The three of them stood and stared at each other for a moment in silence. Mick heard his own heartbeat loud in his ears. “I think it’s a protest,” he said, remembering the atmosphere in the crew lounge these past nights. He could hardly believe he was saying this, but it was the only thing that made sense.
Laurens coughed. “You’re fucking joking, right?” He leaned against the counter, one hand clutching his stomach. The skin of his face was stretched so tight the knobs of his cheekbones gleamed in the overhead glare. “Where’s the night crew?”
“I don’t know,” said Kenji. “They should be here.”
“Chef,” Mick said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” said Laurens. Something rippled across his face, a spasm of some kind. “Please go and inform the night crew that they have duties to perform. I want them here now. Go and find Paolo. I’ll be in my office.” He turned and made his way slowly toward the far end of the galley. But before he’d even reached the door to the first storeroom, he collapsed to the freshly mopped floor. At first Mick thought he had skidded and tripped, since the floor was gleaming wet, but instead he lay propped on his elbows, vomiting.
Kenji grabbed a clean torchon off the counter and helped him up. Mick wet another torchon at the prep sink, wrung it out, and handed it to Laurens.
“This is bad,” said Laurens, gasping, clutching his stomach as he mopped his face. He leaned over and vomited again and kept heaving.
“Let me take you to the infirmary, Chef,” said Kenji. “You need a doctor.”
Mick took it as a clear sign of how sick Laurens was that he didn’t try to argue. “Find Paolo,” Laurens called to Mick as Kenji helped him out of the galley. “We need the night crew in here.”
* * *
*
Miriam couldn’t help smiling at Kimmi’s unflagging energy and enthusiasm as she introduced and applauded one act after another, a jazz guitarist, a retired opera singer, an amateur stand-up comedian.
Kimmi was nominally the Sabra Quartet’s boss on the cruise, and as such, she was easygoing and not unduly concerned with protocol; not a stickler, but not lax, either. She was professional and fun, but there was more to her than that. Every time Miriam saw her, she was making an extra effort to be humane and responsible, talking confidingly to an elderly man as she helped him up the stairs by making it look as if she’d just taken his arm, joining a solitary diner whose spouse was under the weather, rousing torpid midafternoon sunbathers by the pool to get up and swivel their hips to a Frank Sinatra song, which they did with laughing good cheer. She was doing double duty on this cruise. As the entertainment director she was responsible for fun, and as the cruise director she was responsible for morale, and she took both seriously.
During a sweet rendition by two old men of an Everly Brothers song, Miriam’s attention was caught by one of the waiters. He walked quickly, head unobtrusively down, toward the Weisses’ table, which was near the front of the stage. Miriam watched as the waiter leaned down and whispered something in Larry’s ear. Larry put a hand on Rivka’s shoulder, whispered in turn into her ear. Rivka stared up at him as Larry stood and followed the waiter to the back of the lounge, threading the thronged tables, and out the door.
“Where’s he going?” Sasha said into Miriam’s ear. So he had noticed too.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe we hit an iceberg.”
“Through the years our love will grow,” the crooners sang in close harmony. “Like a river, it will flow.” Rivka was nervously glancing over her shoulder at the door. Miriam considered going down to her table and asking her straight-out what the waiter had said, but of course Rivka wasn’t likely to confide in Miriam; she’d probably snub her, make her feel like an idiot for sticking her nose in.
“Our next act is a young and talented piano player,” Kimmi announced when the two old men had finished. “She’s a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley, majoring in chemistry, but if that doesn’t work out, I think music might be a good plan B for her. See what you think. Everyone, Allison Goodwin! Come on out, Allison!”
A spotlight followed young Allison as she walked quickly and shyly onstage in a boxy navy-blue dress. Miriam recognized the slightly plump, socially awkward girl; she had sat at a table near the quartet at dinner the night before, listening avidly to the music and ignoring her parents, her mother’s loose laughter and copious consumption of white wine, her father’s ham-fisted flirtation with the two women at the next table.
Overhead the stage lights blazed. The baby grand had been pushed to the front of the stage, its lid lifted. Votive candles flickered on the tables. Cigarette smoke curled in the candlelight and dissipated in the air blowing strongly from the vents overhead. Allison sat very straight, lifted her right hand slightly, and then brought it down on the opening run of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata no. 2, the cascading notes tumbling effortlessly from her fingers in jagged rocks and fluid gullets of water and tree trunks rushing downstream: colliding, almost violent, powerfully beautiful.
She was a prodigy, this girl, thought Miriam. It was a rare treat to hear another classical musician, a real one, perform on a cruise. But the former soldier in Miriam had split off from the music; she couldn’t help glancing over at Rivka again. As an Israeli, Miriam was prone to jumpiness in crowded public places. Her caution had shaded into paranoia as the years went on. She made hasty exits when she went alone to matinees in the afternoon and someone came in who didn’t look right. She left buses before her stop when a fellow passenger prayed to himself too conspicuously. She fled from pedestrian malls, leaving her tea undrunk on a café table, at the sight of a Palestinian with a backpack and no clear reason to be loitering across the walkway. Every time, she wanted to shout as she left to warn everyone else, but she knew this would be crazy, and she could be arrested for disturbing the peace, for causing panic at a false alarm. So she had to content herself with private reconnoitering, retreating from apparent peril that always, every time, turned out to be nothing. Still, she would rather be on the lookout, sharp, overreacting, than to be caught asleep and dull-witted. When the bomb came to rip her apart, she would at least see it coming. She wanted to die on her toes if she had to die at all.
She stood up and touched Sasha on his shoulder. Without looking up at her, he put his hand over hers and held it against his warm neck. She leaned down and murmured in his ear, “Come with me, let’s get some air.”
When she got to the back of the lounge, he was right behind her. He whispered, “Should we go back to our room?”
“I would love that,” she whispered back. “But I’ve been wondering about Larry.”
“Wondering what?”
“Why he left,” she said.
He didn’t miss a beat. “What are you worried about?”
Three cheers for the Israeli army, she thought; even half a century later, the training was ingrained.
“Rivka seems very worried about something,” said Miriam. “I’m sure it’s nothing. A business call. But you know how I overreact. It’s a terrible habit.”
Sasha cupped her cheek with his hand and gazed at her. She waited for him to laugh at her, her mouth twitching, ready to laugh at herself with him. “I think,” he said, “we should go and find Larry, and you can ask him yourself.”
They opened the door to the lounge and walked hand in hand along the promenade deck, softly lamp-lit, breezy, empty of people. The burnished wooden floor gleamed. The enormous windows held reflections, barely glimpsed through the corners of Miriam’s eyes. Through the closed doors, she heard faint voices in the casino as they passed it, laughter and shouts and the clack of the roulette wheel.
“Do you smell smoke?” said Sasha, stopping. He tilted his head toward the opened doors at the aft end of the promenade to inhale deeply through his nose.
“Cigarettes?” said Miriam, doing the same. Then she caught it: an acrid burn
ing smell, just a whiff. “Yes,” she said. “I smell smoke.”
“A fire.”
Miriam stared at him, inhaling through her nose. Yes, it smelled like there might be a fire somewhere. Of course she didn’t want anything actually to be wrong, the thought terrified her in fact, but even so, she was gratified that Sasha had believed her. And that, for once in her life, she might actually be right.
chapter fourteen
Mick entered the crew lounge and spotted Consuelo right away. She was at the bar, surrounded by a crowd, including several members of the galley crew. Trevor stood behind the bar. Everyone was focused on her. She was holding court like some sort of heroine in a movie.
She caught sight of Mick, and her face blazed. “Hey, boss,” she called with half-affectionate insolence.
Crewmembers moved out of his way to let Mick through, then closed around him again, quiet. He could feel clearly that he was now an outsider in this room. He looked at her and around at the silent, wide-awake faces. “Does anyone want to tell me what’s going on here?”
Consuelo took a deliberate sip of her wine, watching his face over the rim of her glass. “Walkout. We quit.”
“All of you?”
“Yes. They’re firing us anyway. No severance. Nothing. Let them make their own fucking food, clean their own fucking rooms. We’ve got over half the crew with us.”
“This is crazy,” said Mick, looking around at them all. “You’ll be screwed if you do this. No cruise line will hire you. They’ll blackball you. All of you.”
“So what?” said Consuelo. “They treat us like shit.”
“I didn’t treat you like shit,” Mick said. “Laurens didn’t either. He’s a fair boss. He’s tough, but he’s not mean or crazy. Think about this. It’s not too late to stop it.”
“Sorry, Chef. This is a done thing.”
Mick looked at her for a moment. Then he looked around at the others, their expressions all set, determined. He had no idea what to say, how to respond. All he knew was that he no longer had any authority over Consuelo, or any of them, for that matter.
“Okay,” he said wearily. “It’s your ass, not mine. Has anyone seen Paolo? Laurens wants the night crew in the galley for their shift.”
“He’s with us,” said Consuelo.
“But he’s management,” said Mick, genuinely shocked. “Why would Paolo walk out?”
“Solidarity,” said Consuelo. “You can join us too, if you want. It’s not too late.” She grinned cheekily at him.
“And it’s not too late to drop this whole thing and go back to work,” said Mick. “What are you trying to get out of this?”
“What do you mean? The action speaks for itself. We’ll get huge publicity, too. TV news, the Internet, it will be everywhere.”
So that was what she’d meant the other day about getting famous.
“I mean,” said Mick, “are you trying to bargain with the owners? ’Cause they won’t bargain. They never do. They don’t have to.”
“Yes, they will,” said Natalya, the Russian bartender. “Otherwise, good luck to them, finding replacements on short notice in Hawaii for the rest of the cruise. We’ll have leverage.”
“You won’t,” said Mick. “This is really stupid. You’re screwing everybody. Yourselves, and the rest of the crew, and the passengers most of all.”
“Cabaret went too far this time,” said a guy Mick didn’t recognize. “We are reacting the only way we can. It’s their own fault.”
“You won’t get anywhere with Cabaret,” said Mick. “And the rest of us will have to pick up your slack for the rest of the cruise, and no one else will hire you. It’s not like you have a union to fight for you.”
“We do now,” said Consuelo. “This is our union.”
“Oh man,” said Mick, shaking his head. He could feel how useless it was to try to reason with these people. They were excited to do this, even if it was just to screw Cabaret. Walking out was their main objective; vindictive payback. How was he supposed to argue with a room full of defiant, righteous, angry workers who had nothing left to lose? And besides, they weren’t wrong.
Without saying another word, he turned and walked out of the crew lounge, stood for a moment in the hallway, trying to decide what to do. He badly wanted a beer, but the crew lounge would probably enforce a “no management” service policy now. He vaguely contemplated going to the restaurant to get a beer from the bar refrigerator. Or he could go to the small break room where upper management theoretically congregated. Mick had never been in there, and despite everything going on, he still didn’t consider himself management. The crew lounge was where he felt at home, and now that the lines had been drawn, he had nowhere else to go.
He became aware of a chemical, noxious smell. It was coming from one of the vents. He inhaled hard through his nose a few times: smoke. It was unmistakable. Then all at once, the fans stopped, the lights went out, and the hallway was black and silent.
* * *
*
“Where is our waiter?” Valerie said, craning her neck to look around. She got up and went to the bar, leaving Christine alone at the table. Miriam and Sasha had gone off somewhere, probably to neck on the promenade. Christine barely noticed. From the first notes of the piano piece, she had been caught up in its drama, swept away by restless torrents, made dreamy by peaceful interludes. And the girl who was playing was young but masterful. With a start of surprise, Christine recognized the teenager she’d espied just before they’d sailed away from Long Beach, the sullen, gimlet-eyed girl who’d been reading her brochure in a nearby deck chair while Christine had been reading hers.
And here she was again, pouring her soul into the piano. Just as she was pounding out the dizzying final passages of the piece, the stage lights went out. The air-conditioning died, and the lounge became instantly hot, dark, and stuffy. The music stopped. A murmur filled the silence. Christine looked around at confused faces, shrouded in the half light. The votive candles on the tables flickered, jewelry glinted, tips of cigarettes winked throughout the room. Kimmi, confused, tapped the dead mike on the darkened stage.
“Okay, everyone!” she called. Her voice sounded small and weak without the mike. “Everyone, as you can see, the power just went out. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’ll let you know as soon as I know anything.”
Valerie slid back into the chair next to Christine and handed her a glass. Her face was sallow in the greenish emergency lighting that had just come on overhead. “The bartenders are gone,” she said. “I made it myself. I hope this isn’t serious.”
Christine took a gulp. It was straight vodka over ice.
The PA system crackled to life, and the captain’s voice came through, calm and commanding. “Hello, folks, this is Captain Jack. You’ve probably noticed that the power went out. You might have smelled a little smoke, too. There was a small fire, but it’s under control, and we’re working on getting the power back up and running. It’s nothing to worry about, this is temporary, so please try to relax and enjoy your evening and I’ll be back soon with an update.”
“Oh my God,” said Valerie. “Holy shit.”
A few people coughed. Others headed for the exits, propping open the doors to the lounge on their way out.
“Let’s get some fresh air,” said Christine, picking up her drink. As they left the lounge, Christine realized that the constant vibration of the engines underfoot had stopped, along with everything else.
“What happens now?” she heard a woman’s voice ask.
“They’ll get the power back on again,” said her male companion. “They always do. We just have to wait.”
* * *
*
Miriam and Sasha stopped on the stairs leading up to the bridge. Loud voices echoed down below.
“The power went out,” she said. She heard the astonishment
in her own voice. A fine, spitting rain had begun to fall, and the air was dark and heavy, with no wind. In the dim light from the sky, Miriam could make out a thin layer of acrid smoke wrapped around the ship, blanketing it.
“Was it the fire?” she said.
“Probably,” Sasha replied. “Let’s go to the bridge.”
Their feet clanged on the metal staircase as they made their way to the top. They hovered together in the open doorway to the bridge. Under a curved wall of enormous front-facing windows, the long control panel was dark. Dim overhead lights, which must have been battery-powered, illuminated the cavernous room with pale greenish light.
Miriam heard Larry before she saw him.
“This is a bad situation,” he said, his loud voice cutting through all the others. “We’re dead in the water.”
As Miriam’s eyes adjusted, she saw him at the back of the room, sitting at a long table next to the captain. They were both speaking at once into handsets. The captain’s voice was low and even, so Miriam couldn’t make out what he was saying over Larry’s sharp projection, but she could hear speakers crackling all over the ship, so she guessed he was making an official announcement. Three young bridge officers had clustered around the conked-out control panel beneath the windows. They were speaking in low voices. Miriam edged in their direction, her ear cocked like an antenna to pick up whatever she could.
“Was it an oil leak, or electrical?”
“I don’t know. But the sprinklers didn’t even come on. They had to go in and turn them on manually. I heard a couple of the engine room crew passed out from the smoke and had to go to the infirmary.”
“I was working on the Sea Star three years ago when that engine fire happened. We waited three days for a tow. Three days! And that was in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“God. What were they thinking, sending us to Hawaii in this piece of shit?”
Miriam stepped closer to Sasha and took his hand as two more young men in uniform tumbled in through an open door, brandishing flashlights. “What happened?” one of them said. In the greenish light from above, he looked half asleep, shocked out of a stupor. It occurred to Miriam that these kids had probably been sleeping and had come upstairs to begin the night shift.
The Last Cruise Page 17