Madness is Better than Defeat by Ned Beauman

Author:Ned Beauman [Ned Beauman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2017-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Part Four

I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid.

(From ‘The Aleph’ by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley)

In Cuba they believed that if you had a fever you should roll some fingernail clippings into a cigarette and drop the cigarette at a crossroads without looking left or right. Whoever picked it up would also take your fever from you. Seeing Vansaska, I felt like I must have smoked her cigarette. The last time I’d seen her, three years ago in her bungalow in Silver Lake, she’d been soggy and abject, a charity case. Now we’d changed places. How she had looked to me back then, that was probably just how I looked to her today, whereas she’d recovered all of her considerable poise. She wore a gray wool suit, cut very slim, perhaps not untainted by recent French notions, with nylon tape at the seams and glass buttons in a wishbone pattern down the front of the jacket.

‘How many brothers did Frieda have?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘In one place you say she has two brothers, in another place you say she has three. Did you make a mistake or did she?’

I thought about it. ‘Well, fuck me. She contradicted herself. Odd thing to contradict yourself about.’

‘Has it ever crossed your mind that she might not have been who she said she was? That she might have been some kind of plant?’

‘Not for a second. Not until now.’

‘Could somebody have staged that murder film just to make you think you’d lost your mind?’

I was serving a life sentence in the prison of ‘all the available evidence’, with no hope of release by any means other than terminal hepatocellular dysfunction. I hadn’t left Springfield, Virginia in months. I was comprehensively defeated. Why should my opponents bother to launch such an elaborate psychologicalwarfare operation against me? It was a long way to go to discompose a guy who was already pretty discomposed.

But several times in my career at the agency I had gone even further to achieve even pettier aims. I thought of the hallucination from which I’d just surfaced. The interrogation, the Fourth Wall, the story about an OSI research liaison with delusions. Perhaps it hadn’t been so malign after all. Perhaps it was more like a dream with a message, urging me to keep faith in my own sanity.

Frieda had claimed that McKellar sent her to me. I recalled Winch saying, ‘College girls aren’t as innocent as they used to be.’ At the time, I’d taken it for an oblique acknowledgement of the favor he’d done me, sending over a pretty 20-year-old to help me polish the family silver. If that was the case, then surely he must have been complicit in the scheme. My former best friend, my former closest ally against Branch 9, had betrayed me.

But another possibility, I now realised, was that he was trying to warn me not to trust her.

And

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