Bletchley Park. He has moved up to another installation, a radio center called Hanslope in north Buckinghamshire, a place of reinforced concrete, wires, antennas, more military-formal in its atmosphere.
At the time, Waterhouse could not understand why Alan would want to move away from Bletchley. But now he knows how Alan must have felt after they turned decryption into a mechanical process, industrializing Bletchley Park. He must have felt that the battle was won, and with it the war. The rest might seem like glorious conquest to people like the General, but to Turing, and now to Waterhouse, it just looks like tedious mopping-up. It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
Sinkov provides Waterhouse with a desk in the whorehouse and begins to feed him the messages that Central Bureau hasn't been able to decrypt. There are still dozens of minor Nipponese codes that remain to be broken. Maybe, by breaking one or two, and teaching the ETC machines to read them, Waterhouse can shorten the war by a single day, or save a single life. This is a noble calling that he undertakes willingly, but in essence it is no different from being an Army butcher who saves lives by keeping his knives clean, or a lifeboat inspector in the Navy.
Waterhouse cracks those minor Nip codes one after the other. One month he even flies up to New Guinea, where Navy divers are salvaging code books from a sunken Nip submarine. He lives in the jungle for two weeks and tries not to die, comes back to Brisbane, and puts those recovered codebooks to good but dull use. Then one day the dullness of his work becomes irrelevant.
On that day, he returns to Mrs. McTeague's boardinghouse in the evening, goes to his room, and finds a large man snoring in the upper bunk. A lot of clothing and equipment is scattered about the place, emanating sulfurous reek.
The man sleeps for two days and then comes down late for breakfast one morning, peering around the room with Atabrine yellow eyes. He introduces himself as Smith. His oddly familiar accent is not made any easier to understand by the fact that his teeth are chattering violently. He doesn't seem especially bothered by this. He sits down and paws an Irish linen napkin into his lap with a hand that is stiff and raw. Mrs. McTeague fusses over him to the extent that all of the men at the table must resist the impulse to slug her. She pours him tea with plenty of milk and sugar. He takes a few sips, then excuses himself and goes to the WC, where he crisply and politely vomits. He comes back, eats a soft-boiled egg from a bone china egg cup, turns green, leans back in his chair, and closes his eyes for about ten minutes.
When Waterhouse returns from work that evening, he blunders into the parlor and interrupts Mrs. McTeague having tea with a young lady.
The young lady's name is Mary Smith; she is the cousin of Waterhouse's roommate, who is upstairs shivering and sweating in his bunk bed.
Mary stands up to be introduced, which is not technically necessary; but she is a girl from the outback and has no use for effete refinement. She is a petite girl dressed in a uniform.
She is the only woman Waterhouse has ever seen. She is the only other human being in the universe actually, and when she stands up to shake his hand, his peripheral vision shuts down as if he has been sucking on a tailpipe. Black curtains converge across a silver cyclorama, shuttering down his cosmos to a vertical shaft of carbon-arc glory, a pillar of light, a heavenly follow-spot targeted upon Her.
Mrs. McTeague, knowing the score, bids him sit down.
Mary is a tiny, white-skinned, red-headed person who is often seized by little fits of self-consciousness. When this happens she averts her eyes from his and swallows, and when she swallows there is a certain cord in her white neck, rounding the concavity from shoulder to ear, that stands out for a moment. It draws attention both to her vulnerability and to the white flesh of her neck, which is not white in a pallid sick way but in another way that Waterhouse could never have understood until recently: viz., from his little stint in New Guinea, where everything is either dead and decaying, or bright and threatening, or unobtrusive and invisible, Waterhouse knows that anything this tender and translucent is too vulnerable and tempting to hold its own in a world of violently competing destroyers, that it can only be sustained for a moment (let alone years) by the life force within. In the South Pacific where the forces of Death are so powerful, it leaves him vaguely intimidated. Her skin, as unmarked as clear water, is an extravagant display of vibrant animal power. He wants his tongue on it. The whole curve of her neck, from collarbone to earlobe, would make a perfect cradle for his face.
She sees him looking at her, and swallows again. The cord flexes, stretching the living skin of her neck out for just a moment, and then relaxes, leaving nothing but smoothness and calm. She may just as well have caved his head in with a stone and tied his penis round a hitching-rail. The effect must be calculated. But apparently she has not ever done it to anyone else, or there would be a band of gold round her pale left ring finger.
Mary Smith is beginning to get annoyed with him. She lifts the teacup to her lips. She has turned so that the light is grazing her neck in a new way, and this time when she swallows he can see her Adam's apple moving up. Then it comes down like a pile driver on what is left of his good judgment.
There is a thumping noise upstairs; her cousin has just regained consciousness. 'Excuse me,' she says, and she's gone, leaving only Mrs. McTeague's bone china as a reminder.
Chapter 58 CONSPIRACY
Dr. Rudolf Von Hacklheber is not much older than sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, but even emotionally crushed, he has a certain bearing about him that men in Shaftoe's world don't acquire until they are in their forties, if then. His eyeglasses have tiny rimless lenses that look like they were scavenged from a sniper's telescopic sights. Behind them is a whole paintbox of vivid colors: blond lashes, blue eyes, red veins, lids swollen and purple from weeping. Even so, he has a perfect shave, and the silvery Nordic light coming in through the tiny windows of Enoch Root's church cellar glances from the planes of his face so as to highlight an interesting terrain of big pores, premature creases, and old dueling scars. He has tried to grease his hair back, but it misbehaves and keeps tumbling down over his brow. He is wearing a white dress shirt and a very long, heavy overcoat on top of that to ward off the cellar's chill. Shaftoe, who hiked back to Norrsbruck with him several days ago, knows that the long-legged von Hacklheber has the makings of a half-decent jock. But he can tell that rude sports like football would be out of the question; this Kraut would be a fencer or a mountain climber or a skier.
Shaftoe was only startled-not bothered-by von Hacklheber's homosexuality. Some of the China Marines in Shanghai had a lot more young Chinese boys hanging around their flats than they really needed to shine their boots-and Shanghai is far from the strangest or most far-flung place where Marines made themselves at home between the wars. You can worry about morality when you're off duty, but if you are always stewing and fretting over what the other guys are doing in the sack, then what the hell are you going to do when you're presented with an opportunity to hit a Nip squad with a flamethrower?
They buried the remains of Angelo, the pilot, two weeks ago, and only now is von Hacklheber feeling in any kind of shape to talk. He has rented a cottage outside of town, but he has come into Norrsbruck to meet with Root, Shaftoe, and Bischoff on this day, partly because he is convinced that German spies are watching it. Shaftoe shows up with a bottle of Finnish schnapps, Bischoff brings a loaf of bread, Root breaks out a tin of fish. Von Hacklheber brings information. Everyone brings cigarettes.
Shaftoe smokes early and often, trying to kill the mildewy smell of the cellar, which reminds him of being locked up there with Enoch Root, kicking his morphine habit. During that time, the pastor once had to come downstairs and ask him please to stop screaming for a while because they were trying to do a wedding upstairs. Shaftoe hadn't known he was screaming.
Rudolf von Hacklheber's English is, in some respects, better than Shaftoe's. He sounds unnervingly like Bobby's junior high school drafting teacher, Mr. Jaeger. 'Before the war I worked under Donitz for the Beobachtung Dienst of the Kriegsmarine. We broke some of the most secret codes of the British Admiralty even before the outbreak of hostilities. I was responsible for some advances in this field, involving the use of mechanical calculation. When war broke out there was much reorganization and I became like a bone that several dogs are fighting over. I was moved into
