Towing Jehovah (17 page)

I told our bos'n, Eddie Wheatstone, he'd either learn to hold his liquor or I'd clap him in irons. So this morning, what does the idiot do? Gets roaring drunk and smashes up the rec-room pinball machine, thereby obliging me to jam his ass in the brig.

Able Seaman Karl Jaworski insisted he gave Isabel Bostwick "nothing but a friendly good-night kiss." Then I talked to the woman, a wiper, and she showed me her cuts and bruises, and after that two others came forward, An-mei Jong and Juanita Torres, with similar marks and similar complaints about Jaworski. I stuck him in the cell next to Wheatstone.

Until 48 hours ago, nobody had ever died on a vessel under my command.

Leo Zook. An AB. Poor bastard caught a lethal dose of hydrocarbon gas while cleaning out number 2

center tank. Now here's the really troubling part. The hose of his Dragen rig was cut to pieces, and when Rafferty arrived on the scene, Zook's mucking partner—Neil Weisinger, that nervy kid who manned the helm during Beatrice—was crouching beside the body holding a Swiss Army knife. Whenever I stand outside Weisinger's cell and ask him to tell what happened, he just laughs.

"The corpse is taking hold," is how Ockham explains our situation. "Not the corpse per se, the
idea
of the corpse—that's our great enemy, that's the source of this disorder. In the old days," says the padre, "whether you were a believer, a nonbeliever, or a confused agnostic, at some level, conscious or unconscious, you felt God was watching you, and the intuition kept you in check. Now a whole new era is upon us."

"New era?" I say.

"Anno Postdomini One," he says.

The Idea of the Corpse. Anno Postdomini One. Sometimes I think Ockham's losing it, sometimes I think he's dead right. I hate locking up my own crew, especially with His carotid artery still unbreached and the sharks running so thick, but what other choice do I have? I fear that we're a plague ship, Popeye. Our cargo's gotten inside us, sporing and spawning, and I'm no longer certain who's towing whom. A profound sense of regret fell upon Thomas Ockham as, dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Levi Strauss jeans, he descended the narrow ladder to the
Valparaíso's
makeshift brig. This, he decided, is how he should have spent his life—collar off, moving among the rejected and the jailed, siding with the world's outcasts. Jesus hadn't wasted His time worrying about superstrings or some eternally elusive TOE. The Master had gone where needed.

Lower than the pump room, lower even than the engine flat, the cells were strung along an obscure starboard passageway crowded with shielded cables and perspiring pipes. Thomas advanced at a crouch. The three prisoners were invisible, locked behind riveted steel doors improvised from boiler plates. Slowly, haltingly, the priest moved down the row, past the vandal Wheatstone and the lecher Jaworski, pausing before the case he found most disturbing, Able Seaman Neil Weisinger. Twenty-four hours earlier, Thomas had contacted Rome. "In your opinion, does our current ethical disarray trace to some palpable force generated by the process of divine decay," ran his fax's final sentence, "or to some subjective psychological effect spawned by theothanatopsis, that is, to the Idea of the Corpse?"

To which Tullio Di Luca had replied, "How much travel time do you estimate will be lost to this development?"

Outside the cell, Big Joe Spicer sat on an aluminum folding chair, a flare pistol strapped menacingly to his shoulder and a
Playboy
centerfold lying open on his lap.

"Hello, Joe. I'm here to see Weisinger."

Spicer scowled. "Why?"

"A troubled soul."

"Nah, he's happy as a clam at high tide." The second mate jabbed a dull brass skeleton key into the lock, twisting it suddenly like a race-car driver starting his engine. "Listen. The kid makes any threatening gestures"—he patted the flare pistol—"you let out a holler, and I'll come set his face on fire."

"I don't see you at Mass anymore."

"It's like fucking, Father. You gotta be up for it."

Stepping inside the cell, Thomas nearly gagged on the smell, a noxious brew of sweat, urine, and chemically treated feces. Naked to the waist, Weisinger lay atop his bunk, staring upward like a victim of premature burial contemplating the lid of his coffin.

"Hello, Neil."

The kid rolled over. His eyes were the dull matted gray of expired light bulbs. "Whaddya want?"

"To talk."

"About what?"

"About what happened in number two center tank."

"You got any cigarettes?" asked Weisinger.

"Didn't know you were a smoker," said Thomas.

"I'm not. You got any?"

"No."

"Sure could use a cigarette. A Jew-hater died."

"Zook hated Jews?"

"He thinks we murdered Jesus. God. One of those people. What day is this, anyway? You lose all sense of time down here."

"Wednesday, July twenty-ninth, noon. Did you kill him?"

"God. Nope. Zook? Wanted to." Weisinger climbed off his bunk and, staggering to the bulkhead, knelt beside his cistern, a battered copper kettle filled with water the color of Abbaye de Scourmont ale. "Ever known a moment of pure, white-hot clarity, Father Tom? Ever stood over a suffocating man with a Swiss Army knife clutched in your fist? It clears all the cobwebs out of your brain."

"You cut Zook's hose?"

"Of course I cut his hose." The kid splashed his doughy chest with handfuls of dirty water. "But maybe he was already dead, ever think of
that?"

"Was he?" asked Thomas.

"What difference would it make?"

"Big difference."

"Not these days. The cat's away, Tommy. No eyes on us. The Tablets of the Law:
fizz, fizz,
gone, like two Alka Seltzers dissolving in a glass of water. Be honest, don't
you
feel it too? Don't you find yourself dreaming of your friend Miriam and her world-class tits?"

"I won't pretend things haven't gotten confusing around here." Thomas gritted his teeth so hard a tingling arose in his right middle ear. His musings concerning Sister Miriam had indeed been intense of late, including the features specified by Weisinger. He'd even, heaven help him, given them names. "I'll admit the Idea of the Corpse threatens this ship." Wendy and Wanda. "I'll admit we're in the throes of Anno Postdomini One."

"Fizz, fizz
—I can think any damn thought I want. I can think about picking up a Black and Decker needle gun and drilling my Aunt Sarah's eyes out. I'm free, Tommy."

"You're in the brig."

Weisinger dipped a Carpco coffee mug into the cistern and, raising the water to his lips, drank. "You wanna know why I scare you?"

"You don't scare me." The kid terrified Thomas.

"I scare you because you look at me and you see that
anybody
here on the
Val
could find the freedom I've got. Joe Spicer out there could find it. Rafferty could find it. Sure you don't have a cigarette?"

"Sorry." Thomas sidled toward the door and paused, transfixed by the steel rivets; they were pathological and obscene, boils on the back of some leprous robot. Maybe he wasn't cut out for this sort of work. Maybe he'd better stick with quantum mechanics and his meditations on why God died. He looked at Weisinger and said, "Does it help, talking with me like this?"

"O'Connor could find it."

"Does it help?"

"Haycox could find it."

"Anytime you get the urge to talk, just have Spicer send for me."

"Captain Van Horne could find it."

"I really want to help you," said the priest, rushing blindly out of the cell.

"Even you could find it, Tommy," the kid called after him. "Even you!" As the shabby and foul-smelling taxi pulled up to 625 West Forty-second Street, Oliver realized they were only a block away from Playwrights Horizons, the theater where his personal favorite among Cassie's plays,
Runkleberg,
had premiered on a double bill with his least favorite,
God Without Tears.
Lord, what a sexy genius she was. For her he would do anything. For Cassandra he would rob a bank, walk on burning coals, blow God to Kingdom Come.

Viewed from the sidewalk, the New York offices of Pembroke and Flume's World War Two Reenactment Society looked like just another Manhattan storefront, indistinguishable from a dozen such establishments occupying the civilized side of Eighth Avenue, that asphalt DMZ beyond which the sex shops and peep shows had not yet advanced. The instant the three atheists entered, however, a curious displacement occurred. Stumbling into the dark foyer, attache case swinging at his side, Oliver felt as if he'd tumbled through time and landed in the private chambers of a nineteenth-century railroad magnate. A Persian rug absorbed his footfalls. A full-length, gilt-edged mirror rose before him, flanked by luminous cut-glass globes straight from the age of gaslight. A massive grandfather clock announced the hour, four P.M., tolling with such languor as to suggest its true purpose lay not in keeping time but in exhorting people to slow down and savor life.

They were met by a tall, swan-necked woman in a Mary Astor fedora and a sky blue business suit with padded shoulders, and while she was obviously too young to be Pembroke and Flume's mother, she treated the atheists less like clients than like a gang of neighborhood boys who'd come over to play with her own children. "I'm Eleanor," she said, leading them into a small paneled office, blessedly air-conditioned. Posters decorated the walls. PEMBROKE AND FLUME PRESENT
BATTLE OF

THE BULGE
(the four Ts formed by the muzzles of tank cannons) . . . PEMBROKE AND FLUME

PRESENT
ATTACK ON TOBRUK
(cut into the battlements of a fortified harbor) . . . PEMBROKE

AND FLUME PRESENT
FIGHT FOR IWO JIMA
(written in blood on a sand dune). "I'll bet you fellas would like something cold and wet." Eleanor ambled over to an early-forties Frigidaire icebox and opened the door to reveal a slew of classic labels: Ruppert, Rheingold, Ballantine, Pabst Blue Ribbon.

"New beer in old bottles," she explained. "Budweiser, in fact, from the bodega around the corner.

"I'll take a Rheingold," said Oliver. "Pabst for me," said Barclay.

"Ah, the pseudo-choices of late capitalism," said Winston. "Make mine a Ballantine."

"Sidney and Albert are in the back parlor, listening to their favorite program." Eleanor removed the beers, popping the caps with a hand-painted Jimmy Durante opener. "Second door on the left." As Oliver entered the parlor in question—a dark, snug sanctum decorated with pinup photos of Esther Williams and Betty Grable—a high, attenuated male voice greeted him: ". . . where they discovered that Dr. Seybold had perfected his cosmo-tomic energizer. Listen now as Jack and Billy investigate that lonely stone house known as the Devil's Castle."

Two pale young men sat on opposite ends of a green velvet sofa, holding Rupperts and leaning toward a Chippendale coffee table on which rested an antique cathedral radio, its output evidently being supplied by the adjacent audiocassette player. Noticing their visitors, one man slipped a cigarette from a yellowing pack of Chesterfields while the other stood up, bowed politely, and shook Barclay's hand. On the radio, a teenaged boy said, "Great whales and little fishes, Jack! Can you imagine some foreign nation having all that electrical energy for nothing? We'll be reduced to a pauper country!" Barclay made the introductions. Because the moniker "Pembroke and Flume" seemed to suggest a cinematic comedy team whose trademarks included the physical disparity between its members—Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy—Oliver was taken aback by the impresarios' similarity to each other. They could have been brothers, or even fraternal twins, a notion underscored by the matching red-and-black-striped zoot suits hanging from their elongated frames: Giacometti bodies, Oliver, the artist, decided. Both men had the same blue eyes, gold fillings, and blond pomaded hair, and it was only through concentrated effort that he distinguished Sidney Pembroke's open, smiling countenance from the more austere, vaguely sinister visage of Albert Flume.

"I see Eleanor found you some brews," said Pembroke, ejecting the cassette. "Good, good."

"What were you listening to?" asked Winston.

"Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy."

"Never heard of it."

"Really?" said Flume with a mixture of disbelief and disdain. "You're not serious." Whereupon the partners threw their arms across each other's shoulders and sang. Wave the flag for Hudson High, boys,

Show them how we stand!

Ever shall our team be champions,

Known throughout the land!

"There are better programs, of course," said Flume, lighting his cigarette with a silver-plated Zippo.
"The
Green Hornet:
'He hunts the biggest game of all—the public enemies who try to destroy our America!''

"And
Inner Sanctum,
if you've got really strong nerves," said Pembroke. Flume faced Oliver squarely, taking a long drag on his Chesterfield. "I'm told your organization wishes to purchase our services."

"I was quoted a figure approaching fifteen million."

"Were you, now?" said Flume cryptically. Obviously the dominant partner.

"Could you tell us more about the target?" asked Pembroke eagerly. "We don't have a clear picture yet." Oliver's blood froze. Here it was, the moment when he must explain why obliterating a seven-million-ton corpse that didn't belong to any of them was a necessary course of action. Opening his attaché case, he removed an 8X 10 color photo and balanced it atop the radio cabinet.

"As you know," he began, "the Japanese have always been self-conscious about their height."

"The Japs?" said Flume, looking perplexed. "Indeed."

So far, so good. "According to the Freudian interpretation of World War Two, they sought to expand horizontally in compensation for their genetic inability to expand vertically. As scholars of that particular conflict, you're undoubtedly familiar with this theory."

"Oh, yes," said Pembroke, even though Oliver had invented it the previous Tuesday.