Latin America and elsewhere. He’d set about his task with that mixture of practicality and compassion he considered so essential to the job. He’d run things with both a data-base and a heart, because heart alone was the road to ruin. You needed the kind of precision in the political process that raw emotion was unequipped to provide. You needed computer technicians as well as poets, economists as well as visionaries. Soft-headed liberalism was a dinosaur, and the notion of a welfare state, which had never played in Peoria, a sure avenue to bankruptcy. There was a middle road, and that was the one President Truskett would walk. And in those places where that road forked, hell, he’d just stray off the beaten path if that’s what it took.

  He laid his face now against Carolyn’s spine, placing a hand around her buttocks, which were well-toned, soft without flab, luscious, gloriously feminine. He was very afraid of loving this woman. Like other men who have abdicated power for the sake of love, he had a sense of going over Niagara Falls, not in a barrel but in bikini briefs, unprotected, flailing air, choked by spuming water. He lowered his face, kissed that sensitive spot where spine meets the first soft rise of ass, the gentle pillow of flesh covered with almost invisible down. He raised little goosebumps in Carolyn’s skin.

  “It’s almost time for the news,” Carolyn said.

  Truskett adjusted his position only slightly, because he was reluctant to move. He gazed at the TV in the manner of a man who has swallowed one too many downers. Everything beyond the immediate vicinity of Carolyn wasn’t very interesting. Was he hypnotised? Bewitched again? Lust assailed him suddenly. He was on the rise.

  “Not now, wait,” Carolyn said, even as she wrapped her cool palm around his agitated penis, a touch both of exquisite sexuality and deferral, joy delayed. Truskett liked to look down at the head of his cock protruding from the clasp of her white, ladylike fingers because the juxtaposition thrilled him – his anxious member, inherently so unmannered and hasty, palmed by a pale, smooth aristocratic hand. He could come like this, eyes shut, a moan in his throat.

  “Byron, I want to see the news. Then you can fuck me until kingdom come. Or you do. Whichever is first.”

  On screen was a film of boat people attempting to reach Hong Kong from Vietnam. Blown off course, they had drifted for twenty-two days, hungry and dying, in the South China Sea. This tale of human tragedy dissolved into the next item, which was what really interested Carolyn, and she gazed intently at the box to see a not very good photograph of William taken last year in Bucks County. The photograph gave way to tape of President McCune announcing his nomination for the post ‘made vacant by the tragedy of Sandy Bach’s death yesterday’, blah blah, fee fi fum, ‘urgent need for continuity and purpose’, rhubarb rhubarb. Cut back to studio where the anchorperson, an aggressive toothy woman with yellow hair, uttered a few words about William’s background, accompanied by another photograph. And that was it.

  Carolyn zapped off the TV with the remote control, then turned on her back and looked up at the ceiling. Even as she lay here naked with Truskett, William was at the White House with the President, discussing policy, shaping the Central Intell
igence Agency. She was immensely proud of him. For a moment she imagined the penis she held was his, not Byron Truskett’s.

  Truskett had his face buried in the hollow of her throat, the tip of his tongue moving lightly upon this sensitive area of flesh. He had one exploratory hand tracking the contours of her inner thigh. She raised her hips a little, readying herself to receive him, but he delayed the moment of entry, lost as he was in the study of her flesh. This vein, that vein, this hair, that – Truskett might have been an algebraist of surfaces, so avidly did he probe and touch, kiss and admire, a man utterly adrift in the intricacy of love’s complicated formulae.

  His mouth closed around a nipple. He really was a most tender lover. Carolyn shut her eyes, drifted. Directing Truskett gently, she slid her body beneath his, and he entered her with a suddenness she found breathtaking. She clasped her hands around the back of his head as they rocked together, fused for so short a time Truskett was always disturbed by his lack of self-control – but what could he do? This woman thrilled him as no other ever had. Being inside her was as close to perfection as he was ever likely to get. Abstract notions he’d normally dismiss as pretentious – oneness, transcendentalism – took on concrete qualities. The top of his scalp began to come off his skull. Hairs on the back of his neck tingled. Blood went through his veins with ferocity – then that first astonishing sense of coming disintegrated him.

  Feeling him grow, Carolyn locked herself harder to him. An amazing thing happened. For the first time she was being carried along by Truskett’s intensity, she was taking the same mountainous route with him, up and up, a singing in her ears, a pressure in her head, lava flowing through her. Swept along in his excitement, stripped down, disassembled, hearing herself cry aloud, she realised, in a moment of extraordinary intimacy, that she’d come with him, revealing a hidden aspect of herself to him. She gazed at him with unexpected fondness, more than she’d ever wanted to feel, and her eyes filled with tears. By her own standards of fidelity, she’d never truly betrayed William before.

  “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” Truskett asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I might.” He rubbed her neck softly. He thought she had a luminous quality, an aura in which he basked. How could he ever tire of this woman? How could he ever let her drift from his life?

  She had turned her face to the side.

  “Did I do something wrong? Tell me.” Truskett was worried.

  “I’m fine. Really I am.” How touching his concern was, she thought. How pleasing. “I love my husband, Byron.”

  “Yes.”

  “What you and I have is good. Wonderful.”

  “But.”

  “An enormous but.”

  “Insuperable, right?” Truskett asked.

  Carolyn thought of the house in Bucks County, the beech trees, the creek, she imagined herself looking from her bedroom window and seeing William walk across the meadowland, butterflies disturbed into erratic flight by his movement, the whinny of horses. How could she possibly jeopardise her own little world? She could never hurt William. “Insuperable is a good word, Byron.”

  He was about to respond when the telephone rang. Since nobody knew he was here, he was reluctant to pick it up.

  “It has to be for you,” he said.

  Carolyn reached for the receiver. A man’s voice asked to speak to the Senator. When she denied Truskett’s presence, the caller identified himself as Larry Deets. She passed the phone to Truskett, who took it with a mild expression of puzzlement.

  “Senator, we have to talk,” Deets said.

  “Why?” Truskett asked. “Is there a problem?”

  “That would be an acceptable description,” Deets replied, “if your forte was understatement.”

  The darkness falling upon Los Angeles seemed to Charlie Galloway an illusion, a magician’s silk drawn across the sky, soon to be whipped away to reveal – abracadabra – the same old golden egg of the sun. The night had a tenuous hold. The emerging stars looked timidly distant and the moon, waning from fullness, was half turned away in what might have been caution, like that of a man averting his eyes from an open furnace.

  People moved in the darkening streets in shirtsleeves, bare feet in sneakers and sandals. Divine girls in skimpy tank tops or thin cotton blouses caused Charlie to ache for Karen. The severity of separation was killing him.

  On Melrose Avenue he wondered if the world was always going to be this stifling. Perhaps if you were a stern-faced fundamentalist sitting on the porch of your chicken-farm in darkest Alabama and resisting, with great difficulty, some lunar urge to bite the head off a rooster, you might think the apocalypse had begun. This very day, hadn’t the newspaper reported that a group of religious zealots, allegedly hearing the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen in Coldwater Canyon, had taken to the Santa Ana Mountains, there to be safe and multiply?

  Upscale boutiques jostled funky run-down stores on Melrose, where a furtive kid pressed a leaflet into Charlie’s hand, a xeroxed sheet with the information that a certain punk-rock band known as Hepatitis B (formerly Chancre) would be playing for one night only in a bar nearby. Charlie kept moving, passing open stores filled with granny-style clothing, 1940ish wristwatches and fountain-pens and old bakelite radios.

  Near the corner of Crescent Heights Boulevard, Clarence Wylie waited outside a record shop. He looked luminously incongruous, a solitary white-shirted figure milled around by assorted punks and greasers with spiked hair, spangled eyelashes and surly expressions. Clarence noticed Charlie and raised a hand in weary greeting.

  “You’re late, Charlie. You said eight-thirty when you phoned.”

  “Sorry.” Galloway looked at his watch, which had finally quit. He wondered if it had been a good idea to call Clarence – but where else could he turn? He couldn’t go to Len Paffett or Duffy, who’d clap him in irons at once. Elizabeth Honculada had stalled him, and he didn’t like the sensation of defeat.

  Music roared out of the record shop, the lyrics unintelligible. “Let’s stroll,” Wylie suggested. “This music unnerves me. I never got beyond Sinatra. Even Elvis baffled me.”

  Both men walked until they came to a coffee-shop, a place of chrome and exposed ductwork. Wylie suggested coffee. A waitress brought cappuccino.

  Wylie sipped his carefully, then set the cup down. “You said you needed help, Charlie. I hope it’s something extremely simple, like money. But why do I feel it isn’t anything that straightforward?”

  Charlie Galloway looked round the coffee-shop. A multitude of mirrors reflected his image to glassy infinity. How bedraggled he seemed, a crumpled wreck zooming back from those callous, silver surfaces. “I need information.”

  Clarence Wylie sipped his drink. He dabbed milky froth from his lips with a paper napkin. “Information? Money’s easier.” Clarence took out his wallet. “Look. I can give you two hundred. If we go to the automatic teller, I can get you another two. Enough for a ticket to Vegas, Charlie, a couple of nights in a good hotel.”

  “Clarence, I told you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Wylie, shrugging, put his wallet away. The enormous espresso machine issued a vast cloud of steam and for a moment all the mirrors clouded. “All right, Charlie. What kind of information are you chasing?”

  “There’s a guy who calls himself Raymond Cruz. He came here from the Philippines the day Ella was killed. He was with Freddie Joaquin for a few hours the following day. I don’t know what they had in common. They had slightly different versions of reality.” Charlie ran a hand through his unruly hair. “Today Cruz slips out on me and takes off with a girl called Elizabeth … Christ, the last name escapes me, Clarence.”

  Broken brain syndrome. More leakage from the banks of memory. Data vanished into the ether. Galloway was embarrassed.

  “Take your time, Charlie,” Clarence said patiently. He noticed a slight tremor in Galloway’s fingers, not a great sign.

  “Okay. My feeling is Cruz left town, but the g
irl won’t say where or why.”

  “And?”

  “I’d like to know if you have anything on Cruz inside the machine.”

  “I’m retired, Charlie. You don’t seem to grasp that. And even if I wasn’t, how could I justify a computer search? On what grounds?”

  “I don’t have particular grounds. I only have this sense that Cruz isn’t who he seems to be. Clarence, I need to know. It’s that simple. He tried to walk out on me after I told him to stick around. If I hadn’t turned up when I did, he would have hiked clean away. People don’t do that if they’re beyond reproach, now do they?”

  Clarence Wylie said, “I can’t do anything, Charlie.”

  “That’s codswallop. I’m not buying that. You could make a search. You know what buttons to press, Clarence.”

  Clarence leaned across the table. “Charlie, listen to me. You’re in a bad state. Your marriage is unglued. You’re out of work. I know it’s a goddam awful time for you –”

  “Thanks and amen, brother.”

  “Hear me out. You’re walking a thin margin with all this stuff. You’re not yourself.”

  “Okay, I’m having an identity crisis, I’m coming apart at the seams, I need a fucking drink I know I can’t have, and I’m not included in Jesus’s sunbeam quota, okay, okay, let’s accept all that as given – will you help me?”

  Clarence Wylie slumped back in his chair, puffed his cheeks, expelled a stream of air in exasperation. “This Cruz. Do you suspect him of the woman’s murder?”

  Charlie Galloway wasn’t sure how to answer. Vague notions crossed his mind, but he couldn’t track them with anything like certainty. They were erratic, wild comets in his private firmament. He fidgeted with sugar cubes, unwrapping them, building them into a precarious column. The whole clanjamfrie was about to topple.

  Wylie asked, “If you don’t suspect murder, what do you suspect? Complicity?”

  “Complicity. I don’t know. I think he’s involved in something, Clarence. But if I knew what it was, I wouldn’t be asking you for information, would I? Joaquin made some off-the-wall accusation about him, and that’s what keeps sticking in my mind. Now, it might well be the kind of thing somebody says in sheer desperation, so it has to be taken with a few grains of salt, but it’s like a rotten taste in my mouth.”