Julieta has retreated somewhere far up beyond the Arctic Circle. Shaftoe has been pursuing her like a dogged Mountie, slogging across the sexual tundra on frayed snowshoes and leaping heroically from floe to floe. But she remains about as distant, and about as reachable, as Polaris. She has spent more time lately with Enoch Root than with him—and Root’s a celibate priest or something. Or is he?!
On the few occasions Bobby Shaftoe has actually gotten Julieta to crack a smile, she has immediately begun to ask difficult questions: Did you have sex with Glory, Bobby? Did you use a condom? Is it possible that she might have become pregnant? Can you absolutely rule out the possibility that you have a child in the Philippines? How old would he or she be right now? Let’s see, you fucked her on Pearl Harbor Day, so the child would have been born in early September of ’42. Your child would be fourteen, fifteen months old now—perhaps just learning to walk! How precious!
It always gives Shaftoe the willies when tough girls like Julieta get all fluttery and slip into baby talk. At first, he figures it’s all a ruse to keep him at arm’s length. This smuggler’s daughter, this atheist guerilla intellectual—what does she care about some girl in Manila? Snap out of it, woman! There’s a war on!
Then he comes up with a better explanation: Julieta’s pregnant.
The day begins with the sound of a ship’s horn in the harbor at Norrsbruck. The town is a jumble of neat, wide houses packed onto a spur of rock that sticks out into the Gulf of Bothnia, forming the southern shore of a slender but deep inlet lined with wharves. Half the town now turns out beneath an unsettling, turbulent peach-and-salmon dawn to see this quaint harbor being deflowered by an inexorable steel phallus. It comes complete with spirochetes: several score men in black dress uniforms stand on the top of the thing, lined up neat as stanchions. As the blast of the horn fades away, echoing back and forth between the stony ridges, it becomes possible to hear the spirochetes singing: belting out a bawdy German sea chanty which Bobby Shaftoe last heard during a convoy attack in the Bay of Biscay.
Two other people in Norrsbruck will recognize that tune. Shaftoe looks for Enoch Root in his church cellar, but he is not present, his bed and lamp are cold. Maybe the local chapter of Societas Eruditorum holds its meetings before dawn—or maybe he’s found another welcoming bed. But trusty old Günter Bischoff can be seen, leaning out the window of his seaside garret, elbows in the air and his trusty Zeiss 735 binoculars clamped over his face, scanning the lines of the invading ship.
The Swedes stand with arms folded for a minute or so, regarding this apparition. Then they make some kind of collective decision that it does not exist, that nothing has happened here. They turn their backs, pad grumpily into their houses, begin to boil coffee. Being neutral is no less strange, no less fraught with awkward compromises, than being a belligerent. Unlike most of Europe, they can rest assured that the Germans are not here to invade them or sink their ships. On the other hand, the vessel’s presence is a violation of their sovereign territory and they ought to run down there with pitchforks and flintlocks and fight the Huns off. On the third hand, this boat was probably made out of Swedish iron.
Shaftoe fails, at first, to recognize the German vessel as a U-boat because it is shaped all wrong. A regular U-boat is shaped like a surface vessel, except longer and skinnier. Which is to say it has a sort of V shaped hull and a flat deck, studded with guns, from which rises a gigantic conning tower that is covered with junk: ack-ack guns, antennas, stanchions, safety lines, spray shields. The Krauts would put cuckoo clocks up there too if they had room. As a regular U-boat plunges through the waves, thick black smoke spews from its diesel engines.
This one is just a torpedo as long as a football field. Instead of a conning tower there’s a streamlined bulge on the top, hardly noticeable.
No guns, no antennas, no cuckoo clocks; the whole thing’s as smooth as a river rock. And it’s not making smoke or noise, just venting a little bit of steam. The diesels don’t rumble. The fucking thing doesn’t even seem to have diesels. Instead there is a dim whine, like the sound that came out of Angelo’s Messerschmidt.
Shaftoe intercepts Bischoff just as the latter is coming down the steps of the inn carrying a duffel bag the size of a dead sea lion. He’s panting with exertion, or maybe excitement. "That’s the one," he gasps. He sounds like he’s talking to himself, but he’s speaking English, so he must be addressing Shaftoe. "That’s the rocket."
"Rocket?"
"Runs on rocket fuel—hydrogen peroxide, eighty-five percent. Never has to recharge its verdammt batteries! Clocks twenty-eight knots—submerged! That’s my baby." He’s as fluttery as Julieta.
"Can I help you carry anything?"
"Footlocker—upstairs," Bischoff says.
Shaftoe stomps up the narrow staircase to find Bischoff’s room stripped to the bedsprings, and a pile of gold coins on the table, weighing down a thank-you note addressed to the owners. The black locker rests in the middle of the floor like a child’s coffin. A wild hollering noise reaches his ears through the open window.
Bischoff is down there, heading for the pier beneath his duffel bag, and his men, up on the rocket, have caught sight of him. The U-boat has launched a dinghy, which is surging towards the pier like a racing scull.
Shaftoe heaves the locker up onto his shoulder and trudges down the stairs. It reminds him of shipping out, which is what Marines are supposed to do, and which he has not actually done in a long time. Vicarious excitement is not as good as the real thing, he finds.
He follows Bischoff’s tracks through a film of snow, down the cobblestone street, and onto the pier. Three men in black scramble out of the launch, onto the ladder, up to the pier. They salute Bischoff and then two of them embrace him. Shaftoe’s close enough and the salmon light is bright enough, that he can recognize these two: members of Bischoff’s old crew. The third guy is taller, older, gaunter, grimmer, better-dressed, more highly decorated. All in all, more of a Nazi.
Shaftoe can’t believe himself. When he picked up the locker he was just being considerate to his friend Günter—an ink-stained retiree with pacifist leanings. Now, all of a sudden, he’s aiding and abetting the enemy! What would his fellow Marines think of him if they knew?
Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. He is actually participating in the conspiracy that he, Bischoff, Rudy von Hacklheber, and Enoch Root created in the basement of that church. He comes to a dead stop and slams the locker down right there, in the middle of the pier. The Nazi is startled by the noise and raises his blue eyes in the direction of Shaftoe, who prepares to stare him down.
Bischoff notices this. He turns towards Shaftoe and shouts something cheerful in Swedish. Shaftoe has the presence of mind to break eye contact with the chilly German. He grins and nods back. This conspiracy thing is going to be a real pain in the ass if it means backing down from casual fistfights.
A couple of sailors have come up the ladder now to handle Bischoff’s luggage. One of them strides down the pier to get the footlocker. Shaftoe recognizes him, and he recognizes Shaftoe, at the same moment. Damn! The guy’s surprised, but not unpleasantly so, to see Shaftoe here. Then something occurs to him and his face freezes up in horror and his eyes dart sideways, back toward the tall Nazi. Shit! Shaftoe turns his back on all of this, makes like he’s strolling back into town.
"Jens! Jens!" Bischoff hollers, and then says something else in Swedish. He’s running after Shaftoe. Shaftoe keeps his back prudently turned until Bischoff throws one arm around him with a final "JENS!" Then, sotto voce, in English: "You have my family’s address. If I don’t see you in Manila, let’s get in touch after the war." He starts pounding Shaftoe on the back, pulls some paper money out of his pocket, stuffs it into Shaftoe’s hand.
"Goddamn it, you’ll see me there," Shaftoe says. "What is this shit for?"
"I am tipping the nice Swedish boy who carried my luggage," Bischoff says.
Shaftoe sucks his teeth and grimaces. He can tell he is not cut out for this cloak-and-dagger nonsense. Questions come to his mind, among them How is that big torpedo full of rocket fuel safer than what you were riding around in before? but he just says, "Good luck, I guess."
"Godspeed, my friend," Bischoff says. "This will remind you to check your mail." Then he punches Shaftoe in the shoulder hard enough to raise a three-day welt, turns around, and begins walking towards salt water. Shaftoe walks towards snow and trees, envying him. The next time he looks at the harbor, fifteen minutes later, the U-boat is gone. Suddenly this town feels just as cold, empty, and out in the middle of nowhere as it really is.
He’s been getting his mail at the Norrsbruck post office, general delivery. When the place opens up a couple of hours later, Shaftoe’s waiting by the door; venting steam from his nostrils, like he’s rocket-fuel-powered. He receives a letter from his folks in Wisconsin, and one large envelope, posted yesterday from somewhere in Norrsbruck, Sweden, bearing no return address but inscribed in Günter Bischoff’s hand.
It is full of notes and documents concerning the new U-boat, including one or two letters personally signed by John Huncock himself. Shaftoe’s German is slightly better than it was before he went on his own U-boat ride, but he still can’t follow most of it. He sees a lot of numbers there, a lot of technical-looking stuff.
It is your basic priceless naval intelligence. Shaftoe wraps the papers up carefully, sticks them in his pants, begins walking up the beach towards the Kivistik residence.
It is a long, cold, wet trudge. He has plenty of time to assess his situation: stuck in a neutral country on the other side of the world from where he wants to be. Alienated from the Corps. Lumped in with a vague conspiracy.
Technically speaking, he has been AWOL for several months now. But if he suddenly turns up at the American Embassy in Stockholm, carrying these documents, all will be forgiven. So this is his ticket home. And "home" is a very large country that includes places like Hawaii, which is closer to Manila than is Norrsbruck, Sweden.
Otto’s boat is fresh in from Finland, bobbing on an incoming tide, tied up to his bird’s nest of a jetty. The boat, he knows, is still loaded up with whatever Finns are exchanging for coffee and bullets at the moment. Otto himself is sitting in the cabin, drinking coffee naturally, red-eyed and plumb wrung out.
"Where’s Julieta?" Shaftoe says. He’s starting to worry that she moved back to Finland or something.
Otto turns a bit greyer every time he drives his tub across the Gulf of Bothnia. He looks especially grey today. "Did you see that monster?" he says, then shakes his head in a combination of wonderment, disgust, and world-weariness that can only be attained by hardened Finns. "Those German bastards!"
"I thought they were protecting you from the Russians."
This elicits a long thunder-roll of dark, chortling laughter from Otto. "Zdrastuytchye, tovarishch!" he finally says.
"Say what?"
"That means, ‘Welcome, comrade’ in Russian," Otto says. "I have been practicing it."
"You should be practicing the Pledge of Allegiance," Shaftoe says. "Soon as we get done taking down the Germans, I figure we’ll just kick her into high gear and beat the Russkies all the way back to Siberia."
More laughter from Otto, who knows naïveté when he sees it, but is not above finding it charming. "I have buried the German air-turbine in Finland," he says. "I will sell it to the Russians or the Americans—whoever gets there first."
"Where’s Julieta?" Shaftoe asks again. Speaking of naïveté.
"In town," Otto says. "Shopping."
"So you’ve got cash."
Otto looks seasick. Tomorrow is payday.
Then Shaftoe’s going to be on a bus, headed for Stockholm.
Shaftoe sits down across from Otto and they drink coffee and talk about weather, smuggling, and the relative merits of various small fully automatic weapons for a while. Actually, what they are talking about is whether Shaftoe will get paid, and how much.
In the end, Otto issues a guarded promise to pay, provided that Julieta does not spend all of the money on her "shopping" trip, and provided that Shaftoe unloads the boat.
So Bobby Shaftoe spends the rest of the day carrying Soviet mortars, rusty tins of caviar, bricks of black tea from China, Lapp folk art, a couple of icons, cases of pine-flavored Finnish schnapps, coils of vile sausages, and bundles of pelts up out of the hold of Otto’s boat, down the dock, into the cabin.
Meanwhile, Otto goes into town, and still has not come back long after night has fallen. Shaftoe sacks out in the cabin, tosses and turns for about four hours, sleeps for about ten minutes, and then is awakened by a knocking at the door.
He approaches the door on hands and knees, gets the Suomi machine pistol out of its hiding place, then crawls to the far end of the cabin and exits silently through a trap door in the floor. There is ice on the rocks below, but his bare feet give him enough traction to clamber around and get a good view of whoever is standing there, pounding on the door.
It is Enoch Root himself, nowhere to be seen this last week or so.
"Yo!" Shaftoe says.
"Bobby," Root says, turning around, "I gather you heard."
"Heard what?"
"That we are in danger."
"Nah," Shaftoe says, "this is just how I always answer the door."
They go into the cabin. Root declines to turn on any lights and keeps looking out the windows like he’s expecting someone. He smells faintly of Julieta’s perfume, a distinctive scent that Otto has been smuggling into Finland by the fifty-five-gallon drum. Somehow, Shaftoe is not surprised by this. He proceeds to make coffee.
"A very complex situation has arisen," Root says.
"I can see that."
Root is startled by this, and looks up blankly at Shaftoe, his eyes glowing stupidly in the moonlight. You can be the smartest guy in the world, but when a woman comes into the picture, you’re just like any other sap.
"Did you come all this way to tell me that you’re fucking Julieta?"
"Oh, no, no, no!" Root says. He stops for a moment, furrows his brow. "I mean, I am. And I was going to tell you. But that’s just the first part of a more complicated business." Root gets up, shoves hands in pockets, walks around the cabin again, looking out the windows. "You have any more of those Finnish guns?"
"In that crate to your left," Shaftoe says. "Why? We gonna have a shootout?"
"Maybe. Not between you and me! But other visitors may be coming."
"Cops?"
"Worse."
"Finns?" Because Otto has his rivals.
"Worse."
"Who then?" Shaftoe can’t imagine worse.
"Germans. German."
"Oh, fuck!" Shaftoe hollers disgustedly. "How can you say they’re worse than Finns?"
Root looks taken aback. "If you’re going to tell me that Finns are worse, pound for pound, than Germans, then I agree with you. But the trouble with Germans is that they tend to be in communication with millions of other Germans."
"Okay," Shaftoe mutters.
Root hauls the lid off a crate, pulls out a machine pistol, checks the chamber, aims the barrel at the moon, peers through it like a telescope. "In any case, some Germans are coming to kill you."
"Why?"
"Because you know too much about certain things."
"What certain things? Günter and his new submarine?"
"Yes."
"And how, may I ask, do you know this? It has something to do with the fact that you’re fucking Julieta, right?" Shaftoe continues. He’s bored rather than pissed off. This whole Sweden thing is old and tired to him now. He belongs in the Philippines. Anything that doesn’t get him closer to the Philippines just irritates him.
"Right." Root heaves a sigh. "She thinks highly of you, Bobby, but after she saw that picture of your girlfriend—"
"Snap out of it! She doesn’t give a shit about you or me. She just wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts."
"What are the bad parts?"
"Having to live in Finland," Shaftoe says. "So she has to marry someone with a good passport. Which nowadays means American or British. You might have noticed that she didn’t fuck Günter."
Root looks a little queasy.
"Well, maybe she did then," Shaftoe says, heaving a sigh. "Shit!"
Root has rooted an ammo clip out of another crate and figured out how to affix it to the Suomi. He says, "You probably know that the Germans have a tacit arrangement with the Swedes."
"What does ‘tacit’ mean?"
"Let’s just say they have an arrangement."
"The Swedes are neutral, but they let the Krauts push them around."
"Yes. Otto has to deal with Germans at each end of his smuggling route, in Sweden and in Finland, and he has to deal with their navy when he’s out on the water."
"I’m aware that the fucking Germans are all over Europe."
"Well, to make a long story short, the local Germans have prevailed upon Otto to betray you," Root says.
"Did he?"
"Yes. He did betray you."
"Okay. Keep talking, I’m listening to you," Shaftoe says. He begins to mount a ladder up into the attic.
". . . but then he thought better of it. I guess you could say he repented," Root says.
"Spoken like a true man of the cloth," Shaftoe mutters. He’s into the attic now, crawling on hands and knees over the rafters. He stops and sparks up his Zippo. Most of its light is absorbed by a dark green slab: a crude wooden crate with Cryllic letters stenciled on it.
Root’s voice is filtering up from below: "He came to, uh, the place where Julieta and I, uh, were."
Were fucking. "Get me the crowbar," Shaftoe shouts. "It’s in Otto’s toolbox, under the table."
A minute later, the crowbar rises up through the hatch, like the head of a cobra emerging from a basket. Shaftoe grabs it and begins assaulting the crate.
"Otto was torn. He had to do what he did, or the German could have shut down his livelihood. But he respects you. He couldn’t bear it. He had to talk to someone. So he came to us, and told Julieta what he had done. Julieta understood."
"She understood!?"
"But she also was horrified at the same time."
"That is truly heartwarming."
"Um, at that point, the Kivistiks broke out the schnapps and began to discuss the situation. In Finnish."
"I understand," Shaftoe says. Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours. "Thanks for having the guts to come out here."
"Julieta will understand."
"That’s not what I mean."
"Oh, I don’t think Otto would hurt me."
"No, I mean—"
"Oh!" Root exclaims. "No, I had to tell you about Julieta sooner or later—"
"No, goddamn it, I mean the Germans."
"Oh. Well, I didn’t even begin to think about them until I was almost here. It was not courage so much as a lack of foresight."
Shaftoe’s pretty good at foresight. "Take this." He hands down a heavy steel tube of coffee-can diameter, a few feet long. "It’s heavy," he adds, as Root’s knees buckle.
"What is it?"
"A Soviet hundred-and-twenty-millimeter mortar," Shaftoe says.
"Oh." Root remains silent for a while, as he lays the mortar down on the table. When he speaks again, his voice sounds different. "I didn’t realize Otto had this kind of stuff."
"The lethal radius of this bitch is a good sixty feet," Shaftoe says. He is hauling mortar bombs out of the crate and stacking them next to the hatch. "Or maybe it’s meters, I can’t remember." The bombs look like fat footballs with tailfins on one end.
"Feet, meters . . . the distinction is important," Root says.
"Maybe it’s overkill. But we have to get back to Norrsbruck and take care of Julieta."
"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.