by Ned Beauman
‘Would you start that again from the beginning?’ said Zonulet.
‘I think he’s suggesting you’re a woman dressed up as a man,’ I said.
‘No –’ said Wilson, although he did pause to give Zonulet a brief searching look – ‘no, I’m not suggesting that. I’m only suggesting that when I observed the agonies of grief with which you met the news of O’Donnell’s passing I immediately twigged that you could not be who you say you are.’
Zonulet met my eyes. I shrugged back at him, meaning: is there any use in keeping that ragged old cover story going after everything that’s happened? ‘You’ve got me dead to rights, Wilson,’ Zonulet said. ‘I’m not a notary agent.’
‘I knew it!’ said Wilson, shaking his fist in triumph.
‘I am, or was, a case officer at the Central Intelligence Agency. A spy. I first came to San Esteban because I believed O’Donnell would know something about a secret training camp in the jungle. I am here now for similar but more complex reasons.’
‘Oh …’ said Wilson, crestfallen. ‘I was almost certain you were going to say you and O’Donnell were long-lost brothers. Exactly like in Cymbeline. “You call’d me brother, when I was but your sister,” or brother again in this case, “I you brothers,” but just one of them, “when we were so indeed.”’
‘But I’m not Irish.’
‘Separated at birth, I thought. That would have been bally exciting and Shakespearean. Anyway … it doesn’t matter, of course,’ Wilson went on, trying to put a brave face on what was obviously a pretty significant disappointment. ‘Please go ahead.’
‘“In 1935,”’ I said, ‘“Dr Sidney Bridewall, a Cambridge University ethnologist, encountered REMOTER at the temple site during an expedition to Honduras.” I could recite from memory the memorandum to the Deputy Director of Intelligence because I had reread it so many times. ‘“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.”’
‘Who is this REMOTER?’ said Wilson.
‘That’s just what we’re trying to find out.’
‘1935 was long before my time. That would have been under the Tussmann regime. But Reyna might well know something. She’s Victoria, I’m just Gladstone.’ He spoke to the housekeeper in Spanish, and she replied, nodding. ‘She says she does recall the gentleman from Cambridge.’ Wilson asked her another question; this time, Reyna seemed hesitant, so Wilson encouraged her, and she gave a shy reply. Wilson thanked her, but then turned back to us with a smile of apology. ‘No use, I’m afraid. The local superstitions are always picturesque but just occasionally obstructive. She said—’
‘It’s all right, I speak Spanish,’ said Zonulet.
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘What exactly did she say?’
Wilson continued: ‘She said that, on his return from the depths of the jungle, Dr Bridewall brought with him un espíritu – a spirit – that he’d found at the end of the river. I’ve never heard of such a thing happening before. The river traders give offerings to the angry spirits of the rapids but in my understanding those are more or less confined to their own parishes.’
When I was in Puerto Penasco with my then-husband in 1942, my stomach couldn’t get used to the food, and each of my vomitings was preceded by a slow lifting sensation that was easy to mistake for a sort of giddiness or weightlessness brought on by love and leisure. I was in such stupid good spirits that it was not until the third or fourth time that I learned to stop enjoying that feeling. As I sat there listening to Wilson, I said to myself, you had better be quite sure that you are not mistaking for the thrill of revelation a shiver down your spine that is really only the rigor of some old decay inside you. You had better not welcome madness like the renewal of a gift. ‘Ask her about this spirit,’ I said.
Wilson gamely asked Reyna another question. ‘She says she doesn’t know much more about the spirit,’ he reported, ‘she only knows that relations between Dr Bridewall and the spirit were rather fraught, whereas after O’Donnell came on the scene, things were more businesslike.’
And it was at this stage that it finally occurred to Wilson that between 1932 and 1939, Tussmann had kept a diary. ‘After he died I had every intention of mining his chronicle for pointers about the job but somehow I never quite got round to sitting down with it.’
April 2nd
Dr Bridewall, the English ethnologist, back from forest. Ran into him at Gonzales’s. Looked about as sick and tired as any white man will when he gets back from being out there for too long. And he was drunk. But something queer in his eyes too.
‘How was your expedition?’ I said. Bridewall didn’t answer question. Just said, ‘Everything I learned in church is a bloody lie. Everything I learned at school is a bloody lie. It’s all a lie so you might as well just fuck for the rest of your life. There’s nothing else worth doing. When I get back to England all I want to do is fuck. I’m going to tell everyone it’s all right to fuck all the time. And then I’ll just fuck and fuck and fuck.’ Wouldn’t say any more. Told him if he wanted spiritual counsel he could try the Coehorn Missionary Foundation station.
Yet again, French Bulldog Club of America Annual Hard Cover Treasury for 1934 is nowhere to be seen in mail delivery. Now three months late – the limit.
April 3rd
Last night, after I wrote here, Bridewall woke up P and me banging on consulate door. I went downstairs. By then he was even more fried. Could hardly understand him. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘you have to help me. It’s waiting on the edge of the forest. It won’t let me leave here until I find a way to get it to America.’ ‘Get what to America?’ ‘I can’t tell you. You won’t understand.’ ‘If you refuse to tell me what you’re talking about, I can’t very well help you.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose you can. I don’t suppose anyone can.’ As he went away I shouted after him, ‘Have you asked O’Donnell about whatever it is? He can manage almost anything.’
Thought about whether to write letter of complaint to French Bulldog Club of America or to postmaster general in Tegucigalpa. Who at fault? In the end decided to write to both. Got pretty worked up in letters.
April 4th
Late afternoon, ran into Bridewall at Gonzales’s again. ‘It’s in O’Donnell’s storehouse on the riverbank,’ he said to me, as if I knew what he was talking about. ‘It’s going to live there until O’Donnell can build a box big enough for it to travel in. Then he’ll put the box on a truck and drive it to Trujillo and put it on a boat.’ Thought to myself, could Bridewall be smuggler of some kind? Or dealer in exotic animals? Doesn’t seem type. Asked, ‘Did you have to pay O’Donnell for all this?’ ‘O’Donnell will be rewarded for his work,’ he said. ‘But not by me.’
Asked him to explain himself – hopeless. ‘When it leaves here on that truck, it won’t need me any more,’ he said. ‘It will release me. I’ll be a free man again. But I’ll never be able to forget what I’ve been through. I’ll wish until the day I die that I’d never found that bloody temple.’ ‘What temple?’ I said. ‘You mean some native shrine by the river?’ As ever, Bridewall incapable of giving straight answer. ‘The next time an explorer comes through here, you must send them away,’ he said. ‘Don’t let them go into the forest. Tell them there’s nothing to find in the north-east. Better to just stay at home and fuck. Fuck and fuck and fuck. Nothing else means anything.’
Afterwards played poker. On way home went by O’Donnell’s storehouse to have a look. Windows were covered and door was locked. Back at consulate, happened to mention letters of complaint to P. She told me Annual Treasury arrived weeks ago and she just shelved it with the others. Too late to retrieve letters of complaint from mail.
April 5th
Spent whole afternoon in drawing room reading French Bulldog Club of America Annual Hard Cover Treasury for 1934. Best number yet in my opinion, although pleasure inevitably tainted by embarrassment about letters. Hav
e never longed for French Bulldog so much. Must ask O’Donnell again if importation really still impossible next time I see him at Gonzales’s – in which case will not mention Bridewall affair despite curiosity, don’t want him to feel like I’m breathing down his neck about every little thing that happens in town.
But what is in that storeroom? What could be ‘living there’? What the hell did Bridewall bring out of the forest?
That was the last reference to Bridewall we could find in the crinkled pages of the diary.
‘Very puzzling,’ said Wilson. ‘Very puzzling indeed. Tussmann never once mentioned anything to me about an interest in French Bulldogs!’ He chuckled. ‘I’m joking, of course. I realise that the other aspect, not the French Bulldogs, is the pertinent one.’
‘I prefer his style to yours,’ I said to Zonulet. ‘Less flowery. More direct. If you wrote like this, your memoir would only take about an hour to read.’
Later we sat in the shade at a table outside a cantina (not Gonzales’s but a rival) eating fried fish and plantains. A stray cat nuzzled me with what seemed like great affection until I realised it just wanted me to itch a crusty purple sore inside its ear, but since I had already got so much out of the relationship I did not feel I could refuse without exposing myself as flighty and selfish.
‘Bridewall went inside the temple and inhaled the spores and saw visions just like me,’ Zonulet said.
‘So what did he bring back from the jungle?’
‘Maybe nothing. Or maybe a stone idol he thought was talking to him, like a Babylonian. Come on. You can’t seriously think …’
Once again, I recited the agency memo, substituting only one of the words. ‘“In 1935 Dr Sidney Bridewall encountered a Mayan god at the temple site during an expedition to Honduras. The god coerced Bridewall into arranging his passage to the United States, with the logistical support of Poyais O’Donnell.” The ship arrives in New York, and the god asks somebody, who is the most powerful man in this region? The god is told Elias Coehorn Sr., founder-chairman of Eastern Aggregate. Soon afterwards, Coehorn Sr. comes to believe he’s receiving direct instructions from the Lord himself. REMOTER has infiltrated his mind somehow. In 1938, he obligingly sends two expeditions to Honduras, timed to arrive at the same time. He thinks he’s testing his sons against each other to see which one will inherit his empire. He doesn’t realise that he’s been manipulated by REMOTER into arranging for the creation of the diagram.’
‘Oh, sure, the diagram,’ said Zonulet. ‘A Secret Philosophy of the Whole of Things, Geometrically Demonstrated. Working title for a book Leibniz was afraid to finish.’
I had learned many of these details about Coehorn Sr. from reading the freshest pages of Zonulet’s manuscript. Which made my exertions as an investigative reporter seem almost like a waste of time. But really they were not a waste of time. Because for so many years they were all I had. ‘At first Coehorn doesn’t expect the test to last more than a few weeks, but even after years have gone by he refuses to step in,’ I continued. ‘And meanwhile Phibbs and the Eastern Aggregate Good Conduct Division – and maybe other divisions and subsidiaries we don’t even know about – are making sure that anybody who asks “Whatever happened to my cousin who got a job on a movie called Hearts in Darkness?” can’t get any answers. Remember, the exact location of the temple was never made public. We know Adela Thoisy’s family hired a search party to go into the jungle. But they never came back. There were probably others looking. But it must have been hard to get any publicity after the war started, and in the end I guess they gave up hope, or at least they ran out of avenues to pursue. Next: “According to O’Donnell, the Mayan god took up residence in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Apart from that, nothing is known about the Mayan god’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 the Mayan god in a residential suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan.”’
‘Which is where this story passes from the merely cockamamie into night-blooming dementia praecox,’ Zonulet said. ‘You think Branch 9 and United Fruit held a summit in New York with a … shit, I can’t even bring myself to say it.’
‘A god.’ I threw the head of my fish on the ground for the cat to clean. ‘Why not?’
‘What would the god get out of it?’
‘The CIA signs on as a partner in the Pozkito training camp. Keeps it running at full strength. Makes sure the jungle is always lousy with guerrillas. So no outsiders can ever get close enough to the half-temple to disrupt the diagram it’s become.’
‘I wish I’d never let you in on the diagram. So the gods got their night watchmen. What about the secular parties to this deal?’
‘Why do primitive people pray to gods?’ I said.
‘I don’t know … Rain? Good harvests?’
‘You’re on the right track. From around 1954, United Fruit’s banana plantations in and around Honduras were immune to white sigatoka and nobody could understand why. Who arranged that for them? Who has power over something like that?’
Zonulet shook his head. ‘If only Bev Pomutz were here to put a decisive end to this snipe hunt.’
‘You said United Fruit can go to the State Department any time they like and engage the CIA to do some troubleshooting in Central America. So they say to Branch 9, “We have a problem and we think you could help us solve it.”’
‘And Branch 9 say, “Sure, we’ve had lots of experience bargaining with gods. I’m sure we can get this leaf blight taken care of.”’
‘The CIA is full of veterans from the OSS. They went all over the world during the war. Mount Ararat and the Caroline Islands and the South Pole and who knows where else. They must have come across a few things.’
‘Vansaska, you are hallucinating by proxy. The only reason anybody ever mentioned gods or spirits is because the argyrophage inside the temple makes people see things—’
‘Some of which are authentically clairvoyant. Your competing fungus-related theory is the sober and sensible alternative?’
Zonulet did not know what to say to that.
He had hardly slept since Tegucigalpa so after we paid for our lunch we went up to the room that had been made up for us at Le Sphinx. It was bare of decoration, but in the top drawer of the dresser I found a few things that might have been stashed inside upon the departure of a former occupant: the brass handle, engraved with arabesques, of a feather fan with no feathers attached; the skull of a small horned animal I could not identify, as polished as the brass was dull; and a celluloid cigarette case painted with cherry blossoms and, on one side, the words ‘THE BLACK SHIPS’. The latter did not make sense to me until I remembered it was the title of an old Hollywood melodrama about the Convention of Kanagawa. This was the sort of trinket that might have been handed out at a studio party; perhaps it had been carried from Hollywood to San Esteban in the pocket of one of the Hearts in Darkness crew. I put everything back in the drawer. Then, a few minutes after I sat down to begin the account of the day’s events that I am now attempting to finish – and this is the last time I intend to deface Zonulet’s manuscript – I noticed he was lying on the canopy bed with his eyes wide open and an expression on his face like a naked person regarding very cold water.
‘Aren’t you tired?’
‘Every time I fall sleep – every time since I licked the fungus off the film I brought home from the warehouse – I have that dream again. Where the interrogator’s telling me I’m just an OSI research liaison at Apex Chemical and it’s time for my unilateral gradatorectomy.’
There are few sights that arouse in me a greater sympathy than the exhausted unable to sleep. I took off my shoes and lay down behind him, my arm across his chest. I thought it might help. But then he turned over, or I turned him over, I am not sure which, and before long we were making love again, quietly, because even in a whorehouse I did not like to be heard through the walls. Since this morning he had washed only his face a
t a basin and I found grave dirt in his chest hair and between his toes. The less charitable side of me said that if there was to be anything like romance between us the only grounds could be that each of us was chronically unfit for the company of anyone else. But perhaps there are no finer grounds than that.
Afterwards, as we lay side by side, the poor guy probably thought he was safe.
‘What exactly are you looking for in that warehouse?’ I said. ‘You think there’s something in Whelt’s footage that will confirm what you told the tribunal. Prove to them that your story is true. Prove to them that you were “acting in the best interests of [your] country”. But I don’t understand what that could possibly be.’
‘Let me sleep,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve got a beautiful dreamless sleep coming on. I can feel it.’
‘Are you looking for anything at all?’
‘Why the hell would I spend every day in that goddamn warehouse if I wasn’t looking for something?’
‘When you went out for hamburgers, and you let me go through your mail … I looked in your desk, too. I found an official letter. From the sounds of it, if you are willing to sign a two-page statement, the CIA will cancel your tribunal. You’ll be discharged with a full pension. The whole thing will be over. You won’t have to live in Springfield any more. But you’ve been refusing to sign.’
Zonulet didn’t meet my eye. ‘You ransacked my desk?’
‘Nobody is keeping you in that warehouse but you. You talk about it like you’re chained up in a dungeon but you’ve committed yourself voluntarily. You must know that nothing you find there is going to be any use. And nobody’s forcing you to subject yourself to fifty thousand hours of footage. But you’re insisting on it. You’re so damn stubborn. That must be why Branch 9 tried to hoax you into thinking you might have gone crazy and murdered that girl. They don’t want this tribunal to drag on any longer. They don’t want you going through that evidence. All they want is for you to drop the whole thing and walk away.’