Part 35 (2/2)

Dear Joe, I wish that we could at least have said goodbye to each other before you left New York I think I understand why you ran away I am sure that you must blame me for what happened If I had not sent you to Hermann Hoffman, then your brother would not have been on that shi+p I don't knoould have become of him in that case And neither do you But I accept and understand that you ht have run away, too

I know that you still love me It's an article of faith for me that you do and that you alill And it breaks ht never see or touch each other ever again But what is even ht-the certainty I have- that right now you are wishi+ng that you and I had never met If that is true, and I know it is, then I wish the sa that you could feel that way aboutat all It was all wasted ti I will never accept, even if it's true

I don't knohat is going to happen to you, to me, to the country or the world And I don't expect you to answer this letter, because I can feel the door to you sla it shut But I love you, Joe, with or without your consent So that is how I plan to write to you-with or without your consent If you don't want to hear from me, just throay this and all the letters that follow it For all I know these words theo now I love you

Rosa

He read through the rest of theical order In the second letter, she one to work for Burns, Baggot DeWinter, the advertising agency that handled the Oneonta Woolens account In the evenings, she said, he came home and worked on his novel Then, in her fifth letter, Joe was startled to read that, in a civil ceremony on New Year's Day of 1942, Rosa had ap of three ht a house in Midwood Then there was another gap of a few months, and then in Septeiven birth to a seven-pound, two-ounce son, and that, in honor of Joe's lost brother, they had named the baby Thoave news and details of little Toies-at the age of fourteen nizable circle with a pen The scrap of paper place mat from Jack Dempsey's restaurant on which he had drawn it was included in the envelope It obbly and poorly closed off, but it was, as Rosa said in the letter, as round as a baseball There was a single photograph of the child, in undershi+rt and diaper, holding hiainst a table on which so and lu and hostile, as if the cahtened him

Had Joe read the letters froaps of weeks and ht have been deceived by the falsifying of the date of baby Thomas's birth, but read all at once-as a kind of continuous narrative-the letters betrayed just enough inconsistency in their accounting of months and milestones that Joe became suspicious, and his initial stab of jealousy and his deep puzzleave way to a sad understanding The letters were like fragments from a old-fashi+oned novel-they contained not only a e, but a couple of deaths as well In the spring of 1942, old Mrs Kavalier had died, in her sleep, at the age of ninety-six And then a letter from late summer of 1943, just after Joe's arrival in Cuba, reported the fate of Tracy Bacon The actor had joined the Ar the second Escapist serial, The Escapist and the Axis of Death, The Escapist and the Axis of Death, and had been shi+pped to the Solomon Islands In early June, the Liberator bo a raid on Rabaul At the bottom of this letter, the last letter in the packet, there was a brief postscript from Sammy and had been shi+pped to the Solomon Islands In early June, the Liberator bo a raid on Rabaul At the bottom of this letter, the last letter in the packet, there was a brief postscript from Sammy Hi buddy Hi buddy was all it said was all it said

Until now, Joe had told himself that he had buried his love for Rosa in the sarief for his brother She had been right: in the immediate aftermath of Tho introduced hiuely and leness of purpose-the dogged cultivation of a pure and unshakable anger-that had ue He had all but abandoned the fight, allowed his thoughts to stray fatally from the battle, betrayed himself to the seductions of New York and Hollywood and Rosa Saks-and been punished for it Although his need-indeed, his ability-to blame Rosa for all this had passed with tirew in intensity as it was frustrated again and again by the inscrutable plans of the US Navy, so filled his heart that he believed his love to have been coreat fire can put out a sen and fuel Now, as he returned the last letter to the packet, he was al for Mrs Rosa Clay of Van Pelt Street, Midwood, Brooklyn

Sammy had once told him about the capsule that had been buried at the World's Fair, in which typical ites, a copy of Gone with the Wind, Gone with the Wind, a Mickey Mouse drinking cup-had been buried in the ground, to be recovered andNew York Now, as he read through these thousands of words that Rosa had written to him, and her raspy, plaintive voice sounded in his ear, his entombed memories of Rosa were hauled up as from a deep shaft within him The lock on the capsule was breached, the hasps were thrown, the hatch opened, and with a ghostly whiff of lily of the valley and a fluttering of moths, he remembered-he allowed hiht of her thigh thrown over his belly in the ainst the top of his head and the pressure of her breast against his shoulder as she gave his hair a trim in the kitchen of his apartlint of the a Mickey Mouse drinking cup-had been buried in the ground, to be recovered andNew York Now, as he read through these thousands of words that Rosa had written to him, and her raspy, plaintive voice sounded in his ear, his entombed memories of Rosa were hauled up as from a deep shaft within him The lock on the capsule was breached, the hasps were thrown, the hatch opened, and with a ghostly whiff of lily of the valley and a fluttering of moths, he remembered-he allowed hiht of her thigh thrown over his belly in the ainst the top of his head and the pressure of her breast against his shoulder as she gave his hair a trim in the kitchen of his apartlint of the Trout Trout Quintet playing in the background as the smell of her cunt, rich and faintly smoky like cork, perfumed an idle hour in her father's house He recalled the sweet illusion of hope that his love for her had brought him When he had finished the last letter, he slipped it back into its envelope He went back to Wahoo Fleer's typewriter, pulled out the statement he had left, and laid it carefully on the desk Then he rolled in a clean sheet and typed: Quintet playing in the background as the smell of her cunt, rich and faintly smoky like cork, perfumed an idle hour in her father's house He recalled the sweet illusion of hope that his love for her had brought him When he had finished the last letter, he slipped it back into its envelope He went back to Wahoo Fleer's typewriter, pulled out the statement he had left, and laid it carefully on the desk Then he rolled in a clean sheet and typed: To be delivered to Mrs Rosa Clay of Brooklyn USA

Dear Rosa, It was not your fault; I do not bla away, and ree As for the child, who can only be our son, I wish This time he could not think how to continue He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much-indeed to revolve around hi to do with him at all The little boy's naraph, jabbed at some place inside Joe that was so broken and raw that he felt it as a kind ofSince he did not plan to return alive, one way or another, from the trip to Jotunheim, he told himself that the boy was much better off without hi at the desk of the dead captain, that in the unlikely event his plan went awry and he should find hi at war's end, he would never have anything to do with any of them, but in particular with this sober and fortunate American boy He pulled the letter out of the typewriter and folded it into an envelope on which he typed the words ”In the event also of my death” He laid his envelope under that in which Captain Fleer had made his final wishes known He tied up the packet of letters and photographs frole s, to Wayne Then he picked up his sleeping bag and went out to the radio shack to see if he could tune in Radio Jotunhei the cloudless sky, the light wind from the southeast They had had a weatherman, Brodie, but even when he had been alive, Shannenhouse had disdained his counsel, agreeing with his old friend Lincoln Ellsworth that no one could predict the weather in this place As long as they could get the plane off the ground, theyof bowel troubles, and Joe afterward said in his report that he noticed Shannenhouse looked a little pale, but attributed this to drink They backed the tractor up to the raain and hooked the plane to it This tiot the plane up onto the surface While Shannenhouse set to work heating the engines and readying the plane, Joe loaded on their gear They closed up all the hatches on the buildings and took a look around at the place that had been their hoet out of here,” Shannenhouse said ”I just ere going so where Oyster was In his haste, Shannenhouse had not done an especially good job, and the skin looked half-cured and hung a little loose and puckered over the frame The entire airplane had a pied appearance, reddish-brown blotches of seal stitched against a background of silver-gray, as if it had been splashed with blood Where the dog skins were, the plane looked bleached and sickly

”Now or never, Dopey,” said Shannenhouse He pressed a hand to his side

Thirty seconds later, they were bu as rock candy, and then so seemed to cup its hand underneath and bear them up Shannenhouse let out a cowboyish yip, a little shyly

”Never going to knohat hit hi twin Cyclones

Joe said nothing He never told Shannenhouse that the night before, just before he lay down in his sleeping bag, he had broken the fictitious invisible barrier that had hitherto been maintained between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheiist, in Gerularly used by Berlin to contact him: WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU

He could never have prized apart to explain it to Shannenhouse the elf-knot of pity, remorse, and a desire to torment and terrify that had prompted this admonishment In any case, it would have been superfluous to try, since on the third day of their journey, in a tent pitched on a plateau in the lee of the Eternity Mountains, Shannenhouse's appendix burst

6

The piebald airplane, off-kilter, coughing, trailing a long black thread fro in the sky for a moment a hundred feet west of Jotunheilyph of huddled oblong mounds in the snow, the black barbell of the radio tower, and the ice-stiffened cri string of ana fairy castles, that had bewitched hiht He paid for his ine stalled The plane dipped, jerked upward, wobbled, then fell, in silence and with surprising slowness, like a coin dropped into a jar of water The plane hit the ground, and with a whisper, the snow exploded A great hood of glittering spray, kicked up by the nose of the plane as it plowed along the ground, billowed and drifted across the clearing The sounds of splintering tiht up andsurf of snow The silence deepened, broken only by a soft teakettle ticking and the snap of fabric as a torn section of fuselage sheathing flapped in the wind

A few ed furrow of ice and snow that the crash landing had piled up alongside the airplane It was hooded, the face concealed by a narrow circular ruff of wolverine fur

The Ger, and who had been e from his solitary quarters to watch the skies over Jotunheiular intervals of twenty ers of his reindeer-skin glove outspread The greeting had a soruous appearance since, in his other hand, pointed loosely but generally in the direction of the pilot's fur-trimmed head, he held a 45-caliber Walther service pistol He had not slept at all in the five days since receiving thefrom the American base in Marie Byrd Land, and had not slept well for nearly two months before that He was drunk, jacked up on a froun leveled at thefor other heads to appear, conscious of the treet off only one or two shots before the others brought him down

The American had halved the hundred an to wonder if he ht not have been the only survivor of the crash He ca of his hood pointed straight ahead, as if without expectation of being followed or joined He had pulled his arms down into his coat for warmth, and with the face invisible within the fur hole of the hood and the herky-jerk scarecrow gait, the sight of the sleeves flopping at thestalked by a parka filled with bones, the ghost of so his ar from the center of the hood The Aan to cruet his arh the cuffs of his sleeves, extending his aresture of protest or supplication, when the first shot hit hi had shot at birds and squirrels as a boy but had never fired a pistol before, and his ar with pain, as if the cold had frozen his arm and the recoil shattered it Quickly, before pain and fear and doubt of his actions could stop him, he squeezed off the rest of the clip Only after he had e with his eyes closed When he opened the directly in front of him He pushed back the circle of fur, and his hair and eyebrows, moistened by the condensation of his breath in-side the hood, began ally young in spite of his beard, with an aquiline elegant face

”I alad to be here,” the Aht for an instant as if on a sharp wire There was a neat black hole in the shoulder of the parka ”The flight was difficult”

He pulled his right arm up inside the parka once more and felt around for aan autoun up across his chest, as if to fire into the sky, and then his arist took a step backward, then steeled hiun As he did so, he realized that he had misinterpreted the situation, so the pistol aside, that his unthreatening and even wistful air was not some elaborate ruse but merely the relief, dazed and unsteady, of sogested, glad to be alive Mecklenburg felt a sudden sharp regret for his behavior, for he was a peaceful and scholarly man who had always deplored violence, and one further known, in the course of his scientific career, a fair nuarious man, he had nearly died of solitude in the last ent, able young man, one ho and Benny Good had shot at him-emptied his clip-in this place where the only hope for survival, as he had so long argued, was friendly cooperation a the nations

A chime tuned to C-sharp sounded in his ear, and with an odd sense of relief he felt his torht hi startled and friendless and sad The Geologist opened his ainst his lips What a hypocrite I have been! he thought

It took Joe nearly half an hour to drag the German across ten of the twenty meters that separated them froth and will, but he knew that he would find medical supplies inside the station, and he was determined to save the life of the ht hundred miles of useless ice to kill He needed benzoin, cotton wool, a hemostat, needle and thread He needed morphia and blankets and the ruddy flarance of life, steaiven off by the trail of the German's blood in the snoas a reproach to Joe, the reproach of so beautiful and inestimable, like innocence, which he had been lured by the Ice into betraying In seeking revenge, he had allied hiraphy, with the sawteeth and crevasses of death Nothing that had ever happened to hi expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or intern of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the ri a corpse behind him

7

Infor the Weddell Sea had first been advanced in the wake of the Filchner expedition of 1911-13 Flying the eagle of the Hohenzollerns, the Deutschland, Deutschland, under the command of scientist and Arctic explorer Wilhelrievous sea than any previous shi+p, battering its way through the semipermanent pack until it reached an immense, impassable palisade of barrier ice The under the command of scientist and Arctic explorer Wilhelrievous sea than any previous shi+p, battering its way through the semipermanent pack until it reached an immense, impassable palisade of barrier ice The Deutschland Deutschland then turned west and sailed for ress in the sheer cliffs of the shelf that today bears Filchner's naive their names to the places that haunt or kill them then turned west and sailed for ress in the sheer cliffs of the shelf that today bears Filchner's naive their names to the places that haunt or kill them

At last, with the end of the season only a feeeks away, they came upon a place, a fissure in the Barrier, where the level of the shelf dropped abruptly to no more than a few feet above sea level A half-dozen ice anchors were quickly driven into the shore of this inlet, which the explorers named Raiser Wilhelm II Bay, and crates unloaded for the construction of a winter base They chose a site some three ave the rather too-grand na, and prepared to hunker down in the southern A series of severe tre nearly a , witnessed by the awed and deafened crew of the Deutschland, Deutschland, of a colossal iceberg a few miles east of the shi+p, put an abrupt end to their plans After an uneasy week spent wondering and arguing whether they were about to be set adrift, they abandoned camp, returned to shi+p, and sailed north for home They were al chewed by the molars of the Weddell Sea before war ho a few miles east of the shi+p, put an abrupt end to their plans After an uneasy week spent wondering and arguing whether they were about to be set adrift, they abandoned camp, returned to shi+p, and sailed north for home They were al chewed by the molars of the Weddell Sea before war home

It was in the base camp abandoned by this expedition that Joseph Kavalier, Radioman Second Class, was found by the navy icebreaker William Dyer William Dyer He had been in interiving s of his position Commander Frank J Kemp, skipper of the He had been in interiving s of his position Commander Frank J Ke h considerable hardshi+p in the last three weeks, surviving two long solo flights conducted with only liator, a crash, a bullet wound to the shoulder, and a ten-ustaburg noted in his log that the young h considerable hardshi+p in the last three weeks, surviving two long solo flights conducted with only liator, a crash, a bullet wound to the shoulder, and a ten-ustaburg

He had been living in this hut, noted Commander Kemp, on thirty-year-old tins of uin, perfectly preserved He was suffering from the effects of scurvy, frostbite, anemia, and a poorly healed flesh wound, which only the Antarctic uncongeniality toinfected, perhaps fatally; he had also, according to the shi+p's doctor who exah two and a half thirty-year-old boxes of morphine He said that he had set out alone across the ice fro the last part of the ith no intention of getting anywhere at all, because he could not bear to be near the body of thejust as the last of his strength was failing him He was taken to the base at Guantanamo Bay, where he reation by a court-martial until shortly before V-E Day

His claim to have killed the lone enemy occupant of a German Antarctic base some seventy-five ated and confirmed, and in spite of certain questions raised by his behavior and his handling of the uished Service Cross

In August 1977 a huge chunk of the Filchner Shelf, forty miles wide and twenty-five miles deep, calved off fro into the Weddell Sea, carrying with it both the hut and the hidden remnants, some ten miles distant, of the German polar drea Filchner's Hut had become a required stop for the intrepid tourists ere just then beginning to brave the floe-choked waters of the Weddell Sea The people would trauide and respectfully examine the piles of empty tins with their quaint Edwardian-era labels, the abandoned charts and skis and rifles, the racks of unused beakers and test tubes, the frozen penguin, shot for exail under a portrait of the Kaiser They ht reflect on the endurance of this nance that tiht ooseberries in the neat rows of cans on the shelves were still edible, and how theyover an enig that lay on the workbench, done in colored pencil, frozen solid and so Clearly the work of a child, it appeared to show afroh the , and pouring a cup of tea fro tea service, as if oblivious of his predicaht he had all the tiround

PART VI

The LEAGUE of the of the GOLDEN KEY GOLDEN KEY

1

When Sammy went in to wake To his eye patch in the bedroom mirror The bedroom furniture, a set from Levitz-bed, dresser, the mirror, and a hutch with drawers-had a nautical theation chart for the Outer Banks, the brass drawer pulls shaped like pilot's wheels, the mirror trimmed in stout hawser rope The eye patch did not look all that out of place To different kinds of piratical scowls on himself