“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.
“Even you could find it, Tommy,” the kid called after him. “Even you!”
As the shabby and foul-smelling taxi pulled up to 625 West Forty-second Street, Oliver realized they were only a block away from Playwrights Horizons, the theater where his personal favorite among Cassie’s plays, Runkleberg, had premiered on a double bill with his least favorite, God Without Tears. Lord, what a sexy genius she was. For her he would do anything. For Cassandra he would rob a bank, walk on burning coals, blow God to Kingdom Come.
Viewed from the sidewalk, the New York offices of Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society looked like just another Manhattan storefront, indistinguishable from a dozen such establishments occupying the civilized side of Eighth Avenue, that asphalt DMZ beyond which the sex shops and peep shows had not yet advanced. The instant the three atheists entered, however, a curious displacement occurred. Stumbling into the dark foyer, attache case swinging at his side, Oliver felt as if he’d tumbled through time and landed in the private chambers of a nineteenth-century railroad magnate. A Persian rug absorbed his footfalls. A full-length, gilt-edged mirror rose before him, flanked by luminous cut-glass globes straight from the age of gaslight. A massive grandfather clock announced the hour, four P.M., tolling with such languor as to suggest its true purpose lay not in keeping time but in exhorting people to slow down and savor life.
They were met by a tall, swan-necked woman in a Mary Astor fedora and a sky blue business suit with padded shoulders, and while she was obviously too young to be Pembroke and Flume’s mother, she treated the atheists less like clients than like a gang of neighborhood boys who’d come over to play with her own children. “I’m Eleanor,” she said, leading them into a small paneled office, blessedly air-conditioned. Posters decorated the walls. PEMBROKE AND FLUME PRESENT BATTLE OF THE BULGE (the four Ts formed by the muzzles of tank cannons)… PEMBROKE AND FLUME PRESENT ATTACK ON TOBRUK (cut into the battlements of a fortified harbor)… PEMBROKE AND FLUME PRESENT FIGHT FOR IWO JIMA (written in blood on a sand dune). “I’ll bet you fellas would like something cold and wet.” Eleanor ambled over to an early-forties Frigidaire icebox and opened the door to reveal a slew of classic labels: Ruppert, Rheingold, Ballantine, Pabst Blue Ribbon. “New beer in old bottles,” she explained. “Budweiser, in fact, from the bodega around the corner.
“I’ll take a Rheingold,” said Oliver. “Pabst for me,” said Barclay.
“Ah, the pseudo-choices of late capitalism,” said Winston. “Make mine a Ballantine.”
“Sidney and Albert are in the back parlor, listening to their favorite program.” Eleanor removed the beers, popping the caps with a hand-painted Jimmy Durante opener. “Second door on the left.”
As Oliver entered the parlor in question — a dark, snug sanctum decorated with pinup photos of Esther Williams and Betty Grable — a high, attenuated male voice greeted him: “…where they discovered that Dr. Seybold had perfected his cosmo-tomic energizer. Listen now as Jack and Billy investigate that lonely stone house known as the Devil’s Castle.”
Two pale young men sat on opposite ends of a green velvet sofa, holding Rupperts and leaning toward a Chippendale coffee table on which rested an antique cathedral radio, its output evidently being supplied by the adjacent audiocassette player. Noticing their visitors, one man slipped a cigarette from a yellowing pack of Chesterfields while the other stood up, bowed politely, and shook Barclay’s hand.
On the radio, a teenaged boy said, “Great whales and little fishes, Jack! Can you imagine some foreign nation having all that electrical energy for nothing? We’ll be reduced to a pauper country!”
Barclay made the introductions. Because the moniker “Pembroke and Flume” seemed to suggest a cinematic comedy team whose trademarks included the physical disparity between its members — Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy — Oliver was taken aback by the impresarios’ similarity to each other. They could have been brothers, or even fraternal twins, a notion underscored by the matching red-and-black-striped zoot suits hanging from their elongated frames: Giacometti bodies, Oliver, the artist, decided. Both men had the same blue eyes, gold fillings, and blond pomaded hair, and it was only through concentrated effort that he distinguished Sidney Pembroke’s open, smiling countenance from the more austere, vaguely sinister visage of Albert Flume.