Towing Jehovah

EDEN

ON THE SECOND OF September, at 0945 hours, the Carpco Valparaíso steamed free of the fog. The vibrant, piercing clarity of the world — the sparkle of the North Atlantic, the azure glow of the sky, the brilliant white feathers of the passing petrels — made Thomas Ockham weep with joy. This was how the blind beggar must have felt when, told by Christ to visit the Pool of Siloam and wash the muddy spittle from his eyes, he suddenly found he could see.

At 1055 Lianne Bliss’s fax machine kicked in, spewing out what Thomas took to be the latest in a series of hysterical transmissions from Rome, this one distinguished primarily by its being the first to get through. Why had Ockham cut off communication? the Vatican wanted to know. Where was the ship? How was the Corpus Dei? Good questions, legitimate questions, but Thomas was reluctant to reply. While the sudden upwelling of a lost pagan civilization was hardly something he could have anticipated or prevented, he sensed that Rome would nevertheless find some way to blame him — for Van Horne Island, the intolerable delay, their cargo’s dissolution, everything.

At first neither Thomas nor anyone else on board realized how radically the corpse had soured. Their innocence remained intact as late as September 4, when the tanker crossed the 42nd parallel, the latitude of Naples. Then the wind shifted. It was a stench that went beyond mere olfaction. After burrowing into everyone’s nostrils and sinuses, the fumes next sought out the remaining senses, wringing tears from the sailors’ eyes, burning their tongues, scouring their skin. Some deckies even claimed to hear the terrible odor, wailing across the sea like the voices of the sirens enticing Ulysses’s crew to its doom. Whenever a party of stewards crossed over in the Juan Fernandez to harvest edible fillets from amid the burgeoning rot, they had to take Dragen rigs along, breathing bottled air.

Ironically, the softening of the flesh meant that Van Horne was finally able to get his chicksans into a carotid artery: a pathetic gesture at this point, but Thomas understood the captain’s need to make it. On September 5, at 1415, Charlie Horrocks and his pump-room gang began the great transfusion. Although they’d never sucked cargo on the run before, in less than six hours Horrocks’s men had managed to shoot eighty-five thousand gallons of salt water out of the ballast tanks and into the sea while simultaneously channeling as much blood into the Valparaíso’s cargo bays.

And it worked. From the very first, the ship began running at a steady nine knots, a third faster than at any time since the start of the tow.

The officers kept their watches faithfully. The deckies chipped and painted conscientiously. The stewards collected fillets dutifully. But only when the sailors started responding to their obligations with their customary grumpiness, only when the Val’s companionways began ringing with profane complaints and hair-raising curses, did Thomas grow confident that normalcy had returned to the ship.

“It’s over,” he told Sister Miriam. “It’s finally over. Thank God for Immanuel Kant.”

“Thank God for God,” she replied tartly, biting into a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

As Labor Day dawned, cold and overcast, the priest saw that he could no longer deny, either to himself or to Rome, how woefully behind schedule Operation Jehovah had fallen. Indeed, their cargo was now so malodorous that he wondered, half seriously, if this sign of their misadventure could have spread eastward across the ocean, all the way to the gates of the Vatican. His fax was frank and detailed. They were two thousand miles from the Arctic Circle. The ship had gone aground on an uncharted Gibraltar Sea island (37 north, 16 west), trapping them on a mountain of rust for twenty-six days. During this interval, not only had the ethical relativism seeded by the Idea of the Corpse blossomed into total chaos, but putrefaction and neurological disorganization had doubtless befallen the body itself. Yes, the Kantian categorical imperative was now keeping everyone in line, and, yes, the captain’s transfusion scheme had boosted their speed significantly, but neither of these happy facts could begin to compensate for the hiatus on the island. Only when it came to the famine did Thomas censor himself, declining to specify the source of their salvation. Pope Innocent XIV, he felt, was not yet ready for Sam Follingsbee’s recipe for Dieu Bourguignon.

The synod took only one day to absorb, debate, and act upon the bad news. On September 8, at 1315, Di Luca’s reply poured forth.

Dear Professor Ockham:

What can we say? Van Horne has failed, you have failed, Operation Jehovah has failed. The Holy Father is devastated beyond words. According to the OMNIVAC-2000, not only is the divine mind now lost, the concomitant flesh has been corrupted too. By the time the freezing process begins, the degeneration will be so profound as to dishonor Him Whose remains we were elected to salvage. At this point, clearly, a different strategy is indicated.

We have decided to suffuse the Corpus Dei with a liquid preservative, a procedure the OMNIVAC believes will go smoothly, Van Horne having already siphoned off 18 percent of the blood.

Toward this end, Rome has chartered a second ULCC, the SS Carpco Maracaibo, filling her hold with formaldehyde in the port of Palermo and dispatching her west across the Mediterranean. The Maracaibo’s officers and crew have been advised they’re on a mission to commandeer a prop from a planned motion picture of unconscionably pornographic content, thereby forestalling production. We don’t need your friend Immanuel Kant to tell us such a ploy is morally ambiguous, but we feel the body’s true identity is already known to far too many individuals.

Upon receiving this message, you shall direct Van Horne to come about and revisit the island on which he bestowed his surname, there to rendezvous with the Maracaibo. I shall be on board, ready to supervise the formaldehyde injections and subsequent conveyance of the body to its final resting place.

Sincerely,

Tullio Di Luca,

Msgr. Secretary of Extraordinary

Ecclesiastical Affairs

Beyond the rude and uninformed finger pointing of the first paragraph, this letter actually pleased Thomas. Wonder of wonders: it looked as if he’d be getting a second chance to argue Neil Weisinger out of his suicidal penance, a matter that had been weighing on him ever since they’d left Van Horne Island. No less appealing was the thought of dumping the whole sordid, smelly business of Operation Jehovah into Di Luca’s lap. At the moment Thomas wanted nothing more than to go home, settle into his musty Fordham office (how he missed the place, its miniature Foucault pendulum, framed fractal photographs, bust of Aquinas), and start teaching a new semester of Chaos 101.

“He’s gotta be kidding,” said Van Horne after reading Di Luca’s communique.

“I think not,” said Thomas.

“Do you realize what this man’s asking?” Lifting Raphael’s feather from his desk, Van Horne weaved it back and forth through the God-choked air. “He’s asking me to give up my command.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Looks like you’re getting the boot too.”

“No regrets, in my case. I never wanted this job.”

Van Horne settled behind his desk and, opening a drawer, removed a corkscrew, two Styrofoam cups, and a bottle of burgundy. “Too bad you told Di Luca we blew the ballast. He’ll factor that into his calculations when he starts chasing us.” The captain twisted the corkscrew home with the same authority he’d brought to the problem of hoving chicksans into their cargo’s neck. “Luckily, we’ve got a good head start.” Yanking out the cork, Van Horne sloshed a generous amount of Chateau de Dieu into each cup. “Here, Thomas — it drives away the stink.”

“Am I to understand you intend to disobey Di Luca’s orders?”

“Our angels never said anything about an embalming.”

“Nor did they say anything about strange attractors, inverse Eucharists, or ballasting the Val with blood. This voyage has been full of surprises, Captain, and now we’re obliged to turn the ship around.”

“And never learn why He died? Gabriel said you’d have to go the whole nine yards, remember?”

“I’m no longer interested in why He died.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I just want to go home.”

“The bottom line is this: I don’t trust your friends in Rome” — Van Horne neatly ripped Di Luca’s fax in half — “and, what’s more, I suspect you don’t trust them either. Drink your wine.”

Thomas, wincing, lifted the cup to his lips. He sipped. A chill spiraled through him, head to toe. He felt as if he were experiencing the fate that Poe had contrived for the protagonist of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” except in this case the bisection was occurring along the prisoner’s axis. Only after his third sip did the half of Thomas beholden to Holy Mother Church overcome the half that shared the captain’s suspicions.

“Did you know Seaman Weisinger stayed behind?” Thomas asked.

“Rafferty told me.”

“The kid thinks he’s going to have a major religious experience.”

“A major starvation experience.”

“Exactly.”

“We aren’t turning around,” said Van Horne.

“When the cardinals hear you’ve gone renegade, they’ll become irrational — you realize that, don’t you? They’ll — Lord only knows. They’ll send the Italian Air Force after you with cruise missiles.”

Van Horne gulped his burgundy. “What makes you think the cardinals will hear I’ve gone renegade?”

“You have your responsibilities, I have mine.”

“Jesus, Thomas — do I have to ban you from the radio shack?”

“That isn’t your prerogative.”

“Let’s make it official. Okay? From this moment on, the shack’s off limits to you. Make that the whole damn bridge. If I catch you sending Di Luca so much as a fucking chess move, I’ll lock you in the brig and throw the key over the side.”

An icy knot congealed in Thomas’s stomach. “Anthony, I must say something here. I must say that I’ve never had an enemy in my whole life, but today, I fear, you have become my enemy.” He grimaced. “As a Christian, of course, I must attempt to love you just the same.”

Van Horne poked his index finger through the bottom of his Styrofoam cup. “Now let me say something.” He flashed the priest a cryptic grin. “When the cardinals obtained your services, Thomas Ockham, they got a much better man than they deserved.

September 9.

Latitude: 60°15'N. Longitude: 8°5'E. Course: 021. Speed: 9 knots. Sea temperature: 28° Fahrenheit. Air temperature: 26° and falling.

Thank God for the Westerlies, wafting out of Greenland like Grant took Richmond and driving away the stench. I can breathe again, Popeye. I can see clearly, hear distinctly, think straight.

Even though my decision to muzzle Ockham and hijack the body was made in the thick of the stink, I’m sure I did the right thing. Assuming we can maintain our 9 knots, we’ll have dropped our load and started for Manhattan before Di Luca’s even crossed the circle. If the man wants to play taxidermist after that, fine.

Yesterday Sam Follingsbee put it to me: either we get some vitamins into the crew, or we start converting the officers’ wardroom into a sick bay. So I changed course — reluctantly, as you might imagine — and by 1315 the Val was within 2 miles of Galway Harbor and its world-famous grocery shops.

“Would you like to be dropped off here?” I asked Cassie, fervently hoping she’d pass up the offer. “You could probably get a plane out of Shannon Airport before sundown.”

“No,” she replied without hesitation.

“Won’t your bosses be pissed?”

“This voyage is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said, taking my hand and giving it an unchaste squeeze (or so it felt), “and I need to see it through.”

The chief steward himself led the expedition. At 1345 he and his pastry chef, Willie Pindar, set out in the Juan Fernandez, their pockets stuffed with shopping lists and American Express travelers’ checks.

A few minutes after Sam left, a fiberglass cutter with a gold harp on her side appeared, poking around our tow chains like an Irish wolfhound sniffing its littermate’s balls. The skipper got on his bullhorn and demanded a meeting, and I couldn’t see any choice about it. With the Vatican out hunting us in the Maracaibo, I wasn’t about to irritate the rest of militant Christendom as well.

Commander Donal Gallogherm of the Irish Republican Coast Guard turned out to be one of those big, blowsy sons-of-the-old-sod that Pat O’Brien used to play in the movies. He came up to the bridge with his exec, sprightly Ted Mulcanny, and between the two of them they made me homesick — not for the actual New York City, but for the New York City of Hollywood legend, the New York of warmhearted Irish cops whacking their nightsticks across the rumps of Dead End Kids. And at base that’s what these clowns were: a couple of Irish cops patrolling their watery beat from Slyne Head to Shannon Bay.

“Impressive vessel you got here,” said Gallogherm, striding around the wheelhouse like he owned the place. “Took over our whole radar screen.”

“We’re a bit off course,” said Dolores Haycox, the mate on duty. “Damn Marisat — always crashing.”

“That’s an awfully strange flag-o’-convenience you be flyin’,” said Gallogherm.

“You’ve seen it before,” I told him.

“That so? Well, you know what Mr. Mulcanny and I are thinkin’? We’re thinkin’ there’s a major irregularity about this tramp tanker of yours, and so we’ll be needin’ to see your Crude Petroleum Right o’ Passage.”

“Crude Petroleum what?” I said, wishing I’d run their cutter down when I’d had the chance. “Phooey.”

“You don’t have one? It’s a strict requirement for bringin’ a loaded supertanker through Irish territorial waters.”

“We’re in ballast,” Dolores Haycox protested.

“Like hell you are. You’re at the top of your Plimsoll line, sailor girl, and if you don’t produce a Crude Petroleum Right o’ Passage posthaste, we’ll be obliged to detain you in Galway.”

“Say, Commander,” I asked, catching on, “might you happen to have one of those ‘Crude Petroleum Rights of Passage’ on your cutter?”

“Not sure. What about it, Teddy?”

“Only this mornin’ I noticed just such a document flutterin’ about on my desk.”

“Is it … available?” I asked.

Gallogherm flashed me a majority of his teeth. “Well, now that you be mentionin’ it…”

“Dolores, I believe we have a stack of — what do you call them? — American Express travelers’ checks in our safe,” I said.

“The price bein’ eight hundred American dollars,” said Gallogherm.

“The price being six hundred American dollars,” I corrected him as the mate went off to fetch the checks.

“You mean seven hundred?”

“No, I mean six hundred.”

“You mean six hundred and fifty?”

“I mean six hundred.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Gallogherm. “Then, of course” — he pinched his nostrils — “there’s the large and fragrant matter of that sewage you got in tow.”

“Smells like an Englishman,” said Mulcanny.

I knew exactly how to bamboozle them. “Actually, Commander, it’s the dead and rotting carcass of God Almighty.”

“The what?” said Mulcanny.

“You’ve a scandalous sense of humor,” said Gallogherm, more amused than offended.

“The Catholic God or the Protestant?” asked Mulcanny.

“Teddy, lad, can’t you recognize a joke when you hear one?” Gallogherm gave me a conspiratorial wink. “So, what we’ve got here is an ambitious sea captain who’s gone and converted his supertanker to a free-lance garbage scow, am I right? And just where might this ambitious captain be intendin’ to make his dump?”

“Way up north. Svalbard.”

Haycox returned in time to hear Gallogherm say, “In any event, it’s your Solid Waste Right o’ Passage we’ll be needin’ to see.”

“Don’t overplay your hand, Commander.”

“Solid Waste Rights o’ Passage normally run six hundred American dollars, but this week they be goin’ for a mere five.”

“No, this week they’re going for a mere four. What’s more, if you two pirates don’t stop jerking us around, I guarantee it won’t be long before this scam of yours ends up on page one of the Irish Times”

“Don’t you presume to be judgin’ me, Captain. You’ve no notion of what I’ve seen in this life. Ireland’s a nation at war. You’ve no notion of what I’ve seen.”

Grimly I signed and recorded $1,000 worth of travelers’ checks. “Here’s your lousy toll,” I said, greasing Gallogherm’s palm.

“A pleasure it’s been to do business with you.”

“Now get the fuck off my ship.”

At 1600, Follingsbee and Pindar appeared with the groceries. If you factor in Gallogherm’s shakedown money, each orange cost us about $1.25, and the rest was equally outrageous. At least it’s quality stuff, Popeye — juicy yams, crisp cabbages, robust Irish potatoes. You’d envy us our spinach.

Midnight now. A choppy beam sea. Ursa Minor high above. Before us lie the Faeroes, 80 miles distant as the petrel flies, and then it’s open water all the way to Svalbard. Rafferty was just on the intercom, telling me the forward searchlight has picked out “an iceberg shaped like the Paramount Pictures logo.”

We’re steaming for the frigid Norwegian Sea, trimmed with blood, all ahead full, and I’m feeling like a master again.

Beer mug in hand, Myron Kovitsky shuffled up to the piano stool, sat down, and, pressing his Jimmy Durante nose in place, began pounding the keys. He scratched his schnozzola and raised his gravel voice, singing to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”

We was fly in’ in our bombers at one hundred fuckin’ feet, Da weather fuckin’ awful, fuckin’ rain and fuckn’ sleet; Da compass it was swinging fuckin’ south and fuckin’ north, But we made a fuckin’ landing in da Firth of fuckin’ Forth.

Durante stopped playing and showed the crowd a big loopy grin. The men of the Enterprise shuffled uncomfortably in their seats. No one applauded. Oliver cringed. Undaunted, Durante took a slug of Frydenlund and launched into the chorus.

Ain’t da Navy fuckin’ awful? Ain’t da Navy fuckin’ awful? Ain’t da Navy fuckin’ awful? We made a fuckin’ landing in da Firth of fuckin’ Forth.

Rising from the stool, Durante said, “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!”

Hard times had befallen the Midnight Sun Canteen. Bored to death and sick of the cold, the Great American Nostalgia Machine had started adulterating its repertoire with off-color songs that, despite their historical authenticity, were clearly nothing Jimmy Durante, Bing Crosby, or the Andrews Sisters would have ever performed in public. The hostesses were tired of pretending to have crushes on the pilots and sailors, and the pilots and sailors were tired of the hostesses being tired of them. As for Sonny Orbach and His Harmonicoots, they had quit the scene entirely, off reincarnating Glenn Miller’s band at a bar mitzvah in Connecticut, a long-standing commitment they’d insisted on honoring despite Oliver’s offer to double their wages. Those servicemen who still felt the urge to dance were forced to settle for either Myron Kovitsky’s feeble piano-playing skills or Sidney Pembroke’s Victrola rasping out Albert Flume’s original 78-rpm records of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and the real Glenn Miller.

Oliver had to admit it: his grand crusade was on the verge of collapse. By sitting around doing nothing for three weeks, Pembroke and Flume had amassed enough in retainer fees to stage a first-rate D-Day, and while the notion of sinking a Jap golem still appealed to them, they were far more anxious to get home and locate a reasonable facsimile of Normandy. And even if Oliver could somehow convince everybody to stay at Point Luck until a PBY recon flight spotted the Val, it was quite possible that, because of the dreadful Arctic weather, Admiral Spruance would refuse to give the go-ahead. Flaps and landing gear were sticking during the milk runs. Gas lines were clogging. The flight deck was freezing faster than Captain Murray’s men could clear it: an unbroken sheet of ice as vast as the mirror of the Hubble telescope.

Oliver spent these gloomy days at the bar, doodling randomly in his sketch pad as he tried to come up with reasons it was okay for them not to obliterate the Corpus Dei after all.

“Fellas, I got a question for you,” he said, putting the final touches on a caricature of Myron Kovitsky. “This campaign of ours — is it truly justified?”

“What do you mean?” asked Barclay, deftly shuffling a pack of playing cards.

“Maybe the body should be left alone,” said Oliver. “Maybe it should even be brought to light, like Sylvia Endicott insisted the night she quit.” Rotating on his bar stool, he placed himself face to face with Winston. “A disclosure might even spark your True Revolution, right? Once everybody knows He’s cashed it in, they’ll leave their churches and start building the workers’ paradise.”

“You don’t know very much about Marxism, do you?” Winston arranged two dozen stray Frydenlund bottle caps into a hammer and sickle. “Until they’re given something better to replace it with, the masses will never abandon religion, corpse or no corpse. Once social justice triumphs, of course, the God myth will vanish” — he snapped his fingers — “like that.”

“Oh, come off it.” Barclay made the queen of spades vault magically from the pack. “Religion will always exist, Winston.”

“Why do you think that?”

Al Jolson wandered drunkenly onstage.

“One word,” said Barclay. “Death. Religion solves it, social justice doesn’t.” Turning toward Oliver, he caused the jack of hearts to leap into his friend’s lap. “But what does it matter, eh? I hate to be blunt, Oliver, but I think it’s pretty damn likely Cassie’s ship has been lost at sea.”

As Oliver winced, Jolson began singing a cappella:

Oh, I love to see Shirley make water, She can pee such a beautiful stream. She can pee for a mile and a quarter, And you can’t see her ass for the steam.

At which instant Ray Spruance’s portrayer’s static-laden voice exploded from the loudspeakers. “Attention, everyone! This is the admiral! Good news, boys! Initial dispatches from the Coral Sea indicate that Task Force Seventeen has badly damaged the Japanese carriers Shohu and Shokaku, thereby preventing the enemy from occupying Port Moresby!”

A solitary sailor clapped. A lone flier said, “That’s nice.”

“He’s leaving out a few details,” said Wade McClusky’s por-trayer, joining the three atheists at the bar. “He’s afraid to mention we lost Lexington in that particular battle.”

“Truth: the first casualty of war,” said Winston.

“Attention!” continued Spruance. “Attention! All men attached to Task Force Sixteen will report to the ship immediately! This is not a drill! All men from Scout Bombing Six, Torpedo Six, and Enterprise will report immediately!” Spruance suddenly shifted to a jovial, folksy tone. “Strawberry Ten’s just spotted the enemy, boys! That Jap golem’s in Arctic waters, and now we’re gonna bushwhack the sucker!”

“Hey, comrades — you hear that?” squealed Winston.

“We’ve done it, guys!” shouted Barclay. “We’ve got irrationality by the balls!”

Oliver hugged his sketch pad, kissing his caricature of Myron Kovitsky. The Valparaíso was afloat! Cassandra was alive! He pictured her standing on one of the tanker’s bridge wings, scanning the sky for the promised squadrons. I’m on my way, darling, he thought. Here comes Oliver to save your Weltanschauung.

McClusky strode to Pembroke’s Victrola and, detaching the huge conical speaker, held it to his mouth like a megaphone. “Well, boys, you heard the admiral! Let’s get off our duffs and show them Nips they got no right to mess with the natural economic order of things!”

So now it was here, that bittersweet juncture each man had awaited with supreme patience, the moment when he must seek out his favorite hostess and bid her au revoir. Choking back tears half-crocodile and half-genuine, the sailor nearest Oliver clasped the hand of his best girl — a chubby woman with pigtails and dimples — and solemnly vowed to write her every day. The hostess, in turn, gave the sailor Oliver’s money’s worth, assuring him she would carry their brief encounter in her heart forever. Throughout the Midnight Sun Canteen, phone numbers were exchanged, along with fleeting kisses and sentimental tokens (brooches and locks of hair from the women, tie clips and aviation badges from the men). Even Arnold Kovitsky got into the mood, striding up to the mike and transforming himself into Marlene Dietrich singing “Lili Marlene.”

The servicemen trembled and wept, stunned by the sheer hypnotic beauty of it all: the song, the farewells, the call to arms.

A blond, apple-cheeked flier whose name badge read BEESON turned to McClusky and raised his hand.

“Yes, Lieutenant Beeson?”

“Commander McClusky, sir, is there time for one last foxtrot?”

“Sorry, sailor, Uncle Sam needs us right now. Battle stations, men!”

September 14.

Latitude: 66°50'N. Longitude: 2°45'W. Course: 044. Speed: 7 knots. Sea temperature: 23° Fahrenheit. Air temperature: 12° and falling.

At 0745 two momentous events occurred. The Valparaíso crossed the Arctic Circle, and I shaved off my beard. A major operation. I had to borrow a pair of butcher’s shears from Follingsbee, and after that I went through a half dozen of Ockham’s disposable razors.

Ice enshrouds our cargo, a smooth crust running head to toe like the casing on a sausage. By the time we reach Kvitoya, His meat will be solid as marble.

“See, the putrefaction’s stopped, just like our angels predicted,” I said, striding up to Ockham. “We don’t need the Vatican’s damn formaldehyde.”

The padre was standing on the afterdeck, watching the pump-room gang glide around on His sternum. Ice-skating has become the crew’s principal recreation of late, eclipsing both stud poker and Ping-Pong. Their gear is jerry-built — cutlery affixed to hiking boots — but it works fine. For extra protection against the cold, they coat their hands, feet, and faces with glory grease.

Ockham looked me in the eye and smiled, obviously relieved that I’d just placed us back on speaking terms. “Someone should contact Rome and tell them He’s finally stable,” he said as Bud Ramsey fell squarely on his ass. “Surely you’d prefer not to have Di Luca out chasing us in the Maracaibo.”

I couldn’t argue with the man’s logic, and I even allowed him to compose the message. (He did this in his cabin. They’ll be selling earmuffs in hell before I let Ockham on the bridge again.) At 1530 Sparks faxed the good news to Rome, and at 1538 a second communique went out, this one to sunny Spain. It was only a dozen words long. “Expect me in Valladolid next month whether you want me or not,” I told my father.

We’re getting very near the end, Popeye.

After tonight’s dinner, Follingsbee’s best batch of stroganoff yet, the steward said he wanted me to see the results of a “scientific experiment” he’d been working on ever since our stop in Ireland. He led me outside — what a wonderland our weather deck has become, ice hanging from the catwalks in great crystalline webs, frost shimmering on the pipes and valves — and into the depths of number 4 ballast tank, chattering all the way about the joys of home agronomy. We hadn’t gone 20 feet before my nostrils were quivering with pleasure. Lord, such a marvelous scent: utter ripeness, Popeye, sheer fecundity. I switched on my flashlight.

At the bottom of the tank lay a brightly colored garden, its vegetables grown bulbous beyond the wildest fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch, its fruits so fat they practically screamed aloud to be plucked. Gnarled trees lurched out of the darkness, their branches bent by apples the size of volleyballs. Asparagus spears reared up from the floor like some bizarre species of cactus. Broccoli flourished beside the keelson, each stalk as tall and thick as a mimosa tree. Vines drooped from the ladders, their dark purple grapes clustered together like Godzilla’s lymph nodes. “Sam, you’re a genius.”

The steward doffed his cream-puff hat and took a modest bow. “Seeds all came from them groceries we bought in Galway. Soil’s a mixture of skin and plasma. What gets me is how fast everything grew, in subfreezing temperatures yet, and without a single ray of sunshine. You sow an orange pip, and ten hours later — bingo!”

“So half the credit belongs to…”

“More than half. He makes great compost, sir.”

When this voyage is finally over, Popeye, there’s only one thing I’m going to miss, and that’s the food.

Cassie’s parka, borrowed from Bud Ramsey, was stuffed with grade-A goose down; her socks, from Juanita Torres, were 100 percent virgin wool; her gloves, from Sister Miriam, contained pure rabbit fur. But the cold still penetrated, eating through each protective layer like some voracious Arctic moth. The thermometer on the starboard wing stood at negative eight degrees, and that didn’t include the windchill factor.

Lifting her field glasses, she focused on the glistery, snowcapped nose. Far beyond, a steady stream of charged solar particles spilled forth, countless electrons and neutrons entering the earth’s magnetic field and colliding with rarefied atmospheric gases. The resulting aurora filled the entire northern sky: a luminous blue-and-green banner flapping in eerie silence above the rolling waves and the wandering pack ice.

What she most admired about Anthony Van Horne, the fact that made him always there these days, always flitting about in her brain, was his obsessiveness. At last she’d met someone as stubborn as she. Snapshots from a sea odyssey: Anthony killing a tiger shark with a bazooka, quelling a mutiny with fast food, persuading his sailors to move a mountain. Just as Cassie would stop at nothing to destroy God, so the captain would stop at nothing to protect Him. It was truly intense, erotic almost, this strange, unspoken bond between them.

The question, of course, was whether Oliver’s admirable project still existed. Pure logic said the slender threads binding the interests of the Central Park West Enlightenment League to those of the World War Two Reenactment Society had been completely severed during the Valparaíso’s long imprisonment on Van Horne Island. Yet Cassie knew Oliver. She understood his utter, passionate, tedious devotion to her. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that he’d found some way to keep the alliance alive. Any day now, any hour now, the Age of Reason would be visited upon the Corpus Dei.

The Valparaíso’s chart room, surprisingly, was no warmer than her bridge wings. As Cassie stepped inside, her vaporous breath drifted across the Formica table and hovered above a map of Sardinia, creating a massive cloud formation over Cagliari. Luckily, someone had undertaken to compensate for the defective heating ducts by bringing in a Coleman stove. She fired it up and got busy, scanning the wide, shallow drawers until she noticed one labeled ARCTIC OCEAN. She opened it. The drawer contained over a hundred bodies of ice-choked water — Greenland’s Scoresby Sound, Norway’s Vestfjord, Svalbard’s Hinlopenstreten, Russia’s East Siberian Sea — and only after thumbing halfway through the pile did she come upon a chart depicting both the Arctic Circle and Jan Mayen Island.

Expect airstrike at 68°11'N, 2°35'W, Oliver’s fax had said, 150 miles east of launch point…

Pivoting toward the Formica table, she unfurled the map. It was dense with data: soundings, anchorages, wrecks, submerged rocks — the geographic equivalent of an anatomy text, she decided, earth’s most intimate particulars laid bare. She picked up a ballpoint pen and did the math on a stray scrap of Carpco stationery. Wary of the icebergs, Anthony had recently cut their speed from nine knots to seven. Seven times twenty-four: they were covering 168 nautical miles a day. Calibrating the dividers against the bar scale, ten miles tip to tip, she walked them from the Val’s position — 67 north, 4 west — to the spot specified by Oliver. Result: a mere 280 miles. If her optimism was not misplaced, the attack lay fewer than forty-eight hours in the future.

“Searching for the Northwest Passage?”

She hadn’t heard him come in, but there he was, dressed in a green turtleneck sweater and frayed orange watch cap. He was clean-shaven, shockingly so. In the bright neon glow his chin lay wholly revealed, its dimple winking at her.

“Homesick,” she replied, pitching the dividers into the Norwegian Sea. “I figure we’re a good four days from Kvitoya.” She rubbed each arm with the opposite hand. “Wish that damn stove worked better.”

Anthony slipped off his cap. “There are remedies.”

“For homesickness?”

“For cold.”

His arms swung apart like the doors to some particularly cozy and genial tavern, and with a nervous laugh she embraced him, pressing against his woolly chest. He massaged her back, his palm carving deep, slow spirals in the space between her shoulder blades.

“You shaved.”

“Uh-huh. Feeling warmer?”

“Hmmm…”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“The Vatican’s ordered us to turn around and head south.”

“South?” Panic shot through Cassie. She tightened her grip.

“We’re supposed to rendezvous with the SS Carpco Maracaibo back in the Gibraltar Sea. She’s got formaldehyde in her cargo bays.”

“Those angels ordered Him frozen, not embalmed,” she protested.

“That’s why we’re holding steady.”

“Ahh…” Cassie relaxed, laughing to herself, cavorting internally. Holding steady — wonderful, perfect, straight into the clutches of the Enlightenment.

He kissed her cheek, softly, tenderly: a brotherly kiss, non-carnal. Then her brow, her eyes. Jaw, ear, cheek again. Their lips met. She pulled away.

“This isn’t a good idea.”

“Yes, it is,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” she agreed.

And suddenly they were connecting again, hugging fiercely, meshing. They kissed voraciously, mouths wide open, as if to swallow one another. Cassie shut her eyes, reveling in the liquidity of Anthony’s tongue: a life-form unto itself, member of some astoundingly sensual species of eel.

Disengaging, the captain said, “The stove gets hotter, you know…”

“Hotter,” she echoed, catching her breath.

He crouched over the Coleman and adjusted the fuel control, turning the flame into a roiling red mass, a kind of indoor aurora borealis. Opening the INDIAN OCEAN drawer, he whipped out a large, laminated map and spread it on the floor like a picnic blanket. “Madagascar’s the best place for this sort of thing,” he explained, winking at her. Slowly, lasciviously, the chart room heated up.

“You’re wrong,” said Cassie playfully, shedding her parka. She rifled the SULU SEA drawer and grabbed a portrait of the Philippines. “Palawan’s much more erotic.” She released the map, and it glided to the floor like a magic carpet landing in thirteenth-century Baghdad.

“No, Doc.” Scanning the drawer called FRENCH POLYNESIA, he removed the Tuamotu Archipelago. “It’s really Puka-Puka.”

“This one,” she giggled, pulse racing as she extracted Majorca from the BALEARIC ISLANDS drawer.

“No, Java here.”

“Sulawesi.”

“Sumatra.”

“New Guinea.”

They locked the door, turned off the overhead lights, and lay down amid the patchwork of scattered landfalls. Cassie exposed her neck; his lips roamed up and down the length of her jugular, planting kisses. Groaning softly, rolling toward the Caymans, they undressed each other, adrift in the warm waters of the Bartlett Deep. The tensor lamp cast harsh shadows across Anthony’s shaggy legs and great simian chest. As they glided into the Bahia de Alcudi, Cassie went to work with her mouth, sculpting his ardor to full potential, until it seemed the figurehead of some grand priapic frigate.

They floated north, entering the cold, jolting Mozambique Channel, just off Madagascar, and it was here that Anthony drew a Shostak Supersensitive from his wallet and put it on. Wrapping her legs around the small of his back, she piloted his jacketed cock where it wanted to go. Smiling, he plied her salty waters: Anthony Van Horne, a ship with a mission. She inhaled. He exuded an amazing fragrance, an amalgam of musk and brine shot through with all the rubbery, suckered things God and natural selection had wrought from the sea. This, she decided, was how the Galapagos Islands would have smelled, had she gotten there.

By the time he came, they had journeyed all the way past the Mindoro Strait to the bright, steamy beaches of China’s Hainan Island.

Withdrawing, he said, “I guess I feel a little guilty.”

“Oliver?”

He nodded. “Making love to a lady with her boyfriend’s condom…”

“Father Thomas would be proud of you.”

“For fornicating?”

“For feeling guilty. You’ve got a Kantian conscience.”

“It’s not a painful sort of guilt,” he hastened to add, sliding his index and middle fingers inside her. “It’s not like how it feels to blind a manatee. I’m almost enjoying it.”

“Screw Matagorda Bay,” Cassie whispered, reveling in his touch. The Coleman hissed and growled. She dripped with all the planet’s good and oozy things, with chocolate sauce and clarified butter, melted cheese and maple syrup, peach yogurt and potter’s slip. “Screw guilt, screw Oliver, screw Immanuel Kant.” She felt like a bell, a wondrous organic Glocke, and before long she would peal, oh, yes, just as soon as this gifted carillonneur, so attentive to her clapper…

“Screw them,” he agreed.

Her orgasm occurred in the Gulf of Thailand.

It lasted over a minute.

As Anthony worked his condom free, the little sack leaked, adding its contents to the lovely mess of sweat and juices now rolling toward the shores of Hainan. “The thing I’ve always noticed about Chinese sex,” he said, pointing to the tidal wave and grinning, “is that you feel like doing it again an hour later.”

“An hour? That long?”

“Okay, twenty-five minutes.” The captain cupped his hand around her left breast, hefting it like a housewife evaluating a grapefruit. “You want to know the key to my father, Doc?”

“Not really.”

“His fixation on Christopher Columbus.”

“Let’s forget about Dad for a while, okay?”

Gently, Anthony squeezed the gland. “This is what Columbus thought the world looked like.”

“My left breast?”

“Anybody’s left breast. As the years went on, it became clear he hadn’t come anywhere near circling the globe — the earth was obviously four times bigger than he’d guessed — but Columbus still needed to believe he’d reached the Orient. Don’t ask me why. He just had a need. Next thing anybody knew, he’d made up this crazy theory that the world was really shaped like a woman’s breast. He had gone most of the way around, only he’d done so at the nipple” — Anthony ran his finger along the edge of Cassie’s areola, tickling her — “whereas everyone else was measuring the circumference much farther south.” His fingers wandered downward. “So my father, in the end, has a fool for an idol.”

“Jesus, Anthony — he can’t be all bad. Nobody’s all bad, not even God.”

The captain shrugged. “He taught me my trade. He gave me the sea.” A sardonic chuckle broke from his lips. “He gave me the sea, and I turned it into a cesspool.”

Cassie grew suddenly tense. Part of her, the irrational part, wanted to keep this despairing sailor in her life long after the Valparaíso put to port. She could picture them chartering their own private freighter and setting off together for the Galapagos. The other part knew that he would never, ever be free of Matagorda Bay, and that any woman who let herself become entangled with Anthony Van Horne would end up treading the same malignant oil in which he himself was drowning.

For the next fifteen minutes, the captain pleasured her with his tongue — not an eel this time but a wet, fleshy brush, painting the mansion of her body. None of this will make a difference, she swore as he drew out a second Supersensitive. Even if I fall in love with him, ran Cassie’s silent vow, I’ll continue to make war on his cargo.

WAR

“GlVE ME PANTS that entrance” chanted Albert Flume as he herded Oliver, Barclay, and Winston into the Enterprise’s rusting passenger elevator.

“Shoulders Gibraltar, shiny as a halter.” Sidney Pembroke pushed the button labeled HANGAR DECK.

“A frantic cape,” said Flume.

“Of antic shape,” said Pembroke.

“Drape it.”

“Drop it.”

“Sock it.”

“And lock it at the pocket!”

“Navy code?” asked Barclay as the rickety car descended into the hull.

“Zoot-suit slang,” Pembroke replied. “Golly, I miss the forties.”

“You weren’t even alive in the forties,” said Barclay.

“Yeah. Golly, I miss ’em.”

The forward hangar bay was astonishingly hot, a phenomenon that evidently traced to the seven kerosene stoves roaring and snorting along the amidships bulkhead. Sweat popped onto Oliver’s brow, rolling downward and stinging his eyes. Instinctively he stripped, taking off his Karakorum parka, cashmere scarf, cowhide gloves, and Navy watch cap.

“Tactics.” Removing his Memphis Belle bomber jacket, Pembroke swept his bare arm across the cavernous bay.

“Exactly.” Flume pulled off his blue crewneck sweater. “Strategy’s the soul of war, but never underestimate the power of tactics.”

The bay was jammed to the walls, plane stacked against plane, their wings folded like the arms of defeated infantrymen bent in surrender. Dressed in shorts and T-shirts, maintenance crews bustled about, chocking wheels, popping out instrument panels, poking around inside engines. A few yards away, two nervous-looking sailors rolled back the steel door to the powder magazine, gently picked up a 500-pound demolition bomb, and set it on a hand-operated trolley.

“American carrier planes are traditionally stored on the flight deck,” said Pembroke.

“As opposed to the Jap convention of keeping ’em on the hangar deck,” said Flume.

“By bringing both squadrons below, Admiral Spruance has thawed every rudder, flap, and gas line.”

“Come dawn, he’s gonna start all the engines down here. Imagine: starting your engines in your hangar bays — what a brilliant tactic!”

The bomb handlers dollied their charge across the bay and, as if returning a baby to the womb, stuffed it into the fuselage of an SBD-2 Dauntless.

“Say, you folks are planning to come, aren’t you?” asked Flume.

“Come?” said Oliver.

“To the battle. Ensign Reid’s agreed to fly us out in Strawberry Eleven.”

“This isn’t my sort of thing,” said Barclay.

“Oh, you must come,” said Pembroke.

“Marx never cared for battles,” said Winston. “I don’t either, especially.”

“What about you, Oliver?”

The Enlightenment League’s president took out his monogrammed linen handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. If he worked at it, he could easily have discouraged himself, conjuring up fantasies of Strawberry Eleven crashing into an iceberg or being blown apart by a stray demolition bomb. But the final truth was this: he wanted to be able to tell Cassandra he was there, right there, when the Corpse of Corpses went into the Mohns Trench.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

The next morning at 0600, Spruance’s pilots and gunners crowded into the carrier’s stuffy, smoke-filled briefing room. Oliver immediately thought of the Episcopalian services to which his parents had periodically dragged him back home in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania; there was the same weighty silence, the same restless reverence, the same mood of people getting ready to receive the lowdown on matters of life and death. The hundred and thirty-two war reenactors sat at rigid attention, parachute packs balanced on their laps like hymnals.

Ramrod straight, chest puffed out, Spruance’s portrayer slipped his briar pipe between his teeth, ascended the podium, and, grabbing the sash cord, unfurled a hand-drawn overhead view of the body in question, cryptic grin included. “Our objective, gentlemen: the insidious Oriental golem. Code name, ‘Akagi.’ ” The corpse was sketched with its limbs spread-eagled, evoking da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man. “Nimitz’s strategy calls for a series of coordinated strikes against two separate targets.” Lifting the pointer from the chalk tray, the admiral jabbed it into the Adam’s apple. “Our torpedo squadron will concentrate on this area here, Target A, hitting the region between the second and third cervical vertebrae and creating a rupture descending from the epidermis to the center of the throat. If we’ve calculated correctly, Akagi will then begin shipping water, much of it flowing down the windpipe and into the lungs. Meanwhile, Scout Bombing Six will drop its payloads on the midriff, systematically enlarging this depression here — Target B, the navel — until the abdominal cavity is breached.” Clamping his pointer under his arm like a riding crop, Spruance faced the air group’s leader. “We’ll attack in alternating waves. Toward this end, Commander McClusky, you will divide each squadron into two sections. While one section’s over its designated target, the other will be getting refueled and rearmed back here on Mother Goose. Questions?”

Lieutenant Lance Sharp, a paunchy, balding man with a tiny smear of brown mustache on his upper lip, raised his hand. “What sort of resistance might we expect?”

“The PBYs report a total absence of fighter planes and AA artillery on both Valparaíso and the golem. However, let’s not forget who constructed this sucker. I calculate the enemy will launch a fighter umbrella of between twenty and thirty Zeroes.”

Lieutenant Commander E. E. Lindsey, a tense Virginian who bore a startling resemblance to Richard Widmark, spoke up next. “Will they really launch a fighter umbrella?”

“That’s basic carrier tactics, mister.”

“But will they really?”

“They launched a hell of a fighter umbrella on June 4, 1942, didn’t they?” Spruance chomped on his pipe. “Well, no, they won’t really launch a fighter umbrella,” he added, more than a little annoyed.

“Question about technique, Admiral,” said Wade McClusky. “Shall we dive-bomb, or would glide-bombing be best?”

“If I were you, given the inexperience of my pilots, I’d opt for glide-bombing.”

“My pilots aren’t inexperienced. They’re perfectly capable of dive-bombing.”

“They weren’t experienced in ’42.” Spruance slid his pointer along the left breast. “And be sure to come in from the east. That way the AA gunners’ll be blinded by the sun.”

“What AA gunners?” asked Lindsey.

“The Jap AA gunners,” said Spruance.

“This is the Arctic, sir,” said McClusky. “The sun rises in the south, not the east.”

For a moment Spruance looked confused, then a smile to match Akagi’s spread across his face. “Say, let’s take advantage of that! Attack from the south, and dive-bomb the hell out of em!

“Don’t you mean, glide-bomb the hell out of ’em?” said McClusky.

“Your boys can’t dive-bomb?”

“They couldn’t in ’42, sir. They can today.”

“I think you should dive-bomb, don’t you, Commander?”

“I do, sir,” said McClusky.

Spruance lanced his pointer into Akagi’s right side. “Okay, boys, let’s show those slant-eyed bastards how to fight a war!”

At 0720, Ensign Jack Reid’s handsome, toothy portrayer guided Oliver, Pembroke, Flume, and the burly actor playing Ensign Charles Eaton into the barge and ferried them out to Strawberry Eleven. Reid eased himself into the pilot’s seat. Eaton assumed the copilot’s position. After hunkering down in their machine-gun blisters, Pembroke and Flume swapped their parkas for matching mauve flak jackets, then slipped on their headsets, opened an aluminum cooler, and began removing the raw materials of a picnic: checkered tablecloth, paper napkins, plastic forks, bottles of vintage Rheingold, Tupperware containers filled with treats from the Enterprise’s galley. Within minutes the PBY flying boat was moving, climbing toward the gauzy midnight sun. Field glasses in hand, Oliver crawled through the unoccupied compartments, eventually settling on the mechanic’s station; it was a cramped space, mottled with rust and flaking paint (poor Sidney and Albert, he thought, they could never really recover the forties, only its disintegrating remains), but the large window afforded a sweeping vista of sea and sky. For better or worse, this coign of vantage also lay within hearing distance of the impresarios.

“Look, Captain Murray’s turning Enterprise into the wind,” Pembroke told Oliver as the carrier swung slowly east.

“Standard procedure for launching a squadron,” Flume elaborated. “With such a short runway, you want lotsa wind under everybody’s wings.”

Ensign Reid brought the PBY to two thousand feet, then leveled her off and looped around, giving his passengers a clear view of the flight deck. Dressed in green anoraks, a foul-weather crew scurried about, chopping the ice apart with pickaxes and pushing the fragments over the side with coal shovels. A yellow-suited firehose crew finished the job, aiming their nozzles at the runway and letting loose torrents of liquid de-icer.

“Here comes Torpedo Six,” said Pembroke as, wings folded, two Devastators rode their respective elevators to the flight deck.

Taking care not to be swept overboard by the prop wash, a quartet of blue-suited plane handlers ran to the forward Devastator, 6-T-9, unchocking the wheels and spreading the wings, whereupon the pilot turned 180 degrees and taxied amidships. As the signal officer waved his batons, the pilot turned again, revved his engine, and sped down the runway, de-icer spewing from his wheels. Oliver half expected the plane to crash into the sea, but instead some God-made law took over — the Bernoulli effect, he believed it was called — lifting 6-T-9 off the bow and high above the waves.

“The Devastators need a head start over the dive bombers,” Pembroke explained as 6-T-ll joined her airborne twin. Both planes circled the carrier, awaiting the rest of their section. “Slow devils, those Devastators. They were obsolete even before the first one rolled off the assembly line.”

Oliver exhaled sharply, fogging the mechanic’s window. “Obsolete? Oh?”

“Hey, not to worry, fella,” said Pembroke.

“Your golem’s good as dead,” said Flume.

“And if worst comes to worst, we’ve always got Op Plan 29-67.”

“Exactly. Op Plan 29-67.”

“What’s Op Plan 29-67?” asked Oliver.

“You’ll see.”

“You’ll love it.”

Two by two, the Devastators continued to arrive, taxiing, revving, taking off. By 0815 the entire first-strike section of Torpedo Six was aloft, fifteen planes arranging themselves into three V-shaped formations. A delicious inevitability hung in the air, a sense of Rubicons crossed and bridges burned, like nothing Oliver had experienced since he and Sally Morgenthau had relieved each other of their respective virginities following a Grateful Dead concert in 1970. My God, he’d thought at the time — my God, we’re actually doing it.

“Let’s hit the road, Ensign,” Flume barked into his intercom mike. “We mustn’t be late for the ball.”

Turning the control yoke thirty degrees, Jack Reid’s portrayer pushed back on the throttle. Oliver, pulse racing (actually doing it, actually doing it), put on his headset. Pembroke leafed through a wartime issue ofStars and Stripes. Flume opened a Tupperware container and removed a Spam-and-onion sandwich. Over the intercom, Ensign Eaton’s portrayer whistled “Embraceable You.” Strawberry Eleven flew alongside the sun, soaring at seventy knots above a range of mammoth icebergs as she chased Lieutenant Commander Lindsey’s brave squadron east across the Norwegian Sea.

In his short but busy career as an able-bodied seaman, Neil Weisinger had helmed every sort of merchant ship imaginable, from reefers to Great Lakes freighters, bulk carriers to Ro-Ros, but he’d never before taken the wheel of anything so weird as the SS Carpco Maracaibo.

“Come right to zero-two-zero,” commanded the officer on duty, Mick Katsakos, a swarthy Cretan in white bell-bottoms, an oil-stained parka, and a Greek fisherman’s cap.

“Right to zero-two-zero,” echoed Neil, working the wheel.

He’d certainly heard of such vessels, these Persian Gulf tankers outfitted with an eye to the political realities of the Middle East. When filled to her Plimsoll line, a Gulf tanker bore only half the load of a conventional ULCC, yet she displaced a third more water. A single glance at the Maracaibo’s silhouette was sufficient to explain this disparity. Three Phalanx 20mm cannon sat atop her fo’c’sle; six Meroka 12-barrel guns jutted from her stern; fifty Westland Lynx Mk-15 depth charges clung to her bulwarks. Missile-wise, the Maracaibo achieved the elusive ideal of multiculturalism: Crotales from France, Aspides from Italy, Sea Darts from Britain, Homing Hawks from Israel. Since adding a dozen Persian Gulf tankers to her shipping fleet, Carpco’s stock had risen eleven points.

“Steady,” said Katsakos.

“Steady,” echoed Neil.

It was damn hairy, this business of maneuvering at high speed through the bergs and floes of the Norwegian Sea. Despite his second-mate status, Katsakos did not seem like a particularly smart or experienced sailor (the day before, he’d led them six leagues off course before noticing his error), and Neil did not really trust him to guide the tanker safely. Neil’s fervent wish was that the Maracaibo’s captain himself would appear on the bridge and take over.

“Ten degrees left rudder.”

“Ten left.”

But the captain never appeared on the bridge — or anywhere else, for that matter. He was as aloof and inaccessible as the immaterial God whom Neil had failed to find during his self-imposed exile on Van Horne Island. At times he wondered whether the Maracaibo even had a master.

For the first three days, Neil’s penance had gone well. The sun had been suitably hot, his hunger appropriately painful, his thirst fittingly intense (he’d allowed himself no more than a pint of dew every four hours). Perched in his petrified fig tree like some crazed, outcast, spiritually famished vulture, Neil had struggled to gain the universe’s attention. “You appeared to Moses! You appeared to Job!” he’d cried into the fog, over and over until his tongue became so dry the words stuck to it like burrs. “Now appear to me!”

Looking out to sea, Neil had been astonished to behold a Persian Gulf tanker, gravid with cargo and lying at anchor in the very cove from which the Valparaíso had recently departed. An hour later, a Falstaffian man with bad skin appeared at the base of his tree, swathed in the island’s eternal mist.

“And who might you be?” demanded the intruder in a musical Italian accent. Terra-cotta sand clung to his vinyl cassock, muting the bright red silk.

“Able Seaman Weisinger of the United States Merchant Marine,” he mumbled, certain he was about to faint.

“Tullio Cardinal Di Luca of the Vatican. You may address me as Eminence. Are you with the Carpco Valparaíso?”

“Not anymore.” A wave of vertigo. Neil feared he might fall from the tree. “I’m marooned, Eminence. Last time I saw the Val, she was headed for the Arctic.”

“Strange. Your captain was ordered to return to this island. Evidently he’s following his own star.”

“Evidently.”

“Was it Van Horne who marooned you?”

“I marooned myself.”

“Oh?”

“To find God,” Neil explained. The holes in Cardinal Di Luca’s face suggested a child’s connect-the-dots puzzle. What constellation would emerge if you drew a line from pock to pock? Ophiuchus, Neil guessed. Serpent Bearer. “The God beyond God. The God of the four A.M. watch. En Sof.”

“You expect to find God in a tree?”

“Moses did, Eminence.”

“Do you want a job, Able Seaman Weisinger?”

“I want to find God.”

“Yes, but do you want a job? The Maracaibo departed before we could assemble a proper crew. I can offer you the position of quartermaster.”

Hunger clawed at Neil’s stomach. His gullet screamed for water. For all he knew, a few more hours of such suffering might be enough to inflame these branches with En Sof.

And yet…

“As far as the Maracaibo’s company is concerned,” Di Luca continued, “Van Horne’s cargo is a motion-picture prop. The Holy See aims to keep the film from getting made. Join us, Mr. Weisinger. Time-and-a-half for overtime.”

The Lord, Neil decided, worked through many media, not just burning bushes and stone trees. YHWH dispatched angels, wrote on walls, poured dreams into prophets’ heads. Perhaps He even used the Catholic Church from time to time. By sending Tullio Di Luca to this place, Neil realized with a surge of joy, the God of the four A.M. watch was almost certainly telling him to get on with his life…

“Right ten degrees.”

“Right ten,” echoed Neil.

“Steady.”

“Steady.”

Behind Neil a door squealed open. A pungent fragrance wafted across the bridge, the sourness of human sweat mixed with the woodsy scent of a burning cheroot.

“What’s your course, Katsakos?” A male voice, resonant and gruff.

The second mate stiffened. “Zero-one-four.”

Neil turned. With his broad shoulders, ramrod spine, and leonine head emerging from the hood of a brilliant purple parka, the master of the Maracaibo looked aristocratic if not royal. Though scored with age, his face was astonishingly handsome, dark brown eyes shining from beneath a lofty brow, strong cheekbones flanking an aquiline nose.

“Speed?”

“Fifteen knots,” said Katsakos.

“Bump her up to seventeen.”

“Is that safe, Captain Van Horne?”

“When I’m on the bridge, it’s safe.”

“He called you Van Horne,” Neil blurted out as Katsakos advanced the throttles.

“Quite so.” The master of the Maracaibo puffed on his cheroot. “Christopher Van Horne.”

“The last captain I shipped with was named Van Horne too. Anthony Van Horne.”

“I know,” said the old man. “Di Luca told me. My son’s a good sailor, but he lacks — what shall we call it? — gumption.”

“Anthony Van Horne … ,” mused the second mate. “Wasn’t he in charge when the Valparaíso spilled her cookies into the Gulf of Mexico?”

“I heard it was mostly Carpco’s fault,” said Neil. “An overworked crew, an understaffed ship…”

“Don’t defend the man. Know what he’s hauling now? A goddamn skin-flick prop, that’s what.” The captain stubbed out his cheroot on the twelve-mile radar. “Tell me, Mr. Weisinger, are you a sailor I can depend on?”

“I believe so.”

“Ever held the wheel in a storm?”

“Last Fourth of July, I steered the Val through the heart of Hurricane Beatrice.”

“Through the heart?”

“Your son wanted to get from Raritan Bay to the Gulf of Guinea in twelve days.”

“That’s insane,” said the captain. His indignation, Neil felt, was tempered by a certain parental pride. “You made the deadline?”

“We stopped to rescue a castaway.”

“But you would’ve made it?”

“Pretty likely.”

“In just twelve days?”

“Yep.”

Christopher Van Horne smiled, the wrinkled flesh rolling across his magnificent skull. “Listen, Seaman Weisinger, when we finally catch the Val, you’re the man I want at the wheel.” His voice dropped to a half whisper. “Unless I miss my guess, we’ll be making some pretty tricky turns.”

On the sixteenth of September, at 0915, as the Valparaíso hit the 71st parallel, Cassie Fowler realized that she was in love. Her discovery came during a moment of tranquility, as she and Anthony stood watching the tanker’s hatchetlike prow push through the passage formed by two colossal bergs. Had it happened in the heat of sex (and there’d been plenty of that lately, an itinerant orgy staged wherever their impulses took them, from Anthony’s cabin to the fo’c’sle locker to the bizarre garden Sam Follingsbee was cultivating below), she would have dismissed it as illusory, akin to the phenomenon that prompted dying people to mistake oxygen deprivation for the glow of heaven. But this emotion could be trusted. This felt real. Damn, it was confusing, loving the very man who’d been deputized to preserve the most malevolent counterfeminist artifact since Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.

“The Arctic’s a known quantity these days,” said Anthony, “but you can’t imagine all the grief and blood that went into mapping this part of the globe.”

While Cassie’s curiosity urged her to confess her passion then and there — would he laugh? panic? grow mute? say he was as crazy about her as she was about him? — her political convictions told her to wait. This morning, assuming she’d calculated correctly, Oliver would attack their cargo. She would be foolish to divide her loyalties by entertaining romantic protestations from Anthony at such an hour. If he did an effective job of conveying his love, she might even lose her nerve. Her worst-case scenario had her getting on the PW’s radio, contacting the Enterprise, and telling Oliver to scratch the mission.

“In the last century, your average armchair geographer believed there was an open, ice-free sea at the North Pole.”

“Where’d they get that idea?” asked Cassie.

“Here in the Atlantic we’ve got our Gulf Stream — right? — and meanwhile the Japanese have their Kuroshio, their great Black Tide. The geographers imagined both currents flowing all the way north, melting the bergs and floes, then joining to form a vast warm ocean.”

“There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking.”

“Yeah, but such a beautiful wish. I mean, what captain wouldn’t fall in love with a fantasy like that? Piloting your ship up the Bering Strait, finding a secret gateway in the ice, sailing across the top of the world…”

A burst of static drew Anthony’s attention to the walkie-talkie clipped to his utility belt.

“Captain to the bridge!” screamed Marbles Rafferty. “We need you up here, sir!”

Anthony grabbed the radio, pressed SEND. “What’s the problem?”

“Airplanes!”

“Airplanes?”

“Airplanes, Captain — from goddamn World War Two!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Just get up here!”

Airplanes, thought Cassie, following Anthony as he abandoned the lookout post and started down the icy catwalk. Glory be, dear Oliver had actually brought it off. Before the day was out, if all went well, the New Dark Ages would no longer be crouching at the edge of human history, poised to claim center stage.

“Airplanes,” grumbled Anthony, charging into the elevator car. “I don’t need any fucking airplanes in my life right now.”

“Their mission may be more benign than you suppose,” said Cassie. As they rose to level seven, a peculiar thought possessed her. Might it be possible to win him over? If she mustered all her best arguments, might he come to see that locking this corpse forever out of history was far more important than sticking it in a tomb? “And your mission less so.”

They disembarked, passed through the wheelhouse — An-mei Jong at the helm — and marched onto the starboard wing, where the eternally morose Marbles Rafferty stood peering aft through the bridge binoculars, grunting in dismay.

Cassie looked south. Three separate clusters of droning torpedo planes wove among the bergs, sweeping back and forth across the corpse’s ice-glazed neck, while, several miles above sea level, a swarm of noisy dive bombers made ready to plunge toward the frozen omphalos. Wondrous vibrations surged through her, hymns of impending battle, pleasing for their own sake and pleasing for what they meant: despite her love for Anthony, despite the various moral and psychological ambiguities inherent in this crusade, she was not about to buckle.

Rafferty pressed the binoculars into Anthony’s chest. “See what I’m talkin’ about?” moaned the chief mate, pointing south as Anthony lifted the Bushnells and focused. “I think those are classic SBD-2 Dauntlesses over near the belly, and meanwhile we got ourselves a squadron of TBD-1 Devastators zooming ’round the throat — all of ’em built, I swear, Captain, all of ’em built in the late thirties. It’s like some goddamn Twilight Zone episode!”

“Steady, sir?” called An-mei Jong from the wheelhouse.

“No — turn!” bellowed Anthony, cheeks reddening, eyes darting in all directions. “Left full rudder! We’re taking evasive action!”

“You can’t evade this” Cassie insisted.

“Marbles, get on the sticks! Flank speed!”

“Aye!”

As the mate sprinted into the wheelhouse, Anthony seized Cassie’s forearm, squeezing so hard she felt the pressure through the goose-down stuffing. “What do you mean, I can’t evade this?” he said.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Do you know where these planes are from?”

“Yep.”

“Where?”

“Let go of my arm,” Cassie insisted. He did. “Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society.”

“Pembroke and who? What?”

“They’re working for hire.”

“Who hired them?”

“Some friends of mine.”

“Friends of yours? Oliver, you mean?”

“Try to understand, Anthony — dead or alive, this body’s a menace. If it ever becomes public, reason and women’s equality go out the window. Entombment’s not enough — it must be dumped in the Mohns Trench and left to decompose. Tell me you understand.”

He faced her squarely, lips curled, teeth clenched. “Understand? Understand?!”

“I don’t think that’s asking too much.”

“How could you betray me like this?”

“The patriarchy’s been betraying my gender for the past four thousand years.”

“How could you, Cassie? How could you?”

She looked him in the eye and said, “A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.”

For a moment Cassie’s lover stood frozen on the bridge wing, immobilized by anger.

Checkmate, she thought.

He spun toward the wheelhouse. “Evasive action!” he yelled to Jong. “Left full rudder!”

“You already gave that order, sir!”

Locked in a tight V, five Devastators swung around from the west and flew straight for the neck, releasing their payloads as they drew within a thousand feet of the target. Swiftly, smoothly, the torpedoes made their runs, bubbly white lather spuming from their propellers. One by one, the warheads hit flesh and detonated, sending up fountains of boiling lymph and geysers of pulverized tissue. Cassie laughed: a long, low whoop of delight. At last she was getting it. This was why men took such trouble to arrange for fire and chaos in their lives — the rush of destruction, the imperial nonboredom of war, history’s intoxicating grease. There were probably highs of equal caliber on earth, certainly less violent ones, but, oh, what lovely theater it made, what a hell of an opening night.

At last the tanker began her turn, carving a great crescent of foam in the Norwegian Sea, God inexorably following.

“Now hear this!” cried Anthony, grabbing the PA mike. “Now hear this — two squadrons of hostile warplanes are presently harassing our cargo! The Val herself is in no danger, and we’re taking evasive action! Repeat: the Val is in no danger!”

Cassie released a contemptuous snort. He could call it evasive action if he liked, but at nine lousy knots the stiff was a sitting duck.

“I pulled you out of the sea!” Anthony brandished the binoculars, holding them before Cassie as if he meant to smash her across the face. “I fed you my mescal worms!”

She couldn’t decide whether she was madder at Anthony or herself. How naive, how stupefyingly naive, to have imagined he might sanction her agenda. “Damn, I knew you’d miss the point, I just knew it.” Tearing the binoculars from Anthony’s hands, she aimed them at a PBY flying boat currently orbiting above their cargo’s brow. For a brief instant Oliver materialized before her eyes — sweet, weak-chinned Oliver, sitting by a starboard window and looking like a roller-coaster rider on the verge of throwing up. “You know, Anthony, you’re taking this attack much too personally. It’s beyond your control. Relax.”

“Nothing’s beyond my control!”

At 0935 an echelon of six dive bombers struck, engines screaming as they peeled off and hurtled downward, lobbing their payloads against the stomach like a flock of blue-footed boobies defecating on Saint Paul’s Rocks. With each direct hit, a ragged column of melted ice and vaporized skin shot skyward.

“What’s going on here?” demanded a perplexed Father Thomas, striding onto the starboard wing in the company of an equally baffled Dolores Haycox.

“The Battle of Midway,” Cassie replied.

“Jesus H. Christ,” muttered Haycox.

“Is the Vatican behind it?” asked Father Thomas.

“You don’t belong here!” shouted Anthony.

“I warned you not to mess with Rome,” said the priest.

“Get out!”

“The Church can’t take credit,” said Cassie.

“Who, then?” asked Father Thomas.

“The Enlightenment.”

“I said get out!” Anthony, sputtering, lurched toward the third mate. “I want to see Sparks — on the double!”

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Haycox again, starting away.

The next two attacks occurred simultaneously, a V of torpedo planes methodically expanding the breach in God’s neck while another echelon of dive bombers doggedly augmented His belly wound.

“I’ve never boasted a particularly sophisticated grasp of politics,” Father Thomas confessed.

“This isn’t politics,” snarled Anthony. “It’s feminist paranoia!” Again he squeezed Cassie’s arm. “Has it occurred to you that if your little friends succeed, the body will drag us all down with it?”

“Don’t worry — they’ll be bombing the chains soon. Kindly remove your dung forks from my person.”

Lianne strode onto the wing, face lit by a wide, meandering smile. “You rang, sir?”

“Those planes are destroying our cargo,” wailed Anthony.

“So I see.”

“I want you to raise the squadron leaders.”

Aye-aye.

“Hi, Lianne,” said Cassie.

“Morning, sweetie.”

“Shit, did you have a hand in this, Sparks?” asked Anthony.

Lianne winced. “I’ll confess to harboring a certain sympathy for what those planes are trying to do, sir,” she replied, sidestepping the question. “That body’s bad news for women everywhere.”

“Look on the bright side,” Cassie told Anthony. “Normally you’d have to pay sixty dollars to see a Pembroke and Flume extravaganza.”

“Raise those leaders, Sparks!”

Oliver hated the Battle of Midway. It was noisy, confusing, and manifestly dangerous. “Do we have to be so close?” he asked Ensign Reid over the intercom. The third Devastator attack had just gotten under way, five planes zooming across the deckhouse of the circling supertanker and lobbing their torpedoes straight into God’s neck. As each payload exploded, Strawberry Eleven responded to the shock wave, twisting and rocking like a shot goose. “Why don’t we watch” — Oliver extended a trembling index finger — “from over there? Over there by that big berg!”

“Don’t listen to him, Ensign,” said Pembroke, tearing into a pint of macaroni salad.

“Oliver, you gotta get into the spirit,” said Flume, popping a deviled egg into his mouth.

“That’s some golem, huh?” said Pembroke.

“Bet you could drive a Pershing tank down his urethra and not even scratch the fenders,” said Flume.

“God, what a smile,” said Pembroke.

As the last Devastator completed its run, happy chatter spilled from Strawberry Eleven’s transceiver, five creatively fulfilled war reenactors singing their own praises.

“Powder river!”

“Golly, this is swell!”

“Got that baby comin’ and goin’!”

“Hot-cha-cha!”

“The beers’re on me, boys!”

Now the third Dauntless echelon moved into position, climbing swiftly to fifteen thousand feet. Through the haze of his fear, Oliver sensed that the raid was going well. He was particularly impressed by the forgotten art of dive-bombing, the skillful and reckless way the SBD pilots turned their planes into manned bullets, swooping out of the clouds, plunging headfirst toward the midriff, and, at the moment of payload release, pulling out just in time to avoid cracking up — a truly magnificent performance, almost worth the seventeen million dollars it was costing him.

The Dauntlesses peeled away and attacked, dropping their demolition bombs on the navel. Spewing flames and smoke, a seething orange tornado spun across God’s abdomen.

“It’s so beautiful!” gasped Pembroke.

“This is it, Sid — this is our masterpiece!” squealed Flume.

“We’ll never top it, never, even if we do a D-Day!”

“I’m so excited!”

A husky female voice shot from Strawberry Eleven’s transceiver. “Valparaíso to squadron leaders! Come in, squadron leaders!”

The head of Torpedo Six responded instantly. “Lieutenant Commander Lindsey here, United States Navy,” he said in a tone at once curious and hostile. “Go ahead, Valparaíso.”

“Captain Van Horne wishes to address you…”

The voice that now filled the PBY’s cabin was so enraged Oliver imagined the transceiver tubes exploding, spraying glass into the cockpit.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Lindsey?!”

“My patriotic duty. Over.”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you! Over.”

“You’ve got no right to destroy my cargo!”

“And you’ve got no right to destroy the American economy! I don’t care how good your English is! Can’t you Japs ever play fair? Over!”

“Japs? What’re you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about!” said Lindsey. “America first! Out!”

“Get back on the air, you dipshit!”

As the two squadrons turned west and headed for Point Luck, Strawberry Eleven circled the corpse, a slow, leisurely loop extending from nose to knees. The bellybutton, Oliver noted, was considerably larger now, a quarter-mile-wide crater into which the Norwegian Sea flowed like water spiraling into a bathtub drain. The neck sported a gaping cave, its portal a mass of shattered ice and shredded flesh. The only problem was that, in his admittedly inexpert judgment, God wasn’t sinking.

“They did a great job with the bellybutton,” said Pembroke.

“Navel warfare,” said Flume, deadpan.

“Hey, that’s a good one, Alby.”

“Why isn’t there more blood?” asked Oliver.

“Beats me,” said Pembroke, polishing off the macaroni salad.

“Is it frozen?”

“Bombs would’ve thawed it.”

“So where is it?”

“Probably it never had any,” said Flume. “Blood’s such complicated stuff — I’ll bet even Mitsubishi can’t make it.”

As the PBY glided across the body’s right nipple, her transceiver began broadcasting again. “Red Fox Leader to Mother Goose,” said Lindsey. “Red Fox Leader to Mother Goose.”

“Mother Goose here,” said Admiral Spruance’s portrayer aboard the Enterprise.

“We dropped our last egg ten minutes ago. Over.”

“What about Scout Bombing Six?”

“Likewise disarmed. We’re all headin’ home for another batch. Over.”

“How’s it going?”

“Sir, the Japs might be listening in.”

“No screening vessels, remember?” said Spruance. “No Bofors guns.”

“Targets A and B were hit hard, sir,” said Lindsey. “Real hard. Over.”

“Was Akagi shipping water when you left her?”

“No, sir.”

“Then we’re shifting to Op Plan 29-67,” said Spruance.

“Op Plan 29-67,” echoed Lindsey. “Dandy idea.”

“The second strike’s taking off now, McClusky commanding from his Dauntless section. We can begin recovering your planes any time after 0945 hours. Over.”

“Roger, Mother Goose. Out.”

“Now will you tell me about Op Plan 29-67?” asked Oliver.

“An emergency strategy,” explained Pembroke.

“What emergency strategy?”

“The swellest one ever,” said Flume.

At 1120 a new wave appeared along the western horizon — three V-formations of torpedo planes coming in near sea level while three echelons of dive bombers rendezvoused from several miles up.

“Commander McClusky, Air Group Six, to Captain Van Horne on Valparaíso,” came the actor’s reedy voice from the PBY’s transceiver. “You there, Van Horne? Over.”

“This is Van Horne, asshole.”

“Question, Captain. Is Valparaíso carrying a full complement of lifeboats?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’ll assume that means yes. Over.”

“Keep your paws off my cargo!”

“Captain, be advised that at 1150 hours we shall be implementing Op Plan 29-67, whereby Valparaíso comes under attack from a section of Devastators armed with Mk-XIII torpedoes. Repeat: at 1150, your ship comes under attack from a section of…”

Oliver lurched out of the mechanic’s station and scrambled toward the machine-gun blisters. “McClusky said he’s gonna hit the Valparaíso!”

“I know,” said Pembroke, grinning.

“Op Plan 29-67,” said Flume, winking.

“He can’t hit the Valparaíso!” moaned Oliver.

“Valparaíso, not ‘the’ Valparaíso.”

“He can’t!”

“Shhh,” said Pembroke.

“You have thirty minutes to abandon ship,” said McClusky from the transceiver. “We strongly recommend you keep your officers and crew out of the water, which we estimate to be about twenty degrees Fahrenheit. You’ll be rescued within two hours by the decommissioned aircraft carrier Enterprise. Over.”

“Like hell I’m gonna abandon ship!” said Van Horne.

“Have it your way, Captain. Out.”

“You can shove your torpedoes up your ass, McClusky!”

Pembroke ate a radish. “A desperate strategy,” he explained, “but unavoidable under the circumstances.”

“As the tanker sinks,” Flume elaborated, chewing on a chicken thigh, “she’ll drag the golem down with her, deep enough to swamp those wounds.”

“After which the lungs and stomach will finally start to fill.”

“And then—”

“Shazam — mission accomplished!”

Oliver grabbed Flume’s shoulders, shaking the war reenactor as if attempting to rouse him from a deep sleep. “My girlfriend’s on the Valparaíso!”

“Oh, sure,” said Pembroke.

“Let go of me this instant,” said Flume.

“I’m serious!” wailed Oliver, releasing Flume and rocking back on the balls of his feet. “Ask Van Horne! Ask him if he isn’t carrying somebody named Cassie Fowler!”

“Hey, take it easy.” Flume uncapped a Rheingold with a cast-iron Fred Astaire opener. “Nobody’ll get hurt. We’re giving the Japs plenty of time to save themselves. Want a beer? A Spam-and-onion sandwich?”

“You heard the captain! He’s not gonna abandon ship!”

“Once he absorbs a hit or two, I’m sure he’ll reconsider,” said Pembroke. “It takes hours for a big boat like Valparaíso to go down — hours.”

“You people are insane! You’re out of your fucking minds!”

“Hey, don’t get pissed at us,” said Flume.

“We’re only doing what you hired us to do,” said Pembroke.

“Contact Admiral Spruance! Tell him to call off the attack!”

“We never call off an attack,” said Flume, swishing his index finger back and forth. “Have a nice cold Rheingold, okay? You’ll feel much better.” The impresario snatched up his intercom mike.

“Ensign Reid, I think it would be a bad idea if Mr. Shostak back here got his hands on our transceiver.”

“Listen, fellas, I’ve been lying to you,” groaned Oliver. “That body down there isn’t a Jap golem.”

“Oh?” said Pembroke.

“It’s God Almighty.”

“Right,” said Flume with a snide smile.

“God Himself. I swear it. You wouldn’t want to hurt God, would you?”

Flume sipped his beer. “Phew, Oliver, that’s a pretty lame one.”

At exactly 1150, just as McClusky had promised, a V of torpedo planes circled around and, ignoring Oliver’s frantic protests, ran for the tanker, dropping their Mk-XIIIs and sailing over the deckhouse, concomitantly slashing the Vatican flag to ribbons. Like sharks on the scent of blood, the five torpedoes cut across the Val’s wake, passed under her starboard tow chain, grazed her stern, and kept on going. A minute later, they struck a berg and detonated, filling the air with glittering barrages of ice balls.

“Hah! Missed!” came Van Horne’s voice from the transceiver. “You clowns couldn’t hit a dead cat with a fly swatter!”

“Golly, I thought our boys were better trained than that,” said Pembroke.

“They’re not used to these low temperatures,” said Flume.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Oliver looked out to sea — past the Valparaíso, past her cargo. A massive ship, encrusted with rockets and guns, was steaming onto the battlefield from the south.

“Hey, Oliver, what the heck is that thing?” demanded Flume.

“Don’t ask me,” the Enlightenment League’s president replied, putting on his headset.

“You said there’d be no screening vessels!” whined Pembroke. “You explicitly said that!”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea what that ship’s doing here.”

“Looks like one of them Persian Gulf tankers, Mr. Flume,” said Reid over the intercom.

“That’s what she is, all right,” said Eaton. “A goddamn Persian Gulf tanker.”

“Isn’t that just like the nineties” — Reid banked Strawberry Eleven, flying her west across the tow chains — “showing up when you least expect ’em?”

“Missed!” cried Anthony, storming up and down the wheel-house, glove wrapped firmly around the transceiver mike, its cable trailing behind him like an umbilicus. “Missed, suckers! You couldn’t hit an elephant’s ass with a canoe paddle! You couldn’t hit a barn door with a water balloon!”

He didn’t believe himself. He knew it was only through a happy accident that the first Devastator formation had launched all five of its fish without scoring a hit. Already a second V was looping around to the west, making ready to strike.

“Captain, shall we order the crew into life jackets?” asked Marbles Rafferty.

“Sounds like a good idea,” said Ockham.

“Get the hell off the bridge,” Anthony snapped at the priest.

Rafferty pounded his palm with his fist. “Life jackets, sir. Life jackets…”

“Life jackets,” echoed Lianne Bliss.

“No,” muttered Anthony, setting the mike atop the Marisat terminal. “Remember Matagorda Bay? A sixty-yard gash in her hull, and still she didn’t sink. We can easily absorb a couple of obsolete torpedoes — I know we can.”

“They’ve got ten left,” noted Rafferty.

“Then we’ll absorb ten.”

“Anthony, you must believe me,” said Cassie. “I never thought they’d come after your ship.”

“War is hell, Doc.”

“I’m truly sorry.”

“I don’t doubt it. Fuck you.”

Remarkably, he could not bring himself to hate her. True, her duplicity was monumental, a betrayal to rank with that ignominious moment at Actium when Mark Antony had abandoned his own fleet in midbattle to go chasing after Cleopatra. And yet, at some weird, unfathomable level, he actually admired Cassie’s plot. Her audacity turned him on. There was nobody quite so arousing, he decided, as a worthy opponent.

The door to the starboard wing flew open and Dolores Haycox charged onto the bridge, gripping a walkie-talkie. “Forward lookout reports approaching vessel, sir — a ULCC, low riding, bearing three-two-nine.”

Anthony grunted. ULCC. Damn. Despite the blood transfusion, despite his quick and clever maneuvering through the bergs, he still hadn’t managed to outrun the Carpco Maracaibo. He snatched up the bridge binoculars and, peering through the frosted windshield, focused. He gasped. Not only was the Maracaibo a ULCC, she was a Persian Gulf tanker, heavy with formaldehyde but coming on fast. Her thorny profile shifted east and steamed past a berg shaped like a gigantic molar, on a direct course for God’s left ear.

“What’s that, a battleship?” asked Ockham.

“Not quite,” said Anthony, lowering the binoculars. “Your buddies in Rome are obviously serious about making me surrender the goods.” He pivoted toward his chief mate. “Marbles, if we got uncoupled from our cargo, these Devastators would have no reason to target us, right?”

“Right.”

“Then I propose we ring up the Maracaibo and ask her to shoot our chains apart.”

Rafferty smiled, an event so rare that Anthony knew the plan was sound. “At worst, the skipper turns us down,” noted the chief mate. “At best—”

“Oh, he’ll say yes, all right,” Ockham insisted. “Whatever Rome’s ultimate ambitions may be, she has no wish to see this ship go under.”

“Sparks, contact the Maracaibo” said Anthony, shoving the transceiver mike into Lianne Bliss’s hand. “Get her skipper on the line.”

“They shouldn’t be attacking your ship like this,” she said. “It isn’t right.”

Anthony was not surprised when, barely thirty seconds after Bliss ducked into the radio shack, the Maracaibo lashed out, shooting a Sea Dart guided missile toward the second Devastator formation. If Cassie’s story was true, he reasoned, then the forces represented by the World War Two Reenactment Society and those represented by the Gulf tanker had not been privy to each other’s machinations — but suddenly here they were, arriving simultaneously in the same unlikely sea, competing for the same unlikely prize.

“Hey, the Maracaibo can’t do that!” screamed Cassie. “She’s gonna kill somebody!”

“Looks that way,” said Anthony dryly.

“This is murder!”

The instant the Devastators began their chaotic retreat, the V dissolving into five separate planes, Bliss piped the radio traffic onto the bridge.

“Scatter, boys!” screamed the formation leader. “Scatter! Scatter!”

“Christ, it’s on your tail, Commander Waldron!” a flier shouted.

“Mother of God!”

“Bail out, Commander!”

Anthony raised his hand and saluted in the general direction of the Gulf tanker.

“Tell the Maracaibo this is just a reenactment!” screamed Cassie. “Nobody’s supposed to be getting hurt!”

As Anthony tracked it with the binoculars, the lead torpedo plane shot straight across the Val’s weather deck, doggedly pursued by the near-sentient Sea Dart.

“Why’s the missile so poky?” asked Anthony.

“A heat seeker, designed to lock on modern jet exhaust,” Rafferty explained. “It’ll take ’er a while to realize she’s tracking an antique radial engine.”

With an odd mixture of pure horror and indefensible fascination, Anthony watched the missile home in. An explosion brightened the steely sky, vaporizing the Devastator’s two-man crew and disintegrating her fuselage, the thousand flaming shards flashing through the air like a migraine aura.

From the bridge speaker a flier screamed, “They got Commander Waldron! Waldron and his gunner!”

“Christ!”

“Just like in ’42!”

“Lousy bastards!”

“Dirty Japs!”

“The Maracaibo doesn’t answer,” said Bliss, rushing out of the radio shack.

“Keep trying to raise her.”

“She’s stonewalling us, sir.”

“I said keep trying!”

As Bliss returned to her post, two more missiles leapt from the Maracaibo, a svelte French Crotale and a delicate Italian Aspide, speeding toward the third Devastator formation. Seconds later came the roaring vermilion glare of the exploding Crotale, outshining the midnight sun and bursting the lead plane apart, followed by the shrieking, swirling, red-and-purple plumage of the Aspide, setting its target aflame. Four white parachutes blossomed above the Norwegian Sea, gently lowering their riders toward death by hypothermia.

“Holy shit, the crews bailed out,” said Rafferty.

“God help them,” said Ockham.

“No, we’ll help them,” said Anthony, snapping up the intercom mike and tuning in the bos’n’s quarters. “Van Horne to Mungo.”

“Mungo here.”

“There’re four men in the water, bearing two-nine-five. Drop a lifeboat, pick ’em up, give ’em hot showers, and stand by to rescue anybody else who jumps.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Once again Dolores Haycox popped in from the wing. “Starboard lookout reports torpedo wake approaching, sir, bearing two-one-zero.”

Anthony raised his binoculars. Torpedo wake. Quite so. While Commander Waldron was being hunted down, one of his buddies had obviously gotten off a shot.

“Right full rudder!”

“Right full rudder!” repeated An-mei Jong, jerking the wheel forty degrees.

And then it happened. Before the tanker could answer to the helm, a horrid, toothy grinding reached the bridge, the slow-motion crunch of metal devouring metal, followed by a deep, ominous thud. Wall to wall, the wheelhouse shook.

“Delayed fuse,” Rafferty explained. “Fish broke through our plates before goin’ off.”

“That good or bad?” asked Ockham.

“Bad. Damn things do twice the damage that way, like dumdum bullets.”

Seizing the PA mike, Anthony threw the switch. “Now hear this! We’ve just absorbed an Mk-XIII torpedo along our starboard quarter! Repeat: torpedo hit along starboard quarter! Remember, sailors, below decks the Val is divided into twenty-four watertight tanks — we’re in no danger of foundering! Stand by to take on survivors from Mr. Mungo’s party!”

“The Maracaibo still won’t talk!” called Bliss from the radio shack.

“Keep trying!”

“Now what?” asked Rafferty.

“Now I go see if what I just told the crew is true.”

No sooner had Anthony entered the elevator car and begun his descent when a second Mk-XIII drilled into the Valparaíso and exploded. The shock wave lifted the car back toward level seven. He dropped to his knees. The car plunged, the steel cables stopping its fall like elastic cords saving a Bungee jumper.

As Anthony ran outside, a third fish found its target, sending a metallic shudder along the Val’s entire hull. He dashed down the catwalk. The two guilty Devastators roared straight across the weather deck, fleeing the scene of their crime. An acrid fragrance filled the air, a blend of hot metal and burning rubber suffused with a hint of frying meat. The captain climbed down the amidships stairway, sprinted to the starboard bulwark, and leaned over the rail.

Dйjа vu. “No!” It was all happening again, the whole impossible spill. “No! No!” The Valparaíso was leaking, she was bleeding, she was hemorrhaging her ballast into the Norwegian Sea. Blood, thick blood, gallon upon gallon of sizzling, smoking, pungent blood spreading outward from the wounded hull like the first plague of Egypt, staining the waters red. “No! No!”

Anthony looked west. A quarter mile away, Mungo and his lifeboat team rowed toward the torpedo crews: four benumbed war reenactors, treading water amid the billowing canopies and tangled lines of their parachutes.

Plucking the walkie-talkie from his waist, Anthony shouted, “Van Horne to Rafferty! Come in, Marbles!”

He looked down. Evidently a torpedo had blundered into Follingsbee’s garden, for the Greenland Current now bloomed with huge broccoli stalks, sixty-pound oranges, and carrots the size of surfboards, the whole nutritious mess drifting on the crimson tide like croutons in gazpacho.

“Jesus — two more hits, right?” groaned Rafferty from the walkie-talkie. “What’s it like down there?”

“Bloody.”

“We sinking?”

“We’re fine,” Anthony insisted. His honest assessment, but also something of a prayer. “Call up O’Connor and make sure the boilers are okay. And let’s get everybody into life jackets.”

“Aye-aye!”

The captain pivoted north. A sickly blue aurora glimmered in the sky. Beneath the waves, a fourth torpedo made its run, heading straight for the prow.

“Stop!” he yelled at the obscene fish. “Stop, you!”

The torpedo hit home, and as the cargo bay burst open, releasing its holy stores, a disquieting question entered Anthony’s brain.

“Stop! No! Stop!”

If the Val went down, was he supposed to go down with her?

“Get those bastards!” screamed Christopher Van Horne into the intercom mike. “Blow ’em out of the sky!” he ordered his first mate, a wiry Corsican named Orso Peche, presently stationed in the launch-control bunker amidships. The Maracaibo’s master spun toward Neil Weisinger. “Come right to zero-six-zero! They’re trying to kill my son!”

Never before had Neil witnessed such sheer volcanic anger in a sea captain — in any man. “Right to zero-six-zero,” he echoed, working the wheel.

The captain’s misery was understandable. Of the entire squadron called Torpedo Six, only three armed planes still remained in the fight, but if even one of them kicked its load into the bleeding Val, she would surely die.

“All ahead full!”

“All ahead full,” echoed Mick Katsakos at the control console. “What’s that red stuff?”

“Ballast,” Neil explained.

“Wish I had my camera.”

An elegant little Aspide blasted from its launcher, tracking down and vaporizing its target just as the crew bailed out.

“One down, two to go,” said Peche over the intercom.

“That is quite a body,” said Katsakos. “Mmm-mmm.”

“Never been another like it,” said Neil.

Now, suddenly, a fourth man was on the bridge. Dressed in a waterproof alb, trembling with a fury that paled only in comparison with the captain’s, Tullio Cardinal Di Luca waddled toward the console.

“Captain, you must stop shooting at those planes! You must stop it right now!”

“They’re trying to kill my son!”

“I knew we hired the wrong man!”

For the tenth time since the Maracaibo’s arrival at the 71st parallel, the rugged old Spaniard named Gonzalo Cornejo popped out of the radio shack to announce that the Valparaíso’s communications officer was trying to get in touch.

“She’s really — how do you say? — she’s really driving me bugfuck.”

“Like to talk back to her, would you?” asked the captain.

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell the Valparaíso that Christopher Van Horne doesn’t negotiate with pimps for the skin-flick industry. Got that, Gonzo? I don’t talk to pimps.” As Cornejo made a crisp about-face, the captain gave him a second order — “Pipe in the traffic, okay?” — then turned to Neil and said, “Ten degrees left rudder.”

“Ten left,” said Neil, wondering what sort of man would commit cold-blooded murder on his son’s behalf but refuse to exchange two words with him over the radio.

“Captain, if you cannot resist the temptation to fire your missiles, then we simply must leave,” said Di Luca, face reddening. “Do you understand? I’m ordering you to turn this ship around.”

“You mean retreat? Screw that, Eminence.”

“The cardinale has a point,” said Katsakos. “Maybe you noticed — these idiots still have six armed dive bombers over by the belly.”

Even as the mate spoke, a Devastator pilot’s agitated tones blasted from the bridge speaker. “Lieutenant Sharp to Commander McClusky. Come in, Commander.”

“McClusky here,” replied the leader of Air Group Six from his position above the omphalos.

“Sir, you got any eggs left?”

“One echelon’s worth. We’re about to unload ’em. Over.”

“There’s a Persian Gulf tanker on the field,” said Sharp. “Any chance you could help us out?”

“Gulf tanker? Whoa! Spruance said there wouldn’t be any screening vessels. Over.”

“Guess he fibbed.”

“We never done a Gulf tanker script, Sharp — nothin’ that modern. Over.”

“It’s kickin’ the shit out of us! We’re down to just me and Beeson!”

“Christ. Okay, I’ll see what we can do…”

Katsakos’s golden Mediterranean skin acquired a decidedly greenish cast. “Sir, may I remind you we’ve got a full hold? If just one of McClusky’s bombs connects, we’ll go up like Hiroshima.”

A prickly sensation overtook Neil, a tingling such as he’d not experienced since getting gassed inside the Val. The dive bombers were coming, bearing their deadly matches. “I should’ve stayed in Jersey City,” he told Di Luca. “I should’ve waited for another ship.”

“We can always come back later and make sure the Enterprise pulled your son and his crew from their lifeboats,” said Katsakos. “As for now…”

“Anthony Van Horne won’t be crawling into any goddamn lifeboat,” said the captain. “He’ll be going down with his ship.”

“Nobody does that anymore.”

“The Van Hornes do.”

Sighting through the bridge binoculars, Neil saw McClusky’s Dauntless echelon abandon the belly and begin a steady climb, evidently intending to circle around and attack the Maracaibo from the rear.

“Mr. Peche,” said the captain into the intercom mike, “kindly target the approaching dive bombers with Crotales.” He grabbed a swatch of the second mate’s pea jacket, twisting it like a tourniquet. “Who on board can operate a Phalanx cannon?”

“Nobody,” said Katsakos.

“Not you?”

“No, sir.”

“Not Peche?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll fire it.”

“I insist we turn around!” seethed Di Luca.

“Mr. Katsakos, I’m putting you in charge,” said the captain, starting away. “Alter course as the situation requires, whatever gives me a clear shot at the tow chains — they’re only targeting the Val so the body’ll go down with her!”

Neil looked south. Two Crotales were flying across God’s nose toward the maneuvering dive bombers. The warheads exploded simultaneously, hitting the echelon leader and the next plane in line an instant after their pilots and gunners bailed out. Trailing black oil, the first Dauntless crashed into the chin, shattering the encrusted ice and igniting the beard. Wingless, the second plane became a flaming sphere, roaring through the sky and falling into God’s left eye like a cinder.

Neil focused on the beard, each whisker enveloped by a high, slender flame coiling around its shaft. He lowered his gaze. Christopher Van Horne stood on the fo’c’sle deck, his mountainous form hunched over the starboard Phalanx, his purple parka rippling in the Arctic wind.

“Steady,” said Katsakos from the control console.

“Steady,” echoed Neil.

As the blood spill splashed against the Maracaibo’s prow, her captain swerved the gun and aimed. A sudden puff of smoke appeared, haloing the muzzle. Fifty yards from the Valparaíso, a fountain of seawater shot into the air, dead center between the chains.

“Left ten,” muttered Katsakos.

“Left ten.”

Van Horne fired again. This time the shell hit home, turning the central link into a silvery flash of pulverized metal. As the chain flew apart, the segment nearer the cranium slithered into the ocean while its stubby counterpart swung toward the stern, clanging against the hull.

“Nice shooting, Captain!” cried the excited mate.

“Steady!”

“Steady,” said Neil.

“Dive bombers at twelve o’clock!” screamed Katsakos.

Another shell flew from the starboard Phalanx, disintegrating a link and neatly separating the Val from her cargo. Whether or not Christopher Van Horne saw the fruits of his marksmanship was unclear, for the instant the chain broke, a Dauntless dropped its payload barely fifty feet from the captain. The bomb detonated. Cannon, hatches, icicles, and chunks of bulwark sailed heavenward, borne on a pillar of fire. Within seconds the entire fo’c’sle was burning, gouts of black smoke swirling above the fractured deck like rain clouds poised to release India ink.

“No!” shrieked Katsakos.

“Holy shit!” groaned Neil.

“I told him to turn around!” sputtered Di Luca.

Flawlessly, the Maracaibo’s firefighting system sprang to life.

As the klaxon brayed across the Norwegian Sea, a dozen robot hoses appeared, rising from the bulwarks like moray eels slithering out of their lairs. Jets of frothy white foam shot from the nozzles.

“Oh, Christ!” screamed Katsakos as the flames gasped and died. “Oh, Lord!” he wailed. The foam subsided like an outgoing tide, leaving behind a mass of melted pipework and the fallen body of Christopher Van Horne. “Oh, God, they blew up the captain!”

When the Maracaibo went to war against Air Group Six, incinerating her torpedo planes and dive bombers with deadly guided missiles, the focus of Oliver’s terror shifted from Cassie to himself. He was not embarrassed. It was Cassandra, in fact, who liked to dismiss so-called heroism as but one step removed from theistic self-delusion, and besides, at the moment his own peril clearly outclassed hers, the Maracaibo being likely to interpret Strawberry Eleven as yet another hostile plane and attack accordingly.

True, the Gulf tanker had just sustained a direct hit from a 500-pound demolition bomb. But instead of touching off either the tanker’s cargo oil or her bunker fuel, the explosion had merely ignited her fo’c’sle deck — a localized conflagration soon brought under control by automated foam throwers — and before long she was enthusiastically targeting the two armed Devastators and three armed Dauntlesses remaining in the air.

“I can’t stand this!” shouted Oliver.

“Scared, are you?” asked Flume, who did not himself seem particularly happy.

“You bet I’m scared!”

“Don’t be ashamed if your bowels let go,” said Pembroke, likewise distraught. “During World War Two, almost a quarter of all infantrymen lost that kind of control in battle.”

“At least, that’s how many admitted to it,” added Flume, nervously winding his headset cord around his wrist. “The actual percentage was probably higher.”

Tow chains severed, the Valparaíso listed badly to starboard. Blood pooled along her hull. Even if she began to founder, Oliver reasoned, there’d be plenty of time for Cassie and her shipmates to get away in lifeboats — whereas if the Maracaibo opened fire on Strawberry Eleven, her crew and passengers would all, most probably, die.

“Van Horne must’ve been trimmin’ her with blood,” said Reid over the intercom. “Good way to lighten his load — right, Mr. Flume?”

Flume made no reply. His partner remained equally silent. As the Maracaibo took on the remnants of Air Group Six, the war reenactors sat rigidly in their machine-gun blisters and listened to the transceiver broadcasts, a radio horror show to put their beloved Inner Sanctum to shame.

“Missile at six o’clock!”

“Mayday! Mayday!”

“Bail out, everybody!”

“Help me!”

“Jump!”

“Shit!”

“Mommy! Mommy!”

“This isn’t in my contract!”

Oliver felt like praying, but it was impossible to gather the requisite energy when the decayed, frozen, violated remains of the God he didn’t believe in stretched so starkly before his eyes.

“Alby?”

“Yeah, Sid?”

“Alby, I’m not having any fun.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Alby, I want to go home.”

“Ensign Reid,” said Flume into his intercom mike, “kindly climb to nine thousand feet and set off for Point Luck.”

“You mean — withdraw?”

“Withdraw.”

“Ever walk out on one of your own shows before?” asked Reid.

“Just leave, Jack.”

“Roger,” said the pilot, pulling back on the control yoke.

“Alby?”

“Yeah, Sid?”

“Two of our actors are dead.”

“Most of ’em bailed out.”

“Two are dead.”

“I know.”

“Waldron’s dead,” said Pembroke. “His gunner too, Ensign Collins.”

“Carny Otis, right?” said Flume. “I saw him at the Helen Hayes once. Iago.”

“Alby, I think we done bad.”

“Attention, Torpedo Six!” came Ray Spruance’s portrayer’s voice from the transceiver. “Attention, Scout Bombing Six! Listen, men, no matter how you slice it, we aren’t being paid to mess with a Gulf tanker! Break off the attack and return to Enterprise! Repeat: break off attack and return! We weigh anchor at 1530 hours!”

From out of nowhere a crippled dive bomber arrived, sheets of flame flowing from her wings. The plane zoomed so close that Oliver could see the pilot’s face — or, rather, he would have seen the pilot’s face had it not been burned clear to the bone.

“It’s Ensign Gay!” cried Pembroke. “They got Ensign Gay!”

“Please, God, no!” shouted Flume.

The runaway Dauntless headed straight for the flying boat’s tail, shedding sparks and firebrands. Pembroke shrieked madly, moving his hands back and forth as if pantomiming a frenetic game of cat’s cradle. Then, as Strawberry Eleven reached nine thousand feet, the bomber collided with her, snapping off the PBY’s rudder, severing her starboard stabilizer, puncturing her fuselage, and pouring burning gasoline into the tunnel gunner’s compartment, each individual disaster unfolding so rapidly that Oliver’s single scream sufficed to cover them all. A mass of flames swept along the aft flooring and into the portside blister. Searing heat filled the cabin. Within seconds, Albert Flume’s cotton trousers, aviator’s scarf, and flak jacket were ablaze.

“Aaaiiii!”

“Alby!”

“Put me out!”

“Put him out!”

“God, put me out!”

“Here!” Charles Eaton’s portrayer shoved a glossy red cylinder into Oliver’s lap.

“What’s this?” Oliver couldn’t tell whether the tears flooding his eyes sprang from terror, pity, or the black smoke wafting through the mechanic’s station. “What? What?”

“Read the directions!”

“Oh, Jesus!” screamed Flume. “Oh, sweet Jesus!”

“I think we lost our tail!” cried Reid over the intercom.

Oliver wiped his eyes. HOLD UPRIGHT. He did. PULL PIN. Pin? What pin? He made a series of desperate grabs — please, God, please, the pin — and suddenly he was indeed gripping something that looked like a pin.

“Put me out!”

“Put him out! Oh, Alby, buddy!”

STAND BACK 10 FEET AND AIM AT BASE OF FIRE. Oliver Seized the discharge hose and pointed it toward Flume. “We lost our tail!” “Put me out!” SQUEEZE LEVER AND SWEEP SIDE TO SIDE. A thick gray mist gushed from the horn, coating the war reenactor in foul-smelling chemicals and instantly smothering the flames.

“It’s gonna hurt!” groaned Flume as the PBY careened crazily, dropping toward the ocean. “It’s really gonna hurt!”

“No tail!”

“Give me pants that entrance! It’s starting to hurt!”

Tearing off his headset, Oliver crawled past Flume’s smoking, writhing form, lurched into the tunnel gunner’s compartment, and began attacking the flames.

“Why does God permit this?” asked Pembroke of no one in particular.

“Shoulders Gibraltar, shiny as a halter!” screamed Flume, writhing in agony. “Oh, Jesus, it hurts! It hurts so much!”

Everyone tried to be polite.

Everyone struggled to avoid the subject.

But in the end Albert Flume’s situation could not be denied, and right before Strawberry Eleven belly flopped into the Norwegian Sea, splitting into a dozen pieces, Pembroke turned to his best friend and said, in a soft, sad voice, “Alby, buddy, you don’t have any arms.”

FATHER

BY A MIRACLE OF the sort that in an earlier age Jehovah Himself might have wrought, the Valparaíso stayed afloat that afternoon, allowing the officers, crew, and rescued war reenactors to abandon her in an orderly fashion. There was even time to salvage certain crucial items: footlockers, musical instruments, fillets of Corpus Dei, a few jars of glory grease, some supervegetables from Follingsbee’s garden, the Ten Commandments print. The Valparaíso was terminal, of course. Anthony knew it. A captain could always tell. No ingenious patching job or heroic pumping effort could save her. But what a fighter, he thought, what a tough old lady, ceding fewer than ten feet per hour to the bloodstained Norwegian Sea. By noon her weather deck lay completely buried, but her superstructure was still visible, rising out of the waves like a hotel perched on pylons.

At 1420, Anthony began ferrying the final group over the red ocean to the Carpco Maracaibo — a grim little party consisting of Cassie, Rafferty, O’Connor, Father Ockham, and Sister Miriam, each evacuee clutching a seabag. No one said a word. Cassie refused to look him in the eye. She had much to brood about, he knew, several reasons to be sad: the failure of her plot, the crash landing of her boyfriend’s plane, the deaths of John Waldron and two other mercenaries. Were Anthony not himself benumbed and despondent, he might have actually felt sorry for her.

He parked the Juan Fernandez beside a vulcanized rubber dock tied to the Maracaibo’ s hull, waited until everyone had disembarked, then cast off.

“Where’re you going?” Rafferty called after him.

“I forgot my sextant.”

“Christ, Anthony — I’ll buy you a sextant in New York!”

“My sister gave it to me!” he shouted toward the fading figures on the dock.

By 1445 Anthony was back at the wreck site, maneuvering the Juan Fernandez alongside a first-floor window. He smashed the glass with the launch’s stockless anchor and climbed over the sill. The elevator had shorted out, so he used the companionways instead. Reaching level seven, he entered the chart room, locked the door, and waited.

Brain lost.

Body lost.

Val lost.

There was no choice, really. He’d blown the mission. His second chance was gone.

He stared at the Formica table. The jumbled maps tormented him. Sulawesi, redolent of Cassie’s midriff. Pago Pago, so evocative of her breasts. He lifted his gaze. Forward wall, the Mediterranean; aft wall, the Indian Ocean; port wall, the South Pacific; starboard wall, the North Atlantic. He was giving up so much, all these glorious tracts of sea and patches of shore, most of them despoiled and ravaged by the reigning species, yet all still painfully beautiful at the core. Let no man say Anthony Van Horne did not know what he was losing.

His migraine awoke. In a corner of the aura, an oiled egret rose from the chart of Matagorda Bay and flapped its matted wings. Seconds later, a pilot whale, glossy with Texas crude, wriggled out of the same poisoned sea, flopped onto the floor, and died. How would the end come? Would the ocean pour into the chart room and drown him? Or was the door sufficiently watertight that he would survive the descent into the Mohns Trench, only to perish when the impossible pressures hit the superstructure, crushing it like an egg under a jackboot?

A loud knock. Then four, rat-a-tat-tat. Anthony ignored them. His visitor persisted.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Thomas. Open up.”

“Get away!”

“Suicide’s a sin, Anthony.”

“In whose eyes? His? They went to jelly two weeks ago.”

At least one of the losing admirals at Midway, he recalled, had done the honorable thing. Anthony hungered for the details. Had the poor defeated Jap chained himself to the helm? Had he changed his mind at the last minute but died anyway because nobody was around to unlock the manacle?

A new voice now. “Anthony, open the door. Something unbelievable has happened.”

“Cassie, get out! You’re on a sinking ship!”

“I just talked to the Maracaibo’s second mate, and he says her skipper is named Christopher Van Horne.”

Anthony’s migraine flared hotter than ever. “Get out!”

“Christopher Van Horne,” she said again. “Your father!”

“My father’s in Spain.”

“Your father’s a thousand yards to port. Open the door.”

A dark laugh rose from the depths of Anthony’s chest. Him? Dear old Dad? But of course, naturally, who else would the Vatican have picked to hunt down the Val and steal her cargo? He wondered how they’d lured him out of retirement. Money, most likely. (Columbus had been greedy too.) Or had the old man been seduced by the opportunity to humiliate his son once again?

“He wants to see you, Katsakos says.” Cassie sounded on the verge of tears.

“He wants to steal my cargo.”

“He’s in no shape to steal anything,” Ockham insisted. “He was out in the open when that bomb hit the Maracaibo.”

“He’s hurt?”

“Sounds pretty bad.”

“Is he assuming I’ll come?”

“He’s assuming you’ll go down with your ship,” said the priest. “ ‘The Van Hornes go down with their ships,’ he told Katsakos.”

“Then I mustn’t disappoint him.”

“Guess he knows you pretty well.”

“He doesn’t know me at all. Get back to the Maracaibo, both of you.”

“He tried to save the Val,” Cassie protested.

“I doubt that,” said Anthony.

“Open the door. Why do you think he cut your chains?”

“To take my cargo away.”

“To stop the torpedo strike. Why do you think he fired on the planes?”

“So they wouldn’t sink our cargo.”

“So they wouldn’t sink you. Ask Katsakos. Open the door.”

Anthony fixed on the starboard wall. He imagined God massaging the primordial continent, cleaving South America from Africa; he saw the new ocean, the Atlantic, pouring into the breach like amniotic fluid spilling from a ruptured birth sac. Was Cassie telling the truth? Had the old man’s Midway tactics really been intended to save the Val?

“I lost God.”

“Merely for the moment,” said Ockham. “You’ll finish this job yet.”

“Your father loves you,” said Cassie. “So do I, for that matter. Open the door.”

“The Val’s doomed,” said Anthony.

“Then you’ll have to hitch Him to the Maracaibo, won’t you?” said Ockham.

“The Maracaibo’s not mine.”

“That needn’t stop you.”

Anthony opened the door.

And there she stood, eyes moist and sunken, lips chapped, a band of frost spread across her brow like a diamond tiara. Lord, what a perfect match they were: two strong-willed people preoccupied with seven million tons of carrion, though for very different reasons.

“You love me, Cassie?”

“Against my better judgment.”

Taking his mirrorshades from the pocket of his parka, Anthony slipped them on and, turning, confronted Ockham with a dual reflection of his captain. “You really think we can resume the tow?”

“I’ve seen you pull bigger rabbits out of smaller hats,” said the priest.

“Okay, but first I’m goin’ to my cabin. I need some things. A Popeye the Sailor notebook…”

Ockham cringed. “Captain, the Val’s about to break apart.”

“A brass sextant,” said Anthony. “A bottle of burgundy.”

“Be quick about it.”

“The feather of an angel.”

“I can certainly see the resemblance,” said the agitated young man with the frozen stethoscope slung around his neck and the aluminum clipboard snugged against his chest. “The high forehead, the heavy jaw — you’re definitely your father’s son.”

“And my mother’s…” Anthony climbed past a rack of empty Crotale missile launchers and stepped onto the Maracaibo’s athwartships catwalk.

“Giuseppe Carminati,” said the physician. His ensemble included an officer’s cap with a red cross stitched above the brim and a ceremonial overcoat sporting gold buttons and epaulets, as if he’d just come from appearing in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta about shipboard surgeons. “Your father’s alive, but he can’t be moved. Our quartermaster’s attending him over by number three ballast tank. I believe you know the man. We picked him up in the Gibraltar Sea.”

“Neil Weisinger?” asked Ockham eagerly.

Wrapping his glove around the frosty bulb of his stethoscope, Carminati turned toward the priest. “Correct. Weisinger.” The physician smiled with the left side of his mouth. “Perhaps you remember me?”

“We’ve met?”

“Three months ago, in the Vatican screening room — I was Gabriel’s attending physician.” Carminati hugged himself. “I should be in Rome right now, listening to the Holy Father’s heart. I don’t function well in the cold.”

“You got many casualties?” asked Anthony.

“Compared with the original Midway, no. Twenty-one cases of acute hypothermia, most of them complicated by lacerations and broken bones, plus a noncombatant observer who got badly burned when his PBY caught fire.”

“Oliver Shostak?” asked Cassie in a fearful, repentant voice.

“Albert Flume,” said Carminati, consulting his clipboard. “Shostak, it seems, has a dislocated shoulder. You know him?”

“An old boyfriend. Dislocated shoulder, that’s all?”

“Superficial cuts, minor burns, treatable hypothermia.”

“And some people say there’s no God,” muttered Anthony.

“Expect to lose anyone?” asked Ockham.

“No, though the actor portraying Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, a man named” — Carminati glanced at the list — “Brad Keating, was vaporized when a missile hit his torpedo plane. Ditto his gunner, Carny Otis in the role of Ensign Collins. Forty minutes ago we pulled a corpse from the sea: David Pasquali as Ensign George Gay. But for the fact that he’ll be dead soon, Captain, your father would probably be facing a manslaughter indictment.”

“Dead?” Anthony steadied himself on the Crotale rack. No, God, please, the bastard couldn’t be checking out yet, not before shriving his son.

“Forgive my bluntness,” said Carminati. “It’s been a bad morning. I can promise you he’s in no pain. The Maracaibo carries more morphine than bunker fuel.”

“Anthony… I’m so sorry,” said Cassie. “These people Oliver hired, they’re obviously deranged. I never imagined…” The words froze in her throat.

The captain faced the bow, shouldered his knapsack, and marched down the Maracaibo’s central catwalk, passing over a vast tangle of valves and pipework spreading in all directions like exposed entrails. Reaching the fo’c’sle, he picked his way through the aftermath of the demolition bomb — buckled hatches, smashed bulwarks, melted Phalanx cannon — and, descending the ladder, started toward number three ballast tank.

Ever since the butane had gone into the gravy, Anthony had wondered exactly how he would behave when his father finally left the world. Would he snicker through the viewing? Pass out balloons at the funeral? Leave a lunger on the grave? He needn’t have worried. The instant he beheld Christopher Van Horne’s trapped and broken form, a flood of spontaneous pity poured through him.

Evidently the shock wave had lifted the old man from behind the Phalanx, flung him off the fo’c’sle, and dropped him beside the tank. There he lay, parka shredded, eyes closed, body imprisoned by an errant Hoffritz valve assembly, its ten-foot-long stem driven clear through the Butterworth plate, its huge circular handle — larger than a covered-wagon wheel — pressed tightly against his chest, pinning him to the starboard samson post in a dreadful parody of sitting. Fire had ravaged the sides of his face, exposing his beautiful cheekbones. His left leg, grotesquely bent, might have belonged to a castoff marionette, a puppet whose master had died for reasons not even the angels knew.

Neil Weisinger stood atop the plate, teeth chattering as he transferred fresh water from an insulated gallon jug to a cylindrical white Thermos bottle advertising Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “Good afternoon, sir,” said the AB, saluting. “We got a team of licensed welders under the deck right now, cutting the stem loose.”

“You’re a two-time deserter, Weisinger.” Anthony shed his knapsack.

“Not exactly, sir,” said the AB, capping the bottle. A corrugated straw elbowed out of the lid. “I didn’t break out of the brig — Joe Spicer kidnapped me.”

“If somebody’s a deserter,” mumbled Christopher Van Horne, “he should be hauled off…”

Unzipping the knapsack, Anthony removed a liter of burgundy and gestured for the Last Crusade bottle.

“…hauled off and shot.”

Anthony dumped out the water and, in a small-scale recapitulation of the pump-room boys ballasting the Val with blood, filled the bottle to the brim. Kneeling, he placed one glove on the valve, the other on his father’s shoulder. “Hello, Dad,” he whispered.

“Son?” The old man’s eyes flickered open. “That you? You came?”

“It’s me. Hope you’re not in pain.”

“Wish I was.”

“Oh?”

“I knew this guy once, a demac on the Amoco Cadiz, dying of bone cancer. You know what he said? ‘When they give you morphine like there’s no tomorrow, there isn’t.’ ” An oddly seraphic grin spread across Christopher Van Horne’s ashen face. “Tell Tiffany I love her. Got that? Old Froggy loves her.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“You think she’s a bimbo, don’t you?”

“No, no.” Like a firing-squad captain providing his prisoner with a last cigarette, Anthony pushed the corrugated straw between his father’s lips. “Have some wine.”

The old man sipped. “Good stuff.”

“The best.”

“No more beard, huh?”

“No more beard.”

“You didn’t go down with your ship.” His tone was more curious than accusing.

“I’ve found the woman I want to marry. You’d like her.”

“I really stuck it to those squadrons, didn’t I?”

“She’s got Mom’s energy, Susan’s spunk.”

“Smeared ’em all over the sky.”

Anthony withdrew the straw. “Something else you should know. That uncharted island in the Gibraltar Sea — I named it after you. Van Horne Island.”

“Gave every damn Dauntless hell. More wine, okay?”

“Van Horne Island,” said Anthony again, reinserting the straw. “You’ve finally got your own private paradise. Understand?”

“It’s really shitty, dying. There’s nothing good about it. Sure wish Tiff were here.”

Sliding Raphael’s feather from his knapsack, Anthony held it before the old man, its vane quivering in the wind. “Listen, Dad. Do you know what kind of feather this is?”

“It’s a feather.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t give a fuck. Albatross.”

“Angel, Dad.”

“Looks like albatross.”

“An angel hired me. Wings, halo, everything. This cargo I’ve been hauling, it’s not a movie prop, it’s God’s dead body.”

“No, I’m the one with the body, I’m the one, and now it’s all wrecked. You left the bridge. Tiff’s a real knockout, isn’t she? Wonder what she sees in me. Half the time my dick doesn’t even work.”

“I’m going to get the job done. I’m going to haul our Creator to His tomb.”

“You’re not making a whole lot of sense, son. It’s so weird, being crushed like this and not feeling anything. Angel? Creator? What?”

“All the bad things you ever did to me — Thanksgiving, locking up the Constitution — I’m ready to let them go.” Anthony pulled off his gloves, holding his naked hands before his father. “Just tell me you’re proud I drew this mission. Tell me you’re proud, and you know I can finish it, and I should put the spill out of my mind.”

“Constitution?”

As ice formed beneath his fingernails, Anthony slipped his gloves back on. “Look at me. Say, ‘Put the spill out of your mind.’ ”

“What kind of stupid death is this?” Like crude oil seeping from a subterranean reservoir, blood rose to fill the old man’s mouth, mingling with the wine; his words bubbled up through the pool. “Isn’t it enough I shot your tow chains apart? Isn’t that enough?” Tears came, rolling over his naked white cheekbones. “I don’t know what you want, son. Constitution? Angel? Aren’t broken chains enough?” The tears reached his jaw and froze. He shook violently, spasm after spasm of unfelt pain. “Take ’er over, Anthony.” He grabbed the rim of the valve handle and tried to turn it, as if he were living back in 1954, a pumpman again, working the weather deck of the Texaco Star. “Take over the ship.”

The pure hopelessness of the situation, the morbid comedy of it all, brought a sardonic smile to Anthony’s lips, a grin to match his Creator’s. For the first time ever, his father was offering him something that he wouldn’t — couldn’t — take back… only there was one small catch.

“She’s not yours to give,” said Anthony.

“Red sky at night — sailor’s delight.” The old man closed his eyes. “Red sky in the morning — sailors take warning…”

“Tell me Matagorda Bay doesn’t matter anymore. The egrets forgive me. Say it.”

“Mare’s tails and mackerel scales… make tall ships carry low sails… red sky at night… sailor’s delight… delight… delight…”

And then, with a feeling of profound and unutterable dissatisfaction, Anthony watched his father inhale, smile, spit blood, and die.

“May he rest in peace,” said Weisinger.

Feather in hand, Anthony stood up.

“I didn’t know him well,” the AB continued, “but I could tell he was a great man. You should’ve seen him when those planes went after the Val. ‘They’re trying to kill my son!’ he kept screaming.”

“No, he wasn’t a great man.” Anthony slipped Raphael’s feather into the topmost pocket of his parka, enjoying the feel of its gentle heat against his chest. “He was a great sailor, but he wasn’t a great man.”

“The world needs both, I suppose.”

“The world needs both.”

As Oliver Shostak eased himself over the side of the stainless steel rewarming tub and settled into the 110-degree water, he inevitably thought of an earlier avatar of secular enlightenment, Jean-Paul Marat, sitting in his bath day after day, enduring his diseased skin and dreaming the death of aristocracy. Oliver’s shoulder throbbed, his ribs ached, but the sharpest pain was in his soul. Like Marat’s revolution, Oliver’s crusade had come to a wretched and humiliating end. At that moment, he harbored but one major ambition, a wish eclipsing both his desire to stop shivering and his urge to see Cassie, and that ambition was to be dead.

“Your prognosis is excellent,” said Dr. Carminati, crouching beside Oliver. “But stay put, okay? If you move too much, the blood will flow to your extremities, cool off, and lower your temperature, and that could trigger lethal cardiac arrhythmia.”

“Lethal cardiac arrhythmia,” Oliver echoed dully, his teeth chattering like castanets. A most appealing idea.

“Your kilocalorie deficit is probably near a thousand right now, but I predict we’ll normalize your core temperature in under an hour. After that, an Iceland Air-Sea Rescue helicopter will take you to Reykjavik General for observation.”

“Was that really God’s body the Valparaíso was towing?”

“I believe it was.”

“God’s?”

“Yes.”

“It’s hard to accept.”

“Three months ago, the angel Gabriel died in my arms,” said the young physician, starting away. “Since that moment, I’ve been open to all sorts of possibilities.”

Steam rose on every side of the tub, obscuring the hypothermia victims lined up to Oliver’s left and right. So efficient was healthcare delivery aboard the Maracaibo that, once borne to the sick bay, they’d all been treated without delay: shoulders relocated, ribs taped, bones set, burns greased, gashes disinfected, lungs filled with warm, moist air from a heated Dragen tank. No amount of efficiency, however, could revive the faceless body that had passed through on a gurney shortly after their arrival. Oliver knew that he and the dead man had spoken several times in the Midnight Sun Canteen, but he could recall nothing specific from any of their exchanges. To Oliver he was merely another overpaid and anonymous war reenactor, currently engaged in his final performance, playing the corpse of Ensign George Gay.

Within twenty minutes, he felt warmer, but his mood remained bleak as ever. A woman’s form appeared, swathed in steam. Charlotte Corday, he mused, come to stab Marat — he’d always adored Jacques-Louis David’s painting — but instead of a dagger she wielded only a digital thermometer.

“Hello, Oliver. Good to see you.”

“Cassandra?”

“They want me to take your temperature,” she said, piercing the veil of mist.

“Listen, honey, I tried my darnedest. I really, really tried.”

Bending beside the tub, she placed a quick, noncommittal kiss on his cheek. “I know you did,” she said in a gratuitously condescending tone. Her face was gaunt, her demeanor cowed and diffident, and no doubt he appeared equally defeated to her. And yet, as she stood over him, pressing the tiny green button on the thermometer, he thought she’d never looked more beautiful.

“I tried my darnedest,” he said again. “You gotta understand — I had no idea Spruance was planning to torpedo your tanker.”

“I’ll be blunt,” said Cassie, easing the device between his lips. “I never really believed you’d hired the right people.” The remark wounded Oliver — so severely that he almost bit off the thermometer bulb. (Jesus Christ, what did she expect on such short notice, the U.S. Seventh Fleet?) A faint ringing reached his ears, like the sound of a mouse’s alarm clock. Cassie removed the thermometer and squinted at the little numerals. “Ninety-eight point two. Close enough. We’ll let you walk around now.”

“I tried my darnedest. Really.”

“You don’t need to keep saying that.”

“Where’s God?”

“Adrift,” she replied, handing Oliver a white terry-cloth bathrobe and a beach towel imprinted with the Carpco stegosaurus. “He went east, I think. Quite possibly He’s unsinkable. Oliver, we have to talk. Meet me in the snack bar.”

“I love you, Cassandra.”

“I know,” she said evenly — ominously — and, whirling around, vanished into the mist.

As Oliver climbed out of the rewarming tub, a dizzying depression overcame him. He felt landlocked, marooned in the Age of Reason, and, meanwhile, way out to sea, nudging the horizon, there was his Cassandra, sailing into the post-Enlightenment, post-Christian, post-theistic future, moving farther and farther from him with each passing minute.

He dried off and, throwing on the bathrobe, limped through the ranks of dazed war reenactors, half of them sitting in re-warming tubs, the rest lying in bed. A ragged row of stitches ran down McClusky’s left cheek. A turban of bandages sat atop Lieutenant Beeson’s head. Burns dotted Lance Sharp’s chest like abstract-expressionist tattoos. He pitied these eighteen men their snapped bones, their torn flesh, but he also felt betrayed by them. They should have made much bigger holes in God. They simply should have.

When Oliver first encountered the sorry spectacle of Albert Flume, he understood as never before what it meant for a man to lose his arms. Leg loss was a different matter. Leg loss was Captain Ahab, Long John Silver — a whole gallery of romantic heroes. But a man without arms simply looked like a mistake.

Pembroke stood by the bed, his forehead a mass of bruises, a gauze patch over his right eye. “This is all your fault,” he told Oliver, gesturing toward his mutilated partner.

The impresario’s arrogance stunned Oliver. “My fault?”

Flume stared at the ceiling and winced. Spirals of linen covered his stumps, giving the starkly truncated limbs the appearance of baseball bats whose handgrips had been wrapped in adhesive tape.

“You said there wouldn’t be any screening vessels,” whined Pembroke.

“You want a villain, Sidney?” asked Oliver, beating back his impulse to scream. “Try your buddy Spruance. Spruance and his Op Plan 29-67. Try that fool McClusky over there — he should’ve blown retreat the instant the Maracaibo showed up. Try yourself.”

“Maracaibo, not ‘the’ Maracaibo.”

“People around here are mumbling about lawsuits, extradition, manslaughter indictments,” said Oliver. “I think we’re in a lot of trouble, all of us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There weren’t any lawsuits after Midway.” Drawing a plastic comb from his bathrobe, Pembroke tidied up his friend’s thick blond hair. “Jeez, I wish I could help you, Alby. I wish I could make Frances Langford appear right now and cheer you up.”

“What’ll happen to me?” moaned Flume.

“Nothing but the best therapy for you, buddy. You’ll get wonderful mechanical arms — you know, like Harold Russell had.”

“Harold Russell?” said Oliver.

“That double amputee who went into the movies,” said Pembroke. “Ever see The Best Years of Our Lives?”

“No.”

“Swell picture. Russell got an Oscar.”

“I’ll pay the bills,” said Oliver, lightly brushing Flume’s left stump. “No matter what those wonderful mechanical arms cost, I’ll pay.”

“I don’t want wonderful mechanical arms,” mumbled Flume. “Russell had to sell his Oscar.”

“True,” sighed Pembroke.

“Real arms.”

“Hey, buddy, we’re gonna stage one hell of a Guadalcanal, aren’t we?”

“I don’t want a Guadalcanal.”

“No?” said Pembroke.

“I don’t want a Guadalcanal, or an Ardennes, or a D-Day even.”

“I understand.”

“Arms.”

Sure.

“I keep trying to move my hands.”

“Naturally.”

“I can’t move ’em.”

“I know, Alby.”

“I wanna play the piano.”

“Right.”

“Pitch pennies.”

“Or course.”

Time to leave, the Enlightenment League’s president thought as Albert Flume voiced his wish to snap his fingers and twiddle his thumbs. Time to find Cassandra, Oliver decided as the armless impresario articulated his desire to wear a wristwatch, knit samplers, play with a yo-yo, raise the flag for Hudson High, and masturbate. Time to get on with the rest of what Oliver suspected was going to be a crushingly dull and utterly meaningless life.

A loaded bedpan, Thomas Ockham concluded, was a hopeless commodity. No fantasy could redeem it. Every time he bore one across the Maracaibo’ s sick bay, he started out pretending it was a chalice, a ciborium, or the Holy Grail itself, but by the time he reached the bathroom he was carrying a bowl of turds. And so it happened that, when Tullio Di Luca demanded an emergency meeting to discuss the fate of the Corpus Dei, the priest was more than happy to forsake his duties and head for the elevator.

The Valparaíso group — Van Horne, Rafferty, Haycox, O’Connor, Bliss — was already in the wardroom when Thomas arrived, lined up along the far side of the table. Rafferty lit a Marlboro. O’Connor popped a cough drop. Dark concentric circles scored the captain’s cheeks, as if his eyes were pebbles tossed into water. Gradually the Maracaibo’s staff filed in — Di Luca leading, then First Mate Orso Peche, Chief Engineer Vince Mangione, Communications Officer Gonzalo Cornejo, and Vatican Physician Giuseppe Carminati — each man looking more miserable and homesick than the one before him. Mick Katsakos, Thomas surmised, was up on the bridge, keeping the Gulf tanker a safe distance from the foundering Valparaíso.

“In my brief association with your father, I came to admire his seamanship and courage,” said Di Luca, assuming the head of the table. “Your grief must be overwhelming.”

“Not yet,” grunted Van Horne. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Wincing at the captain’s candor, Thomas seated himself beside Lianne Bliss and glanced through the nearest porthole. The Val’s deck island still towered above the choppy Norwegian Sea: the Rasputin of supertankers, he decided. Shoot her, poison her, bludgeon her, and still she clung to life.

Why had God died?

Why?

“The Vatican has a proposition for you,” said Di Luca to Van Horne. “We are not certain why you absconded last week, but the Holy Father, a most generous man, is prepared to ignore your insubordination if you will take over the Maracaibo, subsequently doing as Rome wishes.”

“History’s ahead of you, Eminence,” the captain replied. “Before he passed away, Dad bequeathed me this ship.”

“He didn’t have that right.”

“I can’t agree to follow Rome’s orders till I know what they are.

“Step one: assume command. In the interests of efficiency” — Di Luca swept his arm along the line of Maracaibo personnel — “these men have all agreed to defer to your own officers. Step two: pilot us to the motion-picture prop. Mr. Peche, do you still have it on your radar screen?”

“Aye.”

“Step three: anoint the prop fore to aft.”

“Anoint it?” said Van Horne.

“With Arabian crude oil,” Di Luca explained. “Step four: set the prop on fire. Step five: transport us back to Palermo.”

“On fire?” wailed Rafferty.

“What the fuck?” moaned O’Connor.

“No way,” hissed Haycox.

“Ah, now we’re talking!” cried Bliss, pointing her crystal pendant toward Van Horne. “Hear that, sir? You’re supposed to burn the thing!”

“You said you were hauling formaldehyde, not Arabian crude,” Thomas protested.

Di Luca grinned feebly. “We’re hauling oil,” he admitted.

“You have your orders, Captain,” said Bliss. “Now follow them.”

“You know perfectly well the body’s meant to be entombed at Kvitoya,” Thomas reminded the cardinal. “You heard Gabriel’s wishes in person.”

Di Luca pressed his palms to his bosom and smoothed his waterproof cassock. “Professor Ockham, need I make the embarrassingly obvious point that Rome’s liaison on this mission is no longer you but myself?”

Thomas grew suddenly aware of his own blood. He felt his plasma heating up. “Don’t underestimate your man, Eminence. Don’t expect this Jesuit to lie down and die.”

Leaning toward Van Horne, Di Luca picked up a glass ashtray, holding it out like Christ offering the first stone to the mob. “The problem, Captain, is that Kvitoya provides no deterrents to intrusion. Only a cremation can guarantee that, in the years to come, the corpse won’t be exhumed and defiled.”

“What does it matter if a movie prop gets defiled?” asked Peche.

“The angels seemed to think Kvitoya would be just fine,” said Thomas. “So do I.”

“Please be quiet,” said Di Luca.

“Angels?” said Mangione.

“I won’t be quiet,” said Thomas.

Di Luca gave the ashtray a sudden twist, making it spin like a compass needle gone berserk. “Sir, is it not true that, once our Creator’s death became common knowledge aboard the Valparaíso, a severe ethical breakdown occurred?”

“Whose death?” said Peche.

“Yes, but thanks to the meat, we’re past that now,” said Van Horne.

“Meat?” said Di Luca.

“When we fed the crew Quarter Pounders with Cheese, they regained their moral bearings.”

“Quarter Pounders?”

“You don’t want to know,” said Rafferty.

“According to Father Ockham’s fax of July twenty-eighth, there were thefts, attempted rapes, vandalism, quite possibly a murder.” The cardinal arrested the whirling ashtray. “Now, sir, project such anarchy onto the planet at large, and you have chaos beyond comprehension.”

“There’s another way to look at it,” said Van Horne. “Consider: our trip to the Gibraltar Sea was amazingly intense. We saw the corpse all the time, smelled it around the clock, killed its predators on every watch. Naturally the thing took hold of us. The whole world’s never going to enter into such a close relationship with God.”

“God?” said Mangione.

“The body must be obliterated,” said Di Luca.

Thomas slammed his palm against the table. “Oh, come on, Tullio. Let’s be honest, okay? Your heart was never in this project. If your OMNIVAC hadn’t predicted a few surviving neurons, you’d have wanted a cremation straight away. But now the brain’s beyond salvation, which means all your careers might be beyond salvation too, should the news ever get out. To which I say, ‘Too bad, gentlemen. Swallow your pill. The Chair of Peter was never a tenure-track position.’ ”

“Father Thomas, I want you to leave this meeting,” growled Di Luca. “Right now.”

“Go fry an egg,” said the priest. “From the Church’s perspective this corpse might be a white elephant, but for Captain Van Horne and myself it’s a sacred trust!”

“Get out!”

“No!”

The cardinal grew suddenly mute, absorbed in rapping the ashtray against the table, a steady, frustrated thonk-thonk-thonk.

“It’s not a movie prop, is it?” said Peche.

“Not remotely,” said O’Connor.

“Good God.”

“Exactly,” said Haycox.

Van Horne directed a wide, hostile smile toward Di Luca. “Step one: we steam over to our cargo. Step two: we lash Him to our stern. Step three: we restart the tow.” He shifted his stare to Peche. “Assuming there are no objections…”

A sudden joy took hold of Thomas. How wonderful to be fighting, for once, on the same side as Van Horne.

“My mind’s confused,” asserted Peche, “but my heart, it knows how unforgivable it would be to burn this body.”

Cornejo muttered, “If it’s really what you say it is … if it’s really, really that …”

“Who are we to go against angels?” said Mangione.

The captain reached into the pocket of his shirt, drawing out Raphael’s angel feather and pointing it toward the first mate.

“Marbles, I want you to place our radio shack under armed guard. Any attempt by Monsignor Di Luca to enter should be resisted. While we’re at it, let’s be sure to blackball Sparks here and her buddy Dr. Fowler.”

“Aye,” said Rafferty.

Bliss clutched her crystal pendant and sneered.

“I assume you realize that, as of this moment, you’re all in a lot of trouble with the Vatican,” said Di Luca. “Rome receives regular dispatches from me. When I fail to report, they’ll send another Gulf tanker after you. They’ll send two — three — a whole armada.”

“Never a dull moment,” said Van Horne.

“You’re making a tragic mistake, Captain. Worse than Matagorda Bay.”

“I survived that. I’ll survive this too.” Van Horne aimed the feather directly at Dr. Carminati. “How soon before you lift the survivors out of here?”

“We expect the choppers in about twenty minutes. Give us an hour after that. I hope you realize I’m not about to join this outrageous mutiny of yours.”

“Mutiny’s the word,” said Di Luca.

Van Horne shifted the feather from the physician to the cardinal. “If I’m in rebellion against the Vatican, Eminence, then the Vatican’s in rebellion against heaven.” The captain closed his eyes. “I shall leave it for you to decide which is the more serious sin.”

The half-dozen vending machines in the Maracaibo’s snack bar dispensed a wide variety of grotesqueries: Hostess Twinkies, Li’l Debbie Snack Cakes, Ring Dings — each item underscoring Oliver’s creeping conviction that, with or without a Corpus Dei, Western civilization stood on the brink of collapse. Cassie occupied a contoured plastic chair adjacent to a small Formica table, nursing a Mountain Dew beneath the Lucite glow of the COLD DRINKS machine, an image that for Oliver recalled Degas’s masterful Glass of Absinthe. To her right, PASTRY ’N SNACKS. To her left, CANDY ’N SWEETS. He approached HOT DRINKS, secured black coffee in a paper cup unaccountably decorated with playing cards, and joined her.

“I believe the Reenactment Society is going out of business,” he said. “Midway finished it off.”

“The past dies hard.”

“I guess. Sure. You’ve always been a deeper thinker than me.”

“It kicks and screams, but eventually it dies.” Oliver jammed his thumb into the scalding coffee, savoring the penitential pain. “Hey, Cassandra, we’ve had some terrific times together, haven’t we? Remember Denver?” In some ways that particular Enlightenment League escapade — a colorful protest against the gigantic plywood Ten Commandments that the Fraternal Order of Eagles had erected on the capitol lawn — had been the high point of their relationship. In the park across the street he and Cassie had raised an equally formidable sign labeled WHAT GOD REALLY SAID and featuring a nouvelle decalogue they’d coauthored two days earlier between episodes of rapturous sex (they were field-testing the Shostak Supreme) in her apartment. “I’ll bet if we work at it, we can remember them all. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, except for Roman Catholics if they don’t get tacky about it’.”

“I don’t want to talk about Denver,” said Cassie.

“ ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s manservant, nor his maidservant, nor question why thy neighbor has servants in the first place’.”

“Oliver, I’m in love with Anthony Van Horne.”

And suddenly his hypothermia was back, stealing through his body organ by organ, turning them into frozen cuts of meat.

“Shit.” Charlotte Corday after all, stabbing him, murdering him.

“Van Horne? Van Horne’s the enemy, for Christ’s sake.” He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Have you… slept with him?”

“Yes.”

“More than once?”

“Yes.”

“What brand of condom?”

“Any answer to that question would be the wrong one.”

Oliver licked his smarting thumb. “Has he asked you to marry him?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“I’m planning to ask him,” she said.

“What do you see in a man like that? He’s no rationalist, he’s not one of us!”

In a move Oliver found at once intensely pleasurable and cruelly patronizing, Cassie stroked his forearm. “I’m sorry. I’m truly, truly sorry…”

“Know what I think? I think you’ve been seduced by the mystique of the sea. Hey, look, if this is the life you crave, fine, I’ll buy you a boat. You want a sloop, Cassandra? A cabin cruiser? We’ll sail to Tahiti, lie on the beach, paint pictures of the natives, the whole Gauguin bit.”

“Oliver, it’s over.”

“It isn’t.”

“It is.”

For the next minute neither of them spoke, their silence broken only by an occasional mechanical grunt from a vending machine. Oliver fixed on PERSONAL CARE, desirous of its wares, the Tylenol to assuage his headache, the Alka-Seltzer to settle his stomach, the Wilcox nail file to slit his wrists, the Shostak Supersensitives to facilitate his raging wish to have sex with Cassie one last time.

“ ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ” he said. “Remember what we did with ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”

No.

“Me neither.”

“Oliver…”

“My mind’s a blank.” A dull, metallic thumping filled the air. The Iceland choppers, Oliver realized, landing on the Maracaibo’s helipads. “Are you certain you can’t remember?”

“I guess I’ve — I’ve… I’m not exactly sure what I mean. Blasphemy doesn’t move me the way it used to.”

“Come with me to Reykjavik, okay? You can catch a plane to Halifax tonight, a connecting flight to New York in the morning. With luck you’ll be back teaching by Wednesday.”

“Oliver, you’re grasping at straws.”

“Come with me.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“No.”

Oliver snapped his fingers. “ ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ” he said, fighting tears, “ ‘except for communists, whom thou shalt kill with impunity’.”

September 16.

I assume you’re grateful I rescued you, Popeye. Truth to tell, I’m glad to be here too. A lot of captains have gone down with their ships over the years, and I don’t envy a single one of them.

Rafferty’s worried that the target on the twelve-mile scope might be just another iceberg, but I’d know those holy contours anywhere. Assuming the chains are still in place, the best procedure will probably be to sling the ends around the Maracaibo’s deck island and wire the lead links together. If the load’s too much, of course, it’ll tear the island loose and pull it overboard, dumping us all into the sea.

To earn a living, some men merely have to haul oil.

At 2015 the last of the Reykjavik choppers took off, bearing away Pembroke, Flume, and Oliver Shostak, along with those two fake ensigns who piloted the PBY. I had a notion to seek old Oliver out before he left, identify myself, and introduce his front teeth to the pit of his stomach, but then I decided stealing his girlfriend is revenge enough. Still, I’ll never fully understand what he and Cassie have against our cargo. It seems to me a person ought to be thankful to his Creator. For now, though, none of my personal philosophical opinions matter. I’ve come to bury God, not to praise Him.

I’ll give the Val till dawn. If she’s not gone by then, I’ll fire off an Aspide and put her out of her misery. After that I’ll be sorely tempted to hunt down Spruance’s carrier and send her to the bottom as well. But I’ll resist, Popeye. Such vindictiveness would be wrong. “Once enthralled by the Idea of the Corpse,” Ockham tells me, “a person must remain eternally vigilant, forever seeking the moral law within.”

Under the midnight sun, despair acquires the intensity of sex, insomnia the vehemence of art. To the sailor who finds himself sleepless in the Arctic, wind has never felt sharper, salt air more pungent, a gannet’s cry more piercing. As Anthony Van Horne wandered the central catwalk of the Carpco Maracaibo — icicles dangling everywhere, icebergs growling on all sides — he felt as if he’d become the hero of some vivid Scandinavian myth. He half expected to see the Midgard serpent cruising through the pink sea, swimming in circles around the dying Valparaíso, teeth flashing, eyes aflame, waiting for Ragnarok.

The old man lay on the fo’c’sle deck, wrapped in a canvas seabag like a statue of a Civil War general about to be unveiled.

“When you consider how much TNT and testosterone were on the scene this morning,” said Cassie, tapping the corpse’s head with her boot, “it’s amazing only four people got killed.” She smiled weakly. “How are you?”

“Tired,” he said, unhitching the binoculars from around his neck. “Cold.”

“Me too.”

“We’ve been avoiding each other.”

“True,” she said. “Will my guilt ever go away?”

“You’re asking the wrong man.”

“Fucking Gulf tanker. I mean, who’d have figured on a Gulf tanker showing up?”

Bulky in their down parkas, graceless in their fur-lined boots, they pressed together like two bonded grizzly bears finding each other after a long hibernation.

“I hope you’re not too sad,” said Cassie, extending her sealskin mitten and gesturing toward the seabag.

“Reminds me of the time I got shot by a pirate in Guayaquil,” said Anthony. “The pain didn’t arrive all at once. I’m still waiting for something to hit.”

“Grief?”

“Something. We had a few minutes together at the end.”

“Did you talk about Matagorda Bay?”

“The man was on a morphine trip — hopeless. But even if he’d understood, he couldn’t have helped me. The job’s not done. The tomb’s still empty.”

“Lianne tells me the Vatican wants the corpse cremated.”

“Did she also tell you we’re forging ahead tomorrow?”

“To Kvitoya?”

“Yep.”

“Wish you’d reconsider,” said Cassie evenly. An oddly appealing, peculiarly sensual anger distorted her face. “The angels are dead. Your father’s dead. God’s dead. There’s nobody left to impress.”

“I’m left.”

“Shit.”

“Cassie, friend, wouldn’t you say things have taken a pretty odd turn when the Holy Catholic Church and the Central Park West Enlightenment League want exactly the same thing?”

“I can live with that. Burn the sucker, honey. The world’s women will thank you for it.”

“I gave Raphael my word.”

“The way I heard it,” said Cassie, “Rome will dispatch more Gulf tankers if you don’t play ball. Surely you don’t want to be torpedoed again.”

“No, Doc, I don’t want that.” Swerving toward the wreck, Anthony raised the binoculars and focused. “Of course, I could always send the Pope a fax saying the body’s been torched.”

“You could…”

“But I won’t,” said Anthony crisply. “There’s been enough deception on this voyage.” Black waves washed across the Valparaíso’s weather deck, hurling chunks of pack ice against the superstructure. “Doc, I’ll make you a deal. If a Vatican armada intercepts us between here and Svalbard, I’ll surrender our cargo without a fight.”

“No showdowns?”

“No showdowns.”

Cassie moved her mouth, working the frozen muscles into a smile. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

With a deep gurgle and an unearthly groan, the Valparaíso began to spin, north to east to south to west, round and round, her bow falling sharply, stirring the Greenland Current into a frothy whirlpool as her ten-ton rudder, Ferris wheel-size propellers, and mammoth keel rose into the air. Level by level, companionway by companionway, the superstructure descended — cabins, galleys, wardroom, wheelhouse, stacks, mast, Vatican flag — sliding into the maelstrom as if into the mouth of some unimaginable grouper, portholes blazing brightly even after they slipped beneath the waves.

“Farewell, old friend.” Anthony lifted his hand to his brow and fired off a forceful salute. “I’ll miss you,” he called across the ice-choked sea. The gannets screeched, the wind howled, the watery jaws whooshed closed. “You were the best of them all,” the captain told his ship as she began her final voyage, a slow, inexorable drop from the frothy surface of the Norwegian Sea to the inky blackness of the Mohns Trench, five thousand fathoms down.

CHILD

THE DIVINE FACE was still smoldering when the Maracaibo arrived on the scene, smoke wafting off His cheeks in thick black tendrils and drifting northwest toward Jan Mayen Island. Thousands of whisker stubs speckled the charred, exposed flesh of His lantern jaw, encircling the frosted lips and frozen smile, angling upward like the skeletal remains of a forest fire. God, Anthony saw, had become as beardless as he himself.

Despite the surplus of officers and seamen, it took the Maracaibo’s company all day to dredge up the severed chains, belt them around the superstructure, and splice the raw ends together. “Slow ahead,” Anthony ordered. The chains tightened, grinding against the deckhouse walls, but the foundation held fast, and the Corpus Dei moved forward. At 1830 hours the captain gave the all-ahead-full, gulped down his four hundred and twenty-sixth cup of coffee since New York, and set his course for the Pole.

Anthony did not like the Carpco Maracaibo. It was all he could do to squeeze five knots out of her; even if the burdensome oil in her hold magically disappeared, he doubted she’d give him more than six. She had no soul, this tanker. The archangels had truly known what they were doing when they picked the Valparaíso.

The night the tow began, Cassie took up residence in Anthony’s cabin, an environment made erotically tropical by the eighty-degree air Crock O’Connor was obligingly pumping in from the engine flat.

“I have to know something,” she said, guiding Anthony’s naked body onto the bunk. “If our Midway scheme had worked and God had gone under, would you have forgiven me?”

“That’s not a fair question.”

“True.” She began arraying him in a decorator Supersensitive — the best-selling barber pole design, second in popularity only to the diamondback rattlesnake. “What’s the answer?”

“I’d probably never have forgiven you,” said Anthony, enjoying the way the sweat filled her cleavage like a river flowing through a gorge. “I know that’s not the answer you wanted to hear, but…”

“But it’s the one I expected,” she confessed.

“Now I have to know something.” He plugged her ear with his tongue, swizzling it around. “Suppose another opportunity came along for you to destroy my cargo. Would you take it?”

“You bet I would.”

“You don’t have to answer right away.”

Laughing, Cassie unfurled the condom. “You’re surprised?”

“Not really,” he sighed. Slithering on top of her, he cupped her breasts like Jehovah molding the Andes. “You’re a woman with a mission, Doc. It’s what I love about you.”

The next morning, while Cassie was out helping to chip ice from the central catwalk and Anthony lay in their bunk writing about the death of the Valparaíso, filling his Popeye journal with page after page of angry lamentation, a knock reverberated through the cabin. He rolled off the mattress, opened the door. Crock O’Connor stepped inside, accompanied by spindly little Vince Mangione, the latter gripping a brass birdcage, lifting it level with his face as if deploying a hurricane lantern against a moonless night.

Inside the cage, a parrot stood on a trapeze, making quick jabs with its beak in hopes of killing the mites under its wings. The bird turned its scarlet head, fixing on Anthony. Its eyes were like tiny oiled bearings. At first he thought some sort of resurrection had occurred, for the similarity between this macaw and his boyhood pet, Rainbow, was uncanny, but on further inspection he realized the present parrot lacked Rainbow’s distinguishing marks — the peculiar hourglass shape on her beak, the small jagged scar on her right talon.

“Your father bought her in Palermo, right before we shipped out,” Mangione explained, setting the cage on the bunk.

“The engine flat made a fine home — all that steam,” said O’Connor. “But I’m sure she’ll do fine in your cabin.”

“Get her out of here,” said Anthony.

“What?”

“I want nothing that belonged to my father.”

“You don’t understand,” said Mangione. “He told me it was a present.”

“A present?”

Despite the Thanksgiving humiliation, the bottled Constitution, the malign neglect — despite everything, Anthony was touched. At last the old man was trying to make amends, restoring to his son the gift he’d taken away forty years earlier.

“We don’t know if your dad named her or not,” said O’Connor.

“What do you call her?”

“Pirate Jenny.”

“Leave her here,” said Anthony, returning Pirate Jenny’s unblinking stare. A sudden queasiness came. He half expected the parrot to say something sardonic and wounding, like Anthony left the bridge or Anthony fucked up.

As O’Connor started out of the cabin, Pirate Jenny squawked but produced no vocables. “I’m bored,” said the engineer, pausing in the jamb. He faced Anthony and frowned, crinkling the steam burn on his forehead. “The boilers around here are all on computers. There’s nothing for me to do.”

“The Val was an eyesore, hard to steer…”

“I know. I want her back.”

“Me too, Crock. I want her back too. Thanks for the bird.”

On September 21, a new variety of ice island appeared on the horizon, drifting southeast with the Greenland Current — glacier fragments so huge they made the Jan Mayen bergs seem like molehills. According to the Marisat, the Maracaibo was barely a day from her destination, but the prospect of journey’s end brought Anthony no pleasure. Eight men had died; the Val was in the Mohns Trench; the divine brain was garbage; his father would never absolve him. And for all Anthony knew, a Vatican armada now lay at anchor inside the tomb, ready to pirate his cargo.

“Froggy loves Tiffany.”

He was giving Cassie a backrub, pressing his palms against her beautiful flesh, vertebra after vertebra lined up like speed bumps, and for an instant he thought it was she who’d made the raspy little declaration.

“What?”

“Froggy loves Tiffany,” the scarlet macaw repeated. “Froggy loves Tiffany.”

The universe again, playing another of its outrageous jokes. Froggy loved Tiffany.

Anthony stifled a giggle. “It’s all too perfect, wouldn’t you say?”

“Perfect?” Cassie replied. “What?”

“Absolutely perfect. A masterpiece. The bastard’s dead, and he’s still taking back the things he gave me.”

“Oh, come on — your father’s not doing anything. Mangione didn’t understand the parrot was for Tiffany, that’s all. There’s no malice here.”

“You think so?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I must admit, I’m actually rather impressed,” said Anthony, struck by his mental picture of the old man sitting hour after hour in the engine flat, drilling the half-dozen syllables into the parrot’s head. “Imagine how many times he had to say it, over and over…”

“Maybe he hired a deckie.”

“No, Dad did the work, I’m sure. He loved that woman. Over and over and over.”

“Froggy loves Tiffany,” said Pirate Jenny.

“Cassie loves Anthony,” said Cassie Fowler.

“Anthony loves Cassie,” said Anthony Van Horne.

September 22.

The autumnal equinox. On this day in 1789, my Manner’s Pocket Companion informs me, 5 months after the mutiny on HMS Bounty, “Fletcher Christian and his crew sailed for the last time from Tahiti in search of a deserted island on which to settle.”

Mr. Christian could’ve done a lot worse than where he ended up, Pitcairn’s Island. He could’ve come here, for instance, to Kvitoya, surely the bleakest, coldest place south of Santa Claus’s outhouse.

At 0920 we drew within sight of the coordinates Raphael gave me in the Manhattan Cloisters — 80°6'N, 34°3'E — and, indeed, there it was, the Great Tomb, a waterborne mountain measuring nearly 16 miles across at its base and towering over 28,000 feet (the approximate height of Everest, Dolores Haycox noted), pinned between the deserted island and the beginning of what the charts call “unnavigable polar ice.” As we bore down on the thing, weaving among the lesser bergs at 5 knots, the entire company gathered spontaneously on the weather deck. Most of the sailors dropped to their knees. About half crossed themselves. The shadow of the tomb spread across the water like an oil slick, darkening our path. Directly above, a shimmering gold ring ran around the sun, a phenomenon that prompted Ockham to get on the PA system and explain how we were seeing “light waves bending as they pass through airborne ice crystals.” The sundogs appeared next: greenish, glassy highlights on either side of the ring, where the crystals were “acting like millions of tiny mirrors.”

The sailors wanted no part of the padre’s rationality, and I didn’t either. This morning, Popeye, the sun wore a halo.

For an hour we cruised along the mountain’s western face, probing, poking, seeking entrance, and at 1105 we spotted a trapezoidal portal. We came left 15 degrees, slowed to 3 knots, and crossed the threshold. Those angels knew their math, Popeye; their calculations were on the mark. Our cargo cleared the portal with a margin of perhaps 6 yards along each floating hand and not much more above the chest.

The Maracaibo steamed forward, her searchlights panning back and forth as she spiraled toward the core. For 20 miles we followed the smooth, slick, ever-curving passageway. It was like navigating the interior of a gigantic conch. Then, at last: the central crypt, its silvery walls soaring to meet a vaulted dome whose apex lay well beyond the reach of our beams.

No armada awaited. Rome may find us yet, of course; her ships could be gathering outside even as I write these words, barricading the exit. But right now we’re free to conduct our business in peace.

Dead ahead, dark waves lapped against a mile-long ice shelf, its surface nearly level with our bulwarks, and the minute I saw the glistery, sculpted bollards I knew the angels had intended it as a pier.

At 1450 I sent a half-dozen ordinaries over in the launch. They had no trouble grabbing the mooring lines and making them fast, but docking the Maracaibo was still a damned dicey operation: deceptive shadows, crazy echoes, chunks of pack ice everywhere. By 1535 the bitch was tied up, both her engines cut for the first time since she left Palermo.

I ordered an immediate burial at sea. Cassie, Ockham, and I marched down the catwalk to the fo’c’sle deck, pried up the seabag with grappling hooks, and, after scavenging an anchor from the handiest lifeboat, carried poor old Dad to the starboard bulwark.

“I’m not sure how Dutch Presbyterians go about it,” said Ockham, slipping a King James Bible from his parka, “but I know they’re fond of this translation.”

Loosening the drawstring, I removed my father’s pale, crushed corpse. He was frozen solid. “A Pop-sicle,” I muttered, and Cassie shot me a glance compounded of both shock and amusement.

Opening to First Corinthians, Ockham recited words I’d heard in a thousand Hollywood burial scenes.

“Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible…”

Cassie and I wrapped the lifeboat anchor around Dad’s waist and hoisted his iron-hard body onto the rail. The anchor hung between his legs like a codpiece. We pushed. He fell, crashing into the black lake. Even with the extra weight, he stayed on the surface for over a minute, drifting slowly toward God’s brow.

“Farewell, sailor,” I said, thinking how good it would feel to get back inside and savor a mug of Follingsbee’s jamoke.

“ ‘Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory,’ ” Ockham intoned as Dad dropped from view, legs first, then torso, head, and hair. “ ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ ” said the priest, and I found myself wondering whether the Maracaibo’s main pantry held any doughnuts. “ ‘O grave, where is thy victory?’ ”

And, in fact, it did.

Jelly, glazed, and sugar.

Cupping his gloves around the railing, Neil Weisinger joined the solemn little march down the gangway. Gingerly he crossed the slippery pier, one cautious step at a time. By 1715 the whole company stood on the ice, officers and crew alike, shuffling about in the harsh light, puffs of breath streaming from their mouths like dialogue balloons.

When Neil saw how the angels had prepared the crypt, a chill of recognition shot through him; he thought immediately of the Labor Day barbecue he’d attended two years earlier at the home of his neighbor, Dwight Gorka, a joyless celebration that reached its nadir when Dwight’s cat, Pumpkin, was run over by a Federal Express truck. Responding instantly to his preschool daughter’s grief, Dwight had nailed together a plywood coffin, dug a hole in the stiff Teaneck earth, and laid the poor cat to rest. Before her father shoveled back the dirt, little Emily packed the grave with all the things Pumpkin would need during his journey to cat heaven — his water dish (filled), a can of Friskies Fancy Feast (opened), and, most importantly, his favorite toy, a plastic bottle cap he’d spent many mindless feline hours batting around the house.

The north wall of the crypt featured six immense niches, each sheltering a product God had evidently held in high regard. The forward searchlight struck the colossal carcass of a blue whale, a form at once ponderous and sleek. The amidships beacon swept across the soaring hulk of a sequoia tree, limned the wrinkled remains of an African bull elephant, glinted off a stuffed marlin, ignited a family of embalmed grizzly bears, and, finally, came to rest on a frozen hippopotamus (quite possibly descended, Neil mused, from the hippos his grandfather had helped transport from Africa to France). Directly ahead, a cabinet constructed entirely of ice rose nearly twenty feet. He extended his sleeve, wiping frost and condensation from the transparent doors. He peered inside. Every shelf was jammed with items from the divine portfolio, bottle after bottle. Monarch butterfly… chunk of jade… divot blooming with Kentucky bluegrass… orchid… praying mantis… Maine lobster… human brain… king cobra… cricket… sparrow… nugget of igneous rock.

Spontaneously, the Mourner’s Kaddish formed on Neil’s lips. “Yitgadal veyitkadash shemei raba bealma divera chireutei…” Let the glory of God be extolled, let His great name be hallowed, in the world whose creation He willed…

Drawing up beside Neil, Cassie Fowler jerked a thumb toward the trophy cabinet. “God’s greatest hits.”

“You’re not very religious, are you?”

“He may have been our Creator,” she said, “but He was also something of a malicious lunatic.”

“He may have been something of a malicious lunatic,” he said, “but He was also our Creator.”

The instant Neil spotted the altar — a long, low table of ice spread out beneath the blue whale — he was overwhelmed by a desire to use it. He was not alone in this wish. Somberly the officers and crew filed back up the gangway, returning twenty minutes later, tributes in hand. One by one, the deckies approached the altar, and soon it was piled high with oblations: a National steel guitar, a trainman’s watch on a gold chain, a Sony Walkman, a Texas Instruments calculator, a packet of top-of-the-line condoms (the pricey Shostak Supremes), a silver whiskey flask, a five-string banjo, a shaving mug imprinted with a Currier and Ives skating scene, three bottles of Moosehead beer, a belt buckle bearing the sculpted likeness of a clipper ship.

A disturbing truth fell upon Neil as he observed James Echohawk offer up his 35mm Nikon. Years from now, enacting his love for the God of the four A.M. watch, Neil might actually start feeling good about himself. In buying Big Joe Spicer’s sister a dress for her senior prom or funding a hip operation for Leo Zook’s father, he might very well find inner peace. And the instant this happened, the minute he experienced satisfaction, he’d know he wasn’t doing enough.

Anthony Van Horne came forward and, with a shudder of reluctance, laid down a Bowditch sextant replica that must have been worth five hundred dollars. Sam Follingsbee surrendered a varnished walnut case filled with stainless-steel Ginsu knives. Father Thomas arrived next, sacrificing a jeweled chalice and a silver ciborium, followed by Sister Miriam, who lifted a golden-beaded rosary from her parka and rested it on the stack. Marbles Rafferty added a pair of high-powered Minolta binoculars, Crock O’Connor a matched set of Sears Craftsman socket wrenches, Lianne Bliss her crystal pendant.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Cassie Fowler.

Reaching into his wool leggings, Neil drew out his gift. “Veimeru: amein,” he muttered. And let us say: Amen. “Yeah, Miss Fowler?”

“You’re right — whatever else, we still owe Him. I wish I had an offering. I came aboard with nothing but an Elvis cup and a Betty Boop towel.”

Neil placed his grandfather’s Ben-Gurion medal on the altar and said, “Why not give Him your gratitude?”

In God’s private tomb, Cassie Fowler soon learned, time did not exist. No tides foretold the dusk; no stars announced the night; no birds declared the break of day. Only by glancing at the bridge clock did she know it was noon, eighteen hours after she’d watched Neil Weisinger offer up his bronze medal.

Stepping out of the wheelhouse, melding with the small, sad party on the starboard wing, Cassie was chagrined to realize that everyone else wore more respectful clothing than she. Anthony looked magnificent in his dress whites. Father Thomas had put on a red silk vestment fitted over a black claw-hammer coat. Cardinal Di Luca sported a luxurious fur stole wrapped around a brilliant purple alb. In her shabby orange parka (courtesy of Lianne), ratty green mittens (donated by An-mei Jong), and scruffy leather riding boots (from James Echohawk), Cassie felt downright irreverent. She didn’t mind snubbing their cargo — this was, after all, the God of Western Patriarchy — but she did mind feeding the clich й that rationalists have no sense of the sacred.

Raising the PA microphone to his fissured lips, Father Thomas addressed the company below, half of them assembled on the weather deck, the rest milling around on the pier. “Welcome, friends, and peace be with you.” The cavernous crypt replayed his words, be with you, with you, with you. “Now that our Creator has departed, let it be known that we commend Him to Himself and commit His body to its final resting place — ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

Anthony took up the deckhouse walkie-talkie, pressed SEND, and solemnly contacted the pump room. “Mr. Horrocks, the hoses…”

With the same spectacular efficiency it had displayed during the Battle of Midway, the Maracaibo’s firefighting system swung into action. A dozen hoses rose along the afterdeck and spewed out gallon upon gallon of thick white foam. Every bubble, Cassie knew, was holy, Father Thomas and Monsignor Di Luca having spent the morning in a frenzy of consecration. The purified lather arced through the air and splashed against His left shoulder, freezing solid at the instant of anointment.

“God Almighty, we pray that You may sleep here in peace until You awaken Yourself to glory,” said Father Thomas. Cassie admired the skill with which the priest had adapted the classic rite, the subtle balance he’d struck between traditional Christian optimism and the brute facticity of the corpse. “Then You will see Yourself face to face and know Your might and majesty…”

Hearing her cue, she came forward, Father Thomas’s Jerusalem Bible tucked under her arm.

“Our castaway, Cassie Fowler, has asked permission to address you,” the priest told the sailors. “I don’t know exactly what she intends to say” — an admonitory glance — “but I’m sure it will be thoughtful.”

As she took up the mike, Cassie worried that she might be about to make a fool of herself. It was one thing to lecture on food chains and ecological niches before a class of Tarrytown sophomores and quite another to critique the cosmos before a mob of hardened and depressed merchant sailors. “In all of Scripture,” she began, “it is perhaps the ordeal of Job that best allows me to articulate how rationalists such as myself feel about our cargo.” Swallowing a frigid mouthful of air, she glanced down at the wharf. Lianne Bliss, standing beneath the blue whale, gave her an encouraging smile. Dolores Haycox, slumped against the sequoia, offered a reassuring wink. “Job, you may recall, demanded to know the reason for his terrible losses — possessions, family, health — whereupon the Whirlwind appeared and explained that justice for one mere individual was not the point.” She leaned the Bible’s spine against the rail and opened it near the middle. “ ‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?’ God asks, rhetorically. ‘What supports its pillars at their bases? Who pent up the sea behind closed doors when it leapt tumultuous out of the womb?’ ” She extended her right mitten, indicating the frozen hippopotamus. “ ‘Now think of Behemoth,’ ” she said, still quoting God. “ ‘What strength he has in his loins, what power in his stomach muscles. His tail is as stiff as a cedar, the sinews of his thighs are tightly knit. His vertebrae are bronze tubing, his bones as hard as hammered iron…’ ” Pivoting ninety degrees, Cassie spoke to the Corpus Dei. “What can I say, Sir? I’m a rationalist. I don’t believe the splendor of hippos is any sort of answer to the suffering of humans. Where do I even begin? The Lisbon earthquake? The London plague? Malignant melanoma?” She sighed with a mixture of resignation and exasperation. “And yet, throughout it all, You still remained You, didn’t You? You, Creator: a function You performed astonishingly well, laying those foundations and anchoring those supporting pillars. You were not a very good man, God, but You were a very good wizard, and for that I, even I, give You my gratitude.”

Accepting both the mike and the Jerusalem Bible from Cassie, Father Thomas ran through the rest of the modified liturgy. “Before we go our separate ways, let us take leave of our Creator. May our farewell express our love for Him. May it ease our sadness and strengthen our hope. Now please join me in reciting the words Christ taught us on that celebrated Mount in Judea: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come…’ ”

While the Maracaibo’s company prayed, Cassie scanned their smiling cargo, pondering its myriad misfortunes. The voyage had not been kind to God. Nearly a sixth of the right breast had been plundered for fillets. Demolition-bomb craters scarred the belly. Torpedo holes pocked the neck. The chin appeared to have been shaved with a blowtorch. Head to toe, the bites of predators and the ravages of ice alternated with vast swampy tracts of decay. A Martian happening upon the scene would never guess that the thing these mourners were entombing had once been their principal deity.

“…and the power and the glory. Amen.”

As Lou Chickering broke from the crowd and strode across the pier, tears sparkling in his eyes, Cassie recalled the many times she’d heard his mellifluous baritone drifting upward from the engine flat, reciting a soliloquy or belting out an aria. Reaching the shore of the encapsulated bay, the gorgeous sailor threw back his head and sang.

Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home, Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin for to carry me home.

Now the entire company joined in, over a hundred voices melding into a thunderous dirge that reverberated off the great frozen dome.

I looked over Jordan, an’ what did I see, Comin’ for to carry me home? A band of angels comin’ after me, Comin’ for to carry me home.

“All right, Professor Ockham, you win,” said Di Luca, stroking his stole. “This was all meant to be, wasn’t it?”

“I believe so.”

Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home…

“Tonight I’ll compose a letter.” The cardinal steadied himself on the bridge rail. “I’ll tell Rome the corpse was incinerated as per the consistory’s wishes — and then, with Van Horne’s permission, I’ll send it.”

“Don’t bother,” said Father Thomas. “Three hours ago you faxed the Holy Father just such a message.”

“What?”

“I don’t like situational ethics any more than you do, Tullio, but these are troubled times. Your signature’s not hard to forge. It’s fastidious and crisp. The nuns taught you well.”

If you get there before I do, Comin’ for to carry me home, Jes’ tell my friends that I’m a-comin’ too, Comin’ for to carry me home.

Cassie wasn’t sure which aspect of this exchange disturbed her more: Father Thomas’s descent into expedience, or her realization that Rome was not about to finish the job Oliver had so badly botched.

Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home…

The cardinal glowered but said nothing. Thomas kissed his Bible. Cassie closed her eyes, allowing the spiritual to coil through her unquiet soul, and by the time the last echo of the last syllable had died away, she knew that no being, supreme or otherwise, had ever received a more sonorous send-off to the dark, icy gates of oblivion.

The Maracaibo sailed southeast, crashing through the Arctic Ocean at a brisk sixteen knots as she headed toward the coast of Russia. For Thomas Ockham, the mood aboard the tanker was difficult to decipher. Naturally the sailors were delighted to be going home, but beneath their happiness he sensed acute melancholy and a grief past understanding. On the night of their departure from Kvitoya, a dozen or so off-duty deckies gathered in the rec room for a kind of eschatological hootenanny, and soon the entire superstructure was resounding with “Rock of Ages,” “Kum-Ba-Yah,” “Go Down Moses,” “Amazing Grace,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” The next day at noon, Thomas celebrated Mass as usual, and for the first time ever a whopping ninety percent of available Christians showed up.

As it turned out, the port of Murmansk boasted a deep-water mooring platform, the sort of rig that allowed a tanker to discharge her cargo directly into seabed pipes without entering harbor. Van Horne arranged the transaction over the ship-to-shore radio, and within four hours of hooking up, the Maracaibo had been pumped dry. Although the Russians could not comprehend why the Catholic Church was giving them eight million gallons of Arabian crude oil for free, they quickly stopped looking this gift horse in the mouth. Winter was coming.

On the morning of September 25, as the Maracaibo drew near the Hebrides, the urge to think overcame Thomas. He knew just what to do. Early in the voyage, he’d discovered that a supertanker’s central catwalk was the perfect place for contemplation, as conducive to quietude as a monastery arcade. One slow march down its length and back, and he had effectively penetrated some great mystery — why existing TOE equations failed to accommodate gravity, why the universe contained more matter than antimatter, why God had died. A second such march, and he had ruthlessly generated a thousand reasons for calling his answer invalid.

Tall, choppy waves surrounded the Maracaibo. Walking aft, Thomas imagined himself as Moses leading the escaping Hebrews across the Red Sea basin, guiding them past the slippery rocks and bewildered fish, a cliff of suspended water towering on each side. But Thomas did not feel like Moses just then. He did not feel like any sort of prophet. He felt like the universe’s stooge, a man who could barely solve a riddle on a Happy Meal box, much less derive a Theory of Everything or crack the conundrum of his Creator’s passing.

A cosmic assassination?

An unimaginable supernatural virus?

A broken heart?

He looked to port.

The derelict bore the name Regina Marts: an old-style freighter with deckhouses both amidships and aft, dead in the water and drifting aimlessly through the Scottish mist like some phantom frigate out of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. By 1400 Thomas was ascending her gangway, Marbles Rafferty right behind. The cold fog enshrouded them, turning their breath to vapor and roughening their skin with goose bumps.

As he stepped onto the main deck, Thomas saw that heaven’s very remnants had figured in the Regina’s ill-starred run. Evidently she’d been manned by cherubs. Their gray, bloated corpses lay everywhere — dozens of plump miniangels rotting atop the fo’c’sle, putrefying by the kingposts, suppurating on the quarterdeck. Tiny feathers danced on the North Sea breeze like snowflakes.

“Captain, it’s a pretty weird scene here,” said Rafferty into the walkie-talkie. “About forty dead children with wings on their backs.”

Van Horne’s voice sputtered from the speaker. “Children? Christ…”

“Let me talk to him,” Thomas insisted, appropriating the walkie-talkie. “Not children, Anthony. Cherubs.”

“Cherubs?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No survivors?”

“I don’t think so. It’s amazing they got this far north.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Van Horne.

“When cherubs come,” said Thomas, “angels can’t be far behind.”

Pitted with rust, pocked with corrosion, the Regina was in no better shape than her crew. It was as if she’d been scooped up and sucked upon by God Himself — smashed against His cuspids, burned with His saliva — then spit back into the sea. Thomas started into the amidships deckhouse, following a sharp, fruity odor of such intensity it overpowered the cherubs’ stench. His jugular veins throbbed. Blood pounded in his ears. The scent led him down a damp corridor, up a narrow companionway, and into a gloomy cabin.

On the far bulkhead hung Robert Campin’s masterful Annunciation — either a copy or the original from the Manhattan Cloisters, the priest didn’t know for sure. A lambent glow issued from the bunk. Thomas approached at the same respectful pace he’d employed three months earlier when greeting Pope Innocent XIV.

“Who’s there?” asked the angel, propping himself up on his elbows. A black, fallen halo hung around his neck like a discarded fan belt from Van Horne Island.

“Thomas Ockham, Society of Jesus.”

“I’ve heard of you.” The bed sheet slipped to the floor, revealing the creature’s wasted body. His flesh, though cracked and gritty, was exquisite in its own way, like sandpaper manufactured for some holy task — smoothing the Cross, buffing the Ark. A small harp bridged the gap between his knobby knees. His wings, naked as a bat’s, rested atop mounds of shed feathers. “Call me Michael.”

“It’s an honor, Michael.” Thomas pressed SEND. “Anthony?”

“Yeah?”

“We were right. An angel.”

“The last angel,” rasped Michael. His voice had a dry, brittle quality, as if his larynx had rusted along with his ship.

“Anything I can do for you?” asked Thomas, slipping the walkie-talkie into the pocket of his parka. “You thirsty?”

“Thirsty. Quite so. Please — on the bureau…”

Crossing the cabin, Thomas located a four-chambered glass bottle shaped like a human heart and filled with water.

“Am I too late?” The angel lifted the harp from atop his knees. “Did I miss His funeral?”

“You missed it, yes.” Pressing the bottle to Michael’s withered lips, Thomas realized the angel was blind. His eyes, milky and motionless, lay in his head like pearls wrought by some terminally ill oyster. “I’m sorry.”

“But He’s safe now?”

“Quite safe.”

“Not too much decay?”

“Not too much.”

“Still smiling?”

“Still smiling.”

Michael laid his right hand on his harp and began picking out the famous zither theme from The Third Man. “Wh-where are we?”

“The Hebrides.”

“That near Kvitoya?”

“Kvitoya’s two thousand miles away,” the priest admitted.

“Then I won’t even get to visit the body.”

“True.” The angel’s fever was so intense Thomas could feel the heat against his cheeks. “You built Him a beautiful tomb.”

“We did, didn’t we? It was my idea to inter Him with His masterpieces. Whale, orchid, sparrow, cobra. We had a tough time deciding what to include. Adabiel made a big pitch for human inventions… argued they were His by extension. Wheel, plow, VCR, harpsichord, hardball — we’re all such Yankees fans — but then Zaphiel said, ‘Okay, lot’s put in a .356 Magnum,’ and that settled the matter.”

A crepuscular cabin on a derelict freighter in the middle of the dreary North Sea: not a likely setting for revelation, yet that was what now struck Thomas Wickliff Ockham, S.J. — a revelation, a luminous truth blazing through his mortal soul.

“There’s a fact I must know,” he said. “Did God actually request the Kvitoya tomb? Did He come to you and say, ‘Bury Me in the Arctic’?”

Michael coughed explosively, peppering the Campin Annunciation with droplets of blood. “We peered over the edge of heaven. We saw His body adrift off Gabon. We said, ‘Something must be done.’ ”

“Let me get this straight. He never asked to be buried?”

“It seemed the decent thing to do,” said the angel.

“But He never asked.”

“No.”

“So in sending His corpse to earth, He may’ve had something other than a funeral in mind?”

“Possibly.”

Possibly. Probably. Certainly. “Do you want extreme unction?” asked Thomas. “I have no chrism, but there’s a ton of consecrated firefighting foam on the Maracaibo.”

Michael closed his sightless eyes. “That reminds me of an old joke. ‘How do you make holy water?’ Ever heard it, Father?”

“I don’t know.”

“You take some water and you boil the hell out of it.’ Extreme unction? No. Thank you — but no. The sacraments don’t matter anymore. Precious little matters anymore. I don’t even care if the Yankees are still in first place. Are they?”

Thomas would never know whether Michael heard the good news, for the instant the priest offered his reply — “Yes, the Yankees are still in first place” — the archangel’s eyes liquefied, his hands melted, and his torso disintegrated like the Tower of Babel crumbling beneath God’s withering breath.

Thomas stared at the bunk, beholding Michael’s ashy remains with a mixture of disbelief and awe. He drew out the walkie-talkie. “You there, Anthony?”

“What’s going on?” demanded Van Horne.

“We lost him.”

“I’m not surprised.”

The priest ran his fingers through the soft gray ephemera on the mattress. “Captain, I think I’ve got the answer.”

“You’ve discovered a TOE?”

“I know why God died. Not only that, I’ve decided what our next move should be.”

“Why’d He die?”

“It’s complicated. Listen — tonight’s supper will be a private affair. I’m inviting only four people: you, Miriam, Di Luca, your girlfriend.”

“Whatever your theory, I doubt that my girlfriend will accept it.”

“That’s exactly why I want her there. If I can persuade Cassie Fowler to disinter the corpse, I can persuade anybody.”

“Disinter it?”

Thomas bundled the divine dust and holy feathers into the bedsheet, securing the corners with a convoluted knot.

“Answer me, Thomas. What do you mean, ‘disinter it’?”

For reasons known only to himself, Sam Follingsbee bypassed the Maracaibo’s normal stores that evening and instead cooked up a copious Chinese buffet using the last of the meat they’d salvaged from the sinking Valparaíso. After Thomas said grace, he and his guests dug in. They ate slowly — reverently, in fact, even the habitually sacrilegious Cassie Fowler. Di Luca, too, seemed to approach his meal with piety, as if he somehow sensed its source.

Swallowing a mouthful of artificial mu gu gai pan, Thomas said, “I have a theory for you.”

“He’s solved the great riddle,” Van Horne explained, devouring a mock wonton.

“I’ll start with a question,” said Thomas. “What’s the most accurate metaphor for God?”

“Love,” said Sister Miriam.

“Try again.”

“Judge,” said Di Luca.

“Besides that?”

“Creator,” said Fowler.

“Close.”

“Father,” said Van Horne.

Thomas ate a morsel of bogus Szechuan beef. “Exactly. Father. And what would you say is every father’s ultimate obligation?”

“To respect his children,” said Van Horne.

“Provide them with unconditional love,” said Miriam.

“A strong moral foundation,” said Di Luca.

“Feed them, clothe them, house them,” said Fowler.

“Forgive me, but I think you’re all wrong,” said Thomas. “A father’s ultimate obligation is to stop being a father. You follow me? At some point, he must step aside and allow his sons and daughters to enter adulthood. And that’s precisely what I think God did. He realized our continued belief in Him was constraining us, holding us back — infantilizing us, if you will.”

“Oh, that old argument,” sneered Di Luca. “I must say, I’m saddened to hear it from the author of The Mechanics of Grace.”

“I think maybe Tom’s on to something,” said Miriam.

“You would,” said Di Luca.

“A father’s obliged to step aside,” said Van Horne. “He’s not obliged to drop dead.”

“He is if He’s you-know-Who,” said Thomas. “Think about it. As long as God kept aloof, His decision to enter oblivion would remain a secret. But if He incarnated Himself, came to earth…”

“Excuse me,” said Di Luca, “but at least one of us at this table believes just such an event happened about two thousand years ago.”

“I believe it happened too,” said Thomas. “But history marches on, Eminence. We can’t live in the past.”

Fowler sipped oolong tea. “What, exactly, are you saying, Father? Are you saying He killed Himself?”

“Yes.”

“Cripes.”

“Knowing full well His angels would die of empathy?” asked Van Horne.

“That’s how much He loved the world,” said Thomas. “He willed Himself out of existence, simultaneously giving us ponderous proof of the fact.”

“So where’s His suicide note?” asked Fowler.

“Maybe He never wrote one. Maybe it’s inscribed on His body in some arcane fashion.” Thomas loaded his fork with counterfeit calamari in black bean sauce. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I, for one, am quite moved by our Creator’s selflessness.”

“And I, for one, think you’re way out on a limb,” said Di Luca, eyes narrowing. “Could you tell us exactly how you arrived at this bizarre conclusion?”

“Jesuitical deduction,” Thomas replied, “combined with a crucial fact I learned this afternoon from Michael.”

“What fact?”

“God never asked to be buried. The archangels acted completely on their own. They looked down, saw His body, and with the last of their strength they built Him a tomb.”

“Pretty meager data,” said Di Luca, “for such a lofty hypothesis.”

Van Horne tore into his ersatz Hunan chicken. “When you radioed me from the Regina, you said you knew what our next move should be.”

“Our duty is clear — at least, I think it is,” said Thomas. “After supper, we must bring the Maracaibo about and go back to Svalbard. We’ll re-enter the tomb, hook ourselves up to the body again, and take it on a grand tour.”

“On a what?” said Di Luca.

“Grand tour.”

“The hell we will,” said Fowler.

“Have you lost your mind?” said Di Luca.

“We’ll visit every major Western port, corpse in tow,” Thomas insisted, rising from the table. “If the Maracaibo can’t handle the load, we’ll press other tankers into service en route. The news will travel ahead of us. We can count on CNN. Okay, sure, initially the public will react with denial, terror, grief, everything we observed on the Val when we told the sailors the score, and, yes, as the Idea of the Corpse takes hold there may be an epidemic of anomie such as occurred on Van Horne Island — though, of course, as the captain here explained to Tullio in the wardroom, that was primarily an effect of prolonged and intimate contact with the body — but in any case the categorical imperative will soon kick in, and after that euphoria will follow. Are you seeing this, people? Can you picture the excited mobs charging through the streets of Lisbon, Marseilles, Athens, Naples, and New York, thronging onto the docks, eager for a peek? The human race has been waiting for such an hour. They may not know it, but they’ve been waiting. Bands will play. Flags will fly. Vendors will hawk hot dogs, popcorn, T-shirts, pennants, bumper stickers, souvenir programs. ‘We’re free!’ everyone will shout. ‘Today we are grown men, today we are grown women — the universe is ours!’ ”

Thomas sat down and quietly loaded a flaky pancake with pseudo mu shu pork.

Fowler snorted.

Van Horne sighed.

“I must say, Professor,” said Di Luca, “that is quite the most ridiculous proposal I have ever heard in my life.”

Despite Thomas’s profound lack of respect for Di Luca, the cardinal’s rejection hurt, cutting into him like the negative review The Christian Century had given The Mechanics of Grace.

Have I reasoned incorrectly? he wondered.

“I want to know what the rest of you think. I promised myself I wouldn’t pursue this plan unless a majority at this table tonight favored it.”

“I’ll tell you my opinion,” said Fowler. “If humankind ever learns en masse that God Almighty can no longer fog a mirror, they won’t feel like rushing out and climbing mountains — they’ll feel like crawling into holes and dying.”

“Well put, Dr. Fowler,” said Di Luca.

“And I also think, as I’ve been saying all along — I also think that, once they return to daylight, they’ll institute a theocracy so stifling and misogynistic it will make medieval Spain look like the Phil Donahue show.”

Thomas bit through an egg roll, pointing the stump toward Sister Miriam. “That’s two votes against my proposal and one vote — my own — for it.”

The nun patted her lips with a white linen napkin. “Goodness, Tom, it was so blasted much trouble laying Him to rest. The idea of undoing our efforts — it’s a bit overwhelming.” She wrapped the napkin tightly around her hand, as if bandaging a wounded palm. “But the more I think about it, the more I realize we probably have a responsibility to share the Corpus Dei with the rest of humankind. It’s what He wanted, right?”

“That’s two for, two against,” said Thomas. “It’s up to you, Captain.”

“If you vote yes,” said Fowler, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

For an entire minute, Van Horne said nothing. He sat silently before his egg noodles, absently combing the pale yellow strands with his fork. Thomas fancied he could see the workings of the captain’s brain, the throb and flash of his five billion neurons.

“I think…”

“Yes?”

“…that I would like to sleep on it.”

September 30.

Night. A starless sky. A 10-knot wind from the east.

So the angels lied to us. No, they didn’t lie, exactly. They trod beyond the truth; they permitted their grief to obscure God’s will. And if Raphael was overstating the case for an entombment, maybe he was overstating a few other notions as well — like my father being the man to absolve me.

When angels dissemble, Popeye, whom can you trust?

We’re steaming round and round the Hebrides, and my mind’s moving in circles too. I can see both sides, and it’s making me insane. If I give the padre his grand tour, it won’t be for personal gain. “Exhume Him,” Cassie tells me, “and I’ll walk out of your life forever.”

And yet I wonder if Ockham and Sister Miriam aren’t right.

I wonder if we don’t owe our species the truth.

I wonder if hearing the bad news might not be the best thing that’s ever happened to Homo sapiens sapiens.

For the first four years they lived like peasants in the cramped cottage Cassie had been renting in Irvington, but after they struck it rich they decided to indulge themselves and move into the city. Despite their newfound wealth, Cassie held onto her job, doggedly explicating natural selection and other unsettling ideas for the God-fearing students of Tarrytown Community College while Anthony stayed home and took care of little Stevie. Best to play it safe, they decided. Their money might run out sooner than expected.

Being a parent in Manhattan was a sobering and faintly absurd undertaking. Police sirens sabotaged naps. Air pollution aggravated colds. To make sure Stevie got home safely from Montessori each afternoon, Anthony and Cassie had to hire a Korean martial-arts instructor as his escort. Still, they would have had it no other way. The spacious fourth-floor walk-up they’d acquired on the Upper East Side included full roof rights, and after Stevie was asleep they would snuggle together on their beach recliners, stare at the grimy sky, and imagine they were lying on the fo’c’sle deck of the late Valparaíso.

Their fortune traced to an unlikely source. Shortly after landing back in Manhattan, Anthony got the idea of showing his private papers to Father Ockham, who in turn delivered them to Joanne Margolis, the eccentric literary agent who handled the priest’s cosmology books. Margolis forthwith pronounced Anthony’s journal “the finest surrealistic sea adventure ever written,” showed it to an editor at the Naval Institute Press, and secured a modest advance of three thousand dollars. No one ever imagined so strange a book becoming a New York Times best-seller, but within six months of publication The Gospel According to Popeye had miraculously beaten the odds.

At first Anthony and Cassie feared the bulk of the royalties would go toward lawyers’ fees and court costs, but then it became clear that neither the United States Attorney General nor the Norwegian government had any interest in prosecuting what appeared to be less a criminal case than an instance of fantasy role-playing gone horribly awry. The families of the three dead actors were infuriated by this inertia (Carny Otis’s widow journeyed all the way to Oslo in an effort to move the wheels of justice), and their rage persisted until the Vatican Secretary of State intervened. Having hired the impetuous Christopher Van Horne in the first place, Eugenic Cardinal Orselli naturally regarded it as his moral duty to recompense the bereaved. Each next of kin received a tax-free gift of three and a half million dollars. By the summer of ’99, the whole messy affair of Midway Redux no longer haunted the Van Horne-Fowler household.

Anthony couldn’t decide whether his decision to leave the corpse in place was courageous or a cop-out. At least once a week he would travel uptown and join Thomas Ockham for a picnic lunch of Brie sandwiches and white wine in Fort Tryon Park, after which they would stroll through the Cloisters, puzzling out their obligations to Homo sapiens sapiens. Once Anthony thought he saw a robed angel swoop through the Fuentiduena Chapel, but it was only a beautiful Columbia grad student in a long white dress, applying for a job as a docent.

The deal they’d cut with Di Luca and Orselli was a paragon of symmetry. Anthony and Ockham would not reveal that The Gospel According to Popeye was factual, and Rome would not appropriate the corpse and burn it. While the notion of a grand tour continued to intrigue both the captain and the priest, they were coming to realize that such a spectacle might very well lead to something far sadder and bloodier than the brave new world Ockham had envisioned the day he’d explored the derelict Regina Marts. Then, too, there was the appalling presumption of it all. Nobody, Anthony felt, had the right to take the illusion of God away — not even God had that right, despite His evidently having attempted to do so.

The party Anthony and Cassie threw when Stevie turned six served a dual purpose. It celebrated the boy’s birthday, and it brought together seven alumni of the Valparaíso’s last voyage. They came bearing gifts: stuffed whale, jigsaw puzzle, six-shooter and holster, electric train, first-baseman’s mitt, toy tugboat, set of Fisher-Price homunculi. Sam Follingsbee baked the cake, Stevie’s favorite, Swiss chocolate with cherry frosting.

As the moon rose, the confessions began, each sailor admitting to an intense private terror that his knowledge of what lay entombed above Svalbard might one day deprive him of his sanity. Marbles Rafferty disclosed that suicide figured in his fantasies with much greater frequency than before his trip to the Arctic. Crock O’Connor frankly discussed his impulse to call up Larry King Live and tell the world its prayers were falling on ruptured eardrums. And yet, so far, they’d all managed to become functional and even flourishing citizens of Anno Postdomini Seven.

Rafferty was now master of the Exxon Bangor. O’Connor, retired from the sea, currently spent his days and nights trying to invent a holographic tattoo. Follingsbee ran the Octopus’s Garden in Bayonne, an atmospheric waterfront restaurant whose menu included not a single item of seafood. Lou Chickering was playing a chronically adulterous brain surgeon on The Sands of Time and had just been featured as Heartthrob of the Week in Suds and Studs magazine. Lianne Bliss was working as the technical director of a radical feminist radio station broadcasting from Queens. Ockham and Sister Miriam had recently coauthored Out of Many, One, a comprehensive history of humankind’s ever-changing images of God, from the radical monotheism of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton to the Cosmic Christ of Teilhard de Chardin. The introduction was by Neil Weisinger, presently a rabbi serving a thriving congregation of Reform Jews in Brooklyn.

After the party, while the grown-ups lingered downstairs, indulging in second helpings of cake and admiring the conches and birds’ nests Cassie had collected on her honeymoon cruise to the Galapagos, father and son retired to the roof. The wind was crisp, the night miraculously clear. It was as if the island itself had set sail, flying beneath a cloudless sky.

“Who made them?” Stevie asked, pointing to the stars.

Anthony wanted to say “an old man at the North Pole,” but he knew this would only confuse the boy.

“God did.”

“Who’s God?”

“Nobody knows.”

“When did He do it?”

“A long time ago.”

“Is He still around?”

The captain inhaled a lungful of gritty Manhattan air. “Of course He’s still around.”

“Good.”

Together they picked out their favorites: Sirius, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Aldebaran, Orion’s belt. Stevie Van Horne was a sailor’s boy. He knew the Milky Way like the back of his hand. As the child’s eyes drooped, Anthony chanted the several names of the mariner’s best friend: “North Star, Lodestar, Polestar, Polaris,” he sang, over and over — “North Star, Lodestar, Polestar, Polaris” — and by this method brought his son to the brink of sleep.

“Happy birthday, Stevie,” Anthony told the drowsy child, carrying him down the ladder. “I love you,” he said, tucking the boy in bed.

“Daddy loves Stevie,” squawked Pirate Jenny. “Froggy loves Tiffany. Daddy loves Stevie.”

As it turned out, Tiffany hadn’t wanted the bird. She didn’t like animals, and she knew that Jenny would function less as a sweet memento of her late husband than as a remorseless reminder of his death. Anthony had spent over twenty hours teaching the macaw her new trick, but it’d been worth it. All the world’s children, he felt, should fall asleep hearing some feathered and affectionate creature — a parrot, a mynah bird, an angel — whispering in their ears.

For a time he stood looking at Stevie, just looking. The boy had his mother’s nose, his father’s chin, his paternal grandmother’s mouth. Moonlight poured into the room, bathing a plastic model of the starship Enterprise in a luminous haze. From the birdcage came the steady, clocklike tick of Pirate Jenny pecking at her mirror.

Occasionally — not this night, but occasionally — a dark mantle of pungent Texas crude would materialize on the parrot, rolling down her back and wings, flowing across the floor of the cage, and falling drip-drip-drip onto the carpet.

Whenever this happened, Anthony’s response was always the same. He would press Raphael’s feather against his chest and breathe deeply until the oil went away.

“Froggy loves Tiffany. Daddy loves Stevie.”

Anthony loves Cassie, he thought.

The captain turned off the bedroom light, pulled the blue silk canopy over Jenny’s cage, and stepped back into the dark hallway. Sea fever rose in his soul. The moon tugged at his blood. The Atlantic said, Come hither. North Star, Lodestar, Pole-star…

How long would he be able to hold out? Until Cassie got her next sabbatical? Until Stevie was tall enough to take the helm and steer? No, the voyage must come sooner than that. Anthony could see it all now. In a year or so he’d get on the phone and make the arrangements. Cargo, crew, ship: not a supertanker, something more romantic — a bulk carrier, a freighter. A month later the whole family would rise at dawn and drive to Bayonne. They’d eat a fantastic breakfast at Follingsbee’s restaurant on Canal Street. Scrambled eggs slathered with catsup, crisp strips of real bacon, wet crescents of honeydew melon, bagel halves mortared together with Philadelphia cream cheese. Bellies full, all senses at peak, Anthony and Stevie would kiss Cassie goodbye. They’d get on board. Light the boilers. Pick a port. Plot a course. And then, like those canny Dutch traders who inhabited their blood, they’d set out toward the sun, steady as she goes: the captain and his cabin boy, off with the morning tide.