Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  But now, at sunrise, as the temple cast a long shadow over the trees, not a single one of them was left.

  ‘We hande[d] over everythi[ng],’ Rusk said indistinctly. ‘Everythi[ng]!’ When he was vexed he had a tendency to stuff more chewing tobacco into his mouth than he could really manage.

  ‘I say we pick half a dozen men from each side and send them into the jungle to find those Indians,’ said Aldobrand.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Bring them back here along with everything they’ve stolen.’

  ‘How are twelve white men going to discipline five hundred natives?’

  Aldobrand looked at Rusk as if he didn’t understand the question.

  ‘You’re just trying to whittle us down,’ said Coehorn. ‘I’m not sending anybody away from here.’

  ‘We don’t need the natives, Mr Rusk,’ said Whelt. ‘There are nearly eighty of us. We can rebuild the temple ourselves. Remember what you said about the Labor Day Hurricane.’ One night aboard ship, Rusk had told a story about traveling through the Florida Keys to search for his cousin a few days after the big hurricane of 1935. Watching the disorganised efforts of the Coast Guard, he’d become convinced that if you put a movie studio like Kingdom Pictures in charge of rescue and evacuation, they would do a far more efficient job than the government, because studios knew better than anyone how to feed and shelter and transport masses of people on a tight schedule and a tight budget.

  ‘No, I’m afraid nobody will be rebuilding anything,’ said Coehorn. ‘You squatters may think you’re very clever but two can play that game.’ He gestured at the exposed half of the temple’s acreage. The ancients had laid their foundations on top of a mixture of white clay and broken pottery, recently plowed into broad furrows by the raft-like palettes on which the Pozkitos had been dragging the great stone blocks away from the site. The whole tract was still strewn with debris, not only ropes and tools and timber and empty inga pods but also what looked at a distance like tarnished silver. Now the ‘other Americans’ were hastily shifting their encampment there so that the deconstructionists would sit in the way of the reconstructionists just as the reconstructionists already sat in the way of the deconstructionists. Earlier today Trimble had observed the first tentative and peripheral fraternisation between the two expeditions, but he knew that wouldn’t last. Absently, he sucked his little finger. He had awoken to find the tip encased in a sort of fibrous thimble, presumably spun by some insect with unfathomable motives. His back still ached from sleeping on stone.

  ‘You’re not being rational,’ said Whelt, glaring at Coehorn.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about “rational”,’ said Coehorn, glaring back. ‘You’ve traveled two thousand miles from Hollywood to shoot a movie at this pyramid? Haven’t you ever heard of plywood? Haven’t you ever heard of sets?’

  ‘As long as this goes on, everyone’s snookered,’ said Aldobrand. ‘Someone will have to do the decent thing.’

  ‘We’re not leaving,’ said Whelt.

  ‘We’re not leaving either,’ said Coehorn.

  And they didn’t.

  Part Two

  The heat, we might add, is terrific, but make-ups manage to survive. The jungle is as verdant as ever, but mosquitoes never bother any one.

  (From Bosley Crowther’s review of the film Law of the Tropics in the New York Times, 1941)

  They’ve sent me an assistant.

  I went in this morning and there she was. It was as if someone had taken the image of an assistant I had in my head and made her flesh: twenty years old and so molten with youth under that prim gingham dress that she’s almost painful to look at, like an ingot just pulled from the furnace, but also earnest and efficient and sincerely happy to have the job. Her name’s Frieda and she lives with her parents and her two little brothers not far from my apartment in Springfield. I asked her who’d given her the security clearance to work in the warehouse, and she said it was a man named Mr McKellar. So even after he claimed he was powerless to help, Winch came through for me. Of course, my new assistant may double the chances that I’ll find what I’m looking for among ‘all the evidence in my case’, but that’s like buying two lottery tickets intead of one. If it takes five years to defeat the warehouse instead of ten years, my liver will still kill me long before we finish: it’s not just the drinking, it’s the drinking on top of the organ damage I suffered after I almost bled to death from an abdominal puncture in ’57. The girl’s help will be as futile as everything else in my life.

  All the same, she’s nice to have around. It wasn’t until I tried to imagine what the evidence warehouse must seem like to her that it occurred to me I should at least get a coffee machine and a radio. I spent the morning teaching her how to work a flatbed editor. At lunchtime, after she ate her ham sandwich, I noticed her painting her right thumb with a clear liquid from a bottle, but it didn’t smell like polish. When I asked her about it she blushed and told me that she’s never grown out of sucking her thumb, so now she glazes it with colocynth vinegar twice a day, but it doesn’t work so well any more because she’s started to like the taste. My God, the sweetness of this girl. Just breathing the same air as Frieda might give me another few months on this coil, like old King David rejuvenating himself by lying beside the virgin Abishag; but I decided then that I wouldn’t want her to stay too long with me even if she were willing. I’m not going to sit there day after day watching the light gradually fade from her eyes. That will be her husband’s job.

  She hasn’t asked me yet why I only have two thirds of a left ear, but she did mention that I sound ‘sort of British sometimes.’ I explained that I was begotten in a small colony of the British Empire: my late mother. And even after a decade of American schooling, I never entirely shook off her voice. Later, when I joined the Office of Strategic Services, my half-accent turned out to be an asset, because I fit right in amongst the North-eastern aristocrats who talked like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. I once mentioned that to my mother and she happily took full credit, as if she’d had it in mind all along to train me for an organisation which didn’t yet exist. And I couldn’t argue, because she’d tuned me exactly right. My mother grew up on Berkeley Square, like the song, and talked exactly how those Brahmin wished they could talk. An old man in our neighborhood once told me that listening to her haggling over the price of pastrami gave him more pleasure than any music he’d ever heard.

  My mother was born into wealth but by the time she came to New York there was nothing left. In 1912 her father took out enormous short-term loans against his estate to buy a stake in a British–American syndicate planning a historic consolidation of Atlantic shipping lines. The venture should have made him one of the richest men in London, but one of his American partners swindled him with the connivance of a bribable judge. Rather than rely on lawyers, my grandfather crossed the Atlantic to recover his investment, by force if necessary. But before he could locate his former partner, he came down with tuberculosis. My mother followed him to New York to nurse him until he died. By then the house on Berkeley Square was gone and the only inheritance was debts. But in the meantime my mother had fallen in love with a skating-rink porter, and she never went home.

  I gave Frieda a two-sentence version of the story. But after that she kept asking for more details. I guess it’s romantic.

  The only thing I don’t like about Frieda’s arrival is that I’ll never again be in a position where I can do Winch McKellar a favor in return. It was McKellar who recruited me into OSS in the first place. I first got to know him in the thirties when I was still at the Mirror and he was wasting his father’s money investing in cabarets, becoming in the process one of those guys who are ubiquitous in the city for absolutely no good reason. We loathed each other.

  But in the spring of 1943 I was back in New York on leave from the 2nd Photo Tech Squadron. At about four o’clock on Monday morning, the girl I’d spent most of the weekend with kicked me out of her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, and there was only one
place I could think of to get another drink in that part of midtown. When I turned the corner on to 49th Street, I saw there was already somebody standing in front of the entrance to the old Bering Strait Railroad Association of North America headquarters. In the slump of his shoulders I could read the same disappointment I felt myself a moment later when I realised we were looking at a perfume store.

  ‘When did this place shut down?’ I said.

  ‘You leave New York for a while …’

  ‘This is what happens. Right.’

  ‘Was it because of that poor bastard who died in the tank?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? That was in ’38. This place hadn’t even peaked out yet.’

  ‘That was five years ago? The killer octopus? Jesus Christ, I’d like that time back.’ Finally he turned to look at me and his eyes widened behind his glasses. ‘Zonulet?’

  I chuckled. ‘McKellar!’ We embraced, and from then on all our previous hostility was no more than a vicious rumor that somebody else had started. I was still in my rumpled First Lieutenant’s uniform, but McKellar wore civilian clothes. ‘You in service?’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Same place you ought to be. Where are we going to get a drink? I’m not walking all the way to Broadway.’

  ‘I just came from the Waldorf.’

  ‘Is the bar there open?’ McKellar said. The gonions of his jaw were so wide-set and pointy you could have opened bottles on them.

  ‘No, that’s why I didn’t stay. But there is booze in that building.’

  ‘That much we do know.’

  On the way there we saw a fish-delivery truck pulling in around the back of the hotel, and we managed to sneak inside through the loading dock, which may not have been the most dignified use of our combat training that either of us had ever made. Soon after that we were opening a stolen bottle of sherry in the Waldorf’s umbrella room. ‘This would be quite the romantic escapade if only you were a lady,’ observed McKellar. The room was still in the process of being adapted to the recent fashion for young engaged couples to walk around under tandem umbrellas, which was one of those developments that made me feel pretty content to be going back to war.

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You’re with the Oh So Secret?’ A nickname for the Office of Strategic Services.

  ‘The Oh Such Snobs. Right. And I think you are exactly the fellow I needed to bump into.’ He looked down at the mackerel in his hand. ‘I don’t even remember picking this up.’ He put it down. Then he poured some sherry on his index finger and dabbed it on my forehead.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I’m anointing you. Holy orders. Now I can tell you the classified stuff and if you breathe a word of it the statue of Surgeon General Benjamin Rush on E Street will strike you down with a bolt of lightning.’

  ‘Is that official procedure?’

  ‘Yes, under War Service Regulation My Big Dick. Listen, we’re taking Sicily next month.’ The island had a scattering of partisans, radicals, turncoats and Allied infiltrators, McKellar explained, but nothing resembling a coherent local support network for Operation Husky. What OSS hoped to give General Patton was a way of cinching everything together after the landings. And that was why they needed the Mafia. ‘We’ve been working with the junior wops over here to keep the ports tidy since ’41. Sicily’s different, though. All the padroni there hate the Moose so we thought it would be easy. But we keep hearing that no one will talk to us unless we go through Andreotti. Supposedly he’s the only boss in America they all still respect. You know who Andreotti is?’

  The smell of rain in here was distilled to an overproof. ‘Of course I know who Andreotti is. I was a crime reporter for eight years. Andreotti threatened to personally strangle me I can’t even count how many times. Once it was because of a misapprehension and he apologised afterwards.’

  ‘He apologised?’

  ‘He sent two hookers to my apartment as a gift. I was out. They waited outside on the stoop all evening. I almost got evicted.’

  ‘OSS is all Yale boys – we don’t have the right contacts for this kind of thing. And the FBI haven’t helped any. Can you get us a friendly sit-down with Andreotti?’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Not in the next three hours.’

  ‘That’s when your leave ends?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He patted me on the shoulder. ‘Actually, your leave ends right now. I’m transferring you. The mere fact that you weren’t with OSS already shows there’s something wrong with the way we recruit.’ We drank to it, and that was how I began a career in intelligence that one day would smash like a meteorite into the semi-temple in Honduras.

  But if, to some of us, the temple offered a long, complex fall, to others it offered a short, simple one. Around three years after my reunion with McKellar, in 1946, when a bloody and exhausted Hauptsturmführer Kurt Meinong staggered out of the trees and set eyes on it for the first time, what held his attention was not so much the monument itself as the human figure who stood at the edge of the terrace on top, two hundred feet up, silhouetted against the setting sun, unmistakably about to jump off.

  * * *

  Nine days before that, Meinong had arrived at what was supposed to be the last sanctuary he would ever require. To receive a rapturous welcome at Erlösungfeld, he would only have had to explain that he was a nepotal descendant of Augustus Meinong, the Saxony horse breeder who had come to Spanish Honduras in 1848 to found this devout farm colony in the forest. But after he revealed that he’d spent the last six years fighting for the glory of the Third Reich, the Erlösungfelders treated him like he was Jesus Christ on a furlough. Over a supper of salted pork in the meeting house that evening, many of the women wept as he recalled the night he first learned of his brother’s sacrifice at Dramburg, and when he was obliged to confirm that everything they had heard about the Soviet rape of the Fatherland was true, and much worse besides, one farmer got so angry he literally started tearing out his hair. Several times Meinong was asked to narrate the specifics of his own war service, but although he’d noted with relief that the Erlösungfelders spoke forthrightly about Jews, there were children at these tables.

  Because the majority of German immigrants had been expelled from Belize and Guatemala earlier in the war, but no comparable persecution had taken place in Spanish Honduras, it was felt by many in Erlösungfeld that Augustus Meinong’s choice of this country all those years ago must have been not just felicitous but divinely inspired, and now that they would have the honor of sheltering this handsome knight of the realm they were all the more sure of it. If any Americans came looking for him, they said, or the local police, they would rather raze the settlement than give him up. Kurt did not expect that such a gracious gesture would be necessary, since he’d been careful on the way here, but he also knew it would be too dangerous to leave for quite a while, so he had better start getting used to émigré life in Erlösungfeld. They were extremely boring people, but he could live with that.

  On the third night he lingered at the meeting house for quite a while after the women had cleared the tables. When only half a dozen men were left sitting on the terrace, one of the farmers produced a bottle of sugarcane schnapps. Rather sheepishly, as if he expected Meinong to condemn them as apostates, he explained that although Erlösungfelders did not drink amongst themselves, they brewed small quantities of spirits for their visitors. Meinong nodded as if he believed this story, wondering whether they’d had any other visitors since the last century.

  They talked about Hitler and all that he’d done for Germany. Meinong kept his feelings about the Fuhrer’s volatility and egotism to himself. There had at one point been discussion, the farmers admitted, of traveling to Europe to fight for the Reich, and Meinong could tell they still felt guilty they hadn’t. Of course, they were all eager to hear about his service in detail. When, just as a digression, he lamented how much of the war he’d had to spend in close contact with Jew
s, the farmers expressed their sympathy; but Meinong, now on his fourth large glass of schnapps, didn’t find their sympathy quite heartfelt enough, and after it occurred to him that none of these men had ever met a Jew in person, he decided to make sure they understood exactly how stomach-turning the experience had been, day after day, week after week. Before he knew it, he was telling them about his duties in the pathology section at Location D.

  For a long time after he finished talking there was no sound but the scrubbing of crickets. Meinong drained his glass of schnapps and shakily poured himself another. The farmers exchanged glances, and one of them muttered a word that Meinong didn’t quite catch. Then, with an almost telepathic synchrony, they got to their feet, picked Meinong up, and carried him to the ferny perimeter of the village.

  Meinong was almost able to believe that this was an impromptu victory parade, the way a football team would sometimes bear their stürmer around the pitch after a goal, but there was something too rough about their grip on his arms and legs. And when he found himself prone on the ground, with the brawniest of the farmers holding him down, he knew he’d made a bad mistake.

  ‘“You shall not pollute the land in which you live,”’ said the farmer with his knee on Meinong’s back, ‘“for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it.”’ Some of the other farmers had already tied a noose and now they threw it over the thickest branch of a kapok tree.

  ‘They were just Jews!’ wailed Meinong.