by Ned Beauman
And that, in turn, is not to suggest that I was happy about it. I now wished that instead of applying for access to these currency albums with my own State Department credentials, I had enlisted some numismatical miscellanist, as Phibbs had put it, to apply on my behalf. The reason I hadn’t taken the trouble was that such an obscure request hadn’t seemed liable to attract any attention. But I should have given more thought to the implications, especially bearing in mind my run-in with the Eastern Aggregate agent in San Esteban. Vansaska had told me that someone had methodically snipped off most of the loose threads relating to the Americans at the temple. Perhaps that was true. But these leatherbound albums contained samples of every wage voucher Eastern Aggregate had ever printed, including special issues. Phibbs must have thought those special issues were my objective here. In fact, I had been expecting to photograph only generic scrip. Until I reached that page of the album, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I would find a 1938 special issue with an extra italic line on every denomination that read, ‘Issued for Mr Elias Coehorn, Junior’s expedition to SPANISH HONDURAS’ – the first documentary evidence I had ever set eyes on of those New Yorkers who never came back from the jungle.
The agency may to some degree have resembled a dime-novel publisher, with its writers on contract producing fiction by the yard, but to an even greater degree it resembled a movie studio. And if my operation at the temple had been officially sanctioned, I would have had any number of expert prop-makers at my disposal. But because, to use Trimble’s dated expression, I was now packing my own lunch, I had to take care of the scrip forgery myself. The Deputy Chief of Station in Tegucigalpa had told me he’d found no reliable printer in the whole of Honduras. I did know a real craftsman in Havana, who would take my negatives and make lithograph plates so immaculate they could hang in a museum. But down there you couldn’t get quality rayon of the kind Eastern Aggregate had used, so I had to buy a fifty-yard bolt from a wholesaler in New York’s Garment District and export it personally on my next Pan Am flight.
All that was straightforward enough. The problem was simulating how the notes would look after eighteen years of daily fingering in a tropical climate. Of course, the denizens of the temple wouldn’t be on the lookout for sourdough any more than they were on the lookout for airships, but if they’d been using the same money for eighteen years – or almost half that, anyway, in the case of the Hearts in Darkness crew, who reportedly hadn’t adopted it as legal tender until later – they would be sure to notice the slightest difference in feel. Apex Chemical produced a solution specifically for aging paper, but it only worked on non-synthetics. So in New York, I spent an afternoon touring second-hand clothing stores, nuzzling the oldest rayon frocks I could find, trying to attune myself to the decay of regenerated cellulose. And in Havana, after the rayon scrip notes had been printed and cut, I made a series of experiments in artificial weathering, using acids and yeasts and rotating drums.
The result was a dozen different samples with a dozen different textures, like fabric swatches from some futurist tailor. Back at the barge on the Ebano Lagoon, I packed these into another parcel for Trimble, and then dropped them off from the airship, with the light of a gooseneck flare as my target. Later, over the radio, he told me which of the samples was most convincing. I had hoped this part of the plan would take at most two iterations, but I had to go back with a third set of samples before the former blab man was satisfied that I’d found the right weathering procedure to fool his cohabitants.
Regarding Trimble: this did not, for me, constitute an enchanting twist of fate. I’d had no warning of it, because Droulhiole hadn’t brought up Trimble’s name in the interrogation room, and neither had Vansaska when she reminded me that she was the one who had originally got the assignment to follow the Hearts in Darkness shoot back in ’38. Dredging my memory, I did retrieve some details of that week. Vansaska and Trimble were both away from the newsroom for a few days, but only Vansaska came back. Then Pomutz, so angry you thought his fillings were going to melt out of his jaw, announced that Trimble had sent him a telegram from Havana. But that was around the same time Frank Parker put the word out that he wanted Trimble in a body cast, and when I thought about Trimble I just couldn’t imagine him against any background other than the five boroughs, so it was simplest to assume that this Havana bullshit was only a ploy to throw Parker off. Besides, after Trimble didn’t come back to the Mirror, it wasn’t as if we were sending out search parties. We all hated him. Some people liked him the first time they met him because he was so confiding, so ingratiating, so informal, and realised their mistake only later on – though my own instincts had been swift and accurate. In the thirteen years I’d been in the intelligence services, I had met torturers and child-killers and at least one amateur cannibal, but none of them ever got on my nerves quite like Trimble.
Sometimes I marveled at that figure. Only thirteen years since McKellar press-ganged me in the umbrella room of the Waldorf, and it felt more like a thousand. Only ten years since Harry Truman chartered a peacetime intelligence service, and the agency felt as historied as the Knights Templar. So much had happened. And that dilation of time was reflected back at me in the mirror every night. I remembered sitting beside Vansaska and comparing the different ways life had weathered us, its experiments with acids and yeasts and rotating drums. Admittedly, any doctor would tell me I was accelerating my own decline. I drank a lot. And when I drank I almost always drank Scotch and cognac and añejo rum, barrel-aged spirits, the older the better, as if I wanted to fill up my body with time itself, equalise the pressure between inside and out. Of course, if I’d invented a technique to age grain alcohol eighteen years in a week, instead of printed rayon, I could have made a fortune.
Although I hadn’t yet seen Trimble in the flesh, somehow I felt sure he wouldn’t have changed. He really was an imperishable asshole. But no matter how much I disliked him, that wasn’t important now. I had worked with him before, and I could work with him again. Furthermore, the plan seemed to me sound. Trimble would use the forged scrip to buy Elias Coehorn Jr. just like a mob boss might buy a local politician. So through Trimble I would control Coehorn, and through Coehorn I would, in the long run, control both camps. My eventual goal was to force the temple and the Pozkito/Branch 9/United Fruit training camp into a much more severe juxtaposition, if possible the sort of blazing jumblefuck that the State Department, even the White House, simply could not ignore, so that they would have no choice but to step in and shut Branch 9 down. And my involvement at the temple might be suspected but it would be impossible to verify.
Perhaps when I took an oath to serve my country as an officer of CIA, I didn’t envisage I would ever find myself devoting months of my time to some microfracture on the world map that could not possibly have been more cut off from the foreign-policy interests of the United States. But in my view that was the consummate mode of espionage: to exploit the connections between all things, produce the largest effects through the smallest and most indirect causes, like the gui dao siege demolitionists of the Three Kingdoms period in China, who according to legend had only to dig up some tree roots close to a fort, dam a stream uphill, mutilate the wings of pigeons that roosted in the battlements, before the walls of that fort would come tumbling down at the tap of a mallet.
And Trimble’s next request showed me that he understood this principle just as well as I did.
This was almost four months after we’d started our project. By making small, regular deliveries of the counterfeit scrip, I was ensuring not only that Trimble would remain dependent on me, but also that he couldn’t inject it too fast. Anybody who’d passed through a POW camp during the war could tell you that the quantity theory of inflation still held in economies of just a few dozen buyers and sellers. Beyond that, however, I had no control. The operation was a black box. Even if I’d had an infrared camera to take a few reconnaissance shots from the airship, my Photo Tech Squadron analytical training would have run up shor
t against this strange battleground.
I wasn’t, thank Christ, stuck on the lumber barge the whole time. In between my contacts with Trimble, Pavo and I would motor a little fishing trawler back along the coast to Trujillo, bouncing into the harbor across the wakes of banana freighters, and twice I flew up to Havana to make sure El Movimiento hadn’t been causing too much consternation in my absence, returning each time with an extra trunk full of supplies. Trujillo wasn’t much of a town, but by comparison to San Esteban, the site of my previous detention, it was both temperate and metropolitan, with a merciful sea breeze and a small population of Americans, many of whom styled themselves as exporters or brokers but were actually embezzlers or Ponzis on the run.
Pavo kept a jar of leeches who started jitterbugging every time a storm was near, and one day I personally supplied some spare parts for this meteorological instrument when, a little preoccupied with a hangover, I slipped on the deck of the barge and fell into the lagoon. I bounced out faster than a cat but I was already serifed with leeches, which I had to dig out one by one with a thumbnail, saving a few for the jar. That night, after climbing into my hammock, I also felt a maddening tickle on the ball of my left foot. Peeling off my sock, I discovered a less familiar parasite, which I’d missed on my first inspection: a tiny cerulean grub that had bored into me. I shouted for Pavo to come into my cabin and look at it. He recognised the species, whose local name translated as ‘spite worm’. After we burned it off with my Zippo, he explained, the ulcer it left behind would be volubly purulent for at least a few weeks.
I taught Pavo gin rummy. He got good enough to beat me every time. I taught him heads-up poker. He got good enough to beat me every time. I taught him Pennsylvania needledick. He got good enough to beat me every time. There wasn’t much else to do. Over a bottle of guaro, I learned that Pavo’s father had shot himself two years earlier after the failure of his banana plantation left him in debt to hoodlums. For economic reasons alone, it was hard for a smallholder to hold out alongside the United Fruit Company, but white sigatoka made it even worse. Once, the necrotic leaf disease had terrorised farmer and corporation alike, and if anything the farmers had a better time of it because they knew their plants so intimately. Since around ’54 or ’55, however, the vast United Fruit plantations had been almost immune. Evidently the company had invented a cure for the sigatoka contagion, but not a single one of their local workers knew the secret. Meanwhile, family farms were as ravaged as ever, often losing entire harvests. After her widowing, Pavo’s mother had gone back to Jamaica, where she was born. Pavo didn’t feel much hometown fondness for Trujillo.
However, what made it more endurable to me than San Esteban, apart from a better climate and better food, was that I wasn’t just sitting on my ass, I was building something, block by block, as fast as it could be built. Maybe I had something in common with the artist who, two thirds of the way through some monstrous and solitary undertaking, with nobody else to reassure him that ‘the mysteriously significant world he has made’ has any value whatsoever, must grimly reassure himself. Still, given how much faster everything moved in the underlife of the agency, I was conscious that I was missing, in effect, generations of activity. And sometimes, despite my best attempts at patience, I found myself vibrating with boredom. The daughters of Trujillo’s wealthier households would spend hours in the morning brushing their fine black hair, and often they sat close enough to their open bedroom shutters that I could watch them as I drank coffee on the balcony of my hotel room. I thought of changing my foot dressing in the open air, as a sort of reply, but I was concerned the girls wouldn’t find it comparably romantic.
Short of major developments at Foggy Bottom, I hadn’t expected to have any reason to go back to the United States. But then Trimble, in the gui dao spirit, sent me to Dallas.
In his latest update over the radio, he’d assured me that the sham scrip was working as intended. Coehorn was impressing everyone with how much money he had in his treasury. ‘The fine folk over here, they’ve regained their respect for Mr Coehorn,’ Trimble said. ‘They see he’s plutocratical again and they figure he must be doing something right. For a while there they wouldn’t do a thing for him. Now he’s back to giving orders.’
‘And he’s still in your pocket.’
‘He’s cozy with the lint, absolutely. The problem is the cooze upstairs.’
I grabbed for a firefly that had found its way into the cabin of the barge. For a moment it flickered against my cupped hand like a match-flame in the wind, and then went out. ‘Who do you mean?’ The firefly, escaping, lit again.
‘You want Coehorn running the whole show. Ain’t about to happen while Burlingame’s on top. Whelt’s nothing but she’s the queen bee. Keeps the other camp in line, nice and tight. Doesn’t matter how rich Coehorn gets if the Hollywoods are still loyal.’
‘So we need to reduce her influence.’
‘Listen. There’s a nuthouse in Dallas called the Carrotwood Hospital. And in this nuthouse there’s a lady from Corpus Christi named Emmeline Sapp, around forty years old. Or maybe she isn’t there any longer but she was. Locked up back in ’36 for being a dike. Wherever she is, you got to get me a photograph. And you got to get me a letter from somebody with a fancy title saying that what happens to her is up to him.’
‘But I can’t possibly go to Dallas. Don’t you know Texas seceded from the Union again in ’46? They’ll never give me a visa to cross the border. I mean, I suppose I could try to sneak in from Mexico …’
‘Really?’ said Trimble, surprised. ‘Texas ain’t part of the country any more?’
‘That’s correct, Trimble. Much like my balls, which also seceded in ’46. For too long they had been denied the right of self-determination.’
‘Oh. I get it. Another one of those. What a riot.’
Although I’d pranked Trimble several times with these sidewise histories, my favorite of the whole bunch had come from Trimble himself: a few times already he’d mentioned the ‘German-American Alliance’ that had supposedly won the war, and even though I was curious to find out where he’d got that idea, for my own amusement I preferred not to set him straight. Tonight the morbid smell that sometimes blew through the mangroves was especially strong. These swamps weren’t as thick as the jungle they margined, but they were even more obnoxious; take something that’s already overripe and then leave it in a puddle. Admittedly, the abscess on my foot wasn’t much of an air freshener. ‘Anyway, what the hell does this woman in Dallas have to do with the temple?’
‘Trust me on this, Zonulet. This baritone babe is the easiest way to get to where we’re going.’
I didn’t trust Trimble on anything whatsoever. In fact, I was almost certain that he was lying to me – I just wasn’t sure about exactly what. But at some point he would need to prove his success in advancing my interests, otherwise the manna from heaven, the cigarettes and chocolate and matches and underwear and cold hard rayon, would cease to arrive. He was smart enough to understand that if he tried to screw me he’d only be screwing himself in the long run. Our interests were aligned. That was much better than trust.
So I went to Dallas.
The Lovelinch Institute had been built according to the Aufrichtigkloster doctrine of post-war therapeutic architecture, which held that corners and turns were redolent of labyrinths; hence this second-floor corridor, which was the longest I had ever seen outside a military installation. From the threshold of Dr Kubie’s office, I estimated the distance to the other end to be somewhere between two hundred yards and infinity, and without the windows that ran down one side looking out on to the lawn, it would certainly have matched any labyrinth in oppressiveness. This monument to progressive European ideas felt a little out of place in the middle of Texas, and so did its director, whose starchy bearing and rapid, pedantic, slightly anglicised speech made him seem like a Texan parody of a North-easterner (I later found out he was actually from Chicago).
Fine distinctions aside, howe
ver, the real incongruity in this particular scene was the water that streamed half an inch deep down the endless hallway.
‘I’m afraid you’ve chosen the worst possible day to visit us,’ said Kubie. We were splashing along with rubber galoshes over our shoes. ‘No one has yet been able to explain to me how this was the result of routine maintenance on the hot-water pipes.’
‘I’ve come a very long way to meet your patient. A little indoor weather isn’t of any account.’
‘In circumstances like this we give the patients a choice of whether or not to evacuate. For some it’s horribly distressing, a kind of apocalypse. But for most it’s merely a break in the monotony of life here. Miss Sapp chose to stay in her room. These days she has quite a robust disposition. But please be mindful, all the same, that she is unaccustomed to visitors.’
Here I was again, taking pictures of the most obscure holdings in the archive. ‘What is Miss Sapp’s condition, exactly?’
Kubie made a regretful hum. ‘Her case history is a rather lurid patchwork. With her consent I may one day publish on the subject. In 1935 she was committed to Carrotwood Hospital by her family, suffering from what was described at the time as “sexual derangement”. Meaning she’d supposedly forced herself on her aunt, who was only a few years older than her. I don’t know what happened during her years at Carrotwood – records were only selectively kept. Whether her “sexual derangement” was “cured”, I wouldn’t venture to say, but by the time Carrotwood was closed by the state, and Miss Sapp came here to Lovelinch, she was in a state of chronic delirium. Phantasmagoric hallucinations day and night. She couldn’t function. That was what made her a candidate for the unilateral gradatorectomy.’
‘Unilateral say-it-again?’
‘Gradatorectomy. It’s a new procedure but I dare say we may one day look back on it as the Lovelinch Institute’s chief contribution to the history of psychiatric medicine. In the past, most surgeries of its kind have been bilateral, meaning resections have been made on both sides. But so much is now known about the hemispheric arrangement of the brain that it’s possible to be much more precise. In this case, only the left temporal gradatorium has been resected, and the right temporal gradatorium has been left intact. The gradatorium, a structure so named because of its resemblance to—’