Towing Jehovah (32 page)

After tonight's dinner, Follingsbee's best batch of stroganoff yet, the steward said he wanted me to see the results of a "scientific experiment" he'd been working on ever since our stop in Ireland. He led me outside—what a wonderland our weather deck has become, ice hanging from the catwalks in great crystalline webs, frost shimmering on the pipes and valves—and into the depths of number 4

ballast tank, chattering all the way about the joys of home agronomy. We hadn't gone 20 feet before my nostrils were quivering with pleasure. Lord, such a marvelous scent: utter ripeness, Popeye, sheer fecundity. I switched on my flashlight.

At the bottom of the tank lay a brightly colored garden, its vegetables grown bulbous beyond the wildest fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch, its fruits so fat they practically screamed aloud to be plucked. Gnarled trees lurched out of the darkness, their branches bent by apples the size of volleyballs. Asparagus spears reared up from the floor like some bizarre species of cactus. Broccoli flourished beside the keelson, each stalk as tall and thick as a mimosa tree. Vines drooped from the ladders, their dark purple grapes clustered together like Godzilla's lymph nodes. "Sam, you're a genius." The steward doffed his cream-puff hat and took a modest bow. "Seeds all came from them groceries we bought in Galway. Soil's a mixture of skin and plasma. What gets me is how
fast
everything grew, in subfreezing temperatures yet, and without a single ray of sunshine. You sow an orange pip, and ten hours later—bingo!"

"So half the credit belongs to . . ."

"More than half. He makes great compost, sir."

When this voyage is finally over, Popeye, there's only one thing I'm going to miss, and that's the food. Cassie's parka, borrowed from Bud Ramsey, was stuffed with grade-A goose down; her socks, from Juanita Torres, were 100 percent virgin wool; her gloves, from Sister Miriam, contained pure rabbit fur. But the cold still penetrated, eating through each protective layer like some voracious Arctic moth. The thermometer on the starboard wing stood at negative eight degrees, and that didn't include the windchill factor.

Lifting her field glasses, she focused on the glistery, snowcapped nose. Far beyond, a steady stream of charged solar particles spilled forth, countless electrons and neutrons entering the earth's magnetic field and colliding with rarefied atmospheric gases. The resulting aurora filled the entire northern sky: a luminous blue-and-green banner flapping in eerie silence above the rolling waves and the wandering pack ice.

What she most admired about Anthony Van Horne, the fact that made him always
there
these days, always flitting about in her brain, was his obsessiveness. At last she'd met someone as stubborn as she. Snapshots from a sea odyssey: Anthony killing a tiger shark with a bazooka, quelling a mutiny with fast food, persuading his sailors to move a mountain. Just as Cassie would stop at nothing to destroy God, so the captain would stop at nothing to protect Him. It was truly intense, erotic almost, this strange, unspoken bond between them.

The question, of course, was whether Oliver's admirable project still existed. Pure logic said the slender threads binding the interests of the Central Park West Enlightenment League to those of the World War Two Reenactment Society had been completely severed during the
Valparaíso's
long imprisonment on Van Horne Island. Yet Cassie knew Oliver. She understood his utter, passionate, tedious devotion to her. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that he'd found some way to keep the alliance alive. Any day now, any hour now, the Age of Reason would be visited upon the Corpus Dei.

The
Valparaíso's
chart room, surprisingly, was no warmer than her bridge wings. As Cassie stepped inside, her vaporous breath drifted across the Formica table and hovered above a map of Sardinia, creating a massive cloud formation over Cagliari. Luckily, someone had undertaken to compensate for the defective heating ducts by bringing in a Coleman stove. She fired it up and got busy, scanning the wide, shallow drawers until she noticed one labeled ARCTIC OCEAN. She opened it. The drawer contained over a hundred bodies of ice-choked water—Greenland's Scoresby Sound, Norway's Vestfjord, Svalbard's Hinlopenstreten, Russia's East Siberian Sea—and only after thumbing halfway through the pile did she come upon a chart depicting both the Arctic Circle and Jan Mayen Island.

Expect airstrike at 68°11'N, 2°35'W,
Oliver's fax had said,
150 miles east of launch point

. . .

Pivoting toward the Formica table, she unfurled the map. It was dense with data: soundings, anchorages, wrecks, submerged rocks—the geographic equivalent of an anatomy text, she decided, earth's most intimate particulars laid bare. She picked up a ballpoint pen and did the math on a stray scrap of Carpco stationery. Wary of the icebergs, Anthony had recently cut their speed from nine knots to seven. Seven times twenty-four: they were covering 168 nautical miles a day. Calibrating the dividers against the bar scale, ten miles tip to tip, she walked them from the
Val's
position—67 north, 4

west—to the spot specified by Oliver. Result: a mere 280 miles. If her optimism was not misplaced, the attack lay fewer than forty-eight hours in the future.

"Searching for the Northwest Passage?"

She hadn't heard him come in, but there he was, dressed in a green turtleneck sweater and frayed orange watch cap. He was clean-shaven, shockingly so. In the bright neon glow his chin lay wholly revealed, its dimple winking at her.

"Homesick," she replied, pitching the dividers into the Norwegian Sea. "I figure we're a good four days from Kvitoya." She rubbed each arm with the opposite hand. "Wish that damn stove worked better." Anthony slipped off his cap. "There are remedies."

"For homesickness?"

"For cold."

His arms swung apart like the doors to some particularly cozy and genial tavern, and with a nervous laugh she embraced him, pressing against his woolly chest. He massaged her back, his palm carving deep, slow spirals in the space between her shoulder blades.

"You shaved."

"Uh-huh. Feeling warmer?"

"Hmmm . . ."

"Can you keep a secret?"

"It's been known to happen."

"The Vatican's ordered us to turn around and head south."

"South?" Panic shot through Cassie. She tightened her grip.

"We're supposed to rendezvous with the SS
Carpco Maracaibo
back in the Gibraltar Sea. She's got formaldehyde in her cargo bays."

"Those angels ordered Him
frozen,
not embalmed," she protested.

"That's why we're holding steady."

"Ahh . . ." Cassie relaxed, laughing to herself, cavorting internally.
Holding steady
—wonderful, perfect, straight into the clutches of the Enlightenment.

He kissed her cheek, softly, tenderly: a brotherly kiss, non-carnal. Then her brow, her eyes. Jaw, ear, cheek again. Their lips met. She pulled away.

"This isn't a good idea."

"Yes, it is," he said.

"Yes, it is," she agreed.

And suddenly they were connecting again, hugging fiercely, meshing. They kissed voraciously, mouths wide open, as if to swallow one another. Cassie shut her eyes, reveling in the liquidity of Anthony's tongue: a life-form unto itself, member of some astoundingly sensual species of eel. Disengaging, the captain said, "The stove gets hotter, you know . . ."

"Hotter," she echoed, catching her breath.

He crouched over the Coleman and adjusted the fuel control, turning the flame into a roiling red mass, a kind of indoor aurora borealis. Opening the INDIAN OCEAN drawer, he whipped out a large, laminated map and spread it on the floor like a picnic blanket. "Madagascar's the best place for this sort of thing," he explained, winking at her. Slowly, lasciviously, the chart room heated up.

"You're wrong," said Cassie playfully, shedding her parka. She rifled the SULU SEA drawer and grabbed a portrait of the Philippines. "Palawan's much more erotic." She released the map, and it glided to the floor like a magic carpet landing in thirteenth-century Baghdad.

"No, Doc." Scanning the drawer called FRENCH POLYNESIA, he removed the Tuamotu Archipelago.

"It's really Puka-Puka."

"This one," she giggled, pulse racing as she extracted Majorca from the BALEARIC ISLANDS drawer.

"No, Java here."

"Sulawesi."

"Sumatra."

"New Guinea."

They locked the door, turned off the overhead lights, and lay down amid the patchwork of scattered landfalls. Cassie exposed her neck; his lips roamed up and down the length of her jugular, planting kisses. Groaning softly, rolling toward the Caymans, they undressed each other, adrift in the warm waters of the Bartlett Deep. The tensor lamp cast harsh shadows across Anthony's shaggy legs and great simian chest. As they glided into the Bahia de Alcudi, Cassie went to work with her mouth, sculpting his ardor to full potential, until it seemed the figurehead of some grand priapic frigate.

They floated north, entering the cold, jolting Mozambique Channel, just off Madagascar, and it was here that Anthony drew a Shostak Supersensitive from his wallet and put it on. Wrapping her legs around the small of his back, she piloted his jacketed cock where it wanted to go. Smiling, he plied her salty waters: Anthony Van Horne, a ship with a mission. She inhaled. He exuded an amazing fragrance, an amalgam of musk and brine shot through with all the rubbery, suckered things God and natural selection had wrought from the sea. This, she decided, was how the Galapagos Islands would have smelled, had she gotten there.

By the time he came, they had journeyed all the way past the Mindoro Strait to the bright, steamy beaches of China's Hainan Island.

Withdrawing, he said, "I guess I feel a little guilty."

"Oliver?"

He nodded. "Making love to a lady with her boyfriend's condom . . ."

"Father Thomas would be proud of you."

"For fornicating?"

"For feeling guilty. You've got a Kantian conscience."

"It's not a
painful
sort of guilt," he hastened to add, sliding his index and middle fingers inside her. "It's not like how it feels to blind a manatee. I'm almost enjoying it."

"Screw Matagorda Bay," Cassie whispered, reveling in his touch. The Coleman hissed and growled. She dripped with all the planet's good and oozy things, with chocolate sauce and clarified butter, melted cheese and maple syrup, peach yogurt and potter's slip. "Screw guilt, screw Oliver, screw Immanuel Kant." She felt like a bell, a wondrous organic
Glocke,
and before long she would peal, oh, yes, just as soon as this gifted carillonneur, so attentive to her clapper . . .

"Screw them," he agreed.

Her orgasm occurred in the Gulf of Thailand.

It lasted over a minute.

As Anthony worked his condom free, the little sack leaked, adding its contents to the lovely mess of sweat and juices now rolling toward the shores of Hainan. "The thing I've always noticed about Chinese sex," he said, pointing to the tidal wave and grinning, "is that you feel like doing it again an hour later."

"An hour? That long?"

"Okay, twenty-five minutes." The captain cupped his hand around her left breast, hefting it like a housewife evaluating a grapefruit. "You want to know the key to my father, Doc?"

"Not really."

"His fixation on Christopher Columbus."

"Let's forget about Dad for a while, okay?"

Gently, Anthony squeezed the gland. "This is what Columbus thought the world looked like."

"My left breast?"

"Anybody's left breast. As the years went on, it became clear he hadn't come anywhere near circling the globe—the earth was obviously four times bigger than he'd guessed—but Columbus still needed to believe he'd reached the Orient. Don't ask me why. He just had a need. Next thing anybody knew, he'd made up this crazy theory that the world was really shaped like a woman's breast. He
had
gone most of the way around, only he'd done so at the nipple"—Anthony ran his finger along the edge of Cassie's areola, tickling her—"whereas everyone else was measuring the circumference much farther south." His fingers wandered downward. "So my father, in the end, has a fool for an idol."

"Jesus, Anthony—he can't be
all
bad. Nobody's
all
bad, not even God." The captain shrugged. "He taught me my trade. He gave me the sea." A sardonic chuckle broke from his lips. "He gave me the sea, and I turned it into a cesspool."

Cassie grew suddenly tense. Part of her, the irrational part, wanted to keep this despairing sailor in her life long after the
Valparaíso
put to port. She could picture them chartering their own private freighter and setting off together for the Galapagos. The other part knew that he would never, ever be free of Matagorda Bay, and that any woman who let herself become entangled with Anthony Van Horne would end up treading the same malignant oil in which he himself was drowning.

For the next fifteen minutes, the captain pleasured her with his tongue—not an eel this time but a wet, fleshy brush, painting the mansion of her body. None of this will make a difference, she swore as he drew out a second Supersensitive. Even if I fall in love with him, ran Cassie's silent vow, I'll continue to make war on his cargo.

WAR

"GlVE ME PANTS that
entrance"
chanted Albert Flume as he herded Oliver, Barclay, and Winston into the
Enterprise's
rusting passenger elevator.

"Shoulders Gibraltar, shiny as a halter." Sidney Pembroke pushed the button labeled HANGAR DECK.

"A frantic cape," said Flume.

"Of antic shape," said Pembroke.

"Drape it."

"Drop it."

"Sock it."

"And lock it at the pocket!"

"Navy code?" asked Barclay as the rickety car descended into the hull.

"Zoot-suit slang," Pembroke replied. "Golly, I miss the forties."

"You weren't even alive in the forties," said Barclay.

"Yeah. Golly, I miss 'em."