PLAGUE

FOR OLIVER SHOSTAK, learning that the illusory deity of Judeo-Christianity had once actually inhabited the heavens and the earth, running reality and dictating the Bible, was hands-down the worst experience of his life. On the scale of disillusionment, it far outranked his deduction at age five that Santa Glaus was a mountebank, his discovery at seventeen that his father was routinely screwing the woman who boarded the family’s Weimaraners, and the judgment he’d suffered on his thirty-second birthday when he’d asked the curator of the Castelli Gallery in SoHo to exhibit the highlights of his abstract-expressionist period. (“The great drawback of these paintings,” the stiff-necked old lady had replied, “is that they aren’t any good.”) But the fruits of Pamela Harcourt’s recent expedition could not be denied: a dozen full-color photographs, each showing a large, male, grinning, supine body being towed by its ears northward through the Atlantic Ocean. The 30 X 40 blowups hung in the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall like ancestral portraits — which, in a manner of speaking, they were.

“Our labors of late have been, if I may speak mythologically, Herculean,” Barclay Cabot began, his haggard face breaking into a yawn. “Our itinerary included stops in Asia, Europe, the Middle East…”

Oliver fixed on the blowups. He loathed them. No feminist forced to sit through a Linda Lovelace film festival had ever felt more offended. Yet he refused to admit defeat. Indeed, on receiving Pamela’s dire bulletin from Dakar he’d swung into action immediately, deputizing Barclay to form an ad hoc committee and lead it on a frantic journey around the world.

Winston Hawke finished off a petit four, wiping his hands on his Trotsky sweatshirt. “After eighty-four hours of unbroken effort, our team has reached a sobering conclusion.”

Rising, Barclay slipped a sheet of legal paper out of his waistcoat pocket. “By presenting yourself as the agent of a foreign government eager to prevent its financial resources from falling into the wrong hands…”

“Its own people, for example,” said Winston.

“…you can, these days, obtain almost any tool of mass destruction that catches your fancy. To be specific” — Barclay perused the legal paper — “the French Ministry of Defense was prepared to rent us a Robespierre-class attack submarine equipped with eighteen forward-launched torpedoes. The Iranian State Department proposed to sell us the nine million gallons of Vietnam-surplus napalm it acquired from the American CIA in 1976, plus ten F-15 Eagle fighter jets with which to dispense it. The Argentine Navy offered us a two-month lease on the battleship Eva Peron, and if we’d closed the deal on the spot, they’d have thrown in six thousand rounds of ammunition for free. Finally, as long as we agreed to keep the source a secret, the People’s Republic of China would’ve given us what they called a ‘package deal’ on a tactical nuclear weapon and the delivery system of our choice.”

“Every one of these offers fell through the minute the merchants learned we did not in fact represent a sovereign state.” Winston selected a second petit four. “It’s immoral and destabilizing, they said, for private citizens to possess such technologies.”

“The sole dissenter from this policy was itself a private institution, the American National Rifle Association,” said Barclay. “But the things they wanted to sell us — four MHO howitzers and seven wire-guided TOW missiles — are useless for our purposes.”

Oliver groaned softly. He’d been hoping for a more encouraging report: not simply because he wished to impress Cassandra, whose fax had clearly contained a subtext — prove yourself, she was saying between the lines, show me you’re a man of substance — but also because he truly wanted to spare his species a millennium of theistic ignorance and mindless superstition.

“So we’re licked?” asked Pamela.

“There is one ray of hope,” said Winston, devouring the tiny cake. “This afternoon we spoke with—”

The Marxist stopped in midsentence, stunned by the ascent of Sylvia Endicott, a surge so abrupt it was as if the springs of her Empire chair had suddenly popped free. “Have I missed something?” the old woman demanded in a low, liquid hiss. “Did I fail to attend a crucial meeting? Was I out of town during an emergency session? When, exactly, did we agree on this sabotage business?”

“We never put it to a formal vote,” Oliver replied, “but clearly that’s the consensus in the room.”

“Not in this part of the room.”

“What are you saying, Sylvia?” snarled Pamela. “ ‘Sit back and do nothing’?”

“The Svalbard tomb can hardly be a secure place,” Meredith Lodge hastened to add. “Hell, I suspect it’s vulnerable as Cheops’s pyramid.”

“Obliteration’s the only answer,” said Rainsford Fitch.

Scowling profoundly, Sylvia shuffled to the bust of Charles Darwin stationed by the fireplace.

“Assuming for a moment the Valparaíso is really towing what Cassie Fowler says it’s towing,” she began, “shouldn’t we have the collective courage, if not the simple decency, to admit we’ve been wrong all these years?”

“Wrong?” said Rainsford.

“Yes. Wrong.”

“That’s a rather extreme word,” said Barclay.

“It’s probably time to amend our charter,” said Taylor Scott, puffing on a Turkish cigarette, “but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The theistic world was a nightmare, Sylvia. Have you forgotten the Renaissance witch hunts?”

“But we’re not being honest.”

“The trial of Galileo? The massacre of the Incas?”

“I haven’t forgotten those things, nor have I forgotten the scientific curiosity that is the sine qua non of this organization.” Sylvia tightened her woolen shawl, her primary protection against the ersatz winter raging through Montesquieu Hall. “We should be studying this corpse, not sweeping it under the rug.”

“Let’s look at it from another angle,” said Winston. “Yes, some sort of large entity is currently being hauled toward the Arctic, and for all we know this entity hung the stars, spun the earth, and molded Adam out of clay. But does that mean it’s God? The unmoved mover? The first and final cause? The be-all and end-all? It’s dead, for Christ’s sake. What kind of Supreme Being goes belly up like that?”

“A fake Supreme Being,” said Rainsford.

“Exactly,” said Winston. “A fake, a fraud, a phony. The problem, of course, is that such logic will never impress the credulous masses. A relic like this becomes yet another confirmation of their faith. Ergo, for the good of all, in the name of reason, this God-who-isn’t-God must be removed.”

“Winston, you appall me.” Arms akimbo, Sylvia aimed her blighted corneas directly at the Marxist. “Reason, you said? ‘The name of reason’? This isn’t reason you’re doling out — it’s atheist fundamentalism!”

“Let’s not play with words.”

Sylvia tore off the shawl, hobbled into the foyer, and yanked open the front door. “Ladies and gentlemen, you leave me no other choice!” she foamed as the July heat wafted into the frigid lounge. “Honor dictates but one course for me — I must resign from the Central Park West Enlightenment League!”

“Lighten up, Sylvia,” said Pamela.

The old woman stepped into the steamy night. “Got that, you intellectual pharisees?” she called over her shoulder. “I’m quitting — forever!”

Oliver’s innards contracted. His throat grew dry. Sylvia, goddamn it, had a point.

“The sack of Jerusalem!” wailed Winston as the door slammed shut.

“The siege of Belfast!” howled Rainsford.

“The slaughter of the Huguenots!” screamed Meredith.

A point — but that was all Sylvia had, Oliver decided, a mere rational argument, and meanwhile the woods were burning.

“Let’s hear about that ray of hope,” said Pamela.