Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  Coehorn sighed in exasperation. ‘All right. If you won’t do it, I will. Let’s see if they’ll listen to me.’

  He grabbed for the megaphone. Burlingame, suddenly furious, swung it at him like a weapon so he had to jerk his head back. ‘Get your hands off it! You don’t deserve to say a word to my camps! All you have ever been is a filthy, lazy, greedy—’

  But she was interrupted by the shooting.

  *

  Ever since my first sight of them across the clearing, I was braced for the first shot, and when it finally came I was down on my belly before I even knew I’d heard it. During the stand-off, each of the two squads had sent scouts edging along the treeline around the clearing, trying to gain some ground on their counterparts. Then the scouts must have met somewhere around the midpoint. And just one reckless bullet was like a lit match to a reel of nitrate film. By the time I’d wriggled behind a kapok trunk, the shots were coming in a fusillade from both directions.

  I raised my carbine and leaned out an inch from behind my cover, ready to return fire. But I couldn’t find a target because most of the guerrillas were still on the other side of the clearing. Shooting at them would mean shooting right across the New York camp. Which was out of the question.

  And yet that was exactly what everybody else was doing.

  Before it started, there had been a few dozen men and women and children standing out in the open. Some had hunting bows and now they were returning fire as best they could. The rest were rushing into their huts to shelter behind walls of mud and wood and thatch that even in triplicate wouldn’t have stopped a .308 round. My fungal clairvoyance, even more than my actual visit here, had supplied me with an eidetic blueprint of the camp, but that had been rendered out of date by the removal of the numbered limestone blocks that might previously have offered some real defense.

  I saw one archer get hit in the chest while she had her bow drawn, and as she collapsed to the ground her cane arrow soared into the air like an essence loosed from the body at the moment of death. For the time being the Angelenos up on the steps were safe, but both squads could be expected to send flanking parties to circle around the ruin, and from then on the battlefield would include at least its lower levels. ‘Stop shooting!’ I shouted. ‘Stop fucking shooting!’ But nobody was listening.

  I looked around for Phibbs. He’d advanced into the clearing and was now firing from behind a cabin. I dropped my rifle and sprinted towards him, keeping my head low.

  ‘Phibbs!’ I pounded on his shoulder. ‘Tell them to stop!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Zonulet,’ – he fired – ‘but the Eastern Aggregate Company must protect its assets.’

  Indeed. We all had our missions. I was prepared, if necessary, to spill blood to get my hands on that armor inside the temple. But I was not prepared to spill innocent blood, American blood, not so much of it, not in this witless shambles. I took out my pistol, held it to the back of Phibbs’s head, cocked it so he’d hear the click through his skull-bone. ‘Tell your men to stop firing and fall back, or I’ll kill you right here.’

  Phibbs gurgled and slumped over. My hip stung.

  I hadn’t pulled the trigger. A rifle bullet had cored his Adam’s apple, grazing my side on the way out. I’d been preempted. He was dead.

  Before dropping prone again, I took a hurried look around. A year earlier, when I’d first set eyes on the outpost in daylight, I’d felt respect for the supralogical tenacity with which these emigrés had devoted themselves to their cause, but now it revealed itself to me as sheer cultic folly. I saw an arrow cut down a man in fatigues and heard a whoop of triumph afterwards. But there was nothing to whoop for. At the start, the archers defending the camp had been little more than bystanders yearning to be acknowledged, but by this point they’d been honored with full participation in the proceedings, meaning the soldiers were actually firing right at them instead of just letting them catch a few stray rounds. I didn’t know how many others might already lie bleeding inside the perforated huts. The crossfire was only getting more intense. And with nobody to call off the carnage, the Good Conduct Division would keep at it, like the fingers still twitching on Phibbs’s left hand.

  But then I caught sight of ‘Jawbone’ Atwater, moving along the foot of the temple, no more than sixty feet away.

  I shouldn’t have taken off running. But maybe I sensed something, a tunnel of good luck, a negative cyclone, a transect of time and space where the bullets wouldn’t be, like the line you can draw through the absences in a stack of classified files. Madness, really. No better than these templars. But I did run, and I did not get shot. Instead, I tackled Atwater from the side, hard enough that his rifle flew from his hands as he sprawled to the dirt.

  I kneeled on top of him, pointing my Browning between his eye and his eyepatch. ‘Zonulet?’ he said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ We hadn’t seen each other in almost a decade.

  With my free hand I found his holster, pulled out his sidearm, and tossed it behind me. ‘Order your men to stop firing and fall back. You’d goddamned better do as I tell you because the last guy who said no to me is dead.’ A little misleading but technically true.

  ‘Who are you working for nowadays? These guys in bush jackets?’

  There was an explosion on the other side of the temple. ‘Christ, you’re using grenades?’ I said. ‘Do you know how many civilians live up on those steps?’ But I knew it was no use warning Atwater about casualties. Quite the opposite. For Atwater, pits full of corpses were like silos full of grain, a harvest that secured the future. He lived for casualties. So instead I jammed the barrel of my pistol into his good eye, not quite hard enough to pop his cornea. ‘End this or I will restore your symmetry, you fucking rabid dwarf.’

  Something landed behind me. I glanced back and saw a human hand, singed at the wrist. At that moment I felt something enter my body. I looked down. Atwater had pushed a combat knife into my flank, right up to the hilt. Seven inches, give or take.

  While I was contemplating this surprise, he jerked his head out from under my gun, then threw off my weight. I collapsed sideways. He got up, stamped on my wrist so I let go of my pistol, picked it up, and aimed it down at me. ‘I’ve known you a long time, Zonulet, and, believe me, I will take no pleasure in this, best way to say it—’

  A man-sized object flattened him.

  Not a man-sized object, in fact, but an actual man. An actual man had fallen out of the sky, a brown-skinned soldier with a spear through him. And Atwater wasn’t actually flattened, but he was on the ground, under the actual man, and neither of them was moving. I looked at the severed hand again, and then up at the temple, but from this angle, against the glare of the sun, I couldn’t make out anything going on at the top. ‘Miracles always conform to the general order,’ wrote Leibniz in the Metaphysics, ‘even though they cannot be foreseen by the reasoning of any created mind.’

  The knife inside me felt white-hot and effervescent. I didn’t pull it out, because that would only uncork my heart-blood. Instead, I began crawling towards the treeline. I wasn’t thinking about my safety, I was only thinking that there was one last possibility of ending this – a remote possibility, a ludicrous possibility, but it was all I had left. Nearby I could hear a woman screaming. She was dying or her child was dying, it could have been either one.

  A year earlier, on a come-down from the argyrophage, I’d tapdanced my way from the interior of the temple to the threshold of Wilson’s consulate without ever quite waking up. Now, by force of will, I tried to enter the same state, just for a little while. It wasn’t easy. The universe orbited my body and my body orbited the knife. With every motion I was making the injury worse, cranking the edge around in my guts. It wasn’t exactly a yogic situation. But I knew that in principle I was capable of turning over command to the instincts I’d honed for twenty years instead of my mewling and distractible consciousness, of becoming the shark in the depths instead of the ‘confused murmurings of innumerable waves’
on the surface. And as I squirmed through the alleys between the cabins, I did enter a vigorous kind of trance, where I no longer had to force every action or cringe at every stimulus.

  Only when I reached the shade of the forest did I lose momentum, because my trance was profaned by a conscious thought. Plainly the wisest thing for me to do, now that I had a few big trees between me and the firefight, was to rest here, cradle my wound, wait for one of the Good Conduct Division men to come along and help me.

  But I hadn’t observed any exodus from the temple. Therefore those imbeciles were still there, stubborn unto death. None of this was part of the plan. They weren’t meant to be dying. There wasn’t meant to be a fight. We weren’t meant to have seen our expedition mirrored across the clearing when we arrived at the temple, just like the bad timing that had started all this twenty years ago. I had to regain some sort of control over events. So I hauled myself to my feet and submerged myself in the trance again so I could carry on into the jungle, following the route we’d cleared with machetes this morning.

  Nature was so rapacious out here that when I arrived at the other clearing I half-expected to find the railroad car and the cargo helicopters already rusted, overgrown, converted into microhabitats. But in fact I scared off only a single topazine hummingbird from the car as I staggered inside. All that movement had torn up the seal around the knife, and by now blood had saturated my shirt on that side. For a moment my legs went weak and, groping at the sideboard for support, I scattered the air-sickness mints across the parquet floor. Almost there now.

  I tried the door of the wooden partition, but it was locked, of course. Pressing my ear to it once again, I could still hear that thrum, as of a generator. I had so little strength left. Once, twice, three times I banged on the door with my fist. Each strike, in some obscurely Newtonian fashion, made a shattering impact on my own body but little to none on the door.

  ‘Mr Coehorn?’ I shouted, leaning against it. ‘Are you in there?’

  Elias Coehorn Sr. would now be eighty-six years old. His passing had never been announced, but the tradition of privacy and composure and remove at the highest levels of the Eastern Aggregate Company might have rejected even a death notice as undesirable publicity. Even if he was still alive and compos mentis, it was utterly absurd to imagine the old emperor sweating in the tropics with the rest of us. The world came to Elias Coehorn Sr. (when permitted), not the other way around; that was how it had been for decades.

  And yet, ever since Colby Droulhiole and I had rendezvoused with Phibbs at the airfield outside Trujillo, it had been obvious Phibbs was keeping something from me. The operation had some kind of shadow annex, a major surplus of activity and materiel, all of which had converged, by zero hour, on the curtained half of the railroad car. Was it possible that Elias Coehorn Sr. might have come here in person to collect his wayward son? That he might recline just a few feet away within an electric womb of air conditioners and dehumidifiers and life-support machinery?

  ‘Mr Coehorn, if you’re there … A gunfight has broken out at the temple site. A lot of people are dead already, including Phibbs. I don’t know where your son is, but the longer this goes on, the worse his chances.’ What a tragedy for Coehorn Jr., I thought, if he came so close to the reckoning with his father that he had deserved for so long, but never actually got it. ‘Somebody needs to tell the Good Conduct Division guys to retreat, but they only take orders from the executives. Mr Coehorn, if you’re listening … Is there anything you can do? Is there anything …’

  I passed out.

  *

  What Trimble knew about the Owl’s Head Pier massacre that very few other people did – because back in 1937 he’d been told he’d be force-fed his own ‘greasy nuts’ if so much as a hint of it got into the Mirror – was that it was the cops who had tricked the heads of two rival crime syndicates into arriving simultaneously that night, retinued, twitchy, each expecting to negotiate the purchase of a small ex-navy submarine from a Turkish arms dealer. By a wild exchange of tommy-gun fire, the population of mobsters in New York City was duly reduced. But so was the population of black-tie revelers who happened to be streaming onto the pier after an engine fire aboard the Golden Goblin had resulted in the emergency termination of their pleasure cruise. Which was why the cops were afterwards a mite bashful about their gambit.

  These events were the inspiration for Trimble’s latest prank. They came straight to mind as he spied on Colby Droulhiole warning Burlingame that the Eastern Aggregate party was bearing down on the temple. If he could pass the news on to Atwater fast enough, then Atwater would arrive in full force before these newcomers had a chance to get themselves properly established at the site. The subsequent dispute was unlikely to stop at raised voices. And maybe, just as an incidental matter, a few of Trimble’s auld acquaintances would finally collect what was coming to them.

  He hadn’t planned to watch it happen. If the temple was in range of his opera glasses, then Trimble would be in range of a bullet. Better to stroll over the next day and see what was left of the camps. He had assumed that Atwater would be grateful for the tip-off – and he was grateful, sure, but not that grateful, not overflowing with the ‘What can I possibly do to repay you?’ type of gratitude – a little discourteous, actually, in the sense that he forced Trimble to come along at gunpoint, which was not convenient for Trimble at all. So on the march through the jungle, Trimble was looking for any opportunity to escape. And after the shooting started, he was looking even harder. The trouble was, Atwater had given his soldiers an order: ‘If you see him try to run, don’t even bother telling him to stop. Just put him down like a dog.’

  But then Atwater ordered five men to climb to the top of the temple so they could snipe at the enemy from above and call down observations in the whistle code they used to communicate in the jungle. And Trimble volunteered to go with them.

  No, he hadn’t wanted to come along today; but now that he was here, the chance to watch from the best seats in the house as, one after another, his onetime pals felt the consequences of treating him so shabbily – that was just too good to pass up. There was a hell of a lot of shooting, but although the first few shots had made his breath catch and his hands tremble and his ears ring, the noise didn’t bother him any more. It was the music of his prank coming off perfectly.

  The five men – two Pozkitos and three younger Guyanans – rushed the steps. Trimble scrambled to keep up. Many of the Angelenos had gone down to join the fight on the ground, but others were still among their cabins, so the soldiers wheeled around as they moved up the temple, covering every direction with their battle rifles, firing at anyone who even reached for a bow or a spear. They climbed so fast they were at the top of the steps before any real defense could be organised. A nice testimonial for Atwater’s training camp.

  Burlingame stood alone on the upper terrace, the megaphone at her feet.

  To the soldiers, she was only an unarmed woman, so they motioned at her to move aside. But Burlingame just stared at Trimble, unmoving. Wheezing from the ascent, he watched a series of expressions pass across her face: shock, to start with, which was understandable, because they hadn’t seen each other for eleven years, and this was the first time she was finding out that he’d never quit the neighborhood – then some sort of understanding, using her trusty old feminine intuition – ‘You had a hand in all this, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘You wanted this,’ and he grinned back at her – succeeded by a further understanding, which seemed almost too much for her to bear, like all of a sudden she could feel something big and furry and six-legged moving inside her – ‘Gracie …’ she said, although by now one of the Guyanans was forcing her down to the ground, ‘Gracie wouldn’t have left like that unless you had something to do with …’ – and last of all an expression which made it clear she was not going to be a good sport about this, an expression, to tell the truth, which gave Trimble the chills like no expression ever had in a lifetime of playing pranks. Fortunately for him
, she was on her knees, powerless.

  Except the soldiers no longer looked quite as composed. Trimble, turning, saw that a lot of Angelenos were now approaching up the steps, at least twenty, enough that even with a rifle, you couldn’t be absolutely sure of firing fast enough to drop them all before they tore you to shreds, which was just what they seemed ready to do. ‘You got the queen, fellas,’ he warned, ‘and now the ants are after you.’ He expected the soldiers to shoot into the mob to scare them off.

  Instead, one of them took a hand grenade from his belt and unpinned it and tossed it down the steps.

  While it was still rolling, Rick Halloran jumped on top of it.

  Most of the others probably wouldn’t have known a pineapple grenade from an actual pineapple. But Halloran had served in Europe during the Great War after lying about his age. Trimble remembered that biographical detail just as the first assistant director erupted into gobbets.

  For just a moment, the mob faltered in astonishment. But then they came pelting up the stairs even faster. They were spattered with Halloran’s blood, and they had their mouths open like they were shouting, but after the blast Trimble couldn’t hear anything. He moved behind the soldiers for protection. But there was something frantic in their motions now as they fired shot after shot. They were starting to get rattled. So was Trimble.

  Then a thrown spear hit one of the soldiers in the shoulder and spun him around so hard that he pirouetted off the edge of the temple.

  Burlingame, unattended, brained another one with the megaphone, and he dropped his rifle. She looked like she was going to come for Trimble next, and there was nowhere for him to run.

  Down the entire length of the steps ran the wooden haulage ramp, constructed by Rusk in ’39 and used daily ever since. Trimble threw himself onto the ramp as if it were the Bowery Slide at Coney Island.