Hell's Gate(21)

MacCready shook his head. “Yeah, this one makes a nifty club and you can shit down the barrel.”

Thorne shot his friend a puzzled look, but MacCready waved him off. “Don’t ask. I’ve got other problems.”

“So I hear.”

“Oh yeah, Jap subs, maybe Nazis, early-stage schizophrenia. The normal stuff.” He motioned toward the arch. “Those legs are an interesting touch.”

Thorne let out a nervous, high-pitched laugh that MacCready hadn’t heard in five years, instantly recalling a time that now seemed to be part of someone else’s life. Before Thorne’s sudden disappearance, he had been one of America’s most brilliant young botanists. They’d met as graduate students and, though they attended different schools (MacCready at Cornell and Thorne at Atlantic Tech), it was a mutual love for the Neotropics that brought them together at a scientific conference in Manhattan. But while MacCready had put much of his attention into vertebrate zoology, Thorne split his time between Brooklyn and the Brazilian Amazon, investigating medicinal plants at both locales. He’d actually written and passed the defense of his Ph.D. thesis (“The Urucu Plant as an Insect Repellant with Comments on Possible Psychotropic Effects”). Then, at the age of twenty-four, he was on the verge of taking an assistant professorship when, as his mother, Ashley Thorne, later put it, “He saw something shiny and got distracted.”

Thorne sat down on a stone bench outside the church and patted the space next to him. “So, answering your second question first. Let’s just say it started out as a little tax problem.”

“A little tax problem?” MacCready said, sitting down next to his friend with a laugh. “I heard they wanted to boil you in oil.”

“Yeah, well, it’s all relative—if you’re reading your Einstein. A double sawbuck actually, from a student grant. Seems I somehow forgot to declare it. Big f*ckin’ deal, right?”

MacCready shook his head. That can’t be right, he thought.

“That is what I was thinking, too. But for some reason the feds start squawking like it is some nut-crusher of biblical proportions.”

“And . . . ?” Mac said, still shaking his head, doubt sliding into disbelief.

“And . . . a nut-crusher is what it turns out to be.”

A double sawbuck? “Only twenty dollars?” This could only happen to Bob Thorne.

“Now that is what I call relativity. So I says, ‘Hey let’s talk about this.’ And the fed says, ‘Yeah right,’ and he heads like an arrow straight for the rest of my grant money—the chunk he could lay his mitts on, that is.”

“What did the school have to say about that?”

“Hah!” Thorne said, throwing up his hands. “They were a big help. Their response was something along the lines of ‘You’re lucky we are letting you into the school in the first place—Jew!’”

That was it, Mac thought. That’s why they rescinded his Ph.D. credits. The f*ckers had even downgraded his master’s degree. Now it made sense. All of it.

MacCready had heard of this type of thing happening to other Jewish-American students, in colleges across the United States, about the time his friend had turned up missing. He knew how the public groundswell that raised the Nazis to power had not been entirely unique to Germany. And despite proclamations against the Axis powers overseas, a number of prestigious American academic institutions began writing their darkest chapters.

Shaken by his friend’s response, MacCready decided that this was not a good time to tell Thorne what had happened to his academic credentials.

“Now this is a nice long story with exciting escapes and this and that,” Thorne continued, “but I now give you the much abridged version. Basically, I got to thinking about it. And before these feds could get their hooks into the entire head of lettuce, or worse, toss me in the canaroo, I decided to skip.”

“To Brazil?”

“I figure, Hey, Brazil has got plenty of plants to study and less than a few Jew-hating universities. Now at first I’m thinking this will only be temporary, you know, to allow some time for the shit storm to blow over. But as time goes by—which is a great tune, by the way—the more I think about being dead, the more I like it. And all things considered, is anyone as free as a dead man?”

MacCready paused. “I’ll give you that one, but I still think you’re tying your ponytail a bit too tight.”

“Yeah, well . . . dead or not, eventually the feds found me down here anyway, and now it seems I am working for them on something they will not tell me more than half about.”

“Everybody’s doing his part, I guess,” MacCready said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Speaking of machete-wielding mobs, what the hell’s going on with the legs?”

Thorne avoided looking at the flyblown limbs, which were twisting synchronously in the breeze. “Mac, this is no time for ‘information please’ unless of course you wanna swing with the locals—if you catch my drift.”

“I’ll pass.”

“I figured as much. Personally, I am thinking more in terms of breakfast. Jeet?”

MacCready shook his head.

“In which case, we should head back to—”

“And what’s Joseph doing with boots on in your church?”