Accepting both the mike and the Jerusalem Bible from Cassie, Father Thomas ran through the rest of the modified liturgy. “Before we go our separate ways, let us take leave of our Creator. May our farewell express our love for Him. May it ease our sadness and strengthen our hope. Now please join me in reciting the words Christ taught us on that celebrated Mount in Judea: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come…’ ”
While the Maracaibo’s company prayed, Cassie scanned their smiling cargo, pondering its myriad misfortunes. The voyage had not been kind to God. Nearly a sixth of the right breast had been plundered for fillets. Demolition-bomb craters scarred the belly. Torpedo holes pocked the neck. The chin appeared to have been shaved with a blowtorch. Head to toe, the bites of predators and the ravages of ice alternated with vast swampy tracts of decay. A Martian happening upon the scene would never guess that the thing these mourners were entombing had once been their principal deity.
“…and the power and the glory. Amen.”
As Lou Chickering broke from the crowd and strode across the pier, tears sparkling in his eyes, Cassie recalled the many times she’d heard his mellifluous baritone drifting upward from the engine flat, reciting a soliloquy or belting out an aria. Reaching the shore of the encapsulated bay, the gorgeous sailor threw back his head and sang.
Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home, Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin for to carry me home.
Now the entire company joined in, over a hundred voices melding into a thunderous dirge that reverberated off the great frozen dome.
I looked over Jordan, an’ what did I see, Comin’ for to carry me home? A band of angels comin’ after me, Comin’ for to carry me home.
“All right, Professor Ockham, you win,” said Di Luca, stroking his stole. “This was all meant to be, wasn’t it?”
“I believe so.”
Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home…
“Tonight I’ll compose a letter.” The cardinal steadied himself on the bridge rail. “I’ll tell Rome the corpse was incinerated as per the consistory’s wishes — and then, with Van Horne’s permission, I’ll send it.”
“Don’t bother,” said Father Thomas. “Three hours ago you faxed the Holy Father just such a message.”
“What?”
“I don’t like situational ethics any more than you do, Tullio, but these are troubled times. Your signature’s not hard to forge. It’s fastidious and crisp. The nuns taught you well.”
If you get there before I do, Comin’ for to carry me home, Jes’ tell my friends that I’m a-comin’ too, Comin’ for to carry me home.
Cassie wasn’t sure which aspect of this exchange disturbed her more: Father Thomas’s descent into expedience, or her realization that Rome was not about to finish the job Oliver had so badly botched.
Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home…
The cardinal glowered but said nothing. Thomas kissed his Bible. Cassie closed her eyes, allowing the spiritual to coil through her unquiet soul, and by the time the last echo of the last syllable had died away, she knew that no being, supreme or otherwise, had ever received a more sonorous send-off to the dark, icy gates of oblivion.
The Maracaibo sailed southeast, crashing through the Arctic Ocean at a brisk sixteen knots as she headed toward the coast of Russia. For Thomas Ockham, the mood aboard the tanker was difficult to decipher. Naturally the sailors were delighted to be going home, but beneath their happiness he sensed acute melancholy and a grief past understanding. On the night of their departure from Kvitoya, a dozen or so off-duty deckies gathered in the rec room for a kind of eschatological hootenanny, and soon the entire superstructure was resounding with “Rock of Ages,” “Kum-Ba-Yah,” “Go Down Moses,” “Amazing Grace,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” The next day at noon, Thomas celebrated Mass as usual, and for the first time ever a whopping ninety percent of available Christians showed up.
As it turned out, the port of Murmansk boasted a deep-water mooring platform, the sort of rig that allowed a tanker to discharge her cargo directly into seabed pipes without entering harbor. Van Horne arranged the transaction over the ship-to-shore radio, and within four hours of hooking up, the Maracaibo had been pumped dry. Although the Russians could not comprehend why the Catholic Church was giving them eight million gallons of Arabian crude oil for free, they quickly stopped looking this gift horse in the mouth. Winter was coming.
On the morning of September 25, as the Maracaibo drew near the Hebrides, the urge to think overcame Thomas. He knew just what to do. Early in the voyage, he’d discovered that a supertanker’s central catwalk was the perfect place for contemplation, as conducive to quietude as a monastery arcade. One slow march down its length and back, and he had effectively penetrated some great mystery — why existing TOE equations failed to accommodate gravity, why the universe contained more matter than antimatter, why God had died. A second such march, and he had ruthlessly generated a thousand reasons for calling his answer invalid.
Tall, choppy waves surrounded the Maracaibo. Walking aft, Thomas imagined himself as Moses leading the escaping Hebrews across the Red Sea basin, guiding them past the slippery rocks and bewildered fish, a cliff of suspended water towering on each side. But Thomas did not feel like Moses just then. He did not feel like any sort of prophet. He felt like the universe’s stooge, a man who could barely solve a riddle on a Happy Meal box, much less derive a Theory of Everything or crack the conundrum of his Creator’s passing.
A cosmic assassination?
An unimaginable supernatural virus?
A broken heart?
He looked to port.
The derelict bore the name Regina Marts: an old-style freighter with deckhouses both amidships and aft, dead in the water and drifting aimlessly through the Scottish mist like some phantom frigate out of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. By 1400 Thomas was ascending her gangway, Marbles Rafferty right behind. The cold fog enshrouded them, turning their breath to vapor and roughening their skin with goose bumps.
As he stepped onto the main deck, Thomas saw that heaven’s very remnants had figured in the Regina’s ill-starred run. Evidently she’d been manned by cherubs. Their gray, bloated corpses lay everywhere — dozens of plump miniangels rotting atop the fo’c’sle, putrefying by the kingposts, suppurating on the quarterdeck. Tiny feathers danced on the North Sea breeze like snowflakes.
“Captain, it’s a pretty weird scene here,” said Rafferty into the walkie-talkie. “About forty dead children with wings on their backs.”
Van Horne’s voice sputtered from the speaker. “Children? Christ…”
“Let me talk to him,” Thomas insisted, appropriating the walkie-talkie. “Not children, Anthony. Cherubs.”
“Cherubs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No survivors?”
“I don’t think so. It’s amazing they got this far north.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Van Horne.
“When cherubs come,” said Thomas, “angels can’t be far behind.”
Pitted with rust, pocked with corrosion, the Regina was in no better shape than her crew. It was as if she’d been scooped up and sucked upon by God Himself — smashed against His cuspids, burned with His saliva — then spit back into the sea. Thomas started into the amidships deckhouse, following a sharp, fruity odor of such intensity it overpowered the cherubs’ stench. His jugular veins throbbed. Blood pounded in his ears. The scent led him down a damp corridor, up a narrow companionway, and into a gloomy cabin.
On the far bulkhead hung Robert Campin’s masterful Annunciation — either a copy or the original from the Manhattan Cloisters, the priest didn’t know for sure. A lambent glow issued from the bunk. Thomas approached at the same respectful pace he’d employed three months earlier when greeting Pope Innocent XIV.