An odd combination of dread and annoyance crept over Cassie. “Murder? Jesus. Who died?”
“Deckie named Zook — he got gassed in a cargo bay. Ockham says we’re in thrall to the corpse. Not the corpse itself, the Idea of the Corpse. With God out of the picture, people have lost their main reason to be moral. They can’t help experimenting with sin.
As she always did in the presence of intellectually untenable arguments, Cassie thrust her left hand into her pocket and pinched her inner thigh through the fabric. “Can’t help it? Gimme a break, Anthony. The whole thing’s an alibi. A clever alibi, but an alibi. These sailors of yours — want my opinion? They’re seizing on the carcass to rationalize their crimes. God’s death is so convenient.”
“I think it goes deeper than that.” Reaching into his baseball jacket, Anthony produced a sheet of beige paper covered with smeary black characters, and for one awful instant Cassie imagined he meant to confront her with a copy of Oliver’s communique. “Do me a favor, Doc. Read this. It’s from my father.”
The letter was handwritten on Exxon Shipping stationery: a cramped, feathery scrawl that struck her as oddly feminine.
Dear Anthony: You say you want to visit, but that’s not a very good idea. Tiffany gets easily flustered by guests, and you probably intend to bring up a lot of old grievances, like the…
“This seems awfully personal.”
“Just read it.”
…parrot business. My idea of a relaxing retirement — can you believe it? — includes not having my firstborn dropping by and screaming at me. Don’t think I wasn’t pleasantly surprised to receive your letter. You’re a good sailor, son. Flappable, but good. You deserved to get the Val back, though I can’t imagine what the Vatican needs with a ULCC. Hauling holy water, are you? Love, Dad.
“So, what do you make of it?” asked Anthony.
“Who’s Tiffany?”
“My stepmother. Major airhead. What’s he telling me?”
A humbling sense of her own parochialism crept over Cassie. So far in her life, the worst burdens she’d had to bear were rotten reviews in the Voice and deadhead students in her classes, nothing remotely comparable to a hostile father, an unbreachable neck, or a supertanker crew lapsing into vice. “I’m no psychologist… but when he says you have grievances against him, maybe he’s really saying he has grievances against you.”
“Of course he has grievances against me. I dishonored him at Matagorda Bay. I dragged the family name through an oil slick.”
“What’s this ‘parrot business’?”
Anthony snorted, grimaced, and put on his mirrorshades.
“For my tenth birthday, Dad brought back a scarlet macaw from Guatemala.”
“Order Psittaciformes. Family Psittaddae.”
“Yeah. Beautiful bird. She arrived speaking Spanish. ‘Vaya con Dios.’ ‘Que pasa?’ I tried teaching her ‘See you later, alligator,’ but it didn’t stick. I named her Rainbow. So, four months later, what does Dad do? He decides Rainbow’s costing us too much in parrot food and vet bills, and she’s noisy besides, messy too, so he drives me and the bird across town to a pet store, and he goes up to the counter, and he says, ‘If anybody comes in and wants this miserable beast, I’ll split the take with you, fifty-fifty.’ ”
“How mean.”
“There’s a pattern here, actually. I’m eleven — okay? — and the thing I most want for Christmas is a Revell plastic model kit of the USS Constitution, one to the forty-second scale, two hundred and thirty separate pieces, real canvas for the sails. Dad buys me the kit all right, but he won’t let me put it together. He says I’ll screw it up.”
“So he does it himself?”
“Yeah, and here’s the weird part. He gets some glass blower in Wilmington to seal up my ship in a big blue water-cooler bottle. So I can’t touch it, right? I can’t hold the Constitution or play with it. It isn’t really mine.” Anthony took back the fax, wadded it up, and stuffed the ball in his jacket. “The problem is that I need the bastard.”
“No, you don’t.”
“He’s the one who can wash the oil away.”
“Matagorda Bay?”
“Yeah. I won’t be free till Dad looks right at me and says, ‘Good job, Anthony. You laid His bones to rest.’ ”
“Oh, come on.”
“I got it straight from Raphael’s lips.”
“I don’t care whose lips you got it from.” A completely irrational theory, Cassie decided as she drained the last of her jamoke. “It doesn’t add up.” The breeze turned nasty, clawing at her cheeks, biting her fingers. She pulled the zipper tab of Lianne’s windbreaker as high as it would go. “I need some of Follingsbee’s hot cocoa.”
The captain cocked his head. Aries lay reflected in both lenses of his mirrorshades. “Birds fly through my dreams.”
“Birds? Parrots, you mean?”
“Egrets, herons, ibises — dripping oil. I take showers, but it doesn’t help. Only my father… you understand?”
“No. I don’t. But even if I did… well, what if your dad regards absolution as just another present? What if he gives you a clear conscience and then — bang — he takes that away too?”
“He wouldn’t.”
“The man who sent you that fax” — Cassie indicated the bulge in Anthony’s jacket — “is not a man you can trust.” She started up the ladder, retreating not so much from the cold as from this confused, frightening, peculiarly alluring man, this captain who dreamed of oiled egrets. “Know something, sir? When we get back to New York, I’m going to buy you a scarlet macaw.”
“I’d like that, Doc.”
“Know something else?” She paused on the topmost rung. “It’s perfectly okay to hate our cargo. It’s really quite okay.”
August 3.
On this day in 1924, my Mariner’s Pocket Companion notes, “Joseph Conrad, author of Lord Jim, Typhoon, and other classics of the sea, died in Bishopsbourne, England.”
I’ll start with the good news. For reasons best known to themselves, the predators have thrown in the towel. When it comes to the vultures and snakes, my guess is that we’ve sailed too far beyond their territories. As for the sharks — well, who knows what goes on in those antique minds?
This morning I had Rafferty gather up all the antipredator materiel, remove the shells and charges, and secure the empty weapons in the fo’c’sle hold. We no longer need the stuff, and in the present anarchic atmosphere I can easily imagine the deckies making murderous use of a harpoon gun or a bazooka.
Once again we tried screwing chicksans into His right carotid artery, and once again we failed, but that’s not the really bad news.
The fights and thefts continue, but that’s not the really bad news either.
The really bad news is the weather.
Dead reckoning places us 50 miles south of the Azores. It’s hard to know for sure, because the Marisat signals aren’t getting through, and we can’t see more than 20 yards in any direction. Fog I can deal with, but this is something else, a stew so thick it’s blinded both our radars. Forget the sextants.
An hour ago I explained our options to Ockham. Either we break radio silence and ask the Portuguese Coast Guard where the hell we are, or we slow to a crawl to avoid ramming into the Azores.
“You mean like four knots?”
“I mean like three knots.”
“At that speed, we won’t beat the deadline,” noted the padre.
“Correct.”
“His neurons will die.”
“Yeah, if He’s got any left.”
“What’s your preference?” Ockham wanted to know.
“Raphael never mentioned neurons,” I replied.
“Neither did Gabriel. You want us to slow down?”
“No, I want us to save His brain.”
“So do I, Anthony. So do I.”