Towing Jehovah (18 page)

"Well, gentlemen, the stark fact is that, at the beginning of this year, a team of Japanese scientists over in Scotland found a way to expand vertically. By exploiting the latest breakthroughs in genetic engineering, they've grown the Asian of the future— the gigantic humanoid creature whose prototype you see in this picture. You with me?"

"Sounds like a rejected
Green Hornet
script," said Flume, coiling the gold chain of his zoot suit around his index finger.

"They call it Project Golem," said Barclay.

"Most golems are Jewish," said Winston.

"This one's Japanese.

"The Japs are in
Scotland?"
said Pembroke.

"The Japs are everywhere," admonished Flume.

"Thus far they've failed to endow their golem with life," said Winston, "but if they ever
do
—well, you can imagine the danger such a megaspecies would pose for the environment, not to mention the free enterprise system."

"Jack Armstrong would shit his knickers," said Barclay.

"Luckily, the coming weeks afford us a perfect opportunity to stop Project Golem in its tracks," said Oliver. "Ever since the hot weather hit, the scientists have been looking for a way to freeze the prototype before it putrefies. Then, last Wednesday, they resolved to hook it up to the supertanker
Valparaíso
and tow it above the Arctic Circle."

"Valparaíso
—that's not a Jap name," said Pembroke.

"Neither is 'Rockefeller Center,' " said Winston.

"I don't understand why private enterprise must redress this matter," said Flume. "The United States of America boasts the largest navy in the world. Much larger than Sid's and mine."

"Yeah, but you can't use the American Navy without Congressional approval," said Barclay.

"The CIA?"

"Good people, but we'd never mobilize 'em in time," said Oliver.

"This is clearly a job for concerned businessmen like ourselves," said Winston. "Vigilante capitalism, eh?"

"I'm not a mystical sort of fella," said Barclay, "but I feel it's no accident your ship is named
Enterprise."
Oliver took a hearty swallow of beer. "So, what do you think?"

Pembroke shot his partner a pained glance. "What do we think, Alby?" Flume flicked his cigarette ashes into a pewter tray shaped like Dumbo the Flying Elephant. "We think it sounds pretty fishy."

"Fishy?" said Oliver, peeling the label off his Rheingold bottle.

"Fishy as the hold of a Portuguese trawler."

"Oh?"

"We think this thing you want out of the way might be a Jap golem, and then again it might not be." Flume took a drag, blew a smoke ring. "We also think this: money talks. You mentioned fifteen million. That's a good start. A darn good start."

"It's more than a
start,"
grunted Oliver.

"Indeed. The thing is . . ."

"All right—sixteen."

"The thing is, you're not asking us to do a normal reenactment. In some ways, this is the real McCoy." Flume blew two rings this time, one inside the other. "Wars have a way of going over budget."

"A single strike might not be enough to remove the target," Pembroke elaborated. "The planes might have to return to
Enterprise
and rearm."

"Final offer," said Oliver. "This is it. Tops. Ready? Seventeen million dollars. For that kind of money, you could stage a goddamn musical of my eighth-grade civics text on the back of the moon and keep it running for ten years."

Had the impresarios been dogs, Oliver decided, their ears would have shot straight up and stayed there.

"Overlord," said Flume in a hushed and reverent voice.

"What?" said Oliver.

"Operation Overlord. An old dream of ours."

"You know—Normandy," said an equally respectful Pembroke.

"D-Day," said Flume. "I mean, if you're serious about seventeen million dollars, really serious, no strings attached, then, with a certain amount of luck—like maybe the job turns out to be a cakewalk, you know, a one-strike affair—well, we'd probably have enough left over for a D-Day. All of it. The diversionary bombings, the amphibious landing, the sweep through France. A risky venture, sure, but I predict it'll turn a profit, don't you, Sid?"

"Enough to finance Stalingrad, I should imagine," said Pembroke.

"Or Arnhem, eh?" said Flume. "Forty thousand Allied paratroopers dropping out of the sky like sleet."

"Or maybe even Hiroshima," said Pembroke.

"No," said Flume firmly.

"No?"

"No."

"Poor taste?"

"Execrable."

"World War Two," sighed Pembroke. "We'll never see its like again."

"Let's get one thing straight," said Oliver. "You can't just damage the golem—it's got to vanish without a trace."

"Korea was a crummy stalemate," Pembroke persisted.

"We expect you to blast the tow chains apart," said Oliver, "and send the sucker straight into the Mohns Trench."

"Vietnam had potential," said Flume, "but then the hippies got their hands on it."

"Don't even
talk
to us about Operation Desert Storm," said Pembroke.

"A lousy video game," said Flume.

"A goddamn mini-series," said Pembroke.

"Do you understand me?" said Oliver. "The
Valparaíso's
cargo must disappear."

"No problem," said Flume. "Only we follow U.S. Navy usage 'round here, okay? No 'the' before a ship's name. It's
Valparaíso,
not 'the'
Valparaíso. Enterprise,
not 'the'
Enterprise.
Got that?" Hovering over the photo, Pembroke jabbed his index finger into the carcass's chest. "Why's it grinning like that?"

"If you were that big," said Barclay, "you'd grin too."

"Any reason to suspect we won't get a clear shot at it?" asked Flume. "When Scout Bombing Six sank
Akagi,
Commander McClusky had to put up with all sorts of crap—fighter pianes, screening vessels, flak.
Valparaíso
isn't carrying any Bofors guns, is she?"

"Of course not," said Winston.

"No destroyer escort?"

"Nothing like that."

"Oh," said Pembroke, sounding vaguely disappointed. "I think we should use TBD-1 Devastator torpedo planes, don't you, Alby?"

"They'd clearly be the most effective against a target of this sort," said Flume, nodding. "On the other hand . . ." Gripped by a sudden reverie, the impresario closed his eyes.

"On the other hand . . . ?" said Winston.

"On the other hand, it was SBD-2 Dauntless dive bombers that actually blew
Akagi
out of the water."

"So while the Devastators would work the best . . . ," said Pembroke.

"The Dauntlesses would be more historically accurate," said Flume.

"I'd vote for the Devastators," said Oliver.

"A tough call either way. Shall we leave it to the admiral, Sid?"

"Good idea."

Flume stubbed out his cigarette in the Dumbo tray. "Naturally this has to be a hit-and-run operation. I figure if
Enterprise
hunkers down, say, a hundred and fifty miles west of the target, the Nips'll never know where the planes came from."

"The last thing we want is for Japan to be pissed at Alby and me," Pembroke explained. "We're gonna need their full cooperation for Guadalcanal."

"Swing by Shields, McLaughlin, Babcock, and Kaminsky on Wednesday, and they'll give you a rough draft to shoot past your lawyers," said Flume. "It'll probably take a couple weeks to nail down all the details—payment schedules, representations and warranties, the indemnity picture . . ."

"You mean—we've got ourselves a deal?" said Winston eagerly.

"Seventeen million?" said Flume, raising his Ruppert.

"Seventeen million," Oliver confirmed, lifting his Rheingold.

Two vintage beer bottles came together, clanking in the hot Manhattan air.

"You know what I think we should do right now?" said Pembroke. "I think we should bow our heads and pray."

A silken breeze blew across the
Valparaíso's
stem as Cassie climbed down the ladder and, like Juliet stepping onto her balcony, joined Able Seaman Ralph Mungo in the forward lookout post. The cool air caressed her flesh. Slowly the sweat evaporated from her face. By morning, thank God, they'd be across the thirty-third parallel, the wretched North African summer forever behind them. Puffing on a Marlboro, Mungo stared out to sea. The waxing moon hung low, fixed in the starry sky like a luminous slice of cantaloupe. Cassie set her flip-top coffee Thermos on the rail, reached into her shorts pocket, and removed the encrypted fax Lianne had intercepted that afternoon up in the radio shack. Oliver's love letters, with their mawkish poems illustrated by pornographic sketches, had never truly touched Cassie, but these words cut to her core. Decoding them, she'd experienced something primal, the same variety of awe that Darwin, Galileo, and a handful of others must have felt upon realizing they were shaping the course of intellectual history. True, the particulars were troubling: despite her affection for all things theatrical, she did not like placing reason's fate in the hands of any organization that would call itself Pembroke and Flume's World War Two Reenactment Society. (These men did not sound like the saviors of secular humanism; they sounded like a couple of lunatics.) What Cassie found so moving was Oliver's rationality, the fact that he'd correctly interpreted the body as a menace and immediately swung into action. His insistence on security struck her as particularly astute. Intuitively he'd sensed that if the Vatican got wind of an impending attack, they'd either reroute the mission or erect defenses the Reenactment Society could never hope to penetrate. "This will be my only communique," he'd written near the end.

Expect air stride at 68°11'N, 2°35'W, 150 miles east of launch point, Jan Mayen
Island. In restaging Midway, planes will sever tow chains, breach target, and send our
troubles to bottom of Mohns Trench. . . .

Leaning over the rail, she accorded the fax the same treatment she'd inflicted on the blisteringly negative review the
Village Voice
had given her play about Jephthah, the warrior in the Book of Judges who immolated his own daughter by way of keeping a bargain with God. "Authentic satire is to puerile sniggering as a firecracker is to a soda cracker, a distinction to which a young author named Cassie Fowler is evidently oblivious . . ."

Good old Oliver. He'd always stuck by her—hadn't he? — even when she was a struggling playwright and he a leftist ne'er-do-well painting grim urban landscapes while waiting for his trust fund to kick in. There she'd be, sitting in the basement of some Broome Street saloon or Avenue D hockshop, one of those scuzzy roach reserves that had the nerve to call themselves off-Broadway theaters (any farther off, and she'd have been in Queens), watching a disastrous rehearsal of
Runkleberg
or
God
Without Tears,
and suddenly Oliver would appear, even if it was three A.M., bringing her black coffee and sweet rolls, telling her she was the Lower East Side Jonathan Swift.

No sooner had Cassie tossed the bits of paper into the Portugal Current than Anthony Van Horne himself descended into the lookout post, dressed in his tattered Mets baseball jacket and John Deere visor cap. A spasm of guilt shot through her. This man had saved her life, and here she was, plotting to abort his mission.

"You're in luck, sailor—I'm taking over your watch," Van Horne told Ralph Mungo. A large purple bruise, frosted with glory grease, spread outward from the old AB's right eye. "That okay with you?"

"Aye-aye, sir." Saluting, grinning, Mungo threw his cigarette butt overboard and scooted up the ladder.

"Stargazing?" the captain asked Cassie.

"Something like that." Raising the Thermos to her lips, she took a big swallow of jamoke. It was the fifth time she'd run into him here. She suspected she was being pursued—a flattering thought, but the last thing she needed just then was her adversary developing a crush on her. "I've decided to rename the constellations." She pointed heavenward. "It's time for a wholly American mythology, don't you think?

Look, there's the Myth of the Family. There's Equality. There's One Nation Under God with Liberty and Justice for All."

"You hate our cargo, don't you?"

Cassie nodded. "That's why I hang out here—the farthest I can get from Him without ending up in the water. And what about you, Captain? Do you hate our cargo?"

"I never knew Him." The captain yawned; the reflex took hold of him, rippling through his face and shoulders. "I only know it's good to be at sea again."

"You're exhausted, sir."

"We've been trying to siphon His blood into the tanks—a way to get us moving faster—but His neck won't accept the chicksans." Another elaborate yawn. "The worst of it's . . . I'm not sure what word to use. The
anarchy,
Cassie. Notice that AB's black eye? He got it in a brawl. It's been a week of fistfights, attempted rapes, possibly even a murder. I've had to put three men in the brig." An odd combination of dread and annoyance crept over Cassie. "Murder? Jesus. Who died?"

"Deckie named Zook—he got gassed in a cargo bay. Ockham says we're in thrall to the corpse. Not the corpse itself, the Idea of the Corpse. With God out of the picture, people have lost their main reason to be moral. They can't help experimenting with sin.

As she always did in the presence of intellectually untenable arguments, Cassie thrust her left hand into her pocket and pinched her inner thigh through the fabric. "Can't help it? Gimme a break, Anthony. The whole thing's an
alibi.
A clever alibi, but an alibi. These sailors of yours—want my opinion?

They're seizing on the carcass to rationalize their crimes. God's death is so
convenient."

"I think it goes deeper than that." Reaching into his baseball jacket, Anthony produced a sheet of beige paper covered with smeary black characters, and for one awful instant Cassie imagined he meant to confront her with a copy of Oliver's communique. "Do me a favor, Doc. Read this. It's from my father." The letter was handwritten on Exxon Shipping stationery: a cramped, feathery scrawl that struck her as oddly feminine.