The Ex-President

by Jeff Soloway

  This was the secret Shell had hinted at. This was Chomp’s fortress in the sea. This was the reason Chompians in the know were stocking up on cigarettes, which they could use immediately, but not rum, which would be delivered in Miami. These passengers weren’t returning to Miami.

  “They won’t tell us,” Erica said. “So don’t ask.”

  Perhaps they planned to kill themselves with poisonous Kool-Aid, like the wackos at Jonestown. But Chomp, for all his destructiveness, believed in life, not death. That is, not his own death.

  “Carmen,” I said, “the man you saw banging on the passenger’s door was probably the murderer. I need to know if he was the boy we saw arrested at the restaurant tonight. I don’t think he was.”

  “He was no boy,” Carmen murmured.

  “Good. Can you describe him?”

  “And then you’ll help her?” demanded Erica.

  “I’ll help her in any case. But I want to help the boy they arrested too.”

  More footsteps outside, and voices chatting in a language I’d never heard before.

  Carmen sat up in her bunk. Her T-shirt was an old I LOVE NEW YORK model, familiar to me from the bargain racks outside the tourist shops near the Empire State Building. I imagined Erica mailing them back to the DR as Christmas presents, those years she was unable to visit.

  “And you know Mr. Chomp?” Carmen’s eyes searched my face, touching every part, like an old woman buying a melon.

  “His mother sat next to him at dinner,” Erica said. “She enchants him. Chomp held her hand and stared into her beautiful clear eyes as their feet caressed each other under the table.”

  “Please,” I said.

  Carmen raised an eyebrow. “Ay, virgen.”

  “Dónde?” asked Erica, and the sisters giggled. I groaned at the joke and they giggled harder.

  “Is your mother always so successful with men?” Carmen asked.

  “Always,” I said. “It makes me a little insane.”

  Carmen laughed. Erica backhanded me playfully, mostly to encourage her sister’s laughter.

  “What did you see, Carmen?” I would never have a better chance.

  Carmen picked up her cellphone and stared once more into the screen. Her sister tried to take her hand, but Carmen let her fingers lie stiff and dead. Her eyes drifted out of focus. From outside I heard strange music in a strange language—some crew member had opened his cabin door and released a souvenir of his faraway home.

  Carmen shook her head and told us her story. “I was in the hall, counting the sheets in the closet. Inés hadn’t finished stocking them.”

  “Bitch,” said Erica.

  “Shut up, sister. It was my fault we had to switch assignments. A passenger came to knock on the door of suite 1103. The man inside yelled at him to leave. I watched the passenger for a moment. They tell us to watch suspicious types around these expensive suites. The passenger kept knocking.”

  “Did he speak?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I could not understand. He was angry.”

  “You say he was a passenger. You mean he wore no uniform?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you had never seen him before?”

  “Correct.”

  “Was he white?”

  “Extremely white.”

  “Did the door open?”

  Carmen shook her head. I could hear Erica’s breaths. Short sentences were good for my Spanish. They were beginning to have faith in me. Was it really warranted? If, as I was beginning to suspect, Carmen had seen one of Chomp’s men dressed in civilian clothes, then talking to me truly was dangerous.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “The passenger stopped knocking. He saw me down the hallway. I was embarrassed, and anyway, the evacuation drill was about to start. I closed the closet and left.”

  “You left through the employee door?”

  “Yes. I went downstairs. I never saw the passenger again.”

  “You never saw him enter the room?”

  “No.”

  “But he could have entered it after you left?”

  “Yes. You really believe he was a murderer? He didn’t look like a murderer. His head was pink from the sun. When he saw me, his head became pinker. So did mine. He made me feel guilty. So I left. Stupid! If I had stayed, I might have saved the victim.”

  “Or you might have been hurt yourself,” I said. “I believe that man entered the room after you left, remained there during the evacuation drill when everyone left for the lifeboats, and then killed the man when no one was around to hear.”

  Erica looked away, but Carmen, at least, seemed impressed with my knowledge of the assassinative arts. “It’s so different in Santo Domingo,” she said. “No one is murdered in ships or in nice hotels.”

  Erica waved her hand. “Just last week they killed a man for shining shoes too cheaply. Mami told me.”

  “That was in Cristo Rey, and he was Haitian. Poor man. We Dominicans hate Haitians,” Carmen explained to me, “like Americans hate us.”

  “No one hates me,” Erica said.

  “Because you’re American, stupid. And you dress like a prostitute.”

  “We’re not all like Chomp,” I said.

  Carmen smiled, this time at my naïveté. “Once, it was possible to escape to America, like my sister escaped when she was a girl. Now there’s no place in the world that will take us.”

  “Canada,” said Erica.

  “Do I look like a fucking Eskimo? I don’t even like ice in my Coca-Cola.”

  They were both smiling, relaxed. It was time for the real questions.

  “Tell me, Carmen. The man who knocked, what did he look like?”

  “Normal.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Normal clothes. For a passenger.”

  “I need more, Carmen.”

  “Hombre, I wasn’t taking notes.”

  “Okay. Look here.” I pulled out my cellphone and swiped up a photo I’d taken of the gang of Chompians in the casino. I pinched the screen to zoom in on a nauseated-looking young man off to the side. Carlos. “Was it him?”

  “No, I already told you! The man I saw was much older.”

  I felt myself exhale. Good. I would accept whatever ID Carmen could make, but I much preferred the killer to be someone else.

  “How about him?” I called up a photo of our table at dinner and zoomed in on Harvey.

  “No. Let me think.” She shut her eyes. “I am back in the hall. I am worried about my job. Also the sheets. Now I hear the knocking. Now I see the man. He has hair only in bushes above his ears. The top of his head was bare and pink, like a pig’s butt.”

  Erica rolled her eyes. “Always country.”

  “Sorry. Bare like the ass of a prostitute, for example my sister. Also, this man has a little belly, but his arms are thin like sticks. He shook his hand after he knocked, as if his knuckles hurt him.”

  The man she was describing was certainly not Harvey, or any of the other steak-fed security goons I’d seen around Chomp. Like Julius Caesar, like all megalomaniacs, Chomp distrusted the lean and hungry, who tended to be dangerously thoughtful. Perhaps the assassin was a contract employee disguised as an unassuming passenger. Unfortunately, Carmen’s description—bald, potbellied, weak—could have fit a number of the middle-aged men on board, even my father. I indulged myself in a vision of my dad kicking down a door and pulling from his camera case a knife he’d filched from the carving station. “What else can you remember?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that enough? Wait.” She shut her eyes again. “I see one more little thing. A detail, but strange.”

  “What?”

  “On his feet. The man wore brown sandals. Thick sandals, very old, very ugly.”

  I saw
my father again, this time battering Clark’s door with the full weight of his monstrous sandals.

  “What a memory!” Erica exclaimed. “Did you tell all this to Chomp’s men?”

  “All I said was he was an old passenger. They were already angry. Jacob is much more patient.”

  “Jacob, now you can talk to Chomp and the captain. Tell him what Carmen remembers. Tell him she deserves a raise for her helpfulness and excellent memory. Now they can find the real killer.”

  I made myself nod. Fear, like a fly, was crawling all over my skin. I had to slap it away before I could speak, before I could think. I bent again to my phone and hunted among the older pictures archived there.

  “What are you doing?” asked Erica.

  “Did you see this man?”

  Carmen stared at my screen. It displayed an old scanned photo of my father in a cowboy hat, which he had just won, along with a fifty-dollar gift certificate to the local hardware store, at a school Trivia Night. His expression was glum, but those who knew him well—only me and my mother—would know that it was not his customary glum expression but instead a satire on glumness that he’d put on because he was, for a change, giddy with happiness. My mother had convinced him to come to the Trivia Night, cheered and chanted his name with me as he roared off to a massive lead almost from the start, and snapped the picture of him with his trophy-hat afterward, on his own camera, which she had insisted that he bring. It was my favorite picture of him.

  “Yes,” Carmen said. “Maybe.” Erica shoved her head in to take a look the screen too.

  “Which one, yes or no?” I asked.

  “No,” Carmen said.

  “Okay.”

  “They look similar, but the man I saw was older. And had no hat.”

  My fingers swiped again at my phone. They seemed to be operating without instructions from my brain—indeed, operating despite my brain’s misgivings. “How about this one?”

  I had called up a more recent picture, of him reading the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal the day after Chomp’s election. I’d posted it to Facebook with the title “Achieve Obliviousness.” It got likes from a number of my friends, only a few of whom truly got the joke—that obliviousness ran as deep in my father as his distaste of chitchat, his passion for backgammon, his love of my mother and me.

  “Yes! That’s him. My God. That’s the man that knocked at the door. That’s the murderer! What do we do?”

  Erica tilted her head to get a better view. “Why do you have so many pictures of him?”

  Carmen held up her hand. “Do you hear something?”

  We all fell silent. I heard nothing more than the same patter of footsteps and voices I’d been hearing all along. But the sisters knew better.

  Erica sprang from the bed, almost knocking me over, and backed toward the closet. Carmen flung off her sheet, squeezed past me, and lunged for the peephole.

  Carmen turned from the door. Her face was pale and her small fists clenched. “He’s here,” she whispered. “Hide.”

  I stepped toward the bathroom door.

  Erica caught my shirt from behind. “They’ll look there, idiot!” she hissed.

  I glanced under the bed. The space was full of drawers. There was nowhere to hide.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Erica grabbed my arm and slung me across her body like a whip. I stumbled to the back of the room but managed to stop myself before knocking into the closet. Then she reached past me and opened it.

  “You’re kidding,” I whispered, in English.

  She moved so decisively I never considered resisting. She curved one hand over the top of my head and inserted me into the closet like a perp into a cruiser. My head bumped against hangers; unseen fabrics slithered against my body. I heard more knocking, louder now.

  I tried to stand straight and conked my scalp on a shelf. I looked into Erica’s face: the whites had spread around her dark eyes like petals opening in a flower. She closed the closet door and everything was dark.

  In Bolivia I once had to write up a historical museum whose star attraction was a hall of colonial torture devices. One of them was an upright cage barely tall enough to fit a man standing stooped over but too narrow to allow him to sit. After an hour or so, the contorted prisoner would start screaming; he would be left there for days. My back was already telling me I’d be lucky to last a few minutes. I had to focus on something besides the pain. I thought of my father. For whatever weird reason, he had come to Clark’s room just before Clark died. My father was no murderer, any more than Carlos was, but he was awkward and cantankerous and hated Chomp. He would make the perfect scapegoat.

  What had he been doing at Clark’s door?

  A ringing voice penetrated my dark coffin: “Who is it?” Erica sounded convincingly clueless. She could act as well as dance.

  I heard the click and creak of an opening door.

  “Where is he?” A man’s voice, American. What would he do if he found me?

  “Who?” Erica’s voice seemed to drift toward me. She must be backing toward the closet. To guard it? I imagined her hands on her hips, her head tilted, her body a unified projection of baffled innocence, overdone and yet, in this context, perfect.

  “The writer.”

  “I don’t see nobody.” This was Carmen’s voice, tentative and slow, her usual awkward English voice with extra innocence sprinkled on top. From her more muffled tone, I guessed she’d again taken shelter in her bunk. It was like listening to a radio play.

  Some overtightened muscle in my back suddenly spasmed. I had to grit my teeth to keep from crying out. I tried to quench the pain by bending my knees and slowly readjusting the load of my body. I now could hear Erica’s breathing, slow, deep, and satisfying—my own breaths were highly controlled and painfully brief. If I wanted to speak to my father before they caught him, I had to outlast this visitor. Carmen had only my father’s description, not his name. She had no way to identify him without my help. I would get to his room first to warn him. He would tell me why he’d been pounding at Clark’s door, why he’d kept me out of his room, why he was on the ship in the first place.

  How could he explain all that?

  Darkness and distress unleashed my visual imagination. In my mind, I saw my father again, this time not pounding down a door but creeping into a stateroom, a jeweled dagger in his hand. It was an enormous, opulent room, as big as Chomp’s, with twinkling tchotchkes fixed in the walls and an unlit chandelier hanging over a piano. His sandaled feet moved with the silence of a ninja’s, but the Welcome Back, Kotter hair was all his own, spilling out from under his black cap and setting a nimbus of nerddom about his ears. His lips were curled in annoyance, because to him murder was as distasteful as shoddy software development. But it was a living.

  Okay, that vision was bonkers. That my father had gone insane, however, was plausible. Stronger men than him have lost their minds after many years of loneliness and computer coding. What if he, like a piece of software, had over time become corrupt and suffered some system-wide collapse? Maybe his long-running despair had hardened into a mindless fury. Maybe he had followed Clark to Florida, to the ship, to his stateroom, convinced him to open his door, and then, once inside, lost all self-control. Just because his passions had thus far been repressed didn’t mean they could never emerge or explode inside him. I was afraid both for him and for myself. If his genes carried such a capacity for madness, then I must have it too. We could both go insane. Why should we be any different from the rest of America?

  “We were trying to sleep!” Erica protested. “I got like an hour before the fireworks. For fuck’s sake.”

  Erica’s indignation seemed a bit over the top to me, but this was her authority, and not mine, and she would know how to confound him.

  “Me too,” echoed Carmen. “Sle
ep.”

  A click. The man had opened the door again. He was leaving. My muscles tensed further in anticipation of freedom. At last! Not that the ordeal was over. I would have to wait in the closet until I was sure he was gone for good, and even then wait longer inside the room until we were all three sure he had cleared the deck. But at least, while I waited out there, I could stand normally.

  But I heard no corresponding thud of a door closing. The intruder was still there, tormenting me. Perhaps he had just opened the bathroom door. To look for me.

  He spoke again: “O—kay.” The first syllable a long-building boom, the second a little dud of a pop. “I believe you, Carmen.”

  I recognized the voice—it was Chuckles. The ship’s chief of security.

  “Forget the writer,” he went on. “Who cares about him? Tell me about the guy who died.”

  I could hear the change in Erica’s breath, the wind shifting just before a storm. “She already told them everything!” Erica’s voice seemed to swoop. She was stepping away from the closet, leaving me in order to protect her sister. Not that she had more than a few feet to travel. If only I had such room in my coffin.

  “Shut it, Erica,” Chuckles said. “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Screw you.” This, from Erica, counted as restraint. “They threatened my sister. You got to protect her. She wants to speak to the captain.”

  “I can make that happen. But first tell me what you saw.”

  “Already I tell,” Carmen said.

  “You told Fernando and those assholes, sure, but not us. Not me. You know what their chief asshole told me? He told me you lied. And that’s okay. Go ahead and lie to him. But not to me. I’m your friend.” I wondered what Chuckles had been before he joined the Counterterrorism Bureau. Maybe a narcotics detective, using his nimble personality to charm potential informants. In my radio play he might have been either a magical snake or a kindly old wise man. You had to stick around past the next commercial to find out. “Fernando says you saw a guy outside the victim’s door. Is that true? Was it one of Chomp’s men? Tell me now, and I’ll keep you safe.”