ere the first time he had ever
done it, but is the millionth time and so nothing registers. For example, he
sees two cars smashed together directly beneath a giant road sign that says
NO SWERVING, but he doesn't really take note.
Dear Randy,
The worst is over. Charlene and (more importantly) her lawyer seem to
have accepted, finally, that you are not sitting on top of a huge pile of
gold in the Philippines! Now that your imaginary millions are no longer
confusing the picture, we can figure out how to dispose of the assets you
actually have: primarily, your equity in the house. This would be much more
complicated if Charlene wanted to remain there, however it now appears that
she has landed that Yale job, which means that she is just as eager to
liquidate the house as you are. The question, then, will be how the proceeds
of the sale should be divided between you and her. Their position appears
(not surprisingly) to be that the huge increase in the house's value since
you bought it is a consequence of changes in the real estate market never
mind the quarter million you spent shoring up the foundation, replacing the
plumbing, etc., etc.
I assume you kept all of the receipts, cancelled checks and other proof
of how much money you spent on improvements, because that's the kind of guy
you are. It would help me very much if I could pull these out and wave them
around during my next round of discussions with Charlene's lawyer. Can you
produce them? I realize that this will be something of an inconvenience for
you. However, since you have invested most of your net worth into that
house, the stakes are high.
Randy puts the page into his breast pocket and begins planning a trip
to California.
Most of the ballroom dancing freaks in this town belong to the social
class that can afford cars and drivers. The cars are lined up all the way
down the hotel's drive and out into the street, waiting to discharge their
passengers, whose bright gowns are visible even through tinted windows.
Attendants blow whistles and gesture with their white gloves, vectoring cars
into the parking lot, where they are sintered into a tight mosaic. Some of
the drivers don't even bother getting out, and lean their seats back for a
nap. Others gather beneath a tree at one end of the lot to smoke, joke, and
shake their heads in dazed amusement at the world in the way that only your
hardened future shocked Third Worlders can.
Since he has been dreading this so much, you'd think Randy might just
sit back and savor the delay. But, like jerking a bandage off a hairy part
of the body, it is a deed best done quickly and suddenly. As they pull to a
stop at the back of the line of limos, he shoves money at his surprised
driver, opens the door, and walks the last block to the hotel. He can feel
the eyes of the gowned and perfumed Filipinas playing across his husky back
like laser sights on commandos' rifles.
Aging Filipinas in prom dresses have come and gone across the lobby of
the Manila Hotel for as long as Randy has known the place. He hardly noticed
them during the early months when he was actually living there. The first
time they appeared, he assumed that some function was underway in the grand
ballroom: perhaps a wedding, perhaps a class action suit being filed by
aging beauty contest contestants against the synthetic fibers industry. That
was about as far as he got before he stopped burning out his mental circuits
trying to figure everything out. Pursuing an explanation for every strange
thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of
rainwater out of a discarded tire.
The Shaftoes are not waiting by the door to tell him it was all a joke,
so Randy squares his shoulders and stomps doggedly across the vast lobby,
all alone, like a Confederate infantryman in Pickett's Charge, the last man
of his regiment. A photographer in a Ronald Reagan pompadour and a white
tuxedo is planted before the door to the grand ballroom, shooting pictures
of people on the way in, hoping that they will pay for copies on the way
out. Randy shoots him such a fell look that the man's shutter finger cringes
back from the button. Then it's through the big doors and into the ballroom,
where, beneath swirling, colored lights, hundreds of Filipinas are dancing,
mostly with much younger men, to the strains of a reprocessed Carpenters
tune generated by a small orchestra in the corner. Randy shells out some
pesos for a corsage of sampaguita flowers. Holding it at arm's length so
that he will not be plunged into a diabetic coma by its fumes, he commences
a Magellanian circumnavigation of the dance floor, which is surrounded by an
atoll of round tables that are adorned with white linen tablecloths,
candles, and glass ashtrays. A man with a thin mustache sits alone at one of
those tables, back against the wall, a cellphone against his head, one side
of his face illuminated fluoroscopically by the eerie green light of its
keypad. A cigarette juts from his fist.
Grandma Waterhouse insisted that seven year old Randy take ballroom
dance lessons because one day it would certainly come in handy. He begged to
differ. Her Australian accent had turned lofty and English in the decades
since she had come to America, or maybe that was his imagination. She sat
there, bolt upright as always, on her floral chintz Gomer Bolstrood settee,
the sere hills of the Palouse visible through lace curtains behind her,
sipping tea from a white china cup decorated with was it lavender roses?
When she tilted the cup back, seven year old Randy must have been able to
read the name of the china pattern off the bottom. The information must be
stored in his subconscious memory somewhere. Perhaps a hypnotist could
extract it.
But seven year old Randy had other things on his mind: protesting, in
the strongest possible terms, the assertion that ballroom dance skills could
ever be of any use. At the same time, he was being patterned. Implausible,
even ludicrous ideas were suffusing his brain, invisible and odorless as
carbon monoxide gas: that the Palouse was a normal landscape. That the sky
was this blue everywhere. That a house should look this way: with lace
curtains, leaded glass windows, and room after room full of Gomer Bolstrood
furniture.
"I met your grandfather Lawrence at a dance, in Brisbane," Grandma
announced. She was trying to tell him that he, Randall Lawrence Waterhouse,
would not even exist had it not been for the practice of ballroom dancing.
But Randy did not even know where babies came from yet and probably wouldn't
have understood even if he did. Randy straightened up, remembering his
posture, and asked her a question: did this encounter in Brisbane happen
when she was seven years old, or, perhaps, a little later?
Perhaps if she had lived in a mobile home, the grown up Randy would
have sunk his money into a mutual fund, instead of paying ten thousand
dollars to a soi disant artisan from San Francisco to install leaded glass
windows around his front door, like at Grandma's house.
He provides tremendous, long lasting amusement to the Shaftoes by
walking right past their table without recognizing them. He looks right at
Doug Shaftoe's date, a striking Filipina, probably in her forties, who is in
the middle of making some forceful point. Without taking her eyes off Doug
and Amy Shaftoe, she reaches out with one long graceful arm and snags
Randy's wrist as he goes by, yanking him back like a dog on a meat leash.
She then holds him there while she finishes her sentence, then looks up at
him with a brilliant smile. Randy smiles back dutifully, but he does not
give her the full attention she seems accustomed to, because he is a bit
preoccupied by the spectacle of America Shaftoe in a dress.
Fortunately, Amy has not gone in for the prom queen look. She is
wearing a form fitting black number with long sleeves that hide her tattoos,
and black tights, as opposed to stockings. Randy gives her the flowers, like
a quarterback handing off the pigskin to a runner. She accepts them with a
crooked expression, like a wounded soldier biting down on a bullet. Irony
aside, she has a gleam in her eye that he has never seen before. Or maybe
that is just light from the mirrored ball, reflecting off cigarette smoke
induced tears. He senses in his gut that he did the right thing by showing
up. As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this it is
pathetic self delusion. He was kind of afraid that she would go through some
Hollywoodesque transfiguration into a radiant goddess, which would have the
same effect on Randy as an ax to the base of the skull. The fact of the
matter is that she looks quite good, but arguably, just as out of place as
Randy is in his suit.
He is hoping that they can get the dancing over right away so that he
can flee the building in Cinderellan obloquy, but they bid him sit down. The
orchestra takes a break and the dancers return to their tables. Doug Shaftoe
is comfortably sprawled back in his chair with the masculine confidence of a
man who has not only killed people but who is, furthermore, escorting the
most beautiful woman in the room. Her name is Aurora Taal, and she casts her
flawlessly Lancomed gaze over the other Filipinas with the controlled
amusement of one who has lived in Boston, Washington, and London, and seen
it all, and come back to live in Manila anyway.
"So, did you learn anything more about this Rudolf von Hacklheber
character?" Doug asks, after a few minutes of small talk. It follows that
Aurora must be in on the whole secret. Doug mentioned, weeks ago, that a
small number of Filipinos knew about what they were doing, and that they
could be trusted.
"He was a mathematician. He was from a wealthy Leipzig family. He was
at Princeton before the war. His years there did, in fact, overlap with my
grandfather's."
"What kind of math did he do, Randy?"
"Before the war he did number theory. Which tells us nothing about what
he did during the war. It wouldn't be surprising if he'd ended up working in
the Third Reich's crypto apparatus."
"Which wouldn't explain how he ended up here."
Randy shrugs. "Maybe he did engineering work on the new generation of
submarines. I don't know."
"So the Reich got him involved in some kind of classified work, which
killed him eventually," Doug says. "We could have guessed that for
ourselves, I suppose."
"Why did you mention crypto, then?" Amy asks. She has some kind of
emotional metal detector that screams whenever it comes near buried
assumptions and hastily stifled impulses.
"I guess I have crypto on the brain. And, if there was some kind of
connection between von Hacklheber and my grandfather "
"Was your grandfather a crypto guy, Randy?" Doug asks.
"He never said anything about what he did during the war."
"Classic."
"But he had this trunk up in the attic. A war souvenir. It actually
reminds me of a trunk full of Nipponese crypto materials that I recently saw
in a cave in Kinakuta." Doug and Amy stare at him. "It doesn't amount to
anything, probably," Randy concedes.
The orchestra starts in with a Sinatra tune. Doug and Aurora smile at
each other and rise to their feet. Amy rolls her eyes and looks the other
way, but it's put up or shut up time now, and Randy cannot conceive of any
way out. He stands up and extends his hand to the one he fears and hopes
for, and she, without looking, reaches out and puts her hand into his.
Randy shuffles, which is no way to dance beautifully but does rule out
snapping his partner's metatarsals. Amy is essentially no better at this
than he is, but she has a better attitude. By the time they get to the end
of the first dance, Randy has at least reached the point where his face is
no longer burning, and has gone for some thirty seconds without having to
apologize for anything, and sixty without asking his partner whether she
will be needing medical attention. Then the song is over, and circumstances
dictate that he has to dance with Aurora Taal. This is less intimidating;
even though she is glamorous and a really good dancer, their relationship is
not one that allows for the possibility of grotesque pre erotic fumbling.
Also, Aurora smiles a lot, and she has a really spectacular smile, where
Amy's face was intense and preoccupied. The next dance is announced as
ladies' choice, and Randy is still trying to make eye contact with Amy when
he finds this tiny middle aged Filipina standing there asking Aurora if she
would mind terribly. Aurora consigns him to the other lady like a pork belly
futures contract on the commodity exchange, and suddenly Randy and the lady
are dancing the Texas two step to the strains of a pre disco Bee Gees tune.
"So, have you found wealth in the Philippines yet?" asks the lady,
whose name Randy did not quite catch. She acts as if she expects him to know
her.
"Uh, my partners and I are exploring business opportunities," Randy
says. "Maybe wealth will follow."
"I understand you are good with numbers," the lady says.
Randy is really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he's a
numbers kind of guy? "I'm good with math," he finally says.
"Isn't that what I said?"
"Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as
possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves
to them that's what computers are for."
The lady will not be denied; she has a script and she's sticking to it.
"I have a math problem for you," the lady says.
"Shoot."
"What is the value of the following information: fifteen degrees,
seventeen minutes, forty one point three two seconds north, and a hundred
and twenty one degrees, fifty seven minutes, zero point five five seconds
east?"
"Uh. . . I don't know. It sounds like a latitude and longitude.
Northern Luzon, right?"
The lady nods.
"You want me to tell you the value of those numbers?"
"Yes."
"Depends on what's there, I guess."
"I suppose it does," the lady says. And that's all she says, for the
rest of the dance. Other than complimenting Randy on his balletic skills,
which is just as hard to interpret.
Chapter 57 GIRL
Flats are harder and harder to find in Brisbane, which has become a spy
boomtown Bletchley Park Down Under. There's Central Bureau, which has set up
out at the Ascot Racetrack, and another entity in a different part of town
called Allied Intelligence Bureau. The people who work at Central Bureau
tend to be pallid mathematics experts. The AIB people, on the other hand,
remind Waterhouse very much of those Detachment 2702 fellows: tense, tanned,
and taciturn.
Half a mile from the Ascot Racetrack, he sees one of the latter
tripping lightly down the steps of a nice gingerbready rooming house,
carrying a five hundred pound duffel bag on his back. The man is dressed for
a long trip. A grandmotherish lady in an apron is on the veranda, waving a
tea towel at him. It is like a scene from a movie; you wouldn't even know
that only a few hours' flight from here, men are turning black like
photographic paper in a developer tray as their living flesh is converted
into putrid gas by Clostridium bacteria.
Waterhouse does not stop to estimate the probability that he, who needs
a place to live, should happen along at the exact moment that a room has
become available. Cryptanalysts wait for lucky breaks, then exploit them.
After the departing soldier has disappeared round the corner, he knocks on
the door and introduces himself to the lady. Mrs. McTeague says (to the
extent Waterhouse can penetrate her accent) that she likes his looks. She
sounds distinctly astonished. It seems clear that the improbability of
Waterhouse's having happened upon this vacant room is nothing compared to
the improbability of having his looks liked by Mrs. McTeague. Thus, Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse joins a small elite group of young men (four in all)
whose looks Mrs. McTeague likes. They sleep, two to a room, in the bedrooms
where Mrs. McTeague's offspring grew from the brightest and most beautiful
children ever born into the finest adults who walk the earth except for the
King of England, the General, and Lord Mountbatten.
Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over
his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak
from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a
battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before
doing an Olympic qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks,
climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.
The next morning, at breakfast, he meets the fellows in the next room:
a redheaded British naval officer who shows all the earmarks of working at
Central Bureau, and a fellow named Hale, whose nationality cannot be pegged
because he's not in uniform and he's too hung over to speak.
Having accomplished his mission (according to his understanding with
the General's minions), found a place to live, and settled his other
personal affairs, Waterhouse begins hanging around the Ascot Racetrack and
the adjacent whorehouse, trying to find some way to make himself useful.
Actually he would rather sit in his room all day and work on his new
project, which is to design a high speed Turing machine. But he has a duty
to contribute to the war effort. Even if he didn't, he suspects that when
his new roommate gets back from his mission, and finds him sitting indoors
all day drawing circuit diagrams, he will thrash Waterhouse to the point
where Mrs. McTeague will no longer like his looks.
To put it mildly, Central Bureau is not the kind of place where a
stranger can just wander in, check the place out, introduce himself and find
a job. Even the wandering in part is potentially fatal. Fortunately,
Waterhouse has Ultra Mega clearance, the highest clearance in the Entire
World.
Unfortunately, this category of secrecy is itself so secret that its
very existence is secret, and so he can't actually reveal it to anyone
unless he finds someone else with Ultra Mega clearance. There are only a
dozen people with Ultra Mega clearance in all of Brisbane. Eight of them
comprise the top of the General's command hierarchy, three work at Central
Bureau, and one is Waterhouse.
Waterhouse sniffs out the nerve center in the old whorehouse.
Superannuated Australian Territorial Guards in jaunty asymmetrical hats ring
the place, clutching blunderbusses. Unlike Mrs. McTeague, they don't like
his looks. On the other hand they are used to this kind of thing: smart boys
from far away showing up at the gate with long and, in the end, boring
stories about how the military screwed up their orders, put them in the
wrong boat, sent them to the wrong place, gave them tropical diseases, threw
their belongings overboard, left them to fend for themselves. They don't
shoot him, but they don't let him in.
He hangs around and makes a nuisance of himself for a couple of days
until he finally recognizes, and is recognized by, Abraham Sinkov. Sinkov is
a top American cryptanalyst; he helped Schoen break Indigo. He and
Waterhouse have crossed paths a few times, and though they aren't friends,
per se, their minds work the same way. This makes them brothers in a weird
family that has only a few hundred members, scattered about the world. In a
way, it is a clearance that is rarer, harder to come by, and more mysterious
than Ultra Mega. Sinkov writes him a new set of papers, giving him a
clearance that is very high, but not so high that he can't reveal it.
Waterhouse gets a tour. Shirtless men sit in Quonset huts made stifling
by the red hot tubes of their radios. They pluck the Nipponese Army's
messages out of the air and hand them off to legions of young Australian
women who punch the intercepted messages onto ETC cards.
There is a cadre of American officers composed entirely of a whole
department of the Electrical Till Corporation. One day, early in 1942, they
put their white shirts and blue suits into mothballs, donned Army uniforms,
and climbed on ships to Brisbane. Their ringleader is a guy named Lieutenant
Colonel Comstock, and he has gotten the whole code breaking process totally
automated. The cards punched by the Aussie girls come into the machine room
stacked into ingots which are fed through the machines. Decrypts fly out of
a line printer on the other end and are taken off to another hut where
American nisei, and some white men trained in Nipponese, translate them.
A Waterhouse is the last thing these guys need. He's beginning to
understand what the major said to him the other day: they have passed over
the watershed line. The codes are broken.
Which reminds him of Turing. Ever since Alan got back from New York
he's been distancing himself from Bletchley Park. He has moved up to another
installation, a radio center called Hanslope in north Buckinghamshire, a
place of reinforced concrete, wires, antennas, more military formal in its
atmosphere.
At the time, Waterhouse could not understand why Alan would want to
move away from Bletchley. But now he knows how Alan must have felt after
they turned decryption into a mechanical process, industrializing Bletchley
Park. He must have felt that the battle was won, and with it the war. The
rest might seem like glorious conquest to people like the General, but to
Turing, and now to Waterhouse, it just looks like tedious mopping up. It is
exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern
their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can
openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
Sinkov provides Waterhouse with a desk in the whorehouse and begins to
feed him the messages that Central Bureau hasn't been able to decrypt. There
are still dozens of minor Nipponese codes that remain to be broken. Maybe,
by breaking one or two, and teaching the ETC machines to read them,
Waterhouse can shorten the war by a single day, or save a single life. This
is a noble calling that he undertakes willingly, but in essence it is no
different from being an Army butcher who saves lives by keeping his knives
clean, or a lifeboat inspector in the Navy.
Waterhouse cracks those minor Nip codes one after the other. One month
he even flies up to New Guinea, where Navy divers are salvaging code books
from a sunken Nip submarine. He lives in the jungle for two weeks and tries
not to die, comes back to Brisbane, and puts those recovered codebooks to
good but dull use. Then one day the dullness of his work becomes irrelevant.
On that day, he returns to Mrs. McTeague's boardinghouse in the
evening, goes to his room, and finds a large man snoring in the upper bunk.
A lot of clothing and equipment is scattered about the place, emanating
sulfurous reek.
The man sleeps for two days and then comes down late for breakfast one
morning, peering around the room with Atabrine yellow eyes. He introduces
himself as Smith. His oddly familiar accent is not made any easier to
understand by the fact that his teeth are chattering violently. He doesn't
seem especially bothered by this. He sits down and paws an Irish linen
napkin into his lap with a hand that is stiff and raw. Mrs. McTeague fusses
over him to the extent that all of the men at the table must resist the
impulse to slug her. She pours him tea with plenty of milk and sugar. He
takes a few sips, then excuses himself and goes to the WC, where he crisply
and politely vomits. He comes back, eats a soft boiled egg from a bone china
egg cup, turns green, leans back in his chair, and closes his eyes for about
ten minutes.
When Waterhouse returns from work that evening, he blunders into the
parlor and interrupts Mrs. McTeague having tea with a young lady.
The young lady's name is Mary Smith; she is the cousin of Waterhouse's
roommate, who is upstairs shivering and sweating in his bunk bed.
Mary stands up to be introduced, which is not technically necessary;
but she is a girl from the outback and has no use for effete refinement. She
is a petite girl dressed in a uniform.
She is the only woman Waterhouse has ever seen. She is the only other
human being in the universe actually, and when she stands up to shake his
hand, his peripheral vision shuts down as if he has been sucking on a
tailpipe. Black curtains converge across a silver cyclorama, shuttering down
his cosmos to a vertical shaft of carbon arc glory, a pillar of light, a
heavenly follow spot targeted upon Her.
Mrs. McTeague, knowing the score, bids him sit down.
Mary is a tiny, white skinned, red headed person who is often seized by
little fits of self consciousness. When this happens she averts her eyes
from his and swallows, and when she swallows there is a certain cord in her
white neck, rounding the concavity from shoulder to ear, that stands out for
a moment. It draws attention both to her vulnerability and to the white
flesh of her neck, which is not white in a pallid sick way but in another
way that Waterhouse could never have understood until recently: viz., from
his little stint in New Guinea, where everything is either dead and
decaying, or bright and threatening, or unobtrusive and invisible,
Waterhouse knows that anything this tender and translucent is too vulnerable
and tempting to hold its own in a world of violently competing destroyers,
that it can only be sustained for a moment (let alone years) by the life
force within. In the South Pacific where the forces of Death are so
powerful, it leaves him vaguely intimidated. Her skin, as unmarked as clear
water, is an extravagant display of vibrant animal power. He wants his
tongue on it. The whole curve of her neck, from collarbone to earlobe, would
make a perfect cradle for his face.
She sees him looking at her, and swallows again. The cord flexes,
stretching the living skin of her neck out for just a moment, and then
relaxes, leaving nothing but smoothness and calm. She may just as well have
caved his head in with a stone and tied his penis round a hitching rail. The
effect must be calculated. But apparently she has not ever done it to anyone
else, or there would be a band of gold round her pale left ring finger.
Mary Smith is beginning to get annoyed with him. She lifts the teacup
to her lips. She has turned so that the light is grazing her neck in a new
way, and this time when she swallows he can see her Adam's apple moving up.
Then it comes down like a pile driver on what is left of his good judgment.
There is a thumping noise upstairs; her cousin has just regained
consciousness. "Excuse me," she says, and she's gone, leaving only Mrs.
McTeague's bone china as a reminder.
Chapter 58 CONSPIRACY
Dr. Rudolf Von Hacklheber is not much older than sergeant Bobby
Shaftoe, but even emotionally crushed, he has a certain bearing about him
that men in Shaftoe's world don't acquire until they are in their forties,
if then. His eyeglasses have tiny rimless lenses that look like they were
scavenged from a sniper's telescopic sights. Behind them is a whole paintbox
of vivid colors: blond lashes, blue eyes, red veins, lids swollen and purple
from weeping. Even so, he has a perfect shave, and the silvery Nordic light
coming in through the tiny windows of Enoch Root's church cellar glances
from the planes of his face so as to highlight an interesting terrain of big
pores, premature creases, and old dueling scars. He has tried to grease his
hair back, but it misbehaves and keeps tumbling down over his brow. He is
wearing a white dress shirt and a very long, heavy overcoat on top of that
to ward off the cellar's chill. Shaftoe, who hiked back to Norrsbruck with
him several days ago, knows that the long legged von Hacklheber has the
makings of a half decent jock. But he can tell that rude sports like
football would be out of the question; this Kraut would be a fencer or a
mountain climber or a skier.
Shaftoe was only startled not bothered by von Hacklheber's
homosexuality. Some of the China Marines in Shanghai had a lot more young
Chinese boys hanging around their flats than they really needed to shine
their boots and Shanghai is far from the strangest or most far flung place
where Marines made themselves at home between the wars. You can worry about
morality when you're off duty, but if you are always stewing and fretting
over what the other guys are doing in the sack, then what the hell are you
going to do when you're presented with an opportunity to hit a Nip squad
with a flamethrower?
They buried the remains of Angelo, the pilot, two weeks ago, and only
now is von Hacklheber feeling in any kind of shape to talk. He has rented a
cottage outside of town, but he has come into Norrsbruck to meet with Root,
Shaftoe, and Bischoff on this day, partly because he is convinced that
German spies are watching it. Shaftoe shows up with a bottle of Finnish
schnapps, Bischoff brings a loaf of bread, Root breaks out a tin of fish.
Von Hacklheber brings information. Everyone brings cigarettes.
Shaftoe smokes early and often, trying to kill the mildewy smell of the
cellar, which reminds him of being locked up there with Enoch Root, kicking
his morphine habit. During that time, the pastor once had to come downstairs
and ask him please to stop screaming for a while because they were trying to
do a wedding upstairs. Shaftoe hadn't known he was screaming.
Rudolf von Hacklheber's English is, in some respects, better than
Shaftoe's. He sounds unnervingly like Bobby's junior high school drafting
teacher, Mr. Jaeger. "Before the war I worked under Dönitz for the
Beobachtung Dienst of the Kriegsmarine. We broke some of the most secret
codes of the British Admiralty even before the outbreak of hostilities. I
was responsible for some advances in this field, involving the use of
mechanical calculation. When war broke out there was much reorganization and
I became like a bone that several dogs are fighting over. I was moved into
Referat Iva of Gruppe IV, Analytical Cryptanalysis, which was part of
Hauptgruppe B, Cryptanalysis, which reported ultimately to Major General
Erich Feilgiebel, Chief of Wehrmachtnachrichtungen verbindungen."
Shaftoe looks around at the others, but none of them laughs, or even
grins. They must not have heard it. "Come again?" Shaftoe asks, proddingly,
like a man in a bar trying to get a shy friend to tell a sure fire thigh
slapper.
"Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen," von Hacklheber says, very
slowly, as if repeating nursery rhymes to a toddler. He blinks once, twice,
three times at Shaftoe, then sits forward and says, brightly: "Perhaps I
should explain the organization of the German intelligence hierarchy, since
it will help you all to understand my story."
A BRIEF TRIP INTO HELL'S DEMO with HERR DOKTOR PROFESSOR RUDOLF VON
HACKLHEBER ensues.
Shaftoe only hears the first couple of sentences. At about the point
when von Hacklheber tears a sheet out of a notebook and begins to diagram
the organizational tree of the Thousand Year Reich, with "Der Führer" at the
top, Shaftoe's eyes take on a heavy glaze, his body goes slack, he becomes
deaf, and he accelerates up the throat of a nightmare, like the butt of a
half digested corn dog being reverse peristalsed from the body of an addict.
He has never been through this experience before, but he knows intuitively
that this is how the trip to Hell works: no leisurely boat ride across the
scenic Styx, no gradual descent into that trite tourist trap, Pluto's
Cavern, no stops along the way to buy fishing licenses for the Lake of Fire.
Shaftoe is not (though he should be) dead, and so this is not hell. It
is closely modeled after hell, though. It is like a mock up slapped together
from tar paper and canvas, like the fake towns where they practiced house to
house warfare during boot camp. Shaftoe is gripped with a sort of giddy
queasiness that, he knows, is the most pleasant thing he will feel here.
"Morphine takes away the body's ability to experience pleasure," says the
booming voice of Enoch Root, his wry, annoying Virgil, who for purposes of
this nightmare has adopted the voice and physical shape of Moe, the mean,
dark haired Stooge. "It may be some time before you feel physically well."
The organizational tree of this nightmare begins, like von
Hacklheber's, with Der Führer, but then branches out widely and crazily.
There is an Asian branch, headed up by the General, and including, among
other things, a Hauptgruppe of giant carnivorous lizards, a Referat of
Chinese women holding up pale eyed babies, and several Abteilungs of
plastered Nips with swords. In the center of their domain is the city of
Manila, where, in a tableau that Shaftoe would identify as Boschian if he
had not spent his high school art class out behind the school leg fucking
cheerleaders, a heavily pregnant Glory Altamira is being forced to do blow
jobs on syphilitic Nipponese troops.
The voice of Mr. Jaeger, his drafting teacher the most boring man
Shaftoe had ever known, until perhaps today fades in for a moment with the
words, "but all of the organizational structures I have detailed to this
point became obsolete at the outbreak of hostilities. The hierarchy was
shuffled and several of the entities changed their names, as follows . . ."
Shaftoe hears a new sheet of paper being torn from the notebook, but what he
sees is Mr. Jaeger tearing up a diagram of a table leg bracket that the
young Bobby Shaftoe had spent a week drafting. Everything has been
reorganized, General MacArthur is still very high in the tree, walking a
brace of giant lizards on steel leashes, but now the hierarchy is filled
with grinning Arabs holding up lumps of hashish, frozen butchers, dead or
doomed lieutenants, and that fucking weirdo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse,
dressed in a black, hooded robe, heading up a whole legion of pencil necked
Signals geeks, also in robes, holding bizarrely shaped antennas above their
heads, wading through a blizzard of dollar bills printed on old Chinese
newspapers. Their eyes glow, flashing on and off in Morse code.
"What are they saying?" Bobby says.
"Please, stop screaming," says Enoch Root. "Just for a little while."
Bobby's lying on a cot in a thatched hut in Guadalcanal. Swedish
tribesmen run around in loincloths, gathering food: every so often, a ship
gets blown up out in the Slot, and fish shrapnel rains down and gets hung up
in the branches, along with the occasional severed human arm or hunk of
skull. The Swedes ignore the human bits and harvest the fish, taking it off
to make lutefisk in black steel drums.
Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out
of the crack around its lid.
But he's not in the thatched hut anymore; he's inside a cold black
metal phallus that has been probing around down below the surface of the
nightmare: Bischoff's submarine. Depth charges are going off all over the
place and it's filling up with sewage. Something clocks him on the side of
the head: not a ham this time, but a human leg. The sub's lined with tubes
that carry voices: in English, German, Arabic, Nipponese, Shanghainese, but
confined and muffled in the plumbing so that they mingle together like the
running of water. Then a pipe is ruptured by a near miss from a depth
charge; from its jagged end issues a German voice:
"The foregoing may be taken as a rather coarse grained treatment of the
general organization of the Reich and particularly the military.
Responsibility for cryptanalysis and cryptography is distributed among a
large number of small Amts and Diensts attached to various tendrils of this
structure. These are continually being reorganized and rearranged, however I
may be able to provide you with a reasonably accurate and detailed picture .
. ."
Shaftoe, chained to a bunk in the submarine by fetters of gold, feels
one of his small, concealed handguns pressing into the small of his back,
and wonders whether it would be bad form to shoot himself in the mouth. He
paws wildly at the broken tube and manages to slap it down into the rising
sewage; bubbles come out, and von Hacklheber's words are trapped in them,
like word balloons in a comic strip. When the bubbles reach the surface and
burst, it sounds like screaming.
Root is sitting on the opposite bunk with the cigar box on his lap. He
holds up his hand in a V for Victory, then levels it at Shaftoe's face and
pokes him in the eyes. "I cannot help you with your inability to find
physical comfort it is a problem of body chemistry," he says. "It poses
interesting theological questions. It reminds us that all the pleasures of
the world are an illusion projected into our souls by our bodies."
A lot of the other speaking tubes have ruptured now, and screaming
comes from most of them; Root has to lean close in order to shout into
Bobby's ear. Shaftoe takes advantage of it to reach over and make a grab for
the cigar box, which contains the stuff he wants: not morphine. Something
better than morphine. Morphine is to the stuff in the cigar box what a
Shanghai prostitute is to Glory.
The box flies open and blinding light comes out of it. Shaftoe covers
his face. The salted and preserved body parts suspended from the ceiling
tumble into his lap and begin to writhe, reaching out for other parts,
assembling themselves into living bodies. Mikulski comes back to life, aims
his Vickers at the ceiling of the U boat, and cuts an escape hatch. Instead
of black water, golden light rushes through.
"What was your position in all this, then?" asks Root, and Shaftoe
nearly jumps out of his chair, startled by the sound of a voice other than
von Hacklheber's. Given what happened the last time someone (Shaftoe) asked
a question, this is heroic but risky. Starting with Hitler, von Hacklheber
works his way down the chain of command.
Shaftoe doesn't care: he's on a rubber raft, along with various
resurrected comrades from Guadalcanal and Detachment 2702. They are rowing
across a still cove lit by giant flaming klieg lights in the sky. Standing
behind the klieg lights is a man talking in a German accent: "My immediate
supervisors, Wilhelm Fenner, from St. Petersburg, who headed all German
military cryptanalysis from 1922 onwards, and his chief deputy, Professor
Novopaschenny."
All of these names sound alike to Shaftoe, but Root says, "A Russian?"
Shaftoe is really coming around now, reemerging into the World. He sits up
straight, and his body feels stiff, like it hasn't moved in a long time. He
is about to apologize for the way he has been behaving, but since no one is
looking at him funny, Shaftoe sees no reason to fill them in on what he's
been doing these last few minutes.
"Professor Novopaschenny was a Czarist astronomer who knew Fenner from
St. Petersburg. Under them, I was given broad authority to pursue researches
into the theoretical limits of security. I used tools from pure mathematics
as well as mechanical calculating devices of my own design. I looked at our
own codes as well as those of our enemies, looking for weaknesses."
"What did you find?" Bischoff asks.
"I found weaknesses everywhere," von Ha