“I’m telling you to bring us about. Turn the Val around and point her toward Saint Paul’s Rocks.”
“You seem to have forgotten who’s commanding this operation.”
“And you seem to have forgotten who’s paying for it. Don’t imagine you can’t be replaced, sir. If the cardinals hear you neglected an obvious Christian duty, they won’t hesitate to airlift in a new skipper.”
“I think we should talk in my cabin.”
“I think we should bring the ship about.”
Van Horne raised the binoculars and, inverting them, looked at Thomas through the wrong ends, as if by diminishing the priest’s size he could also diminish his authority.
“Joe.”
“Sir?”
“I want you to plot us a new course.”
“Destination?”
Mouth hardening, eyes narrowing, Van Horne slid the binoculars into their canvas bin. “That guano farm in the middle of the Atlantic.”
“Good,” said Thomas. “Very good,” he added, wondering how, exactly, he would justify this detour to Di Luca, Orselli, and Pope Innocent XIV. “Believe me, Anthony, acts of compassion are the only epitaph He wants.”
DIRGE
WHEN CASSIE FOWLER awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?
It was, of course, a pious place. A small ceramic Christ with blue eyes and cherry red lips hung bleeding on the far wall. A gaunt, rawboned priest hovered by her pillow. At the foot of her bed a large man loomed, his gray beard and broken nose evoking every Old Testament prophet she’d ever taught herself to mistrust.
“You’re looking much better.” The priest rested his palm against her blistered cheek. “I’m afraid there’s no physician on board, but our chief mate believes you’re suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion combined with dehydration and a bad sunburn. We’ve been buttering you with Noxzema.”
Gradually, like cotton candy dissolving in a child’s mouth, the fog evaporated from Cassie’s mind. On board, he’d said. Chief mate, he’d said.
“I’m on a ship?”
The priest gestured toward the prophet. “The SS Valparaíso, under the command of Captain Anthony Van Horne. Call me Father Thomas.”
Memories came. Maritime Adventures… Beagle II … Hurricane Beatrice… Saint Paul’s Rocks. “The famous Valparaíso? The oil-spill Valparaíso?”
“The Carpco Valparaíso,” said the captain frostily.
As Cassie sat up, the medicinal stench of camphor filled her nostrils. Pain shot through her shoulders and thighs: the terrible bite of the equatorial sun, her red skin screaming beneath its coating of Noxzema. Good God, she was alive, a winner, a golden girl, a beater of the odds. “How come I’m not thirsty?”
“When you weren’t babbling your brains out,” said the priest, “you consumed nearly a gallon of fresh water.”
The captain stepped into the light, holding out a tangerine. He was better looking than she’d initially supposed, with a Byronesque forehead and the sort of sorrowful, vulnerable virility commonly found in male soap-opera stars on their way down.
“Hungry?”
“Famished.” Receiving the tangerine, Cassie worked her thumb into its north pole, then began peeling it. “Did I really babble?”
“Quite a bit,” said Van Horne.
“About what?”
“Norway rats. Your father died of emphysema. In your youth you wrote plays. Oliver — your boyfriend, we presume — fancies himself a painter.”
Cassie grunted, half from astonishment, half from annoyance. “Fancies himself a painter,” she corroborated.
“You’re not sure you want to marry him.”
“Well, who’s ever sure?”
The captain shrugged.
She broke off a quadrisphere of tangerine and chewed. The pulp tasted sweet, wet, crisp — alive. She savored the word, the holy vocable. Alive, alive.
“Alive,” she said aloud, and even before the second syllable passed her lips, she felt her exhilaration slipping away. “Thirty-three passengers,” she muttered, her voice at once mournful and bitter. “Ten sailors…”
Father Thomas nodded empathically. His eyebrows, she noticed, extended onto the bridge of his nose, meshing like two gray caterpillars in the act of kissing. “It’s tragic,” he said.
“God killed them with His hurricane,” she said.
“God had nothing to do with it.”
“Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” said the priest cryptically.
Cassie finished her tangerine. In her irreverent sequel to Job, the hero’s mistress kept repeating a line from the original, over and over. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
“This your cabin?” she asked, pointing to the ceramic Christ.
“Was. I’ve moved.”
“You forgot your crucifix.”
“I left it here on purpose,” said Father Thomas without elaboration.
“Excuse my ignorance,” said Cassie, “but do oil tankers normally carry clergy?”
“This isn’t a normal voyage, Dr. Fowler.” The priest’s eyes grew wide and wild, darting every which way like bees who’d lost track of their hive. “Abnormal, in fact.”
“Once our mission’s accomplished,” said the captain, “we’ll ferry you back to the States.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“For the next nine weeks,” said Van Horne, “you’ll be our guest.”
Cassie scowled, her broiled body hardening with confusion and anger. “Nine weeks? Nine weeks? No, folks, I start teaching at the end of August.”
“Sorry.”
“Send for a helicopter, okay?” Slowly, like some heroic, evolution-minded fish hauling itself onto dry land, she rose from the berth, and only after her feet touched the green shag carpet did she bother to wonder whether she was clothed. “Do you understand?” Looking down, she saw that someone had swapped her bikini for a kimono printed with zodiac signs. Glued by Noxzema, the silk stuck to her skin in large amorphous patches. “I want you to charter me an International Red Cross helicopter, the sooner the better.”
“I’m not authorized to report our position to the International Red Cross,” said Van Horne.
“Please — my mother, she’ll go nuts,” Cassie protested, not knowing whether to sound desperate or furious. “Oliver, too. Please…”
“We’ll allow you one brief message home.”
An old scenario, and Cassie hated it, the patriarchy wielding its power. Yeah, lady, I think we might eventually get around to fixing your reduction gear, as if you knew what the hell a reduction gear is. “Where’s the phone?”
Blue veins bulged from Van Horne’s brow. “We’re not offering you a phone, Dr. Fowler. The Valparaíso isn’t some farmhouse you stumbled into after getting a flat tire.”
“So what are you offering me?”
“All communication goes through our radio shack up on the bridge.”
A spasm of sunburn pain tore through Cassie’s neck and back as she followed Father Thomas down a gleaming mahogany corridor and into the sudden claustrophobia of an elevator car. She closed her eyes and grimaced.
“Who’s Runkleberg?” the priest asked as they ascended.
“I babbled about Runkleberg? I haven’t thought of him in years.”
“Another boyfriend?”
“A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg’s my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he’s out watering his roses, and he hears God’s voice telling him to sacrifice his son.”
“Does he obey?”
“His wife intervenes.”
“How?”
“She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.”
The priest gulped audibly. The elevator halted on the seventh floor.