by Ned Beauman
‘This is quite unexpected,’ Phibbs said, although he didn’t show the most microscopic sign of surprise in his tone or his body language – perhaps because he’d already guessed my purposes, but more likely, I thought, because this was a guy with such discipline over his involuntary reactions that he scheduled his belches a week in advance.
‘The world still doesn’t know any temple is there,’ I said. ‘It’s a regular Shambhala. To the north and the east there are mountains and to the south and the west there are Indians running around the rainforest with guns. So up until now, no prying eyes. But that’s going to change. Do you know anything about artificial satellites?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a matter of months from launching one of their doohickeys into orbit around the earth. I have friends in that business so if I want to find out the latest all I have to do is make a long-distance call to California. Soon there’ll be so many up there it’ll look like rush hour on Lexington. Maybe the first one won’t have a camera on it. Maybe even the second one won’t have a camera on it. But after that? Come on. You know where I work. You can imagine the anticipation. So we’ll have these satellites up there, transmitting pictures to us just like television. But we can’t just park them up over Russia. That’s not how they work. They keep going round and round. Over the oceans. Over the continents. Over Honduras. And even if nobody gives a damn what the Honduran jungle looks like to the birds, somebody is going to look at those pictures. We’ve got a lot of people in government just trying to pass the time. And they’re going to find out the temple is there. I don’t just mean my outfit. I mean the world is going to find out. And there aren’t enough Indians with guns to keep the door shut after that. So there will be a lot of inquisitive people at the temple. And before long the front page of the New York Times will be reporting that in 1938 Elias Coehorn Sr. sent his son, and about fifty other Eastern Aggregate contract employees, out to the jungle, and they didn’t come back, and he kept quiet about it, and he didn’t fetch them home, and indeed he may have impeded any efforts to fetch them home, and golly, you won’t believe this, but they’re still out there, in an awfully strange condition. Now, is that your preference? I don’t think it is. That doesn’t sound to me like the Eastern Aggregate style. This temple thing has to be wrapped up one way or another, and I think you’d rather it was wrapped up with a minimum of embarrassment and a minimum of untidiness. That means stopping the party before the cameras roll from the firmament. Understand?’
‘I believe I follow you, yes,’ said Phibbs evenly.
‘So we send an expedition out there. Well-trained, well-armed. You pay for it. I lead it. Will it be official Eastern Aggregate business? That’s up to you. Will it be official State Department or Central Intelligence Agency business? Not at the time, no. But afterwards I expect to find myself in a position to make any retrospective endorsements that might prove necessary.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘Sure, you could just send an expedition of your own. You could leave me out of it. But right now there are only two guys outside Honduras who have ever been to the Eastern Aggregate camp. One of them is me. The other one is a kid who grew up there, and nobody except me knows where that kid is now. If you go out there without us, you’re astray in a gloomy wood, as an old buddy of mine used to say. Bring me and the kid, and you know where to go and who to see once you get there.’
‘If you’ll permit me the question, Mr Zonulet, what would be your own incentive to steward such a venture? I assume you wouldn’t be drawing a salary.’
‘Simple: there’s something at the temple I want. The Americans living there are in the way of my getting it. And when I say I want it, I say that in my capacity as a servant of our government and our nation. I have the future of every free society in mind.’
‘I see.’ Phibbs paused, not actually for thought, it seemed to me, because he already knew what he was going to say, but as a courtesy, signaling to his guest that in principle he found this conversation important enough to be worth pausing over. As with all his courtesies, its absolute hollowness was part of its grandeur. ‘I understand that you believe the venture you propose would be to the benefit of the Eastern Aggregate Company, and for that reason I must give you my deepest thanks for bringing it to my attention. However, I regret to say that we don’t see eye to eye on every one of your premises. The vision you present of a globe photographed from every angle by these remarkable stringless kites – no doubt such a thing will come to pass. One day. But if I’m correct, no country on earth has so far succeeded in launching a single such electronic satellite into orbit?’
‘Both the White House and the Kremlin have stated the intention—’
‘Our current war is a war of bluff,’ Phibbs said. ‘Naturally, intentions of all kinds will be stated.’
‘Like I said, it’s a matter of months. A year at the most.’
‘With the greatest respect, you are far from the first visitor to sit in my office and tell me about a technological advance that will supposedly be critical to the future of this company. I am reminded of a proverb that Mr Coehorn sometimes liked to use in analogous situations. “Don’t burn the milkmaid until you see the third tit.” Have you ever come across the phrase yourself?’
In the atmosphere of this office the word ‘tit’ exploded like a neutron bomb, just as Phibbs must have intended. It made the remark definitive. There would be no point in arguing. ‘No, I never have.’
‘It refers to the old folk belief, still not quite lapsed during Mr Coehorn’s boyhood in Hershey, that witches possess a supernumary nipple. I think it can best be elucidated as a combination of two more common proverbs: “I’ll believe it when I see it” and “Let sleeping dogs lie”.’
‘Right.’
Another pause. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr Zonulet?’
As I took the elevator back down after my failed sales pitch, I realised that Phibbs had never even admitted outright to knowing anything about any Americans in the jungle. Meanwhile, I’d laid out my own position in prodigal detail. That asymmetry was inherent to the situation, of course, and I’d expected it from the start, but I still couldn’t help feeling as if I’d shamed my own training. Phibbs was truly a professional. I imagined him coming into Ada Coehorn’s dressing room with a pistol when she was naked on the chaise longue with Arnold Spindler all those years ago, and how terrifying that must have been.
Outside, it was one of those blue fall afternoons like a cool windowpane against your forehead, the perfect curative for all those months in the tropics, but I was in no mood to appreciate it. If Eastern Aggregate wouldn’t back me, who would? Kingdom Pictures no longer existed. Maybe a year or two earlier I could have gone back to Cuba to raise the money myself by brokering a few deals. There had always been opportunities, but I had rarely bothered, because dollars and pesos were so trivial to me compared to the more arcane currencies in which I preferred to traffic. However, I’d been neglecting my contacts there – and Batista’s clumsiness was starting to breed a measure of anxiety and circumspection among those who had the most to lose, even though you only needed to take a calm look at the situation to see the rebels didn’t have a hope in hell of reaching Havana – so I couldn’t be sure I was still adequately placed to make those quick profits as an insider-outsider.
Until I could fund this mission, the fungus on the armor at the temple would just be waiting there pricelessly like sunken treasure; and I was in a worse position than I’d been in the day before, because I didn’t know what steps Phibbs might now take. I cursed Branch 9 for diverting McKellar to Jakarta. Together we could have cracked this. I decided to go to a bar to think it over. Just a couple of drinks would help.
Seventeen hours later, I was woken by the telephone in my hotel room on Seventh Avenue. Deep in the Ebano Lagoon – beneath the dark water shackled by algae and fronds, beneath the trickle of effluent from the pumps of my lumber barge, beneath the rotting corpses of fish and f
owl, beneath the spite-worm eggs quickening in the flatulent mulch, beneath the bottom-feeders and the parasites upon the bottom-feeders and the parasites upon those parasites – deep beneath all of that, in the most fetid zone in the world, creation might have found a place for an invertebrate as dismal as I felt at that moment.
Lying on the other pillow was a set of false teeth. I didn’t recognise them. Maybe one day, I thought as I reached for the handset, they would package the scrying mold along with your Alka-Seltzer, so you could find out what had happened to you the previous night.
‘Mr Zonulet? This is John Phibbs. Good morning to you.’
I was sure I hadn’t mentioned to him where I was staying. ‘Hi. Yes.’ I could barely speak.
‘As you will already have guessed, I’m calling to eat my words.’
He seemed to assume I would know what he was talking about. I wasn’t about to admit that I’d only just woken up. ‘Oh. Yes.’
‘Events have proven me wrong, and they have not tarried a moment in doing so.’
‘Right. Yes.’ With a titanic effort of will I hauled myself out of bed, and, carrying the telephone cradle with me, walked naked to the door.
‘Today’s news has prompted me to a reconsideration of sorts. May I prevail upon you to return to my office for another discussion? This afternoon, perhaps?’
‘Okay. Yes.’
* * *
I opened the door. As I’d hoped, my complimentary copy of the New York Times lay on the threshold. SOVIET FIRES SATELLITE INTO SPACE, read the headline. IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 M.P.H.; SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S.
* * *
Greetings from picturesque San Esteban.
I will quote from Zonulet’s manuscript, because it describes me well enough, to say that during the period of my life I call the Pinch, ‘a connection or a logic seemed absent, grievously absent, absent like something stolen.’ I think Zonulet feels the same way about the events of the last few years, and that is why he could be persuaded to come with me to Honduras.
In this case if the absent logic has a name it may be REMOTER. In 1935 REMOTER left the temple in Honduras, which had been lost to the world for centuries, and set sail for Red Hook, Brooklyn. Three years later, Elias Coehorn Sr., the skyscraper khan of New York, made the decision to send two expeditions back to that same temple, one under his own name, the other under the name of Arnold Spindler, a dead man living on as an impostrous puppet, in order to test their two sons against each other. I do not believe the timing can be a coincidence. Somehow REMOTER must have precipitated all this.
If Poyais O’Donnell could explain to us who REMOTER is and what agenda he or she has been pursuing – well, this manuscript is an accounting, and even though it is too late now for Zonulet to avert the ruin of his enterprise, it would still mean something to him to fill out some of the vast blank spaces in the ledger.
I may as well carry on from where I left off (even if that is a nicety obsolete in these pages). Zonulet and I talked for hours at his kitchen table. I wanted him to admit what he has been hiding from me but he never did. I could not ask him outright because to do so would have felt like an act of aggression. There was nothing flirtatious in our talk, and yet this long, serious, difficult conversation was conducive to what followed because, as if the two of us were working a great crosscut saw together, it synchronised us physically, not only in the rhythm of our work but also in our exhaustion as the night drew on. We fell into bed together, as they say. There, we were not tired, and Zonulet belied his account of himself as a hospice case, even if he did take a very long time to recover afterwards.
When I passed him a cigarette, he said, ‘I’ll go to Tegucigalpa with you as long as we can get back here by Monday.’
‘Aha. The honeytrap has sprung.’
‘Hey, no joke. I’ve been waiting for a chance with you since 1938.’
‘What a nice thing to say.’ I knew it wasn’t true.
But he said, ‘I mean it. You ever think maybe this was all my plan, not yours?’
‘All what?’
‘The last twenty years. Maybe it was all leading up to tonight.’
‘The expeditions? The temple?’
He yawned. ‘Branch 9. Everything. And here you are. Worked out perfectly.’
‘My God. So when I plotted the connections between everything that’s happened and in those connections I made out a grand conspiracy … a powerful and mysterious intent … a sort of kraken moving beneath the waters …’
‘You know how far I’ll go for a nice piece of tail.’ He turned over. After that he was asleep so fast I had to reach over and take the cigarette out of his hand. The sheet had fallen off him, and before I pulled it up over his shoulders, I saw for the first time that he has a scar on his left side from what must have been a very bad wound.
The next morning we drove to Washington National Airport. Ahead of us in line at the Pan Am counter were two unshaven men whose conversation returned so continually to the refrain ‘The important thing is to know when to cut your losses and get out,’ that I felt almost personally defrauded when they bought round-trip tickets to Mexico City instead of the more dramatic one-way tickets they had led me to anticipate. Our turn came and we booked our own passage to Tegucigalpa via Miami.
No need to worry: I do not intend to begin a travelogue. This is not Life magazine and I am not getting paid five cents a word for my evocations. (You would think Zonulet was getting paid ten.) I will only note that the Plaza Dolores in Tegucigalpa seems like a lovely place to get married, with its fudge carts and its russet pigeons and its lazy fragrant air on which confetti might drift for miles to seed other weddings in other houses. Which makes it a special pity that Señorita Josefa Candida Gonzalez was cheated out of her ceremony. No, we did not find Poyais O’Donnell in San Esteban, because Poyais O’Donnell did not attend his own wedding.
Arriving in the early evening, we checked into connecting rooms in a hotel near the church. Zonulet discovered that although the concierge had dealt with O’Donnell in the past, he did not know where he might be staying this time. So Zonulet slipped him a bill to call around his counterparts at all the other hotels, but none of them had seen O’Donnell either. As a fall-back, the concierge gave us directions to the villa of General Gonzalez, O’Donnell’s fiancée’s father, only a few blocks to the north. Watching Zonulet, I could see he had already recovered some of his old springiness. He was buying information in a tropical climate. He was home.
As we approached the house, I drew Zonulet’s attention to a beautiful young woman on one of the upstairs balconies. She stood there weeping, both hands on the rail as she looked out over the rooftops as if demanding some sort of explanation from the dusk. We rang the bell. A maid answered. I do not speak Spanish but I knew Zonulet was telling her that we were in town for our friend O’Donnell’s wedding and wanted to enquire about his whereabouts.
The maid’s tone was grave. Zonulet’s tone was at first incredulous and then angry. He asked several more questions.
I said, ‘What’s going on?’
Zonulet stamped his foot. ‘God-fucking-damnit!’
‘What?’
‘She says the wedding’s off! O’Donnell’s in San Esteban! He has a nasty case of hemorrhagic fever and they don’t know if he’ll live. Josefa up there’ – the girl on the balcony – ‘wants to go there to be with him, but her father won’t allow it in case she catches it too. That’s their story.’ He backed a few steps away from the door and started shouting up at the balcony.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m asking her where the prick’s hiding. I’m asking her what they’ve really done with him. Hemorrhagic fever my ass!’
‘She looks awfully sad. Maybe you’d better not—’
But the fiancée, at first too taken aback to speak, was now screaming back down at Zonulet, her voice raw from crying and ablaze with fury. Zonulet replied with undiminished conviction. I tugged on Zonulet’
s arm but the exchange continued until Josefa darted indoors. I thought perhaps Zonulet had heroically routed the tearful young bride, until she returned to the balcony with crystal sherry glasses fanned in each hand and started hurling them down at us one by one. At that point Zonulet was finally willing to leave.
As we walked back to the hotel I said, ‘How do we get to San Esteban?’
‘Oh, no. Not a chance. I might’ve squired you as far as Tegucigalpa against my better judgment, but I’m sure as hell not going all the way to San Esteban. O’Donnell’s made an asshole out of me for the last time. I’m not even sure any more that he really exists. Nobody’s ever seen him.’
‘But the concierge and the maid and the girl …’
‘To hell with them,’ he said. ‘O’Donnell might as well be a fucking leprechaun.’
‘And your friend Wilson …’
‘What kind of a name is Poyais, anyway?’
‘I suppose it’s Irish or something. Listen, we’re already in Honduras. We know where O’Donnell is and we know he isn’t going anywhere if he’s sick in bed. We’re so close to REMOTER. We’d be fools to turn back now. Imagine saying to Bev, “Well, I went all the way out to Sheepshead Bay, but it turned out my source was in Brighton Beach, so I gave up and came home.”’
‘Don’t try to hoke me with nostalgia,’ Zonulet growled.
Perhaps the important thing is, indeed, to know when to cut your losses and get out. No doubt tidy people can make a tidy severance. But without my losses I am not sure what would be left of my life. I am not one of those tidy people, and neither is Zonulet. As far as he is concerned, until it is too late to turn back, you have not really set out.
He never announced a change of mind. When we got back to the hotel, he simply marched up to the concierge and started asking him about buses to Catacamas.
We left the next morning. I had been led to understand that when you take a bus south of the border there are chickens under every arm, there are chickens on every lap, there are chickens in the aisles, there are chickens on the roof, the driver and conductor are perhaps also chickens. But there were no chickens at all on this bus, which jounced for 150 miles over what I very naïvely took for bad roads. About those roads I was mistaken too. I now know that in fact they were not bad roads. In relative terms they were wonderful roads. Only later, after nightfall, did I find out what bad roads are, when we hired a truck to take us from Catacamas to San Esteban.