Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  ‘Please stop wasting time. First of all, we’re writing a book about Wilf Laroux, not Ada Coehorn. Second, Verree wouldn’t talk to you. She always hated tripe-hounds. And third, even if she did, she wouldn’t have a single kind word to say about me. So you can forget about your “background”. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Laroux,’ said Vansaska. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Laroux.’

  Of people entering late middle age it was sometimes said that their face told the whole story of their life; for a twice-married former Broadway actress and ‘clip-joint queen’ like Verree Dietz to have maintained such wholesome and unfussy good looks at the age of fifty-five made Vansaska feel optimistic that sometimes, like an autobiography, that story might be rather selective in its content. ‘What do you want?’ Dietz said, standing at the door of her apartment.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Dietz. My name is Meredith Vansaska. I’m a writer—’

  ‘I’m sorry but I don’t talk to writers any more.’

  Vansaska didn’t literally put her foot in the door, but she made a sort of feint in that spirit, which was just enough to stop Dietz from shutting it in her face. ‘Wilf Laroux sent me.’

  That was clearly a name Dietz hadn’t heard for a while. ‘Wilf? Really?’

  ‘Yes. I’m ghosting his autobiography and he asked me to talk to you.’

  Dietz smiled and shook her head. ‘You must be a very patient and creative young woman. I once asked Wilf about his childhood. He could muster precisely one story about his mother, except he turned out to have mixed her up with his nanny, and precisely one story about his father, except he turned out to have mixed him up with Mark Twain. But he’s not going to recruit me as one of his research assistants. I hope you didn’t come all the way across the country for this.’

  ‘I did, yes.’ She thought of herself as wearing a diving suit with a breathing tube that stretched thousands of miles back to Silver Lake. On this visit she would not see any friends or family, nor entertain any recollections of her past, nor breathe so much as a molecule of frozen New York air, because she was not really here. She had taken a week’s unpaid vacation and bought a roundtrip sleeper ticket she could scarcely afford for the sole purpose of following a ‘lead’ with which she had no real reason to concern herself, and this folly would be kept pure and confined. Walking through Manhattan, she made sure to zigzag through the grid – down one block, across one block, down one block, across one block – because superstitiously she felt it reduced her chances of bumping into anyone she knew. ‘And I have a letter from Mr Laroux here,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how keen he is for me to talk to you.’

  Reluctantly, Dietz took the letter and looked it over. Vansaska had been professionally contracted to imitate Laroux’s voice, so those three typewritten paragraphs should have been as easy to fake as the signature underneath. However, when Laroux wanted anything at all, even a meaningless favor from a total stranger, he spent his charm so profligately that Vansaska wasn’t sure what register he would have left to fall back on in a situation like this when he needed to persuade a perceptive old friend of his sincerity. All the same, she felt she’d done a creditable job.

  Dietz looked up. ‘And why didn’t you telephone before you arrived?’ she said. ‘I suppose because you wanted to put this forcibly into my hands as if you were serving a subpoena?’

  ‘That was Mr Laroux’s suggestion, yes.’

  ‘All I can say about this document is that Wilf must have changed. Whether for the better or worse I wouldn’t venture to say. You can have one hour.’

  ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Dietz.’ When she stepped into the apartment, Vansaska said, without thinking, ‘Oh, are you in the middle of …’ Moving, she might have said, or spring-cleaning or refurbishing, but she tailed off because none of those quite made sense. Couch, chair, writing desk, bookshelf: the living room had exactly four objects of furniture, two small paintings on the walls, and not a single ornament or knick-knack. But this wasn’t an attempt at the sort of European rigor that was fashionable along certain highbrow foothills of Hollywood. The place just felt evacuated.

  ‘In the middle of what?’ said Dietz. ‘Take that off,’ she added, meaning Vansaska’s winter coat, and gestured to the chair. ‘I do have an idea of what people expect from an obsolete actress who lives alone. Framed playbills and newspaper clippings and signed photographs of myself. Old props and presents from my dead admirers and perhaps a corgi mummifying under the chaise longue. That’s about what you had in mind?’

  ‘Not at all …’ said Vansaska, without enough conviction.

  Dietz sat down opposite her on the couch. ‘Have you ever been to a movie at the Loew’s Park Theater over on Eighth Avenue?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No, of course not, you’re much too young. For some reason that theater is almost exclusively patronised by people older than the Brooklyn Bridge. And if you go there and watch how they behave, you realise that almost everyone who lives in New York City long enough eventually goes crazy. Money doesn’t help you. Not by itself. There are only two things that do. One of them is children, and I don’t have any of those.’

  ‘What’s the other one?’

  ‘A place upstate, and I don’t have that either. So I just do what I can. I live in an apartment that looks like this because in an apartment that looks like this I believe I am less likely to go crazy. I may have taken it a little too far. I don’t think it would really do any harm to hang more than two pictures, for instance. But those are the best two pictures I own and I haven’t finished looking at them yet. Perhaps when I finish looking at them I’ll put up some others. I just don’t want to live inside one of those Egyptian pyramids where all your valuables are buried with you and every last detail of your life is carved on the walls. I’ve been to apartments like that and those are the apartments where people go crazy as they get old. Then they go to Loew’s Park Theater and spit at the popcorn girl. Now, produce your notebook or your tape recorder. What do you want to know about Wilf and me?’

  Vansaska had decided that she would ask a direct question about Arnold Spindler only if the subject hadn’t come up naturally within fifty minutes of her allotted sixty. As it turned out, however, she didn’t have to wait that long. After less than half an hour, Dietz said, ‘… and he used to get so worked up because he couldn’t always have me exactly when he wanted me. But even if I had been as obsessed with Wilf’s penis as Wilf was himself, I had a duty to Ada. In those years she had very few friends and certainly no other real confidante. Granted, she had a tendency to talk in circles, for hours and hours sometimes, but she was in an impossible situation.’

  ‘What sort of situation?’

  ‘Well, it’s of no relevance to the Ballad of Wilf Laroux.’

  ‘But Ada Coehorn left the production quite abruptly, didn’t she? That’s how you ended up playing the role opposite Mr Laroux.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dietz, ‘and let me assure you, this is the one occasion in the entire history of the theater that the understudy wasn’t pleased to see the principal depart.’ Ada Coehorn and Arnold Spindler, she explained, had at that time been lovers for eleven years, ever since they met at an audition in 1907. Their affair had continued undiscouraged after they both got married to other people and Ada bore a sickly son for her husband, Elias Coehorn. The latter had first identified her as a potential acquisition when he was obliged for business reasons to sit through a performance of When Knights Were Bold in a private box at the Garrick, and thereafter he pursued his takeover bid mostly through her parents. That Arnie and Ada’s affair was common knowledge on Broadway didn’t seem like an immediate liability because, although Coehorn had permitted his wife to maintain her acting career, he declined to have any contact whatsoever with her colleagues. And when she and Arnie wanted to dine together in public, they often took a trolley up to Little Mongolia (which at that time, before its dwindling, still had plenty of cozy restaurants) and afterwards strolled hand in hand ove
r the footbridge to watch the circus riders practicing, so there wasn’t much chance of anybody recognizing either of them. From time to time Ada’s husband did send men from Eastern Aggregate’s Good Conduct Division to shadow her, but in general they were easy enough to avoid, distract, or pay off. Then, at last, came the apocalyptic afternoon when a soft-footed and indivertible young Good Conduct agent named Phibbs caught them together in a dressing room after a rehearsal for The Rainbow Girl.

  Careful to make clear that he was aiming his pistol only at Arnold’s head, never at Ada’s, Phibbs wouldn’t let them leave the chaise longue until his employer could arrive in person. For nearly two hours they lay there naked and scared like foxes run to ground, until Elias Coehorn Sr. came through the door.

  Exactly one month later Ada broke her neck after falling from a turret window. Her husband had ordered that for the indefinite future she was to be confined to Braeswood and all her correspondence was to be read, so the intervening sequence of events was known only because before her death she managed to smuggle out a letter to Dietz in her son’s Latin tutor’s briefcase. And the most surprising part of this story was that she had succeeded in convincing Coehorn that this was the first time she had ever sinned, that there had been no ongoing affair. This man who overlooked nothing and presupposed nothing, who saw new opportunities and cheaper alternatives where others saw only a cataract haze of sentiment and precedent and social norms and received wisdom, who would have made Jesus Christ Himself submit to a standard aptitude test if he’d asked for a job in the mailroom – this man who’d built an empire on undistorted judgment – even this man was apparently not immune to wishful thinking when it came to his empress.

  As a result, Coehorn did not have Spindler destroyed. Instead, that balmy evening after the rehearsal, he merely took the adulterers downtown to the Spindler residence and forced them to watch while he raped Spindler’s wife on the dining-room table.

  Vansaska gasped, and Dietz gave a small nod. ‘With regard to what happened afterwards,’ she went on, ‘there are two possibilities. One is that, a few weeks later, Coehorn’s agents turned up some firm evidence that Ada and Arnold had been going together for years, and when the boss found out he had them both killed. Or perhaps he even took care of it personally. You know, people in show business will joke about anything. Anything! But when Coehorn’s wife was in our midst I didn’t hear anybody joke much about that man. He was frightening even from a distance. I never did see Arnie again after that winter.’

  ‘That was because he went to Hollywood,’ said Vansaska. ‘Mr Laroux met him there once. He became quite a potentate.’

  ‘Really? Well, I think that just about rules it out. A man truly afraid for his life would have run a lot further than Hollywood. If Coehorn had wanted to find him there, he would have found him. QED, if Spindler survived it was because Coehorn didn’t particularly want him dead.’

  ‘And the other possibility?’

  ‘What Coehorn did to Spindler’s wife … The way Ada wrote about it in that last letter … She was laid absolutely to waste. She blamed herself for it. Furthermore, she was never going to see the love of her life again. She was never going to act on the stage again. And perhaps for the first time she fully understood what sort of man her son had for a father. But it is all a darkness, of course. We can’t know. What does seem to me unlikely is that the whole matter concluded with Ada’s funeral. Arnie Spindler may have made something of himself in Hollywood, as you say. But imagine the hatred between those two men. Darling Ada gone and each blaming the other for it. That sort of hatred can have a very long run.’ Dietz looked at her. ‘My my, young lady, how your ears have pricked up. It’s only now I see how interested you are right this minute that I realise how bored you must have been before. All those dutiful questions about Wilf. What are you really here to find out?’

  ‘This is all for Mr Laroux’s book.’ And I wasn’t bored, Vansaska wanted to say. I wish you had an hour on the radio every week where you told stories and explained how not to go crazy.

  ‘Wilf’s name hasn’t been mentioned for quite a while. You’ve made no attempt to bring me back to the point. Quite the opposite.’

  ‘It’s background.’

  ‘No. No, I don’t believe it is. You’re not the first writer I’ve dealt with, you know.’ Dietz stood up. ‘False pretenses aren’t clever. They are merely rude. I think you’d better go.’

  The following Monday morning, back in Silver Lake, she got up a little early to attend to the condition of her house before she left for the Miramar. Over the weekend, for the first time in her life, she’d bought herself a pot plant, and she was at the sink filling a milk pan with water when she heard the telephone ring.

  ‘I got a call from Verree Dietz over the weekend,’ said Laroux down the line. ‘She said she was paid a visit by a writer who had supposedly been sent to interview her on my behalf. This writer had a letter from me – on my headed stationery, no less – explaining how much I wanted Verree to offer some reminiscences for my book.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Laroux,’ said Vansaska. She wouldn’t beg, she decided.

  ‘You’ve betrayed my trust. I believe you may even have committed a crime. I’m astonished that my editor should ever have recommended you. My next telephone call will be to the Dial Press, and I hope they spread the word about you. Good day, Miss Vansaska.’

  There followed two types of morning silence. The first was the silence of a telephone handset replaced without jingling on its cradle, because Vansaska was reminding herself to take a positive outlook, and a positive outlook was so fragile that it would shatter the moment you lost concentration, so the tension of it in her muscles made her very careful about small actions. Never again, at least, would her stomach turn at the mingled odors of semen and interwar restaurant cooking. But in the second type of silence, the fathomless silence that always follows a bad phone call, she could hear the black basalt prison assembling itself block by block outside her window. To drown it out she lunged to turn on her radio, and heard the familiar theme music of the Apex Chemical Breakfast Bulletin, a slow ascending scale followed by a glissando back down. She wished she could call Dietz and ask her whether devoting yourself to an old mystery was the sort of thing that drove you crazy or, on the contrary, the sort of thing that kept you sane.

  * * *

  Something terrible has happened.

  My hand is shaking as I write this. If I had any sense I would burn this memoir, but I have to find a way to understand what I saw this morning and I can’t talk to anybody about it. I’ll try to be as straightforward as I can.

  I arrived at the warehouse around eight o’clock, nodding hello to the guard as I went inside. I hung up my coat and I took a sip of coffee from my Thermos flask. When I glanced at the flatbed editor I saw that it still had a strip of film loaded into the plate. This was out of the ordinary, because when I go home for the night I always make sure to unload the Steenbeck and put the film I’ve been working on back in its canister. So my first thought was that the previous night I must have been too distracted, and I reproached myself for my carelessness. I turned on my machine, the one with sprocket wheels specially modified for fragile negatives, and the frame behind the prism was projected on to the viewing screen. Four realisations came to me in succession, and although they cannot have taken more than a few moments in total, they felt like they were spaced widely apart.

  First, this footage was in color, so it could not be from Hearts in Darkness.

  Second, it showed a naked girl. Her mouth was gagged and her hands and feet were bound. Her eyes were wide with fear and bloodshot from crying. She was slumped across the lap of a larger figure, whose head was cut off by the top of the frame. They were on a bed.

  Third, the girl was Frieda, my assistant.

  Fourth, the bed looked like the bed in my apartment. The larger figure had my build and his hands had my complexion and he was wearing one of my suits.

  I turned the s
peed switch on the editor to begin playback.

  The larger figure took one of Frieda’s breasts in his hand and squeezed it, making her wince. For another minute or so he continued to fondle her. Then with the other hand he reached behind him and picked up a kitchen knife. I recognised the knife because I have sliced lemons with that knife. Frieda tried to squirm away but he grabbed her under the armpit and yanked her up towards him. He pulled the knife across her throat. Blood spurted from the gash and the light began to fade from her eyes. The footage ended.

  There was a ringing in my ears. I thought I was going to faint. But I managed to unload the film from the plate and stuff it into my pocket. As I passed the guard again on the way out of the warehouse I said ‘Taken ill,’ in a hoarse voice. I didn’t realise until I got to my car that I’d forgotten to put on my coat and my keys were still in the pocket, so I had to march past the guard two more times.

  The suit from the film is still hanging in my wardrobe and there are bloodstains on the lining of the jacket. The kitchen knife is back in the drawer but as far as I can tell it’s clean. The sheets on my bed are also clean but I found more dried blood on the underside of the headboard. Frieda’s body is nowhere in the apartment. If something happened here, someone has done a good job, but not a perfect job, of tidying up afterwards.

  Someone.

  I have no recollection of kidnapping and murdering a 20-year-old girl. I have no recollection of cleaning up the scene or disposing of the corpse. I have no recollection of setting up a movie camera in my bedroom. I have no recollection of fostering any desire or intention to do any of those things.

  Frieda was my assistant. That is what I do remember. But yesterday McKellar told me again that he didn’t send me an assistant. He told me it was unrealistic to imagine that anyone like Frieda could have been allowed into the warehouse with me.

  If you believe the agency’s psychologists, I have been mentally unsound at least as far back as my first visit to the temple; even when I’m attempting to give the honest testimony of my own senses, I still cannot be trusted as a witness; I am erratic and delusional. That’s what they intimated, a little euphemistically but nevertheless assuredly, in their testimony to the tribunal. They were just saying what Branch 9 told them to say. Nevertheless, I have to concede that in at least one respect they were right. Ever since I ‘met the gods’, my brain hasn’t worked quite like a normal person’s does.