by Ned Beauman
It had not been Trimble’s intention to shed fingers last night. Certainly he’d expected Meinong to threaten him with violence if he didn’t lead him to the (notional) extortion materials. But he hadn’t planned on Meinong paying out some of that violence as an advance deposit.
Nor had he planned on being taken captive before he could make the most of his victory. Now Meinong was just a buffet for the forest and maybe nobody would ever know about it.
‘I hope my boys have been giving you proper care for your injury,’ said Colonel Atwater. He was a packet of sinews, not much more than five feet tall, with thinning gray hair, and he spoke without variation in pitch or rhythm. ‘As you can see I have some idea of what it’s like to lose a part of your body you depend upon.’ He gestured at the black patch he wore over his right eye. ‘Souvenir of my army days.’
‘He beat a man to death in a beer hall in Stuttgart and that’s what he got for his trouble,’ slurred his wife, splashing some more water over her head.
‘We’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long while,’ Colonel Atwater said. ‘My boys made visual contact a few times, enough to be pretty sure you were the one picking up those airdrops in the forest. But they never could catch up with you, and they never could catch up with any of those airdrops, either – until that last one. We’d already fired on the airship and we saw the pilot jettison the weight not far from here. After we found the crate we opened it up and we found some’ – he lifted the manila file – ‘best way to say it, puzzling photographs and a puzzling letter.’
‘For my husband those pictures were better than a nude cabaret,’ said Mrs Atwater. ‘Close-ups of burns and whelts on pale skin. A woman with dead eyes like you could do anything to her and she wouldn’t complain. I’m surprised he didn’t take them into the latrine with him.’
Her husband looked pained. ‘Honey, I wish you …’ He turned back to Trimble. ‘I’m posted overseas for so long sometimes that it’s nice for us both when I can bring her out here for a little while.’
‘Since the Theorozole warmed me up he doesn’t dare leave me unattended back in Washington. We’ve been married for twenty-four years and I know everything he’s done and I’ll tell anybody who asks.’
‘Now, honey—’
‘Make him give me a massage.’
‘I told you, honey, he’s not the masseur. He probably doesn’t have a qualification.’ Colonel Atwater turned back to Trimble. ‘Do you have a qualification?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘This letter says that under certain circumstances a woman named Emmeline Sapp could be allowed to leave a mental institution in Texas, where the conditions are not very, best way to say it, modern, judging from these photographs. Now, why was this material in the airdrop? Was there material like this in every airdrop? Who was responsible for these airdrops?’
‘Give me back what’s in that file and I’ll tell you everything you want to know,’ Trimble said.
‘I think you may have, best way to say it, misconstrued the nature of this conversation, Mr Trimble. I work for the State Department—’
‘He works for the Central Intelligence Agency,’ said Mrs Atwater. ‘You’d better spill. He may talk like a furniture salesman but the only thing that gives him pleasure is causing pain. I bet he’s jealous of whoever got to take those fingers off you.’
‘I don’t think anything like that will be necessary,’ said the colonel.
‘Oh, but he sure hopes it will be necessary,’ said his wife. ‘He prays to God, Santa Claus, and Eisenhower it will be necessary.’
‘Like I told you,’ Trimble said. ‘Let me have the file and I’ll sing the whole songbook.’
‘Hold him,’ Colonel Atwater told one of the soldiers behind Trimble, who clamped down on Trimble’s upper arms. Then he gave Trimble a punch in the gut hard enough to turn shit into diamonds. Trimble bowed his head, retching, until Atwater pushed his chin back up and walloped him twice across the face.
‘Don’t make me watch this again,’ said Mrs Atwater. ‘Not if you’re going to go all the way.’
Trimble’s cheekbone felt like it might be broken. ‘I’ll tell you all about Emmeline Sapp for nothing,’ he said, in a voice as slushy as Mrs Atwater’s, ‘and then after that we can make a deal for the real hot cockles.’
‘What’s a hot cockle, honey?’ said the colonel. His wife mumbled something. ‘Me neither.’ He turned back to his interrogatee. ‘No deals, Mr Trimble.’ He wound up for another punch.
‘Sir?’ An officer had come into the tent.
Atwater dropped his fist. ‘Just a moment,’ he said to Trimble, almost apologetically. He went over to confer with the officer in an undertone, and Trimble was surprised to make out a word that sounded a lot like ‘Burlingame’. Mrs Atwater and the metal frame of her camp bed groaned in chorus as she turned onto her side. Outside, Trimble could hear music playing from a tinny speaker, maybe some Honduran dancehall number.
‘What’s the Central Intelligence Agency?’ he said. ‘Is that like Hoover’s bureau?’
‘No, a much better invention,’ said Mrs Atwater, ‘because it exports so many of our assholes to other countries.’
At last, Atwater came back to where Trimble sat bleeding from the mouth. ‘Our guy at the temple—’
‘You’ve got a guy at the temple?’ Trimble said. ‘An American?’
‘Sure. We recruited him a long time ago. He keeps us up to date with what’s going on over there.’ Trimble felt sick with indignation that somebody at the temple had the kind of secret you could display in the window at Tiffany’s and he’d never heard about it. ‘We just got an urgent report from him. They’re talking about putting it back together. Do you know anything about that?’
‘You mean Whelt won?’
‘No. For some reason they’ve decided to put it back together the wrong way. They’re going to stack it up like a pallet of bricks. On Burlingame’s initiative. This is what I’m told.’
‘He works for the CIA but he takes orders from the United Fruit Company,’ said Mrs Atwater. ‘He was sent to take over this camp from the natives. They only train guerrillas to pay the electric bill. Really they’re here to make sure nobody meddles with the temple. He doesn’t know why. It tortures him that he doesn’t know why. But back in Washington we get big hampers of mangos and pineapples sent to the house.’
‘Actually, I’m just here as a, best way to say it, neutral observer,’ said Atwater, ‘and I can tell you that the United States has no policy of intervention in this region. All the same, there are good reasons why the temple ought to be kept how it is.’
‘I can help you with that,’ said Trimble. He understood how power flowed and pooled and cascaded over the temple steps, so it was no surprise to him that, with Meinong gone, Burlingame was bossier than ever. But he wasn’t sure why she would give such a screwy order. ‘You just got to give me back what’s in that file.’
He explained that he only had to show the pictures and the letter to Gracie Calix, Burlingame’s moll, and Calix would do anything he asked. And if Calix threatened to leave her lover over this pallet-of-bricks idea, Burlingame would drop it like a poisonous snake. You couldn’t get to Burlingame by Trimble’s usual method, a friendly exchange of favors. She was too much of a bluenose. But you could get to her through Calix, because, as Trimble saw it, Calix was like the magical Crown of Shambhala that the Imperator wore to battle evil on (the mention of the company had brought it straight back to him) the old United Fruit Company Radio Hour. Take it off and Burlingame would transform back into a frightened little nobody.
‘But if I give you this file and let you go,’ Colonel Atwater said, ‘what’s to stop you from just high-tailing it?’
‘Because you still got something I want,’ Trimble said.
‘And what’s that?’
‘I want a job with your Central Intelligence Agency. I think it would suit me pretty fine.’
Colonel Atwater took a cigar from a box on his desk, lit it, and pu
ffed a couple of times. ‘You want a job.’
‘That’s right.’
Atwater raised his eyebrows, as if to say, stranger things have happened. ‘All right, it’s a deal. I’ll give you this file. Heck, I’ll throw in a first-aid kit and a few cans of pork loaf. And if you can get Burlingame’s sexual companion to talk her out of interfering with the temple, you have my word that afterwards you will have a job waiting for you with the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. Entry-level, of course. But people move up fast.’ Trimble got to his feet and they shook on it like two men who hadn’t just been on opposite ends of a beating. ‘I’d better warn you that if you can’t manage it, I will probably have no option but to send my boys to, best way to say it, supervise things there for a while.’
‘One time he came back whistling from a mission like that,’ said Mrs Atwater, ‘and he sat down with a pocket knife to get a stone out of the sole of his boot, but when it fell out, it wasn’t a stone, it was a tooth. Another time I actually saw pictures. The convent in Bangassou. Some men have mistresses …’
‘The men and women at the temple are American citizens and their safety is paramount. Good to meet you, Mr Trimble.’
‘Tell him to give me a massage before he leaves. I can’t wait any longer. My neck is full of fluid. These damned pills. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what Theorozole means.’
‘Honey, he doesn’t have the fingers for it.’
‘I’d rather feel his bleeding nubs on my back than smell the reek of your socket the next time you take off your eyepatch to get into bed with me.’
‘My socket emitted an odor only in the first few weeks after the injury and even then just intermittently,’ Colonel Atwater assured Trimble. His wife mumbled something. ‘That’s hurtful, honey.’
*
November 5th, 1957
The Lovelinch Institute
3350 Sheldon Avenue
Dallas, TX
United States
My love,
I never thought I’d write you another letter. The first time was the day I met Trimble & the last time was the day before Trimble left the camp. Now he’s back & I’m writing you again. It figures I’d say because you’re the opposite of him, he’s you with a minus sign in front, Trimble walking this earth would be grounds to condemn the whole property like one of those plague houses in Galveston if you weren’t walking it too to make up for him. So maybe before I even knew how bad he was I was already trying to set your blessing against his curse. But that’s why it spins my eyes in my head to think of you tangled up with that man. I swear it shouldn’t be possible, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, I mean metaphysically speaking, him & you shouldn’t be able to touch any more than noon can share a porch with night. But he found you. I don’t know how but he found you.
He was a shadow out of the rain when I was foraging. Missing fingers, busted face. Both recent by the looks of it. I don’t know who did that to him but whoever it was I’d like to shake his hand.
He showed me the pictures of you & when I saw them
Twenty years but I still recognise every part of you like the sound of a voice. Do you know color pictures look [illegible] now than they used to, I guess they came up with a way to put in more colors. Well I wish they hadn’t. All those bruises. All those scalds. Too many colors. No mercy in what those colors tell. Have they been doing that to you these twenty years Emmy. All this time you’ve been burning in hell. I swear I never knew you had it as bad as that, I heard stories about some of those places, but I figured your folks, my kin, they may not have half a heart between them but they wouldn’t let anything like that happen to their Emmy. But it’s my fault as much as it’s theirs. I know that.
You’re still so beautiful Emmy. More than in my memory even.
All this time & I still don’t like to talk to you about Joan. It’s not because I think you’ll be jealous, I’m not such a fool as that, not quite. It just feels like a discourtesy to both of you. I do love her, I’ll tell you that straight out. In bed one night she asked if I loved her more than I loved you, but I think only her tongue was still awake because she was snoring before I’d pronounced a word on the matter & the next day she said she didn’t remember asking. But I lay there thinking on it. Well what do you love the most, the air you breathe or the lungs you were given to breath it with.
She might do it, that’s the trouble. If I went to Joan & said to her what Trimble asked me to say, that she’s got to hang up the cubing or I’ll leave her, then she might do it, I really think so. If she even heard that he had me in a fix, & there was no way around it because this fix reaches all the way up to Texas, she might go ahead & hang up the cubing without my even asking. She’s that good to me.
Oh Emmy I haven’t even told you what the cubing is, I haven’t told you anything that’s been going on, & there’s so much to tell. Mr Meinong’s gone & we still haven’t any idea what became of him except his machete was gone too, so he must have had some business in the forest, unless somebody went in his cabin & took them both but not the credit afterwards. It was lucky for the New York folks that Joan was down there the next morning because they were so used to Mr Meinong telling them what to do they needed reminding to breathe I’d say. Not to mention Mr Coehorn out of his jail cell & acting like a gentleman, that might have been the biggest shock of all ha ha.
But we didn’t have the leisure to get accustomed to it all because right away Joan & Mr Coehorn & Mr Whelt were telling us about the cubing. Joan reckons the cubing is the only way we can all get right in the head & I guess she’s right because just hearing about it I felt righter in the head & we hadn’t even started yet. Now everybody’s pitching in. We’re going to put the temple together again but together according to our own fancy this time & nobody else’s. Joan’s set on it & all hell couldn’t stop her now.
All hell couldn’t but one lady could, & that’s your unfaithful correspondent. She’s got one weakness & it’s me & I never asked to be her weakness but I am. Eleven years back Trimble tried to bend me to his purposes & for a while I let him & I learned that nothing you do for that man is harmless, even the small things are evil, & the big things, they’re the destruction of us all. When he wanted me to say Mr Aldobrand had misused me I saw things clearly for the first time & I didn’t do it & I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t know why he wants to stop the cubing now but I’m not going to help him. I’m going to call his bluff. You understand don’t you Emmy.
But that means he won’t spring you. If I say no to him it’ll be like I had a chance to spring you right in front of me, easy, & I didn’t take it. All this time I’ve lived with you on my conscience but after that. No. It doesn’t bear contemplating. So I’ll have to spring you myself.
I’ll get you out Emmy, I’ll do it with a shotgun if I have to. I’ll come back to Texas & I’ll find you & I’ll get you out. I’m just sorry it took me so long. I ought to be grateful to Trimble I suppose, it sounds like a bad joke but first of all if he hadn’t shown me those pictures I wouldn’t have seen for myself the arrears I was in, & second he proved it isn’t ever too late to come back & make good on your promises. It isn’t crazy to wait all those years, or maybe it is crazy but crazy’s better than giving up. I should have come for you with Lyndon’s 12-gauge the same night they put you in, but I was just a raw little girl then, I didn’t know how to do the least thing for myself. Now I’ve lived out here all this time & seen what a body can do if she only sets her mind to it.
It’ll hurt Joan something [illegible]. I know it will & I’m sorry for that too. But she’s too strong for the hurt to last. She was a sapling when I met her but now she’s a kapok tree. I don’t want to say goodbye to her face in case I change my mind. I’ll leave her a note but I won’t put Trimble’s name in it. I don’t want to set her thinking he might could fetch me back for her if she does what he says. One day I’ll see her again & I’ll explain. I’ll tell her I was just trying
to be as gutsy once as she is all the time.
I’ll see you soon Emmy. Yours forever. Feels like we’ve been here forever already but don’t you worry forever still isn’t up so I’m still yours.
And like they say that’s all she wrote.
Gracie
* * *
Vansaska here, yet again.
This morning Zonulet almost throttled Wilson after it turned out that O’Donnell’s coffin was empty. I will not go into detail, because the events were along much the same lines as last night, when Zonulet almost throttled Wilson after it turned out that O’Donnell had died of hemorrhagic fever, except this time they were of a rather greater intensity and I had to go to rather greater lengths to talk Zonulet down. Wilson seemed sheepish, not because he admits any involvement in O’Donnell’s continuing incorporeality – he does not, and I believe him – but only because a host of his breeding will always feel personally responsible if one of his guests should happen to find himself inconvenienced during his stay by a head cold or a forgotten shaving kit or an uncontrollable urge to commit a reckless murder in front of a number of witnesses.
Afterwards, I thought we had better leave, and Zonulet agreed, but Wilson would not allow it. Instead, we all sat down in the drawing room of Le Sphinx and his housekeeper, Reyna, poured us all glasses of horchata, which looks like milk and tastes like chocolate. ‘I believe I may have grasped the situation at last,’ Wilson said. ‘I would not for a moment accuse you of dishonesty. But there may come a time in even the most upright fellow’s life when, like King Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen masquerading as a pageboy, he must “disguise that, which, to appear itself, must not yet be, but by self-danger.” (Admittedly not the Bard’s most tripsome lines.)’