by Roman Klee
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“So you couldn’t sleep either?”
Nathan shook his head.
“Sometimes I wonder what real oblivion feels like …”
Nathan tried not to look frustrated, because he knew there was no way he would find the poker players now.
“I love staring out onto a blank, dark open sea. I imagine what it would be like to plunge into the all consuming darkness, never to return.” Then Mary Beth appeared to collect her thoughts, and asked pointedly, “So how do you know Carla?”
Nathan explained that he worked for the Banderbilt Trust, and they handled Liz’s financial affairs. Carla had recently attended a meeting at the firm’s Park Avenue office and that’s where they met.
“Dad’s always warning us about people like you. He calls you helpers. But you and I know that’s not what he means.”
Nathan laughed, “Well, we try our best, we’re always ready to go the extra mile.” It sounded very odd to be making a pitch in the middle of the night, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean to one of Budd Wright’s daughters.
“Do I need to warn Carla about you, now that Dad’s gone missing?”
Nathan decided not to follow up on the mention of Budd and instead replied, “Do you think I look dangerous?”
“Well, if you want an honest answer, no, you don’t look dangerous to me at all.”
Nathan was not surprised by her reply, even though there were times when a more threatening presence would certainly have helped him at work.
“You know, you’re not the first. We see your kind all the time.”
Nathan was not sure how to reply, and then realized what Mary Beth was doing; she was defending her sister.
“I kinda guessed that to be honest.”
“See, the thing is, Carla gets like this every now and then. She catches someone who amuses her. He’s like a distraction for a while. And when she’s bored, she drops the guy in an instant.”
Nathan could tell Mary Beth had been drinking. He assumed she felt compelled to tell it how she saw it, just so long as she had drunk enough of her favorite truth serum.
“Her money attracts guys like bees to a honey pot. They think they can cut in and help themselves to a big slice of cherry pie. So let me tell you one thing mister, it ain’t gonna happen, not in a million years.”
Nathan was surprised by Mary Beth’s directness and wanted her to know that she had the wrong idea about why he was a guest on board Anastasia.
“No, it’s not like that at all. I’m sorry if you thought I’m on the make.”
Although the truth was, Nathan had half fantasized about having a relationship with Carla that would lead somewhere serious. In so many ways, Carla could solve all his financial problems with a stroke of her elegant Mont Blanc pen.
Nathan needed no reminding about how many family splits were caused by arguments over money. He had learned during his orientation course, that sorting out sibling disputes was one of the Trust’s specialist areas. Although at that moment, he was at a loss to come up with a good answer to defend himself against Carla’s sister.
Retreat rather than attack was clearly the best form of defense. And Nathan returned to his cabin, without knowing the result of The Game.
Later, in the morning, he was woken up for a second time. Only Captain Volcker was doing the talking.
Δ = T –17,582,040
When Nathan heard that the captain was to make an important announcement at precisely eleven o’clock, he tried the relaxation technique his therapist taught him; slowly breathe in the essence of tranquility, breathe out tension. And repeat twenty times.
He tried to block out of his mind the fact that only a thin sheet of metal separated him from what lay below—the suffocating pressure of deep, deep, ice cold water.
Nathan had been casually checking the progress of Anastasia on the internal info channel, when he noticed that she appeared to be slowing down, a fact confirmed by the average cruising speed on the stats screen.
Then suddenly, the yacht shuddered and her engines stopped completely. A deadly hush followed. Anastasia was five hundred miles south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
And she was already beginning to drift …
Nathan immediately wondered how strong the current was. Would it take them far? Would the anchor hold? Would they drift up to the Arctic? Would they hit an iceberg?
Had he unintentionally boarded a yacht with the safety record of the Titanic?
Without bothering to check the weather report, Nathan was convinced a storm was coming. A violent, all consuming storm they had no protection against.
Then he scanned the yacht’s info pages to see the latest satellite photos and weather reports just to make sure. In which direction was Anastasia drifting? How long would it take for the next weather depression to hit them? How much time did they have before they discovered there were really all alone and powerless, entirely at the mercy of nature’s brutal elements?
Surely someone had to tell the other guests what was going on. Nathan was about to go to the bridge, when Captain Volcker’s face appeared on the TV and his voice was piped through the yacht’s internal audio network for everyone to hear.
He began to explain why they had closed down Anastasia’s engines. A dramatic drop in oil pressure on the starboard engine meant there was a major oil leak somewhere, which the engineers were doing their best to trace.
In normal conditions Volcker said they could have continued on a single engine, even though it would have extended their journey time by two days.
But unfortunately they had detected another oil leak, this time in the port engine gearbox and so they had no option but to shut down both engines.
The captain did however have some good news.
There was no need to be concerned about the weather worsening. Or anything like that. No heavy swells were likely while they waited and as the sun was out, it would be a good time to top up a tan.
Comforting words no doubt, thought Nathan, but he was not so sure. Sitting around the table in the dining room at lunch, he appeared to be the only one concerned.
He tried to bring up the subject with Carla and Mary Beth, but they batted the whole thing away, as if it was just the most normal thing in the world to be on a yacht somewhere in the Atlantic with no functioning engines, drifting ever closer to a massive iceberg, Nathan imagined had just broken off from Greenland and was heading in their direction.
Was he the only one who could see all the angles? He had worked out how bad things could become, if as he expected, the engineers could not mend the oil leak.
The captain would send an SOS. No ship would reply and they would carry on drifting at sea for days or weeks or months. No help would come. Eventually the power generators would fail.
The food would run out.
And Nathan knew what happened next.
He had read the stories, unlike his fellow companions. They would be forced to abandon Anastasia and the rule of law and instead adopt the customs of the sea. Who would organize the drawing of lots? Who was the youngest? Whose flesh the tenderest?
Then a rumor started that confirmed all Nathan’s fears.
The problem was more serious than just replacing a couple of leaky oil pan gaskets and split feed lines. Now they needed a critical spare part for the starboard prop shaft.
So there it was, the reality was staring him in the face. He had always questioned the wisdom of crossing the Atlantic in an old boat. He warned himself of the risks. He knew all along the yacht would encounter some kind of problem involving oil.
And yet once again he seemed incapable of taking his own advice. Why didn’t he listen to himself? Then he could stop replaying in his head the if only tape, which seemed to be permanently on loop.
Why in the world had he succumbed to Anastasia’s
charms? He knew how vulnerable eighty-year-old technology was to breaking down, usually when everyone least expected.
They were so far away from any shipyard that could supply the specialist part Captain Volcker said they needed. No doubt it had been carefully handcrafted on a traditional metal worker’s lathe, back in a Marseille tool shop.
And just as Nathan was about to fall into complete despair, the captain announced a breakthrough.
They had made contact with another vessel in the area, the Olympia, and explained the problem. Her chief engineer was now on the bridge, and as luck would have it, he had once been on a yacht with a similar problem.
He then described a short-term workaround, which did not involve getting a brand-new part.
The Olympia carried an extensive collection of spares ready to be cannibalized. Olympia’s captain was happy to transfer them to Anastasia. So now she could complete the rest of her crossing to Gibraltar.
They were all saved! A guardian angel really was looking down on them. Nathan wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
Only, he was left feeling uncomfortable. Because he felt the emergency had been handled a little too smoothly for his liking.
Dirk worried about the lost time and how it would prevent them from spending any of the weekend at Valencia. Maybe they would have to skip the racing trials and head straight for Marseille, where the specialist team with the blueprints would sort out Anastasia and get her engines back in perfect running order.
The waiting game always appeared longer than it was in reality. It was during this time, Nathan thought he should try to get to the bottom of what had happened on Anastasia the previous night.
He realized he was not supposed to have accessed that channel. When he tried to find it the following morning, all he got was a message saying, viewing rights denied.
That meant someone on board must have known he was watching and they didn’t want him doing it again.
He tried counting the number of portholes, hoping to work out whether there was a secret cabin behind one or two of them. He already discounted the main deck salon and the master cabin on the upper deck as possible locations.
It was difficult to see how they could have made a space big enough and yet still kept everything concealed.
Nathan thought his best starting point was to ask a couple of the crew members. They always knew what was really going on—even if they were trained to look the other way and pretend they noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
When Julius entered Nathan’s cabin to turn down the bed and make sure he had everything he needed before dinner, Nathan asked the guy which part of the U.S. he was from.
He replied his folks lived in Silver Peak, Nevada. The mention of the desert state reminded Nathan of Tiffani and her nocturnal adventures along the Vegas Strip with her father. But before he could tell Julius about them, the cabin steward was informing Nathan of his own story.
He moved to Las Vegas, to cut himself in on the American Dream. Within a matter of days, he found a job at the Flamingo, where he worked as a junior cage cashier, handling customer bank deposits and withdrawals and exchanging cash for gaming chips.
Julius realized how Horatio Alger it sounded, but he was determined to do something with his life and improve the financial situation for his family. In under a year, he bought a three bedroom house in Mountain Edge with its own yard and a second hand BMW 3 Series convertible. It was turning out just like in the movies.
But then the downturn came. Frankly, he never understood what happened. All he knew was they fired him when the takings started going down. Not long after, the bank foreclosed on his house, and now his family lived in a trailer park off Las Vegas Boulevard.
The outlook appeared bleak, until one day a friend told him about the unbelievable job prospects in the private yacht sector. Thankfully, the casino gave him great references and he was accepted by an agency straight away.
Now he got to send money back home. The pay for the crew was good and he felt a new sense of achievement, knowing he could once again help out his mother and sisters.
Nathan was heartened by the guy’s story—it made him feel he should have more faith in the American Way, even if it also contained a hard dose of real economics.
In one sense, he considered Julius’s situation to be quite similar to his own. Okay, the bank hadn’t foreclosed on his properties, but the end result following his divorce amounted to the same thing.
In Nathan’s opinion, the single biggest difference between himself and Julius was an expensive education. It was strange how the benefits of attending one of America’s greatest universities had played out. Nathan had obtained a passport to a high paying job in the financial industry, plus multiple ways to pile on debt—to a degree far exceeding what Julius had managed.
“So, the quarters up front, what are they like?”
“They’re cool. I share a twin single with another guy. He’s from Queens, New York City. All the cabins have like bathrooms.”
Nathan was at least pleased that Liz Wright’s refurbishment hadn’t skimped on the parts of the yacht the guests would never see.
“How well do you know the boat?”
“It’s not like the first time they asked me to crew. I’ve been on Anastasia three times.”
“So you figure you know your way around, huh?”
“You could say so.”
“How about you give me a tour … sometime later tonight?”
Nathan knew he could not even hint at the real reason why he wanted to look around Anastasia. Whatever had gone on the gaming room, was supposed to stay in the gaming room.
And Nathan was about to shove his big nose in where it was not wanted.
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Nathan expected they would take the normal route to the forward section of the yacht, which meant going up to the main deck, crossing over to starboard and then walking almost the full length of the side deck, past the salon and library, until they reached the door leading through to the galley and the stairs down to the crew quarters.
But Julius had another idea. Instead of turning right outside Nathan’s cabin, they turned left and carried on to the end of the corridor. It looked to the untrained eye as if there was no way through. Only at waist height, there was a very small keyhole, into which Julius slipped a brass key.
Open sesame, a secret door!
“This is how we move around. Saves so much time, you can’t imagine.”
“But isn’t the engine near here?” Nathan was sounding puzzled about Anastasia’s internal layout.
“Yep, watch the steps and lower your head, we’re gonna go under the center of the engine room.”
And true to his word, Julius led the way to the forward section of the yacht. Nathan could hear some raised voices coming from the other side of the bulkhead. The engines were silent and he assumed the engineers were getting on with a new workaround solution.
His original idea, was to tap lightly along any suspicious looking bulkhead, hoping to hear a hollow sound that might indicate a secret cabin had been built behind it. But on second thought, Nathan realized noise traveled further on the water and he was more likely to attract attention than achieve anything useful.
There was a slight trace of moisture in the air, possibly caused by seepage from one of the grey-water storage tanks. And he noticed the floor sloped lower, the further forward they moved. Nathan assumed the secret passage was frequently used by other members of the crew as well.
In no time they came to another door, which Julius opened without the need for a key. And they both stepped into a very different world.
“This is the senior crew mess,” said Julius, “and through here, is the second mess for the rest of us.”
The surroundings were clean and well appointed. There was nothing luxurious about them but they were certa
inly not spartan. On a whiteboard behind the mess table, Nathan noticed what he thought looked like some kind of time sheet. He asked Julius what it was for.
“Oh that, it’s for when we like to have fun with newbies. We run a book—they have to bet who’ll make it to a cabin first when we get an order. But we never tell them about the short cut. It’s like taking candy from a baby.”
And just as Julius finished speaking, Nathan could smell, burned grass clippings and instantly, he was transported back to Ted Faulkner’s house in Thailand. Nathan now recognized what the smell was, but thought it best not to say anything.
“Saturday nights are poker nights,” declared Julius, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm.
Nathan tried not to display any interest and merely asked, “Who plays the best hand?”
“I get to win most times,” said Julius, once again barely disguising his pride.
“So your time spent at the Flamingo paid off?”
“You could say so.” Julius hesitated and then added, “I mean, I don’t lose all my wages at the end of the month, that’s for sure.”
And Nathan noticed a couple of purple and gold poker chips lying under the table. If his memory served him right, they looked very much like the ones used in the game he’d watched the previous night.
He bent down and picked them up, noticing they were partly covered in a thin white powder. He ran a wet finger over one and then sucked it. The taste was bitter.
“Are these yours?”
Julius held out his hand and examined the chips, checking to see if they carried the name of a famous casino. Nathan watched and noticed that Julius looked slightly puzzled.
“No, we only play with white and red chips. I can’t imagine how they ended up in here.”
Julius stared at Nathan as if he were expecting some kind of signal. When he didn’t get one he said, “Did you want to see the sleeping quarters?”
“No, no,” replied Nathan realizing he risked intruding on the privacy of the crew. He was a guest on board, and imagined he was not supposed to do his own exploring. What would Carla say?