Madness is Better than Defeat Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Ned Beauman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Acknowledgements

  Ned Beauman

  Ned Beauman was born in 1985 in London. His debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction Book and the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel, Glow, was published in 2014. He has been chosen by The Culture Show as one of the twelve best new British novelists and by Granta as one of the 20 best British novelists under 40. His work has been translated into more than ten languages.

  Also by Ned Beauman

  Boxer, Beetle

  The Teleportation Accident

  Glow

  www.sceptrebooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Sceptre

  An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Ned Beauman 2017

  The right of Ned Beauman to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Quote from Heart of Darkness appears courtesy of The Estate of Orson Welles. Represented exclusively by Reeder Brand Management

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 473 61360 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.sceptrebooks.com

  Part One

  Madness is better than defeat. Down the river is the light of reason.

  (From Orson Welles’s screenplay for an unproduced adaptation of Heart of Darkness, 1939)

  Springfield, Virginia – 1959

  The tribunal will not reconvene until I’ve had a chance to consider all the available evidence in my case. That is my right as an American and as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. If the testimony I’ve submitted is true, then the proof may be somewhere in that warehouse, and therefore I must be allowed to look for it. My persecutors pretend to regard this rule as an inconvenience, because without it they’d be permitted to empty the warehouse tomorrow to make more room for stolen Politburo cigar stubs or whatever else they want to archive out here in Virginia. But really it delights them. There’s no easy way to take a measure of ‘all the available evidence in my case’, but I estimate it at about three hundred million feet, an alchemical prodigy of urine and rock salt and Mayan armor, glossy bales decomposing into nitric frass. To pick through it all with proper care, building a chronology and a concordance, is the work of decades. And I don’t have decades.

  This is how I know. During the failed Cuban War of Independence in 1868, a wealthy Spanish family called the Azpeteguias, who owned sugar plantations near the Valle de Viñales, were besieged inside their villa by their own farmers. They died of yellow fever, all sixteen of them, before they could be relieved by the army. It was decided to send the bodies to Havana for burial to ensure they wouldn’t be desecrated by the locals. But the farmers ambushed the caravan in the hills, prying open the coffins and tipping the bodies into the dust. In 1953, when I was still working for the agency in Cuba, I did a significant favor for a friend of mine in Pinar del Río and afterwards he gave me a bottle of rum that had been aged in a barrel made from staves of Azpeteguia coffin wood.

  I have about twelve ounces left. It’s what’s called a diagnostic liquor. According to folk medicine, the long aftertaste is the most volatile fraction of the rum escaping out of your mouth as tinted vapor after it’s already washed through your guts. You taste yourself on it. There are some old bourbons with the same property. When I first opened it, back when I was in good health, Azpeteguia añejo was the most exquisite rum I’d ever sipped, but now I can taste poison at the end of every mouthful, a bile so rank and doomy your standard pre-vomit is like maple syrup in comparison. One of these days I’ll have a doctor palpate my liver just to make it official, but I know perfectly well what he’ll tell me. Between my stomach and my lungs sits a wedge of black gristle. Instead of a functioning organ I have only a ruin, a sinkhole, a blocked sewer.

  I’m forty-three years old. Alcoholism runs in the Zonulet family and it’s going to kill me even younger than it killed my father. I will die long before I finish preparing my defense. Early on, I asked if I could have an assistant to help me hack through this jungle, but they said they wouldn’t give security clearance to anyone but me. They’ve fucked me and they know it. Really, there is no need for the tribunal to reconvene, because a life sentence has already been handed down, in the most elegant possible fashion, with nothing so clattering or banal as a verdict spoken aloud. I am my own jailer, in the prison of my inalienable rights. They know I never wanted anything more to do with that temple, and now I’ll be trapped for the remainder of my life among its ribbons of silver drool.

  From the very beginning I’ve given the same testimony. I did everything I could to prevent what happened in Honduras, but the forces arrayed against me were too powerful (and some of those same forces are now discreetly overseeing my prosecution). The censure I’m threatened with is not proportionate to the rules I may have bent or broken in pursuit of entirely valid aims, nor to my peripheral culpability in a sequence of events that for the most part were far beyond my control. I’m a fallible human being, and I regret the mistakes I made, but with a sound mind and a clear conscience I can avow that I was acting in the best interests of my country. I know dozens of guys back in Foggy Bottom who’ve done much, much worse and suffered nothing but commiserations on their bad luck.

  I spent a decade with CIA, and three years with the Office of Strategic Services before that, and what do I have to show for it? Just one friend, Winch McKellar, my only ally in the whole crew. He’s back from Jakarta now but he can’t do anything to help. Sometimes I’m tempted to go to the Washington Post and tell them everything I know about Branch 9, and sometimes I’m tempted to burn the warehouse to the ground with myself inside, but what keeps me from either variety of self-immolation is that the proof I’m looking for, the proof that would vindicate the testimony I submitted to the tribunal, is somewhere on those shelves. In theory, I might find it tomorrow. That is, at least, mathematically possible.

  In any case, if I do die before I hit the jackpot, I want it to be there in the warehouse. They’ll wonder where the smell is coming from until they notice my body draped across a steel roof truss like a pair of sneakers tossed over a telephone line. No one will be able to figure out how I got up there and they’ll have to fish me down with a crane.

  So every night I stay there until ten or eleven o’clock at night with my flatbed editor and my notebooks. Then I peel off my gloves, say goodbye to the guard, and stop at the diner on the way home for a hamburger that tastes like scorched oakum. Back at my apartment, I don’t sleep much, so I’m never sure how to pass the time. But now I have a hobby. Tap tap tap tappety
tap.

  This is going to be a tell-all. But the only person who’s ever likely to read it is the junior from the Office of Security who, after my death, will be assigned to examine my papers and prepare a detailed report on their contents. Presumably, that whelp is going to wonder how I seem to know so much about what happened to people I’ve never met in places I’ve never been.

  A great deal of what’s done at the agency is textual analysis of some kind – often, in its methods, verging on literary criticism or scriptural exegesis – and one of the guys who helped train us in OSS was the Yale ethnologist Newton Mathers. He spent years studying the oral traditions of the Amazon, which are of inconstant usefulness if you’re looking for solid historical fact, and he taught us always to look for what he called ‘the stench of truth’. A stench is a stench because it’s too complex and microbial and surprising to be merely an odor. Created things have odors. Natural things have stenches.

  Since the whelp from the Office of Security will already have been told that before my death I submitted an absolutely cockamamie testimony to the tribunal, he may assume this memoir is just an elaboration of that fantasy. But if he judges that it’s detailed and consistent and lifelike enough to exude the stench of truth, and he knows I didn’t have some treasure chest of surveillance reports and wiretap transcripts to draw from, he’ll be looking for an explanation. Is it really possible that, from only the data I had available to me in the warehouse, I inferred the rest of the universe? That, from just a few clues, I filled out the measureless crossword?

  In our first week with him, Old Man Mathers gave us Leibniz to read. ‘Let us suppose that someone jots down a quantity of points helter-skelter upon a sheet of paper,’ Leibniz writes in his Discourse on Metaphysics. ‘Now I say that it is possible to find a geometrical line, whose concept shall be uniform and constant, in accordance with a certain formula, which will pass through all of those points, and in the same order in which the hand jotted them down. When the formula is very complex, that which conforms to it passes for irregular. But God does nothing out of order.’ Even the jotting isn’t truly helter-skelter. Everything happens for its own opaque reasons. Consequently, if you have enough of the points to deduce the formula that determines them, you can in turn deduce all the other points you don’t already have.

  If it sounds like I’m stretching Leibniz a little far, recall that he goes even further himself. ‘When we consider carefully the connection of things,’ he writes, ‘we can say that from all time in a man’s soul there are vestiges of everything that has happened to him and marks of everything that will happen to him and even traces of everything that happens in the universe.’ In other words, you can deduce every formula from just one point. Maybe it will take a few days’ interrogation for that point to break, but it will spill its guts eventually.

  Yet that isn’t how I did it. I didn’t discover the formula. I didn’t read the traces in one point or extrapolate from many, like a diligent intelligence analyst. I used a much cruder method, almost a cheat. I went to the aleph, the point from which all other points are visible. I crawled inside that temple in Honduras and I saw everything at once. If you asked the director of Hearts in Darkness, the most ill-starred movie in Hollywood history, he’d assure you that the gods talked to me in there. I maintain that the explanation is mycological. What the whelp will conclude, I don’t know. He’ll be my obituarist, my executor and my graverobber all rolled into one, so perhaps in the long run his opinion is the only one that counts.

  When he sees the cinder block of typescript on my desk and realises he’s going to have to crawl through the whole thing, perhaps he’ll feel the same way I did when the guard flipped on the halide lamps my first day at the warehouse: I cannot possibly get through all this. That would be fine by me. I’m past the point of cultivating a readership, which I had to do not only as a crime reporter with the New York Evening Mirror but also a case officer of CIA. I remember a supervisor of mine once rejected my account of a brawl I’d witnessed among some communists in Paris because it was ‘too Hemingway’. The reference was a little out of date but along the right lines. The agency generates millions of pages of documents a year, much of that in the form of first-person narratives, and although the internal literature of the agency may never have had its Modernist or its Beat period, it’s absurd to suppose that a bunch of neophiliac college-educated guys at their typewriters would be totally unaffected by what’s going on out there at the publishing houses that in some cases they’re secretly funding. I asked my supervisor what style I should write the report in, and he shouted back, ‘You don’t write in any style at all, Zonulet, you just damned well put down what happened!’ Obviously after that I couldn’t write another word for about a month.

  This time, though, I don’t have to worry about critics. So I won’t agonise about where to begin. I’m going to begin twenty-one years ago, in 1938, on 49th Street in Manhattan, with a bet.

  * * *

  The terms of this bet declared that for every ten seconds under sixty seconds it took the diver to wrestle the octopus out of the tank, Elias Coehorn Jr. would lose a hundred dollars, and for every ten seconds over sixty seconds, he’d win the same increment. The diver that night was a Chelsea longshoreman who could break your nose so badly with one right hook that a doctor would have to tweezer the cartilage out through your nostrils, and he’d never been known to take more than a minute and a half to humble an octopus. Once or twice he’d even flipped the beast out of the tank almost the instant the bell rang with the nonchalance of a teenage swimming-pool attendant retrieving a deflated flotation aid. ‘The first thing you have to learn,’ he’d been heard to say, ‘is that you can’t put a crotch hold on a fucker with eight crotches.’

  Although Coehorn had stamped on his own wristwatch back at his friend Irma’s apartment to emphasise some rhetorical point that could not now be recalled, he estimated that it was some time after midnight on Saturday, which meant he’d been up for at least thirty-six hours, and his own consciousness floated in a tank of champagne, gin, cocaine, hashish, Benzedrine and sewing-machine oil. Despite all that, he didn’t need a slide rule to tell him that those odds weren’t in his favor. And yet he’d taken the bet anyway, because he believed this particular octopus wouldn’t give up so easily. Earlier, as he’d stood there with Irma admiring the noble bulge of its purple cranium, she’d pointed out that this captive Martian had only seven intact limbs. Petticoat rags of intertentacular membrane trailed from the stump of the eighth. This octopus already knew what it felt like to fight for its life.

  ‘Hey,’ someone said to Coehorn, ‘anybody ever tell you you look just like that singer, uh … What’s his name?’

  Coehorn rolled his eyes at Irma. ‘Frank Parker?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘Only about half a million times.’

  The impresario who organised these weekend sprees in the basement library of the derelict New York headquarters of the Bering Strait Railroad Association of North America had never bothered to clear out the rotting atlases from the bookshelves, and the sulfides in the blue inks had begun to give the dead oceans within an appropriately algal reek. Tonight the whole venue was so alarmingly crowded that if you wanted to provoke a morbid giggle from your date you could point at the precarious candelabras and make a reference to the recent West Side abattoir fire that had turned the Hudson into bouillon for a day. I was on my way to 49th Street myself, because I was hoping to run down a source of mine in the Boilermakers’ Union case I was looking into for the New York Evening Mirror, but I wouldn’t arrive at the basement for another few minutes. As I’ve explained, this memoir is going to describe a number of events that I didn’t see with my own eyes but learned about some years later when I went inside the temple.

  The hubbub diminished a little as the diver got to the top of the stepladder beside the tank. The thin straps of his black swimming costume did such a tenuous job of containing his pectorals that they brought to mind a burlesqu
e dancer’s lingerie. After taking a bow he turned back towards the tank and bent his knees in readiness like a marble Kratos on a plinth. ‘Good Lord, look at him,’ said Irma appreciatively. Coehorn himself found ostentatious sexual characteristics – in physique, dress, or behavior – to be unattractive in both males and females. Having sampled everything under the sun, he now felt that his ideal concubine would be a wiry hermaphrodite, equipped for any configuration, groomed and tailored so exquisitely as to transcend sex. He tried to get the octopus’s attention, hoping to communicate his warm wishes, but too many different refractive media were interposed. Then, as the bell rang and the diver made his short dive, Coehorn felt a hand on his arm. He turned.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a gambler, Mr Parker.’ If you found this creature scampering around your kitchen one night you’d telephone for a fumigator, and although there was an oily familiarity to his manner, Coehorn was certain they’d never met before.

  ‘Yes, I’m banned from the Saratoga track so I have to come here instead,’ he replied sardonically. Two in a row. Sometimes he found himself resenting Frank Parker as deeply as if the crooner had adopted the resemblance as a willful mode of bullying. Parker was an Italian Jew who’d changed his name, whereas Coehorn didn’t have a drop of Jewish blood. Plus Parker was at least five years older. The most insulting episode of all was when he was approached by a scout from a celebrity impersonators’ agency called Seeing Double! who told him that he could probably get some occasional work if he were willing to pay for his own singing lessons.

  ‘I ain’t had the pleasure of your acquaintance, ma’am,’ said the ratty man, turning to Irma, ‘but I hope you’ll allow me to say that the two of you make a very eye-catching couple.’

  ‘We aren’t together,’ said Coehorn.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Well, in any case …’ He stuck out his hand. ‘Leland Trimble. New York Evening Mirror.’ He really seemed to have convinced himself that Coehorn was Frank Parker. Coehorn was about to tell him to go to hell when he saw Irma turn pale.