Agents of Darkness Page 9

  And so perchance does the lack of it, Charlie Galloway thought as he put down the receiver and stood in the direct spot where the sun skewered the room, lighting him like a nervous actor in a play whose lines he hasn’t learned. Six months. Sackcloth and ashes. Empty glasses and tarpaulins drawn across the carnival rides and every day a funeral. Tae hell with that.

  Because the house had begun to feel like the inside of a baked apple, he dressed, called a cab and went out, mumbling to Ella Nazarena about an unexpected appointment. He understood she saw through this threadbare ruse, of course. If he’d had an appointment of a sober nature, he would have driven his own car. The cab, he knew, was a dead giveaway. He instructed the driver, an Iraqi whose English was impeccable, just to drive around for a while, it didn’t matter where.

  When he was absolutely sure he wasn’t being tracked by Clarence Wylie – as if Clarence, a happily married man with an attractive wife twenty years his junior, didn’t have better things to do than hound-dog a drunk – he stepped from the taxi outside a grubby little cocktail bar, the kind with a piano nobody ever played. Secretive windows, a Schlitz neon, a bleached-out poster promoting a pianist who hadn’t been inside the bar for years, so that now his photo looked like that of a man wanted by law enforcement agencies long gone out of existence – this tavern had all the elements that magnetised Galloway, who had no taste for yuppie wine joints or any place that served drinks with umbrellas or was adorned with ferns and brass or, Christ forbid, had a Theme.

  He liked his bars to remind him a little of the funky haunts in the city of his birth, the kind of pubs where no fern would ever have survived, where the only things that ever grew were the magic of your inebriation and the ardency of your patriotism. Ah, Jesus, didn’t you love sweet grubby old Glasgow and Scotland on those glorious long-ago rainy nights? Those ancient pubs had a joyful smell, spilled beer and a million smokes and if you were lucky damp newspaper or sawdust or wet umbrellas, a great spellbinding perfume your lungs relished.

  He went inside. A familiar wave flowed over him. If he caught and rode it there was no knowing where the night would lead. He adored the unpredictability of the tide, its powerful undertow, the hidden currents. Drunk, he was usually neither clownlike nor morose, nor did he normally become bellicose. His tendency was to be affable and sentimental, and if he ran into a fellow exile there would be lethal overdoses of nostalgia. You just never knew where booze would lead you.

  Now and then he had moments when he slipped into a dark reverie where he couldn’t locate the centre of himself, or get a handle on his own scrambled thoughts, when from a point far above – the lofty position of some puzzled angel – he seemed to be seeing himself seated at the bar. And then he’d break into little fragments, as if all his atoms had exploded and he had no way of gathering them up again. These dislocations were weird, and he’d panic because he felt he’d cracked, his identity gone. At such times he’d look at other faces in the bar and wonder if anyone had noticed a sudden change in him, or if he was being stared at. Then the panic would subside and he’d order another glass and remember his comforting credo. I drink, therefore I am. He placed himself up on a stool. The bartender resembled a whippet, lean, bare arms corded with muscles. “Hot enough for you?” he asked Galloway.

  Galloway made a sympathetic sound of agreement. Shheee. He ordered a scotch and a beer chaser. When they were set down before him he looked round the room, dark and lovely, isolated from the branding-iron of the street. The other customers, three in all, were solitary drinkers like Galloway.

  He catalogued them quickly. One was a woman of about forty with too much lipstick. Her teeth were red, her eyes puffy. She was drinking straight vodka in which a pallid cherry floated. Given enough alcohol to suspend his critical faculties and impose amnesia on the fact of his marriage – splintered as it was – Galloway would have fallen coyly in love with her for about twenty minutes. His drunken romanticism was less incurable than chronic.

  A few feet from the woman, but closing in, was a skinny man with a battered suitcase, which hinted at a lonesome life on the road, a salesman of some kind. The third drinker, a muscular man in a cowboy hat, was a country-western sociopath who looked inside his beer for long periods without actually drinking. He might have been listening to some maudlin tune playing in the jukebox of his head. I’ll never get over her blue eyes, I see them everywhere.

  Charlie Galloway picked up his scotch. At the same instant the skinny man made his move toward the woman and plonked his case on an empty stool, whipping the lid open with a flourish. The case contained a variety of novelty items, plastic dog droppings, fake ice-cubes with cockroaches trapped in them, long slinky things you wore like spectacles that had bug-eyes attached to the ends. The woman accepted a pair of these and put them on and they drooped about two feet from her eyes and swung when she moved her face.

  “I bet I look damn stupid,” she said and laughed, a wonderful barroom laugh that rang like bells on Hogmanay.

  “You look terrific,” the novelty salesman said.

  The woman moved her head from side to side rapidly and the slinkies went with her. She couldn’t stop laughing.

  “What planet do I look like I’m from?” she asked.

  “Jupiter,” said the salesman.

  The cowboy figure looked up and sourly said, “Ask me, you’re from the planet moron.”

  The woman wasn’t perturbed. Nor did she remove the bug eyes. She simply said, “Chacun à son gout, cowboy. Up yours.”

  The man fell silent, looking as if he’d heard something very profound. Charlie Galloway picked up his shot and tossed it back in one. Then he reached for the beer even as he gestured with his free hand to the bartender that the small glass might kindly be replenished.

  He had long ago realised there were two worlds, one inhabited by people such as Paffett, a demanding place where clocks kept accurate time and your life was logged, and this other one he occupied now, a land without limits, a place where loneliness was outlawed in the momentary connection of lives, and a woman had weird metal tubes hanging from her eyes – and yet it all seemed so damned normal compared to what Paffett expected of him.

  Six months without a drink. He’d show Lennie Paffett.

  Tomorrow, he thought. He’d begin tomorrow. What difference did the rest of this day make anyway, because it was already shot, already ruined, a day out of joint? Tomorrow, nice and early, he’d get up with the sun and

  And what?

  And stop drinking.

  He’d do things.

  Practical, sober things such as other men did.

  Like what?

  Karen, he’d start there. He’d woo her all over again. Win her back. See, my darling lassie, the new Charles Galloway, a changed man, a different person. Reborn. Sober. Redeemed. Those would be his goals. A wife he loved, and his own self-respect. What was wrong with that? All the alternatives were bleak.

  He leaned against the bar, closing his eyes as he considered the suddenly luminescent prospect of changing his life. I’ll turn things around, he thought. I’ll make things new again.

  He heard the door open and shut as the man in the cowboy hat went out into the sun. The skinny salesman and the woman were talking about another bar they apparently frequented, and making preparations to go there together. And, goddammit, she’d wear the silly glasses all the way down the street and to hell with it, people could stare if they wanted, it was her life.

  She and the salesman stepped out, leaving Galloway alone with the barman, who was reading a racing newspaper. It was that moment of unbearable solitude familiar to drinkers, a time of sudden panic when all life receded from you like the ocean rushing backward, and you were left on your own at the bar after people had hurried to other locations and engagements and the small self-contained promising universe that had existed only minutes before was in smithereens. You were the last person alive. The last one left. Even the barman didn’t count because he hadn’t been included in the origina
l census, and besides he was sober as a hanging judge. But you needed somebody. Anybody. Another face. Another drinker to offset the solitude.

  Galloway had two empty glasses before him now. The question was whether he made his exit or kept on drinking until the bar filled up with other sets of people and different worlds.

  The barman looked at him. “Need anything?”

  Yes, Galloway thought, but I can’t put a name to it. “Maybe soon,” he said.

  The barman turned away.

  Galloway looked toward the window. The sun was dying little by little, creating shadows that looked deceptively cool between buildings. The street was lifeless, indifferent to him. He wondered about Karen and where she might be right now. He’d find her and hold her and kiss her and ask forgiveness, and then all would be well. He’d be reinstated in her heart, redeemed.

  Sure, Charlie. In what easy, imaginary world? Love didn’t have the simplicity of a confessional, and he knew it. You couldn’t mouth a few platitudes and hope the tarnished brass of the past would shine like bloody gold. You couldn’t just try to make things new again. You actually had to go out and do it.

  But what if it was too late? What then? What if the rest of his life was destined to be lived without her? What if what if she’d found somebody else? This question terrorised him, an armed guerrilla that took his heart hostage. Karen and Another. Karen’s body in another man’s bed. Her thighs spread for him. His cock between her lovely lips. Some things you didn’t think about, couldn’t entertain.

  He’d get her back. Yes. He’d find her. He’d be lost forever in this world of isolation and empty bars if he didn’t.

  He went to the pay-phone situated outside the toilets. Restrooms, a euphemistic sign said, as if yawning people stretched out on beds beyond closed doors. He pulled a handful of quarters from his pockets. He removed also his small brown leather address book. Where to begin? In this great overheated labyrinth of a city where did you look for one specific individual?

  He flicked through the names of mutual friends – some half forgotten, others eclipsed by alcohol – dialled their numbers, listened to the recorded messages left on answering machines. Wait for the beep. After the beep. Millions of people all over the world listened to the same ludicrous message every day. The whole planet was waiting for the beep. I’m looking for Karen, he’d say. If she turns up, get her to call me. He had the impression of people listening as he spoke but choosing not to pick up. Once or twice he’d find a real person at the end of the line. He got Herb Mascott on the first ring. Herb was a homosexual who’d once worked for the same company as Karen. He sounded irritable.

  “Have you been drinking again, Charlie?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that. I want to know if you’ve seen Karen, that’s all.”

  “Lord, you drag all this negative energy around with you when you drink. Anyhow, I don’t want to get involved. I love you both as friends. Just don’t ask me to take sides, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I’m not asking you to referee, Jesus –”

  “Call me when you’re sober.”

  Snip. One vasectomised phone-line.

  Suddenly he was tired of the panic in himself, drained by the heat and the loss of Karen, by Paffett and his ‘prolonged’ suspension. He wanted to go up to his small house above the canyons and sleep. But he didn’t have a car to drive and he wasn’t in a condition to do so anyway.

  The last time he’d driven drunk it had led to the disaster, The African Disgrace, when he’d totally bolloxed a simple chore, something a chauffeur could do in his sleep. Paffett had charged him with the task of picking up a foreign dignitary from Los Angeles International Airport. The visitor was the Chief of Police in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, a questionable position in view of that city’s unbridled lawlessness. Paffett often entertained foreign law-enforcement officers, showing them his computer systems, giving guided tours of the expensive arsenal available to the men in his command. A little PR, a little education; Paffett was humbly proud of his force.

  The plane from Nigeria had been very late, and Charlie Galloway had idled away the hours in an airport bar. By the time the Nigerian arrived Galloway had already decided, with a drunk’s blind indifference to consequence, that he’d show the African something of Los Angeles before depositing him with Leonard Paffett. The man from Lagos would want to see the fabled film capital of the world, not some computer system in a building that smelled like a locker-room. And so they went up into the Hollywood Hills, Galloway careless at the wheel, pointing out this sight and that to the enormous black man in an Armani suit who smiled with restrained terror. Why had this lunatic driver been sent to fetch him? Why didn’t he pay attention to the twists and turns in the road? And how did he know where all the famous movie actors lived anyway?

  Galloway, tour operator, enthusiast, film historian, madman, was beyond interruption. Enthusiasm devoured him. This was the chosen city of his self-imposed exile, was it not? Look! Myrna Loy had lived there! Loretta Young here! And that was Jack Nicholson’s house! As darkness fell and the lights of the city tantalised far below, his driving became more erratic and his determination to show the homes of the famous increasingly persistent. Even if he was making most of it up, or confusing this place with that, even if he was hurtling along on the locomotive of his own inventions, what did it matter to the Chief of Police from Lagos? Hollywood was a fiction anyway: here you could take any kind of licence you liked with reality. Because it lacked any definition, this city could be reinvented a thousand times a day.

  Somewhere above Laurel Canyon where, for a reason he couldn’t remember, he was absolutely convinced Kirk Douglas had his home, he drove the Dodge over the lip of a cliff and it went plummeting down a leafy ravine, bouncing under branches and over tangled roots, crashing through thick foliage and stubborn fern before finally ploughing down a cedar fence and thundering into a back yard where Kirk Douglas didn’t live, but a legal assistant to the Governor of California did. The following day Galloway, uninjured, was suspended, and the African was treated for a fractured rib and a broken thumb at an expensive hospital, courtesy of the taxpayer.

  Charlie Galloway shook his head at the memory. It didn’t happen to me, he thought. It was that other Galloway, the lookalike who did bad things behind the sober Charlie’s back. It was the reckless spirit that sometimes invaded him when he was drunk, the poltergeist, more childlike than malicious, who seized his brain and tossed thoughts and impulses around like loose kitchen objects.

  He inserted a quarter into the phone and called a taxi.

  When he hung up he stood motionless for a long time. He put the palm of his hand to his forehead. Something nagged him, something he’d promised to do. It was on the tip of his tongue, annoyingly elusive. And it wasn’t the idea that had just occurred to him about changing his life, it was some other business from before. Gone.

  When his cab arrived he walked with stiffbacked dignity out of the bar and into the early evening sun whose brutal light lay over Los Angeles like the incandescent spore of an unnamed plague.

  He woke in hot blackness, fighting his way up from some swampy dream of doom whose images vanished at once. He wore only his underwear. In sleep he’d kicked aside the bedsheet. He looked at the lit panel of the clock-radio on the bedside table. Ten-thirty p.m. precisely. He’d slept for a little more than two hours. Dehydrated, sweating, he moved through darkness toward the bathroom where he dipped his face beneath the cold water tap, flooding his eyes and mouth and nostrils. He straightened up and stood dripping on the tiled floor. A moon, low among the hills, was visible through the bathroom window. Rich and white, it had the terrifying immensity of a giant’s eye.

  He dried his face, walked back to the bedroom, turned on the lamp. When the taxi had brought him home earlier, he’d come upstairs at once and collapsed in sleep. Now he noticed the wardrobe door was open and Karen’s dresses he was sure had hung there only that afternoon were gone – which meant she’d come her
e in his absence, as she’d done before, because she didn’t want to see him. But why was she removing her belongings in stages? Why didn’t she just come like a dutiful bailiff and seize everything at once?

  When she’d first gone three weeks ago she’d taken only toilet items and jeans and a couple of blouses. Three days later she’d come back for shoes, skirts, underwear. Four days after that the jewellery had gone. This piecemeal removal suggested to Charlie Galloway, in his more optimistic moments, that Karen didn’t want to make a clean break, that she was repossessing things as if she too thought there might still be some chance of reconciliation. Then why didn’t she talk to him? Why didn’t she want to sit down at a summit conference? Why scurry around behind his back for her stuff?

  They’d spoken once briefly on the telephone the day after her departure, the conversation of embarrassed strangers, Karen reluctant to divulge her plans or whereabouts, Charlie unwilling to beg her to return. She’d said I just can’t take it any more, Charlie. I need to get away from you. He’d underestimated, or chosen to ignore, the fault-lines in their relationship, flaws his drinking had both caused and exacerbated. Immunised by alcohol, he’d always thought that he and Karen would stay together no matter what turbulence rocked the seven-year-old marriage. Dear Christ, they were in love, after all!

  He had imagined she’d come back within a day or two, perhaps three, a week at the outside. Now, twenty-one days later, his optimism was a sad little flag that fluttered occasionally in his head but hung mainly still.

  He went downstairs to the kitchen. There might be a note. Something pinned by a magnet to the refrigerator. A sign. Keep a candle burning in the window for me, Charlie. Tie a yellow ribbon. In a pig’s arse. There was nothing save the scent of pine cleaner and floorwax and gleaming surfaces where Mrs Nazarena had been hard at work. He opened the refrigerator, then vaguely recollected that Clarence Wylie had poured the last beer down the sink. Shit.