all to tighten up security, and
Marshall throws him a bone every so often, just to keep the Alliance on an
even keel." For the first time, the major looks Waterhouse in the eye. "You
happen to be the latest bone. That's all."
There is a long silence, as if Waterhouse is expected to say something.
He clears his throat. No one ever got court martialed for following his
orders. "My orders state that "
"Fuck your orders, Captain Waterhouse," the major says.
There is a long silence. The major tends to one or two other
distracting duties. Then he stares out the window for a few moments, trying
to compose his thoughts. Finally he says, "Get this through your head. We
are not idiots. The General is not an idiot. The General appreciates Ultra
as much as Sir Winston Churchill. The General uses Ultra as well as any
commander in this war."
"Ultra's no good if the Japanese learn about it."
"As you can appreciate, the General does not have time to meet with you
personally. Neither does his staff. So you will not have an opportunity to
instruct him on how to keep Ultra a secret," says the major. He glances down
a couple of times at a sheet of paper on his blotter, and indeed he is now
speaking like a man who is reading a prepared statement. "From time to time,
since we learned that you were being sent to us, your existence has been
brought to the General's attention. During the brief periods of time when he
is not occupied with more pressing matters, he has occasionally voiced some
pithy thoughts about you, your mission, and the masterminds who sent you
here."
"No doubt," Waterhouse says.
"The general is of the opinion that persons not familiar with the
unique features of the Southwest Pacific Theater may not be entirely
competent to judge his strategy," says the major. "The General feels that
the Nips will never learn about Ultra. Never. Why? Because they are
incapable of comprehending what has happened to them. The General has
speculated that he could go down to the radio station tomorrow and broadcast
a speech announcing that we had broken all of the Nip codes and were reading
all of their messages, and nothing would happen. The General's words were
something to the effect that the Nips will never believe how totally we have
fucked them, because when you get fucked that badly, it's your own goddamn
fucking fault and it makes you look like a fucking shithead."
"I see," Waterhouse says.
"But The General said all of that at much greater length and without
using a single word of profanity, because that is how The General expresses
himself."
"Thank you for boiling it down," Waterhouse says.
"You know those white headbands that the Nips tie around their
foreheads? With the meatball and the Nip characters printed on them?"
"I've seen pictures of them."
"I've seen them for real, tied around the heads of pilots of Nip
fighter planes that were about fifty feet away firing machine guns at me and
my men," says the major.
"Oh, yeah! Me too. At Pearl Harbor," Waterhouse says. "I forgot."
This appears to be the most irritating thing that Waterhouse has said
all day. The major has to spend a moment composing himself. "That headband
is called a hachimaki."
"Imagine this, Waterhouse. The emperor is meeting with his general
staff. All of the top generals and admirals in Nippon parade into the room
in full dress uniforms and bow down solemnly before the emperor. They have
come to report on the progress of the war. Each of these generals and
admirals is wearing a brand new hachimaki around his forehead. These
hachimakis are printed with phrases saying things like, 'I am a dipshit' and
'Through my personal incompetence I killed two hundred thousand of our own
men' and 'I handed our Midway plans over to Nimitz on a silver platter.'
The major now pauses and takes a phone call so that Waterhouse can
savor this image for a while. Then he hangs up, lights another cigarette,
and continues. "That's what it would look like for the Nips to admit at this
point in the war that we have Ultra."
More smoke rings. Waterhouse has nothing to say. So the major
continues. "See, we've gone over the watershed line of this war. We won
Midway. We won North Africa. Stalingrad. The Battle of the Atlantic.
Everything changes when you go over the watershed line. The rivers all flow
a different direction. It's as if the force of gravity itself has changed
and is now working in our favor. We've adjusted to that. Marshall and
Churchill and all those others are still stuck in an obsolete mentality.
They are defenders. But The General is not a defender. As a matter of fact,
just between you and me, The General is lousy on defense, as he demonstrated
in the Philippines. The General is a conqueror.
"Well," Waterhouse finally says, "what do you suggest I do with myself,
seeing as how I'm here in Brisbane?"
"I'm tempted to say you should connect up with all of the other Ultra
security experts Marshall sent out before you, and get a bridge group
together," the major says.
"I don't care for bridge," Waterhouse says politely.
"You're supposed to be some expert codebreaker, right?"
"Right."
"Why don't you go to Central Bureau. The Nips have a zillion different
codes and we haven't broken all of them yet."
"That's not my mission."
"You don't worry about your fucking mission," the major says. "I'll
make sure that Marshall thinks you're doing your mission, because if
Marshall doesn't think that, he'll give us no end of hassles. So you're
clean with the higher ups."
"Thank you."
"You can consider your mission accomplished," the major says.
"Congratulations."
"Thank you."
"My mission is to beat the stuffing out of the fucking Nips, and that
mission is not accomplished just yet, and so I have other matters to attend
to," the major says significantly.
"Shall I just see myself out then?" Waterhouse asks.
Chapter 55 DÖNITZ
Once, when Bobby Shaftoe was eight years old, he went to Tennessee to
visit Grandma and Grandpa. One boring afternoon he began skimming a letter
that the old lady had left lying on an end table. Grandma gave him a stern
talking to and then recounted the incident to Grandpa, who recognized his
cue and gave him forty whacks. That and a whole series of roughly parallel
childhood experiences, plus several years in the Marine Corps, have made him
into one polite fellow.
So he doesn't read others' mail. It be against the rules.
But here he is. The setting: a plank paneled room above a pub in
Norrsbruck, Sweden. The pub is a sailorly kind of place, catering to
fishermen, which makes it congenial for Shaftoe's friend and drinking buddy:
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich (retired).
Bischoff gets a lot of interesting mail, and leaves it strewn all over
the room. Some of the mail is from his family in Germany, and contains
money. Consequently Bischoff, unlike Shaftoe, will not have to work even if
this war continues, and he remains in Sweden cooling his boilers for another
ten years.
Some of the mail is from the crew of U 691, according to Bischoff.
After Bischoff got them all here to Norrsbruck in one piece, his second in
command, Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, cut a deal with the Kriegsmarine in
which the crew were allowed to return to Germany, no hard feelings, no
repercussions. All of them except for Bischoff climbed on board what was
left of U 691 and steamed off in the direction of Kiel.
Only days later, the mail began to pour in. Every member of the crew,
to a man, sent Bischoff a letter describing the heroes' welcome they had
received: Dönitz himself met them at the pier and handed out hugs and kisses
and medals and other tokens in embarrassing profusion. They can't stop
talking about how much they want dear Günter to come back home.
Dear Günter isn't budging; he's been sitting in his little room for a
couple of months now. His world consists of pen, ink, paper, candles, cups
of coffee, bottles of aquavit, the soothing beat of the surf. Every crash of
wave on shore, he says, reminds him that he is above sea level now, where
men were meant to live. His mind is always back there a hundred feet below
the surface of the gelid Atlantic, trapped like a rat in a sewer pipe,
cringing from the explosions of the depths charges. He lived a hundred years
that way, and spent every moment of those hundred years dreaming of the
Surface. He vowed, ten thousand times, that if he ever made it back up to
the world of air and light, he would enjoy every breath, revel in every
moment.
That's pretty much what he's been doing, here in Norrsbruck. He has his
personal journal, and he's been going through it, page by page, filling in
all of the details that he didn't have time to jot down, before he forgets
them. Someday, after the war, it'll make a book: one of a million war
memoirs that will clog libraries from Novosibirsk to Gander to Sequim to
Batavia.
The pace of incoming mail dropped dramatically after the first weeks.
Several of his men still write to him faithfully. Shaftoe is used to seeing
their letters scattered around the place when he comes to visit. Most of
them are written on scraps of cheap, greyish paper.
Directionless silver light infiltrates the room through Bischoff's
window, illuminating what looks like a rectangular pool of heavy cream on
his tabletop. It is some kind of official Hun stationery, surmounted by a
raptor clenching a swastika. The letter is handwritten, not typed. When
Bischoff sets his wet glass down on it, the ink dissolves.
And when Bischoff goes to empty his bladder, Shaftoe can't keep his
eyes away from it. He knows that this is bad manners, but the Second World
War has led him into all sorts of uncouth behavior, and there don't seem to
be any angry grandpas lurking in the trenches with doubled belts; no
consequences at all for the wicked, in fact. Maybe that will change in a
couple of years, if the Germans and the Nips lose the war. But that
reckoning will be so great and terrible that Shaftoe's glance at Bischoff's
letter will probably go unnoticed.
It came in an envelope. The first line of the address is very long, and
consists of "Günter BISCHOFF" preceded by a string of ranks and titles, and
followed by a series of letters. The return address has been savaged by
Bischoffs letter opener, but it's somewhere in Berlin.
The letter itself is an impossible snarl of Germanic cursive. It is
signed, hugely, with a single word. Shaftoe spends some time trying to make
out that word; he whose John Hancock this is. Must have an ego that ranks
right up there with the General's.
When Shaftoe figures out the signature belongs to Dönitz, he gets all
tingly. That Dönitz is an important guy Shaftoe's even seen him on a
newsreel, congratulating a grimy U boat crew, fresh from a salty spree.
Why's he writing love notes to Bischoff? Shaftoe can't read this stuff
any better than he could Nipponese. But he can see a few figures. Dönitz is
talking numbers. Perhaps tons of shipping sunk, or casualties on the Eastern
Front. Perhaps money.
"Oh, yes!" Bischoff says, having somehow reappeared in the room without
making any noise. When you're down in a U boat, running silent, you learn
how to walk quietly. "I have come up with a hypothesis on the gold."
"What gold?" Shaftoe says. He knows, of course, but having been caught
in an act of flagrant naughtiness, his instinct is to play innocent.
"That you saw down in the batteries of U 553," Bischoff says. "You see,
my friend, anyone else would say that you are simply a crazy jughead."
"The correct term is Jarhead."
"They would say, first of all, that U 553 sank many months before you
claim to have seen it. Secondly, they would say that such a boat could not
have been loaded with gold. But I believe that you saw it."
"So?"
Bischoff glances at the letter from Dönitz looking mildly seasick. "I
must tell you something about the Wehrmacht of which I am ashamed, first."
"What? That they invaded Poland and France?"
"No.
"That they invaded Russia and Norway?"
"No, not that."
"That they bombed England and . . . "
"No, no, no," Bischoff says, the very model of forbearance. "Something
you did not know about."
"What?"
"It seems that, while I have been sneaking around the Atlantic, doing
my duty the Führer has come up with a little incentive program."
"What do you mean?"
"It seems that duty and loyalty are not enough for certain high ranking
officers. That they will not carry out their orders to the fullest unless
they receive . . . special awards."
"You mean, like medals?"
Bischoff is smiling nervously. "Some generals on the Eastern Front have
been given estates in Russia. Very, very large estates."
"Oh."
"But not everyone can be bribed with land. Some people require a more
liquid form of compensation."
"Booze?"
"No, I mean liquid in the financial sense. Something you can carry with
you, and that is accepted in any whorehouse on the planet."
"Gold," says Shaftoe, quietly.
"Gold would suffice," Bischoff says. It has been a long time since he
looked Shaftoe in the eye. He's staring out the window instead. His green
eyes might be a little moist. He takes a deep breath, blinks, and gets the
bitter irony under control before continuing: "Since Stalingrad, it has not
gone well on the Eastern Front. Let us say that Ukrainian real estate is no
longer worth what it used to be, if the deed to the land happens to be
written in German and issued in Berlin."
"It's getting harder to bribe a general by promising him a chunk of
Russian land," Shaftoe translates. "So Hitler needs lots of gold."
"Yes. Now, the Japanese have lots of gold consider that they sacked
China. As well as many other places. But they are lacking in certain things.
They need wolframite. Mercury. Uranium."
"What's uranium?"
"Who the hell knows? The Japanese want it, we provide it. We provide
them technology too blueprints for new turbines. Enigma machines." At this
point Bischoff breaks off and laughs, painfully and darkly, for a long time.
When he gets it under control, he continues: "So we have been shipping them
these things, in U boats."
"And the Nips pay you in gold."
"Yes. It is a dark economy, hidden beneath the ocean, trading small but
valuable items over vast distances. You got a glimpse of it."
"You knew this was going on but you didn't know about U 553," Shaftoe
points out.
"Ah, Bobby, there are many, many things going on in the Third Reich
that a mere U boat captain does not know about. You are a soldier, you know
this is true."
"Yes," Shaftoe says, recalling the peculiarities of Detachment 2702. He
looks down at the letter. "Why is Dönitz telling you all of this now?"
"He is not telling me anything," Bischoff says reprovingly. "I have
figured this out myself" He gnaws on a lip for a while. "Dönitz is making me
a proposition."
"I thought you'd retired."
Bischoff considers it. "I have retired from killing people. But the
other day I sailed a little sloop around the inlet."
"So?"
"So it seems that I have not retired from going down to the sea in
ships." Bischoff heaves a sigh. "Unfortunately, all of the really
interesting ships are owned by major governments."
Bischoff is getting a little spooky, so Shaftoe opts for a little
change in the subject. "Hey, speaking of really interesting things..." and
he tells the story of the Heavenly Apparition that he saw while he was
walking down here.
Bischoff is delighted by the story, which revives the hunger for
excitement that he has kept pickled in salt and alcohol ever since reaching
Norrsbruck. "You are sure it was manmade?" he asks.
"It whined. Chunks of shit were falling out of it. But I've never seen
a meteor so I don't know."
"How far away?"
"It crashed seven kilometers from where I was standing. So, ten clicks
from here."
"But ten kilometers is nothing for an Eagle Scout and a Hitler Youth!"
"You weren't a Hitler Youth."
Bischoff broods over this for a moment. "Hitler so embarrassing. I
hoped that if I ignored him he would go away. Perhaps if I had joined the
Hitler Youth, they would have given me a surface ship."
"Then you'd be dead."
"Right!" Bischoff's mood brightens considerably. "Ten kilometers is
still nothing. Let's go!"
"It's already dark."
"We will follow the flames."
"They will have gone out."
"We will follow the trail of debris, like Hansel and Gretel."
"It didn't work for Hansel and Gretel. Didn't you even read the fucking
story?"
"Don't be such a defeatist, Bobby," says Bischoff, diving into a hearty
fisherman's sweater. "Normally you are not like this. What is troubling
you?"
Glory. It is October and the days are growing short. Shaftoe and
Bischoff, both mired in the yet to be discovered emotional dumps of Seasonal
Affective Disorder, are like two brothers trapped in the same pit of
quicksand, each keeping a sharp eye on the other.
"Eh? Was ist los, buddy?"
"Guess I'm just feeling at loose ends."
"You need an adventure. Let's go!"
"I need an adventure like Hitler needs an ugly little toothbrush
mustache," says Bobby Shaftoe. But he drags himself up out of his chair and
follows Bischoff out the door.
***
Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a
pair of lost souls trying to find the side entrance to Limbo. They take
turns carrying the kerosene lantern, which has an effective range about as
long as a grown man's arm. Sometimes they go for a whole hour without
talking, each man alone with his own struggle against suicidal depression.
Then one of them (usually Bischoff) will perk up and say something, like:
"Haven't seen Enoch Root recently. What has he been up to since he
finished curing you of your morphine addiction?" Bischoff asks.
"Don't know. He was such a fucking pain in the ass during that project
that I never wanted to see him again. But I think he got a Russian radio
transmitter from Otto and took it into that church basement where he lives;
he's been messing around with it ever since."
"Yes. I remember. He was changing the frequencies. Did he ever get it
to work?"
"Beats me," Shaftoe says, "but when big pieces of burning shit start
falling out of the sky in my neighborhood, makes me wonder."
"Yes. Also he goes to the post office quite frequently," Bischoff says.
"I chatted with him there once. He is carrying on a heavy correspondence
with others around the world."
"Other what?"
"That is my question, too."
Eventually they find the wreck only by following the sound of a
hacksaw, which reverberates through the pines like the shriek of some
extraordinarily stupid and horny bird. This enables them to home in on it in
a general way. Final coordinates are provided by a sudden, strobelike
flashing light, devastating noise, and a sap scented rain of amputated
foliage. Shaftoe and Bischoff both hit the dirt and lie there listening to
fat pistol slugs ricocheting from tree trunk to tree trunk. The hacksawing
noise continues with no break in rhythm.
Bischoff starts talking Swedish, but Shaftoe shushes him. "That was a
Suomi," he says. "Hey, Julieta! Knock it off! It's just me and Günter."
There is no answer. Then, Shaftoe remembers that he has recently fucked
Julieta, and therefore needs to remember his manners. "Excuse me, ma'am," he
says, "but I gather from the sound of your weapon that you are of the
Finnish nation, for which I have unbounded admiration, and I wanted to let
you know that I, former Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, and my friend, former
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, mean you no harm."
Julieta, homing in on the sound of his voice in the darkness, responds
with a controlled burst of fire that passes about a foot over Bobby
Shaftoe's head. "Don't you belong in Manila?" she asks.
Shaftoe groans, and rolls over on his back as if he has been shot in
the gut.
"What does she mean by this?" asks the bewildered Günter Bischoff.
Seeing that his friend has been (emotionally) incapacitated, he tries: "This
is Sweden, a peaceful and neutral country! Why are you trying to machine gun
us?"
"Go away!" Julieta must be with Otto, because they hear her talk to him
before saying, "We do not want representatives of the American Marines and
the Wehrmacht here. You are not welcome."
"Sounds like you are sawing away on something that is pretty damn
heavy," Shaftoe finally retorts. "How you gonna haul it out of these woods?"
This leads to an animated conversation between Julieta and Otto. "You
may approach," Julieta finally says.
They find the Kivistiks, Julieta and Otto, standing in a pool of
lantern light around the severed, charred wing of an airplane. Most Finns
are hard to tell apart from Swedes, but Otto and Julieta both have black
hair and black eyes, and could pass for Turks. The tip of the airplane wing
is painted with the black and white cross of the Luftwaffe. An engine is
mounted to that wing. If Otto's hacksaw has its way, it won't be for much
longer. The engine has recently been set on fire and then used to knock down
a large number of pine trees. But even so Shaftoe can see it's like no
engine he has ever seen before. There is no propeller, but there are a lot
of little fan blades.
"It looks like a turbine," says Bischoff, "but for air, rather than
water." Otto straightens up, squeezes his lower back theatrically, and hands
Shaftoe the hacksaw. Then he hands him a bottle of benzedrine tablets for
good measure. Shaftoe eats a few tablets, strips off his shirt to reveal
splendid musculature, does a couple of USMC approved stretching exercises,
grabs the hacksaw, and sets to work. After a couple of minutes he looks up
nonchalantly at Julieta, who is standing there holding the machine pistol
and watching him with a look that is simultaneously frosty and smoldering,
like baked Alaska. Bischoff stands off to the side, reveling in this.
Dawn is slapping her chapped and reddened fingers against a frostbitten
sky, attempting to restore some circulation, when the remains of the turbine
finally fall away from the wing. Pumped on benzedrine, Shaftoe has been
operating the hacksaw for six hours; Otto has stepped in to change blades
several times, a major capital investment on his part. Next, they devote
half of the morning to dragging the engine through the woods and down a
creek bed to the sea, where Otto's boat is waiting, and Otto and Julieta
take their prize away. Bobby Shaftoe and Günter Bischoff trudge back up to
the site of the wreck. They have not discussed this openly yet it would be
unnecessary but they intend to find the part of the airplane that contains
the body of the pilot, and see to it that he gets a proper burial.
"What is in Manila, Bobby?" Bischoff asks.
"Something that morphine made me forget," Shaftoe answers, "and that
Enoch Root, that fucking bastard, made me remember."
Not fifteen minutes later they come to the gash in the woods that was
carved by the plunging airplane, and hear a man's voice wailing and sobbing,
completely out of his mind with grief. "Angelo! Angelo! Angelo! Mein
liebchen!"
They cannot see the man who is crying out in this way, but they do see
Enoch Root, standing there and brooding. He looks up alertly as they
approach, and produces a semiautomatic from his leather jacket. Then he
recognizes them, and relaxes.
"What the fuck is going on here?" Shaftoe says never one to beat around
in the bush. "Is that a fucking German you're with?"
"Yes, I am with a German," Root says, "as are you."
"Well, why is your German making such a fucking spectacle of himself?"
"Rudy is crying over the body of his lover," Root says, "who died in an
attempt to reunite with him."
"A woman was flying that plane?" says the flabbergasted Shaftoe.
Root rolls his eyes and heaves a sigh. "You have forgotten to allow for
the possibility that Rudy might be a homosexual."
It takes Shaftoe a long time to stretch his mind around this large,
inconveniently shaped concept. Bischoff, in typical European fashion, seems
completely unruffled. But he still has questions to ask. "Enoch, why are you
. . . here?"
"Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical body in this world
generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on
the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs
over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?
"Last rites," Root answers his own question. "Angelo was Catholic."
Then, after a while, he notices that Bischoff is staring at him, looking
completely unsatisfied. "Oh. I am here, in a larger sense, because Mrs.
Tenney, the vicar's wife, has become sloppy, and forgotten to close her eyes
when she takes the balls out of the bingo machine."
Chapter 56 CRUNCH
The condemned man showers, shaves, puts on most of a suit, and realizes
that he is ahead of schedule. He turns on the television, gets a San Miguel
out of the fridge to steady his nerves, and then goes to the closet to get
the stuff of his last meal. The apartment only has one closet and when its
door is open it appears to have been bricked shut, Cask of Amontillado
style, with very large flat red oblongs, each imprinted with the image of a
venerable and yet oddly cheerful and yet somehow kind of hauntingly sad
naval officer. The whole pallet load was shipped here several weeks ago by
Avi, in an attempt to lift Randy's spirits. For all Randy knows more are
still sitting on a Manila dockside ringed with armed guards and dictionary
sized rat traps straining against their triggers, each baited with a single
golden nugget.
Randy selects one of the bricks from this wall, creating a gap in the
formation, but there is another, identical one right behind it, another
picture of that same naval officer. They seem to be marching from his closet
in a peppy phalanx. "Part of this complete balanced breakfast," Randy says.
Then he slams the door on them and walks with a measured, forcibly calm step
to the living room where he does most of his dining, usually while facing
his thirty six inch television. He sets up his San Miguel, an empty bowl, an
exceptionally large soup spoon so large that most European cultures would
identify it as a serving spoon and most Asian ones as a horticultural
implement. He obtains a stack of paper napkins, not the brown recycled ones
that can't be moistened even by immersion in water, but the flagrantly
environmentally unsound type, brilliant white and cotton fluffy and
desperately hygroscopic. He goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, reaches
deep into the back, and finds an unopened box bag pod unit of UHT milk. UHT
milk need not, technically, be refrigerated, but it is pivotal, in what is
to follow, that the milk be only a few microdegrees above the point of
freezing. The fridge in Randy's apartment has louvers in the back where the
cold air is blown in, straight from the freon coils. Randy always stores his
milk pods directly in front of those louvers. Not too close, or else the
pods will block the flow of air, and not too far away either. The cold air
becomes visible as it rushes in and condenses moisture, so it is a simple
matter to sit there with the fridge door open and observe its flow
characteristics, like an engineer testing an experimental minivan in a River
Rouge wind tunnel. What Randy would like to see, ideally, is the whole milk
pod enveloped in an even, jacketlike flow to produce better heat exchange
through the multilayered plastic and foil skin of the milk pod. He would
like the milk to be so cold that when he reaches in and grabs it, he feels
the flexible, squishy pod stiffen between his fingers as ice crystals spring
into existence, summoned out of nowhere simply by the disturbance of being
squished.
Today the milk is almost, but not quite, that cold. Randy goes into his
living room with it. He has to wrap it in a towel because it is so cold it
hurts his fingers. He launches a videotape and then sits down. All is in
readiness.
This is one of a series of videotapes that are shot in an empty
basketball gym with a polished maple floor and a howling, remorseless
ventilation system. They depict a young man and a young woman, both
attractive, svelte, and dressed something like marquee players in the Ice
Capades, performing simple ballroom dance steps to the accompaniment of
strangled music from a ghetto blaster set up on the free throw line. It is
miserably clear that the video has been shot by a third conspirator who is
burdened with a consumer grade camcorder and reeling from some kind of inner
ear disease that he or she would like to share with others. The dancers
stomp through the most simple steps with autistic determination. The camera
operator begins in each case with a two shot, then, like a desperado
tormenting a milksop, aims his weapon at their feet and makes them dance,
dance, dance. At one point the pager hooked to the man's elastic waistband
goes off and a scene has to be cut short. No wonder: he is one of the most
sought after ballroom dance instructors in Manila. His partner would be too,
if more men in this city were interested in learning to dance. As it is, she
must scrape by earning maybe a tenth of what the male instructor pulls down,
giving lessons to a small number of addled or henpecked stumblebums like
Randy Waterhouse.
Randy takes the red box and holds it securely between his knees with
the handy stay closed tab pointing away from him. Using both hands in unison
he carefully works his fingertips underneath the flap, trying to achieve
equal pressure on each side, paying special attention to places where too
much glue was laid down by the gluing machine. For a few long, tense
moments, nothing at all happens, and an ignorant or impatient observer might
suppose that Randy is getting nowhere. But then the entire flap pops open in
an instant as the entire glue front gives way. Randy hates it when the box
top gets bent or, worst of all possible words, torn. The lower flap is
merely tacked down with a couple of small glue spots and Randy pulls it back
to reveal a translucent, inflated sac. The halogen down light recessed in
the ceiling shines through the cloudy material of the sac to reveal gold
everywhere the glint of gold. Randy rotates the box ninety degrees and holds
it between his knees so its long axis is pointed at the television set, then
grips the top of the sac and carefully parts its heat sealed seam, which
purrs as it gives way. Removal of the somewhat milky plastic barrier causes
the individual nuggets of Cap'n Crunch to resolve, under the halogen light,
with a kind of preternatural crispness and definition that makes the roof of
Randy's mouth glow and throb in trepidation.
On the TV, the dancing instructors have finished demonstrating the
basic steps. It is almost painful to watch them doing the compulsories,
because when they do, they must willfully forget everything they know about
advanced ballroom dancing, and dance like persons who have suffered strokes,
or major brain injuries, that have wiped out not only the parts of their
brain responsible for fine motor skills but also blown every panel in the
aesthetic discretion module. They must, in other words, dance the way their
beginning pupils like Randy dance.
The gold nuggets of Cap'n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a
sound like glass rods being snapped in half Tiny fragments spall away from
their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World
class cereal eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl
of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one
wants the bone dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth
with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place
in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special
cereal eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a
little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl,
hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon
even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to
work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in
your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of
loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap'n Crunch, takes about thirty
seconds.
At this point in the videotape he always wonders if he's inadvertently
set his beer down on the fast forward button, or something, because the
dancers go straight from their vicious Randy parody into something that
obviously qualifies as advanced dancing. Randy knows that the steps they are
doing are nominally the same as the basic steps demonstrated earlier, but
he's damned if he can tell which is which, once they go into their creative
mode. There is no recognizable transition, and that is what pisses Randy
off, and has always pissed him off, about dancing lessons. Any moron can
learn to trudge through the basic steps. That takes all of half an hour. But
when that half hour is over, dancing instructors always expect you'll take
flight and go through one of those miraculous time lapse transitions that
happen only in Broadway musicals and begin dancing brilliantly. Randy
supposes that people who are lousy at math feel the same way: the instructor
writes a few simple equations on the board, and ten minutes later he's
deriving the speed of light in a vacuum.
He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the
other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when
cold milk and Cap'n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute
each other's essential natures: two Platonic ideals separated by a boundary
a molecule wide. Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon handle, the
polished stainless steel fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole
milk, because otherwise why bother? Anything less is indistinguishable from
water, and besides he thinks that the fat in whole milk acts as some kind of
a buffer that retards the dissolution into slime process. The giant spoon
goes into his mouth before the milk in the bowl has even had time to seek
its own level. A few drips come off the bottom and are caught by his freshly
washed goatee (still trying to find the right balance between beardedness
and vulnerability, Randy has allowed one of these to grow). Randy sets the
milk pod down, grabs a fluffy napkin, lifts it to his chin, and uses a
pinching motion to sort of lift the drops of milk from his whiskers rather
than smashing and smearing them down into the beard. Meanwhile all his
concentration is fixed on the interior of his mouth, which naturally he
cannot see, but which he can imagine in three dimensions as if zooming
through it in a virtual reality display. Here is where a novice would lose
his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between
his molars, but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the
unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armor of razor
sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the
rest of the meal into a sort of pain hazed death march and rendering him
Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has, over time, worked out a really
fiendish Cap'n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the
nuggets' most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are
pillow shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests.
Now, with a flake type of cereal, Randy's strategy would never work.
But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would
last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a
deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape
that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between
the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken
treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably
clamoring for, they came up with this hard to pin down striated pillow
formation. The important thing, for Randy's purposes, is that the individual
pieces of Cap'n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of
like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap'n Crunch chew itself by
grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones
in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations
(or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body
just has to learn the moves.
By the time he has eaten a satisfactory amount of Cap'n Crunch (about a
third of a 25 ounce box) and reached the bottom of his beer bottle, Randy
has convinced himself that this whole dance thing is a practical joke. When
he reaches the hotel, Amy and Doug Shaftoe will be waiting for him with
mischievous smiles. They will tell him they were just teasing and then take
him into the bar to talk him down.
Randy puts on the last few bits of his suit. Any delaying tactics are
acceptable at this point, so he checks his e mail.
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: The Pontifex Transform, as requested
Randy,
You are right, of course as the Germans learned the hard way, no new
cryptosystem can be trusted until it has been published, so that people like
your Secret Admirer friends can have a go at breaking it. I would be in your
debt if you would do this with Pontifex.
The transform at the heart of Pontifex has various asymmetries and
special cases that make it difficult to express in a few clean, elegant
lines of math. It almost has to be written down as pseudo code. But why
settle for pseudo when you can have the real thing? What follows is Pontifex
written as a Perl script. The variable $D contains the 54 element
permutation. The subroutine e generates the next keystream value whilst
evolving $D.
#!/usr/bin/perl s
$f=$d? 1:1;$D=pack('C*'.33..86);$p=shift;
$p=~y/a z/A Z/;$U='$D=~s/(.*)U$/U$1/;
$D=~s/U(.)/$1U/;';($V=$U)=~s/U/V/g;
$p=~s/[A Z]/$k=ord($&) 64,&e/eg;$k=0;
while(<>){y/a z/A Z/;y/A Z//dc;$o.=$_}$o.='X'
while length ($o)%5&&!$d;
$o=~s/./chr(($f*&e+ord($&) l3)%26+65)/eg;
$o=~s/X*$// if $d;$o=~s/.{5}/$& /g;
print"$o\n";sub v{$v=ord(substr($D,$_[0])) 32;
$v>53?53:$v}
sub w{$D=~s/(.{$_[0]})(.*)(.)/$2$1$3/}
sub e{eval"$U$V$V";$D=~s/(.*)([UV].*[UV])(.*)/$3$2$l/;
&w(&v(53));$k?(&w($k)):($c=&v(&v(0)),$c>52?&e:$c)}
There is also one message from his palimony lawyer in California, which
he prints and puts into his breast pocket to savor while he is stuck in
traffic. He takes the elevator downstairs and catches a taxi to the Manila
Hotel. This (riding in a taxi through Manila) would be one of the more
memorable experiences of his life if this were the first time he had ever
done it, but is the millionth time and so nothing registers. For example, he
sees two cars smashed together directly beneath a giant road sign that says
NO SWERVING, but he doesn't really take note.
Dear Randy,
The worst is over. Charlene and (more importantly) her lawyer seem to
have accepted, finally, that you are not sitting on top of a huge pile of
gold in the Philippines! Now that your imaginary millions are no longer
confusing the picture, we can figure out how to dispose of the assets you
actually have: primarily, your equity in the house. This would be much more
complicated if Charlene wanted to remain there, however it now appears that
she has landed that Yale job, which means that she is just as eager to
liquidate the house as you are. The question, then, will be how the proceeds
of the sale should be divided between you and her. Their position appears
(not surprisingly) to be that the huge increase in the house's value since
you bought it is a consequence of changes in the real estate market never
mind the quarter million you spent shoring up the foundation, replacing the
plumbing, etc., etc.
I assume you kept all of the receipts, cancelled checks and other proof
of how much money you spent on improvements, because that's the kind of guy
you are. It would help me very much if I could pull these out and wave them
around during my next round of discussions with Charlene's lawyer. Can you
produce them? I realize that this will be something of an inconvenience for
you. However, since you have invested most of your net worth into that
house, the stakes are high.
Randy puts the page into his breast pocket and begins planning a trip
to California.
Most of the ballroom dancing freaks in this town belong to the social
class that can afford cars and drivers. The cars are lined up all the way
down the hotel's drive and out into the street, waiting to discharge their
passengers, whose bright gowns are visible even through tinted windows.
Attendants blow whistles and gesture with their white gloves, vectoring cars
into the parking lot, where they are sintered into a tight mosaic. Some of
the drivers don't even bother getting out, and lean their seats back for a
nap. Others gather beneath a tree at one end of the lot to smoke, joke, and
shake their heads in dazed amusement at the world in the way that only your
hardened future shocked Third Worlders can.
Since he has been dreading this so much, you'd think Randy might just
sit back and savor the delay. But, like jerking a bandage off a hairy part
of the body, it is a deed best done quickly and suddenly. As they pull to a
stop at the back of the line of limos, he shoves money at his surprised
driver, opens the door, and walks the last block to the hotel. He can feel
the eyes of the gowned and perfumed Filipinas playing across his husky back
like laser sights on commandos' rifles.
Aging Filipinas in prom dresses have come and gone across the lobby of
the Manila Hotel for as long as Randy has known the place. He hardly noticed
them during the early months when he was actually living there. The first
time they appeared, he assumed that some function was underway in the grand
ballroom: perhaps a wedding, perhaps a class action suit being filed by
aging beauty contest contestants against the synthetic fibers industry. That
was about as far as he got before he stopped burning out his mental circuits
trying to figure everything out. Pursuing an explanation for every strange
thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of
rainwater out of a discarded tire.
The Shaftoes are not waiting by the door to tell him it was all a joke,
so Randy squares his shoulders and stomps doggedly across the vast lobby,
all alone, like a Confederate infantryman in Pickett's Charge, the last man
of his regiment. A photographer in a Ronald Reagan pompadour and a white
tuxedo is planted before the door to the grand ballroom, shooting pictures
of people on the way in, hoping that they will pay for copies on the way
out. Randy shoots him such a fell look that the man's shutter finger cringes
back from the button. Then it's through the big doors and into the ballroom,
where, beneath swirling, colored lights, hundreds of Filipinas are dancing,
mostly with much younger men, to the strains of a reprocessed Carpenters
tune generated by a small orchestra in the corner. Randy shells out some
pesos for a corsage of sampaguita flowers. Holding it at arm's length so
that he will not be plunged into a diabetic coma by its fumes, he commences
a Magellanian circumnavigation of the dance floor, which is surrounded by an
atoll of round tables that are adorned with white linen tablecloths,
candles, and glass ashtrays. A man with a thin mustache sits alone at one of
those tables, back against the wall, a cellphone against his head, one side
of his face illuminated fluoroscopically by the eerie green light of its
keypad. A cigarette juts from his fist.
Grandma Waterhouse insisted that seven year old Randy take ballroom
dance lessons because one day it would certainly come in handy. He begged to
differ. Her Australian accent had turned lofty and English in the decades
since she had come to America, or maybe that was his imagination. She sat
there, bolt upright as always, on her floral chintz Gomer Bolstrood settee,
the sere hills of the Palouse visible through lace curtains behind her,
sipping tea from a white china cup decorated with was it lavender roses?
When she tilted the cup back, seven year old Randy must have been able to
read the name of the china pattern off the bottom. The information must be
stored in his subconscious memory somewhere. Perhaps a hypnotist could
extract it.
But seven year old Randy had other things on his mind: protesting, in
the strongest possible terms, the assertion that ballroom dance skills could
ever be of any use. At the same time, he was being patterned. Implausible,
even ludicrous ideas were suffusing his brain, invisible and odorless as
carbon monoxide gas: that the Palouse was a normal landscape. That the sky
was this blue everywhere. That a house should look this way: with lace
curtains, leaded glass windows, and room after room full of Gomer Bolstrood
furniture.
"I met your grandfather Lawrence at a dance, in Brisbane," Grandma
announced. She was trying to tell him that he, Randall Lawrence Waterhouse,
would not even exist had it not been for the practice of ballroom dancing.
But Randy did not even know where babies came from yet and probably wouldn't
have understood even if he did. Randy straightened up, remembering his
posture, and asked her a question: did this encounter in Brisbane happen
when she was seven years old, or, perhaps, a little later?
Perhaps if she had lived in a mobile home, the grown up Randy would
have sunk his money into a mutual fund, instead of paying ten thousand
dollars to a soi disant artisan from San Francisco to install leaded glass
windows around his front door, like at Grandma's house.
He provides tremendous, long lasting amusement to the Shaftoes by
walking right past their table without recognizing them. He looks right at
Doug Shaftoe's date, a striking Filipina, probably in her forties, who is in
the middle of making some forceful point. Without taking her eyes off Doug
and Amy Shaftoe, she reaches out with one long graceful arm and snags
Randy's wrist as he goes by, yanking him back like a dog on a meat leash.
She then holds him there while she finishes her sentence, then looks up at
him with a brilliant smile. Randy smiles back dutifully, but he does not
give her the full attention she seems accustomed to, because he is a bit
preoccupied by the spectacle of America Shaftoe in a dress.
Fortunately, Amy has not gone in for the prom queen look. She is
wearing a form fitting black number with long sleeves that hide her tattoos,
and black tights, as opposed to stockings. Randy gives her the flowers, like
a quarterback handing off the pigskin to a runner. She accepts them with a
crooked expression, like a wounded soldier biting down on a bullet. Irony
aside, she has a gleam in her eye that he has never seen before. Or maybe
that is just light from the mirrored ball, reflecting off cigarette smoke
induced tears. He senses in his gut that he did the right thing by showing
up. As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this it is
pathetic self delusion. He was kind of afraid that she would go through some
Hollywoodesque transfiguration into a radiant goddess, which would have the
same effect on Randy as an ax to the base of the skull. The fact of the
matter is that she looks quite good, but arguably, just as out of place as
Randy is in his suit.
He is hoping that they can get the dancing over right away so that he
can flee the building in Cinderellan obloquy, but they bid him sit down. The
orchestra takes a break and the dancers return to their tables. Doug Shaftoe
is comfortably sprawled back in his chair with the masculine confidence of a
man who has not only killed people but who is, furthermore, escorting the
most beautiful woman in the room. Her name is Aurora Taal, and she casts her
flawlessly Lancomed gaze over the other Filipinas with the controlled
amusement of one who has lived in Boston, Washington, and London, and seen
it all, and come back to live in Manila anyway.
"So, did you learn anything more about this Rudolf von Hacklheber
character?" Doug asks, after a few minutes of small talk. It follows that
Aurora must be in on the whole secret. Doug mentioned, weeks ago, that a
small number of Filipinos knew about what they were doing, and that they
could be trusted.
"He was a mathematician. He was from a wealthy Leipzig family. He was
at Princeton before the war. His years there did, in fact, overlap with my
grandfather's."
"What kind of math did he do, Randy?"
"Before the war he did number theory. Which tells us nothing about what
he did during the war. It wouldn't be surprising if he'd ended up working in
the Third Reich's crypto apparatus."
"Which wouldn't explain how he ended up here."
Randy shrugs. "Maybe he did engineering work on the new generation of
submarines. I don't know."
"So the Reich got him involved in some kind of classified work, which
killed him eventually," Doug says. "We could have guessed that for
ourselves, I suppose."
"Why did you mention crypto, then?" Amy asks. She has some kind of
emotional metal detector that screams whenever it comes near buried
assumptions and hastily stifled impulses.
"I guess I have crypto on the brain. And, if there was some kind of
connection between von Hacklheber and my grandfather "
"Was your grandfather a crypto guy, Randy?" Doug asks.
"He never said anything about what he did during the war."
"Classic."
"But he had this trunk up in the attic. A war souvenir. It actually
reminds me of a trunk full of Nipponese crypto materials that I recently saw
in a cave in Kinakuta." Doug and Amy stare at him. "It doesn't amount to
anything, probably," Randy concedes.
The orchestra starts in with a Sinatra tune. Doug and Aurora smile at
each other and rise to their feet. Amy rolls her eyes and looks the other
way, but it's put up or shut up time now, and Randy cannot conceive of any
way out. He stands up and extends his hand to the one he fears and hopes
for, and she, without looking, reaches out and puts her hand into his.
Randy shuffles, which is no way to dance beautifully but does rule out
snapping his partner's metatarsals. Amy is essentially no better at this
than he is, but she has a better attitude. By the time they get to the end
of the first dance, Randy has at least reached the point where his face is
no longer burning, and has gone for some thirty seconds without having to
apologize for anything, and sixty without asking his partner whether she
will be needing medical attention. Then the song is over, and circumstances
dictate that he has to dance with Aurora Taal. This is less intimidating;
even though she is glamorous and a really good dancer, their relationship is
not one that allows for the possibility of grotesque pre erotic fumbling.
Also, Aurora smiles a lot, and she has a really spectacular smile, where
Amy's face was intense and preoccupied. The next dance is announced as
ladies' choice, and Randy is still trying to make eye contact with Amy when
he finds this tiny middle aged Filipina standing there asking Aurora if she
would mind terribly. Aurora consigns him to the other lady like a pork belly
futures contract on the commodity exchange, and suddenly Randy and the lady
are dancing the Texas two step to the strains of a pre disco Bee Gees tune.
"So, have you found wealth in the Philippines yet?" asks the lady,
whose name Randy did not quite catch. She acts as if she expects him to know
her.
"Uh, my partners and I are exploring business opportunities," Randy
says. "Maybe wealth will follow."
"I understand you are good with numbers," the lady says.
Randy is really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he's a
numbers kind of guy? "I'm good with math," he finally says.
"Isn't that what I said?"
"Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as
possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves
to them that's what computers are for."
The lady will not be denied; she has a script and she's sticking to it.
"I have a math problem for you," the lady says.
"Shoot."
"What is the value of the following information: fifteen degrees,
seventeen minutes, forty one point three two seconds north, and a hundred
and twenty one degrees, fifty seven minutes, zero point five five seconds
east?"
"Uh. . . I don't know. It sounds like a latitude and longitude.
Northern Luzon, right?"
The lady nods.
"You want me to tell you the value of those numbers?"
"Yes."
"Depends on what's there, I guess."
"I suppose it does," the lady says. And that's all she says, for the
rest of the dance. Other than complimenting Randy on his balletic skills,
which is just as hard to interpret.
Chapter 57 GIRL
Flats are harder and harder to find in Brisbane, which has become a spy
boomtown Bletchley Park Down Under. There's Central Bureau, which has set up
out at the Ascot Racetrack, and another entity in a different part of town
called Allied Intelligence Bureau. The people who work at Central Bureau
tend to be pallid mathematics experts. The AIB people, on the other hand,
remind Waterhouse very much of those Detachment 2702 fellows: tense, tanned,
and taciturn.
Half a mile from the Ascot Racetrack, he sees one of the latter
tripping lightly down the steps of a nice gingerbready rooming house,
carrying a five hundred pound duffel bag on his back. The man is dressed for
a long trip. A grandmotherish lady in an apron is on the veranda, waving a
tea towel at him. It is like a scene from a movie; you wouldn't even know
that only a few hours' flight from here, men are turning black like
photographic paper in a developer tray as their living flesh is converted
into putrid gas by Clostridium bacteria.
Waterhouse does not stop to estimate the probability that he, who needs
a place to live, should happen along at the exact moment that a room has
become available. Cryptanalysts wait for lucky breaks, then exploit them.
After the departing soldier has disappeared round the corner, he knocks on
the door and introduces himself to the lady. Mrs. McTeague says (to the
extent Waterhouse can penetrate her accent) that she likes his looks. She
sounds distinctly astonished. It seems clear that the improbability of
Waterhouse's having happened upon this vacant room is nothing compared to
the improbability of having his looks liked by Mrs. McTeague. Thus, Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse joins a small elite group of young men (four in all)
whose looks Mrs. McTeague likes. They sleep, two to a room, in the bedrooms
where Mrs. McTeague's offspring grew from the brightest and most beautiful
children ever born into the finest adults who walk the earth except for the
King of England, the General, and Lord Mountbatten.
Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over
his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak
from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a
battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before
doing an Olympic qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks,
climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.
The next morning, at breakfast, he meets the fellows in the next room:
a redheaded British naval officer who shows all the earmarks of working at
Central Bureau, and a fellow named Hale, whose nationality cannot be pegged
because he's not in uniform and he's too hung over to speak.
Having accomplished his mission (according to his understanding with
the General's minions), found a place to live, and settled his other
personal affairs, Waterhouse begins hanging around the Ascot Racetrack and
the adjacent whorehouse, trying to find some way to make himself useful.
Actually he would rather sit in his room all day and work on his new
project, which is to design a high speed Turing machine. But he has a duty
to contribute to the war effort. Even if he didn't, he suspects that when
his new roommate gets back from his mission, and finds him sitting indoors
all day drawing circuit diagrams, he will thrash Waterhouse to the point
where Mrs. McTeague will no longer like his looks.
To put it mildly, Central Bureau is not the kind of place where a
stranger can just wander in, check the place out, introduce himself and find
a job. Even the wandering in part is potentially fatal. Fortunately,
Waterhouse has Ultra Mega clearance, the highest clearance in the Entire
World.
Unfortunately, this category of secrecy is itself so secret that its
very existence is secret, and so he can't actually reveal it to anyone
unless he finds someone else with Ultra Mega clearance. There are only a
dozen people with Ultra Mega clearance in all of Brisbane. Eight of them
comprise the top of the General's command hierarchy, three work at Central
Bureau, and one is Waterhouse.
Waterhouse sniffs out the nerve center in the old whorehouse.
Superannuated Australian Territorial Guards in jaunty asymmetrical hats ring
the place, clutching blunderbusses. Unlike Mrs. McTeague, they don't like
his looks. On the other hand they are used to this kind of thing: smart boys
from far away showing up at the gate with long and, in the end, boring
stories about how the military screwed up their orders, put them in the
wrong boat, sent them to the wrong place, gave them tropical diseases, threw
their belongings overboard, left them to fend for themselves. They don't
shoot him, but they don't let him in.
He hangs around and makes a nuisance of himself for a couple of days
until he finally recognizes, and is recognized by, Abraham Sinkov. Sinkov is
a top American cryptanalyst; he helped Schoen break Indigo. He and
Waterhouse have crossed paths a few times, and though they aren't friends,
per se, their minds work the same way. This makes them brothers in a weird
family that has only a few hundred members, scattered about the world. In a
way, it is a clearance that is rarer, harder to come by, and more mysterious
than Ultra Mega. Sinkov writes him a new set of papers, giving him a
clearance that is very high, but not so high that he can't reveal it.
Waterhouse gets a tour. Shirtless men sit in Quonset huts made stifling
by the red hot tubes of their radios. They pluck the Nipponese Army's
messages out of the air and hand them off to legions of young Australian
women who punch the intercepted messages onto ETC cards.
There is a cadre of American officers composed entirely of a whole
department of the Electrical Till Corporation. One day, early in 1942, they
put their white shirts and blue suits into mothballs, donned Army uniforms,
and climbed on ships to Brisbane. Their ringleader is a guy named Lieutenant
Colonel Comstock, and he has gotten the whole code breaking process totally
automated. The cards punched by the Aussie girls come into the machine room
stacked into ingots which are fed through the machines. Decrypts fly out of
a line printer on the other end and are taken off to another hut where
American nisei, and some white men trained in Nipponese, translate them.
A Waterhouse is the last thing these guys need. He's beginning to
understand what the major said to him the other day: they have passed over
the watershed line. The codes are broken.
Which reminds him of Turing. Ever since Alan got back from New York
he's been distancing himself from Bletchley Park. He has moved up to another
installation, a radio center called Hanslope in north Buckinghamshire, a
place of reinforced concrete, wires, antennas, more military formal in its
atmosphere.
At the time, Waterhouse could not understand why Alan would want to
move away from Bletchley. But now he knows how Alan must have felt after
they turned decryption into a mechanical process, industrializing Bletchley
Park. He must have felt that the battle was won, and with it the war. The
rest might seem like glorious conquest to people like the General, but to
Turing, and now to Waterhouse, it just looks like tedious mopping up. It is
exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern
their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can
openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
Sinkov provides Waterhouse with a desk in the whorehouse and begins to
feed him the messages that Central Bureau hasn't been able to decrypt. There
are still dozens of minor Nipponese codes that remain to be broken. Maybe,
by breaking one or two, and teaching the ETC machines to read them,
Waterhouse can shorten the war by a single day, or save a single life. This
is a noble calling that he undertakes willingly, but in essence it is no
different from being an Army butcher who saves lives by keeping his knives
clean, or a lifeboat inspector in the Navy.
Waterhouse cracks those minor Nip codes one after the other. One month
he even flies up to New Guinea, where Navy divers are salvaging code books
from a sunken Nip submarine. He lives in the jungle for two weeks and tries
not to die, comes back to Brisbane, and puts those recovered codebooks to
good but dull use. Then one day the dullness of his work becomes irrelevant.
On that day, he returns to Mrs. McTeague's boardinghouse in the
evening, goes to his room, and finds a large man snoring in the upper bunk.
A lot of clothing and equipment is scattered about the place, emanating
sulfurous reek.
The man sleeps for two days and then comes down late for breakfast one
morning, peering around the room with Atabrine yellow eyes. He introduces
himself as Smith. His oddly familiar accent is not made any easier to
understand by the fact that his teeth are chattering violently. He doesn't
seem especially bothered by this. He sits down and paws an Irish linen
napkin into his lap with a hand that is stiff and raw. Mrs. McTeague fusses
over him to the extent that all of the men at the table must resist the
impulse to slug her. She pours him tea with plenty of milk and sugar. He
takes a few sips, then excuses himself and goes to the WC, where he crisply
and politely vomits. He comes back, eats a soft boiled egg from a bone china
egg cup, turns green, leans back in his chair, and closes his eyes for about
ten minutes.
When Waterhouse returns from work that evening, he blunders into the
parlor and interrupts Mrs. McTeague having tea with a young lady.
The young lady's name is Mary Smith; she is the cousin of Waterhouse's
roommate, who is upstairs shivering and sweating in his bunk bed.
Mary stands up to be introduced, which is not technically necessary;
but she is a girl from the outback and has no use for effete refinement. She
is a petite girl dressed in a uniform.
She is the only woman Waterhouse has ever seen. She is the only other
human being in the universe actually, and when she stands up to shake his
hand, his peripheral vision shuts down as if he has been sucking on a
tailpipe. Black curtains converge across a silver cyclorama, shuttering down
his cosmos to a vertical shaft of carbon arc glory, a pillar of light, a
heavenly follow spot targeted upon Her.
Mrs. McTeague, knowing the score, bids him sit down.
Mary is a tiny, white skinned, red headed person who is often seized by
little fits of self consciousness. When this happens she averts her eyes
from his and swallows, and when she swallows there is a certain cord in her
white neck, rounding the concavity from shoulder to ear, that stands out for
a moment. It draws attention both to her vulnerability and to the white
flesh of her neck, which is not white in a pallid sick way but in another
way that Waterhouse could never have understood until recently: viz., from
his little stint in New Guinea, where everything is either dead and
decaying, or bright and threatening, or unobtrusive and invisible,
Waterhouse knows that anything this tender and translucent is too vulnerable
and tempting to hold its own in a world of violently competing destroyers,
that it can only be sustained for a moment (let alone years) by the life
force within. In the South Pacific where the forces of Death are so
powerful, it leaves him vaguely intimidated. Her skin, as unmarked as clear
water, is an extravagant display of vibrant animal power. He wants his
tongue on it. The whole curve of her neck, from collarbone to earlobe, would
make a perfect cradle for his face.
She sees him looking at her, and swallows again. The cord flexes,
stretching the living skin of her neck out for just a moment, and then
relaxes, leaving nothing but smoothness and calm. She may just as well have
caved his head in with a stone and tied his penis round a hitching rail. The
effect must be calculated. But apparently she has not ever done it to anyone
else, or there would be a band of gold round her pale left ring finger.
Mary Smith is beginning to get annoyed with him. She lifts the teacup
to her lips. She has turned so that the light is grazing her neck in a new
way, and this time when she swallows he can see her Adam's apple moving up.
Then it comes down like a pile driver on what is left of his good judgment.
There is a thumping noise upstairs; her cousin has just regained
consciousness. "Excuse me," she says, and she's gone, leaving only Mrs.
McTeague's bone china as a reminder.
Chapter 58 CONSPIRACY
Dr. Rudolf Von Hacklheber is not much older than sergeant Bobby
Shaftoe, but even emotionally crushed, he has a certain bearing about him
that men in Shaftoe's world don't acquire until they are in their forties,
if then. His eyeglasses have tiny rimless lenses that look like they were
scavenged from a sniper's telescopic sights. Behind them is a whole paintbox
of vivid colors: blond lashes, blue eyes, red veins, lids swollen and purple
from weeping. Even so, he has a perfect shave, and the silvery Nordic light
coming in through the tiny windows of Enoch Root's church cellar glances
from the planes of his face so as to highlight an interesting terrain of big
pores, premature creases, and old dueling scars. He has tried to grease his
hair back, but it misbehaves and keeps tumbling down over his brow. He is
wearing a white dress shirt and a very long, heavy overcoat on top of that
to ward off the cellar's chill. Shaftoe, who hiked back to Norrsbruck with
him several days ago, knows that the long legged von Hacklheber has the
makings of a half decent jock. But he can tell that rude sports like
football would be out of the question; this Kraut would be a fencer or a
mountain climber or a skier.
Shaftoe was only startled not bothered by von Hacklheber's
homosexuality. Some of the China Marines in Shanghai had a lot more young
Chinese boys hanging around their flats than they really needed to shine
their boots and Shanghai is far from the strangest or most far flung place
where Marines made themselves at home between the wars. You can worry about
morality when you're off duty, but if you are always stewing and fretting
over what the other guys are doing in the sack, then what the hell are you
going to do when you're presented with an opportunity to hit a Nip squad
with a flamethrower?
They buried the remains of Angelo, the pilot, two weeks ago, and only
now is von Hacklheber feeling in any kind of shape to talk. He has rented a
cottage outside of town, but he has come into Norrsbruck to meet with Root,
Shaftoe, and Bischoff on this day, partly because he is convinced that
German spies are watching it. Shaftoe shows up with a bottle of Finnish
schnapps, Bischoff brings a loaf of bread, Root breaks out a tin of fish.
Von Hacklheber brings information. Everyone brings cigarettes.
Shaftoe smokes early and often, trying to kill the mildewy smell of the
cellar, which reminds him of being locked up there with Enoch Root, kicking
his morphine habit. During that time, the pastor once had to come downstairs
and ask him please to stop screaming for a while because they were trying to
do a wedding upstairs. Shaftoe hadn't known he was screaming.
Rudolf von Hacklheber's English is, in some respects, better than
Shaftoe's. He sounds unnervingly like Bobby's junior high school drafting
teacher, Mr. Jaeger. "Before the war I worked under Dönitz for the
Beobachtung Dienst of the Kriegsmarine. We broke some of the most secret
codes of the British Admiralty even before the outbreak of hostilities. I
was responsible for some advances in this field, involving the use of
mechanical calculation. When war broke out there was much reorganization and
I became like a bone that several dogs are fighting over. I was moved into
Referat Iva of Gruppe IV, Analytical Cryptanalysis, which was part of
Hauptgruppe B, Cryptanalysis, which reported ultimately to Major General
Erich Feilgiebel, Chief of Wehrmachtnachrichtungen verbindungen."
Shaftoe looks around at the others, but none of them laughs, or even
grins. They must not have heard it. "Come again?" Shaftoe asks, proddingly,
like a man in a bar trying to get a shy friend to tell a sure fire thigh
slapper.
"Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen," von Hacklheber says, very
slowly, as if repeating nursery rhymes to a toddler. He blinks once, twice,
three times at Shaftoe, then sits forward and says, brightly: "Perhaps I
should explain the organization of the German intelligence hierarchy, since
it will help you all to understand my story."
A BRIEF TRIP INTO HELL'S DEMO with HERR DOKTOR PROFESSOR RUDOLF VON
HACKLHEBER ensues.
Shaftoe only hears the first couple of sentences. At about the point
when von Hacklheber tears a sheet out of a notebook and begins to diagram
the organizational tree of the Thousand Year Reich, with "Der Führer" at the
top, Shaftoe's eyes take on a heavy glaze, his body goes slack, he becomes
deaf, and he accelerates up the throat of a nightmare, like the butt of a
half digested corn dog being reverse peristalsed from the body of an addict.
He has never been through this experience before, but he knows intuitively
that this is how the trip to Hell works: no leisurely boat ride across the
scenic Styx, no gradual descent into that trite tourist trap, Pluto's
Cavern, no stops along the way to buy fishing licenses for the Lake of Fire.
Shaftoe is not (though he should be) dead, and so this is not hell. It
is closely modeled after hell, though. It is like a mock up slapped together
from tar paper and canvas, like the fake towns where they practiced house to
house warfare during boot camp. Shaftoe is gripped with a sort of giddy
queasiness that, he knows, is the most pleasant thing he will feel here.
"Morphine takes away the body's ability to experience pleasure," says the
booming voice of Enoch Root, his wry, annoying Virgil, who for purposes of
this nightmare has adopted the voice and physical shape of Moe, the mean,
dark haired Stooge. "It may be some time before you feel physically well."
The organizational tree of this nightmare begins, like von
Hacklheber's, with Der Führer, but then branches out widely and crazily.
There is an Asian branch, headed up by the General, and including, among
other things, a Hauptgruppe of giant carnivorous lizards, a Referat of
Chinese women holding up pale eyed babies, and several Abteilungs of
plastered Nips with swords. In the center of their domain is the city of
Manila, where, in a tableau that Shaftoe would identify as Boschian if he
had not spent his high school art class out behind the school leg fucking
cheerleaders, a heavily pregnant Glory Altamira is being forced to do blow
jobs on syphilitic Nipponese troops.
The voice of Mr. Jaeger, his drafting teacher the most boring man
Shaftoe had ever known, until perhaps today fades in for a moment with the
words, "but all of the organizational structures I have detailed to this
point became obsolete at the outbreak of hostilities. The hierarchy was
shuffled and several of the entities changed their names, as follows . . ."
Shaftoe hears a new sheet of paper being torn from the notebook, but what he
sees is Mr. Jaeger tearing up a diagram of a table leg bracket that the
young Bobby Shaftoe had spent a week drafting. Everything has been
reorganized, General MacArthur is still very high in the tree, walking a
brace of giant lizards on steel leashes, but now the hierarchy is filled
with grinning Arabs holding up lumps of hashish, frozen butchers, dead or
doomed lieutenants, and that fucking weirdo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse,
dressed in a black, hooded robe, heading up a whole legion of pencil necked
Signals geeks, also in robes, holding bizarrely shaped antennas above their
heads, wading through a blizzard of dollar bills printed on old Chinese
newspapers. Their eyes glow, flashing on and off in Morse code.
"What are they saying?" Bobby says.
"Please, stop screaming," says Enoch Root. "Just for a little while."
Bobby's lying on a cot in a thatched hut in Guadalcanal. Swedish
tribesmen run around in loincloths, gathering food: every so often, a ship
gets blown up out in the Slot, and fish shrapnel rains down and gets hung up
in the branches, along with the occasional severed human arm or hunk of
skull. The Swedes ignore the human bits and harvest the fish, taking it off
to make lutefisk in black steel drums.
Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out
of the crack around its lid.
But he's not in the thatched hut anymore; he's inside a cold black
metal phallus that has been probing around down below the surface of the
nightmare: Bischoff's submarine. Depth charges are going off all over the
place and it's filling up with sewage. Something clocks him on the side of
the head: not a ham this time, but a human leg. The sub's lined with tubes
that carry voices: in English, German, Arabic, Nipponese, Shanghainese, but
confined and muffled in the plumbing so that they mingle together like the
running of water. Then a pipe is ruptured by a near miss from a depth
charge; from its jagged end issues a German voice:
"The foregoing may be taken as a rather coarse grained treatment of the
general organization of the Reich and particularly the military.
Responsibility for cryptanalysis and cryptography is distributed among a
large number of small Amts and Diensts attached to various tendrils of this
structure. These are continually being reorganized and rearranged, however I
may be able to provide you with a reasonably accurate and detailed picture .
. ."
Shaftoe, chained to a bunk in the submarine by fetters of gold, feels
one of his small, concealed handguns pressing into the small of his back,
and wonders whether it would be bad form to shoot himself in the mouth. He
paws wildly at the broken tube and manages to slap it down into the rising
sewage; bubbles come out, and von Hacklheber's words are trapped in them,
like word balloons in a comic strip. When the bubbles reach the surface and
burst, it sounds like screaming.
Root is sitting on the opposite bunk with the cigar box on his lap. He
holds up his hand in a V for Victory, then levels it at Shaftoe's face and
pokes him in the eyes. "I cannot help you with your inability to find
physical comfort it is a problem of body chemistry," he says. "It poses
interesting theological questions. It reminds us that all the pleasures of
the world are an illusion projected into our souls by our bodies."
A lot of the other speaking tubes have ruptured now, and screaming
comes from most of them; Root has to lean close in order to shout into
Bobby's ear. Shaftoe takes advantage of it to reach over and make a grab for
the cigar box, which contains the stuff he wants: not morphine. Something
better than morphine. Morphine is to the stuff in the cigar box what a
Shanghai prostitute is to Glory.
The box flies open and blinding light comes out of it. Shaftoe covers
his face. The salted and preserved body parts suspended from the ceiling
tumble into his lap and begin to writhe, reaching out for other parts,
assembling themselves into living bodies. Mikulski comes back to life, aims
his Vickers at the ceiling of the U boat, and cuts an escape hatch. Instead
of black water, golden light rushes through.
"What was your position in all this, then?" asks Root, and Shaftoe
nearly jumps out of his chair, startled by the sound of a voice other than
von Hacklheber's. Given what happened the last time someone (Shaftoe) asked
a question, this is heroic but risky. Starting with Hitler, von Hacklheber
works his way down the chain of command.
Shaftoe doesn't care: he's on a rubber raft, along with various
resurrected comrades from Guadalcanal and Detachment 2702. They are rowing
across a still cove lit by giant flaming klieg lights in the sky. Standing
behind the klieg lights is a man talking in a German accent: "My immediate
supervisors, Wilhelm Fenner, from St. Petersburg, who headed all German
military cryptanalysis from 1922 onwards, and his chief deputy, Professor
Novopaschenny."
All of these names sound alike to Shaftoe, but Root says, "A Russian?"
Shaftoe is really coming around now, reemerging into the World. He sits up
straight, and his body feels stiff, like it hasn't moved in a long time. He
is about to apologize for the way he has been behaving, but since no one is
looking at him funny, Shaftoe sees no reason to fill them in on what he's
been doing these last few minutes.
"Professor Novopaschenny was a Czarist astronomer who knew Fenner from
St. Petersburg. Under them, I was given broad authority to pursue researches
into the theoretical limits of security. I used tools from pure mathematics
as well as mechanical calculating devices of my own design. I looked at our
own codes as well as those of our enemies, looking for weaknesses."
"What did you find?" Bischoff asks.
"I found weaknesses everywhere," von Hacklheber says. "Most codes were
designed by dilettantes and amateurs with no grasp of the underlying
mathematics. It is really quite pitiable."
"Including the Enigma?" Bischoff asks.
"Don't even talk to me of that shit," von Hacklheber says. "I dispensed
with it almost immediately."
"What do you mean, dispensed with it?" Root asks.
"Proved that it was shit," von Hacklheber says.
"But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it," Bischoff says.
Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette.
"You expect them to throw all those machines away because one mathematician
writes a paper?" He stares at his cigarette a while longer, then puts it to
his lips, draws on it tastefully, holds the smoke in his lungs, and finally
exhales it slowly through his vocal cords whilst simultaneously causing them
to emit the following sounds: "I knew that there must be people working for
the enemy who would figure this out. Turing. Von Neumann. Waterhouse. Some
of the Poles. I began to look for signs that they had broken the Enigma, or
at least realized its weaknesses and begun trying to break it. I ran
statistical analyses of convoy sinkings and U boat attacks. I found some
anomalies, some improbable events, but not enough to make a pattern. Many of
the grossest anomalies were later accounted for by the discovery of
espionage stations and the like.
"From this I drew no conclusion. Certainly if they were smart enough to
break the Enigma they would be smart enough to conceal the fact from us at
any cost. But there was one anomaly they could not cover up. I refer to
human anomalies."
"Human anomalies?" Root asks. The phrase is classic Root bait.
"I knew perfectly well that only a handful of people in the world had
the acumen to break the Enigma and then to cover up the fact that they had
broken it. By using our intelligence sources to ascertain where these men
were, and what they were doing, I could make inferences." Von Hacklheber
stubs out his cigarette, sits up straight, and drains a half shot of
schnapps, warming to the task. "This was a human intelligence problem not
signals intelligence. This is handled by a different branch of the service "
and he's off again talking about the structure of the German bureaucracy.
Terrified, Shaftoe flees from the room, runs outside, and uses the outhouse.
When he gets back, von Hacklheber is just winding up. "It all came down to a
problem of sifting through large amounts of raw data lengthy and tedious
work."
Shaftoe cringes, wondering what something would have to be like in
order to qualify as lengthy and tedious to this joker.
"After some time," von Hacklheber continues, "I learned, through some
of our agents in the British Isles, that a man matching the general
description of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had been stationed to a castle
in Outer Qwghlm. I was able to arrange for a young lady to place this man
under the closest possible surveillance," he says dryly. "His security
precautions were impeccable, and so we learned nothing directly. In fact, it
is quite likely that he knew that the young woman in question was an agent,
and so took added precautions. But we did learn that this man communicated
through one time pads. He would read his encrypted messages over the
telephone to a nearby naval base whence they would be telegraphed to a
station in Buckinghamshire, which would respond to him with messages
encrypted using the same system of one time pads. By going through the
records of our various radio intercept stations we were able to accumulate a
stack of messages that had been sent by this mysterious unit, using this
series of one time pads, over a period of time beginning in the middle of
1942 and continuing up to the present day. It was interesting to note that
this unit operated in a variety of places:
Malta, Alexandria, Morocco, Norway, and various ships at sea. Extremely
unusual. I was very interested in this mysterious unit and so I began trying
to break their special code."
"Isn't that impossible?" Bischoff asks. "There is no way to break a one
time pad, short of stealing a copy."
"That is true in theory," von Hacklheber says. "In practice, this is
only true if the letters that make up the one time pad are chosen perfectly
randomly. But, as I discovered, this is not true of the one time pads used
by Detachment 2702 which is the mysterious unit that Waterhouse, Turing, and
these two gentlemen all belong to."
"But how did you figure this out?" Bischoff asks.
"A few things helped me. There was a lot of depth many messages to work
with. There was consistency the one time pads were generated in the same
way, always, and always exhibited the same patterns. I made some educated
guesses which turned out to be correct. And I had a calculating machine to
make the work go faster."
"Educated guesses?"
"I had a hypothesis that the one time pads were being drawn up by a
person who was rolling dice or shuffling a deck of cards to produce the
letters. I began to consider psychological factors. An English speaker is
accustomed to a certain frequency distribution of letters. He expects to see
a great many e's, t's, and a's, and not so many z's and q's and x's. So if
such a person were using some supposedly random algorithm to generate the
letters, he would be subconsciously irritated every time a z or an x came
up, and, conversely, soothed by the appearance of e or t. Over time, this
might skew the frequency distribution."
"But Herr Doctor von Hacklheber, I find it unlikely that such a person
would substitute their own letters for the ones that came up on the cards,
or dice, or whatever."
"It is not very likely. But suppose that the algorithm gave the person
some small amount of discretion." Von Hacklheber lights another cigarette,
pours out more schnapps. "I set up an experiment. I got twenty volunteers
middle aged women who wanted to do their part for the Reich. I set them to
work drawing up one time pads using an algorithm where they drew slips out
of a box. Then I used my machinery to run statistical calculations on the
results. I found that they were not random at all."
Root says, "The one time pads for Detachment 2702 are being created by
Mrs. Tenney, a vicar's wife. She uses a bingo machine, a cage filled with
wooden balls with a letter stamped on each ball. She is supposed to close
her eyes before reaching into the cage. But suppose she has become sloppy
and no longer closes her eyes when she reaches into it."
"Or," von Hacklheber says, "suppose she looks at the cage, and sees how
the balls are distributed inside of it, and then closes her eyes. She will
subconsciously reach toward the E and avoid the Z. Or, if a certain letter
has just come up recently, she will try to avoid choosing it again. Even if
she cannot see the inside of the cage, she will learn to distinguish among
the different balls by their feel being made of wood, each ball will have a
different weight, a different pattern in the grain."
Bischoff's not buying it. "But it will still be mostly random!"
"Mostly random is not good enough!" von Hacklheber snaps. "I was
convinced that the one time pads of Detachment 2702 would have a frequency
distribution similar to that of the King James Version of the Bible, for
example. And I strongly suspected that the content of those messages would
include words such as Waterhouse, Turing, Enigma, Qwghlm, Malta. By putting
my machinery to work, I was able to break some of the one time pads.
Waterhouse was careful to burn his pads after using them once, but some
other parts of the detachment were careless, and used the same pads again
and again. I read many messages. It was obvious that Detachment 2702 was in
the business of deceiving the Wehrmacht by concealing the fact that the
Enigma had been broken."
Shaftoe knows what an Enigma is, if only because Bischoff won't shut up
about them. When von Hacklheber explains this, everything that Detachment
2702 ever did suddenly makes sense.
"So, the secret is out then," Root says. "I assume you made your
superiors aware of your discovery?"
"I made them aware of absolutely nothing," von Hacklheber snarls,
"because by this time I had long since fallen into a snare of
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. I had become his pawn, his slave, and had
ceased to feel any loyalty whatsoever towards the Reich."
***
The knock on Rudolf von Hacklheber's door had come at four o'clock in
the morning, a time exploited by the Gestapo for its psychological effect.
Rudy is wide awake. Even if bombers had not been pounding Berlin all night
long, he would have been awake, because he has neither seen nor heard from
Angelo in three days. He throws a dressing gown over his pajamas, steps into
slippers, and opens the door of his flat to reveal, predictably, a small,
prematurely withered man backed up by a couple of classic Gestapo killers in
long black leather coats.
"May I proffer an observation?" says Rudy von Hacklheber.
"But of course, Herr Doktor Professor. As long as it is not a state
secret, of course."
"In the old days the early days when no one knew what the Gestapo was,
and no one was afraid of it, this four in the morning business was clever. A
fine way to exploit man's primal fear of the darkness. But now it is 1942,
almost 1943, and everyone is afraid of the Gestapo. Everyone. More than they
are of the dark. So, why don't you work during the daytime? You are stuck in
a rut."
The bottom half of the withered man's face laughs. The top half doesn't
change. "I will pass your suggestion up the chain of command," he says.
"But, Herr Doktor, we are not here to instill fear. We have come at this
inconvenient time because of the train schedules."
"Am I to understand that I am getting on a train?"
"You have a few minutes," the Gestapo man says, pulling back a cuff to
divulge a hulking Swiss chronometer. Then he invites himself in and begins
to pace up and down in front of Rudy's bookshelves, hands clasped behind his
back, bending at the waist to peer at the titles. He seems disappointed to
find that they are all mathematical texts not a single copy of the
Declaration of Independence in evidence, though you can never tell when a
copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion might be hidden between the
pages of a mathematical journal. When Rudy emerges, dressed but still
unshaven, he finds the man displaying a pained expression while trying to
read Turing's dissertation on the Universal Machine. He looks like a lower
primate trying to fly an aeroplane.
Half an hour later, they are at the train station. Rudy looks up at the
departures board as they go in, and memorizes its contents, so that he will
be able to deduce, from the track number, whether he's being taken in the
direction of Leipzig or Konigsberg or Warsaw.
It is a clever thing to do, but it turns out to be a waste of effort,
because the Gestapo men lead him to a track that is not listed on the board.
A short train waits there. It does not contain any boxcars, a relief to
Rudy, since he thinks that during the last few years he may have glimpsed
boxcars that appeared to be crammed full of human beings. These glimpses
were brief and surreal, and he cannot really sort out whether they really
happened, or were merely fragments of nightmares that got filed in the wrong
cranial drawer.
But all of the cars on this train have doors, guarded by men in
unfamiliar uniforms, and windows, shrouded on the inside with shutters and
heavy curtains. The Gestapo lead him to a coach door without breaking
stride, and just like that, he is through. And he is alone. No one checks
his papers, and the Gestapo do not enter behind him. The door is closed
behind his back.
Doktor Rudolf von Hacklheber is standing in a long skinny car decorated
like the anteroom of an upper class whorehouse, with Persian runners on the
polished hardwood floor, heavy furniture upholstered in maroon velvet, and
curtains so thick that they look bulletproof. At one end of the coach, a
French maid hovers over a table set with breakfast: hard rolls, slices of
meat and cheese, and coffee. Rudy's nose tells him that it is real coffee,
and the smell draws him down to the end of the car. The maid pours him a cup
with trembling hands. She has plastered thick foundation beneath her eyes to
conceal dark circles, and (he realizes, as she hands him the cup) she has
also painted it onto her wrists.
Rudy savors the coffee, stirring cream into it with a golden spoon
bearing the marque of a French family. He strolls up and down the length of
the car, admiring the art on the walls: a series of Dürer engravings, and,
unless his eyes deceive him, a couple of pages from a Leonardo da Vinci
codex.
The door opens again and a man enters clumsily, as if thrown on board,
and ends up sprawled over a velvet settee. By the time Rudy recognizes him,
the train has already begun to pull out of the station.
"Angelo!" Rudy sets his coffee down on an end table and throws himself
into the arms of his beloved.
Angelo returns the embrace weakly. He stinks, and he shudders
uncontrollably. He is wearing a coarse, dirty, pajamalike garment, and is
wrapped up in a grey wool blanket. His wrists are encircled by half scabbed
lacerations embedded in fields of yellow green bruises.
"Don't worry about it, Rudy," Angelo says, clenching and opening his
fists to prove that they still work. "They were not kind to me, but they
took care with my hands."
"Thou canst still fly?"
"I can still fly. But that is not why they were so careful with my
hands."
"Why, then?"
"Without hands, a man cannot sign a confession."
Rudy and Angelo gaze into each other's eyes. Angelo looks sad,
exhausted, but still has some kind of serene confidence about him. Like a
baptizing priest ready to receive the infant, he holds up his hands. He
silently mouths the words: But I can still fly!
A suit of clothes is brought in by a valet. Angelo cleans up in one of
the coach's lavatories. Rudy tries to peer out between the curtains, but
heavy shutters have been pulled down over the windows. They breakfast
together as the train maneuvers through the switching yards of greater
Berlin, perhaps working its way around some bombed out sections of track,
and finally accelerates into the open territory beyond.
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring makes his way through the car, headed
towards the rear of the train, where the most ornate coach is located. His
body is about as big as the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus tent
sized Chinese silk robe, the sash of which drags on the floor behind him,
like a leash trailing behind a dog. He has the largest belly of any man Rudy
has ever seen, and it is covered with golden hair that deepens as the belly
curves under, until it becomes a tawny thicket that completely conceals his
genitals. He is not really expecting to see two men sitting here eating
breakfast, but seems to consider Rudy and Angelo's presence here to be one
of life's small anomalies, not really worth noticing. Given that Göring is
the number two man in the Third Reich the designated successor to Hitler
himself Rudy and Angelo really should jump to attention and give him a "Heil
Hitler!" But they are too stunned to move. Göring stumbles down the middle
of the coach, paying them no mind. Halfway down, he begins talking, but he's
talking to himself, and his words are slurred. He slams open the door at the
end of the coach and proceeds into the next car.
Two hours later, a doctor in a white coat passes through, headed for
Göring's coach, carrying a silver tray with a white linen cloth on it.
Tastefully arrayed on this, like caviar and champagne, are a blue bottle and
a glass hypodermic syringe.
Half an hour after that, an aide in a Luftwaffe uniform passes through
carrying a sheaf of papers, and favors Rudy and Angelo with a crisp "Heil,
Hitler!"
Another hour goes by, and then Rudy and Angelo are escorted back
through the train by a servant. The coach at the rear of the train is darker
and more gentlemanly than the florid parlor where they have been cooling
their heels. It is paneled in darkly stained wood and contains an actual
desk a baronial monstrosity carved out of a ton of Bavarian oak. At the
moment, its sole function is to support a single sheet of paper, hand
written, and signed at the bottom. Even from a distance, Rudy recognizes
Angelo's handwriting.
They have to walk past the desk in order to reach Göring, who is spread
across an equally massive couch at the end of the car, underneath a Matisse,
and flanked between a couple of Roman busts on marble pedestals. He is
dressed in red leather jodhpurs, red leather boots, a red leather uniform
jacket, a red leather riding crop with a fat diamond set into the butt of
the handle. Bracelet sized gold rings, infected with big rubies, grip his
pudgy fingers. A red leather officer's cap is perched on his head, with a
gold death's head, with ruby eyes, centered above the bill. All of this is
illuminated only by a few striations of dusty light that have forced their
way in through tiny crevices between curtains and shutters; the sun is up
now, but Göring's blue eyes, dilated to dime sized pits by the morphine,
cannot face it. He has his cherry colored boots up on an ottoman; no doubt
he has trouble with circulation in his legs. He is drinking tea from a
thimble sized porcelain cup, encrusted with gold leaf, looted from a chateau
somewhere. Heavy cologne fails to mask his odor: bad teeth, intestinal
trouble, and necrotizing hemorrhoids.
"Good morning, gentlemen," he says brightly. "Sorry to have kept you
waiting. Heil Hitler! Would you like some tea?"
There is small talk. It goes on at length. Göring is fascinated with
Angelo's work as a test pilot. Not only that, he has any number of peculiar
ideas adapted from the Bavarian Illuminati, and is groping for some way to
tie these in with higher mathematics. Rudy is afraid, for a while, that this
task is about to be placed on his shoulders. But even Göring himself seems
impatient with this phase of the conversation. Once or twice he reaches out
with his riding crop to part a curtain slightly.
The outdoor light seems to cause him appalling pain and he quickly
looks away.
But finally the train slows, maneuvers through more switches, and
coasts to a gentle stop. They can see nothing, of course. Rudy strains his
ears, and thinks he hears activity around them: many feet marching, and
commands being shouted. Göring catches the eye of an aide and waves his
riding crop towards the desk. The aide springs forward, snatches up the
handwritten document, and bears it over to the Reichsmarschall, presenting
it with a small, neat bow. Göring reads through it quickly. Then he looks up
at Rudy and Angelo and makes tut tut tut noises, shaking his gigantic head
from side to side. Various layers of jowls, folds, and wattles follow,
always a few degrees out of phase. "Homosexuality," Göring says. "You must
be aware of the Führer's policy regarding this sort of behavior." He holds
up the sheet and shakes it. "Shame on you! Both of you. A test pilot who is
a guest in our country, and an eminent mathematician working on great
secrets. You must have known that the Sicherheitsdienst would get wind of
this." He heaves an exhausted sigh. "How am I going to patch this up?"
When Göring says this, Rudy knows for the first time since the knock on
his door that he is not going to die today. Göring has som