Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"Find out if you can find out if he can arrange it. Strangelove could."

M2 paled again. "You'd go to Strangelove?"

"Strangelove will come to me. And the chaplain won't produce if I tell him not to."

"I must tell my father."

"I've already told him, but he doesn't always hear."

M2 was shaken. "I just thought of something else. Should we be talking about all this in front of Michael? The chaplain is secret now, and I'm not sure I'm authorized to let anyone else hear about him."

"About who?" asked Michael mischievously.

"The chaplain," responded M2.

"What chaplain?"

"Chaplain Albert T. Tappman," said M2. "That friend of your father's from the army who's producing heavy water inside himself without a license and is now secretly in custody while they investigate and examine him while we try to patent him and register a trademark. Do you know about him?"

Michael spoke with a grin. "You mean that friend of my father's from the army who began producing heavy water inside himself illegally and is now--"

&

nbsp; "That's the one!" M2 cried, and gaped as though confronted by a specter. "How'd you find out?"

"You just told me," laughed Michael.

"I did it again, didn't I?" blubbered M2, and collapsed with a thump into the chair at his desk in a grieving paroxysm of repentant lamentation. Now his shiny white shirt, which was of synthetic fabric, was rumpled, wet, and in need of ironing, and sopping adumbrations of a fidgety, sweltering anxiety were already darkening the fabric below the armholes of a sleeveless white undershirt he never failed to wear as well. "I just can't keep a secret, can I? My father is still angry with me for telling you about the bomber. He says he could kill me. So is my mother. So are my sisters. But it's your fault too, you know. It's his job to restrain me from telling him secrets like that."

"Like what?" asked Michael.

"Like that one about the bomber."

"What bomber?"

"Our M & M E & A Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber. I hope you don't know about it."

"I know about it now."

"How'd you find out?"

"I have my ways," said Michael, and turned to his father with a glower. "Are we in munitions now too?"

Yossarian answered testily. "Somebody is going to have to be in munitions whether we like it or not, they tell me, so it might as well be them, and somebody is going to work with them on this, whether I say yes or no, so it might as well be you and me, and that's the perfect truth."

"Even though it's a lie?"

"They told me it was a cruise ship."

"It does cruise," M2 explained to Michael.

"With two people?" Yossarian contradicted him. "And here's another way out, to put your conscience at rest," Yossarian added to Michael. "It won't work. Right, M2?"

"We guarantee it."

"And besides," said Yossarian, with resentment surfacing, "you're only being asked to draw a picture of the plane, not to fly the fucking thing or launch an attack. This plane is for the new century. These things take forever, and we both may be dead before they get one into the air, even if they do get the contract. They don't care now if it works or not. All they want is the money. Right, M2?"

"And we'll pay you, of course," offered M2, coming back to his feet and fidgeting. He was slender, spare, with formless shoulders and prominent collarbones.