Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  ‘That’s not right. I must have been a little moggadored. I was sick.’

  This was something else I couldn’t account for: my passenger kept using slang – like ‘moggadored’ to mean confused – that I hadn’t heard since before the war. Back in America that usually meant a person had grown up rich. ‘Okay, let’s just say you were “moggadored” and you meant to say you were going to Hollywood. Why Hollywood?’

  ‘To tell everybody about the camp,’ he said.

  ‘To tell everybody about the camp that you refuse to tell me anything about.’

  ‘To tell everybody about the movie. The progress on the movie. You must know the movie!’

  After we’d been around that mulberry bush half a dozen times, I ran out of patience. Previously, I’d intended to check into a hotel suite in Tegucigalpa to let the boy complete his convalescence. Instead, I directed our driver to the agency’s headquarters downtown (acquired in ’52 from a gold-prospecting company) where they were certain to have at least rudimentary detention facilities. If anyone should ask, the boy would be a reform-school inmate from Sacramento who’d run away to join the Guatemalan communists and seen a few things he wasn’t supposed to see.

  I left Droulhiole alone for an hour or so before I came in with a lunch pail of egg baleadas and two bottles of beer. He was staring at the mirror window that took up most of one wall of the interrogation room, stretching from the ceiling about halfway down to the floor. Having no free hands, I kicked the door closed behind me. ‘You’re thinking we wouldn’t have a mirror that big just for guys like you to check their zits,’ I said. ‘We call that the Fourth Wall. If you’ve never been in a room like this before, you’ve probably never seen one. From this side it’s a mirror, but from the other side it’s a window. There’s a little observatory next door. If my colleagues want a peep show, they only need to pull up a seat in there, and you won’t ever know they’re watching us.’

  ‘You must have used a lot of silver to make a mirror that big,’ Droulhiole said. He didn’t seem to have understood me. Somehow even sitting in a straight-backed chair he managed to look as awkward as a raccoon stuck in a cat flap.

  ‘I think they make them with aluminum now, not silver,’ I said. ‘But only a little of that. It’s mostly glass.’ This only made the boy stare more intently at the mirror window. I followed his gaze long enough to catch a glimpse of myself. Lately I was losing my hair from my temples even faster than I was losing it from my crown. ‘If you’re wondering if you can break it: trust me, you can’t. Pound on it, throw the chair at it, whatever you like. Doesn’t matter. It might crack, but it won’t break. Anyway, how are you feeling, Mowgli? I know you haven’t eaten for a while. Are you hungry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I sat down myself. ‘Well, it’s not quite lunchtime yet. Let’s commence with where you were going, because on that subject you’re a man divided against himself, and that isn’t good for the constitution. You start telling me the truth, you can eat, all right? You keep telling me the truth, we can finish our business here, and maybe we can even put you back on the road to New York or Hollywood or wherever it was you were headed. But until then, here we are, and here we’ll stay. As long as it takes.’

  ‘You’re not on the foraging rota today?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The day after, then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, are you injured?’

  ‘No … No, kid, this is my job. So you’re stuck with me. And try to bear in mind that if it weren’t for the guy you’re looking at, you would’ve died on the riverbank back in San Esteban.’

  For a while Droulhiole looked down at the table. ‘You won’t tell anybody?’

  ‘You have my word.’

  ‘New York first, then Hollywood. That’s where I was going.’

  ‘Terrific. Now we’re getting somewhere. So why didn’t you want me to know you were going to New York first?’

  ‘I was supposed to travel directly to Hollywood to tell everybody about the progress on the movie. That’s what I promised Mr Whelt I was going to do. But before I left, Mr Coehorn had a talk with me. He told me eight years ago they sent Mr Pennebaker to New York but he never came back like he was supposed to. Mr Coehorn said Mr Pennebaker must have gone native. He must have forgotten himself amongst those people. Mr Coehorn told me I had a special duty I couldn’t tell anybody about. I was to travel up the river and appear in New York as if by accident and reestablish my acquaintance with Mr Pennebaker and find out what had happened and then …’ He trailed off. ‘Also, Mr Coehorn told me Mr Pennebaker would be fat and half-naked and smeared all over with, uh, with funnel cakes – that’s a type of cake – just fit to make you puke. Is that true? Is that what Mr Pennebaker is like now?’

  There we sat, on opposite sides of the table, thoroughly baffled in our different ways. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know any Mr Pennebaker,’ I said.

  ‘I met Mr Pennebaker when I was younger but I can’t really remember his face or his voice or anything like that. He’s just a name to me, I guess. Anyhow, I asked Mr Coehorn how I could be sure that I wouldn’t forget myself too when I got to New York, and he told me not to worry, because I haven’t grown up with all the luxuries you have here, the funnel cakes and the cocaines and all that stuff, so they won’t be such a temptation. You know, he’s right, I couldn’t even tell you what a cocaine looks like.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Say, how much longer do you think it would have taken me to get to New York if I hadn’t been taken ill? Mr Coehorn said it would take a long time, but I tend to be faster than the older folks. I figured if I could find somebody in, uh, Cancún with a boat who’d row me across to Florida, I could cut the trip right down. How close are we to New York now? I saw a lot of tall buildings.’

  For a moment I imagined myself as my old mentor Professor Mathers interviewing a Tucano tribesman, listening to his version of recent history, taking notes, sifting through the allegory and the exaggeration, flaring his nostrils at ‘the stench of truth’. Anthropologists weren’t supposed to draw conclusions from lone subjects, ever since the Provençal scam artist George Psalmanazar not only convinced everyone in Queen Anne’s London that he was a Formosan expat but made a bestseller of his Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. Knowledge began with consensus, the overlap of two or more minds, otherwise it was no better than the solipsistic universe of the ‘schizoid or strange character’.

  And yet when the agency debriefed a Soviet defector, he would often describe some department of the Kremlin that was as obscure to us as Formosa was to the Stuarts, and we would have to decide whether to take him at his word. Like the Directorate of Support inspecting a conference room for bugs, we would narrow our paranoia to a tight beam, double-check every inch of the transcript for gadgetry. Of course, we also had guys of our own, many of them frustrated novelists, whose job it was to punch up cover stories, to bottle the stench of truth like a musk and spray it where necessary, to supply all the arbitrary and redundant details that give the feel of reality. So we knew, roughly, what was feasible in that respect (though if the Russians should suddenly advance the technology of fiction it wouldn’t be the first time). But what about The New Adventures of Tarzan over here? I had been so convinced that he came from the training camp. But the longer he talked, the harder I found it to believe that his account of himself could possibly be pure invention, either his own or anyone else’s. To me, it positively reeked of truth.

  I pushed the lunch pail across the table to Droulhiole. ‘Try one of these baleadas, kid, and by all means wash it down with a beer. I don’t want to butt in with any more questions. I just want you to explain to me who you are and where you came from. And I want you to start from the very beginning.’

  Three hours later I was on a secure line to McKellar back in Foggy Bottom, having summarised, as best I could, what Droulhiole had told me. With the t
elephone cradle under my arm and the cord stretched taut I was pacing back and forth across the empty office like a dog on a chain, and talking so fast I hadn’t let him break in once. ‘I know it sounds crazy. I know you’re going to tell me that nobody in their right mind would believe it. But I do. Damn it, Winch, I do. And do you know what this means, if it’s all true? Branch 9 has neighbors. About 150 white American neighbors. Like a convent school next door to the whorehouse. Do you know how many different ways that gives us to make Branch 9 rue the day they partnered with those Indians to run the training camp? We have pieces on the chess board now. We have pieces on the fucking chess board! The Dullards will forgive Branch 9 a lot’ – meaning Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles – ‘but if we play this right we can start the kind of jumblefuck down there they will not have the option to forgive.’

  ‘I hope so, pal,’ McKellar said, ‘but you’re going to have to do it on your own. I’m shipping out to Jakarta next month. I would have told you sooner but I didn’t know where to get hold of you.’

  ‘You’re kidding me,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘How do you think? Branch 9 fixed it.’

  ‘Those fucking maggots!’ I shouted, thumping the desk with my fist. ‘Winch, I feel like I just got word that you died. Indonesia. You don’t know shit about Indonesia.’

  ‘I certainly don’t. But at least Laura’s excited.’

  ‘You’re telling me I have to take on Branch 9 by myself? I’m good at this job, but have a sense of proportion, Christ. I can only be in one place at a time.’ All my excitement about Droulhiole had flushed away. I sat down heavily in the chair behind the desk. So rarely did I permit myself anything less than total self-confidence that even a temporary diminution staggered me like a migraine. McKellar and I had been separated before, but never by half a world. For the first time since my birthday eight weeks ago I became aware of myself as forty years old. No seniority in Foggy Bottom. No home. No family. Not many friends. I saw myself from the outside, a lone subject, hoarsely insisting upon the reality of ‘the mysteriously significant world he has made’, nobody to reassure him but his own face staring back from the mirror wall …

  ‘This is just a pothole,’ McKellar said. ‘We’re still on the road. You and me. Deputy Director and Director by 1964. New York for Christmas and sherry in the umbrella room at the Waldorf-Astoria.’

  That was all it took. My crisis was already over. I lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair. ‘Promise me you’ll write every day, sweetheart.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Put lipstick on before you kiss the envelopes.’

  The baleada vendor across the street started up his chant again, so loud, penetrating and relentless that I wasn’t sure how anybody in these offices managed to sustain an unbroken train of thought. There was something badly wrong with an organisation that could silence a leftist radio station for the sake of American foreign-policy interests but could not silence ‘Baleadas con huevos!’ ‘You said these camps are out in the north-east,’ McKellar said.

  ‘The kid drew me a map. He doesn’t understand scale, but aside from that he’s a born cartographer. All we need to do – all I need to do – is establish some kind of influence over them. Without making such a commotion that Branch 9 and the Indians get wind of it.’

  ‘This is the middle of the jungle you’re talking about, with no communications,’ McKellar said. ‘You’ll be cut off from everything that’s going on in DC. Not to mention you might get bitten by a jumping viper. This isn’t going to be an easy op to run. And you can’t bring anyone else on. How are you going to keep both ends up?’

  ‘Didn’t Sturgis have almost exactly this problem with those Kuomintang who were hiding out in northern Burma in ’46?’

  ‘Yes, and from what I remember he got them all killed.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘And what are you going to do about the boy?’

  With all the melodrama I’d almost forgotten that my new asset was still sitting downstairs. ‘As far as we know, pretty much nobody west of my left shoe knows about these two American camps, and that’s how we want to keep it. I’m going to take the kid to Isla de Pinos. Find him a nice cabin on the beach somewhere nobody speaks English.’ Neither Branch 9 nor Eastern Aggregate would have any chance of finding him there.

  ‘You really think nobody in the States knows about the camps?’ said McKellar.

  ‘If they do, they’ve been keeping quiet about it for eighteen years.’

  ‘What about this individual your boy was trying to find?’

  ‘Mr Pennebaker? If he’d ever turned up in New York with a story like that, we would have heard about it. And I don’t have time to look for him. But I’m going to put a PI on it just in case.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a Pennebaker who was head bookkeeper at the Lollipop before the war? It’s not a very common name.’

  ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘Maybe they’re related.’ My flask was empty so I opened the bottom drawer on the off-chance of a bottle of rum but found only a pair of metalworker’s earmuffs.

  ‘Listen,’ McKellar said, ‘you remember that weasel Tapscott mentioned something called REMOTER?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ve found out a little more. REMOTER is the codename for an individual. I don’t know which individual, but apparently there were meetings in New York in ’53. Branch 9, United Fruit, and REMOTER sat down together. They made an agreement for Branch 9 and United Fruit to take a joint 50 per cent stake in the training camp.’

  ‘So REMOTER was one of the Indians?’

  ‘Maybe, if you can believe some Indian from the back of beyond ended up cutting deals in a hotel suite in Manhattan. Sounds cockamamie to me. But that’s the last help I’m going to be able to give you for a while, buddy. You’re on your own now.’

  We stood in the shade of the warehouse to watch the men force-feeding the airship, gorging it as it lay on its side in the dust, plucking every so often at its underbelly to even out the swell. At first it didn’t look like much more than a discarded stocking, but then, in a manner that seemed biological, almost indecently so, it began to writhe, bloat, iron out its creases, double in size and double again, stiffen the cartilage of its tail fins, rear up until it was bigger than you ever would have believed it could get, a blind white grub a hundred feet long, reborn from the darkness of its packing crate and now glowing under the Southern California sun. The guys in overalls turned on the propane burner between the blower and the airship’s mouth, and from where I stood I couldn’t see the flame but I could see the muddled air and within minutes I saw the effect on the airship as it rolled a little, bounced a few times on the tarmac like something just come to rest, and finally began to haul itself upright, testing first the weight of its own hide and then that of the gondola with which it was saddled. No one was actually flying today, however, so before long the men turned off the burner and started circling the pressurised airship, sometimes upright, sometimes on their hands and knees, pressing their ears to its flanks.

  ‘What are they doing?’ I said.

  ‘Listening for leaks.’

  ‘Does that really work?’

  Albee chuckled. ‘Sometimes.’ He was a tall, chunky guy who tended to stand with his feet wide apart, unshakeable, as if in an emergency you could slip the airship’s bow line under his chin and use him as a mooring tower. Earlier this afternoon he had, as ever, refused to confirm to me whether or not his company was working on a flying car. ‘How about it?’ he said. ‘Think she looks fit for purpose?’

  ‘She’s quiet?’

  ‘Big slow-revving ducted fans. Heck of a lot quieter than any airplane engine. And of course when you’re just hovering she doesn’t make any noise at all. The problem is she’s slow. You’ll be lucky to get fifteen miles an hour.’

  ‘I can live with that. She steer all right?’

 
‘Not in a high wind. But the rudder’s a good size. What kind of weight are you carrying?’

  ‘Just me, my gut, and about another sixty, seventy pounds of equipment.’

  ‘She won’t even notice.’

  Albee knew better than to ask for specifics. His company had a long-standing relationship with the agency, and he had the authority to sign over the airship as a donation in kind. That worked out well for me, because I didn’t have a budget for my operation in Honduras, and it worked out well for Albee’s company, because the airship hadn’t been taken out of storage in over a decade but they would still get a tax write-off according to some fairytale estimate of its peak value. I walked over to stroke the airship’s warm envelope, a heavyweight cotton varnished with iron oxide, butyrate, and fire-retardant halocarbons. ‘You can paint her black for me before I ship her down to Honduras?’

  ‘Nine thousand square feet of canvas, almost,’ Albee said. ‘But if that’s what you need. Put enough boys on it, shouldn’t take us more than a few days.’

  This warehouse represented the very back of the attic here, and was situated accordingly, so we rode some kind of two-man battery-powered tricycle back to Albee’s office. The seagulls of Redondo Beach made regular patrols of the complex to shit on any novel threats to their sovereign airspace that had emerged from the hangars that day. I wondered whether the company’s planners had deliberately set out to erect such a faithful imitation of the studio lots to the north or whether in fact the tribute had been unconscious. Once we were seated upstairs, in a sunny office with balsawood scale models arrayed along the shelves like specimens in a natural-history museum, I took out my cigar cutter to cut a Petit Upmann for each of us. ‘They’ve been sitting in the archive all those years?’ I said. ‘Perfectly good airships? Can’t anybody find any use for them?’