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“Duck,” the major said, by way of greeting. “It's the duck of the century. And the gumbo roux is uncompromisingly dark. Where have you been, darling?”

“I was imprisoned by Mullin, Major.” Felicity took the chair to Notz's left. Andrea sat demurely on the edge of the velveteen chair to his right.

Without preamble, Felicity described her confinement, her loss of memory, the strange powers of the hymns that had filled her mind, the appearance of Nikola Tesla, who had helped her escape, and her wandering through the city she barely recognized. But she had the odd feeling that her words slid over the sparkling silverware without reaching her uncle. He sat unmoved during her confession, as if she were part of the music.

“I am going to put Mullin out of his misery,” she concluded grimly, “and I could use your help. He has not just harmed me, but he is planning a catastrophe for the entire world.”

“Perhaps,” the major said. “But first we must dine, to celebrate the end of the Christian era.” He studied Andrea from under his heavy lids as if she were an item on the menu. “Your friend is shocked by our ways.”

“This is true,” Andrea agreed graciously. “I grew up communist. But I want to learn.”

Felicity was exasperated. “Something horrible is about to happen, Uncle.” She felt like the scared little girl who, years ago, had depended on him to explain the big, bad world.

“Nothing could be as horrible as interrupting this magnificent dinner.”

“You have to call your friends in the CIA, Interpol, the secret services … Someone is planning to turn Louisiana into a bomb. I think that it's a planned Armageddon … the oil reserves … a chain reaction of some kind. If the Gulf of Mexico catches fire, all the underground oil could be involved … and our nuclear submarines …”

“Felicity, darling. Please. You're breaking my concentration. This menu may be the most important document produced in New Orleans in this wretched century.”

Boppy, who had not moved, now spoke: “Shall we begin?”

Tears in her eyes, Felicity tried again. “Don't you understand?”

“All right. Hold on another moment, Boppy.” The major put down the menu, visibly annoyed, and removed a Cuban cigar from his vest pocket. He clipped the tip with tiny gold scissors. “Who is the somebody planning all this?”

“Why, Mullin, of course.”

“Suppose that he is indeed, my all-seeing private eye. Don't you think that people monitoring catastrophe are cognizant of his intentions? Can anyone enter the strategic petroleum reserve without authorization?”

“An evangelist could. Someone wearing only one shoe, preaching the word of God, could plant a trigger …” Something else occurred to Felicity. “Besides, you gave me a job. I believe that Kashmir Birani, the Indian television star you charged me with finding, is Mullin's prisoner at the Dome. I must rescue her.”

Finally Major Notz seemed to take in what she was saying. “This Tesla, the anchorite who helped you—what sort of contraption is he building?”

Felicity was exasperated. Major Notz had never been this obtuse.

“What does it matter? He's a good guy. The main point is that we stop Mullin.”

“Fine. Now, Boppy, let us begin.”

Felicity could hardly believe her ears. As Boppy uncorked the champagne and poured its gold bubbles into their glasses, Felicity leaned toward Notz and said calmly, “Uncle, are you with me, or not? I am going to go directly to Armadillo Island to the strategic reserve. You can come with me, or you can get your gumbo and wait here for the End of the World …”

The major put his napkin back on the table. Tonight he was sporting the olive uniform of an Israeli tank commander. “My child, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else but in your company for the End of the World. Shall we eat now?”

Boppy Beauregard covered his eyes with the back of his left hand. It was the second time in two weeks that an immovable routine was being upset. The world was surely on its last legs.

“I promise to bring great force to bear on this rogue preacher.” The major laid his palm over Felicity's clenched fist. “But let us first show your young friend the deeply civilized ways of our city.” He withdrew his hand and raised his champagne glass. “To the end of sorrow,” he toasted.

Felicity had no choice but to raise her own glass. Andrea did, too.

“To the end of sorrow.”

It seemed for a moment that their toast reverberated throughout the restaurant and then beyond it, as if these words and no others had found a way into the hardened hearts of the city's doubt-wracked citizens. Who knows, thought Andrea, these words may now be circumnavigating the globe. To the end of sorrow.

Trying to conquer her impatience, Felicity drank her glass of champagne, and then another and another, and ate the marvelous dinner. Andrea glowed in the shimmer of the torches and looked like she'd been born among the exquisite flowers. Felicity saw her reflected in the mirrors and loved her. Andrea marveled at Felicity's compact and graceful presence and felt that they had always been together. The major nearly faded into the shimmer and the velveteen, a discreet producer of marvels who directed the ceremony without intrusion.

At midnight they toasted again to the end of sorrow.

The city outside exploded with fireworks, as it had every night of the New Year. Andrea came out of her chair and kissed Felicity on the lips, and then, without warning, planted a kiss on the major's blubbery cheek. The cold flesh quivered like a Jell-O mold, but he smiled.

“Dance,” he urged them.

Felicity took Andrea's hand and swept her onto the dance floor, and there, feeling boundless liberty, the two friends danced their first dance of the new millennium.

When they returned to the table, Notz was gone. He had left untouched his favorite desert, the bread pudding in whiskey sauce. Boppy, who had been gone but a minute, stood by wringing his hands. He hadn't seen the major leave.

An hour before midnight, Officer Joe arrived at Desire, Ltd. Joe had spent the day tracing again the intricate web of connections between Mullin's legal and phony businesses, and had struck gold. He owned a small software design company called Heaven's Works, which produced religious virtual reality games. The company tested its products at a nature preserve near Armadillo Island. The nature preserve had struck Joe as incongruous. Sooner will a pig escape a Sunday barbecue than a Baptist save a pelican. Or something like that. Joe wasn't too good at aphorisms, but he didn't take Mullin for a nature lover. The place was probably a survivalist enclave of some sort, and the religious games were for training militants. Joe had nearly driven there to look for Felicity when a street informant came up with information that she'd been seen at Desire, Ltd. The place was right under his nose, and Joe felt stupid as he jingled through the beaded curtain into the dark club.

He heard the jukebox carrying on about blue velvet and then felt the cold barrel of a gun against his neck. A deft hand unsnapped his holster and withdrew his service revolver. He was ordered to lie facedown on the floor, and he complied. When he reached out his hand on the floor he encountered a warm buttock.

“Hey,” a woman said. “This may be unusual, but no pay, no touch.”

When Joe's eyes became accustomed to the dark, he sneaked a look and saw a sea of buttocks, most of them bare. He was lying on the floor with a bunch of strippers. Towering above them were men with weapons. Presently someone fastened his wrists beyond his back with plastic handcuffs. Another hand pulled his head back, slipped a blindfold over his eyes, and inserted a gag in his mouth. The girls also were being cuffed, blindfolded, and gagged over protests that were soon reduced to muffled moans.

The captives were ordered to stand and then herded out the door and up the stairs of a vehicle that Joe thought was either a camper or a bus. As they rolled out, a voice trilled merrily: “Happy New Year! You are all going to a party!”

Sylvia-Zack, in a state of uneasy symbiosis, was returning from the Verte Mart with a pack of Vantage Ultra Lights. Sylvia wanted to rush forward, cursing, to stop the kidnapping, but Zack stopped her. There is a purpose to this, he declared, and we must find out what it is. Sylvia angrily tore the top off the smokes and lit one. Damn. Zack hated smoking. They got in Sylvia's car, across the street from the club, and followed.

Ben Redman arrived at Desire, Ltd., shortly after the abductors' bus had left. He parted the beaded curtain and walked in. He called out Andrea's name, then shouted, “Is anybody here?” Receiving no answer, he sat in one of the booths and proceeded to wait. The jukebox, stuffed full of quarters, played one song after another. Ben wasn't sure where everyone had gone, and being myopic, he missed the signs of struggle visible on the floor. It was dark anyway, and the bits of tassel and scattered beads weren't very obvious.

He pulled a book from his knapsack. It was
The Nag Hammadi Library
, a fourth-century-Gnostic anthology he thought might shed some light on events. He had used this book for divination before. His rabbi would have frowned at this non-Jewish text, but his rabbi was far away. It contained, among other texts, the
Gospel of Thomas
, which bore this promise: “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.” These writings had long been thought to contain secret keys and had been used to divine everything from particular fortunes to the course of history.

Ben essayed two experiments. He opened the book at random, an oracular method he had been taught by Rebbe Zvetai. His teacher had said that sacred texts, by their very nature, were equal in their parts to the whole. Each part reflected the whole: every letter contained the book just as every book contained the universe. This is what the Nag Hammadi text had to say:

“The Savior said to his disciples: ‘Already the time has come, brothers, for us to abandon our labor and stand at rest. For whoever stands at rest will rest forever. When I came I opened the path and I taught them about the passage which they will traverse, the elect and solitary.'”

Ben understood this to mean that he ought to let go now of his plans and ambitions. A path was opening before him, now that he had come full circle. The journey was going to unfold without his conscious participation.

He opened the book again.

For those who were in the world had been prepared by the will of our sister Sophia—she who is a whore—because of the innocence which has not been uttered. And she did not ask anything from the All, nor from the greatness of the Assembly, nor from the Pleroma. Since she was first she came forth to prepare monads and places for the Son of Light and the fellow workers which she took from the elements below to build bodily dwellings from them. But, having come into being in an empty glory, they ended in the destruction of the dwellings in which they were, since they were prepared by Sophia.

Interesting, thought Ben, to be spoken to so plainly. The whore who was Wisdom was now preparing the world for its reentry into the light. Her name was Sophia, meaning “wisdom,” but also Andrea, the feminine form of “man.” He loved none other than Sophia, the light of wisdom herself. Besides which, he stood in a temple of divine whorish wisdom. “
Strike him, mistress, and cure his heart
,” wailed the jukebox.

Midnight came and went, and no one returned to Desire, Ltd. Ben fell asleep with his head on the table.

Chapter Thirty-four

Wherein Mullin prepares the End of the World. Felicity and Andrea, aided by Shades
,
begin their journey to the Dome
.

Earthquake! From the tip of Tierra del Fuego to the rock of Manhattan, a pluripotent finger traced a line of fire that buried 100 million lives under their proudest buildings. A finger with a vamp red fingernail scratched a death sentence on the skin of the earth. The subterranean rumble was like horses running under the ground—no, panicked herds of hippos tearing up the bottoms of hidden rivers. It was like nothing ever seen before. The mightiest things that had happened could only be compared retroactively to this, the greatest event.

Zags of vamp red light streaked across the three hundred screens in the Dome. Parti-colored objects ricocheted in all directions. There were body parts mixed with domestic junk: lacquered faux toenails curling out of high-heel sandals, prosthetic thighs encased in silk, rubber bellies shaking with uncontrolled laughter, clown noses, detached silicon eyeballs, ivory elbows, sliced plastic fruit, coffeemakers, crushed cans, paper cones, torn stamps, weapons, coins, furniture, crumpled lithos, family photos, baby carriages, keyboards, handcuffs, and violins.

As the velocity of the junk increased, the Dome stretched to accommodate it. Above it all, near the expanding heavenly vault, twirled a hyperbulbous blue rose. It was carnal, the revelation made flesh! It was made of light!

Reverend Mullin raised his arms over his head and roared over the rumble, “SWEET GOD! HERE WE COME!”

Bamajans wearing camouflage abandoned their keyboards and streamed toward the gesticulating reverend, beaming and raising their arms in imitation and shouting, bright-eyed and released from fatigue: “PRAISE THE LORD! SWEET JEEZUS, HERE WE COME!” They danced to the explosions, their faces upturned, their hearts filled with bright fear. There were men with shaved heads and young women dressed in white. Not exactly a cross section of society, but each faithful unto death to their leader, avatar, Bamajan supreme, true Elvis, and deliverer.

“You are the missing and torn pages of the lost scriptures!” he hollered to his frenzied followers.

The blue rose swelled above them until it burst into smithereens and strings of words shot from it like comets through the dome.

Over one wall was a map of the world like the ones at NASA and at the Pentagon. It was lit up red and trembled under the rumbling earthquake. Mullin imagined the military men at NASA and the Pentagon, studying the same sort of map, unsure of the nature of the catastrophe, unable to prevent it, their knees weak, their hearts racing, an awesome black light at the root of their brains. They could stop fire falling from the sky, but they could not fathom the conflagration raging under the earth, connecting pools of oil to pools of oil under the crust.