by Ned Beauman
He looks up. ‘You said there was a third item.’
Phibbs puts the last file down on the desk. ‘I wasn’t quite sure whether this warranted your attention, sir, but it is a rather singular occurrence. Here is an image we received by wirephoto from La Ceiba in Spanish Honduras. As you know, your foundation operates a mission station near a small town in the north-east called San Esteban. Three days ago a pair of French archaeologists arrived at this mission station requesting water and medical aid. After this was provided, they reported that deep in the jungle, near one of the tributaries of the Río Patuca, about fifty miles inland from the Caribbean Sea, they had been astonished to come across … I’m extremely sorry, sir, but there appears to be something in your ear.’ From the leather instrument pocket sewn into the interior of his suit jacket, Phibbs takes a tiny pair of tweezers. ‘If I may …?’
He leans over and plucks me out of Coehorn’s ear. Before he can drop me into the wastepaper basket next to the glasses, his employer raises a hand. ‘I want to see what it was.’ So instead Phibbs places me on the desk with the care of a jeweller presenting a gemstone, and indeed my blue cuticle stands out with a sapphirine glint against the somber tones of the office as I lie there wriggling on the blotter.
‘Have you ever seen one of these before?’ Coehorn says.
‘Not to my recollection.’
‘How the blazes did it get in my ear?’
For once Phibbs has no answer.
‘Better kill it before you throw it away. Might get out again.’
As fast as I can I try to squirm away from the tweezers, but the distance to the edge of the desk is fifty times the length of my body. Holding me over the wastepaper basket by my midsection, Phibbs increases the pressure on the tweezers just enough to—
When I woke up I was face down on my typewriter. My mouth was dry, my body drenched in sweat.
‘You’re awake. Good timing. I’ve just finished your manuscript.’
I looked up. Meredith Vansaska sat in the armchair by the window, a stack of typewritten pages on her lap.
Part Four
I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid.
(From ‘The Aleph’ by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley)
In Cuba they believed that if you had a fever you should roll some fingernail clippings into a cigarette and drop the cigarette at a crossroads without looking left or right. Whoever picked it up would also take your fever from you. Seeing Vansaska, I felt like I must have smoked her cigarette. The last time I’d seen her, three years ago in her bungalow in Silver Lake, she’d been soggy and abject, a charity case. Now we’d changed places. How she had looked to me back then, that was probably just how I looked to her today, whereas she’d recovered all of her considerable poise. She wore a gray wool suit, cut very slim, perhaps not untainted by recent French notions, with nylon tape at the seams and glass buttons in a wishbone pattern down the front of the jacket.
‘How many brothers did Frieda have?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘In one place you say she has two brothers, in another place you say she has three. Did you make a mistake or did she?’
I thought about it. ‘Well, fuck me. She contradicted herself. Odd thing to contradict yourself about.’
‘Has it ever crossed your mind that she might not have been who she said she was? That she might have been some kind of plant?’
‘Not for a second. Not until now.’
‘Could somebody have staged that murder film just to make you think you’d lost your mind?’
I was serving a life sentence in the prison of ‘all the available evidence’, with no hope of release by any means other than terminal hepatocellular dysfunction. I hadn’t left Springfield, Virginia in months. I was comprehensively defeated. Why should my opponents bother to launch such an elaborate psychologicalwarfare operation against me? It was a long way to go to discompose a guy who was already pretty discomposed.
But several times in my career at the agency I had gone even further to achieve even pettier aims. I thought of the hallucination from which I’d just surfaced. The interrogation, the Fourth Wall, the story about an OSI research liaison with delusions. Perhaps it hadn’t been so malign after all. Perhaps it was more like a dream with a message, urging me to keep faith in my own sanity.
Frieda had claimed that McKellar sent her to me. I recalled Winch saying, ‘College girls aren’t as innocent as they used to be.’ At the time, I’d taken it for an oblique acknowledgement of the favor he’d done me, sending over a pretty 20-year-old to help me polish the family silver. If that was the case, then surely he must have been complicit in the scheme. My former best friend, my former closest ally against Branch 9, had betrayed me.
But another possibility, I now realised, was that he was trying to warn me not to trust her.
And a third possibility was that he genuinely had no foreknowledge of her existence, his joke had been nothing but a pleasantry, and her mention of his name had been another lie. I tried to recall his exact intonation, but Vansaska interrupted: ‘I ought to sock you, by the way.’ She gestured down at the manuscript. ‘You knew everything. And when you came to see me in Silver Lake you wouldn’t even throw me a fucking scrap. No matter how much it would have meant to me.’
I shrugged. ‘I couldn’t. I’m sorry. And I didn’t know everything. I still don’t.’
‘You know a hell of a lot about me and my life. You got almost all of it right. And I’m supposed to believe this was because a fungus made you see things?’
‘Do you have a better explanation?’
‘Not to hand. I hope you admire my dedication, reading every damn page of this. Where did you learn to write this way? A guy whose apartment looks how this apartment looks, you don’t expect him to be secretly addicted to ornamentation. What would Bev have said about all these frills? Don’t you realise simile is a form of paranoia? Proposing a connection between two things because you, and only you, can make out some hidden correspondence in the manner of their operation? Also, it must be as long as Moby Dick already, and you’re not even close to finishing the story.’
‘It is not as long as Moby Dick.’
‘You introduce this person Phibbs at the beginning and we’re expected to remember who he is about ten thousand pages later?’ She groaned. ‘I’m a reporter with a very retentive memory, and I read it in one sitting, and I still had to flip back and check. That’s just one example of many. I hope the hardcover will have an index.’
‘The only other person who was ever supposed to read this—’
‘—is the junior from the Office of Security who will have to go through your things after you die. Sure. But I don’t believe this book is just a curse on anyone who disturbs your tomb. It’s obvious you’ve taken some pride in it. Deep down I bet you hope it gets discovered – leaked – published – lauded in the New York Times.’
I got up and went into the kitchen, where I poured a glass of water, drank it straight down, and poured another one to bring back with me. ‘How d’you get in here?’
‘You left your door unlocked.’
‘That was you in the Bel Air,’ I said. ‘Parked there most of the week.’
‘Yes.’
‘What were you watching me for?’
‘I was told you’d been put out to pasture,’ Vansaska said. ‘I found that hard to believe. I thought it might be a cover. I was going to watch you long enough to verify to my satisfaction the truth of your depressing life here – no offense. So I saw you had a routine, but when you stopped leaving your apartment I became a little concerned.’
‘Why should you care if this is a cover?’
‘I needed to decide whether I could trust you. If you were still enmeshed in your agency, I probably couldn’t.’
‘And what do you need to trust me with?’
‘You know you were talking in your sleep?’ Va
nsaska said. ‘I thought if you talked in your sleep they didn’t let you become a spy.’
‘I wasn’t asleep. I was just somewhere else.’
‘Even in your sleep you sound full of yourself.’
‘What do you need to trust me with?’
Vansaska produced a sheet of paper from her jacket and handed it to me. Unfolding it, I saw that it was a photostat of an agency memorandum marked ‘S-E-C-R-E-T’. ‘Who gave this to you?’ I said.
She told me, but I’m not going to write the name down here.
July 3rd, 1958
MEMORANDUM FOR: Deputy Director of Intelligence
SUBJECT: Summary of REMOTER’s movements since 1935
1. In 1935 Dr Sidney Bridewall, a Cambridge University ethnologist, encountered REMOTER at the temple site during an expedition to Honduras. REMOTER coerced Bridewall into arranging his passage to the United States, with the logistical support of Poyais O’Donnell, a fixer operating in San Esteban and Tegucigalpa.
2. According to O’Donnell, REMOTER took up residence in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Apart from that, nothing is known about REMOTER’s activities in the interim period before Branch 9 first made contact with him in 1953. As a sweetener during negotiations with United Fruit, Branch 9 installed REMOTER in a residential suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan.
3. In the aftermath of the events in north-eastern Honduras in late 1957, REMOTER was found to have quit the Waldorf-Astoria. All subsequent efforts to establish his whereabouts have been unsuccessful. Analysts at Branch 9 believe he is likely to have returned to Honduras, but no word of him has reached our stations there.
‘Who is REMOTER?’ Vansaska said.
‘That’s what you came here to ask me?’
‘I hoped you might know.’
I shook my head. Because of my latest excursion with the fungus, there were things I knew now that I hadn’t known a day earlier, a vast supplementary chronicle of events at the temple between 1956 and 1959. I felt as if my temporal lobes were running red-hot with the effort to house it all, and I was looking forward to getting some of it down on paper simply to relieve the pressure. But that code name still brought nothing useful to mind. ‘Sorry you wasted a trip. Your source couldn’t tell you?’
‘No. You write in here that Tapscott mentioned REMOTER when you questioned him in Havana.’
‘Yeah, but all he knew was the name, same as you. Then McKellar found out a little more, but not enough.’
Vansaska sighed. ‘Have you got anything to eat? I skipped lunch waiting for you outside the doors of perception.’
‘Well, I had a bit of trouble finding the latch,’ I said. ‘I have cornflakes, but I think the milk’s sour. Some lemons. Maybe a little anchovy paste.’
‘Can we go out and eat, then?’
‘They probably already know you’re here talking to me, but even so, I’m not going out with you in public for no good reason.’ However, I was hungry myself. ‘I’ll drive over and get carry-out from the diner. What do you want?’
‘What do you usually get?’
‘The hamburger.’
‘Is it good?’
‘It’s terrible.’
She shrugged. ‘Fine.’
As I was leaving, she said, ‘Why do you get so much mail?’
‘I don’t. I just gave up opening it. So it piles up.’
‘Shall I go through it for you? Zonulet, even when I’m at my lowest, I still open my mail.’
‘The last girl who did my clerical work gave her notice a little abruptly. So, sure, I guess I could use a temp.’
Outside, the sky was violet over Springfield. These were the hours before dinner when all the boys and girls came out, on foot or on bicycles, never stopping to play but always in motion, aswirl around the wide leafy streets, yipping and voracious, so you felt they might swarm and devour any grown-up who hadn’t had the good sense to lock himself indoors. Nevertheless, I survived my mission to the diner and, back at the apartment, I hadn’t even shut the door behind me before Vansaska shoved some paper in my face. ‘Look at this!’
Dropping the bag of food on the side table, I obeyed. First I examined the envelopes, of which there were two. The larger envelope had American stamps and was addressed to my apartment in Springfield, and the smaller envelope had Honduran stamps and was addressed to the offices of Letterblair, Handsom and Lowe in New York. In other words, the letter had been sent on to me by the forwarding service at the address I used when I was undercover.
Then I examined the contents of the inner envelope. There was a letter and a card. The letter was from Wilson.
April 15th, 1959
Manager’s Office
Le Sphinx
San Esteban
Honduras
Esteemed chum,
I’ll begin by explaining the address at the head of this letter. You remember I told you that when I first arrived in San Esteban, Tussmann was running the American consulate here and he needed a man who spoke good English so I took a job. Then when he died I stepped into his shoes. I was the first to admit the situation wasn’t quite official but the Department of State wouldn’t answer any of my letters. Well, the November before last, I finally had the opportunity to make enquiries in person, because there happened to be a number of chaps from your foreign service making a staging post of our little town. (From what I gathered there had been some sort of brouhaha in the jungle relating to an Indian ruin, rather a lot of dead, these Americans busy tidying up afterwards, but that’s by the by.) You’ll never guess what they told me. There isn’t, and never has been, an American consulate in San Esteban. So venerable Tussmann was operating it on spec, as it were, just like me. What an enterprising fellow! His reasons must remain an enigma, but perhaps he wanted a fresh start, as so many of us have at one time or another, and he had some very particular ideas about what that fresh start should entail. At any rate, once the veil of ignorance had been pierced, I felt I could no longer in good conscience introduce myself as the American consul. So I am now merely the proprietor of an establishment we’ve christened Le Sphinx, after the place in Paris. Quite an appropriate narrowing of purview, in a sense, because wasn’t it Tocqueville who once said ‘In America, a diplomacy of courtesans has not yet
That’s as much as I seem to have of it just now but no doubt you can finish it off yourself.
Now, the purpose of this missive is to enclose the enclosed. The last time I saw Poyais O’Donnell, who these days is in San Esteban at least half the time, I asked him, just out of friendly curiosity, if he’d ever seen any sort of windfall from that business with the Irish inheritance, because I assumed it must all have been resolved by now, but he didn’t know what I was talking about, and had never heard of you. So even after all this time you still haven’t caught up with the blighter! Of course, it may very well be that the matter is closed, but in case on the contrary you remain in tireless pursuit like Culhwch after Trwyth (to put it in fittingly Celtic terms), I thought I’d draw your attention to an occasion at which Mr O’Donnell can hardly fail to appear. I don’t know much about the lady except that her clan is bally rich. No doubt there will be rumors that he is marrying her for her money. Well, what of it? My own father was always quite open about his motives in that quarter, even in front of guests, and I felt it perfused our household with a bracing atmosphere of straightforwardness and pragmatism. For that matter
Putting Wilson’s letter aside, I turned to the card.
General and Señora Juan Gonzalez
request the honor of your presence
at the marriage of their daughter
Josefa Candida
to
Mr Poyais O’Donnell
on Saturday the first of July
at twelve o’clock
at the Los Dolores church
in the city of Tegucigalpa
*
Meredith Vansaska here.
It’s after midnight, Zonulet is snoring, and I am writing this by hand on the b
ack of his typescript. He has already put down so much of my history in here that I may as well cut out the middleman.
I was unpacking the carry-out bag on his kitchen table while he read the invitation. He still has a bullish physique, but since I last saw him there has been an alteration, or at least a modulation, in the way he holds himself: he is watchful still, in his face and in his posture, for you can never take that out of a man with his experience, but now it is a watchfulness that scans without expectation a foggy blank horizon, a watchfulness resigned to nothing much to watch for and even less to do about it. I almost wish I could have been here when he really thought he might have murdered that girl, if only because I might have got a look at his old hectic self. ‘That wedding is the day after tomorrow,’ I said. ‘If we go to Tegucigalpa, we can find Poyais O’Donnell, and he can tell us who REMOTER is. This could break the whole thing open, finally.’
‘In ’56, after I got that tip from Tapscott, I spent three weeks in San Esteban waiting around for O’Donnell to arrive. He never did. I felt like a fool. You really think I’m going to go chasing after him again?’
(I still have, as I mentioned to Zonulet, a retentive memory, but nevertheless this must be understood as a reconstruction. I am not going to pretend, like him, that I deal in transcripts.)
‘He’ll be at that church,’ I said. ‘Most likely he’s already in Tegucigalpa. Listen, according to your masterwork it was Poyais O’Donnell who supplied the extras for Hearts in Darkness in ’38, and also the laborers for Eastern Aggregate, except he tried to sell the same natives to both sides. He’s been involved in all this from the beginning. There probably aren’t a lot of people alive who can identify REMOTER. And most of those people work for the CIA, and even if they don’t, we don’t know their names. But we know O’Donnell’s name, and we know exactly where he’ll be this weekend. Don’t you want to interview him?’
Zonulet came over to the table. ‘Not if it means going all the way to Honduras.’