Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  ‘There was an evaluation during the war. But it didn’t come to anything, and these days non-rigid thermals are about as fashionable as the Half Doodle. Nothing wrong with the concept. I’m sure one day they’ll come back around. It’s funny, though – nothing for years, and now two of you in a month.’

  I had been about to pass him his cigar, but that stilled me. ‘Two of us?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. There was a lady, that’s all. She had a few questions. You know how we developed those airships originally? When I was just out of school, I got a job at Gardena Aviation. Tiny outfit but in ’28 we won a contract from Kingdom Pictures to develop a camera blimp. They wanted something non-rigid so you could fold it up and drive it out into the desert on a trailer; thermal because around then you fellows’ – meaning the federal government – ‘were talking about buying up all the helium; and quiet so you could just hang it a hundred feet up and it wouldn’t interfere with the sound recording. Well, that airship you just saw is more or less the airship we designed.’

  ‘That was the one that crashed? With Arnold Spindler inside?’

  ‘Yes. After that there was a lawsuit, of course. That was the end of Gardena. Our patents got sold off. They were passed around for a while, but by the time I ended up here they were here too. Reunited!’

  ‘So you’re giving me an airship that’s primarily famous for crashing,’ I said.

  ‘No, no, you don’t have to worry. That crash was the product of special circumstances. Never should have happened. That’s what this lady wanted to know about. The crash. She was writing a book, she said. But I could tell she was a crackpot. She had that googly look in her eyes. And she smelled like laundry you forgot to air out after a wash.’

  To seek an audience with Arnold Spindler – that name from another era – had been Droulhiole’s stated mission in Hollywood. Nothing for years, and now two in a month. ‘What was her name?’ I said.

  Albee, who by now had taken his cigar, blew a smoke ring that testified to a long career in aerodynamic engineering. ‘Oh, I didn’t take the trouble to remember. Say, you can settle this for me – is it true most of the flavor is in the wrapper?’

  ‘Can you find out for me?’

  ‘About the wrapper?’

  ‘About this writer’s name.’

  Albee shrugged, not knowing why I was pursuing the subject. ‘I guess I could ask my girl to look in the datebook.’ He pressed a button on his intercom. ‘Felicity, sweetheart, could you remind me of the name of the lady writer who came to talk to me a couple of weeks ago?’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Albee.’ A pause, in which I had the feeling that something was passing over my head, vast and soundless and camouflaged against the sky. The intercom spoke again. ‘Her name was Meredith Vansaska, Mr Albee. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

  There are some houses that give you such a forceful vision of your corpse lying undiscovered for several weeks after your death that you can’t possibly walk past them without resolving to talk to your neighbors more often or at the very least to sign up with a cleaning service. Here, the front door was ajar, but the chain was on, perhaps because the wood of the door was so warped that it would have been hard to shut properly. I knocked, but there was no answer. If you looked through the big windows on either side, or peered through the gap between the door and the frame, you could see only leaves, as if the whole place had been barricaded with philodendrons. But the lawn behind me was a parched brown, in contrast to its immaculate neighbors. After several weeks in the tropics, the silence of Silver Lake, the absence of stray dogs and street hawkers, felt like the result of some purge or rapture. ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Vansaska? Are you there?’ There was still no answer.

  I took out a rubber band, reached around to the other side of the door, and fumbled out of sight until I had one end looped around the slider at the end of the chain and the other end around the door handle. Then I turned the handle from the outside so that the slider was pulled along to the end of the receiver and the chain came loose.

  I stepped into an atmosphere so thick I felt chloroformed – or rather chlorophylled.

  It was as if the director of a failing botanical garden had decided to bring the entire collection home to live with him. Ferns, orchids, figs, bromeliads, ficus trees, violets, palms, succulents, cacti, some potted on the floor and others hanging from hooks, some dead and others flourishing, some nearly my height and others small enough for my buttonhole, scores upon scores of plants, a hyperbaric greenhouse, a slum crammed with every race and nationality. The bungalow itself seemed to be disintegrating into compost, with condensation running down the walls and mold dappling the cornices and plaster bellying from the ceiling. Sacks of nitrogen fertiliser were piled by the doorway and there was a film of mud underfoot. I used the toe of my shoe to tear up a spiderweb connecting the stalk of an aroid palm to the spout of an overturned watering can. Because I couldn’t even see as far as the other end of the living room, it was by the rustling of the foliage that I first perceived her approach.

  ‘Zonulet?’ she said, shambling towards me in a stained blue kimono. Her hair was lank and she did indeed have what Albee had so compassionately described as a ‘googly look in her eyes’, a look that reminded me of certain women I’d met as a crime reporter, not the violent ones but the ones who were strangled by some vine of grief. ‘You’re so much older.’

  ‘It’s been almost fifteen years,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose that is the relevant statistic.’

  I wasn’t sure it was, actually. Something else at least as pitiless as time had blasted my former New York Evening Mirror colleague into this condition. When I looked at her I felt fear. Not just worry, like when I was on the phone with McKellar in Tegucigalpa, but fear. Not just fear for her, but fear for myself. I wanted a swig from my flask but I knew it wasn’t very good manners to let an old friend see that you couldn’t even stand to look at them without groping for some Dutch courage. ‘This is where you live?’

  ‘“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.”’

  ‘… What is that, a poem?’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Pleased to see you too,’ I said. ‘Come on, we’ll go to a hotel and then later on we can see about cleaning this place up. Can you pack a bag? I’ll pack a bag for you. Where’s the bedroom?’

  ‘I’m not a child.’

  ‘You can’t stay here. It’s not …’ It’s not sane. ‘It’s not healthy for a person.’ I took her arm.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, pulling away without vigor. ‘Why are you here? I assume you came with some other purpose than to serve me an eviction order.’

  ‘I came to catch up with an old friend. But that doesn’t really matter just now. What matters is taking you somewhere you’re less likely to die from either a swamp disease or a collapsing roof.’

  ‘This is my home. These are my plants. If I weren’t comfortable here I would already have left. I’m perfectly aware of how it must look to you.’ Her voice was as toneless as if she were reciting from a script.

  I realised I might have to come at this less directly. ‘Can we just talk, then? Can we sit down somewhere?’

  ‘If you like.’

  She led me to the bedroom, which was just as thickly vegetated, although at least the bed made a clearing in the center. Littering the floor was a corona of hamburger wrappers, soup cans, cigarette butts, pencil erasers, tissues, underwear. What troubled me even more than the squalor itself was her total renunciation of embarrassment or self-consciousness about a visitor setting eyes on it. We sat down side by side on the bed’s edge, which didn’t feel any less provisional than standing in the living room. ‘Did you lose someone?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean did somebody die? Or run off? A kid of yours, or a husband …’

 
; ‘No.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘My parents are dead, yes.’ She yawned, beginning to wilt sideways. I saw that I shouldn’t have let her return to her nest.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘My father in ’48, my mother in ’49.’

  She couldn’t still be in mourning. And yet I knew that the woman I remembered from our Mirror days – a keen reporter, a good sport, a pretty face who’d never had much trouble filling her dance card – wouldn’t have just cracked up for no good reason. ‘What is it, then? What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing much has ever happened, really.’

  ‘The plants, then. Why the plants?’

  ‘I never went to the jungle, so … The old woman who lived below my piano teacher – after she died, her grand-nephew … I’ve always remembered it. I’ve always wanted to go to the real jungle.’

  ‘That’s what this is supposed to be? The jungle?’ For someone who’d never seen it first-hand, she’d done a fine job dressing the set. If you had asked me, before I saw this bungalow, whether a human author could ever produce a fully convincing imitation of nature’s chaos, I would have said no, but now I wondered if it just took the right state of mind. ‘Vansaska, for Christ’s sake, if you want to go to the jungle so much, why not just go now? Go today! We can go together! I can get us on a plane to Cancún and we can drive down through the Yucatan. Won’t cost you a dime. Shit, we’re only a couple days’ drive from the redwood forests up the coast. You ever seen those? I swear it’s just like being in the tropics except you don’t sweat so much.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. No.’

  ‘No what? You could be in the real jungle tomorrow! Why not? Give me one good excuse.’

  ‘No. No.’ She seemed to be refusing not only the offer but even to let the topic enter her head, hunching over self-protectively as if the conversation itself was a threat to some internal poise.

  ‘Vansaska, beautiful, just listen to me. I can see you’re at a low ebb here—’

  All at once her posture changed, and for the first time she really looked at me, not sideways from a half-bowed head but straight at me with a fury that in an instant had burned off the haze from her eyes. ‘You think this is low? You asshole. Do you have any idea what a Battle of Normandy Ascent of Everest Theory of fucking Relativity accomplishment it is every minute of every day that I don’t eat that whole bottle of Nembutal in the dresser? This is low? I am alive. I am alive and I have not yet taken any decisive steps to amend that state of affairs. I am not even in an institution. This is as good as it gets. This is summa cum fucking laude. And you come in here uninvited to complain about my fucking houseplants?’

  I exhaled heavily. ‘Jesus Christ.’ I took out my flask. ‘Sorry.’ And yet I was glad I’d said what I’d said, because she was so much more lucid now that she was roused. ‘Not to dispute your assessment,’ I said, ‘but I happen to know you went to see a man about an airship a few weeks ago. What I mean is, you were not only alive, you also made it as far as South Bay.’

  ‘That feels like a very long time ago. I have good weeks and bad weeks. This is not a good week.’ She rummaged in the sheets behind her to find a headband before scraping her hair back into it so impatiently she pulled out a few blonde strands in the process. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘I was with Albee a few hours ago. He mentioned you. He said you wanted him to tell you about Arnold Spindler’s airship crash. He said you were writing a book.’

  ‘I tell people that because I don’t have press credentials. There’s no book.’

  ‘So it’s … what? Just an interest of yours?’

  ‘You could say that. Some days I feel like it’s the only thing in the world keeping me from taking the decisive steps I mentioned. But if you want to call it an interest, call it an interest. I’ve spent the last ten years looking into Arnold Spindler and Elias Coehorn. It’s been slow, because most of the time I’m not up to it. But I have a hot cockle here, Zonulet.’

  We both smiled at that nostalgic expression. ‘What’s your hot cockle?’ I said.

  ‘The man they pulled out of the wreckage of that airship was not Arnold Spindler. Or, to be precise, they pulled two men out, and one was Spindler and the other wasn’t. The one who got photographed on the stretcher, and recuperated in hospital, and went back to the mansion in Bel Air: that wasn’t him. What happened to the real Spindler after the crash, I don’t know. Whether he was alive or dead, I don’t know. But no one ever saw the real Spindler again. The crash was a set-up.’

  ‘So who was the other guy?’

  There was ten times more life in her voice now: ‘An impersonator. Spindler never looked quite the same after the accident. His skull was a different shape. His right eye was smaller and lower down.’

  ‘Because he smashed himself up in the crash.’

  ‘It was a way to cover the switch. No surgeon could have made the impersonator look exactly like the real Spindler. But Spindler with a scrambled face was an easier commission. Hence the airship crash. Also, it was a lot tidier to make the switch out in the Alabama Hills than it would have been if his limousine got T-boned on Sunset Boulevard.’

  ‘Albee told you all this?’ I said.

  ‘No, but everything he told me fits with what I’ve already found out. He has a lot of doubts himself about what happened that day.’

  ‘This was ’29. Correct me if I’m wrong, but New York money didn’t start coming into Hollywood until the early thirties. That’s how Kingdom Pictures got so big. Before that, who would’ve had enough at stake for these shenanigans?’

  ‘It wasn’t about money.’ There was something almost involuntary about the way she’d taken up the old rhythm of the newsroom, like a drummer tapping his fingers on a countertop.

  ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Revenge. Paternity. Have you ever heard of a movie called Hearts in Darkness?’

  Droulhiole had spent three hours telling me about it in the interrogation room. But Droulhiole was a secret. Droulhiole didn’t exist. ‘No.’

  ‘In 1938 Kingdom Pictures started production on a movie called Hearts in Darkness. They assembled a cast and crew. When I was in Hollywood that year I … met the director. He was going to shoot it on location at a Mayan temple in Honduras. Bev wanted me to report on the shoot but I didn’t go, remember? Anyway, the movie was never finished. And none of those people ever came back from the rainforest. Around the same time, an expedition left from New York with exactly the same destination. They never came back either. Elias Coehorn Jr. was leading that expedition. The only legal heir of one of the richest men in America disappeared into the wilderness, along with at least a hundred others, and as far as I can tell no one has ever published a word about it in an American newspaper. In 1940 the family of the actress Adela Thoisy hired a search party to go into the rainforest. There’s some evidence the search party were massacred by one of the native tribes out there before they even got as far as the temple.’

  Nice to have corroboration that Droulhiole wasn’t a Psalmanazar. Also, it probably meant that Pennebaker had never surfaced in New York, although I would keep my freelancer on it just in case. ‘I don’t understand what this has to do with the airship,’ I said.

  ‘The Spindler expedition and the Coehorn expedition set out for this temple at the same time. But that wasn’t the first opportunity anybody ever had to use those two names in the same sentence. Back in the teens, Spindler had a long affair with Coehorn Sr.’s wife. Later Coehorn found out about it, and he raped Spindler’s wife to punish him, and Coehorn’s wife threw herself out of a window. That was 1918. Spindler fled to Hollywood and started Kingdom Pictures. Eleven years later someone arranged for Spindler’s airship to go down so that from then on they could puppeteer his corpse, figuratively speaking. People say Spindler used to pride himself more than anything on his dignity and straightforwardness and good sense in the middle of all those hysterics on Broadway. Imagine the sort of revenge wher
e you don’t just kill someone and have done with it, you carry on afterwards. You turn his name into a punchline. You make sure that anything he ever accomplished will be subordinate to the stories about his craziness. You own him dead for longer than he owned himself alive.’

  ‘And when people met Spindler after 1929—’

  ‘Hardly anybody did.’

  ‘But when they did. You think he was played by that impersonator?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you think Coehorn did all that?’ I said. ‘Granted, the rich do find odd ways to keep themselves occupied – but what’s your reasoning? Spindler must’ve had other enemies in Hollywood. And if Coehorn had already got back at him once, why would he have waited eleven years to do it again?’

  ‘There are photographs of Spindler from when he’s a boy. He starts puberty late. Before puberty he has the most nondescript face you’ve ever seen. After puberty something distinctive comes through in the features.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘If puberty brought so much out of him then it’s reasonable to suppose that in a son of his it would also—’ But then she stopped herself and gave me another hard look. ‘What did you say you were doing here? In California, I mean.’

  ‘I told you. I came to see Albee.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I work at the State Department now. His company does some business with us. Lately there’s been some interest in one of the old Gardena Aviation thermal airship designs – from us and, as it turned out, from you. “Nothing for years,” he said to me, “and now two of you in a month.” Quite a coincidence. So I thought I’d pay you a call.’

  ‘You’re lying. Or at least you’re streamlining considerably. I’ve known you longer than almost anybody, Zonulet, remember? Why are you really here?’