Then Shaftoe comes awake and knows that this was all just his body desiring morphine. He is certain for a moment that he is back in Oakland and that Lieutenant Reagan is looming over him, preparing for Phase 2 of the interview.
'Good afternoon, Sergeant Shaftoe,' Reagan says. He has adopted a heavy German accent for some reason. A joke. These actors! Shaftoe smells meat, and other things not so inviting. Something heavy, but not especially hard, thuds into his face. Then it draws back. Then it hits him again.
'Your companion is morphium-seeky?' says Beck.
Enoch Root is a bit taken aback; they've only been on the boat for eight hours. 'Is he already making a nuisance of himself?'
'He is semiconscious,' Beck says, 'and has a great deal to say about giant lizards-among other subjects.'
'Oh, that's normal for him,' Root says, relieved. 'What makes you think he is morphium-seeky?'
'The morphium bottle and hypodermic syringe that were in his pocket,' Beck says with that deadpan Teutonic irony, 'and the needle marks in his arms.'
Root observes that the U-boat is like a tunnel bored out of the sea and lined with hardware. This cabin (if that's not too grand a word for it) is by far the largest open space Root has seen, meaning that he can almost stretch his arms out without hitting someone or inadvertently tripping a switch or a valve. It even sports some wooden cabinetry, and has been sealed off from the corridor by a leather curtain. When they first brought Root in here, he thought it was a storage closet. But as he looks around the place, he begins to realize that it's the nicest place on the whole boat: the captain's private cabin. This is confirmed when Beck unlocks a desk drawer and produces a bottle of Armagnac.
'Conquering France hath its privileges,' Beck says.
'Yeah,' Root says, 'you blokes really know how to sack a place.'
Lieutenant Reagan is back again, molesting Bobby Shaftoe with a stethoscope that appears to have been kept in a bath of liquid nitrogen until ready for use. 'Cough, cough, cough!' he keeps saying. Finally he takes the instrument away.
Something is fucking with Shaftoe's ankles. He tries to get up on his elbows to look, and smashes his face into a blistering hot pipe. When he's recovered from that, he peeks carefully down the length of his body and sees a goddamn hardware store down there. The bastards have put him in leg irons!
He lies back down and gets slugged in the face by a dangling ham. Above him is a firmament of pipes and cables. Where has he seen this before? On the Dutch-Hammer, that's where. Except the lights are on in this U- boat, and it doesn't appear to be sinking, and it's full of Germans. The Germans are calm and relaxed. None of them is bleeding or screaming. Damn! The boat rocks sideways, and a giant Blutwurst socks him in the belly.
He begins looking around, trying to get his bearings. There's not much else to see except hanging meat. This cabin is a six-foot-long slice of U-boat, with a narrow gangway down the center, hemmed in by bunks. Or maybe they are bunks. The one directly across from him is occupied by a dirty canvas sack.
Fuck that. Where is the box with the purple bottles?
'It is amusing to read my communications from Charlottenburg,' Beck says to Root, changing the subject to the message decrypts on his table. 'They were perhaps written by that Jew Kafka.'
'How so?'
'It seems that they do not expect that we will ever make it home alive.'
'What makes you say that?' Root says, trying not to savor the Armagnac too much. When he brings it up to his nose and inhales, its perfume nearly obliterates the reek of urine, vomit, rotten food, and diesel that suffuses everything on the U-boat down to the atomic level.
'They are pressing us for information about our prisoners. They are very interested in you guys,' Beck says.
'In other words,' Root says carefully, 'they want you to question us now.'
'Precisely.'
'And send the results in by radio?'
'Yes,' Beck says. 'But I really should be concentrating on how to keep us alive-the sun will be up soon, and then we are in for some very bad trouble. You'll remember that your ship radioed our coordinates before I sunk it. Every allied plane and ship is now out looking for us.'
'So, if I cooperate,' Root says, 'you can get back to the business of keeping us all alive.'
Beck tries to control a smile. His little tactic was crude and obvious to begin with, and Root has already seen through it. Beck is, if any thing, more uncomfortable than Root with this whole interrogation business.
'Suppose I tell you everything I know,' Root says. 'If you send it all back to Charlottenburg, you'll be running your radio, on the surface, for hours. Huffduff will pick you out in a few seconds and then every destroyer and bomber within a thousand miles will jump on you.'
'On us,' Beck corrects him.
'Yes. So if I really want to stay alive, it's best if I shut up,' Root says.
'Are you looking for this?' says the German with the stethoscope, who (Shaftoe has learned) is not a real doctor-just the guy who happens to be in charge of the box of medical stuff. Anyway, he is holding up just the thing. The very thing.
'Gimme that!' Shaftoe says, making a weak grab for it. 'That's mine!'
'Actually, it's mine,' the medic says. 'Yours is with the captain. I might share some of mine with you, if you are cooperative.'
'Fuck you,' Shaftoe says.
'Very well then,' the medic says, 'I will by-leave it.' He puts the syringe full of morphine on the bunk opposite and one level below Shaftoe's, so that Shaftoe, by peering between a couple of Knockwursts, can see it. But he can't reach it. Then the medic leaves.
'Why was Sergeant Shaftoe carrying a German morphine bottle and a German syringe?' says Beck quizzically, doing his best to make it sound conversational and not interrogational. But the effort is too much for him and that smile tries to seize control of his lips again. It is the smile of a whipped dog. Root finds this somewhat alarming, since Beck's the guy in charge of keeping everyone on the boat alive.
'That's news to me,' Root says.
'Morphine is closely regulated,' Beck says. 'Each bottle has a number. We have already radioed the number on Sergeant Shaftoe's bottle to Charlottenburg, and soon they'll know where it came from. Even though they may not tell us.'
'Good work. That should keep them busy for a while. Why don't you go back to running the ship?' Root suggests.
'We are in the calm before the storm,' Beck says, 'and I have not so much to do. So I try to satisfy my own curiosity about you.'
