trunk that has received some attention from a
drawknife but still has bark adhering to it in places, and long dribbles of
golden sap like wax trails on a candle, themselves streaked with sea salt.
Her sails are nearly black with dirt and mildew, and rudely patched, here
and there, with fat black stitches, like the flesh of Frankenstein's
monster.
The men on board are scarcely in better shape. They do not even bother
to drop anchor they just run Gertrude aground on a coral head at the
entrance to the cove, and call it a day. Most of Bischoffs crew has gathered
on the top of V Million, the rocket submarine; they think it's the most
hilarious thing they've ever seen. But when the men on Gertrude climb into a
dinghy and begin rowing towards them, Bischoff's men remember their manners,
and stand at attention, and salute.
Bischoff tries to recognize them as they row closer. It takes a while.
There are five in all. Otto has lost his pot belly and gone much greyer.
Rudy is a completely different man: he has long flowing hair ponytailed down
his back, and a surprisingly thick, Viking like beard, and he appears to
have lost his left eye somewhere along the way, because he's got an actual
black patch over it!
"My god," Bischoff says, "pirates!"
The other three men he has never seen before: a Negro with dread locks;
a brown skinned, Indian looking fellow; and a red headed European.
Rudy is watching a stingray furling and unfurling its meaty wings ten
meters straight down.
"The clarity of the water is exquisite," he remarks.
"When the Catalinas come for us, Rudy, then you will long for the old
northern murk," Bischoff says.
Rudolf von Hacklheber swings his one eye around to bear on Bischoff,
and allows just a trace of amusement to show on his face. "Permission to
come aboard, Captain?" Rudy asks.
"Granted with pleasure," Bischoff says. The dinghy has come alongside
the round hull of the submarine, and Bischoff's crew unrolls a rope ladder
to them. "Welcome to the V Million!"
"I have heard of the V 1 and the V 2, but . .
"We could not guess how many other V weapons Hitler might have
invented, and so we chose a very, very large number," Bischoff says proudly.
"But Günter, you know what the V stands for?"
"Vergeltungswaffen," Bischoff says. "You're not thinking about it hard
enough, Rudy."
Otto's puzzled, and being puzzled makes him angry. " Vergeltung means
revenge, doesn't it?"
"But it can also mean to pay someone back, to compensate them, to
reward them," says Rudy, "even to bless them. I like it very much, Günter."
"Admiral Bischoff to you," Günter returns.
"You are the supreme commander of the V Million – there is no one
above you?"
Bischoff clicks his heels together sharply and holds out his right arm.
"Heil Dönitz!" he shouts.
"What the hell are you talking about?" asks Otto.
"Haven't you been reading the papers? Hitler killed himself yesterday.
In Berlin. The new Führer is my personal friend Karl Dönitz."
"Is he part of the conspiracy too?" Otto mutters.
"I thought my dear mentor and protector Hermann Göring was going to be
Hitler's successor," Rudy says, sounding almost crestfallen.
"He is down in the south somewhere," Bischoff says, "on a diet. Just
before Hitler took cyanide, he ordered the SS to arrest that fat bastard."
"But in all seriousness, Günter when you boarded this U boat in Sweden,
it was called something else, and there were some Nazis on board, yes?" asks
Rudy.
"I had completely forgotten about them." Bischoff cups his hands around
his mouth and shouts down the hatch in the top of the sleek rounded off
conning tower. "Has anyone seen our Nazis?"
The command echoes down the length of the U boat from sailor to sailor:
Nazis? Nazis? Nazis? but somewhere it turns into Nein! Nein! Nein! and
echoes back up the conning tower and out the hatch.
Rudy climbs up V Million's smooth hull on bare feet. "Do you have any
citrus fruit?" He smiles, showing magenta craters in his gums where teeth
might be expected.
"Get the calamansis," Bischoff says to one of his mates. "Rudy, for you
we have the Filipino miniature limes, great piles of them, with more vitamin
C than you could ever want."
"I doubt that," Rudy says.
Otto just looks at Bischoff reproachfully, holding him personally
responsible for having been thrown together with these four other men for
all of 1944 and the first four months of 1945. Finally he speaks: "Is that
son of a bitch Shaftoe here?"
"That son of a bitch Shaftoe is dead," Bischoff says.
Otto averts his glare and nods his head.
"I take it you received my letter from Buenos Aires?" asks Rudy von
Hacklheber.
"Mr. G. Bishop, General Delivery, Manila, the Philippines," Bischoff
recites. "Of course I did, my friend, or else we would not have known where
to meet you. I picked it up when I went into town to renew my acquaintance
with Enoch Root."
"He made it?"
"He made it."
"How did Shaftoe die?"
"Gloriously, of course," Bischoff says. "And there is other news from
Julieta: the conspiracy has a son! Congratulations, Otto, you are a grand
uncle."
This actually elicits a smile, albeit black and gappy, from Otto.
"What's his name?"
"Günter Enoch Bobby Kivistik. Eight pounds, three ounces superb for a
wartime baby."
There is hand shaking all around. Rudy, ever debonair, produces some
Honduran cigars to mark the occasion. He and Otto stand in the sun and smoke
cigars and drink calamansi juice.
"We have been waiting here for three weeks," Bischoff says. "What kept
you?"
Otto spits out something that is pretty bad looking. "I am sorry that
you have had to spend three weeks tanning yourselves on the beach while we
have been sailing this tub of shit across the Pacific!"
"We were dismasted, and lost three men, and my left eye, and two of
Otto's fingers, and a few other items, going around Cape Horn," Rudy says
apologetically. "Our cigars got a little wet. It played havoc with our
schedule."
"No matter," Bischoff says. "The gold isn't going anywhere."
"Do we know where it is?"
"Not exactly. But we have found one who does."
"Clearly, we have much to discuss," Rudy says, "but I have to die
first. Preferably on a soft bed."
"Fine," Bischoff says. "Is there anything that needs to be removed from
Gertrude before we cut her throat, and let her barnacles pull her to the
bottom?"
"Sink the bitch now, please," Otto says. "I will even stay up here and
watch."
"First you must remove five crates marked Property of the
Reichsmarschall ," Rudy says. "They are down in the bilge. We used them as
ballast."
Otto looks startled, and scratches his beard in wonderment. "I forgot
those were down there." The year and a half old memory is slowly resolving
in his mind's eye. "It took a whole day to load them in. I wanted to kill
you. My back still aches from it."
Bischoff says, "Rudy you made off with Göring's pornography
collection?"
"I wouldn't like his kind of pornography," Rudy answers evenly. "These
are cultural treasures. Loot."
"They will have been ruined by bilge water!"
"It's all gold. Sheets of gold foil with holes in it. Impervious."
"Rudy, we are supposed to be exporting gold from the Philippines, not
importing it."
"Don't worry. I shall export it again one day."
"By that time, we'll have money to hire stevedores, so poor Otto won't
have to put his back out again."
"We won't need stevedores," Rudy says. "When I export what is on those
sheets, I'll do it on wires."
They all stand there on the deck of V Million in the tropical cove
watching the sun set and the flying fish leap and hearing birds and insects
cry and buzz from the flowering jungle all around. Bischoff's trying to
imagine wires strung from here to Los Angeles, and sheets of gold foil
sliding down them. It doesn't really work. "Come below, Rudy," he says, "we
need to get some vitamin C into you."
Chapter 95 GOTO SAMA
Avi meets Randy in the hotel lobby. He has burdened himself with a
square, old fashioned briefcase that pulls his slender frame to one side,
giving him the asymptotic curve of a sapling in a steady wind. He and Randy
take a taxi to Some Other Part of Tokyo Randy cannot begin to fathom how the
city is laid out enter the lobby of a skyscraper, and take an elevator up
far enough that Randy's ears pop. When the doors slide open, a maître d' is
standing right there anticipating them with a radiant smile and a bow. He
leads them into a foyer where four men wait: a couple of younger minions;
Goto Furudenendu; and an elderly gentleman. Randy was expecting one of these
gracile, translucent Nipponese seniors, but Goto Dengo is a blocky fellow
with a white buzz cut, somewhat hunched and collapsed with age, which only
goes to make him seem more compact and solid. At first blush he seems more
like a retired village blacksmith, or perhaps a master sergeant in a
daimyo's army, than a business executive, and yet within five or ten seconds
this impression is swallowed up by a good suit, good manners, and Randy's
knowledge of who he really is. He's the only guy in the place who isn't
grinning from ear to ear: apparently when you reach a certain age you are
allowed to get away with staring tunnels through other people's skulls. In
the manner of many old people, he looks vaguely startled that they have
actually shown up.
Still, he levers himself up on a big, gnarled cane and shakes their
hands firmly. His son Furudenendu proffers a hand to help him to his feet
and he shrugs it off with glare of mock outrage this transaction looks
pretty well practiced. There's a brief exchange of small talk that goes
right over Randy's head. Then the two minions peel off, like a fighter
escort no longer needed, and the maître d' leads Randy, Avi, and Goto père
et fils across a totally empty restaurant twenty or thirty tables set with
white linen and crystal to a corner table, where waiters stand at attention
to pull their chairs back. This building is of the sheer walls of solid
glass school of architecture and so the windows go floor to ceiling,
providing, through a bead curtain of raindrops, a view of nighttime Tokyo
that stretches over the horizon. Menus are handed out, printed in French
only. Randy and Avi get the girl menus, with no prices. Goto Dengo gets the
wine list, and pores over it for a good ten minutes before grudgingly
selecting a white from California and a red from Burgundy. Meanwhile,
Furudenendu is leading them in exceedingly pleasant small talk about the
Crypt.
Randy can't stop looking at Tokyo on the one hand and the empty
restaurant on the other. It's like this setting was picked specifically to
remind them that the Nipponese economy has been on the skids for the last
several years a situation that the Asian currency crisis has only worsened.
He half expects to see executives dropping past the window.
Avi ventures to ask about various tunnels and other stupefyingly vast
engineering projects that he happens to have noticed around Tokyo and
whether Goto Engineering had anything to do with them. This at least gets
the patriarch to glance up momentarily from his wine list, but the son
handles the inquiries, allowing as how, yes, their company did play a small
part in those endeavors. Randy figures that it's not the easiest thing in
the world to engage a personal friend of the late General of the Army
Douglas MacArthur in polite chitchat; it's not like you can ask him if he
caught the latest episode of Star Trek: More Time Space Anomalies. All they
can really do is cling to Furudenendu and let him take the lead. Goto Dengo
clears his throat like the engine of a major piece of earth moving equipment
rumbling to life, and recommends the Kobe beef. The sommelier comes around
with the wines and Goto Dengo interrogates him in a mixture of Nipponese and
French for a while, until a film of sweat has broken out on the sommelier's
brow. He samples the wines very carefully. The tension is explosive as he
swirls them around in his mouth, staring off into the distance. The
sommelier seems genuinely startled, not to mention relieved, when he accepts
both of them. The subtext here would seem to be that hosting a really first
class dinner is a not insignificant management challenge, and that Goto
Dengo should not be bothered with social chatter while he is coping with
these responsibilities.
At this point Randy's paranoia finally kicks in: is it possible that
Goto sama bought the whole restaurant out for the evening, just to get a
little privacy? Were the two minions just aides with unusually bulky
briefcases, or were they security, sweeping the place for surveillance
devices? Again, subtext wise, the message seems to be that Randy and Avi are
not to worry their pretty, young little heads about these things. Goto Dengo
is seated underneath a can light in the ceiling. His hair stands
perpendicularly out from his head, a bristling stand of normal vectors,
radiating halogenically. He has a formidable number of scars on his face and
his hands, and Randy suddenly realizes that he must have been in the war.
Which should've been perfectly obvious considering his age.
Goto Dengo inquires about how Randy and Avi got into their current
lines of work, and how they formed their partnership. This is a reasonable
question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept of fantasy role
playing games. If Randy had known this would happen, he would have thrown
himself bodily through a window instead of taking a seat. But Goto Dengo
takes it pretty calmly and instantly cross correlates it to late breaking
developments in the Nipponese game industry, which has been doing this
gradual paradigm shift from arcade to role playing games with actual
narratives; by the time he's finished he makes them feel not like
lightweight nerds but like visionary geniuses who were ten years ahead of
their time. This more or less obligates Avi (who is taking conversational
point) to ask Goto Dengo how he got into his line of work. Both of the Gotos
try to laugh it off, as if how could a couple of young American visionary
Dungeons and Dragons pioneers possibly be interested in something as trivial
as how Goto Dengo singlehandedly rebuilt postwar Nippon, but after Avi
displays a bit of persistence, the patriarch finally shrugs and says
something about how his pop was in the mining racket and so he's always had
a certain knack for digging holes in the ground. His English started out
minimal and is getting better and better as the evening proceeds, as if he
is slowly dusting off substantial banks of memory and processing power,
nursing them on line like tube amplifiers.
Dinner arrives; and so everyone has to eat for a bit, and to thank Goto
sama for his excellent recommendation. Avi gets a bit reckless and asks the
old man if he might regale them with some reminiscences about Douglas
MacArthur. He grins, as if some secret has been ferreted out of him, and
says, "I met the General in the Philippines." Just like that, he's jujitsued
the topic of conversation around to what everyone actually wants to talk
about. Randy's pulse and respiration ratchet up by a good twenty five
percent and all of his senses become more acute, almost as if his ears have
popped again, and he loses his appetite. Everyone else seems to be sitting
up a bit straighter too, shifting in their chairs slightly. "Did you spend
much time in that country?" Avi asks.
"Oh, yes. Much time. A hundred years," says Goto Dengo, with a rather
frosty grin. He pauses, giving everyone a chance to get good and uneasy, and
then continues, "My son tells me that you want to dig a grave there."
"A hole," Randy ventures, after much uncomfortableness.
"Excuse me. My English is rusty," says Goto Dengo, none too
convincingly.
Avi says, "What we have in mind would be a major excavation by our
standards. But probably not by yours."
Goto Dengo chuckles. "That all depends on the circumstances. Permits.
Transportation issues. The Crypt was a big excavation, but it was easy,
because the sultan was supporting it."
"I must emphasize that the work we are considering is still in a very
early planning phase," Avi says. "I regret to say I can't give you good
information about the logistical issues."
Goto Dengo comes this close to rolling his eyes. "I understand," he
says with a dismissive wave of the hand. "We will not talk about these
things this evening."
This produces a really awkward pause, while Randy and Avi ask
themselves what the hell are we going to talk about then? "Very well," Avi
says, sort of weakly lobbing the ball back in Goto Dengo's general
direction.
Furudenendo steps in. "There are many people who dig holes in the
Philippines," he explains with a big knowing wink.
"Ah!" Randy says. "I have met some of the people you are talking
about!" This produces a general outburst of laughter around the table, which
is none the less sincere for being tense.
"You understand, then," says Furudenendo, "that we would have to study
a joint venture very carefully." Even Randy easily translates this to: we
will participate in your loony tunes treasure hunt when hell freezes over.
"Please!" Randy says, "Goto Engineering is a distinguished company. Top
of the line. You have much better things to do than to gamble on joint
ventures. We would never propose such a thing. We would be able to pay for
your services up front."
"Ah!" The Gotos look at each other significantly. "You have a new
investor?" We know you are broke. Avi grins. "We have new resources." This
leaves the Gotos nonplussed. "If I may," Avi says. He heaves his briefcase
up off the floor and onto his lap, flips the latches open, and reaches into
it with both hands. Then he performs a maneuver that, in a bodybuilding gym,
would be called a barbell curl, and lifts a brick of solid gold into the
light.
The faces of Goto Dengo and Goto Furudenendo are transmuted to stone.
Avi holds the bar up for a few moments, then lowers it back into his
briefcase.
Eventually, Furudenendo scoots his chair back a couple of centimeters
and rotates it slightly toward his father, basically excusing himself from
the conversation. Goto Dengo eats dinner and drinks wine calmly, and
silently, for a very, very long fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally, he looks
across the table at Randy and says, "Where do you want to dig?"
"The site is in mountains south of Laguna de Bay "
"Yes, you already told my son that. But that is a large area of boon
docks. Many holes have been dug there. All worthless."
"We have better information."
"Some old Filipino has sold you his memories?"
"Better than that," Randy says. "We have a latitude and longitude."
"To what degree of precision?"
"Tenths of a second."
This occasions another pause. Furudenendo tries to say something in
Nipponese, but his father cuts him off gruffly. Goto Dengo finishes his
dinner and crosses his fork and knife on the plate. A waiter's there five
seconds later to clear the table. Goto Dengo says something to him that
sends him fleeing back into the kitchen. They have essentially a whole floor
of the skyscraper to themselves now. Goto Dengo utters something to his son,
who produces a fountain pen and two business cards. Furudenendo hands the
pen, and one card, to his father, and the other card to Randy. "Let's play a
little game," Goto Dengo says. "You have a pen?"
"Yes," Randy says.
"I am going to write down a latitude and longitude," Goto Dengo says,
"but only the seconds portion. No degrees and no minutes. Only the seconds
part. You understand?"
"Yes."
"The information is useless by itself. You agree?"
"Yes."
"Then there is no risk for you to write down the same."
"It's true."
"Then we will exchange cards. Agreed?"
"I agree."
"Very well." Goto Dengo starts writing. Randy takes a pen from his
pocket and jots down the seconds and tenths of a second: latitude 35.2,
longitude 59.0. When he's done, Goto Dengo's looking at him expectantly.
Randy holds out his card, numbers facing down, and Goto Dengo holds out his.
They exchange them with the small bow that is obligatory around here. Randy
cups Goto sama's card in his palm and turns it into the light. It says
35.2/59.0
No one says anything for ten minutes. It's a measure of how stunned
Randy is that he doesn't realize, for a long time, that Goto Dengo is just
as stunned as he is. Avi and Furudenendu are the only people at the table
whose minds are still functioning, and they spend the whole time looking at
each other uncertainly, neither one really understanding what's going on.
Finally Avi says something that Randy doesn't hear. He nudges Randy
firmly and says it again: "I'm going to the lavatory."
Randy watches him go, counts to ten, and says, "Excuse me." He follows
Avi to the men's washroom: black polished stone, thick white towels, Avi
standing there with his arms crossed. "He knows," Randy says.
"I don't believe it."
Randy shrugs. "What can I say? He knows."
"If he knows, everyone knows. Our security broke down somewhere along
the line."
"Everyone doesn't know," Randy says. "If everyone knew, all hell would
be breaking loose down there, and Enoch would have gotten word to us.
"Then how can he know?"
"Avi," Randy says, "he must be the one who buried it." Avi looks
outraged. "Are you shitting me?"
"You have a better theory?"
"I thought all the people who buried the stuff were killed."
"It's fair to say that he's a survivor. Wouldn't you agree?"
Ten minutes later they return to the table. Goto Dengo has allowed the
restaurant staff back into the room, and dessert menus have been brought
out. Weirdly, the old man has gone back into polite chitchat mode, and Randy
gradually figures out that he's trying to work out how the hell Randy knows
what he knows. Randy mentions, offhandedly, that his grandfather was a
cryptanalyst in Manila in 1945. Goto Dengo sighs, visibly, with relief and
cheers up somewhat. Then it's more completely meaningless chatter until
postprandial coffee has been served, at which point the patriarch leans
forward to make a point. "Before you sip look!"
Randy and Avi look into their cups. A weirdly glittering layer of scum
is floating atop their coffee.
"It is gold," Furudenendu explains. Both of the Gotos laugh. "During
the eighties, when Nippon had so much money, this was the fashion: coffee
with gold dust. Now it is out of fashion. Too ostentatious. But you go ahead
and drink."
Randy and Avi do a bit nervously. The gold dust coats their tongues,
then washes away down their throats.
"Tell me what you think," Goto Dengo demands.
"It's stupid," Randy says.
"Yes." Goto Dengo nods solemnly. "It is stupid. So tell me, then: why
do you want to dig up more of it?"
"We're businessmen," Avi says. "We make money. Gold is worth money."
"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo.
"I don't understand."
"If you want to understand, look out the window!" says the patriarch,
and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty
years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders
of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it
in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The
General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care
about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here " he points to his
head " in the intelligence of the people, and here " he holds out his hands
" in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that
ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst
thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."
"Then let's get it out of the Philippines," Avi says, "so that they too
can have the opportunity to become rich."
"Ah! Now you are making sense," says Goto Dengo. "You are going to take
the gold out and dump it into the ocean, then?"
"No," Avi says, with a nervous chuckle.
Goto Dengo raises his eyebrows. "Oh. So, you wish to become rich as
part of the bargain?"
At this point Avi does something that Randy's never seen him do, or
even come close to doing, before: he gets pissed off. He doesn't flip the
table over, or raise his voice. But his face turns red, the muscles of his
head bulge as he clenches his teeth together, and he breathes heavily
through his nose for a while. The Gotos both seem to be rather impressed by
this, and so no one says anything for a long time, giving Avi a chance to
regain his cool. It seems as though Avi can't bring words forth, and so
finally he takes his wallet out of his pocket and flips through it until
he's found a black and white photograph, which he pulls from its transparent
sleeve and hands across to Goto Dengo. It's a family portrait: father,
mother, four kids, all with a mid twentieth century, Middle European look
about them. "My great uncle," Avi says, "and his family. Warsaw, 1937. His
teeth are down in that hole. You buried my uncle's teeth!"
Goto Dengo looks up into Avi's eyes, neither angry nor defensive. Just
sad. And this seems to have an effect on Avi, who softens, exhales finally,
breaks eye contact.
"I know you probably had no choice," Avi says. "But that's what you
did. I never knew him, or any of my other relatives who died in the Shoah.
But I would gladly dump every ounce of that gold into the ocean, just to
give them a decent burial. That's what I'll do if you make it a condition.
But what I was really planning on doing was using it to make sure that
nothing of the kind ever happens again."
Goto Dengo ponders this for a while, looking stonefaced out over the
lights of Tokyo. Then he unhooks his cane from the edge of the table, jams
it into the floor, and shoves himself to his feet. He turns towards Avi,
straightens his posture, and then bows. It's the deepest bow Randy's ever
seen. Eventually he straightens up and retakes his seat.
The tension has been broken. Everyone's relaxed, not to say exhausted.
"General Wing is very close to finding Golgotha," Randy says, after a
decent interval has ticked by. "It's him or us."
"It's us, then," says Goto Dengo.
Chapter 96 R.I.P.
The clamor of the Marines' rifles echoes through the cemetery, the
sharp reports pinging from tombstone to tombstone like pachinko balls. Goto
Dengo bends down and thrusts his hand into a pile of loose dirt. It feels
good. He scoops up a handful of the stuff, it trickles out from between his
fingers and trails down the legs of his crisp new United States Army
uniform, getting caught in the trouser cuffs. He steps to the sharp brink of
the grave and pours the earth from his hand onto the General Issue coffin
containing Bobby Shaftoe. He crosses himself, staring at the coffin lid
stained with dirt, and then, with some effort, lifts his head up again,
towards the sunlit world of things that live. Other than a few blades of
grass and some mosquitoes, the first living thing that he sees is a pair of
feet in sandals made from old jeep tires, supporting a white man wrapped in
a shapeless brown garment of rough fabric with a large hood on the top.
Staring out from the shade of that hood is the supernaturally weird looking
(in that he has a red beard and grey hair) head of Enoch Root a character
who keeps bumping into Goto Dengo as he goes around Manila trying to carry
out his duties. Goto Dengo is seized and paralyzed by his wild stare.
They stroll together across the burgeoning cemetery.
"You have something you would like to tell me?" Enoch says.
Goto Dengo turns his head to look into Root's eyes. "I was told that
the confessional was a place of perfect secrets."
"It is," Enoch says.
"Then, how did you know?"
"Know what?"
"I think your Church brothers told you something that you should not
know."
"Put this idea out of your mind. The secrecy of the confessional has
not been violated. I did not talk to the priest who took your first
confession, and if I did, he would tell me nothing."
"Then how do you know?" Goto Dengo asks.
"I have several ways of knowing things. One thing I know is that you
are a digger. A man who engineers big holes in the ground. Your friend and
mine, Father Ferdinand, told me that."
"Yes."
"The Nipponese went to much trouble to bring you here. They would not
have done this unless they wanted you to dig an important hole."
"There are many reasons they might have done this."
"Yes," Enoch Root says, "but only a few that make sense."
They stroll silently for a while. Root's feet kick the hem of his robe
out with each step. "I know other things," he continues. "South of here, a
man brought diamonds to a priest. This man said he had attacked a traveler
on the road, and taken from him a small fortune in diamonds. The victim died
of his injuries. The murderer gave the diamonds to the Church as penance."
"Was the victim Filipino or Chinese?" asks Goto Dengo.
Enoch Root stares at him coolly. "A Chinese man knows of this?"
More strolling. Root will gladly walk from one end of Luzon to the
other if that's how long it takes for the words to come out of Goto Dengo.
"I have information from Europe too," Root says. "I know that the
Germans have been hiding treasure. It is widely known that General Yamashita
is burying more war gold in the northern mountains even as we speak."
"What do you want from me?" Goto Dengo asks. There's no preliminary
moistening of the eyeballs, the tears leap out of him and run down his face.
"I came to the Church because of some words."
"Words?"
"This is Jesus Christ who taketh away the sins of the world," Goto
Dengo says. "Enoch Root, no one knows the sins of the world better than me.
I have swum in those sins, drowned in them, burned in them, dug in them. I
was like a man swimming down a long cave filled with black cold water.
Looking up, I saw a light above me, and swam towards it. I only wanted to
find the surface, to breathe air again. Still immersed in the sins of the
world, at least I could breathe. This is what I am now."
Root nods and waits.
"I had to confess. The things that I saw the things I did were so
terrible. I had to purify myself. That is what I did, in my first
confession." Goto Dengo heaves a deep, shuddering sigh. "It was a very, very
long confession. But it is finished. Jesus has taken away my sins, or so the
priest said."
"Good. I'm glad it helped you."
"Now, you want me to speak of these things again?"
"There are others," says Enoch Root. He stops in his tracks, and turns,
and nods. Silhouetted on the top of a rise, on the other side of several
thousand white tombstones, are two men in civilian clothes. They look
Western, but that is all Goto Dengo can tell from here.
"Who are they?"
"Men who have been to hell and come back, as you did. Men who know
about the gold."
"What do they want?"
"To dig up the gold."
Nausea wraps around Goto Dengo like a wet bedsheet. "They would have to
tunnel down through a thousand fresh corpses. It is a grave."
"The whole world is a grave," says Enoch Root. "Graves can be moved,
corpses reinterred. Decently."
"And then? If they got the gold?"
"The world is bleeding. It needs medicine and bandages. These cost
money."
"But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight.
In the world. Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is
stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day
by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By school children doing
their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want
wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start
businesses and build buildings."
"Spoken like a true Nipponese," Enoch says bitterly. "You never
change."
"Please make me understand what you are saying."
"What of the man who cannot get out of bed and work, because he has no
legs? What of the widow who has no husband to work, no children to support
her? What of children who cannot improve their minds because they lack books
and schoolhouses?"
"You can shower gold on them," Goto Dengo says. "Soon enough, it will
all be gone."
"Yes. But some of it will be gone into books and bandages."
Goto Dengo does not have a rejoinder for this. He is not outsmarted so
much as sad and tired. "What do you want? You think I should give the gold
to the Church?"
Enoch Root looks mildly taken aback, as if the idea hadn't really
occurred to him before. "You could do worse, I suppose. The Church has two
thousand years of experience in using its resources to help the poor. It has
not always been perfect. But is has built its share of hospitals and
schools."
Goto Dengo shakes his head. "I have only been in your Church for a few
weeks and already I have many doubts about it. It has been a good thing for
me. But to give it so much gold I am not sure if this is a good idea."
"Don't look at me as if you expect me to defend the Church's
imperfections," says Enoch Root. "They have kicked me out of the
priesthood."
"Then what shall I do?"
"Perhaps give it to the Church with conditions."
"What?"
"You can stipulate that it only be used to educate children, if you
choose."
Goto Dengo says, "Educated men created this cemetery."
"Then choose some other condition."
"My condition is that if that gold ever comes out of the ground, it
should be used so that we do not have any more wars like this one."
"And how should we accomplish such a thing, Goto Dengo?"
Goto Dengo sighs. "You put a big weight on my shoulders!"
"No. I did not put the weight on your shoulders. It has always been
there." Enoch Root stares mercilessly into Goto Dengo's tormented face.
"Jesus takes away the sins of the world, but the world remains: a physical
reality on which we are doomed to live until death takes us away from it.
You have confessed, and you have been forgiven, and so the greater part of
your burden has been taken away by grace. But the gold is still there, in a
hole in the ground. Did you think that the gold all turned into dirt when
you swallowed the bread and the wine? That is not what we mean by
transubstantiation." Enoch Root turns his back and walks away, leaving Goto
Dengo alone in the bright avenues of the city of the dead.
Chapter 97 RETURN
"I SHALL RETURN" wrote Randy in his first e mail message to Amy after
he got to Tokyo. Returning to the Philippines is not a very good idea at
all, and probably not the kind of thing that the old mellow Randy would have
even considered. But here he is on a beach in the Sultanate of Kinakuta,
down below Tom Howard's personal citadel, dipped in sunblock and Dramamined
to the gills, getting ready to return. Reckoning that the goatee would make
him easy to identify, he has shaved it off, and reckoning that hair is
useless where he's headed (the jungle, jail, and Davy Jones's Locker being
the three most likely possibilities), has run a buzzer over his head and
shorn himself down to about an eighth of an inch all around. This in turn
has necessitated finding a hat, to prevent radiation burns of the skull, and
the only hat in Tom Howard's house that fits Randy is an outback number that
some cephalomegalic Aussie contractor left behind there, evidently because
its fragrance had begun to attract nocturnal rodents with a proclivity for
aimless gnawing.
A pamboat is drawn up on the beach, and a couple of families' worth of
badjao kids are tear assing around, exactly like kids at a rest area on the
interstate who know that in ten minutes they have to get back into the
Winnebago. The boat's main hull is carved from a single rainforest tree,
fifty feet long if it's an inch, narrow enough at its widest point that
Randy could sit in the middle and touch both gunwales with out stretched
hands. Most of the hull's shaded under a thatched roof of palm fronds,
almost all grey brown from age and salt spray, though in one place an older
woman is patching it with fresh greens and plastic twine. On each side a
narrow bamboo outrigger is connected to the hull by bamboo poles. There's a
sort of bridge that sticks way out over the bow, painted with bright red and
green and yellow curlicues, like chains of vortices thrown off in the wake
of a boat and reflecting the colors of a tropical sunset.
Speaking of which, the sun's going down right now, and they are making
preparations to bring the final load, of gold up out of the hull of the
pamboat. The land drops so precipitously towards the water that there's no
road access to the beach, which is probably a good thing since they want
this to be as private as possible. But Tom Howard had a lot of heavy stuff
shipped in here when he was constructing his house, and so he already has a
short section of narrow gauge railway in place. This sounds more impressive
than it is: a pair of steel I beams, already rusting, bracketed to half
buried concrete ties, running fifty yards straight up a forty five degree
slope to a small plateau that's accessible via private road. There he's got
a diesel powered winch that he can use to drag stuff up the rails. It is
more than adequate for this evening's job, which is to move a couple of
hundred kilograms of bullion the last of the gold from the sunken submarine
up from the beach and into the vault in his house. Tomorrow, he and the
others can truck it into downtown Kinakuta at their leisure, and turn it
into strings of bits representing very large numbers with noteworthy
cryptological properties.
The badjaos share the same maddening refusal to be exotic that Randy
has found everywhere on his travels: the guy who's running the show insists
that his name is Leon, and the kids on the beach are forever copping
stereotyped martial arts poses and hollering "hi yaaa!" which Randy knows is
a Power Rangers thing, because Avi's kids did exactly the same thing until
their father banned all Power Ranger emulation inside the house. When the
first milk crate full of gold bars is dropped off the high bridge of the
pamboat by Leon, and half buries itself in the floury damp sand below, Avi
stands over it and tries to utter some kind of solemn prayer for the dead in
Hebrew, and gets maybe half a dozen phonemes into it before two of the
badjao kids, having pegged him as a permanent stationary object, decide to
use him as tactical cover, and take up positions on either side of him madly
hi yaaaing each other. Avi's not so full of himself that he can't see the
humor in this, and yet not so sentimental that he doesn't obviously want to
strangle them.
John Wayne is patrolling the surf with a cigarette and a pump shotgun.
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe rates the probability of frogman attack rather low
because the gold in the pamboat is only worth two and half million dollars,
an amount that hardly rates anything as elaborate, and expensive, as a
seaborne assault. John Wayne needs to be there in case someone gets the
mistaken impression that they've somehow managed to pack ten or twenty times
that much gold into the pamboat. This seems improbable from a hydrodynamics
standpoint. But Doug says that overestimating the intelligence of the enemy
is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. He, Tom Howard, and
Jackie Woo are up the hill guarding the roadhead with assault rifles. Tom's
been positively strutting. All of his fantasies are coming true in this
little tableau.
A large plastic box thuds into the sand, breaks open, and spills out a
mess of shattered coral. Randy strolls over to it and sees leaves of gold
inside the coral carapace, tiny holes punched into them. To him the holes
are more interesting than the gold.
But everyone's reacting differently. Doug Shaftoe's always
conspicuously cool and sort of pensive in the presence of a very large
amount of gold, like he's always known that it was there, but touching it
makes him think about where it came from and what was done to get it there.
The sight of a single brick almost made Goto Dengo vomit up his Kobe beef.
For Eberhard Föhr, who is out in the cove doing a lazy backstroke, it is the
physical incarnation of monetary value, which for him, and the rest of
Epiphyte, has mostly been a mathematical abstraction a practical application
of one particular sub sub sub branch of number theory. So it has the same
kind of purely intellectual attraction to him as a moon rock or a dinosaur
tooth. Tom Howard sees it in the embodiment of some political principles
that are almost as pure, and as divorced from human reality, as number
theory. Mixed in with that is some sense of personal vindication. For Leon
the Sea Gypsy, it's just a cargo to be hauled from point A to point B, for
which he'll be compensated with something more useful. For Avi it's an
inextricable mixture of the sacred and the satanic. For Randy and if anyone
knew about this, he would be dreadfully embarrassed, and would freely admit
to its cloyingness it is the closest thing he's got right now to a physical
link with his beloved, in that she was pulling these bars out of the wreck
of the submarine just a few days ago. And that is really the only sense in
which he gives a damn about it, anymore. In fact, in the few days since he
decided to hire Leon to smuggle him up the Sulu Sea and into southern Luzon,
he has had to remind himself over and over again that the nominal purpose of
the trip is to open up Golgotha.
After the gold has been unloaded, and Leon has taken on some supplies,
Tom Howard produces a bottle of single malt scotch, finally answering
Randy's question of who patronizes all of those duty free stores in
airports. Everyone gathers on the beach for a toast. Randy's a little edgy
when he joins this circle, because he's not sure what he's going to propose
a toast to if the responsibility falls to him. Unearthing Golgotha? He can't
really drink to that. The meeting of minds between Avi and Goto Dengo was a
spark jumping across an air gap sudden, dazzling, and a little scary and it
hinged around their common understanding that all of this gold is blood
money, that Golgotha is a grave they're preparing to desecrate. So that's
not exactly toast material. How about a toast to abstract lofty principles,
then?
Here Randy's got another hangup, something that's been slowly dawning
on him as he stands on the beach beneath Tom Howard's concrete house: the
perfect freedom that Tom's found in Kinakuta is a cut flower in a crystal
vase. It's lovely, but it's dead, and the reason it's dead is that it has
been alienated from its germinal soil. And what is that soil exactly? To a
first approximation you could just say "America," but it's a little more
complicated than that; America's just the hardest to ignore instantiation of
a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places.
Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta. The closest outpost is really not that
far away: the Filipinos, for all of their shortcomings in the human rights
department, have imbibed the whole Western freedom thing deeply, in a way
that has arguably made them economic laggards compared to Asian countries
where no one gives a shit about human rights.
In the end it's a moot point; Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe purposes a
toast to smooth sailing. Two years ago Randy would have found this to be
banal and simple minded. Now he understands it as Doug's implicit nod to the
world's moral ambiguity, and a pretty deft preemptive strike against any
more inflated rhetoric. Randy downs his Scotch in a gulp and then says,
"let's do it," which is also pretty stunningly banal, but this gathering in
a circle on the beach thing really makes him nervous; he signed on to
participate in a business opportunity, not to join a cabal.
Four days on the pamboat ensue. It putts along at a steady ten
kilometers per hour day and night, and it sticks to shallow coastal waters
along the periphery of the Sulu Sea. They are lucky with the weather. They
stop twice on Palawan and once on Mindoro to take on diesel fuel and to
barter for unspecified commodities. Cargo goes down in the hull, people go
above it on the deck, which is just a few loose planks thrown crosswise over
the gunwales. Randy feels more out and out lonely than he has since he was a
teenaged geek, but he's not sad about it. He sleeps a lot, perspires, drinks
water, reads a couple of books, and dicks around with his new GPS receiver.
Its most salient feature is a mushroom shaped external antenna that can pick
up weak signals, which ought to be useful in triple canopy jungle. Randy has
punched Golgotha's latitude and longitude into its memory, so that by
hitting a couple of buttons he can instantly see how far away it is, along
what heading. From Tom Howard's beach it's almost exactly a thousand
kilometers. When the pamboat finally noses up on a tidal mudflat in southern
Luzon, and Randy sloshes ashore in full MacArthurian style, the distance is
only about forty clicks.
But tumbledown volcanoes rise before him, black and mist shrouded, and
he knows from experience that forty kilometers in boondocks will be much
rougher going than the first nine hundred and sixty.
The bell tower of an old Spanish church rises up above the coconut
palms not far away, carved from blocks of volcanic tuff that are beginning
to glow in the lambency of another damn mind blowing tropical sunset. After
he's snagged some extra bottles of water and said his good byes to Leon and
the family, Randy walks towards it. As he goes, he erases the memory of
Golgotha's location from his GPS, just in case it gets confiscated or ripped
off.
The next thought he has says something about his general frame of mind:
that nuts are the genitalia of trees is never more obvious than when you are
looking at a cluster of swelling young coconuts nestled in the hairy dark
groin of a palm tree. It's surprising that the Spanish missionaries didn't
have the whole species eradicated. Anyway, by the time he's reached the
church, he's picked up a retinue of little bare chested Filipino kids who
apparently aren't used to seeing white men materialize out of nowhere.
Randy's not crazy about this, but he'll settle for no one summoning the
police.
A Nipponese sport utility vehicle of the adorably styled, alarmingly
high center of gravity school is parked in front of the church, ringed by
impressed villagers. Randy wonders if they could have done this any more
conspicuously. A fiftyish driver leans against the front bumper smoking a
cigarette and shooting the breeze with some local dignitaries: a priest and,
for god's sake, a cop with a fucking bolt action rifle. Just about everyone
in sight is smoking Marlboros, which have apparently been distributed as a
goodwill gesture. Randy's got to get himself back into a Philippine frame of
mind: the way to sneak into the country is not to mount some cloak and
dagger operation, crawling up onto an isolated beach in a matte black
wetsuit in the middle of the night, but simply to waltz in and make friends
with all of the people who see you. Because it's not like they're stupid;
they are going to see you.
Randy smokes a cigarette. He had never done this in his life until a
few months ago, when he finally got it through his head that it was a social
thing, that some people take it as an insult when you turn down an offered
cigarette, and that a few smokes weren't going to kill him in any case. None
of these people, except for the driver and the priest, speaks a word of
English, and so this is the only way he can communicate with them. Anyway,
given all the other changes he's gone through, why the hell shouldn't he
become a cigarette smoker while he's at it? Maybe next week he'll be
shooting heroin. For something disgusting and lethal, cigarettes are
amazingly enjoyable.
The driver is named Matthew, and he really turns out to be not so much
a driver as a charismatic fixer/negotiator, a smoother of the way, a human
road grader. Randy just stands there passively while Matthew charmingly and
hilariously extricates them from this impromptu village meeting, a job that
would probably be next to impossible if the priest were not so clearly
complicit. The cop looks to the priest for cues as to what he should do, and
the priest tells him something complicated with a series of looks and
gestures, and in that way, somehow, Randy finds his way into the sport
utility vehicle's passenger seat and Matthew gets behind the wheel. Well
after sunset they trundle out of the village along its execrable one lane
road, trailed by kids who run alongside keeping one hand on the car, like
Secret Service agents in a motorcade. They are able to do this for quite a
while because they've gone a few kilometers before the road gets good enough
for Matthew to shift out of first gear.
This is not a part of the world where it makes any sense at all to
drive at night, but clearly Matthew wasn't interested in an overnight stay
at that village. Randy has a pretty good idea of what's going to happen now:
many hours of driving very slowly on circuitous roads, half blocked by piles
of freshly harvested young coconuts, impeded by hunks of lumber thrown
across the right of way as speed bumps to prevent kids and dogs from being
run over. He leans his seat back.
Bright light is streaming into the car and he thinks: roadblock, cops,
spotlights. The light's blocked by a silhouette. There's a rapping noise on
the window. Randy looks over and sees the driver's seat empty, no keys in
the ignition. The car's cool and dormant. He sits up and rubs his face,
partly because it needs to be rubbed and partly because it's probably smart
to keep one's hands in plain sight. More rapping on the windshield,
growingly impatient. The windows are fogged and he can only see shapes. The
light's reddish. He's got a completely inappropriate erection. Randy gropes
for a window control, but the car's got power windows and they don't work
when it's not running. He gropes around on the door until he's figured out
how to unlock it, and almost instantly it flies open and someone's coming
inside to join him.
She ends up on Randy's lap, lying sideways on top of him, her head on
his chest. "Close the door," Amy says, and Randy does. Then she squirms
around until she's face to face with him, her pelvic center of gravity
grinding mercilessly against the huge generalized region between navel and
thigh that has, in recent months, become one big sex organ for him. She
brackets his neck between her forearms and grabs the carotid supports of the
whiplash arrestor. He's busted. The obvious thing now would be a kiss, and
she feints in that direction, but then reconsiders, as it seems like some
serious looking is in order at this time. So they look at each other for
probably a good minute. It's not a moony kind of look that they share, not a
starry eyed thing by any means, more like a what the fuck have we gotten
ourselves into thing. As if it's really important to both of them that they
mutually appreciate how serious everything is. Emotionally, yes, but also
from a legal and, for lack of a better term, military standpoint. But once
Amy is satisfied that her boy does indeed get it, on all of these fronts,
she permits herself a vaguely incredulous looking sneer that blossoms into a
real grin, and then a chuckle that in a less heavily armed woman might be
characterized as a giggle, and then, just to shut herself up, she pulls hard
on the stainless steel goalposts of the whiplash arrestor and nuzzles her
face up to Randy's and, after ten heartbeats' worth of exploratory sniffling
and nuzzling, kisses him. It's a chaste kiss that takes a long time to open
up, which is totally consistent with Amy's cautious, sardonic approach to
everything, as well as with the hypothesis, alluded to once while they were
driving to Whitman, that she is in fact a virgin.
Randy's life is essentially complete at the moment. He has come to
understand during all of this that the light shining in through the windows
is in fact the light of dawn, and he tries to fight back the thought that
it's a good day to die because it's clear to him that although he might go
on from this point to make a lot of money, become famous, or whatever,
nothing's ever going to top this. Amy knows it too, and she makes the kiss
last for a very long time before finally breaking away with a little gasp
for air, and bowing her head so that her brow is supported on Randy's
breastbone, the curve of her head following that of his throat, like the
coastlines of South America and Africa. Randy almost can't take the pressure
of her on his groin. He braces his feet against the floorboards of the sport
utility vehicle and squirms.
She moves suddenly and decisively, grabbing the hem of the left leg of
his baggy shorts and yanking it almost up to his navel, taking his boxer
shorts along with. Randy pops free and takes aim at her, straining upwards,
bobbing slightly with each beat of his heart, glowing healthily (he thinks
modestly) in the dawn light. Amy's in a sort of light wrap around skirt,
which she suddenly flings over him, producing a momentary tent pole effect.
But she's on the move, reaching up beneath to pull her underwear out of the
way, and then before he can even believe it's happening she sits down on
him, hard, producing a nearly electrical shock. Then she stops moving daring
him.
Randy's toe knuckles pop audibly. He lifts himself and Amy into the
air, experiences some kind of synaesthetic hallucination very much like the
famous "jump into hyperspace" scene from Star Wars. Or perhaps the air bag
has accidentally detonated? Then he pumps something like an Imperial pint of
semen it's a seemingly open ended series of ejaculations, each coupled to
the next by nothing more than a leap of faith that another one is coming and
in the end, like all schemes built on faith and hope, it lapses, and then
Randy sits utterly still until his body realizes it has not drawn breath in
quite a while. He fills his lungs all the way, stretching them out, which
feels almost as good as the orgasm, and then he opens his eyes she's staring
down at him in bemusement, but (thank god!) not horror or disgust. He
settles back into the bucket seat, which squeezes his butt in a not
unpleasant gesture of light harassment. Between that, and Amy's thighs, and
other penetrations, he is not going anywhere for a while, and he's
moderately afraid of what Amy's going to say she has a lengthy menu of
possible responses to all of this, most of them at Randy's expense. She
plants a knee, levers herself up, grabs the tail of his Hawaiian shirt and
cleans herself off a bit. Then she shoves the door open, pats him twice on
his whiskery cheek, says "Shave," and exits stage left. Randy can now see
that the air bag has not, in fact, deployed. And yet he has the same feeling
of a major sudden life change that one might get after surviving a car
crash.
He is a mess. Fortunately his bag's in the backseat, with another
shirt. A few minutes later he finally emerges from the fogged up car and
gets a look at his surroundings. He's in a community built on a canted
plateau with a few widely spaced, very high coconut palms scattered about.
Downslope, which appears to be roughly south, there is a pattern of
vegetation that Randy recognizes as a tri leveled cash crop thing:
pineapples down on the ground, cacao and coffee at about head level,
coconuts and bananas above that. The yellowish green leaves of the banana
trees are especially appealing, seemingly big enough to stretch out and
sunbathe on. To the north, and uphill, a jungle is attempting to tear down a
mountain.
This compound that he's in is obviously a recent thing, laid out by
actual surveyors, designed by people with educations, subsidized by someone
who can afford brand new sheets of corrugated tin, ABS drainpipe, and proper
electrical wiring. It has something in common with a normal Philippine town
in that it's built around a church. In this case the church is small Enoch
called it a chapel but that it was designed by Finnish architecture students
would be obvious to Randy even if Root hadn't divulged it. It has a bit of
that Bucky Fuller tensegrity thing going for it lots of exposed, tensioned
cables radiating from the ends of tubular struts, all collaborating to
support a roof that's not a single surface but a system of curved shards. It
looks awfully well designed to Randy, who now judges buildings on the sole
criterion of their ability to resist earthquakes. Root told him it was built
by the brothers of a missionary order, and by local volunteers, with
materials contributed by a Nipponese foundation that is still trying to make
amends for the war.
Music is coming out of the church. Randy checks his watch and discovers
that it's Sunday morning. He avoids participating in the Mass, on the excuse
that it's already underway and he doesn't want to interrupt it, and ambles
toward a nearby pavilion a corrugated roof sheltering a concrete floor slab
with some plastic tables where breakfast is being laid out. He arouses
violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling
across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his
way; they're scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate
that fear into a coherent plan of action. Several miles away, a helicopter
is flying in from the sea, shedding altitude as it homes in on a pad
somewhere up in the jungle. It is a big and gratuitously loud cargo carrying
chopper with unfamiliar lines, and Randy vaguely suspects that it was built
in Russia for Chinese customers and that it is part of Wing's operations.
He recognizes Jackie Woo lounging at one of the tables, drinking tea
and reading a bright magazine. Amy's in the adjacent kitchen, embroiled in
Tagalog girl talk with a couple of middle aged ladies who are handling the
preparations for the meal. This place seems pretty safe, and so Randy stops
in the open, punches in the digits that only he and Goto Dengo know, and
takes a GPS reading. According to the machine, they are no more than 4500
meters away from the main drift of Golgotha. Randy checks the heading and
determines that it is uphill from here. Although the jungle blurs the
underlying shape of the earth, he thinks that it's going to be up in the
valley of a nearby river.
Forty five hundred meters seems impossibly close, and he's still
standing there trying to convince himself that his memory is sound when the
ragged voices of the worshippers suddenly spill out across the compound as
the chapel's door is pushed open. Enoch Root emerges, wearing (inevitably)
what Randy would describe as a wizard's robe. But as he walks across the
compound he shucks it off to reveal sensible khakis underneath, and hands
the robe to a young Filipino acolyte who scurries back inside with it. The
singing trails off and then Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe emerges from the
church, followed by John Wayne and several people who appear to be locals.
Everyone drifts towards the pavilion. The alertness that comes with being in
a new place, combined with the neurological aftermath of that shockingly big
and long orgasm, has left Randy's senses sharper, and his mind clearer, than
they've ever been, and he's impatient to get going. But he can't dispute the
wisdom of getting a good breakfast, so he shakes hands all around and sits
down with the others. There is a bit of small talk about how his pamboat
voyage went.
"Your friends should have come into the country that way," says Doug
Shaftoe, and then goes on to explain that Avi and both of the Gotos were
supposed to be here yesterday, but they were detained at the airport for
some hours and eventually had to fly back to Tokyo while some mysterious
immigration hassles were ironed out. "Why didn't they go to Taipei or Hong
Kong?" Randy wonders aloud since both those cities are much closer to
Manila. Doug stares at him blankly and observes that both of those are
Chinese cities, and reminds him that their presumed adversary now is General
Wing, who has a lot of pull in places like that.
Several backpacks have already been prepared, laden mostly with bottled
water. After everyone's had a chance to digest breakfast, Douglas MacArthur
Shaftoe, Jackie Woo, John Wayne, Enoch Root, America Shaftoe, and Randall
Lawrence Waterhouse all don packs. They begin to stroll uphill, passing out
of the compound and into a transitional zone of big leaved traveler trees
and giant clusters of bamboo: ten centimeter thick trunks spraying out and
up from central roots, like frozen shell bursts, to heights of at least ten
meters, the poles striped green and brown where the husky leaves are peeling
away. The canopy of the jungle looms higher and higher, accentuated by the
fact that it's uphill from here, and emits a fantastic whistling noise, like
a phaser on overload. As they enter the shade of the canopy the racket of
crickets is added to that whistling noise. It sounds as though there must be
millions of crickets and millions of whatever's making the whistling noise,
but from time to time the sound will suddenly stop and then start up again,
so if there are a lot of them, they are all following the same score.
The place is filled with plants that in America are only seen in pots,
but that grow to the size of oak trees here, so big that Randy's mind can't
recognize them as, for example, the same kind of Diefenbachia that
Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs
bathroom. There is an incredible variety of butterflies, for whom the wind
free environment seems to be congenial, and they weave in and out among huge
spiderwebs that call to mind the design of Enoch Root's chapel. But it is
clear that the place is ultimately ruled by ants; in fact it makes the most
sense to think of the jungle as a living tissue of ants with minor
infestations of trees, birds, and humans. Some of them are so small that
they are, to other ants, as those ants are to people; they prosecute their
ant activities in the same physical space but without interfering, like many
signals on different frequencies sharing the same medium. But there are a
fair number of ants carrying other ants, and Randy assumed that they are not
doing it for altruistic reasons.
Where the jungle's dense it is impassable, but there are a fair number
of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the under growth
is only knee high, and light shines through. By moving from one such place
to another they make slow progress in the general direction indicated by
Randy's GPS. Jackie Woo and John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear to be
moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to
visit, but you wouldn't want to live, or even stop moving, there. Just as
the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the
insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended
food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an
unforgeable guarantee of freshness. The canopy's tentpoles are huge trees
"Octomelis sumatrana," says Enoch Root with narrow buttress roots splayed
out explosively in every direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into
the earth. Some of them are almost completely obscured by colossal
philodendrons winding up their trunks.
They crest a broad, gentle ridgeline; Randy had forgotten that they
were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and moisture condenses
on their skins. When the whistlers and the crickets pause, it be comes
possible to hear the murmur of a stream down below them. The next hour is
devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They cover a
total of a hundred meters; at this rate, Randy thinks, it should take them
two days, hiking around the clock, to reach Golgotha. But he keeps this
observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become aware of,
and to be taken aback by, the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be
above them forty or fifty meters above them in many cases. He feels as
though he's at the bottom of the food chain.
They enter a sunnier zone that consequently is snarled by much heavier
undergrowth, and are forced to break out the machetes and hack their way
through to the river. Enoch Root explains that this is a place where a small
lahar, which had been funneled between the steep walls of the river's gorge
farther upstream, spread out and mowed down a few hectares of ancient trees,
clearing the path for smaller, opportunistic vegetation. This is fascinating
for about ten seconds and then it's back to the machete work. Eventually
they reach the edge of the river, all of them sticky and greenish and
itching from the sap and juice and pulp of the vegetation they have
assaulted in order to get here. The river's bed is shallow and rocky here,
with no discernible bank. They sit down and drink water for a while. "What
is the point of all this?" asks Enoch Root suddenly. "I don't mean to sound
discouraged by these physical barriers, because I'm not. But I'm wondering
whether you have worked out the goal of it in your own mind."
"This is fact finding. Nothing more," Randy says.
"But there's no point in just aimlessly finding facts unless you're a
pure scientist, or a historian. You are representing a business concern
here. Correct?"
"Yes."
"And so if I were a shareholder in your company I could demand an
explanation of why you are sitting here on the edge of this river right now
instead of actually doing whatever it is that your company does."
"Assuming you were an intelligent shareholder, yes, that's what you'd
be doing."
"And what would your explanation be, Randy?"
"Well "
"I know where we are going, Randy." And Enoch quotes a string of
digits.
"How did you know that?" Randy asks kind of hotly.
"I've known it for fifty years," Enoch says. "Goto Dengo told me."
All Randy can do for a while is fume. Doug Shaftoe's laughing. Amy just
looks distracted. Enoch broods for a few moments, and finally says:
"Originally the plan was to buy this land with a smaller cache of gold that
was dug up and loaded aboard a certain submarine. We would then wait for the
right moment and then dig up the rest. But the submarine sank, and the gold
sank with it. I sat on the knowledge for many years. But then people started
buying up land around here people who were obviously hoping to find the
Primary. If I'd had the money, I would have bought this land myself. But I
didn't. So I saw to it that the Church bought it."
Doug Shaftoe says, "You haven't answered Enoch's question yet, Randy:
what good are you doing your shareholders here?"
A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings
moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability
distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum
mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport
from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a
couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between.
There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in
the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of
serious evolutionary badass.
"We took the gold that you recovered from the submarine and turned it
into electronic cash, right?" Randy says.
"So you claimed. I haven't actually spent any of that electronic cash
yet," says Doug.
"We want to do the same thing for the Church or Wing or whoever ends up
in possession of the gold. We want to deposit it in the Crypt, and make it
usable as electronic currency."
Amy asks, "Do you understand that, in order to move the gold out of
here, it'll be necessary to travel across land controlled by Wing?"
"Who says we have to move it?"
Silence for a minute, or what passes for silence in a jungle.
Doug Shaftoe says, "You're right. If the stories are even half true,
this facility is far more secure than any bank vault."
"The stories are all true and then some," Randy says. "The man who
designed and built Golgotha is Goto Dengo himself."
"Shit!"
"He drew plans of it for us. And the larger issue of local and national
security is not a problem here," Randy adds. "Of course the government has
sometimes been unstable. But any invader who wants to physically seize
possession of the gold will have to fight his way across this jungle with
tens of millions of heavily armed Filipinos barring his path."
"Everyone knows what the Huks did against the Nips," Doug says, nodding
vigorously. "Or the VC against us, for that matter. No one would be stupid
enough to try it."
"Especially if we put you in charge, Doug."
Amy's been woolgathering through most of the conversation, but at this
she turns and grins at her father.
"I accept," Doug says.
Randy's slowly becoming aware that most of the birds and bugs who live
here move so fast that you can't even turn your head fast enough to center
them in your vision. They exist only as slicing movements in your peripheral
vision. The only exception would seem to be a species of gnat that has
evolved into the specific niche of plunging into the left eyeballs of human
beings at something just under the speed of sound. Randy has taken about
four hits in the left eye, none in the right. He takes another one now, and
as he's recovering from it, the earth jumps underneath them. It is a little
like an earthquake in its psychological effect: a feeling of disbelief, and
then betrayal, that the solid ground is having the temerity to move around.
But it's all over by the time the sensation has moved up their spines to
their brains. The river's still running, and the dragonfly is still hunting.
"That felt exactly like high explosive going off," says Doug Shaftoe,
"but I didn't hear anything. Did anyone hear anything?"
No one heard anything.
"What that means," Doug continues, "is that someone is setting off
explosives deep underground."
They start working their way up the riverbed. Randy's GPS indicates
that Golgotha is less than two thousand meters upstream. The river begins to
develop proper banks that get steadily higher and steeper. John Wayne
clambers up onto the left bank and Jackie Woo onto the right, so that the
high ground on either side will be guarded, or at least reconnoitered. They
pass back into the shade of the canopy. The ground here is some kind of
sedimentary rock with granite boulders embedded in it from place to place,
like mixed nuts in half melted chocolate. It must be nothing more than a
scab of congealed ash and sediment on top of an underlying monolith of hard
rock. Those who are down in the streambed move very slowly now. Part of the
time they are down in the river, struggling upstream against a powerful
current, and part of the time they are picking their way from boulder to
boulder, or sidestepping. along crumbling ledges of harder rock that
protrude from the banks here and there. Every few minutes, Doug looks up and
makes visual contact with Jackie Woo and John Wayne who must be contending
with challenges of their own, because sometimes they fall behind the main
group. The trees only seem to get higher as they work their way up into the
mountains, and now their height is accentuated by the fact that they are
rooted in the top of a bank that rises above the stream two, five, ten, then
twenty and thirty meters. The bank actually overhangs them now: the river's
gorge is a tube mostly buried in the earth, open to the sky only through a
narrow slot in the top. But it's close to midday and the sun is shining
nearly straight down through it, illuminating all of the stuff that makes
its way down from the heights. The corpse of a murdered insect drifts down
from the upper canopy like winter's first snowflake. Water seeping from the
rims of the overhanging bank forms a drip curtain, each drop glittering like
a diamond and making it nearly impossible to see the dark cavity behind.
Yellow butterflies weave among those falling drops but never get hit.
They come around a gentle bend in the river and are confronted by a
waterfall some twenty meters high. At the base of the falls there's a still
and relatively shallow pool, filling the bottom of a broad melon shaped
cavity formed by the concave, overhanging banks. The vertical sun beams
straight down on the cloud of white foam at the base of the falls, which
radiates the light back at blinding power, forming a sort of natural light
fixture that illuminates the whole inside of the cavity. The stone walls,
sweating and dripping and running with groundwater, glisten in its light.
The undersides of the ferns and big leaved plants epiphytes sprouting from
invisible footholds in the walls flicker and dapple in the weirdly bluish
foam glow.
Most of the cavity's walls are hidden behind vegetation: fragile,
cascading veils of moss growing from the rock, and vines depending from the
branches of the trees hundreds of feet above them and dangling halfway down
into the gorge, where they have become entangled with protruding tree roots
and formed a natural trellis for a finer network of creepers that is itself
the warp and woof of a matted carpet of moss saturated with flowing ground
water. The gorge is alive with butterflies burning with colors of
radioactive purity, and down closer to the rustling water are damselflies,
mostly black with aqua bodies that flash in the sun their wings revealing
glimpses of salmon and coral red on the underside as they orbit around each
other. But mostly the air is filled with this continual slow progress of
things that didn't survive, making their way down through the column of air
and into the water, which flushes them away: dead leaves and the
exoskeletons of insects, sucked dry and eviscerated in some silent combat
hundreds of feet above their heads.
Randy's keeping an eye on the display of his GPS, which has been having
a hard time locking onto any satellites down in this gorge. But finally some
numbers come up. He has it calculate the distance from here to Golgotha, and
the answer comes up immediately: a long row of zeroes with a few
insignificant digits trailing off the end.
Randy says, "This is it." But most of what he says is obscured by a
sharp explosion from high above them on the bank. A few seconds later, a man
begins to scream.
"No one move," says Doug Shaftoe, "we are in a minefield."
Chapter 98 CRIBS
On a grassy knoll, a man crouches behind a tombstone, peering through a
telescope on a tripod, and tracking the steady pace of a robed and hooded
figure across the grass.
FUNERAL. That's the crib that broke these guys.
The Nipponese man in the American uniform, whom Enoch Root is leaving
behind, must be that Goto Dengo fella. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has
seen that name punched on so many ETC cards that he no longer even has to
read the printed letters at the top of the card: he can identify a "Goto
Dengo" from arm's length simply by glancing at the pattern of punched out
rectangles. The same is true of some two dozen other Nipponese mining
engineers and surveyors who were brought to Luzon in '43 and '44, in
response to Azure/Pufferfish messages emanating from Tokyo. But, as far as
Waterhouse can tell, all of the others are dead. Either that, or they
retreated north with Yamashita.
Only one of them is alive, well, and living in what is left of Manila,
and that's Goto Dengo. Waterhouse was going to rat him out to Army
Intelligence, but that doesn't seem like such a good idea now that the
unkillable Nip engineer has become a personal protegé of The General.
Root is heading in the direction of those two mysterious white men who
attended Bobby Shaftoe's funeral. Waterhouse peers at them through the
scope, but mediocre optics, combined with the heat waves rising from the
grass, complicate this. One of them seems oddly familiar. Odd because
Waterhouse doesn't know that many bearded men with long swept back blond
hairdoes and black eyepatches.
An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This
is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from
tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good
ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot
ignore them just because they are ridiculous. Waterhouse stifles a giggle
and tries not to get overly excited. The dull, tedious, bureaucratic part of
his mind is feeling testy, and wants a few shreds of supporting evidence.
This is quickly supplied. Waterhouse knows, and has proved to Earl
Comstock, that strange information is in the air, dotting and dashing
furtively from a small number of feeble transmitters scattered around Luzon
and the surrounding waters, encrypted using the Arethusa system. Lawrence
and Alan have known for two years now that Rudy invented it, and from the
decrypts chattering out of digital computers in Bletchley Park and Manila,
they now know other things. They know that Rudy flew the coop late in 1943
and probably went to Sweden. They know that one Günter Bischoff, captain of
the U boat that plucked Shaftoe and Root out of the water, also ended up in
Sweden, and that Dönitz persuaded him to take over the gold running work
that had been performed by U 553 until it ran aground off Qwghlm. The Naval
Intelligence boys are fascinated by Bischoff, and so he had already been the
subject of much research. Waterhouse has seen photos of him from his student
days. The shorter of the two men he is peering at now could easily be the
same fellow, now middle aged. And the taller one, the one with the eyepatch,
could most definitely be Rudy von Hacklheber himself.
It is, then, a conspiracy.
They have secure communications. If Rudy is the architect of Arethusa,
then it will be essentially impossible to break, except for rare lapses such
as this FUNERAL business.
They have a submarine. It cannot be found or sunk, because it is one of
Hitler's new rocket fuel powered babies, and because Günter Bischoff, the
greatest U boat commander in history, is its skipper.
They have, at some level, the backing of the odd brotherhood that Root
belongs too, the ignoti et quasi occulti guys.
And now they are trying to enlist Goto Dengo. The man who, it is safe
to assume, buried the gold.
Three days ago, the intercept boys in Waterhouse's section picked up a
brief flurry of Arethusa messages, exchanged between a hidden transmitter
somewhere in Manila and a mobile one in the South China Sea. Catalinas were
vectored toward the latter, and picked up diminishing radar echoes at first,
but found nothing when they arrived on the scene. A team of journeyman
codebreakers jumped on those messages and started trying to tear them apart
by brute force. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, the old hand, went for a
stroll along the Manila Bay seawall. A breeze suddenly rose from the bay. He
stopped to let it cool his face. A coconut fell from the top of a tree and
smashed into the ground ten feet away. Waterhouse turned on his heel and
went back to the office.
Just before the flurry of Arethusa messages began, Waterhouse had been
sitting in his office listening to Armed Forces Radio. They had broadcast an
announcement that, three days from now, at such and such a time, the funeral
for the hero, Bobby Shaftoe, was going to be held at the big new cemetery
down in Makati.
Sitting down in his office with the fresh Arethusa intercepts, he went
to work, using FUNERAL as a crib: if this group of seven letters decrypts to
FUNERAL, then what does the rest of the message look like? Gibberish? Okay,
how about this group of seven letters?
Even with this gift thrown into his lap, it took him two and a half
days of nonstop work to decrypt the message. The first one, transmitted from
Manila, went: OUR FRIEND'S FUNERAL SATURDAY TEN THIRTY AM US MILITARY
CEMETERY MAKATI.
The response from the submarine: WILL BE THERE SUGGEST YOU INFORM GD.
He aims the spyglass at Goto Dengo again. The Nipponese engineer is
standing with his head bowed and his eyes tightly shut. Perhaps his
shoulders are heaving, perhaps it's just the heat waves that make it seem
so.
But then Goto Dengo straightens up and takes a step in the direction of
the conspirators. He stops. Then he takes another step. Then another. His
posture is straightening up miraculously. He seems to feel better with every
stride. He walks faster and faster, until he is almost running.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is hardly a mind reader, but he can
easily enough tell what Goto Dengo is thinking: I have a burden on my
shoulders, and it has been crushing me. And now I'm going to hand that
burden over to someone else. Hot damn! Bischoff and Rudy von Hacklheber step
forward to meet him, holding out their right hands enthusiastically.
Bischoff, Rudy, Enoch, and Goto Dengo join into a knot, practically on top
of Bobby Shaftoe's grave.
It is a shame. Waterhouse knew Bobby Shaftoe, and would have liked to
attend his funeral standing up not skulking around like this. But Enoch Root
and Rudy would both recognize him. Waterhouse is their enemy.
Or is he? In a decade full of Hitlers and Stalins, it's hard to worry
about a conspiracy that seemingly includes a priest, and that risks its very
existence in order to attend a member's funeral. Waterhouse rolls over and
lies on his back on some dead guy's grave and ponders it. If Mary were here,
he would lay out the dilemma for her and she would tell him what to do. But
Mary's in Brisbane, picking out bridesmaids' dresses and china patterns.
***
The next time he sees any of these fellows is one month later, in a
clearing in the jungle a couple of hours south of Manila. Waterhouse gets
there before they do, and spends a sweaty night under a mosquito net. In the
morning, about half of Bischoff's submarine crew arrives, grumpy from an all
night march. As Waterhouse expected, they are quite nervous about being
ambushed by the local Huk commander known as the Crocodile, and so they post
a number of sentries in the jungle. That is why Waterhouse took pains to get
here before they did: so that he would not have to infiltrate their picket
line.
The Germans who aren't standing guard go to work with shovels, digging
a hole in the ground next to a big piece of red pumice shaped vaguely like
the continent of Africa. Waterhouse squats no more than twenty feet away,
trying to figure out how he can make his presence known without being gunned
down by a nervous white man.
He almost gets close enough to tap Rudy on the shoulder. Then he slips
on a slimy rock. Rudy hears him, turns, and sees nothing except for a swatch
of undergrowth being torn down by Waterhouse's falling body.
"Is that you, Lawrence?"
Waterhouse stands up cautiously, keeping his hands in plain sight.
"Very good! How did you know?"
"Don't be stupid. There aren't that many people who could have found
us."
They shake hands. Then they think better of it, and embrace. Rudy gives
him a cigarette. The German sailors look on incredulously. There are some
others: a Negro and an Indian, and a grizzled, dark man who looks like he
wants to kill Waterhouse on the spot.
"You must be the famous Otto!" Waterhouse exclaims. But Otto does not
seem eager to make new friends, or even acquaintances, at this juncture in
his life, and turns away sourly. "Where's Bischoff?" Waterhouse asks.
"Minding the submarine. It is risky, lurking in the shallows. How did
you find us, Lawrence?" He answers his own question before Waterhouse can.
"By decrypting the long message, obviously."
"Yes."
"But how did you do that? Did I miss something? Is there a back door?"
"No. It wasn't easy. I broke one of your messages, a while back."
"The FUNERAL one?"
"Yes!" Waterhouse laughs.
"I could have killed Enoch for sending out a message with such an
obvious crib." Rudy shrugs. "It is hard to teach crypto security, even to
intelligent men. Especially to them."
"Maybe he wanted me to decrypt it," Waterhouse muses.
"It is possible," Rudy admits. "Perhaps he wanted me to break
Detachment 2702's one time pad, so that I would come and join him."
"I guess he figures if you're smart enough to break hard codes, you're
automatically going to be on his side," Waterhouse says.
"I'm not sure that I agree . . . it is naive."
"It's a leap of faith," Waterhouse says.
"How did you break Arethusa? I am naturally curious," Rudy says.
"Because Azure/Pufferfish employs a different key every day, I assumed
that Arethusa did the same."
"I call them by different names. But yes, continue."
"The difference is that the daily key for Azure/Pufferfish is simply
the numerical date. Very easy to exploit, once you have figured it out."
"Yes. I intended it that way," Rudy says. He lights up another
cigarette, taking extravagant pleasure in it.
"Whereas the daily key for Arethusa is something I haven't been able to
put my finger on yet. Perhaps a pseudo random function of the date, perhaps
random numbers you are taking from a one time pad. In any case it is not
predictable, which makes Arethusa harder to break."
"But you did break the long message. Would you explain how?"
"Well, your meeting at the cemetery was brief. I guess you had to get
out of there pretty fast."
"It did not seem a good place to linger."
"So, you and Bischoff went away back to the submarine, I figured. Goto
Dengo went back to his post at The General's headquarters. I knew that he
couldn't have told you anything substantive at the cemetery. That would have
to come later, and it would have to be in the form of an Arethusa encrypted
message. You are justifiably proud of Arethusa."
"Thank you," Rudy says briskly.
"But the drawback of Arethusa, as with Azure/Puffeffish, is that it
requires a great deal of computation. This is fine if you happen to have a
computing machine, or a room full of trained abacus operators. I assume you
have a machine on board the submarine?"
"That we do," Rudy says diffidently, "nothing very special. It still
requires a great deal of manual calculation."
"But Enoch Root in Manila, and Goto Dengo, could not have had such a
thing. They would have to encrypt the message by hand doing all of the
calculations on sheets of scratch paper. Enoch already knew the algorithm,
and could tell it to Goto Dengo, but you would have to agree on a key to put
into that algorithm. The only time you could have decided on the key was
while you were all together at the cemetery. And during your conversation
there, I saw you pointing at Shaftoe's headstone. So I figured that you were
using that as a key maybe his name, maybe his dates of birth and death,
maybe his military serial number. It turned out to be the serial number."
"But still you did not know the algorithm."
"Yes, but I had some idea that it was related to the Azure/Pufferfish
algorithm, which in turn is related to the zeta functions that we studied at
Princeton. So I just sat down and said to myself if Rudy were going to build
the ultimate cryptosystem on this basis, and if Azure/Pufferfish is a
simplified version of that system, then what is Arethusa? That gave me a
handful of possibilities."
"And out of that handful you were able to pick the right one."
"No," Waterhouse says, "it was too hard. So I went to the church where
Enoch was working, and looked through his wastebasket. Nothing. I went to
Goto Dengo's office and did the same. Nothing. Both of them were burning
their scratch paper as they went along."
Rudy's face suddenly relaxes. "Oh, good. I was afraid they were doing
something incredibly stupid."
"Not at all. So, you know what I did?"
"What did you do, Lawrence?"
"I went and had an interview with Goto Dengo."
"Yes. He told us that much."
"I told him about the research I had been doing into Azure/Pufferfish,
but I didn't tell him I had broken it. I got him talking, in a very general
way, about what he was doing on Luzon during the last year. He told me the
same story that he has stuck to all along, which is that he was building
some minor fortifications somewhere, and that after escaping from that area
he wandered lost in the jungle for several days before emerging near San
Pablo and joining up with some Air Force troops who were heading north
towards Manila.
" 'It's a good thing you got out of there,' I told him, 'because ever
since then, the Hukbalahap leader who calls himself the Crocodile has been
ransacking the jungle he's convinced that you Nipponese buried a fortune in
gold there.' "
As soon as the word "crocodile" emerges from Waterhouse's mouth, Rudy's
face screws up in disgust and he turns away.
"So when the long message was finally transmitted last week, from the
transmitter that Enoch has hidden on the top of that church's bell tower, I
had two cribs. First of all, I suspected that the key was a number from the
tombstone of Bobby Shaftoe. Secondly, I was confident that the words
'Hukbalahap,' 'crocodile,' and probably 'gold' or 'treasure' would appear
somewhere in the message. I also looked for obvious candidates like
'latitude' and 'longitude.' With all of that to go on, breaking the message
wasn't that hard."
Rudy von Hacklheber heaves a big sigh. "So. You win," he says. "Where
is the cavalry?"
"Cavalry, or calvary?" Waterhouse jokes.
Rudy smiles tolerantly. "I know where Calvary is. Not far from
Golgotha."
"Why do you think the cavalry is coming?"
"I know they are coming," Rudy says. "Your efforts to break the long
message must have required a whole room full of computers. They will talk.
Surely the secret is out." Rudy stubs out his half smoked cigarette, as if
preparing to leave. "So, you have been sent to give us an offer surrender in
a civilized way and we will get good treatment. Something like that."
"Au contraire, Rudy. No one knows except me. I did leave a sealed
envelope in my desk, to be opened if I should die mysteriously on this
little trip to the jungle. That Otto character has a fearsome reputation."
"I don't believe you. It is impossible," Rudy says.
"You of all people. Don't you see? I have a machine, Rudy! The machine
does the work for me. So I don't need a room full of computers human ones,
leastways. And as soon as I read the decrypted message, I burned all of the
cards. So I am the only one who knows."
"Ah!" Rudy says, stepping back and looking into the sky, adjusting his
mind to these new facts. "So, I gather that you have come here to join us?
Otto will be troublesome about it, but you are quite welcome."
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse actually has to think about it. This
surprises him a little.
"Most of it is going to help victims of the war, in one way or
another," Rudy says, "but if we take a tenth of a percent as commission, and
distribute it among the entire crew of the submarine, we are all among the
richest men in the world."
Waterhouse tries to imagine himself one of the richest men in the
world. It doesn't seem to fit.
"I've been exchanging letters with a college in Washington State," he
says. "My fiancée put me on to them."
"Fiancée? Congratulations."
"She's Qwlghmian Australian. It seems that there's a colony of
Qwghlmians in the Palouse Hills as well, where Washington and Oregon and
Idaho all come together. Sheepherders mostly. But there is this little
college there, and they need a mathematics professor. I could be chairman of
the department within a few years." Waterhouse stands there in the
Philippine jungle smoking his cigarette and imagining this. Nothing sounds
more exotic. "It sounds like a nice life!" he exclaims, as if this were the
first time he had thought of such a thing. "It sounds perfectly all right to
me."
The Palouse Hills seem very far away. He is impatient to begin covering
the distance.
"That it does," says Rudy von Hacklheber.
"You don't sound very convincing, Rudy. I know it wouldn't be so great
for you. But for me it's the cat's pajamas."
"So, are you telling me you don't want in?"
"I'll tell you this. You said most of the money was going to charity.
Well, the college can always use a donation. If your plan works out, how
about endowing a chair for me at this college? That's all I really want."
"I will do that," Rudy says, "and I'll endow one for Alan too, at
Cambridge, and I'll provide both of you with laboratories full of electrical
computers." Rudy's eyes wander back to the hole in the ground, where the
Germans having withdrawn most of their sentries are making steady progress.
"You know that this is nothing more than one of the outlying caches. Seed
capital to finance the Golgotha work."
"Yes. Just as the Nips planned it."
"We'll dig it up soon enough. Sooner, now that we no longer have to
worry about the Crocodile!" Rudy says, and laughs. It is an honest, genuine
laugh, the first time Waterhouse has ever seen him drop his guard. "Then we
will go to ground until the war is over. In the meantime, maybe there will
be enough left over to give you and your Qwghlmian bride a nice wedding
present."
"Our china pattern is Lavender Rose by Royal Albert," Waterhouse says.
Rudy takes an envelope out of his pocket and writes that down. "It was
very good of you to come out and say hello," he mumbles around his
cigarette.
"Those bicycle rides in New Jersey might as well have taken place on a
different planet," Waterhouse says, shaking his head.
"They did," Rudy says. "And when Douglas MacArthur marches into Tokyo,
it's going to be a different planet yet again. See you there, Lawrence."
"See you, Rudy. Godspeed."
They embrace one more time. Waterhouse backs away and watches the
shovels biting into the red mud for a few moments, then turns his back on
all of the money in the world and starts walking.
"Lawrence!" Rudy shouts.
"Yes?"
"Don't forget to destroy that sealed envelope you left in your office."
Waterhouse laughs. "Aw, I was just lying about that. In case someone
wanted to kill me."
"That's a relief."
"You know how people are always saying 'I can keep a secret' and they
are always wrong?"
"Yes."
"Well," Waterhouse says, "I can keep a secret."
Chapter 99 CAYUSE
Another shock wave passes silently through the ground, setting up a
pattern of waves, and reflections of waves, in the water that laps around
their knees.
"Things are going to happen very slowly now for a while. Get used to
it," says Doug Shaftoe. "Everyone needs a probe a long knife or a rod. Even
a stick."
Doug's got a big knife, he being that kind of guy, and Amy has her
kris. Randy pulls the lightweight aluminum frame of his backpack apart to
produce a couple of tubes; this takes a while but, as Doug said, everything
is happening slowly now. Randy tosses one of the tubes to Enoch Root, who
snatches a basically poorly aimed throw out of the air. Now that everyone is
equipped, Doug Shaftoe gives them a tutorial on how to probe one's way
through a minefield. Like every other lesson Randy's ever imbibed, this one
is sort of interesting, but only until Doug divulges the main point, which
is that you can poke a mine from the side and it won't blow up; you just
can't poke it vertically. "The water is bad because it makes it hard to see
what the hell we're doing," he says. Indeed, the water has a milky look,
probably from suspended volcanic ash; you can see clearly for a foot, hazily
for another foot, and below that you can see vague, greenish shapes at best;
everything is covered in a uniform brown jacket of silt. "On the other hand,
it's good because if a mine gets detonated by something other than your
foot, the water's going to absorb some of the blast by flashing into steam.
Now: tactically our problem is that we are exposed to an ambush from above
left: the west bank. Poor old Jackie Woo is down and he can't protect that
flank anymore. You can bet that John Wayne is covering things on the right
as best as he can. Since it is the left bank that's most vulnerable, we will
now head for the bank on that side, and try to reach the protection of the
overhang. We should not all converge on the same point; we spread out so
that if one of us detonates a mine it won't hit anyone else."
Each one of them picks a destination on the west bank and tells
everyone else what it is, so that they won't converge on the same place, and
then each begins probing his or her way towards it. Randy tries to resist
the temptation to look up. He says, after about fifteen minutes: "I know
what's going on with the explosions. Wing's people are tunneling their way
toward Golgotha. They're going to remove the gold through some kind of an
underground conduit. It'll look like they are excavating it from their own
property. But they'll actually be taking it from here."
Amy grins. "They're robbing the bank."
Randy nods, mildly annoyed that she's not taking it more seriously.
"Wing must have been too busy with the Long March and the Great Leap Forward
to buy this real estate when it was available," Enoch says.
A few minutes later, Doug Shaftoe says, "To what extent do you give a
shit, Randy?"
"What do you mean?"
"Would you be willing to die to prevent Wing from getting that gold?"
"Probably not."
"Would you be willing to kill?"
"Well," says Randy, a bit taken ab