The Ex-President

by Jeff Soloway

  The waiters moved in to clear the table. I slipped away and headed toward the stairs. Halfway there, I turned back and saw one pair of eyes tracking my escape. Not my mother’s, not Chomp’s, not Harvey’s, but those of Jimbo the bodyguard. He wiggled two fingers at me—Goodbye, my friend, for now.

  Chapter 17

  I was caught in a crowd of exiting diners. After the security stomping, no one could now mistake Carlos’s speech for praise, but a number took it as satire. I passed one who was flailing his arms in imitation of Carlos as he jumped off the table: “The dude was hilarious!” As if Carlos, like the Witch, were simply another dressed-up caricature of one of Chomp’s enemies. But others were more somber. “This is the enemy we’re facing,” one said. “Thank God they’re so stupid.”

  “Did you see how fast the police were?” a mother asked a lump of five-year-old in her arms. “So fast! That’s how heroes run.”

  But no one was shrieking, or shoving, or cowering under a table. These Chompians were used to harmless political enemies shouting nonsense. They had no idea a real murderer was aboard.

  But Chomp knew. He’d declared to us that his life too was in danger. And still he maintained his customary insouciance in the face of Carlos’s provocation. If he’d truly been afraid, he would have belly flopped to the floor.

  Chomp must have known that Carlos was no murderer. But how did he know it? Perhaps his men had already found the murderer. Perhaps Chomp himself was the murderer.

  All modern presidents have blood on their hands. The killing of innocents is the unavoidable, and not always unwelcome, side effect of that favorite presidential pastime, decisive military action. But no president, in or out of office, has organized a specific civilian murder (notwithstanding those pre-Chompian conspiracy freaks who would cite Vince Foster and Obama’s mother’s Kenyan OB-GYN). Half the country would think my theory insane; the other half would find it eminently plausible. What if I could find enough evidence to convince both sides? What if I could finally unite the country in condemning Chomp?

  Poor Clark—his fate to become just another skirmish in the forever war of political popularity, his death no more significant than a dirty text message, a bad joke caught on a live mike, a hypocritical tweet. I would remember the best of him. He had loved my mother. He had publically apologized for screwing up, which Chomp had never done. He deserved better.

  Finally free of the restaurants, I charged up the stairs to the boulevard. The scene had changed. The elderly had apparently gone to bed, leaving behind only the young in body or attitude. The women wore cocktail dresses and heels ill-suited to boozing on the high seas—but then, the seas seemed calmer now. We must be approaching the island. I passed the bars at a half run. Club music thumped, karaoke singers screeched, everyone was drinking. They might all have been murderers celebrating with a night out. Kids darted by, staying low to avoid parental detection. They were fugitives from bedtime, not justice, but to me they looked guilty too. All these people were guilty, if not of murder then of loving Chomp. They supported his vitriol, his machinations, his redcaps. So what if they’d been duped into trusting him? If Chomp proved anything, it was the inseparability of foolishness and evil.

  The Oxford Don Library was, as usual, empty. I took shelter in the duty-free shop across the way and spied through the plate-glass window. It was just past eight o’clock. Erica was late. I pretended to price 144-pack cartons of duty-free cigarettes, specially designed for that sweet spot of smokers with enough foresight to stock up but not so much that they fear lung cancer. The Marlboros were almost gone, but there were lots of Newports left. Poor inventory choice for this cruise. I kept checking my phone for the time. A silver-haired couple was told that the duty-free gallon jugs of rum they’d lugged up to the counter would be delivered only upon the ship’s return to Miami. “Then we don’t want ’em,” said the man. “Who’d be there to pick ’em up?” His wife chuckled and shushed him as they walked away.

  The couple wasn’t returning to Miami. Was that the cruise’s secret?

  I turned back to the window. Erica was peering into the empty library. She turned around. Our eyes met through the window, but the glass seemed to repel understanding. She took off down the boulevard. No security was in sight. I squeezed out of the shop and started after her. She was slight, short, shifty, and quick and would soon have lost me but for the barrage of passenger high-fives and daps that slowed her journey.

  A young officer pointed at her as he passed. “See you at the island party, Erica!” he called out.

  “No doubt, Ari!” Erica called out. “Got to get the whole ship moving!”

  “I’ll be there!”

  It was like being at Colonial Williamsburg.

  She flew down the stairs. I followed, but before I could catch her, she was off at the landing, moving down a passage lined with staterooms. As I passed them, I heard televisions, snores, parents pleading with children. No music, no parties, no politics, no higher purpose than winding down and getting the kids to sleep. These were also Chomp’s people.

  Erica paused beside an interior door labeled CREW ONLY. I finally caught up.

  “Wait a moment,” she murmured. “Then act like you’re lost.” She pulled the handle and slipped through, leaving the door not quite shut behind her. As graceful a spy as she was a dancer.

  Wait a moment. How long is a moment? Graceful was one thing, but spies should be specific. I counted to ten Mississippi, pushed open the door, and stepped through.

  I was on the landing of a set of whitewashed metal stairs as steep as a fire escape. Attached to the wall above, undisguised and aimed directly at me, was a security camera. I spun around, a confused landlubber, then stopped and frowned angrily at the outrageously disorienting design of this ship. I shrugged and moved on down the stairs. A preposterous performance unlikely to convince anyone watching on a monitor, but Chomp had taught us all to play the fool for deniability’s sake.

  As I descended, gripping the thin tubular rails, I felt like I was climbing through the skeleton of a gigantic creature, cleaned, preserved, and worshipped by a strange people. I was leaving Chomp’s world and entering a fearsome place beyond his reach. I could hear Erica’s feet clattering below me on the stairs. I reminded myself that this wasn’t an alien planet, it was where Carmen and Erica and thousands of their colleagues lived and labored. I hit a landing, curled, and descended again. Another landing, another curl. I was now far below any passenger deck. I assumed we were going to Carmen’s room. The cleaning crew live in the lowest places.

  I hit the bottom, where Erica was waiting. The air felt thicker, compressed by the weight of all the decks above. Up ahead, the blue-tiled floor of a long hallway shone like a canal in moonlight. Some cleaner had polished this crew deck hallway, someone who must live in an even lower, more contemptible deck, accessible only through a hidden manhole and a rope ladder. I saw visions of undocumented immigrants in Florida and Arizona hiding in their secret basement burrows like slaves on the Underground Railroad, Jews in occupied Poland, the oppressed and frightened anywhere since the first basements were dug. I knew that “Terror under Chomp” photojournalism was sometimes staged or exaggerated, and the use of such sensational historical analogies tended to drive Chompians into an anti-media fury. The truth was, immigrants mainly chose to hide in churches (which usually had pleasant finished basements), because even the rootin’-tootin’est of ICE agents piously avoided violating federal law to raid them. But some of the worst stories were true, too thoroughly documented even for the most dedicated Chompian trolls to dispute effectively, and those immigrant mothers and children who had escaped to tell them had become stars of the anti-Chomp resistance. What if Carmen, unjustly accused, had been driven to hide amid the engine machinery deep in the ship’s sweltering bowels? I would help her escape and tell her story.

  “There was a camera over the stairs,” I whispered, i
n Spanish, in case someone was listening.

  “No one watches,” she said, also in Spanish. We were foreign spies teaming up against a common enemy. “Come on.” She started moving.

  As I followed, she reached back and grabbed a handful of my shirt to speed me up. No, we weren’t spies, just kids sneaking into a movie.

  She stopped by a door.

  “Carmen’s room?” I whispered.

  “Mine too.”

  The room was half the size of my stateroom. A skinny strip of floor separated the bathroom door and the set of bunks on the left from the desktop and set of drawers on the right. A laptop, a copy of Inglés para Dummies, a TV, and a cacophony of device cables covered the desk’s entire surface. If you wanted to set down a glass of water, you were out of luck. Straight ahead was a closet door; scraps of clothing poked through the crack like prisoners’ fingers. This professional cleaner apparently preferred not to spend her off-hours being tidy. Or maybe, since the sisters apparently shared the room, the mess was Erica’s.

  Carmen was lying on a bottom bunk, her eyes open, her body covered to the chin by a gray sheet. She looked like one of the dead queens lying atop their monument in a European cathedral. A privacy curtain dangling from the top bunk was pulled only halfway across. Pinned to the bed frame were printouts of family photos—little girls, teenage girls, older women, no men that I could see. One of the teenagers looked like Erica with a floppy haircut. She was in a city, a ratty city, the wall behind her mangy with water stains, but it could have been Jersey City as well as Santo Domingo. As an American citizen, Erica would have been able to travel home for the summer or Christmas; Carmen could never have visited her.

  Erica squeezed past me on the floor strip, knocking me against a dresser. “Wake up,” she said loudly, in Spanish, and pinched her sister’s shoulder. “He’s here!”

  Blood flowed to the queen’s cheeks. She opened her eyes. “I told you not to bring him.”

  “Don’t worry, love! Jacob promised to help.”

  That she used my name implied they’d discussed me beforehand. I felt a little flattered.

  Carmen rolled toward the wall. “They ordered me to speak to no one. He can’t help me anyway. No one can.”

  “Have faith.” Erica knelt on the floor by the bed and smoothed her sister’s hair. “Yes, he will help. He knows El Chomp. He sat with him at dinner. I saw. He just has to ask, and you’ll have your job again. Maybe he talked to him already?” She looked at me.

  I thought of myself as a crusading writer on a dangerous investigative journey; to them, I was a member of the power elite, a Chomp whisperer.

  “There were too many people,” I said apologetically. “And then that incident…”

  “A young man was arrested,” Erica explained. “It was very exciting. He was screaming at Chomp. They’re calling him a terrorist. Maybe he was the murderer!”

  Footsteps outside sent a shiver through me, but the women were unperturbed.

  I tried to step closer to Carmen’s face without stepping on Erica. “Who ordered you to speak to no one, Carmen?” My Spanish seemed heavy, almost brutal compared to theirs.

  “Those fat men who came to ask me questions.”

  “Chomp’s men?”

  “Yes, idiot!” Erica’s Spanish was faster and harsher when she spoke to me. Soothing tones were reserved for her sister. “Why not talk to Chomp at dinner?”

  “I’ll tell my mother to talk to him. She’s better at this than I am. But, Carmen, what did the men say to you?”

  “Tell him, love,” Erica whispered. I was still her sister’s best hope.

  “They asked about the passenger I saw banging on the dead man’s door. I had already told Fernando, before he fired me. I wanted to be helpful. The men said I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “I hate them,” said Erica.

  “They said they could put me in jail. For what? For seeing a man in a hallway? For missing one little stain?”

  “Don’t worry, love.” Erica’s soothing tone seemed intended for herself as much as her sister. “Jacob will help. He’ll speak to Chomp. He and his mother together. Right, Jacob?”

  “Carmen, I need to know what you saw. Erica’s right. The man they arrested at dinner, they think he’s the murderer. But I know him. He’s innocent.”

  Erica glowered at me. This was not what she bargained for. I wondered what her swearing sounded like in Spanish.

  “I’m very sorry,” Carmen said politely. “The men commanded me to be silent.”

  Erica turned to me and said in English, “How do you fucking know the guy’s innocent?”

  “I met him,” I said, also in English. “He’s some Latin kid from Miami. He came to protest. His mom got hauled off to a detention center. Did you see him too?”

  “Yeah. I had to eat with passengers tonight.”

  “Did the kid look like a murderer?”

  “He looked like a dork.”

  Carmen’s wide eyes radiated the disappointed confusion of incomprehension. I feel that way in foreign countries all the time.

  “Please, Carmen,” I said in Spanish.

  “I can’t.” Carmen reached her hand into the wilds of her sheets and brought out a cellphone. Erica smiled at the image on the screen.

  I tried to lean closer, but Erica’s shoulder blocked my way. “Can I see?” I asked.

  Erica sighed and thrust out her butt, making a longbow of her body to give me space. I dipped my head under the upper bed frame and managed to bark my knee against the lower. This cabin was maddening.

  But I could now see Carmen’s screen. It showed an unsmiling boy about five or six years old. His face exuded a kind of man-of-the-house dignity I associate with an absent father. “Your son?”

  “No.” Carmen extinguished the screen. “My pet iguana.”

  Erica’s reprimand was still just a whisper: “Sister, enough.”

  “Why? Is Jacob your boyfriend?”

  “Please. He’s as ugly as your husband.”

  I hoped this teasing meant they were warming up to me. I tried to summon my most gallant Spanish: “Why would I want some noisy dancer? I much prefer her beautiful sister.”

  I would have felt like an idiot saying this in English, but in Spanish I’m a different person—bolder and blunter, because my grasp of the language is too uncertain for subtlety; less self-conscious, because my Spanish persona is so far removed from my core self. My jokes are cruder but also more frequent, which perhaps explains why people like me more in Spanish. I spend a lot of time smiling ruefully at my own words, to indicate I’m not quite as dumb as I sound. It struck me that Chomp’s own speaking style was a more fluent version of my Spanish—blunt, comical, ridiculous, confident, an act but not a fake. Did Chomp too have a truer, more anxious self to revert to?

  “Will the Chomp listen to you?” Carmen asked.

  Erica nodded. “To his mother, definitely.”

  Even my Spanish persona was unable to agree outright. “I can also speak to Captain Prosti.”

  “They said if I tell anyone, they would lock me up for many years. Who will take care of my son? My mother is old.”

  “Poor mami,” said Erica. “I’ll care for Manuelito during all my vacations. He loves me.”

  “Please, God, no.” But Carmen smiled.

  I wondered what the boy thought of his glamorous aunt, invigorating parties all over the high seas.

  Erica slithered by me to slip next to her sister on the bed. As they lay side by side, their differences in cruise ship social class, in years (Carmen was older), in skin tone (Erica spent more time in the sunlight), in circumstances (Carmen’s skin had the shadows and flecks of motherhood), all fell away in the face of what they shared—memories, habits, love for each other. I’d always longed for a brother or sister. As an only child, I h
ad no one but my parents to share home memories with, no one at all who understood what my parents were like. I might have envied Carmen and Erica, but instead I felt grateful for this glimpse at their bond.

  “When did you leave the Dominican Republic?” I asked Erica, sticking to Spanish.

  “When I was eight.”

  “And you two were always such good friends?” I wanted to know, but even more I wanted to see the light such a question would surely bring to their faces.

  “Always,” Erica answered. “We talked every week. In the beginning, my dad would fill a new phone card every Sunday. After I got my papers, I visited my sister and our mother in the summers. Her son likes me better than his father.”

  “Erica.”

  “Sorry, your husband is good-humored and funny, at least when he’s not drunk, but even you have to admit he’s as stupid as a chicken. I can see him right now, watching his telenovelas in the afternoon, if he still has a television wherever he’s living, probably in some wrecked car somewhere—”

  “Erica.” Carmen turned away again, and Erica went back to smoothing her now thoroughly smooth hair.

  “Years in jail,” Carmen murmured. “All because I saw a man…”

  Erica rapped her on the shoulder. “Pah! What jail?”

  “On the island.”

  “There’s no jail on the island, no police, no courts. How could they arrest you?”

  Carmen sighed. Having lived longer in the DR, she was better acquainted with extrajudicial power. Then again, there was enough of it these days in the United States too.

  “Besides,” Erica added, “they need you to work on the way back. Inés can’t clean every room. Fernando can’t clean any room.”

  “But there won’t be so many rooms to clean,” Carmen said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  The sisters exchanged a single glance, long enough for a whole silent conversation.

  Now I knew. “Chomp’s staying on the island, isn’t he? Some of the passengers are staying on with him. That’s why there won’t be so many rooms to clean on the trip back. But what are they doing on the island? What are they building there?”