Able Seaman Karl Jaworski insisted he gave Isabel Bostwick “nothing but a friendly good-night kiss.” Then I talked to the woman, a wiper, and she showed me her cuts and bruises, and after that two others came forward, An-mei Jong and Juanita Torres, with similar marks and similar complaints about Jaworski. I stuck him in the cell next to Wheatstone.
Until 48 hours ago, nobody had ever died on a vessel under my command.
Leo Zook. An AB. Poor bastard caught a lethal dose of hydrocarbon gas while cleaning out number 2 center tank. Now here’s the really troubling part. The hose of his Dragen rig was cut to pieces, and when Rafferty arrived on the scene, Zook’s mucking partner — Neil Weisinger, that nervy kid who manned the helm during Beatrice — was crouching beside the body holding a Swiss Army knife.
Whenever I stand outside Weisinger’s cell and ask him to tell what happened, he just laughs.
“The corpse is taking hold,” is how Ockham explains our situation. “Not the corpse per se, the idea of the corpse — that’s our great enemy, that’s the source of this disorder. In the old days,” says the padre, “whether you were a believer, a nonbeliever, or a confused agnostic, at some level, conscious or unconscious, you felt God was watching you, and the intuition kept you in check. Now a whole new era is upon us.”
“New era?” I say.
“Anno Postdomini One,” he says.
The Idea of the Corpse. Anno Postdomini One. Sometimes I think Ockham’s losing it, sometimes I think he’s dead right. I hate locking up my own crew, especially with His carotid artery still unbreached and the sharks running so thick, but what other choice do I have? I fear that we’re a plague ship, Popeye. Our cargo’s gotten inside us, sporing and spawning, and I’m no longer certain who’s towing whom.
A profound sense of regret fell upon Thomas Ockham as, dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Levi Strauss jeans, he descended the narrow ladder to the Valparaíso’s makeshift brig. This, he decided, is how he should have spent his life — collar off, moving among the rejected and the jailed, siding with the world’s outcasts. Jesus hadn’t wasted His time worrying about superstrings or some eternally elusive TOE. The Master had gone where needed.
Lower than the pump room, lower even than the engine flat, the cells were strung along an obscure starboard passageway crowded with shielded cables and perspiring pipes. Thomas advanced at a crouch. The three prisoners were invisible, locked behind riveted steel doors improvised from boiler plates. Slowly, haltingly, the priest moved down the row, past the vandal Wheatstone and the lecher Jaworski, pausing before the case he found most disturbing, Able Seaman Neil Weisinger.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Thomas had contacted Rome. “In your opinion, does our current ethical disarray trace to some palpable force generated by the process of divine decay,” ran his fax’s final sentence, “or to some subjective psychological effect spawned by theothanatopsis, that is, to the Idea of the Corpse?”
To which Tullio Di Luca had replied, “How much travel time do you estimate will be lost to this development?”
Outside the cell, Big Joe Spicer sat on an aluminum folding chair, a flare pistol strapped menacingly to his shoulder and a Playboy centerfold lying open on his lap.
“Hello, Joe. I’m here to see Weisinger.”
Spicer scowled. “Why?”
“A troubled soul.”
“Nah, he’s happy as a clam at high tide.” The second mate jabbed a dull brass skeleton key into the lock, twisting it suddenly like a race-car driver starting his engine. “Listen. The kid makes any threatening gestures” — he patted the flare pistol — “you let out a holler, and I’ll come set his face on fire.”
“I don’t see you at Mass anymore.”
“It’s like fucking, Father. You gotta be up for it.”
Stepping inside the cell, Thomas nearly gagged on the smell, a noxious brew of sweat, urine, and chemically treated feces. Naked to the waist, Weisinger lay atop his bunk, staring upward like a victim of premature burial contemplating the lid of his coffin.
“Hello, Neil.”
The kid rolled over. His eyes were the dull matted gray of expired light bulbs. “Whaddya want?”
“To talk.”
“About what?”
“About what happened in number two center tank.”
“You got any cigarettes?” asked Weisinger.
“Didn’t know you were a smoker,” said Thomas.
“I’m not. You got any?”
“No.”
“Sure could use a cigarette. A Jew-hater died.”
“Zook hated Jews?”
“He thinks we murdered Jesus. God. One of those people. What day is this, anyway? You lose all sense of time down here.”
“Wednesday, July twenty-ninth, noon. Did you kill him?”
“God. Nope. Zook? Wanted to.” Weisinger climbed off his bunk and, staggering to the bulkhead, knelt beside his cistern, a battered copper kettle filled with water the color of Abbaye de Scourmont ale. “Ever known a moment of pure, white-hot clarity, Father Tom? Ever stood over a suffocating man with a Swiss Army knife clutched in your fist? It clears all the cobwebs out of your brain.”
“You cut Zook’s hose?”
“Of course I cut his hose.” The kid splashed his doughy chest with handfuls of dirty water. “But maybe he was already dead, ever think of that?”
“Was he?” asked Thomas.
“What difference would it make?”
“Big difference.”
“Not these days. The cat’s away, Tommy. No eyes on us. The Tablets of the Law: fizz, fizz, gone, like two Alka Seltzers dissolving in a glass of water. Be honest, don’t you feel it too? Don’t you find yourself dreaming of your friend Miriam and her world-class tits?”
“I won’t pretend things haven’t gotten confusing around here.” Thomas gritted his teeth so hard a tingling arose in his right middle ear. His musings concerning Sister Miriam had indeed been intense of late, including the features specified by Weisinger. He’d even, heaven help him, given them names. “I’ll admit the Idea of the Corpse threatens this ship.” Wendy and Wanda. “I’ll admit we’re in the throes of Anno Postdomini One.”
“Fizz, fizz — I can think any damn thought I want. I can think about picking up a Black and Decker needle gun and drilling my Aunt Sarah’s eyes out. I’m free, Tommy.”
“You’re in the brig.”
Weisinger dipped a Carpco coffee mug into the cistern and, raising the water to his lips, drank. “You wanna know why I scare you?”
“You don’t scare me.” The kid terrified Thomas.
“I scare you because you look at me and you see that anybody here on the Val could find the freedom I’ve got. Joe Spicer out there could find it. Rafferty could find it. Sure you don’t have a cigarette?”
“Sorry.” Thomas sidled toward the door and paused, transfixed by the steel rivets; they were pathological and obscene, boils on the back of some leprous robot. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this sort of work. Maybe he’d better stick with quantum mechanics and his meditations on why God died. He looked at Weisinger and said, “Does it help, talking with me like this?”
“O’Connor could find it.”
“Does it help?”
“Haycox could find it.”
“Anytime you get the urge to talk, just have Spicer send for me.”
“Captain Van Horne could find it.”
“I really want to help you,” said the priest, rushing blindly out of the cell.