“Reynolds,” Jeremiah said.
He could not have reproduced, vocally or in writing, the sound that Alfred Reynolds made in response. Bolstered in the bottom registers by a kind of terrified bellowing, it showcased some high screaming accents as well, and filled out the middle range with a gurgle that would have made a hippopotamus expiring of multiple arrow wounds proud. It was the sound of a heart attack missing a man’s heart by a few inches.
“Jeremiah, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” Reynolds confirmed.
There followed a brief investigation into Reynold’s level of certainty that the heart attack had, in fact, missed him, and was not doubling back for another go.
“What are you doing here?” Reynolds asked.
“Why were you putting back that pesticide?” countered Jeremiah.
“I wasn’t putting back any pesticide,” Reynolds said. He said it too quickly, with too offended an air, and the implication hung uncomfortably in the space between him and Jeremiah.
“I came to get some lacquer,” said Jeremiah. “We’re making a stage for the talent show.”
“Lacquer is two aisles over. I’ll show you.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jeremiah, “I’m sure I can find it myself.”
“I hear great things about the work you’ve been doing in the office, Jeremiah. It’s a load off my mind to know that everything is well in hand there. I’ll put in a good word for you with Grubel. Well, I’m off.”
He made as if to offer Jeremiah his hand, then stopped and began to wipe it off on his pants before catching himself and darting away, refusing to meet Jeremiah’s eyes the whole time.
* * *
Back in the suite, Jeremiah lay sleepless on the couch with his hands behind his head, staring up at the featureless ceiling. Jeremiah had no proof that Reynolds was the murderer, beyond circumstantial evidence: access to the keycard encoder, being one of the first on the crime scene in his role as General Clerical, his unexplained absences from the office, the can of pesticide, and above all his guilty manner upon being discovered returning it. But that was exactly the point: now that Jeremiah finally had a suspect to investigate, investigation was impossible, because it would break Katherine’s heart, and that—the demands of justice and threat of indentured servitude and misery be damned—Jeremiah simply refused to do.
The distant sentence of doom had suddenly grown proximate, and New Jeremiah’s resolution to revel in absurd action did not translate well to having his hands tied by love. So Old Jeremiah and New Jeremiah lay together, reunified, rehearsing the multitude of insoluble problems and watching the ceiling as the hands of the clock inched inevitably towards the start of the big day.
25
The Way of the Samurai
Saturday (1 day until arrival)
One evening near the beginning of the cruise, back when it had been easier to maintain the fiction that all the passengers were aboard merely for pleasure, a Golden Worldlines representative had trotted one of the ship’s engineers into the dining room and encouraged the guests to ask him any and every question they might have about the subtlest technological workings of the Einstein IV.
After a series of questions about the technology on the E4 that was so advanced as to border on magic—the Quantum Caterpillar Drive, the Inertial Dampers, and so on—Mr. Drinkwater had asked about something much more pedestrian. How did the engineers of the E4 handle the problem of air? Where did they keep the oxygen tanks, how much space did they take up, how could they possibly hold enough for a trip of this length? The engineer had tried not to laugh at Mr. Drinkwater’s question as he had explained, at great length and in excruciating detail, how the carbon scrubbers and oxygen reclamators worked and (shudder) sometimes didn’t work. Of all the technical facts and figures the engineer had presented, only one had stuck with Jeremiah: that on average each and every breath of air taken across the entire Einstein IV was effectively recycled every 6.2 hours.
Which, Jeremiah reckoned with a great deal of mental erasure and rework, meant that by now, the morning of the last full day of their 2/20 cruise, the atmosphere of the ship had been reborn somewhere north of 2,800 times, and it had never felt quite like it did on the morning of the First Ever—as far as we know—Golden Worldlines Passenger Talent Show.
It was as if that dour engineer had poured something into the scrubbers and reclamators—some substance that charged and crackled, transforming even the quiet of empty rooms and halls into something eager and expectant, like an airport terminal in the small hours leading up to a holiday crush.
Each of the souls on board felt the charge. Even after her late night, Katherine had woken up early—Jeremiah had heard her pacing in her bedroom when he awoke. He’d tried knocking, but she hadn’t answered, so he’d showered and left. The chatter and clatter from the food service and laundry rooms had reached a Detroit-like pitch as Jeremiah walked by them. He’d passed Mr. Drinkwater in one of the guest hallways, who had given him a very passable mime of a batter knocking dirt off his shoes and stepping up to plate, followed by a hearty thumbs up. Notorious late risers who in two years had not been witnessed in polite company before eleven a.m. were already out and about, wandering the ship with slightly dazed expressions, as if expecting or recovering from some cataclysm.
Jeremiah himself had felt the despair of last night dwindle, replaced by a sense of purpose so hard and grim that he was reminded of the passage Appleton had always loved to quote from the Hagakure, the Book of the Samurai:
When one has made a decision to kill a person, even if it will be very difficult to succeed by advancing straight ahead, it will not do to think about doing it in a long, roundabout way. The Way of the Samurai is one of immediacy, and it is best to dash in headlong.
True, Jeremiah was not going to kill anyone—or injure them grievously—or even in the slightest, which blunted his samurai swagger just a bit. But he was going to break into two safe deposit boxes, dashing in headlong, with complete immediacy.
Which was to say, as soon as he had delivered the lacquer to Luis.
* * *
“But might not dry by tonight,” Luis said when Jeremiah offered him the can of lacquer in the cafeteria. “Maybe there is no enough time.”
“When one has made a decision to lacquer a stage,” said Jeremiah in response, imagining as best he could what the Hagakure would have to say about this topic, “even if it might not be dry by that evening, it will not do to leave it unlacquered. The Way of the Samurai is one of—constancy to purpose, and it is best to—to lacquer everything that one has decided to lacquer. Headlong. And then—I don’t know—dry it with hair dryers or something.”
Jeremiah would have been the first to admit that it was not his best work, but somehow the original sentiment was so powerful that it survived these multiple cultural, linguistic, and situational transplantations. Luis stood up straight, puffed up his chest with pride, and accepted the can of lacquer with an air of great purpose.
“I gonna liquor the hell out of that son a bitch,” he said.
Which restored whatever samurai swagger Jeremiah might have lost, and then some.
* * *
The feeling of bold immediacy stayed with Jeremiah as he walked quickly but calmly to Mr. Drinkwater’s cabin and then to Mr. Roof’s, not even pausing to ensure they weren’t inside (luckily they were not) before using the keycards he had encoded to open their doors and retrieve the golden keycards for their safe deposit boxes.
Then, just as quickly and just as calmly, he made his way to the Einstein IV’s bank, arriving right as it opened at nine. Russell Upton was already sitting at the desk, reading a comic on his PED, which he put away hurriedly as Jeremiah approached. Jeremiah—who had visited the bank only once before, to drop off his passport and a copy of Uncle Leo’s (now tragically outdated) will—imagined that Upton didn’t get as much foot traffic as, say, the Guest Services desk.
“Hello,” Russell Upton said, and Jeremiah could tell that he wa
s trying to figure out whether to address him as Mr. Brown or as Jeremiah. As a result he did not address him at all.
“Hello, Russell,” said Jeremiah. “I’m here to access to my safe deposit box.”
“But you’re not a passenger anymore.”
“But I still have a safe deposit box.”
Russell’s brow furrowed with the effort of reconciling these deep and terrifying contradictions—that only passengers had a safe deposit box, that Jeremiah was not a passenger, and that Jeremiah had a safe deposit box. It was like a syllogism copied from a blackboard in Wonderland.
“Maybe I should call Mr. Grubel to make sure,” he said.
Many powerful personalities in the waves Jeremiah had seen—secret agents, dictators, and so on—always went about claiming that they “needed” things from other people, when in fact they only wanted them. In general this approach seemed to work pretty well for them, and having turned over his new, forceful leaf, Jeremiah thought he would give it a try himself.
“I need access to my safe deposit box,” Jeremiah said. “And I need you to give it to me.”
He could see the word working its magic: Russell’s brow unfurled bit by bit, and he looked almost relieved to have the matter taken out of his hands. If it was a question of need, after all.
“All right,” said Russell Upton. He stood up and took his master keycard from under the desk. “Let’s go.”
“No,” Jeremiah said. “I need you to give me your keycard and I’ll go in alone.”
“But I can’t do that,” Russell Upton said. “I’m required to enter the vault with guests and—other people.”
“But I need you to,” said Jeremiah, in case he hadn’t been clear on that point.
“But I can’t.”
They had reached the part of the conversation where a plan might have been useful. But Jeremiah didn’t have a plan and he wasn’t going to sully the purity of his headlong intentions by making one now, so once again he let himself go and summoned the spirit of improvisation and inspiration.
“That’s a shame,” he said, looking forward himself to discovering why. “Your non-cooperation will come as a great disappointment to—”
“To?” said Russell Upton after a moment of silence. It was a good question.
“To the person who sent me here,” said Jeremiah. He was worried that the spirit of improvisation and inspiration might have hit a snarl of traffic somewhere on the astral plane.
“Which was?”
Russell was putting on a greater display of inquisitive prowess than Jeremiah would have expected from a man who had apparently been reading comics for the past two years. They must have been detective comics.
“Mrs. Mayflower,” said Jeremiah.
Upton blanched.
“Did you say Mrs.—”
He paused to swallow.
“Mayflower,” said Jeremiah, notching the assist. “She was very particular that I enter the vault alone.”
“But why does Mrs. Mayflower care if you’re alone when you access your own safe deposit box?”
Tenacious even in the face of raw terror—Jeremiah had to respect that. Maybe those were not detective, but samurai comics he had been reading. Or samurai detective comics, if those were a thing. But now the inspiration was flowing as if Jeremiah had just stepped forward to take a solo.
“That was a smokescreen,” said Jeremiah. “A mere ruse. I should have known it wouldn’t work with a man as astute as yourself, but I had to try. I’m here on Mrs. Mayflower’s behalf, to access her safe deposit box for her, and she insisted that I do so alone.”
Upton’s face still showed some activity going on behind it—activity that Jeremiah was keen to stop as soon as possible.
“Listen,” he said, leaning in to speak to the older man conspiratorially, “I know what it’s like to man a desk. I know the feeling of responsibility it gives you—of honor, even. Mrs. Mayflower or no Mrs. Mayflower, I can’t ask you to sit here while I go into the vault.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you were doing?”
“Why don’t you take a walk instead? Go get a cup of coffee. Five minutes. Forget to lock the drawer that holds the master keycard. I’ll be gone by the time you come back. If anyone ever asks, you can say—with perfect honesty—that you’ve never seen anyone enter the vault without you.”
“I see,” Upton said.
The gears were still turning, but now instead of the gears of a clock counting down to Jeremiah’s sure defeat, they were the spinning gears of a slot machine—a machine on which Jeremiah might still hit the jackpot. Fear of Mrs. Mayflower and the opposing reluctance to abandon his post whirled by in Upton’s eyes like so many sevens and cherries, until all at once the spinning stopped.
“I feel like a coffee,” said Upton, standing up. “I won’t be but a few minutes.”
* * *
The air inside the vault was cold and deathly still, like an airlock about to open. The architect of the E4’s bank had continued the useless but beautiful theme from the lobby, so that even in this space where passengers ventured but once or twice in their whole 2/20 experience, marble floors gleamed and the safe deposit boxes rose in stacks of brushed steel on every available wall, like the skyline of a futuristic city whose population had reached a point of extreme horizontal saturation. Jeremiah imagined that New Tokyo, which had already gleamed and teemed like a sci-fi set 20 years ago, might look like this by now.
Jeremiah did not put it past Upton to take his five-minute coffee break with a stopwatch, so he went right to work, starting with Mr. Drinkwater’s safe deposit box. Jeremiah inserted the card he had stolen from Mr. Drinkwater’s room and the one he had lifted from Upton’s desk into their respective slots. He was rewarded with a click from the locking mechanism deep inside the box. Jeremiah felt his samurai-like singleness of purpose waver ever so slightly, but he could imagine that even a samurai who’d had to walk such a fine moral line might have tugged fretfully at the neck of his kimono once or twice before looking inside. Jeremiah took a deep breath and slid Mr. Drinkwater’s safe deposit box from its drawer.
Inside he found photos—old-style black and white portraits, printed on actual paper—two stacks of them, as diverse in angle and setting as they were singular in subject: for every photo captured some mood, expression, or moment in the life of Lyuba Abdurov.
Here she was narrowing her eyes in suspicion and gazing off somewhere to the left of the camera. In another, her glare burned twin holes through the fourth wall, as if she suspected that Mr. Drinkwater was recording the moment and she did not like the fact. Here she seemed to be ensuring that, if her chicken Kiev was not already dead, it would not survive the assault she was mounting with knife and fork. There she simply looked angry. Jeremiah spread the photos out in as wide a fan as the box had space for and, using the camera pen Mrs. Abdurov had given him, snapped some pictures of these pictures. Then he replaced the box to its drawer and moved on to Roof’s.
As Jeremiah took down Roof’s safe deposit box, it felt surprisingly light, which turned out to be because—as befitted the sanctum sanctorum of a man of the deepest mystery—it was empty. Jeremiah shook it upside down a few times to convince himself, then replaced the box and made himself scarce before Upton’s coffee mug could have been even half empty.
And indeed, Upton was nowhere to be seen when Jeremiah came out of the vault—which success would have excited Jeremiah more, if Jack and Mr. Grubel had not taken his place in the meantime. It seemed that the former had caught the latter by chance in the hallway and had seized the opportunity to pull the latter into the bank lobby in order to get some minor complaints off the former’s chest (which chest Jeremiah could not see, as Jack had his back to the vault).
“Illegal surveillance,” Jack was saying. “Pens that record conversations for which permission to record has been not just withheld but explicitly revoked. Informants masquerading as passengers. Informants masquerading as crew. Entrapment, conspiracy, unlawful
interrogation. We’re not talking your run-of-the-mill price gouging or false advertising here—I’m going to bring a civil rights suit against this company—a whole suite of civil rights suits—precedent-setting cases that will go all the way to the Supreme Court. I will take this whole System down.”
At that moment Grubel looked over Jack’s shoulder and caught sight of Jeremiah. Grubel looked relieved to see him—which said a lot about how much he must have been enjoying his chat with Jack—and for a moment Jeremiah thought he might escape any awkward lines of questioning about, for example, what he had been doing alone in the vault, or where Upton was.
“Jeremiah?” said Grubel. “What have you been doing alone in the vault? Where’s Upton?”
It was an awkward line of questioning. Fortunately Jeremiah’s solo was not quite over.
“Ask Jack,” said Jeremiah.
Grubel did so, specifically by asking “Jack?” in a rising, expectant tone.
Jack, who had frozen stock still at the sound of Jeremiah’s voice, turned around, trembling, to face his accuser. He had the look of a plumber suddenly consulted on foreign policy by heads of state.
“You asked me to retrieve that item for you from your safe deposit box?” Jeremiah said over Jack’s hem and haw. “That green item? You insisted that I go alone, over my strenuous objections? You said your satisfaction as a passenger on this ship absolutely depended on it?”
Jeremiah started with only subtle question marks at the ends of these statements, but the wild confusion in Jack’s eyes prompted him to dial up the interrogative intensity, until finally Grubel began to look a bit suspicious and Jeremiah thought the game might be up.
“I did,” said Jack, cottoning on just in time. “That’s exactly what I said. Depended on it—depended on it absolutely. Did you have any problems finding the, uh, item?”
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