Blameless in Abaddon (25 page)

As the night deepened, Martin and Augustine sat talking atop the forecastle—or, rather, Augustine talked and Martin listened. He didn't mind. The bishop's diatribes were considerably more entertaining than Saperstein's moody silences, Beauchamp's oblique jokes, Ockham's incomprehensible cosmologizing, and Belphegor's endless enumerations of the reasons
Blood Feast
was a better movie than
The Corpse Grinders.

Besides concupiscence, the human failing that most angered Augustine was heresy. “For thirty long years I battled the Donatists in my bishopric. I fined them, evicted them from public office, revoked their civil rights, exiled their clerics—and in the end, thanks be to God, I prevailed.”

“You wiped them out?” asked Martin.

“I wiped them out. Show me one practicing Donatist in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

“There aren't any.”

“Indeed. I had to fight Pelagius's followers just as hard, and once again the Lord granted me victory. I'll wager not one of your friends is a Pelagian, right?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Nary a Manichaean in your crowd either.”

“No Manichaeans.”

“I tell you, sir, non-Catholic Christianity has no future.”

“What about Protestantism?”

“Protestantism? Pshaw! Next door to idolatry, with the Bible instead of a golden calf. Believe me, Mr. Candle, Protestantism won't last over the long haul. It hasn't got the teeth.”

A second noise now filled the air, as regular as Belphegor's vibrating palate. Without exchanging a word, Martin and Augustine rose and, following the insistent
thunk-thunk-thunk
, crept furtively toward the stern.

Dressed in a watch cap, pea jacket, and sailor's bell-bottoms, a gnarled, bearded man leaned over the bulwark, his hands locked around the shaft of an iron-headed ax. With each successive chop, the intruder came closer to separating the
Good Intention
's rudder from her transom.

“What do you think you're doing?” demanded Augustine.

Startled, the ancient mariner lurched backward, swinging the ax in a wide circle and missing Martin's left breast by barely an inch.

“I
knew
I'd never get away with it,” the mariner moaned.

“Explain yourself!” said Augustine.

“Perhaps I should've requested your permission—‘Excuse me, might I make off with your rudder?'—but I deemed your assent unlikely.”

“Of
course
you can't have our rudder,” Martin snapped. “We need it to reach the Garden.”

“What ails you, sir?” Augustine asked the mariner. “In the whole of Genesis, there lives no nobler hero than Noah. Your present behavior baffles me.”

The Idea of Noah pulled off his watch cap and pointed toward the northern levee. Glazed with moonbeams, a mooring line as thick as a fire hose ran from the
Good Intentions
to an immense houseboat lashed to a weatherbeaten wharf. Corroded by spray, lacerated by gales, the ark had clearly seen better days. She looked completely deserted—no predators crept along her decks; no birds nested on her roof; no giraffes poked their heads through her skylights.

“Do you know what an ark is?” asked Noah. “I mean, do you really
know?
”

“An ark is a ship,” said Martin.

“Wrong!” said Noah. “Wrong! Wrong! A ship has a rudder. A ship has a sail. You can steer a ship where you want her to go. But an ark? Nothing but a bottle tossed into the sea, bobbing about at the mercy of winds and currents. Even as we speak, Sarkos is making me a canvas sail. I'm picking it up tomorrow.”

“You're too late,” said Augustine.

“No,” said Noah.

“They're all dead.”

“No, they're not. I'm going back.”

“They're dead—every last one.”

Turning, Noah presented Martin with the sort of crazed countenance he associated with the dipsomaniacs who'd routinely paraded through the Abaddon Municipal Building during his JP days. “All I need is a rudder and a sail,” said the mariner. Craggy and pitted, his features suggested the blasted terrain surrounding Sodom. “Do you know how it feels to slam the door in the faces of eighty-seven million people, guaranteeing their doom? Do you know what it's like to huddle with your wife and sons in a leaky cabin, hearing the sounds of ten thousand species as the flood waters drag them down? Their cries fill my dreams. Their eyes haunt my sleep. I'm going back.”

“Waste of time,” said Augustine.

Noah slid the ax handle across his neck, balancing the tool atop his shoulders like a yoke. “You really think so?”

“Yes—and you do too.” Augustine lit his briar pipe and sucked on the stem, the burning tobacco glowing red in the coagulated gloom. “Behold, Mr. Candle: the hidden harmony defense,” he said, indicating the ark with a dramatic sweep of his arm. “To the outside observer—a visitor from Mars—a worldwide flood looks like a bad thing. Our naive spaceman wouldn't realize that every victim of this disaster was wicked beyond redemption. If God hadn't eradicated Noah's entire generation, the Earth today would be crawling with adulterers, sybarites, and malefactors.”

“Father knows best,” said Martin dryly.

“Yes, that's one way to put it,” said Augustine. “Read Thomas Aquinas's
Summa theologiae
—read Julian of Norwich's
Book of Showings
and Meister Eckhart's
Sermons
—and you'll see that God in His day not only tolerated floods, earthquakes, tornadoes—”

“Prostate cancer.”

“—and other so-called evils, He actively
cultivated
them . . . though always, of course, for the sake of a greater good.”

“If we could but grasp the divine plan,” added Noah with an unapologetic sneer, “we would learn to love a lesion, make friends with anthrax, and invite tuberculosis over for tea.”

“Well, let's not push it,” said Augustine.

“No,
let's
push it,” said Noah. “If we're not going to take the problem of evil seriously, we might as least have some
fun
with it.”

“In the entire history of Western civilization,” protested the bishop, “no man has ever taken the problem of evil more seriously than Augustine of Hippo Regius.”

“Until I came along,” said Martin.

“Don't flatter yourself.”

Noah fixed his gaze on Martin. “Judge Candle, yes?
International 227
?”

“At your service.”

“You've set yourself a fearsome task.”

“I know.”

“Not as fearsome as cramming an entire biosphere into a three-hundred-cubit ark, but still fearsome.” Noah put his cap back on, pulling it down over his ears. “Once we landed on Ararat, our troubles continued to multiply—Lord, such problems! The bears couldn't stand each other. I had to become an ursine marriage counselor. The elephant was impotent. We resorted to artificial insemination. The kangaroo's mate kept having miscarriages. I've got a thousand stories. No survivors? Really?”

“No survivors,” said Augustine.

“I'm going back.”

“Futile, Noah. F-U-T-I-L-E.”

A prolonged sigh escaped the mariner's lips. He slumped onto the afterdeck. “Here,” he said at last, handing Martin the ax. “You can make better use of this than I. It will vaporize eventually, but meanwhile you should take it to The Hague. Tell the judges it's the very tool with which I felled the trees for my ark. Tell them that—in Noah's opinion—the hidden harmony defense runs counter to all our best instincts as human beings.”

Martin leaned the ax against the bulwark and offered the mariner a corroborating smile. “When an upright citizen hears his neighbor has met with an earthquake or a hurricane, he doesn't stop to ask, ‘Is there a hidden harmony here?' He rolls up his sleeves and tries to help.”

“Exactly.” With an athleticism that defied his years, Noah regained his feet and climbed onto the long, taut mooring line. “If I learned one thing from the Deluge, Your Grace, it is this: a man who seals up his ark for the sake of a greater good is a man who has ceded his soul to chaos.” Slowly, cautiously, he tightrope-walked toward the rudderless vessel. “The hidden harmony defense is pornography, Bishop Augustine—pornography for priests!”

“You're wrong!” Augustine called after the retreating sailor.

“You're right!” shouted Martin.

“Read your Aquinas! Aquinas, Noah, Aquinas!”

The mariner jumped from the mooring line to the weather deck of his ark. “The moose was gay! The lioness was a lesbian! You don't know what I've been through! You simply can't imagine!”

 

For two tedious and sleepy days the
Good Intentions
continued on her westward course, the remorseless sun pounding on her decks, the ravenous mosquitoes relentlessly pricking Martin and the scientists. The passing countryside was a parched wasteland crawling with outsized scorpions, their abdomens curving upward like scythes. Skeletons dotted the terrain as well—human skeletons, posed in tableaux alluding to various Renaissance masterworks.

“The Valley of Dry Bones,” Augustine explained as the packet cruised past a deathly rendition of Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
and a meatless reconstruction of Raphael's
School of Athens.
“Ezekiel, chapter thirty-seven.”

“I'm sure of one thing—those boneheads can't tell us whether Fermat proved Fermat,” said Beauchamp.

“Nor do they know how the spirochetes adhere,” said Saperstein.

“I'm beginning to think this expedition was a mistake,” said Ockham, videotaping a flayed facsimile of Michelangelo's
Fall of Man.

On the third day there appeared a population of skeletons who—far from behaving like the dead—had undertaken to stage
Crabs
, a musical revue that, according to Augustine, “aimed to do for T. S. Eliot's serious poetry what
Cats
accomplished for his lighter verse.” Dressed in top hats and tails, the skeletons threw their arms around each other's clavicles and did a kick dance as they sang “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to a lush, Andrew Lloyd Webber-ian melody.

 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

 

The skeletons began to waltz.

 

“I am Lazarus, come from the dead
,

Come back to tell you all . . .”

 

For Martin,
Crabs
was both highly entertaining and supremely puzzling. Had God conjured up this extravaganza merely to torment him? The ex-JP hardly needed to be reminded that a carcinomic crustacean had colonized his pelvis and thighs; the constant pain informed him of its ever-expanding authority. Perhaps
Crabs
was God's idea of humor. If so, then which was worse: getting the joke, or not getting it?

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Fri, May 19, 10:46 AM EDT

 

I sent Lovett a telegram as you suggested, and an hour ago he called from a pay phone in Harvard Square. He gave me the identities of his three “theological witnesses” but refused to divulge anything further. In Lovett's words, “I feel no more obligated to reveal the whole of my strategy than Henry did to contact the French before Agincourt and warn them about the English longbow.”

 

Evidently we're up against the following superstars: Bernard Kaplan (a rabbi from Fitchburg, Massachusetts), Eleanor Swann (a Yale Divinity School professor), and Brother Sebastian Cranach (a Franciscan monk living in Olean, New York). I've hired a half dozen hungry Harvard grad students
—
Ph.D. candidates in philosophy—to assemble dossiers on all three. The rabbi and the academic don't give me much pause, but I'm scared of that monk.

 

Our plan to show
A History of Havoc
during Tonia Braverman's testimony has hit a snag. PBS doesn't want to give the series “a world première by default” over Court TV and CNN, and when I faxed Torvald a motion asking him to subpoena the thing, he turned us down flat. I'm hoping a serious donation will change the networks mind.

 

Martin glanced up from the laptop screen. The living skeletons were animating yet another “Prufrock” stanza, singing lines that—thirty-four years after he'd first heard them in Mr. Gianassio's class—still gave him a frisson.

 

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker
,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker
,

And in short, I was afraid.

 

An antique hearse clattered across the Valley of Dry Bones, pulled by four horses so aged and diseased they made the carousel ponies back in Celestial City USA seem like Kentucky Derby winners. The driver reined up, hobbled around to the rear of the hearse, and yanked open the door. An oblong wooden coffin tumbled out, striking the ground and shattering to reveal the corpse of a man without any arms or legs.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Sun, May 21, 03:19 PM Local Time

 

Maybe Lovett regards himself as another Henry V, but I think of him more as Falstaff: large and self-indulgent. Is Lovett's Rabbi Kaplan the same Rabbi Kaplan who wrote that best-seller called
When You Walk Through a Storm?
He's going to make a pretty sympathetic defense witness. My Aunt Bridget gave me his book, but I never read it. She says Kaplan's philosophy helped her get over Uncle Wilmer's death.