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.
“Death,” he echoed, dropping the Ben-Gurion medal. The bronze disc bounced off the rim of the bucket and clanked against the steel floor. “Death by Zyklon-B.”
“Huh?” said Kommandant Zook.
Neil’s brain was airborne, hovering outside his skull, bobbing around on the end of his spinal cord like a meat balloon. “I know your game, Kommandant. ‘Lock those prisoners in the showers! Turn on the Zyklon-B!’ ”
Like spiders descending on silvery threads, a pair of Dragen rigs floated down from the weather deck. Caught in the beam of Neil’s hard-hat lamp, the oxygen tanks glowed a brilliant orange. The black masks and blue hoses spun wildly, intertwining. Lunging forward, he flexed his unfeeling fingers and began loosening the rubbery knot.
“Zyklon what?” said Zook.
Neil freed up a pear-shaped mask. Frantically he strapped it in place. He reached out, arched his fingers around the valve, rotated his wrist. Stuck. He tried again. Stuck. Again. It moved! Half an inch. An inch. Two. Air! Closing his eyes, he inhaled, sucking the sweetness through his mouth — nose — pores. Air, glorious oxygen, an invisible poultice drawing the poison from his brain.
He opened his eyes. Kommandant Zook sat on the floor, skin pale as a mushroom, lips fluted in a moan. One hand held his mask in place. The other rested atop the tank, curled over the valve like a gigantic tick in the act of siphoning blood.
“Help me.”
It took Neil several seconds to grasp Zook’s predicament. The Nazi was completely immobile, frozen by some dreadful combination of brain damage and fear.
“Plague,” said Neil. Dragging his oxygen tank behind him, he hobbled to Zook’s side.
“P-please.”
Freedom rushed through Neil like a hit of cocaine. YHWH wasn’t watching. No eyes on Neil. He could do whatever he felt like. Open the Kommandant’s valve — or cut his hose in two. Give him a shot of oxygen from the functioning rig — or spit in his face. Anything. Nothing.
“Famine,” said Neil.
The Kommandant stopped moaning. His jaw went slack. His eyes turned dull and milky, as if made of quartz.
“War,” Neil whispered to Leo Zook’s corpse.
From his breast pocket he drew out his Swiss Army knife. He pinched the spear blade, rotated it outward. He clenched the red handle; he stabbed; the blade pierced the rubber as easily as if it were soap. Laughing, reveling in his freedom, he carved a long, ragged incision along the axis of the Nazi’s hose.
“Death.”
Neil crouched beside the suffocated man, drank the delicious oxygen, and listened to the slow, steady thunder of the retreating horsemen.
PLAGUE
FOR OLIVER SHOSTAK, learning that the illusory deity of Judeo-Christianity had once actually inhabited the heavens and the earth, running reality and dictating the Bible, was hands-down the worst experience of his life. On the scale of disillusionment, it far outranked his deduction at age five that Santa Glaus was a mountebank, his discovery at seventeen that his father was routinely screwing the woman who boarded the family’s Weimaraners, and the judgment he’d suffered on his thirty-second birthday when he’d asked the curator of the Castelli Gallery in SoHo to exhibit the highlights of his abstract-expressionist period. (“The great drawback of these paintings,” the stiff-necked old lady had replied, “is that they aren’t any good.”) But the fruits of Pamela Harcourt’s recent expedition could not be denied: a dozen full-color photographs, each showing a large, male, grinning, supine body being towed by its ears northward through the Atlantic Ocean. The 30 X 40 blowups hung in the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall like ancestral portraits — which, in a manner of speaking, they were.