by Ned Beauman
In all my reflections on the qualities the agency looks for in an employee, there is one opinion of mine that has not wavered: the best of us must have a part of our personality that looks at the human beings around us as no more than objects colliding in space, that operates without morality or emotion, only purpose and will, like an educated tarantula. I’m trying to remember where I first heard that story about the psychopath the agency hired as an analyst.
The cream-colored Chevy is still parked down the street.
* * *
When the rumors went around Cambridge that the Vice Chancellor had suffered a nervous breakdown, Burlingame’s friend Claire had said to her, ‘It shows, doesn’t it, how near we all are to losing our senses if the wrong thing happens?’ Speak for yourself, Burlingame had wanted to reply. She had always felt almost oppressively sane, like the only sober person at a party. Yesterday, with Gracie, she’d behaved just as her mother would have, trying to cleave the girl’s attempted suicide from the rest of her life as a ‘moment of madness’. But assuming that certain acts were insane by definition was as circular as assuming that your calculating machine must be faulty just because it gave you a figure that didn’t suit you. And now here she was with Whelt, wondering how much of this epiphany she could blame on his fever. A Pozkito tribesman reports a conversation with the gods and he is sane. A clerk from Tooting reports a conversation with the gods and he is mad. A pope reports a conversation with the gods and he is sane. A film director reports a conversation with the gods and he is … what?
It wasn’t as if there was such a profound contrast between this new focus and the obsessions of the past. Today, the patient sounded so rational you could have mistaken him for the doctor. In fact, Burlingame didn’t even feel as if she were privy to the full stretch of Whelt’s rationality, because she could tell that most of it was still busy reanalyzing precedents and permuting outcomes. She knew he should be resting for the sake of his health, but she also knew that he was set on talking whether she responded or not, so she did her best to question him as seriously and attentively as she would have questioned any other anthropological interviewee. ‘Let’s go from the beginning,’ she said. ‘While you were in the temple you met the Pozkito gods.’
‘Yes.’
‘You only heard their voices? Or you saw them as well?’ The humidity had brought her out in her usual sizzling rash, and outside the thunder rolled on, nearing and receding and nearing and receding like a sentry on patrol.
‘I was with them,’ Whelt said. ‘As close as I am to you now. There were at least two of them, maybe more. They had accents, but I could understand them pretty well – except that they told me their names several times and I just couldn’t seem to fix them in my mind. No one else can be allowed to go down there, Burlingame. That’s imperative. Tell Yang and Halloran. You know I’ve spent all my life purging unreason from my thinking. I’m the only man here who can say that and I’m the only man who can risk spending time alone with the gods. Anybody who left them any openings would have lost his mind in there.’
‘But that’s just what surprises me. I always thought of you as a freethinker.’
‘I am familiar with all the arguments for and against the existence of a Judaeo-Christian creator. Those arguments have no bearing on the gods of this region.’
‘What did you talk to them about?’
‘Burlingame, did you ever wonder why we arrived one day after the New Yorkers? Instead of a week after, or two weeks before? Hasn’t that always seemed a bit too exact to be just bad luck?’
‘Well, yes, now that you mention it, I have wondered. Quite often.’ It was the second great puzzle, to be turned to as a sort of refresher when you were bored with the first great puzzle – the question of why, in eight years, nobody from back home had ever come out to the temple to find out what had become of them all. Eight years stalling and staling, she thought, which aggregated to about one average human life frittered away per nine residents, or nearly fifteen in total (in addition to the smaller number of lives lost in the conventional sense). Such an unthinkable gush of dead time, like walking through one of those foot tunnels under the Thames where you couldn’t acknowledge the weight of it pressing down over your head or you’d scream. And yet she’d discovered in herself another viewpoint, a sort of belvedere fixed up out of soft-boiled parrot eggs and the smell of Gracie’s hair, from which she could look down and feel prouder of their home with every day that passed. They had come here with high ambitions but they had not achieved them, and in that respect the worst you could say about the temple was that it was part of the general run of things. If time was wasted here, perhaps time was wasted almost everywhere.
‘Did you have any theories about the coincidence?’ Whelt said.
Burlingame hesitated. ‘We can’t possibly know. It was all arranged so long ago and so far away. But I suppose it’s crossed my mind that … well, that Coehorn’s father might have heard about your expedition, or Arnold Spindler might have heard about Coehorn’s expedition, and for some reason one of them had a desire to confound the other. They were both rich men with all sorts of international business interests. They might have had some professional enmity. Some grudge.’
‘No. That’s not it. The gods have “international business interests” of their own. They explained everything to me, Burlingame. It seems so obvious now. I don’t know why we couldn’t see the trap for ourselves. The Whelt Rule was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. We’ll have to start the picture again from the beginning. Do it completely differently this time.’ There was not a speck of fever in his gaze, which was hard, bare, too bare, like exposed wiring. ‘The gods did this to us. They brought us all here for a reason.’
Part Three
Do not stray from the subject; omit the extraneous.
(From the Central Intelligence Agency’s Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, Eighth Edition, 2011)
Wilson stood on the balcony of the American consulate with his bald pink knees thrust through the ironwork. He had become trapped there while leaning over the railing to talk to me. Two prostitutes were already greasing the sides of his kneecaps with cabbage-palm oil in preparation for tugging him free. ‘Please don’t worry about me,’ he called down. ‘This happens quite often. Like a bally snare trap, this ironwork. I keep meaning to get it replaced.’ Both prostitutes now bent to encircle his waist with their arms. ‘Ready, ladies: one, two – three!’ Craning my neck to watch, I felt a warm drop of lubricant splatter on my forehead like an unction as Wilson’s knees slipped clear. For an instant it looked as if all three of them were going to topple over backward on the balcony, but Wilson executed a pas de bourrée of undeniable elegance and kept the others steady with his hands on their shoulders. With all the resonance of a mallet on sheet metal, the church bell began to clang for morning mass. Today was Sunday, February 5th, 1956, my fortieth birthday.
A short time earlier, getting down from the dented old McCormick truck that had brought me to the main square of San Esteban, I had said to an old man, ‘Donde queda el consulado americano?’ My driver had been to the town before but he didn’t know.
‘I can get you a girl much cheaper,’ the old man replied, also in Spanish.
To describe the truck as temperamental would have been condescending; rather, I had the impression it had been earnestly wrestling with a deep crisis of personal faith about the very principle of internal combustion as a motive power. As a result, the eighty-mile overnight journey south from Trujillo had left me in no mood to waste any more time. ‘I’m not looking for a girl. I’m looking for the American consulate. Understand?’
‘The girls I know are also much prettier,’ said the old man. I dismissed him and moved on. An Indian boy wearing nothing but a muddy vest and a straw hat, previously absorbed in tying together some cockroaches by the legs with a piece of thread, abandoned his work and ran after me begging for coins. When I said no, three more boys made the same request, as i
f encouraged. A barber – who must have been able to see that I had a fresh crewcut and an even fresher shave, because I’d seen to myself with a razor out of sheer boredom during one of the McCormick’s intermittent crises – offered me the full works, and then, persistently, a generous discount on the full works. From my travels in Cuba I was already familiar with the vacuous bustle of this kind of tropic square, the ritual and the reflex action, a null economy in which every figure in every negotiation tended towards zero, like a parched man swigging from an empty canteen in the hope of masticating a dry cracker. And yet it was also true that every settlement on the edge of the jungle shone with a sort of unearned glamor, not only because of its intimacy, like a tyrant’s doorman, with the adjoining horrors, but also because of the memory – faded, garbled, borrowed – of the explorers who once made it their final nominate waypoint before they disappeared in search of El Dorado, the White City, the Kingdom of Prester John, the Fountain of Youth, the Hesperides, and/or the Garden of Eden.
At last I found a waiter smoking outside a cantina who could tell me how to get to the American consulate, although he, too, mentioned something about whores. When I followed his directions to the building with the pediment over the front door, and my knock was answered by a woman in a moth-eaten negligée eating a cherimoya, I was ready to acknowledge that the problem must lie with either my pronunciation of consulado or with its local idiomatic meaning, but then Wilson called down from the balcony.
Over glasses of chilled horchata in the drawing room, having changed from shorts into slacks, he explained how an Englishman came to be running a brothel out of the American consulate in San Esteban. ‘Ever since I was at prep school I’d always wanted to be a writer,’ he told me. ‘A serious one, like Dostoevsky or Kafka.’ He had a boyish face and ears like ruddy oyster mushrooms. ‘But all I seemed to be able to come up with were humorous stories about school sports’ days and so forth. They were quite well received in some quarters but they weren’t what I dreamed of doing. So I thought I’d better go out and see something of the world. I got a job with my uncle’s match company because they do some business in Tegucigalpa. Quite soon I decided it didn’t suit me but by then I was making a few shekels on the side as a string man for a couple of American papers. Always looking for the sick-makingest side of everything in case there was something I could glean from it. At any rate, one day I got wind there was a doctor in a town called San Esteban who’d invented a cure for leprosy. Off I went. Well, do you know how many San Estebans there are in Spanish Honduras?’
‘No.’
‘Quite a few! I didn’t realise before I left but there are quite a few. For all I know this doctor really is doing marvelous work in one of the others, still unburdened by publicity. Anyway, by the time I got here and twigged this was the wrong one, I’d run out of traveling money, but old Tussmann, the American consul here, needed a man who spoke good English. At that time Tussmann was allowing his young wife – I’m not sure which of them initiated the arrangement; mustn’t pry, that’s my rule – but he was allowing his wife to receive gentleman callers on a freelance basis in one of the guest rooms. Then after Tussmann died, she more than ever needed to support herself, and to be quite honest so did I. One thing led to another. Naturally I’ve written to your Department of State to see if they feel like replacing Mr Tussmann, but I still haven’t had a reply, and in the meantime I feel we’re very much living up to the spirit of his mission here if not the letter. The female sexual organ is, after all, the universal consulate. Don’t you think?’
‘What if a lady knocks on your door?’ I said. ‘Or a pious family man?’
‘We also maintain an extensive lending library.’
‘How long are you planning to stay in San Esteban?’
‘As long as I bally well can. I’m very happy here. The only deficiency, really the only one, is that I never get any decent material for my fiction – which was supposed to be my reason for leaving England in the first place.’
‘Really? In a place like this?’
‘I’ve turned out quite a number of little comic sketches but there’s not much to distinguish them from what I used to write about Walton-on-Thames. You know, eccentric sorts next to a river.’
‘But the isolation …’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘The vice, the torpor, the decay. The white men feeling greater and greater contempt for their own values. The sense of the numinous as horribly distant, or at times, on the contrary, horribly close. You don’t see it as a kind of … allegorical hell?’
‘Now that you mention it …’ He mulled that over for a little while. ‘No. Anyway, if I’m ever in a dirty mood, I just remind myself how fortunate I am to have found my vocation. I can’t recommend this line of work highly enough.’
‘Snatch on tap?’
‘Pardon? Oh, I see!’ He laughed as if genuinely delighted by the expression. ‘No, no, no. I don’t indulge. It would show favoritism. But the company of the ladies never fails to enchant. Now, I’ve blathered on long enough. You must have business in San Esteban, and something tells me you’re not a fruit man.’ By this I took Wilson to mean an employee of the United Fruit Company, rather than a homosexual. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’m looking for an Irishman named Poyais O’Donnell. Know him?’
‘Of course! Everyone in San Esteban knows Mr O’Donnell. He’s one of the pillars of our little community. And the only other chap within an egret’s flight who appreciates a cup of tea. Not that we ever get any real tea down here. Are you a friend of his?’
‘I’m a notary agent for the firm of Letterblair, Handsom and Lowe. There’s a probate dispute involving another branch of the O’Donnell clan who emigrated to the United States during the famines and got rich. No one seems to be able to agree on exact furcation of the family tree. I’ve been sent to interview Mr O’Donnell, see what he remembers, get a sworn statement, find out if he’s kept hold of any photograph or papers. There may be some money in it for him.’
‘Sounds rather Jarndyce and Jarndyce,’ said Wilson.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Well, I’m afraid it’s rotten timing because Mr O’Donnell left just this morning to see to something somewhere or other. But he’s sure to be back before too long. He always is. Are you in a tremendous hurry? Would you like to leave a note for him?’
The large mirror over the mantelpiece was spotty with oxidation. In my experience, the belief that rust was somehow contagious like mildew was remarkably common, even among well-educated grown-ups. Perhaps because there was a deeper truth to it. Rust could indeed be contagious, especially in places like San Esteban. You could catch rust if you hung around here too long.
On the other hand, my horchata was delicious. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait.’
A week before I arrived in San Esteban, I had watched a young man creep into a police morgue in Havana with the intention of doing outrageous things to a corpse. He was visibly nervous, as any young man will be the first time he embarks on such a venture. Havana nights were never peaceful but this morgue was in the basement, so nothing could be heard but the young man’s footsteps and the electric hum of the refrigerator cabinet. Religious iconography was not permitted in government morgues, but without it Cubans tended to be a little skittish when they found themselves alone with the dead, and when the beam of the young man’s flashlight moved across the wall it revealed the standard unofficial compromise, a fire hose that had been threaded around some nails hammered above its reel so that it made the shape of a chubby-fingered Mano Poderosa. He put down his briefcase, swung open the doors of the cabinet, and one by one checked the faces of the eight cadavers shelved on trays inside until he recognised the object of his quest: a well-muscled specimen with a swarthy complexion and a few days of stubble on his scowling face. Holding the flashlight in his mouth, the young man pulled the tray halfway out of its housing, knelt down to open his briefcase, and produced from it an eyeliner brush and a
bottle of indelible ink.
‘I’m afraid I cannot in good conscience let you go any further,’ I said.
As the young man whirled around, the flashlight slipped out of his mouth and I heard the lens crack on the concrete floor. ‘Who,’ he huffed in panic, ‘who – who’s there?’
‘Just an onlooker with a natural concern for the sanctity of the dead.’
The young man turned to scurry away. But before he could get out through the doorway, Winch McKellar stepped into his path. ‘Not so fast, buddy.’
The two of us had been lying in wait for about half an hour. ‘Turn the lights on, would you, Winch?’ I said.
He did so. Now we could all get a better look at each other. The interrupted desecrator was so scrawny you could have fit a sheaf of him on one of those cadaver trays. I already knew his name – Hank Tapscott – and his occupation – officer of CIA, just like Winch and myself. With respect to the corpse, whose arms were marked with tattoos and whose chest was marked with bullet wounds, the corresponding details were a matter of public record. About forty-eight hours earlier, he’d been gunned down in flight from a double-murder scene, and afterwards he had been officially identified by the police as a local vagrant known to them from earlier petty offenses.
But why a local vagrant would have got it into his head one night to equip himself with a semi-automatic, break into the Zamoranos mansion on Calle 17, and assassinate the industrialist Vicente Zamoranos and his wife Floramaria while they lay in their 100-gallon bathtub together, nobody had yet explained.