World pacific, p.1
World Pacific, page 1
Dedication
To my sister, Melissa—my original sidekick
Epigraph
Life itself is always a shipwreck . . .
—José Ortega y Gasset
Beach your vessel hard by the Ocean’s churning shore and make your own way down to the moldering House of Death. . . . Once there, go forward, hero.
—Homer, Odyssey
So many career intelligence officers went around looking terribly mysterious—long black boots and sinister smiles. Nobody ever issued me with a false beard. And invisible ink? I can’t even read my own writing when it’s supposed to be visible. My disguise was my own reputation as a bit of an idiot.
—Noël Coward
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I: Flotsam Interstitial
1. Hildegard Rauch
2.
3. Hildegard Rauch
4.
5. Hildegard Rauch
6.
7.
8. Hildegard Rauch
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10. Hildegard Rauch
11.
12. Hildegard Rauch
13.
14. Hildegard Rauch
15.
16. Hildegard Rauch
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18. Hildegard Rauch
19.
Part II: Trade Winds 20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
Part III: The Deep 25.
Part IV: Ashore Interstitial
26.
27. Hildegard Rauch
28. Simon Faulk
29. Hildegard Rauch
30. Simon Faulk
31.
32. Hildegard Rauch
33.
34. Hildegard Rauch
35. Simon Faulk
36. Hildegard Rauch
37. Simon Faulk
38.
Part V: Horizon 39. Hildegard Rauch
40.
41. Simon Faulk
Historical Note and Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Peter Mann
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part I
Flotsam
Interstitial
San Francisco Chronicle, October 13, 1939:
HALIFAX DEAD, COURT DECLARES
Author-Adventurer Drowned on Chinese Junk in Typhoon in Pacific, Jury Holds
KANSAS CITY, Mo., Oct. 13 (AP)—
Richard Halifax, author-adventurer, last heard from in May after a typhoon hit the Chinese junk Soup Dumpling, was declared legally dead today. After two search-and-rescue missions, a jury concluded he died on May 28 near the international date line while attempting to sail from Hong Kong to San Francisco. He is survived by his parents, Franklin and Regina Halifax, and was predeceased by a brother, Wesley.
Richard Halifax made a name for himself as a world traveler for the stay-at-home crowd. He was the swashbuckler of the Ladies’ Home Journal, Don Quixote of the dining hall, Lord Byron of all dreamy-eyed schoolboys. Neither a poet nor an explorer himself, he brightened the annals of adventure by following in the footsteps of the greats, adding a fresh coat of charm and, as many critics observed, a good deal of manufactured drama and drollery. Wherever he went, Halifax always found himself “in a tight spot,” usually of his own making, which he met with Midwestern cheerfulness and the breeziest of styles.
Halifax was born on February 11, 1900, in Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended the Country Day School. After studies at Princeton, he stowed away on a steamer to Rotterdam and tramped his way across Europe and Asia. This became the subject of his first book, in 1925, Romance by Rucksack, and the beginning of his career on the lecture circuit. More trips and books soon followed. The Glorious Wanderer (1927) retraced the odyssey of Homer’s eponymous hero. The Magic Carpet (1928) chronicled his journey across the deserts of Africa, the Near East, and America in an open-cockpit airplane. The Glittering Kingdom (1929) found the writer trekking through the ruins of Indochina and Siam, while that same year Steppe Lively! recounted a train journey across the Soviet Union.
In 1930, in the first of a series of trips titled “Paths of the Conquerors,” Halifax walked Cortés’s route from Veracruz to the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. There he met the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, who joined him on the next leg, by car, to the Panama Canal, where, after securing permission from the U.S. naval authorities, Halifax swam the channel.
Halifax was always in search of a good swim and even better stunt, stripping down in picturesque ports and diving in while the press watched from ashore. During one such feat, while he was attempting to mimic Byron’s splash across the Hellespont, several papers reported him drowned. Three days later, the author-adventurer surfaced in a Turkish fishing boat, where he was photographed grinning at news of his own demise.
The anecdote was indicative of Halifax’s charmed life in that period. During the worst years after the Wall Street crash, he lived the high life in San Francisco, emitting a steady stream of exotic hijinks for those who could only dream of travel—let alone climb Mount Fuji in the dead of winter, ride an elephant across the Alps, or be feted by a seven-foot-tall Arabian king at Mecca, just before trying to sneak inside the gates. His 1934 Codex of Wonders, a compendium of world marvels for young readers, was a New York Times bestseller for nearly two years and spawned the Dicky Halifax Junior Adventurers Club, a newsletter subscription service that put the author in direct communication with his legion of pint-sized admirers.
But by 1937 hard times caught up with Halifax. A novel home on the cliffs of Laguna Beach drained his wealth, a stint in Hollywood led to a box-office flop, followed by rumors of missing funds intended for the doomed Spanish republic. Halifax went to the Orient, splitting his time between Bangkok and Shanghai. But rather than chronicle heroic swims or elephant rides, his dispatches told of Japanese atrocities and air raids.
In 1938, Halifax announced he was preparing for his greatest adventure yet: an ocean crossing from Hong Kong to San Francisco on his custom-built junk, the Soup Dumpling. She was to have been exhibited last summer at the World’s Fair on Treasure Island as part of its “Pageant of the World Pacific.” To raise funds for the voyage, Halifax, ever the entrepreneur, sold a package of Junior Adventurers Club subscriptions that, for the price of five dollars, would send his young readers letters written aboard ship and mailed from ports of call en route.
On May 27 this year, the SS President Coolidge received a radio transmission from the Soup Dumpling, its position some five hundred miles west of Midway Island. In what would prove to be the author-adventurer’s final words, Halifax reported that a typhoon had struck the ship: “Gales . . . squalls . . . bunks soaked, lee rail underwater . . . having whale of a time . . . wish you were here instead of me.”
1.
Hildegard Rauch
How could you? I don’t understand. Of course the world is a disaster, your own life a ruin, and the future without hope. But to Werther yourself right out of existence? What a horrible cliché. You always wanted to free yourself from Father’s shadow, but now look where you are. No doubt tomorrow’s papers will report that Son of Germany’s Greatest Living Writer in Exile Was Not Up to the Task.
I’m so angry, I could pull those tubes right out of your throat. That would give the newshounds a better headline: Daughter of Germany’s Greatest Living Writer in Exile Murders Twin. Sounds like a story out of the High Priest’s own corpus: early middle period, when incest and sex-murder were all the rage. Sickly, fine-boned brother arrives in fleshpot metropolis, reunites with his likeness in feminine form (though let’s be honest, I’m far manlier than you could ever hope to be), whereupon they bathe in blue waters, sun themselves on the cliffs, and, after he cries on her shoulder about the last mean boy who broke his heart, the two fall quite naturally into the embrace they first knew in the amnion. Brother, tormented by guilt, swallows his suitcase full of chemicals, which doesn’t quite do the trick, until hysterical sister comes to finish the job. I call it “The Geminicide”—doesn’t that have a nice ring to it? The Viennese would have eaten it right up.
Of course, that’s a story for a world that no longer exists. And the real one of today is so much drabber: Penniless brother and hopeless drug addict, having destroyed the last shred of patience among family and friends in Los Angeles, flees to San Francisco and calls upon sister, whom he’s neglected for the better part of three years but who surely must pity him enough to throw him some bread. When she refuses—only because she knows every cent will go straight into his veins—he says he’s only one unmet fix away from offing himself. She calls his bluff, tells him the meat cleaver is in the top drawer on the right, that he’s welcome to borrow it but could he please wash it before bringing it back? The next morning she gets a call from the manager of the St. Francis Hotel, saying Mr. Heinrich Rauch was found in his room unconscious and rushed to Mount Zion in an ambulance.
Of all the stories we could have lived together, Eiko, why this one? With me stuck in a hospital room, seeing your sallow form laid out, listening to the precarious beep of your pulse. We should be at Treasure Island right now, looking at my painting in the new exhibition, winning prizes at the shooting gallery (me for accuracy, you for consolation), and licking ice cream cones like real Americans.
You always say it’s harder for the sons of great fathers than it is for the daughters. But that’s only because nobody expects,
I went to get your things from the St. Francis today. Glad being broke didn’t stop you from springing for the suite for the last six weeks. Pretty high-tone for one of the self-proclaimed “Lumpenproletariat of Literature.” When Monsieur Gaurin presented me with your bill, I thought I was going to have to make a run for it. Thank God he’s the last of San Francisco’s old-world hoteliers and didn’t expect payment upon departure. You’ll be glad to know I’ve forwarded the bill on to the High Priest.
Wish I could be there to see his eyes pop when he sees the tally. Though I doubt Mother will even mention it—wouldn’t want it to interfere with his work, especially now that Father thinks the fate of Europe hangs on his prose. He was out for his constitutional when I called to break the news of your trip to the underworld. I told Mother, who insists it must have been an accident, that you’re stable and that you will eventually wake up; we just don’t know when. That’s what the doctors have said, more or less. They have also said that you may remain in “a chronic vegetative state of indeterminate length” and suffer “permanently impaired brain function.” These I did not share.
And, yes, I found your note. Witty and impeccably typed, even as you board Charon’s ferry. I grant you, the world is not a pleasant place to lay over right now. That little black spider, hatched in our own rotten garden, will soon ensnare all of Europe, if not the world. But this is what makes me so furious with you, why I stand before your action uncomprehending and seemingly without pity. While others are interned or shot or run down by tanks, you, one of the lucky ones, take your precious gift of life up to the twelfth-floor suite and, surrounded by the splendor of the Pacific, try to cash it in. Why?
You’ve always said you feel called to death, whereas I am called to life, but I don’t think you understand death in its brutal simplicity. You seem to regard it as some kind of realm or state of being, when it is simply a negation. The fall of a blade, the flip of a switch, the crushing of all into dust. That is death and nothing more. And you have not yet earned it. I must say, it’s easier to argue with you in your unconscious state. You can’t disagree with me or call me an aloof aesthete or a manly giantess. Though I wish you would, because the silence of your acid tongue makes me fear you are not there at all.
But there’s something else—something I don’t understand. And I need, above all, to understand you. You said in your note that, despite how it looks, it wasn’t Hitler or his war, it wasn’t the loss of your homeland and years of exile, it wasn’t your literary failures or the towering shadow cast by Father and his public contempt for your work, it wasn’t even your crippling dependence on drugs and booze that made things unbearable. It was the pain of lost love. Love!
Yet not three days ago you were telling me about that Croatian tennis player, laughing at how boring he was and that the only thing you’d miss about him was how marvelously he filled out those white shorts. Surely it wasn’t the souring of this little fling that made you want to throw yourself overboard, and in any event I believe his name was Marko. How, then, am I to understand the parting declaration of your note? I just can’t bear to live in a World without Dick.
Assuming you were talking about a man and not an appendage—your appallingly German habit of capitalizing nouns in English has complicated things—I have only one question for you: Who the hell is Dick?
2.
To: The Dicky Halifax Junior Adventurers Club
From: Dicky Halifax
Aboard the Wreckage of the Soup Dumpling
Adrift in the Pacific
Summer 1939
Ahoy, my dearest boys!
Sorry I haven’t fired up the mimeograph machine these last few weeks—she got a bit waterlogged—but boy howdy, have I got a tale for you.
Your old pal Dicky sure ended up in the weeds this time. For a second there, I thought it was so long, world, and sayonara, Dick. But what do I always say? If the brain stem’s still glued to the spinal cord, it’s not lights out yet. No sirree, when you find yourself in a tight spot, you gotta make like Ulysses and use your noggin. We hardly know all the goodies it’s teeming with till Dame Fortune has boxed our ears and sat on our chest—and let me assure you, boys, she’s a big girl, the Dame. Besides, that’s the whole point of adventure. If we wanted to take it easy, we could have stayed in Kansas City and gone for a ride on the Brush Creek gondola with all the other weak sisters.
But not me, boys. While the rest of the adult world was punching the clock, I was astride the prow of the Soup Dumpling, sun on my bare chest, beaming like a priapic god as we cut the waves along the Chinese main. The firecrackers from our glorious send-off out of Hong Kong were still ringing in my ears, and my grin was so wide the salt spray made my gums bleed.
This was the moment I’d spent my whole life dreaming of and the last two years busting my hump to make happen. All the keen scores and lucky breaks, the failed business pitches, pulled endorsements, and pillows soaked with tears—it had all been worth it. Even when that stuffed suit from Buick said his company couldn’t afford to be associated with anything called a “junk,” even when those pussyfoot investors from the San Francisco Chinese Benevolent Society jumped ship because they were worried about “my assessment of the Japanese threat,” and even when that sour English spy in Bangkok said he’d chase me down and kill me if it turned out I was grifting him. All those moments had led me here, and now the rest was pure adventure.
I was recalling these travails from my perch when a shriek rang out that nearly sent me overboard. It sounded like the roar of a breached sea dragon, but when I turned I saw our surly captain, Pengelly, his ulna burst through his skin, and my man Roderick brandishing a kitchen knife.
Despite how things looked, it was an accident. Pengelly had slipped on Roderick’s martini puddle after sneaking into the galley to make one of his sickening Cornish pies. Roderick warned him at knifepoint to stay out of his kitchen, and Pengelly, being the uncharitable, suspicious sort, accused Roderick of planting the puddle there as a trap. The arm could not be reset and, seeing as we were only two days from port, Pengelly demanded we turn back. In short, a real porty pooper. He vowed to sue me the moment we reached the harbor, which still bore faint traces of smoke and confetti from our big send-off.
Demoralizing as it was to abort our maiden voyage before we’d even gotten the tip in, it was for the best. I’d grown tired of the Cornishman’s glower, and just the thought of enduring ten thousand miles of his disapproving looks was too much. Of course, I didn’t wish for the man to suffer a life-altering, artery-rupturing arm break. But the Fates are mysterious ladies, boys, and some say they follow a cosmic justice.
Plus, truth be told, the little drop-in motor that Pengelly had insisted on was never going to get us to Formosa, let alone across open ocean. And our resident Harvard crybaby, George Winslow III, having acquired a walloping dose of the clap just before we left harbor, had spent every minute at sea dunking his hair snake in talcum powder, howling like a banshee.
So we hightailed it back to Hong Kong, where we sent George and Pengelly off to hospital and parked the Soup Dumpling in Ming Fat’s shipyard. Don’t be fooled by the funny name, boys—Ming Fat was thin as a bed rail and cunning as a jackal. He’d taken his sweet time building the junk to my specifications on the first go-round, always second-guessing me. I told the man I wanted a traditional Chinese junk, made just like the one Zheng He sailed when he kissed the coast of Peru, but with a few modern appurtenances. Well, hang me if ole Fat didn’t use my own words as a license to suck Dicky dry of every last dime in his pocket. He proceeded to build my junk by the slow-boat-from-China method, with wooden mallets and pegs and a whole lotta penge! I’d still be sitting in the Hong Kong boatyard if I hadn’t butted in and introduced the crew to the wonders of iron screws and a drill.
