by Ned Beauman
‘You’re the new guy they were talking about? The German?’ From where Hickock was standing, he wouldn’t see Pennebaker’s body unless he looked over to his left.
The next exchange was inaudible.
Then Meinong smiled. ‘The food they serve in our camp, it is not so easy on the stomach.’
‘You walked all this way just to take a crap?’
‘I thought it best, yes.’
‘That bad, huh?’
‘What about yourself?’
‘I came looking for Trimble. He came this way earlier on. Have you seen him?’
‘No, I haven’t. Why are you trying to find him?’
Hickock narrowed his mouth. ‘I meant to have a talk with him before he left. That’s all. No sign of him?’ He looked around. That was when he caught sight of Pennebaker’s feet. ‘Hey, what the heck …?’
Meinong bowed his head and charged at Hickock, tackling him in the chest.
Trimble thought back to that night at the Bering Strait Railroad Association when he’d won a stack betting long on the diver against the mollusk. This fight was going to be enjoyable enough to watch, but it was a shame he couldn’t put any money down. If Trimble himself had been caught in the same predicament as Meinong, he could have talked his way out of it, but he had to admit it would have been harder for this stranger with a foreign accent, who was now kneeling on Hickock’s torso.
With his left hand Meinong had Hickock’s right wrist pinned to the earth and with his right hand he was prying his fingers away from the handle of the axe. But that meant Hickock’s left hand was free, and he could reach up just far enough to knock Meinong in the jaw. The third time he did that, Meinong looked unsteady for a moment, and Hickock jacked his knees to tip Meinong off him.
Each scrambled to get on top of the other; each maintained his own grip on the axe handle; each clawed at the other’s eyes, nose, throat with his free hand. They were so slathered in mulch that their two bodies together might have been some octopod newly burped from a mudpot. And Hickock, who’d already torn open Meinong’s left nostril, must have been stronger, because he forced Meinong down and knocked his front teeth down his throat with one punch. As Meinong wriggled, he fit the heel of his hand under Hickock’s chin and tried to push him off, but he couldn’t do much. They were both roaring as they strained against each other like some misaligned machine. Then all of a sudden Meinong let himself go limp. Hickock jerked forward a few inches. And his shoulder came down hard on the head of the axe, which was upturned in the soil.
Hickock fell sideways, his eyes screwed shut with the pain. Meinong wrenched the axe out of Hickock’s shoulder. Now the weapon was uncontestedly in his grasp. But by some furious effort of will, Hickock managed to haul himself most of the way upright before Meinong did, clamping down on the gash in his shoulder with one bloody hand. So Meinong, who was on his back, was flailing up at Hickock, who was still down on one knee but nearly on his feet. This was awkward, and if Hickock had been quick enough, he could have snatched the axe out of the German’s hands. But instead Meinong rammed him in the groin with the blunt end of the handle.
Hickock collapsed again, and now it was Meinong who got back up on his knees, panting. He had his back to Trimble, who realised that there might still be time to intervene. Trimble didn’t know exactly why Meinong had intercepted Pennebaker. Perhaps this supposed war hero didn’t want the outside world to know about the two camps, or perhaps he didn’t want the two camps to know about the outside world, or perhaps both. Regardless, he was playing some kind of long game. Hickock had some unfriendly intentions towards Trimble, sure, but he didn’t have the right instincts to be a real threat. Meinong, on the other hand, could very well take advantage of Trimble’s absence, undo some of his hard work, complicate his eventual return. If Hickock was the one who got home alive instead of Meinong, there might come a time when Trimble would be thankful for that. All he had to do was snake forward and yank one of Meinong’s legs out from under him. That little prank would probably be enough to give the American the upper hand. A nice patriotic idea.
But he stopped himself. Hickock couldn’t know he was here. He thought of the youthful Coehorn, whom he’d mistaken that night for Frank Parker, failing to break up the wrestling match.
And then it was too late to get involved, because Meinong swung the axe down on Hickock’s skull like the mallet of a fairground high striker, hard enough that the blade broke off the rotten handle.
Trimble wondered how the German expected to handle this. If Hickock’s absence was noticed today, then a lot of people might surmise, accurately, that he’d gone out to take his own revenge on Trimble and something had gone wrong. They’d be regretful, until they realised one of the axes was missing too, at which point they’d be livid. That was if Meinong could return to the camp without anyone noticing he’d been gone. But in fact Meinong would get back there with mud in his hair and a face like the cherry pie the dog found on the sideboard, so everyone would see he’d been in a fight, and he would need to come up with a story. If Trimble had to bet on it, he’d say that Meinong would succeed in persuading the others that his injuries had nothing to do with Hickock’s disappearance, but there would certainly be some suspicion.
Once again, Trimble started backing up through the bushes to make room for Meinong to schlep the bodies away from the path. Then Meinong looked towards Trimble.
He must have heard movement. The rain was still chattering on the canopy, and Trimble thought he’d been quiet – but obviously not quiet enough. He stayed absolutely still.
Meinong started walking towards him. In a matter of seconds he would flush Trimble out like a bevy of quail. The axe might be broken but Trimble wasn’t likely to win a fight; you might say that in murder terms Meinong was on a little bit of a roll.
He jumped up and ran for his life.
Running through the jungle was always a waking nightmare. The empty air turned solid as an enormous wasp’s nest loomed out of the mist, or the solid ground turned hollow as your foot crashed through a squirrel’s burrow. Vines snared your ankles and branches slashed your eyes and you sprained joints you didn’t even know you had. He was making so much noise in the hell gym he couldn’t even hear if Meinong was behind him, but still he lurched onward.
Then he was falling.
He had come to a long, steep incline of the kind you did not often find in this terrain, and his momentum had pitched him right over it. His thigh smacked into the earth and then his shoulder and then his forehead and then his ass as he rolled and bounced and tom-tommed down this hillside that seemed to carry on halfway to the Mariana Trench. He realised he was screaming.
Finally he came to a stop.
He felt like the proverbial penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building. His body was a trade fair for the pain business, exhibiting every different type of sting and twinge known to modern man, and he already knew that when he woke tomorrow morning it would seem easier to hold his breath until his heart stopped than to crank himself upright. On the bright side, it probably hadn’t been as bad as slamming face-first into the temple and then hanging upside down by one ankle all night, like a dope. Also, he had quite a head start on Meinong now, assuming the German didn’t choose to come down in the same elevator. He listened hard but he didn’t hear any movement further up the slope. For the moment, he was safe.
*
By daybreak the rain had stopped but the mist was thicker than ever. A clammy and enfeebled thing, the sun, dragged itself up out of the night. A clammy and enfeebled thing, Jervis Whelt, dragged himself up out of the temple.
The previous evening, Yang had gone straight to Burlingame to give her the news about the rope, and she’d persuaded him they should keep it to themselves for twelve hours instead of snuffing out the festivities. ‘We won’t send anyone in there to look for him until first light, so we’re stuck for the moment,’ she’d said. ‘And until then it’s pointless to cause a panic. They don’t all h
ave to know yet. It might sound heartless, with Whelt down there alone, but really I think the heartless thing would be to make everyone cancel their fun for a vigil. It’s been so long since people have looked happy. And the two camps are mixing for once.’ So Yang had spent the night fretting in a wigwam on the upper terrace, and when Whelt did at last flop from the temple’s cleft, the developer was there to give him water and shout for help. Weighing ninety-nine pounds and nine ounces, the newborn was lifted from the platform on the same stretcher that Calix had once occupied, and he was put to bed in the same infirmary cabin.
Today, however, Burlingame did not intend to give any consequential sponge baths. She urged Whelt to sleep but he refused to close his eyes, and when she touched his forehead it was so hot she flinched. Burlingame did not, of course, believe in the Mummy’s Curse of Daily Mail legend. And yet, as envious as she felt that Whelt had been the first to properly explore the temple, she wasn’t sure if she would have had the courage to go in there all by herself. She was unsuperstitious but she was not above the creeps. Now, in some sense, such fears had been substantiated. This wasn’t just thirst and fatigue. Whelt looked as if he had knots tied in his arteries. He must have roused some old venomer or pathogen from its bed in the dust. If he hadn’t come back, she wondered whether they really would have risked sending another soul into the darkness to see what had become of him. A brave man makes a long journey into a dusky place …
‘Bats,’ he croaked, as if she’d just asked him a question.
‘Pardon?’
‘Think about the bats, Burlingame.’
‘That’s what happened? A bat bit you?’ She knew that if he had rabies he would certainly die here.
‘No. There were no bats in there. That’s exactly what I mean. Think about it. Why not? It’s cavernous – in the sense of literally cave-like, I mean, not in the sense of spacious – and it’s dark and there are no disturbances. Every bat’s dream house. Why have we never seen them flying out of the temple at sunset?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘They’re afraid.’
‘Of what? What did you find in there?’
‘Apart from silver, you mean?’
‘There was more silver?’
There was a degree of satisfaction in Whelt’s voice as he delivered this news, but Burlingame could tell that something else was limiting his exuberance. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There were more suits of armor. Dozens of them. A whole infantry company’s worth. Silver by the ton. We can make millions of feet of film. Tens of millions of feet. Tens of thousands of reels. But that’s not all. You know about the Pozkito gods, don’t you?’
‘I know a bit.’
‘I met them down there, Burlingame. While I was in the temple I met the gods.’
* * *
Of all the proxy wars in which the United States has involved itself during my lifetime, the smallest to date is the Bangassou Civil War of 1951. It began after a French mineral-exploration firm announced that this piddling independent sultanate had between twenty and thirty thousand tons of uranium beneath its hills. The Sultan at the time was friendly to the local French colonial powers, and thereby diplomatically and commercially accessible to the United States, so right away the USSR started trucking hampers of arms and cash to his enemies. He was soon deposed, and escaped to Paris, where I spent a few hours with him one afternoon. By then the agency was backing his nephew. Not a lot of reliable reports were getting out of the region, but the Sultan knew that back home his former subjects were slaughtering one another with foreign weapons. Proxy wars are nasty, shabby affairs. If the belligerents down there had described themselves as pawns of the superpowers, even that would have been a little self-aggrandising: at best, they were the buttons and nickels you play with when you’ve mislaid some of the original pieces. ‘It would have been better if we’d never found the uranium,’ the Sultan said to me in his soft voice. ‘Not just better for me. Better for everyone. There are some curses I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. My wife assumed it would corrupt me. She was looking forward to that.’ The following year the CEO of the French firm was charged with investment fraud after it turned out that in fact Bangassou had uranium reserves of no more than one thousand tons. By that time the Sultan had been shot dead on a massage table and nearly half the surviving population of Bangassou had fled across the border into the Belgian Congo. The debacle forced the resignations of three of my colleagues who probably should have run a few more checks before they got so carried away pushing back against the Kremlin. As far as I know not a single word about the Bangassou Civil War ever appeared in the American press. The annals of CIA are gilded with such triumphs.
It would have been better if Whelt had never found the silver. Not just better for everyone. Better for me.
Uranium, gold, diamonds, rubber, oil: if you’re a young nation all of these will glimmer like white lead in your mother’s breast milk. And that lode of Mayan silver certainly had its deforming effect on Hearts in Darkness. But I’m the only person left who still chokes down the silver every day of my life.
Since they first let me into the warehouse a few months ago, I’ve worked my way through something like a thousand hours of footage, which is about a fiftieth of the three hundred million feet of 35mm that Whelt shot at the temple between 1938 and 1957. As I’ve said, the tribunal can’t proceed until I’ve had a chance to consider all the available evidence. So that’s how I’m condemned to live out these last few seasons until my liver takes its revenge on me: watching the unedited rushes of Hearts in Darkness, searching for the photographic evidence that would vindicate the testimony I submitted to the tribunal. My forensic audit requires a systematic chronology of the footage, but if God had knocked the world off His workbench and it had shattered on the ground He could not have had a bigger job piecing history back together. As a boy, I loved going to the movies, but I hated jigsaws.
Admittedly, my days have been a lot more pleasant since Frieda arrived. But on Tuesday she never came into work, and now it’s Thursday night and I still haven’t seen her. Three days. The warehouse feels empty without her, but I’m not concerned just because I miss my assistant. I’m concerned because I know how conscientious she is. If she were sick in bed I’m almost sure she would have got word to me. I’m too tired and queasy to feel predatory towards Frieda, but she’s so enchanting I have to feel something, so instead I feel fatherly – that’s my dime-store psychoanalysis. And perhaps I’m just an overprotective parent. All the same, she’s exactly the type of girl that the universe likes to desecrate just to prove a point, and I can’t help worrying about what might have happened to her. I know my orchid lives with her family in Springfield but I never took down her telephone number or her address. So earlier this evening, as a last resort, I called Winch McKellar to ask him.
‘I didn’t send you any assistant,’ he said.
That didn’t surprise me. ‘I understand you can’t admit it because you have to keep up appearances. All that horseshit. But we both know there’s nobody else who could’ve done me that kind of good turn. I wouldn’t call for any other reason, I promise you I wouldn’t, but she hasn’t come to the warehouse the last three days. She’s pretty young. I know Springfield isn’t the Bronx but I just want to make sure she’s all right.’
‘I didn’t send you any assistant. Even if I wanted to, it would be impossible. That material is classified. Do you think they’d bend the rules for you of all people? There’s no way they’d let some college girl in there.’
‘Well, the fact is, they did. She’s been doing terrific work.’
McKellar’s voice softened. ‘If that’s true … All I can say, Zonulet, is be careful. College girls aren’t as innocent as they used to be. Take it from me. I know how faithfully you’ve guarded your virtue all these years and I wouldn’t want you to be led astray.’
I chuckled, knowing this might be the closest McKellar would ever come to acknowledging the favor he’d done for me. Of course, if h
e’d really intended to gift me an easy lay as well as a helping hand, he’d recruited the wrong girl.
Straight after that he was back to business. ‘Listen, I can’t help you with this or anything else. Please don’t call me again until your tribunal is over.’
‘My tribunal will never be over,’ I said, but he’d already hung up. Notwithstanding that joke about college girls, nobody would have guessed that until a few years ago we’d been best friends. Short of driving around Springfield shouting out of my car window, I’m not sure what else I can do about Frieda. I’ll just have to hope she comes in tomorrow, or on Monday, and all this fuss was for nothing.
As McKellar kindly reminded me, the evidence in my case is classified. Which means that I may or may not be guilty of ‘unauthorised removal and retention of classified documents or material’, a federal offense. This evening, I smuggled a few frames of film out of the warehouse. I took two silly precautions. The first was to hide them in my underpants, even though the guard never pays me any attention. The second was to choose only frames so over- or underexposed that they show nothing but white or black and therefore cannot sensibly be regarded as classified material, even though I know that wouldn’t be enough to exculpate me if somehow they were discovered in my apartment. I risked it because I needed to take a closer look at them in private. When I put a strip of 35mm on the flatbed editor today, I thought I saw something on the viewing screen that I recognised from Honduras. Not something the camera put in the negative. Something living on its surface.
I’m almost certain, for two reasons, that I must be wrong about what I thought I saw. The first reason is that the film was brewed in the jungle out of antique panoply and tapir gristle and nephrolithic urine. Over the years the recipe was continually adjusted to taste. This is a pre-industrial, home-cooked product, like something you’d buy from a stand by the side of the road, and so of course there are irregularities in texture and appearance. The reel in question may simply have come from a loused-up batch.
