Cryptonomicon

"Why?"

"Because you know too much about certain things."

"What certain things? Günter and his new submarine?"

"Yes."

"And how, may I ask, do you know this? It has something to do with the fact that you're fucking Julieta, right?" Shaftoe continues. He's bored rather than pissed off. This whole Sweden thing is old and tired to him now. He belongs in the Philippines. Anything that doesn't get him closer to the Philippines just irritates him.

"Right." Root heaves a sigh. "She thinks highly of you, Bobby, but after she saw that picture of your girlfriend--"

"Snap out of it! She doesn't give a shit about you or me. She just wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts."

"What are the bad parts?"

"Having to live in Finland," Shaftoe says. "So she has to marry someone with a good passport. Which nowadays means American or British. You might have noticed that she didn't fuck Günter."

Root looks a little queasy.

"Well, maybe she did then," Shaftoe says, heaving a sigh. "Shit!" Root has rooted an ammo clip out of another crate and figured out how to affix it to the Suomi. He says, "You probably know that the Germans have a tacit arrangement with the Swedes."

"What does 'tacit' mean?"

"Let's just say they have an arrangement."

"The Swedes are neutral, but they let the Krauts push them around."

"Yes. Otto has to deal with Germans at each end of his smuggling route, in Sweden and in Finland, and he has to deal with their navy when he's out on the water."

"I'm aware that the fucking Germans are all over Europe."

"Well, to make a long story short, the local Germans have prevailed upon Otto to betray you," Root says.

"Did he?"

"Yes. He did betray you."

"Okay. Keep talking, I'm listening to you," Shaftoe says. He begins to mount a ladder up into the attic, but then he thought better of it.

"I guess you could say he repented," Root says.

"Spoken like a true man of the cloth," Shaftoe mutters. He's into the attic now, crawling on hands and knees over the rafters. He stops and sparks up his Zippo. Most of its light is absorbed by a dark green slab: a crude wooden crate with Cryllic letters stenciled on it.

Root's voice is filtering up from below: "He came to, uh, the place where Julieta and I, uh, were."

Were fucking."Get me the crowbar," Shaftoe shouts. "It's in Otto's toolbox, under the table."

A minute later, the crowbar rises up through the hatch, like the head of a cobra emerging from a basket. Shaftoe grabs it and begins assaulting the crate.

"Otto was torn. He had to do what he did, or the German could have shut down his livelihood. But he respects you. He couldn't bear it. He had to talk to someone. So he came to us, and told Julieta what he had done. Julieta understood."

"She understood!?"

"But she also was horrified at the same time."

"That is truly heartwarming."

"Um, at that point, the Kivistiks broke out the schnapps and began to discuss the situation. In Finnish."

"I understand," Shaftoe says. Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours. "Thanks for having the guts to come out here."

"Julieta will understand."

"That's not what I mean."

"Oh, I don't think Otto would hurt me.

"No, I mean--"

"Oh!" Root exclaims. "No, I had to tell you about Julieta sooner or later--"

"No, goddamn it, I mean the Germans."

"Oh. Well, I didn't even begin to think about them until I was almost here. It was not courage so much as a lack of foresight."

Shaftoe's pretty good at foresight. "Take this." He hands down a heavy steel tube of coffee-can diameter, a few feet long. "It's heavy," he adds, as Root's knees buckle.

"What is it?"

"A Soviet hundred-and-twenty-millimeter mortar," Shaftoe says. "Oh." Root remains silent for a while, as he lays the mortar down on the table. When he speaks again, his voice sounds different. "I didn't realize Otto had this kind of stuff."

"The lethal radius of this bitch is a good sixty feet," Shaftoe says. He is hauling mortar bombs out of the crate and stacking them next to the hatch. "Or maybe it's meters, I can't remember." The bombs look like fat footballs with tailfins on one end.

"Feet, meters . . . the distinction is important," Root says. "Maybe it's overkill. But we have to get back to Norrsbruck and take care of Julieta."

"What do you mean, take care of her?" Root says warily.

"Marry her."

"What?"

"One of us has to marry her, and fast. I don't know about you, but I kind of like her, and it'd be a shame if she spent the rest of her life sucking Russian dick at gunpoint," Shaftoe says. "Besides, she might be pregnant with one of our kids. Yours, mine, or Günter's."

"We, the conspiracy, have an obligation to look after our offspring," Root agrees. "We could establish a trust fund for them in London."

"There should be plenty of money for that," Shaftoe agrees. "But I can't marry her, because I have to be available to marry Glory when I get to Manila."

"Rudy can't do it," Root says.

"Because he's a fag?"