“What do you mean, take care of her?” Root says warily.
“Marry her.”
“What?”
“One of us has to marry her, and fast. I don’t know about you, but I kind of like her, and it’d be a shame if she spent the rest of her life sucking Russian dick at gunpoint,” Shaftoe says. “Besides, she might be pregnant with one of our kids. Yours, mine, or Günter’s.”
“We, the conspiracy, have an obligation to look after our offspring,” Root agrees. “We could establish a trust fund for them in London.”
“There should be plenty of money for that,” Shaftoe agrees. “But I can’t marry her, because I have to be available to marry Glory when I get to Manila.”
“Rudy can’t do it,” Root says.
“Because he’s a fag?”
“No, they marry women all the time,” Root says. “He can’t do it because he’s German, and what’s she going to do with a German passport?”
“It would not be savvy exactly,” Shaftoe agrees.
“That leaves me,” Root says. “I’ll marry her, and she’ll have a British passport. Best in the world.”
“Huh,” Shaftoe says, “how does that square with your being a celibate monk or priest or whatever the fuck you supposedly are?”
Root says, “I’m supposed to be celibate—”
“But you’re not,” Shaftoe reminds him.
“But God’s forgiveness is infinite,” Root fires back, winning the point. “So, as I was saying, I’m supposed to be celibate—but that doesn’t mean I can’t get married. As long as I don’t consummate the marriage.”
“But if you don’t consummate it, it doesn’t count!”
“But the only person, besides me, who will know that we didn’t consummate it, is Julieta.”
“God will know,” Shaftoe says.
“God doesn’t issue passports,” Root says.
“What about the church? They’ll kick you out.”
“Maybe I deserve to be kicked out.”
“So let me get this straight,” Shaftoe says, “when you really were fucking Julieta, you said you weren’t and so you were able to remain a priest. Now you’re going to marry her and not fuck her and say that you are.”
“If you’re trying to say that my relationship with the Church is very complicated, I already knew that, Bobby.”
“Let’s go, then,” Shaftoe says.
Shaftoe and Root haul the mortar and a boxload of bombs down onto the beach, where they can take cover behind a stone retaining wall a good five feet high. But the surf makes it impossible to hear anything, so Root goes up and hides in the trees along the road, and leaves Shaftoe to fiddle with the Soviet mortar.
There turns out to be not much fiddling necessary. An unlettered tundra farmer with bilateral frostbite could get this thing up and running in ten minutes. If he’d stayed up late the night before—celebrating the fulfillment of the last five-year plan with a jug of wood alcohol—maybe fifteen minutes.
Shaftoe consults the instructions. It does not matter that these are printed in Russian, because they are made for illiterates anyway. A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison. Shaftoe scans the terrain, picks out his killing zone, then climbs up and paces off the distance, assuming one meter per pace.
He’s back down on the beach, adjusting the tube’s angle, when he’s startled by a bulky form vaulting over the wall, so close it almost knocks him down. Root’s breathing fast. “Germans,” he says, “coming in from the main road.”
“How do you know they’re Germans? Maybe it’s Otto.”
“The engines sound like diesels. Huns love diesels.”
“How many engines?”
“Probably two.”
Root turns out to be right on the money. Two large black Mercedes issue from the forest, like bad ideas emerging from the dim mind of a green lieutenant. Their headlights are not illuminated. Each stops and then sits there for a moment, then the doors open quietly, Germans climb out and stand up. Several of them are wearing long black leather coats. Several are carrying those keen submachine guns that are the trademark of German infantry, and the envy of Yanks and Tommies, who must go burdened with primeval hunting rifles.
This is the moment, then. Nazis are right over there and it is the job of Bobby Shaftoe, and to a lesser degree Enoch Root, to kill them all. Not just a job but a moral requisite, because they are the living avatars of Satan, who publicly acknowledge being just as bad and vicious as they really are. It is a world, and a situation, to which Shaftoe and a lot of other people are perfectly adapted. He heaves a bomb up out of the box, introduces it to the muzzle of the fat tube, lets it go, and plugs his ears.
The mortar coughs like a kettledrum. The Germans look towards them. An officer’s monocle glints in the moonlight. A total of eight Germans have gotten out of the cars. Three of them must be combat veterans because they are down on their stomachs in a microsecond. The trench-coated officers remain standing, as do a couple of civilian-clad goons, who immediately open fire in their general direction with their submachine guns. This makes a lot of noise but only impresses Shaftoe insofar as it is an impressive display of stupidity. The bullets sail far over their heads. Before they have had time to pepper the Gulf of Bothnia, the mortar bomb has exploded.
Shaftoe peeks over the top of the seawall. As he more or less expected, all of the people who were standing up are now draped over the nearest Mercedes, having been bodily lifted off their feet and flung sideways by a moving curtain of shrapnel. But two of the survivors—the veterans—are belly-crawling towards Otto’s cabin, whose thick log walls look extremely reassuring in these circumstances. The third survivor is blasting away with his submachine gun, but he has no idea where they are.
The ground is convex in a way that makes it hard to see those belly-crawling Germans. Shaftoe fires a couple more mortar rounds without much effect. He hears the two Germans kicking down the door to Otto’s cabin.
Since it is only a one-room cabin, this would be a fine moment to be armed with grenades. But Shaftoe has none, and he doesn’t really want to blow the place up anyway. “Why don’t you kill the one German up there,” he tells Root, and then heads down the beach, hugging the seawall in case the Germans are looking out the windows.
Indeed, when he’s almost there the Germans smash the windows out and begin firing in the direction of Enoch Root. Shaftoe creeps underneath the cabin, opens the trap door, and emerges into the center of the room. The Germans are standing there with their backs to him. He fires his Suomi into their backs until they stop moving. Then he drags them over to the trapdoor and dumps them down onto the beach so they won’t bleed all over the floor. The next high tide will carry them away, and with any luck they’ll wash ashore on the Fatherland in a couple weeks.
It is silent now, the way it’s supposed to be at an isolated cabin by the sea. But that doesn’t mean anything. Shaftoe makes his way carefully up into the trees and circles around behind the action, surveying the killing zone from above. The one German is still crawling around on his elbows, trying to figure out what’s going on. Shaftoe kills him. Then he makes his way down to the beach and finds Enoch Root bleeding into the sand. He has taken a bullet just under the collarbone and there is a lot of blood, both from the wound and from Root’s mouth, whenever he exhales.
“I feel like I’m going to die,” he says.
“Good,” Shaftoe says, “that means you probably won’t.”
One of the Mercedes automobiles is still functional, though it has a number of shrapnel holes and a flat tire. Shaftoe jacks it up and swaps in a surviving tire from the other Mercedes, then drags Root over and gets him laid out in the backseat. He drives into Norrsbruck, fast. The Mercedes
is a really great car and he wants to drive it all the way to Finland, Russia, Siberia, down through China—maybe stop for a little sushi in Shanghai—then on down through Siam and then Malaya, whence he could hop a sea-gypsy’s boat to Manila, find Glory, and—
The ensuing erotic reverie is cut short by the voice of Enoch Root, bubbling through blood, or something. “Go to the church.”
“Now padre, this is no time to be trying to convert me into a religious nut. You take it easy.”
“No, go now. Take me.”
“What, so you can make your peace with god? Hell, Rev, you ain’t gonna die. I’ll take you to the doctor’s. You can go to church later.”
Root drifts off into a coma, mumbling something about cigars.
Shaftoe ignores these ravings, burns rubber into Norrsbruck, and wakes up the doctor. Then he goes and finds Otto and Julieta and takes them over to the doctor’s office. Finally, he goes round to the church and wakes up the minister.
When they get back to the clinic, Rudolf von Hacklheber’s arguing with the doctor: Rudy (who’s apparently speaking on behalf of Enoch, who can hardly even talk) wants Enoch’s wedding to Julieta to happen now, in case Enoch dies on the table. Shaftoe is startled by how bad the patient suddenly looks. But remembering what he and Enoch talked about earlier, he weighs in on Rudy’s side, and insists that marriage must come before surgery.
Otto produces a diamond ring literally out of his asshole—he carries valuables around in a polished metal tube shoved up his rectum—and Shaftoe serves as best man, uneasily holding that ring, still hot from Otto. Root’s too weak to thread it over Julieta’s finger and so Rudy guides his hands. A nurse serves as bridesmaid. Julieta and Enoch are joined in holy matrimony. Root utters the words of the oath one at a time, pausing after each one to cough blood into a stainless-steel bowl. Shaftoe gets all choked up, and actually sniffles.
The doctor etherizes Root, opens his chest, and goes in to repair the damage. Combat surgery isn’t his metier, and so he makes a few mistakes and generally does a great job of keeping the tension level high. Some major artery gives way, and it’s necessary for Shaftoe and the minister to go out and yank Swedes off the streets and persuade them to donate blood. Rudy is nowhere to be found, and Shaftoe suspects for a few minutes that he has blown town. But then suddenly he shows up at Root’s bedside holding an ancient Cuban cigar box, Spanish words all over it.
When Enoch Root dies, the only other people in the room are Rudolf von Hacklheber, Bobby Shaftoe, and the Swedish doctor.
The doctor checks his watch, then steps out of the room.
Rudy reaches out and closes Enoch’s eyes, then stands there with his hand on the late padre’s face, and looks at Shaftoe. “Go,” he says, “and make sure that the doctor files the death certificate.”
In war, it happens pretty frequently that one of your buddies dies, and you have to go right back into action, and save the waterworks for later. “Right,” Shaftoe says, and leaves the room.
The doctor’s sitting in his little office, umlaut-studded diplomas all over the walls, filling out the death certificate. A skeleton dangles in one corner. Bobby Shaftoe stands at attention on the opposite flank, he and the skeleton sort of triangulating on the doctor and watching him scrawl out the date and time of Enoch Root’s demise.
When the doctor’s finished, he leans back in his chair and rubs his eyes.
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” asks Bobby Shaftoe.
“Thank you,” says the doctor.
The young bride and her father are sprawled blearily in the doctor’s waiting room. Shaftoe offers to buy them coffee too. They leave Rudy to keep watch over the body of their late friend and coconspirator, and walk down the high street of Norrsbruck. Swedish people are beginning to come out of their houses. They look exactly like American midwesterners, and Shaftoe’s always startled when they fail to speak English.
The doctor stops in at the courthouse to drop off the death certificate. Otto and Julieta go on ahead to the cafe. Bobby Shaftoe loiters outside, staring back up the street. After a minute or two he sees Rudy poke his head out the door of the doctor’s office and look one way, then the other. He pulls his head back inside for a moment. Then he and another man walk out of the office. The other man is wrapped in a blanket that covers even his head. They climb into the Mercedes, Blanket Man lies down in the back seat, and Rudy drives off in the direction of his cottage.
Bobby Shaftoe sits down in the cafe with the Finns.
“Later today I’m gonna get into that fucking Mercedes and drive into Stockholm like a fucking bat out of hell,” Shaftoe says. Though the Finns will never appreciate it, he has chosen the “bat out of hell” phrase for a good reason. He understands, now, why he has thought of himself as a dead man ever since Guadalcanal. “Anyway. I hope y’all have a nice boat ride.”
“Boat ride?” Otto says innocently.
“I gave you up to the Germans, just like you did to me,” Shaftoe lies.
“You bastard!” Julieta begins. But Bobby cuts her off: “You got what you wanted and then some. A British passport and—” glancing out the window he sees the doctor emerging from the courthouse “—Enoch’s survivor’s benefits on top of it. And maybe more later. As for you, Otto, your career as a smuggler is over. I suggest you get the fuck out of here.”
Otto’s still too flabbergasted to be outraged, but he’s sure enough gonna be outraged pretty soon. “And go where!? Have you bothered to look at a map?”
“Display some fucking adaptability,” Shaftoe says. “You can figure out a way to get that tub of yours to England.”
Say what you will about Otto, he likes a challenge. “I could traverse the Göta Canal from Stockholm to Göteborg—no Germans there—that would get me almost to Norway—but Norway’s full of Germans! Even if I make it through the Skagerrak—you expect me to cross the North Sea? In winter? During a war?”
“If it makes you feel any better, after you get to England you have to sail to Manila.”
“Manila!?”
“Makes England seem easy, huh?”
“You think I am a rich yachtsman, who sails around the world for fun!?”
“No, but Rudolf von Hacklheber is. He’s got money, he’s got connections. He’s got a line on a good yacht that makes your ketch look like a dinghy,” Shaftoe says. “C’mon, Otto. Stop whining, pull some more diamonds out of your asshole, and get it done. It beats being tortured to death by Germans.” Shaftoe stands up and chucks Otto encouragingly on the shoulder, which Otto does not like at all. “See you in Manila.”
The doctor’s coming in the door. Bobby Shaftoe slaps some money down on the table. He looks Julieta in the eye. “Got some miles to cover now,” he says, “Glory’s waiting for me.”
Julieta nods. So in the eyes of one Finnish girl, anyway, Shaftoe’s not such a bad guy. He bends over and gives her a big succulent kiss, then straightens up, nods to the startled doctor, and walks out.
COURTING
* * *
WATERHOUSE HAS BEEN CHEWING HIS WAY THROUGH exotic Nip code systems at the rate of about one a week, but after he sees Mary Smith in the parlor of Mrs. McTeague’s boarding house, his production rate drops to near zero. Arguably, it goes negative, for sometimes when he reads the morning newspaper, its plaintext scrambles into gibberish before his eyes, and he is unable to extract any useful information.
Despite his and Turing’s disagreements about whether the human brain is a Turing machine, he has to admit that Turing wouldn’t have too much trouble writing a set of instructions to simulate the brain functions of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.
Waterhouse seeks happiness. He achieves it by breaking Nip code systems and playing the pipe organ. But since pipe organs are in short supply, his happiness level ends up being totally dependent on breaking codes.
He cannot break codes (hence, cannot be happy) unless his mind is clear. Now suppose that mental clarity is designated by Cm, which is normalized, or calibrated,
in such a way that it is always the case that
where Cm = 0 indicates a totally clouded mind and Cm = 1 is Godlike clarity—an unattainable divine state of infinite intelligence. If the number of messages Waterhouse decrypts, in a given day, is designated by Ndecrypts, then it will be governed by Cm in roughly the following way:
Clarity of mind (Cm) is affected by any number of factors, but by far the most important is horniness, which might be designated by σ, for obvious anatomical reasons that Waterhouse finds amusing at this stage of his emotional development.
Horniness begins at zero at time t = t0 (immediately following ejaculation) and increases from there as a linear function of time:
The only way to drop it back to zero is to arrange another ejaculation.
There is a critical threshold σc such that when σ > σc it becomes impossible for Waterhouse to concentrate on anything, or, approximately,
which amounts to saying that the moment σ rises above the threshold σc it becomes totally impossible for Waterhouse to break Nipponese cryptographic systems. This makes it impossible for him to achieve happiness (unless there is a pipe organ handy, which there isn’t).
Typically, it takes two to three days for σ to climb above σc after an ejaculation:
Critical, then, to the maintenance of Waterhouse’s sanity is the ability to ejaculate every two to three days. As long as he can arrange this, σ exhibits a classic sawtooth-wave pattern, optimally with the peaks at or near σc [see below] wherein the grey zones represent periods during which he is completely useless to the war effort.
So much for the basic theory. Now, when he was at Pearl Harbor, he discovered something that, in retrospect, should have been profoundly disquieting. Namely, that ejaculations obtained in a whorehouse (i.e., provided by the ministrations of an actual human female) seemed to drop σ below the level that Waterhouse could achieve through executing a Manual Override. In other words, the post-ejaculatory horniness level was not always equal to zero, as the naive theory propounded above assumes, but to some other quantity dependent upon whether the ejaculation was induced by Self or Other: σ = σself after masturbation but σ = σother upon leaving a whorehouse, where σself >
Cryptonomicon Page 74
