“Shit.”
“Cassie, friend, wouldn’t you say things have taken a pretty odd turn when the Holy Catholic Church and the Central Park West Enlightenment League want exactly the same thing?”
“I can live with that. Burn the sucker, honey. The world’s women will thank you for it.”
“I gave Raphael my word.”
“The way I heard it,” said Cassie, “Rome will dispatch more Gulf tankers if you don’t play ball. Surely you don’t want to be torpedoed again.”
“No, Doc, I don’t want that.” Swerving toward the wreck, Anthony raised the binoculars and focused. “Of course, I could always send the Pope a fax saying the body’s been torched.”
“You could…”
“But I won’t,” said Anthony crisply. “There’s been enough deception on this voyage.” Black waves washed across the Valparaíso’s weather deck, hurling chunks of pack ice against the superstructure. “Doc, I’ll make you a deal. If a Vatican armada intercepts us between here and Svalbard, I’ll surrender our cargo without a fight.”
“No showdowns?”
“No showdowns.”
Cassie moved her mouth, working the frozen muscles into a smile. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”
With a deep gurgle and an unearthly groan, the Valparaíso began to spin, north to east to south to west, round and round, her bow falling sharply, stirring the Greenland Current into a frothy whirlpool as her ten-ton rudder, Ferris wheel-size propellers, and mammoth keel rose into the air. Level by level, companionway by companionway, the superstructure descended — cabins, galleys, wardroom, wheelhouse, stacks, mast, Vatican flag — sliding into the maelstrom as if into the mouth of some unimaginable grouper, portholes blazing brightly even after they slipped beneath the waves.
“Farewell, old friend.” Anthony lifted his hand to his brow and fired off a forceful salute. “I’ll miss you,” he called across the ice-choked sea. The gannets screeched, the wind howled, the watery jaws whooshed closed. “You were the best of them all,” the captain told his ship as she began her final voyage, a slow, inexorable drop from the frothy surface of the Norwegian Sea to the inky blackness of the Mohns Trench, five thousand fathoms down.
CHILD
THE DIVINE FACE was still smoldering when the Maracaibo arrived on the scene, smoke wafting off His cheeks in thick black tendrils and drifting northwest toward Jan Mayen Island. Thousands of whisker stubs speckled the charred, exposed flesh of His lantern jaw, encircling the frosted lips and frozen smile, angling upward like the skeletal remains of a forest fire. God, Anthony saw, had become as beardless as he himself.
Despite the surplus of officers and seamen, it took the Maracaibo’s company all day to dredge up the severed chains, belt them around the superstructure, and splice the raw ends together. “Slow ahead,” Anthony ordered. The chains tightened, grinding against the deckhouse walls, but the foundation held fast, and the Corpus Dei moved forward. At 1830 hours the captain gave the all-ahead-full, gulped down his four hundred and twenty-sixth cup of coffee since New York, and set his course for the Pole.
Anthony did not like the Carpco Maracaibo. It was all he could do to squeeze five knots out of her; even if the burdensome oil in her hold magically disappeared, he doubted she’d give him more than six. She had no soul, this tanker. The archangels had truly known what they were doing when they picked the Valparaíso.
The night the tow began, Cassie took up residence in Anthony’s cabin, an environment made erotically tropical by the eighty-degree air Crock O’Connor was obligingly pumping in from the engine flat.
“I have to know something,” she said, guiding Anthony’s naked body onto the bunk. “If our Midway scheme had worked and God had gone under, would you have forgiven me?”
“That’s not a fair question.”
“True.” She began arraying him in a decorator Supersensitive — the best-selling barber pole design, second in popularity only to the diamondback rattlesnake. “What’s the answer?”
“I’d probably never have forgiven you,” said Anthony, enjoying the way the sweat filled her cleavage like a river flowing through a gorge. “I know that’s not the answer you wanted to hear, but…”
“But it’s the one I expected,” she confessed.
“Now I have to know something.” He plugged her ear with his tongue, swizzling it around. “Suppose another opportunity came along for you to destroy my cargo. Would you take it?”
“You bet I would.”
“You don’t have to answer right away.”
Laughing, Cassie unfurled the condom. “You’re surprised?”
“Not really,” he sighed. Slithering on top of her, he cupped her breasts like Jehovah molding the Andes. “You’re a woman with a mission, Doc. It’s what I love about you.”
The next morning, while Cassie was out helping to chip ice from the central catwalk and Anthony lay in their bunk writing about the death of the Valparaíso, filling his Popeye journal with page after page of angry lamentation, a knock reverberated through the cabin. He rolled off the mattress, opened the door. Crock O’Connor stepped inside, accompanied by spindly little Vince Mangione, the latter gripping a brass birdcage, lifting it level with his face as if deploying a hurricane lantern against a moonless night.
Inside the cage, a parrot stood on a trapeze, making quick jabs with its beak in hopes of killing the mites under its wings. The bird turned its scarlet head, fixing on Anthony. Its eyes were like tiny oiled bearings. At first he thought some sort of resurrection had occurred, for the similarity between this macaw and his boyhood pet, Rainbow, was uncanny, but on further inspection he realized the present parrot lacked Rainbow’s distinguishing marks — the peculiar hourglass shape on her beak, the small jagged scar on her right talon.
“Your father bought her in Palermo, right before we shipped out,” Mangione explained, setting the cage on the bunk.
“The engine flat made a fine home — all that steam,” said O’Connor. “But I’m sure she’ll do fine in your cabin.”
“Get her out of here,” said Anthony.
“What?”
“I want nothing that belonged to my father.”
“You don’t understand,” said Mangione. “He told me it was a present.”
“A present?”
Despite the Thanksgiving humiliation, the bottled Constitution, the malign neglect — despite everything, Anthony was touched. At last the old man was trying to make amends, restoring to his son the gift he’d taken away forty years earlier.
“We don’t know if your dad named her or not,” said O’Connor.
“What do you call her?”
“Pirate Jenny.”
“Leave her here,” said Anthony, returning Pirate Jenny’s unblinking stare. A sudden queasiness came. He half expected the parrot to say something sardonic and wounding, like Anthony left the bridge or Anthony fucked up.
As O’Connor started out of the cabin, Pirate Jenny squawked but produced no vocables. “I’m bored,” said the engineer, pausing in the jamb. He faced Anthony and frowned, crinkling the steam burn on his forehead. “The boilers around here are all on computers. There’s nothing for me to do.”
“The Val was an eyesore, hard to steer…”
“I know. I want her back.”
“Me too, Crock. I want her back too. Thanks for the bird.”
On September 21, a new variety of ice island appeared on the horizon, drifting southeast with the Greenland Current — glacier fragments so huge they made the Jan Mayen bergs seem like molehills. According to the Marisat, the Maracaibo was barely a day from her destination, but the prospect of journey’s end brought Anthony no pleasure. Eight men had died; the Val was in the Mohns Trench; the divine brain was garbage; his father would never absolve him. And for all Anthony knew, a Vatican armada now lay at anchor inside the tomb, ready to pirate his cargo.
“Froggy loves Tiffany.”
He was giving Cassie a backrub, pressing his palms against her beautiful flesh, vertebra after vertebra lined up like speed bumps, and for an instant he thought it was she who’d made the raspy little declaration.