“You mean you’re going to drain our Creator’s liquid essence into those filthy cargo tanks?”
I figured I should tell him the truth, even though I could see where he was heading. “Yes, Thomas, that’s one way to put it.”
“We’ll have to clear it with Rome.”
“No, we won’t.”
“Yes, we will.”
The Vatican got back to us in less than an hour.
“The synod has reached a consensus,” said somebody named Tullio Cardinal Di Luca. “Under no circumstances may His blood be defiled with secular oil. Before the transfusion, you must scrub the cargo tanks thoroughly.”
“Scrub them?” I moaned. “That’ll take two days!”
“Then we’d better start right now,” said the padre, simultaneously smiling and frowning.
Eat more yogurt, Neil Weisinger’s physician had advised him upon appraising the cramps, diarrhea, and general misery that had settled in his gut shortly after his twentieth birthday. Yogurt, Dr. Cinsavich had explained, would increase his acidophilus count and aid his digestion. Until that moment, Neil hadn’t even realized that his intestines housed bacteria, much less that the bugs performed a welfare function. And so he tried the yogurt cure, and while it didn’t work (he was in fact suffering from lactose intolerance, a condition he eventually conquered by abstaining from dairy products), he nevertheless came away with an intense respect for his internal ecosystem.
Four years after his visit to Dr. Cinsavich, as Neil climbed into number two center tank aboard the SS Carpco Valparaíso, he found himself identifying fiercely with the microbial proletariat teeming inside him. It was germs’ work, this thankless and malodorous business of scouring the ship’s innards, preparing them to receive God’s blood. Although the washing machine had done a good job, pulverizing the largest tarballs and flushing them away, there was still a considerable residue to harvest, gluey blobs of asphalt clinging to the ladders and catwalks like immense wads of discarded chewing gum. Gradually he descended — hand under hand, Leo Zook by his side — below the hawsepipes and the Plimsoll line, past the churning surface of the sea, deeper, ever deeper, into the hull. They scrubbed as they went, scooping up the gunk with their ladles and plopping it into a huge steel mucking bucket dangling beside them on a chain. Whenever the bucket became full, they broadcast the news via walkie-talkie to Eddie Wheatstone on the weather deck, and he winched the load aloft.
Grandfather Moshe, no doubt, would have found redemption in this drudgery. The old man actually liked crude oil. “Oil’s a fluid fossil,” he’d once lectured his ten-year-old grandson as they stood on the Baltimore docks watching a supertanker glide across the horizon. “Memories of the Permian, messages from the Cretaceous, crushed and cooked and turned to jam. That ship’s a pail of history, Neil. That ship carries liquid dinosaurs.”
Having Zook along only made things worse. In recent days the Evangelical’s piety had taken a truly ugly turn, degenerating into full-blown anti-Semitism. True, his mind was in upheaval, his soul in torment, his worldview in flames. But that was no excuse.
“Please understand, I don’t think you’re in any way responsible for this terrible thing that’s happened,” said Zook, sweat leaking from beneath his hard hat and trickling down his freckled face.
“That’s mighty gracious of you,” said Neil with a sneer. His voice reverberated madly in the great chamber, echoes of echoes of echoes.
“But if I had to point a finger, which is not my style, but if I had to point, all I could say is, ‘Your people killed God once before, so maybe they did it this time too.’ ”
“I don’t want to hear this shit, Leo.”
“I’m not talking about you personally.”
“Oh, yes, you are.”
“I’m talking about Jews in general.”
During their first hour in the tank, the midday sun lit their path, the bright golden shafts slanting through the open hatchway, but fifty feet down they had to switch on the electric lamps bolted atop their hard hats. The beams shot forward a dozen feet and vanished, swallowed by the darkness. Neil hacked a wad of mucus into his throat. He spit. A goddamn underwater coal miner, that’s what he was. How had this happened to him? Why had his life come to so little?
At last they reached the bottom — a grid of high steel walls flung outward from the keelson, dividing the tank into twenty gloomy bays, each the size of a two-car garage. Neil unhooked the bucket and took a deep breath. So far, so good: no hydrocarbon stink. Groping toward his utility belt, he snapped up the walkie-talkie.
“You with us, bos’n?” he radioed Eddie.
“Roger. How’s the weather down there?”
“Swell, I think, but be ready to bail us out, okay?”
“Gotcha.”
Mucking bucket at the ready, Neil began the inspection, crawling from compartment to compartment via the two-foot-long culverts cut into the bulkheads, Zook right behind. Bay one proved clean. Bay two held not a smudge. You could eat your lunch off the floor of three and blithely lick the walls of four. Five was the purest space yet, home to the washing machine itself, a conical mountain of pipes and nozzles rising over twenty feet. In six they finally found something worth removing, a glop of paraffin cleaving to a handgrip. They ladled it into the bucket and pressed on.
It happened the instant Neil stepped into bay seven. At first there was just the odor — the ghastly aroma of a ruptured gas bubble, drilling into his nose. Then came the tingling in his fingertips and the patterns in his head: silvery pinwheels, red mandalas, shooting stars. His stomach unhooked itself, plunging downward.
“Gas!” he screamed into the walkie-talkie. No doubt the malignant sphere had been waiting there for months, crouching in the prison of its own surface, and now the beast was out, popped free by Neil’s footfalls. “Gas!”
“Jesus!” wailed Zook.
“Gas!” Neil screamed again. “Eddie, we got gas down here!” He looked skyward. The hatchway drifted two hundred feet above his head, shimmering in the corrupted air like a harvest moon. “Drop the Dragens, Eddie! Bay seven!”
“Jesus Lord God!”
“Gas! Bay seven! Gas!”
“God!”
“Stay put, guys!” came Eddie’s voice, crackling out of the walkie-talkie. “The Dragens are coming!”
Both sailors were weeping now, tear ducts spasming, cheeks running with salt water. Neil’s flesh grew bumpy and numb. His tongue itched.
“Hurry!”
Zook tucked his thumb against his palm and uncurled his fingers. One… two… three… four.
Four. It was something you learned during seamanship training. A man gassed at the bottom of a cargo tank has four minutes to live.
“They’re coming,” said the Evangelical, choking on the words.
“The Dragens,” Neil agreed, reaching uncertainly into the side pocket of his overalls. His hands had taken on lives of their own, trembling like epileptic crabs.
“No, the horsemen,” Zook gasped, still holding up his fingers.
“Horsemen?”
“The four horsemen. Plague, famine, war, death.”
As Neil tore the Ben-Gurion medal free, a hot stream of half-digested Chicken McNuggets coursed up his windpipe. He vomited into the mucking bucket. What ship was this? The Carpco Valparaíso? No. The Argo Lykes? No. The rogue freighter on which Chief Mate Moshe Weisinger had borne fifteen hundred Jews to Palestine? No, not a merchant vessel of any sort. Something else. A floating concentration camp. Birkenau with a rudder. And here was Neil, trapped in a subsurface gas chamber as the Kommandant flooded it with Zyklon-B.