Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  I had to give her something. ‘When I say State Department …’ I cocked my head.

  ‘I see. That doesn’t surprise me. You’d be good at that.’

  ‘Ever since the war.’

  ‘Where do you live now? Washington?’

  ‘I’m a sort of circuit rider.’

  ‘You could help, you know. Some car salesman gets his passport stolen in a cathouse in Mexico and the federal government springs into action, but a hundred Americans die in Honduras and somehow it’s like nothing ever happened. As I said: this story is all I have now. Don’t you look in the mirror sometimes and think, “Thirty more years? They expect me to go through thirty more years of this? Thirty at least?”’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I never think that.’

  ‘Sometimes I have a sort of vision, of a stack of diaries, thirty of them, those big desk diaries like my mother used to have, all blank, all empty, and I’m an ant who has to crawl across every single one of those empty pages before I’m allowed to get to the end. Unless … unless I decide I don’t have to.’ She paused. ‘Put it this way. I don’t often find reasons to leave this house. I’ve given over the best part of my inheritance to errand boys sent by grocery clerks to deliver bags and collect bills. When I do leave, it’s because I’m trying to find out what happened in ’38. But I don’t have any leads left. Your pal Albee was the last one. Someone has rather methodically snipped off most of the loose threads. I’ve run short of places to go. But it seems to me that if anyone should know what happened to those Americans in Honduras, it’s you people.’

  My old friend had given me almost everything she had and I’d given her nothing whatsoever in return, just as if I’d been pumping some whiffled attaché in a hotel bar. I could have told her that those Americans were mostly still alive. I could have told her that there was a boy living in a cabin by the beach on the Isla de Pinos who’d grown up on the set of Hearts in Darkness. I could have told her, at the very least, that she wasn’t wasting her time, that she should keep looking, that if she could substantiate her hunches she would have a story that would make the bones of Beverly Pomutz rise up out of the earth to buy one last exclusive for the New York Evening Mirror. The greatest kindness in the world at that moment would have been just a few words out of my mouth, a breath of life in this miasmal air.

  But I knew Branch 9 was waiting for me to get careless.

  I didn’t even want to risk asking any more questions, in case she detected a second time that I knew more than I was admitting. And as our conversation about Arnold Spindler began to sputter out, so did Vansaska herself. I tried to keep my hostess engaged with chitchat about the years since we’d seen each other, our old colleagues, the state of the newspaper business, life in Los Angeles. But the longer she went without talking about Arnold Spindler and Hearts in Darkness, the further she sank back into her previous condition. Melancholy came on like hypothermia, her spirit withdrawing inside her inch by inch until once again her voice was flat and her eyes were dull and her muscles were slack. Before I left, I repeated my offer to take her to the real tropics, even though I knew her response would be the same. Soon there was nothing else to do but tuck her back into bed. Once again, I found myself standing over a chronic drowser in dirty sheets whose jungle malady was beyond my expertise. ‘Keep at it, sweetheart,’ I murmured. ‘Keep at it if you can.’ Then I gathered up the trash around her bed and carried it out to the garbage cans beside the house.

  At long last, the temple came into sight.

  Three hours earlier, just before midnight, I’d taken off from a barge anchored in the Ebano Lagoon, about eighty miles east of Trujillo Bay along the north coast of Honduras. This was my fourth sally, and my last chance for almost a month, because by the following night the moon would start waxing too bright. I had some faith in Droulhiole’s amateur cartography, but he’d been working from memory and without instruments. If his map had been precisely accurate, the temple ought to have been forty-six miles from the lagoon at a 197-degree heading. In practice, I was a rookie pilot navigating a thermal airship with only a directional gyroscope and a pitot-tube speedometer on cloudy nights that were calm but never entirely windless, which meant that the indeterminacy of my course was probably about commensurate with the indeterminacy of his map, and the most I could do with those numbers was set the mood for the evening.

  On each slow flight I described a long teardrop shape, skimming about four hundred feet above the canopy, and so far I hadn’t even managed to locate the tributary of the Patúca that was supposed to guide me towards the temple. I had agency-issue eyedrops to improve my night vision (which gave me glittering paisley floaters when I closed my eyes, perhaps because I took three times the recommended dose); all the same, with clouds masking the starlight, the darkness was vertiginous, a nearly fathomless blackout on every side of the airship’s cramped gondola, the dim red glow of my instrument lights like the last ember of an extinguished universe. During the war, I’d spent a year in the 2nd Photo Tech Squadron of the Air Force before McKellar recruited me for OSS, but I’d never actually been up in one of the P-40s from which most of the reconnaissance pictures were taken. Now, at last, I’d come to understand how truly severed from the earth you felt when you were lofting over obscure terrain with nothing to guide you home but a quivering needle. Fortunately, I had twice the fuel I needed, and all the yammer of the forest to keep me company, reaching up like sirens and car horns to a window on the fiftieth floor.

  I’d just taken a gulp from my flask when I saw it. The senses are always so eager to please, and dozens of times each night my eyes had traced right angles in the stipple of their own straining. But this was different. I could make out an adumbration of the landscape that was neither treetop nor empty air. I turned the rudder to swing the airship to the west.

  Before long I was close enough that a flickering spark came into view below. After turning the rudder again, to make sure my black whale wouldn’t swim directly over the site, I raised the field binoculars that hung around my neck, and made out a white man tending a fire on a stone step.

  I had found the temple.

  According to Droulhiole’s map, I was on the opposite side of the ruin from what he’d described to me as ‘the camp with all the Indians wearing green’, which had to be the Pozkito/Branch 9/United Fruit training camp. Bent over because the gondola’s ceiling was too low to stand up straight, I went around behind the pilot’s seat to shove my cargo out of the open rear hatch. As it fell from the gondola, the static line deployed the crate’s black parachute. The loss of sixty pounds of ballast sent the airship lurching skyward. Steadying myself on a handrail, I reeled the static line back inside the hatch. About ten seconds later I heard the crack of branches as the crate hit the canopy. By then I was back in the pilot’s seat, holding down the rudder to make the interminable starboard turn – the Roman Catholic Church could reverse itself faster than this airship – that eventually would point it back in the direction of the coast.

  The craft was designed to suppress not only the thrum of the engine, as Albee had promised, but also the flash of the burner. I couldn’t be quite certain that some first-rate pair of eyes down there might not still catch sight of the vessel – as faintly out of place against the sky as the temple was faintly out of place against the forest – but a hundred-foot shadow lumbering over the horizon would be a singularity so immune to explanation that any rational person would discount it as a phantasm.

  Inside the crate was an RS-1 field radio, the same model we used behind the Iron Curtain, comprising a receiver, a transmitter, and a hand-cranked power supply (all waterproof) with a range of seventy-five miles, along with four gooseneck flares, two Zippo lighters, and a pound of Hershey’s chocolate. Stapled to all six sides of the crate were copies of the following notice: ‘This is a radio. HIDE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE FOUND HERE SO NOBODY CAN FIND IT, and TELL NOBODY ABOUT IT. After you have studied the operating manual in private, use the radio to contact me. I can sup
ply food, medicine, weapons, tobacco, alcohol, news and correspondence from the United States, or anything else you require. If you follow these instructions CAREFULLY, you will become the most powerful individual at the temple.’

  The radio was a dart thrown blindfolded. But it was the best option I had. I couldn’t approach either of the two settlements openly, in case Branch 9 was watching. And even if I’d had a direct telephone line to Coehorn or Whelt or Burlingame (names I knew from Droulhiole) I wouldn’t have used it. Too often when you made an overture to some footling provincial boss you promoted him in his own mind, alerted him that he had something America wanted, so that all of a sudden he thought he was Napoleon Bonaparte and became correspondingly tiresome to bargain with. Instead, I intended to worm my way in from the periphery. Of course, there was a chance that whoever found the radio would be such a poster boy for good citizenship that he’d take it straight back to camp. But if I knew anything at all about human nature, that notice on the crate was enough to win over nine people out of ten. I just had to hope my new asset didn’t turn out to be either too stupid or, worse yet, too smart.

  In Trujillo, I’d hired a skinny half-Jamaican guy called Pavo for four dollars a day, because he struck me as sharp and dependable when I talked to him in a cantina. Any kid off the street could be my airship groom, but I needed somebody I could also trust as my radio operator. For hours at a time, whenever I was off shift, he would have to sit there listening for a transmission from the RS-1 that might never arrive.

  As it turned out, however, I was the one wearing the headphones when it came in, the first word that followed Droulhiole out of the jungle and into my embrace: ‘Testing.’

  This was the third night after I’d dropped off the field radio. I was in my cabin aboard the lumber barge I’d leased, and my feet were up on my TBX receiver while I read the new Scribner’s translation of Leibniz by the light of a gas lantern, so when I heard it come to life I had to twist around so fast I practically unsocketed myself at the waist. The receiver ran off a battery but I was cranking up the transmitter by hand as I shouted, ‘Yes, I read you, come in, come in!’

  ‘Who’s on the other end of this?’ A man’s voice, with an unmistakeable Brooklyn accent, and also a crust on the glottis as if maybe it hadn’t got a lot of use lately.

  ‘Your new best pal.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. ‘Pleased as hell.’

  ‘And where are you, new best pal?’

  ‘Somewhere between you and the good old United States. Not too far. Are you alone?’

  ‘I sure am.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to catch you with the radio?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve hidden the crate and the parachute?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pavo appeared at the door of my cabin, and I gave him a thumbs up. ‘Must have been quite a surprise to find them, I guess?’ I said.

  ‘A lot of funny things happen in the jungle.’

  The voice was starting to remind me of someone in particular, but I couldn’t think who. ‘So I’m told. Well, let me give you the essentials of the situation. I’m an interested party with resources at my disposal. I want to make sure the outcome for all of you at the temple is the best it can be. And to do that I need a man on the ground I can trust. Are you that man?’

  ‘At your service.’

  Of course I would have preferred to interview for the post like I had with Pavo, but in this case I would just have to play whatever cards I was dealt, even if they were nothing but a deuce and two old bus tickets. ‘Terrific,’ I said. ‘I hope your cranking arm isn’t tired yet, because I need to ask you some questions about the lay of the land down there. And then we’re going to come up with a plan together. By the way, did you enjoy the chocolate?’

  ‘I ain’t eaten it yet.’

  ‘Really? No need to ration it out. There’s going to be a lot more where that came from. Or anything else you want. Anything at all. Remember that. Now, tell me a little more about yourself. Which of the two expeditions do you belong to?’

  ‘I came here in ’38 with the Kingdom Pictures crew. That don’t mean I belong to them, though. I pack my own lunch.’

  ‘And what exactly …’ But then the words faltered in my throat and my hand faltered on the crank handle. Because I’d picked up another staticky signal, this one transmitting across a distance of eighteen years, and it was a recollection of a specific voice: a more youthful one, more insinuating, more inflated in its confidence, but nevertheless very similar indeed. Eighteen years was a long time, but back at the New York Evening Mirror I’d got so used to the sound of this voice, in your ear day after day like a gabardine-sleeved tentacle still mucky from its spawning-bed at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal. I tried to put the thought out of my mind, because there was no sane and well-ordered universe in which it could possibly be the same one.

  And yet I had to ask because I had to be sure.

  ‘Trimble?’ I said. ‘Is that you?’

  When I heard footsteps behind me I assumed the librarian had come back so I didn’t even look up from the viewfinder. My camera was mounted on a copy stand between two lamps, all pointing down at the album open on the table. The copy stand was crafted like a Chippendale, and the furnishings of the corporate library in Eastern Aggregate’s Manhattan headquarters were in general exorbitantly grand and Oxbridgean, perhaps in order to foster the feeling that the collected ledgers and records of the company should be regarded, in some sense, as classics. Nearly all queries were answered by telephone, and as far as I knew I had the place to myself aside from the superabundant library staff. But then somebody made a polite cough, and I turned.

  ‘I’m very sorry to interrupt your work, Mr Zonulet. But I was hoping you might permit me to introduce myself.’ Despite the luxe carpentry of the copy stand, one of the two lamps kept losing its angle because of a broken spring, and the guy in front of me produced a similar impression, with a light-bulb head that seemed to overburden his scrawny neck. He was in his mid fifties and wore a suit of a fussy, old-fashioned, expensive cut that fit in well with the decor. ‘John Phibbs,’ he said. ‘I’m one of the vice presidents of Eastern Aggregate.’

  We shook hands. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Phibbs. To what do I owe the honor?’

  ‘The head librarian tells me you are taking some photographs of our wage vouchers from the interwar period.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m extremely curious as to the purpose.’

  ‘I hate to be awkward, Mr Phibbs, but the librarian probably also told you that I’m here on State Department business. So I can’t go into detail. But let me assure you that your company’s cooperation is very much appreciated by the United States government.’

  ‘What puzzles me,’ Phibbs said, ‘is that the vouchers you’re photographing have been out of circulation since the early forties. The company no longer issues private currency of any kind. One would expect that today those items would be of interest only to the numismatical miscellanist.’

  ‘Oh, you’d laugh if I explained the reason. It’s pretty silly. But as I said, I just can’t.’

  ‘Of course. I quite understand.’

  ‘You said you were a vice president here?’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve been at the company for a long time. I started in 1917 as an operative for the Good Conduct Division. Then for many years I was the personal assistant to Mr Elias Coehorn, our founder.’

  ‘Surely you don’t come down to say hello to every visitor to your library? Seems a little below your pay grade.’

  Phibbs gestured at the copy stand. ‘And surely this work could be done by any clerk, Mr Zonulet? It seems a little below yours.’ He held my gaze for a moment. Then he smiled, and retrieved a business card from his jacket. ‘But in fact you’re quite right. Because of my other responsibilities, I’m obliged to limit the time I spend in this fine library, as agreeable as I may find it.
Now, I urge you to telephone my secretary on this number if you need prompt assistance with any matter whatsoever. Good day, Mr Zonulet, and best of luck with your enquiries.’

  I watched him walk away, his head bobbing on his shoulders as he moved, and then I turned back to the viewfinder of my camera. ‘Redeemable on pay day for ONE DOLLAR ($1.00) in lawful money of the United States,’ declared each scrip note, ‘without discount or interest, subject to terms of contract, from THE EASTERN AGGREGATE COMPANY,’ with a five-digit serial number, a date, and the printed signature of ‘Emerson Opdycke, TREASURER’, all this superimposed on a red sunburst pattern that radiated from an engraving of the same Lower Manhattan headquarters in which I now stood. Plus, in this case, one further line in italic type. There must have been children born into the villages around Eastern Aggregate coal mines in south-western Pennsylvania who until they grew up and left home would never even have set eyes on a federal greenback, only this rayon scrip. That much they had in common with Colby Droulhiole. Ostensibly, as Phibbs had said, it was out of circulation now, but I felt that if you asked around after midnight you could find brokers who could tell you the rate of exchange against the hell money they burned in the Barrio Chino.

  Phibbs was still on my mind as I adjusted the focus. The Eastern Aggregate Good Conduct Division had been notorious as the most brutal corporate enforcers of the Depression. I had once heard ‘Jawbone’ Atwater compare them, admiringly, to Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichniki. Usually a guy of Phibbs’s seniority would prefer to suppress that part of his résumé. But perhaps he felt it compensated a little for his bullyable physique if he hinted that he might once have cracked a few skulls, or at least provided logistical assistance to said cracking.

  That is not to suggest that Phibbs had mentioned that detail in order to intimidate me. Intimidation had not been the aim of his visit. Yes, he had wanted me to know I was being watched. But that was, in its odd fashion, an act of hospitality, of respect, like the owner of the restaurant coming over to your table. The point was not just that I was being watched, but that I was being watched from the highest levels, as my status merited.