Closing Time

  The idea of the others festered, and after another few spells of aggravated embitterment, Yossarian took the bull by the horns and telephoned the office.

  "Anything new?" he began, to Milo's son.

  "Not as far as I know."

  "Are you telling me the truth?"

  "To the best of my ability."

  "You're not holding anything back?"

  "Not as far as I can tell."

  "Would you tell me if you were?"

  "I would tell you if I could."

  "When your father calls in today, M2," he said to Milo Minderbinder II, "tell him I need the name of a good private detective. It's for something personal."

  "He's already phoned," said Milo junior. "He recommends a man named Jerry Gaffney at the Gaffney Agency. Under no circumstances mention that my father suggested him."

  "He told you that already?" Yossarian was enchanted. "How did he know I was going to ask?"

  "That's impossible for me to say."

  "How are you feeling, M2?"

  "It's hard to be sure."

  "I mean in general. Have you been back to the bus terminal to look at those TV monitors?"

  "I need to clock them some more. I want to go again."

  "I can arrange that again."

  "Will Michael come with me?"

  "If you pay him for the day. Are things all right?"

  "Wouldn't I want to tell you if they were?"

  "But would you tell me?"

  "That would depend."

  "On what?"

  "If I could tell you the truth."

  "Would you tell me the truth?"

  "Do I know what it is?"

  "Could you tell me a lie?"

  "Only if I knew the truth."

  "You're being honest with me."

  "My father wants that."

  "Mr. Minderbinder mentioned you were going to call," said the sanguine, soft-spoken voice belonging to the man named Jerry Gaffney when Yossarian telephoned him.

  "That's funny," said Yossarian. "Which one?"

  "Mr. Minderbinder senior."

  "That's very funny then," said Yossarian in a harder manner. "Because Minderbinder senior insisted I not mention his name to you when I phoned."

  "It was a test to see if you could keep things secret."

  "You gave me no chance to pass it."

  "I trust my clients, and I want all of them to know they can always trust Jerry Gaffney. Without trust, what else is there? I put everything out front. I'll give you proof of that now. You should know that this telephone line is tapped."

  Yossarian caught his breath. "How the hell did you find that out?"

  "It's my telephone line and I want it tapped," Mr. Gaffney explained reasonably. "There, see? You can count on Jerry Gaffney. It's only me who's recording it."

  "Is my line tapped?" Yossarian thought he should ask. "I make many business calls."

  "Let me look it up. Yes, your business is tapping it. Your apartment may be bugged too."

  "Mr. Gaffney, how do you know all this?"

  "Call me Jerry, Mr. Yossarian."

  "How do you know all this, Mr. Gaffney?"

  "Because I'm the one who tapped it and I'm one of the parties who may have bugged it, Mr. Yossarian. Let me give you a tip. All walls may have ears. Talk only in the presence of running water if you want to talk privately. Have sex only in the bathroom or kitchen if you want to make love or under the air conditioner with the fan setting turned up to--That's it!" he cheered, after Yossarian had walked into the kitchen with his portable phone and turned on both faucets full pressure to talk secretly. "We're picking up nothing. I can barely hear you."

  "I'm not saying anything."

  "Learn to read lips."

  "Mr. Gaffney--"

  "Call me Jerry."

  "Mr. Gaffney, you tapped my telephone and you bugged my apartment?"

  "I may have bugged it. I'll have one of my staff investigators check. I keep nothing back. Mr. Yossarian, you have an intercom system with the staff in the lobby. Can you be sure it's not on now? Are there no video cameras watching you?"

  "Who would do that?"

  "I would, for one, if I were paid. Now that you know I tell the truth, you see we can become close friends. That's the only way to work. I thought you knew that your telephone was tapped and that your apartment might be bugged and your mail, travel, credit cards, and bank accounts monitored."

  "Holy shit, I don't know what I know." Yossarian soaked up the disagreeable intelligence with a prolonged groan.

  "Look on the bright side, Mr. Yossarian. Always do that. You'll soon be party to another matrimonial action, I believe. You can pretty much take all that for granted if the principals have the wherewithal to pay us."

  "You do that too?"

  "I do a lot of that too. But this is only the company. Why should you care what M & M E & A hears if you never say anything you wouldn't want the company to hear? You believe that much, don't you?"

  "No."

  "No? Keep in mind, Mr. Yossarian, that I'm getting all of this down, although I'll be pleased to erase as much of it as you wish. How can you have reservations about M & M E & A when you share in its progress? Doesn't everybody share?"

  "I have never gone on record with that, Mr. Gaffney, and I won't do that now. When can we meet to begin?"

  "I've already begun, Mr. Yossarian. Grass doesn't grow under Senor Gaffney's feet. I've sent for your government files under the Freedom of Information Act and I'm getting your record from one of the best consumer credit-rating bureaus. I already have your Social Security number. Like it so far?"

  "I am not hiring you to investigate me!"

  "I want to find out what these people following you know about you before I find out who all of them are. How many did you say you think there are?"

  "I didn't. But I count at least six, but two or four of them may be working in pairs. I notice they drive cheap cars."

  "Economy cars," Gaffney corrected punctiliously, "to escape being noticed. That's probably how you noticed them." He seemed to Yossarian to be extremely exact. "Six, you say? Six is a good number."

  "For what?"

  "For business, of course. There is safety in numbers, Mr. Yossarian. For example, if one or two of them decided to assassinate you, there'd already be witnesses. Yes, six is a very good number," Gaffney continued happily. "It would be nicer to get them up to eight or ten. Forget about meeting me yet. I wouldn't want any of them to figure out I'm working for you unless it turns out that they're working for me. I like to have solutions before I find out the problems. Please turn off that water now if you're not having sex. I'm growing hoarse shouting, and I can hardly hear you. You really don't need it when you're talking to me. Your friends call you Yo-Yo? Some call you John?"

  "Only my close ones, Mr. Gaffney."

  "Mine call me Jerry."

  "I must tell you, Mr. Gaffney, that I find talking to you exasperating."

  "I hope that will change. If you'll pardon my saying so, it was heartening to hear that report from your nurse."

  "What nurse?" snapped Yossarian. "I have no nurse."

  "Her name is Miss Melissa MacIntosh, sir," corrected Gaffney, with a cough that was reproving.

  "You heard my answering machine too?"

  "Your company did. I'm just a retainer. I wouldn't do it if I didn't get paid. The patient is surviving. There's no sign of infection."

  "I think it's phenomenal."

  "We're happy you're pleased."

  ...

  And the chaplain was still out of sight: in detention somewhere for examination and interrogation after tracking Yossarian down in his hospital through the Freedom of Information Act and popping back into his life with the problem he could not grapple with.

  Yossarian was lying on his back in his hospital bed when the chaplain had found him there the time before, and he waited with a look of outraged hostility as the door to his room inched open after he'd given no response to the timid tappi
ng he'd heard and saw an equine, bland face with a knobby forehead and thinning strands of hay-colored hair discolored with dull silver come leaning in shyly to peer at him. The eyes were pink-lidded, and they flared with brightness the instant they alighted upon him.

  "I knew it!" the man bearing that face burst right out with joy. "I wanted to see you again anyway. I knew I would find you! I knew I would recognize you. How good you look! How happy I am to see we're both still alive! I want to cheer!"

  "Who," asked Yossarian austerely, "the fuck are you?"

  The reply was instantaneous. "Chaplain, Tappman, Chaplain Tappman, Albert Tappman, Chaplain?" chattered Chaplain Albert Tappman garrulously. "Pianosa? Air force? World War II?"

  Yossarian at last allowed himself a beam of recognition. "Well, I'll be damned!" He spoke with some warmth when he at last appreciated that he was again with the army chaplain Albert T. Tappman after more than forty-five years. "Come on in. You look good too," he offered generously to this man who looked peaked, undernourished, harried, and old. "Sit down, for God sakes."

  The chaplain sat down submissively. "But, Yossarian. I'm sorry to find you in a hospital. Are you very sick?"

  "I'm not sick at all."

  "That's good then, isn't it?"

  "Yes, that is good. And how are you?"

  And all at once the chaplain looked distraught. "Not good, I'm beginning to think, no, maybe not so good."

  "That's bad then," said Yossarian, glad that the time to come directly to the point was so soon at hand. "Well, then, tell me, Chaplain, what brings you here? If it's another old air corps reunion, you have come to the wrong man."

  "It's not a reunion." The chaplain looked miserable.

  "What then?"

  "Trouble," he said simply. "I think it may be serious. I don't understand it."

  He had been to a psychiatrist, of course, who'd told him he was a very good candidate for late-life depression and already too old to expect any better kind.

  "I've got that too."

  It was possible, it had been suggested, that the chaplain was imagining it all. The chaplain did not imagine, he imagined, that he was imagining any of it.

  But this much was certain.

  When none in the continuing stream of intimidating newcomers materializing in Kenosha on official missions to question him about his problem seemed inclined to help him even understand what the problem was, he'd remembered Yossarian and thought of the Freedom of Information Act.

  The Freedom of Information Act, the chaplain explained, was a federal regulation obliging government agencies to release all information they had to anyone who made application for it, except information they had that they did not want to release.

  And because of this one catch in the Freedom of Information Act, Yossarian had subsequently found out, they were technically not compelled to release any information at all. Hundreds of thousands of pages each week went out regularly to applicants with everything blacked out on them but punctuation marks, prepositions, and conjunctions. It was a good catch, Yossarian judged expertly, because the government did not have to release any information about the information they chose not to release, and it was impossible to know if anyone was complying with the liberalizing federal law called the Freedom of Information Act.

  The chaplain was back in Wisconsin no more than one day or two when the detachment of sturdy secret agents descended upon him without notice to spirit him away. They were there, they said, on a matter of such sensitivity and national importance that they could not even say who they were without compromising the secrecy of the agency for which they said they worked. They had no arrest warrant. The law said they did not need one. What law? The same law that said they never had to cite it.

  "That's peculiar, isn't it?" mused Yossarian.

  "Is it?" said the chaplain's wife with surprise, when they conversed on the telephone. "Why?"

  "Please go on."

  They read him his rights and said he did not have them. Did he want to make trouble? No, he did not want to make trouble. Then he would have to shut his mouth and go along with them. They had no search warrant either but proceeded to search the house anyway. They and others like them had been back several times since, with crews of technicians with badges and laboratory coats, gloves, Geiger counters, and surgical masks, who took samples of soil, paint, wood, water, and just about everything else in beakers and test tubes and other special containers. They dug up the ground. The neighborhood wondered.

  The chaplain's problem was heavy water.

  He was passing it.

  "I'm afraid it's true," Leon Shumacher had confided to Yossarian, when he had the full urinalysis report. "Where did you get that specimen?"

  "From that friend who was here last week when you dropped by. My old chaplain from the army."

  "Where did he get it?"

  "From his bladder, I guess. Why?"

  "Are you sure?"

  "How sure can I be?" said Yossarian. "I didn't watch him. Where the hell else would he get it?"

  "Grenoble, France. Georgia, Tennessee, or South Carolina, I think. That's where most of it is made."

  "Most of what?"

  "Heavy water."

  "What the hell does all of this mean, Leon?" Yossarian wanted to know. "Are they absolutely sure? There's no mistake?"

  "Not from what I'm reading here. They could tell it was heavy almost immediately. It took two people to lift the eyedropper. Of course they're sure. There's an extra neutron in each hydrogen molecule of water. Do you know how many molecules there are in just a few ounces? That friend of yours must weigh fifty pounds more than he looks."

  "Listen, Leon," Yossarian said, in a voice lowered warily. "You'll keep this secret, won't you?"

  "Of course we will. This is a hospital. We'll tell no one but the federal government."

  "The government? They're the ones who've been bothering him! They're the ones he's most afraid of!"

  "They have to, John," Leon Shumacher intoned in an automatic bedside manner. "The lab sent it to radiology to make sure it's safe, and radiology had to notify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy. John, there's not a country in the world that allows heavy water without a license, and this guy is producing it by the quart several times a day. This deuterium oxide is dynamite, John."

  "Is it dangerous?"

  "Medically? Who knows? I tell you I never heard of anything like this before. But he ought to find out. He might be turning into a nuclear power plant or an atom bomb. You ought to alert him immediately."

  By the time Yossarian did telephone Chaplain Albert T. Tappman, USAF, retired, to warn him, there was only Mrs. Tappman at home, in hysteria and in tears. The chaplain had been disappeared only hours before.

  She had not heard from him since, although punctually each week Mrs. Karen Tappman was visited and assured he was well and given cash approximating on the generous side the amount he would have brought in were he still at liberty. The agents glowed with elation upon being told, tearfully, she had not heard from him. It was the confirmation they wanted that he was not getting through to anyone outside.

  "I'll keep trying to track him down for you, Mrs. Tappman," Yossarian promised each time they spoke. "Although I don't really know where to turn next."

  The lawyers she'd consulted did not believe her. The police in Kenosha were skeptical too. Her children also were dubious, although they could give no currency to the police theory that the chaplain, like many a missing man in their missing-persons book, had run off with another woman.

  All that John Yossarian had been able to find out since was that whatever significance the chaplain had for his official captors was only monetary, military, scientific, industrial, diplomatic, and international.

  He found this out from Milo.

  He went first to good friends in Washington with influence--a lawyer, a fund-raiser, a newspaper columnist, and an image maker--who all said they did not want to go near it and thereafter did not
return his calls or want him for a friend anymore. A lobbyist and a public relations counselor both requested large fees and guaranteed they could not guarantee they would do anything to earn them. His senator was useless, his governor helpless. The American Civil Liberties Union backed off too from the Case of the Missing Chaplain: they agreed with the police in Kenosha that he probably had run off with another woman. At last, in frustration, he went to Milo Minderbinder, who chewed his upper and then his lower lip and said: "Heavy water? How much is heavy water selling for?"

  "It fluctuates, Milo. A lot. I've looked it up. There's a gas that comes from it that costs even more. About thirty thousand dollars a gram right now, I'd guess. But that's not the point."

  "How much is a gram?"

  "About one thirtieth of an ounce. But that's not the point."

  "Thirty thousand dollars for one thirtieth of an ounce? That sounds almost as good as drugs." Milo spoke with his disunited eyes fixed on a distance speculatively, each brown iris pointing off in a different direction, as though, in concert, they took in to the horizon the entirety of all that was visible to humankind. The halves of his mustache were palpitating in separate cadences, the individual rusty-gray hairs oscillating skittishly like sensors taking notes electronically. "Is there much of a demand for heavy water?" he inquired.

  "Every country wants it. But that's not the point."

  "What's it used for?"

  "Nuclear energy, mainly. And making atomic warheads."

  "That sounds better than drugs," Milo went on in fascination. "Would you say that heavy water is as good a growth industry as illegal drugs?"

  "I would not call heavy water a growth industry," Yossarian answered wryly. "But this is not what I'm talking about. Milo, I want to find out where he is."

  "Where who is?"

  "Tappman. The one I'm talking to you about. He was the chaplain in the army with us."

  "I was in the army with a lot of people."

  "He gave you a character reference when you nearly got in trouble for bombing our own air base."