“Nothing to do with the fire. This is their last cruise. Their contracts are being canceled, and they’re pissed, so they decided to get their revenge.”
“How many?” she asked.
“I have no idea. I’m not even sure anyone will show up this morning.”
“Okay,” she said, clearly startled. “I’m happy to do whatever you need me to do. I’m a farmer, I used to be a waitress. I cook at a soup kitchen every week, anywhere from fifty to a hundred people. I know how to work.”
Mick made a frank assessment of her plain shorts and T-shirt, her earnest eagerness to help. Maybe she was okay, not the rich bitch he’d originally pegged her as. At any rate, he didn’t have the luxury of turning her down.
“Let’s go,” he said.
He led her through the doors and into the main galley, which was empty, silent, lit by the emergency track lighting, still smelling faintly of the harsh bleach-based cleanser he had used to mop up Laurens’s vomit, swabbing the floor and counters several times to try to wipe out whatever virus or bacteria he was harboring and had left behind. The dead stoves were shadowy through the gloom.
Christine looked around. “I could make coffee.”
Mick took a liter beaker from a shelf, filled it with tepid water, and took a long drink. “Can’t make coffee,” he told her, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “No electricity for the burners. Can’t boil water, can’t cook anything.”
“What about cold brew? I could start it now. You let it sit and then just strain it. I could make a huge batch.”
“Go for it. Your first assignment.”
He went to the locker room, pissed in the little toilet, tried to flush and couldn’t, and felt a sudden sense of dread. No plumbing. He put on a clean set of chef’s whites. Back in the galley, he tossed another to Christine: she put it on without having to be told. After he’d shown her where the coffee was kept, he went into the first walk-in refrigerator to take stock of the remaining supplies, the perishables that had to be eaten immediately.
A while later, as he emerged with a hotel pan of hard-boiled eggs, he heard voices.
“Morning, Chef,” said a young man with an Aussie accent.
Mick didn’t recognize the clean-cut blond kid, but he must have been on the morning crew. Or what was left of it. Behind him was a small cluster of people—eight, he counted—all wearing clean white jackets and neckerchiefs, exactly on time for their normal shift. He recognized a few of them from the main galley, one from his own station, a prep cook named Camille, dark and serious, with glasses.
Mick felt himself relax a little. So there was order in the world after all. The remnants of his exhaustion lifted, the scrim of grime around his vision cleared.
“Good morning,” he said. “Does anyone know what’s going on with the rest of the crew?”
“Most of them are on the main deck,” said Camille. “They’ve taken it over. I think they’re planning to stay there until we get to Hawaii.”
“Some of them are in the buffet galley,” said another young woman. She had an Indian accent, and Mick remembered her, though not her name, from the first day; he had put her in charge of service aesthetics in the buffet galley, because she had seemed to have a good eye. Then he’d come over here to the main galley and hadn’t seen her since. “They’ve taken that over too,” she was saying. “They’re eating breakfast in there. I’m supposed to be working there, but they said I couldn’t stay unless I joined them. But I didn’t want to. So they threw me out.”
“What about Chef Jean-Luc?” Mick asked. “Isn’t he in charge?”
“He’s joined the walkouts,” said the Aussie.
“Okay,” said Mick, trying to hide the shock he felt at this news. “I guess it’s just us then. Until others decide to show up. So let’s get started.”
He looked into their faces: they all looked frankly relieved to have found someone to tell them what to do. He glanced over at Christine, who was stirring coffee into cold water in a soup pot. She looked back at him with the same expectant, trusting expression everyone else had.
“By the way, everybody, this is Christine. She volunteered to help us out. So please treat her as one of the crew. Right now she’s cold-brewing some coffee, which is the only way we’re going to get it since the power’s still out, so you should be extra nice to her.” A couple of weak smiles. Good. “We’ll put out breakfast for the passengers first. Simple stuff like cereal, milk, fruit, hard-cooked eggs, anything immediately perishable. You two,” he said, pointing at Camille and the Aussie, “go up to the breakfast room and see what they’ve got, what they need. The rest of us are going to make a quick inventory of our stores, starting with the perishables: meats, dairy, fish, vegetables.” He could feel himself slipping into autopilot, running through the service as he had done a thousand times for executive chefs, trying to impress them. The pitch was the same, but now that there was no one to impress, he heard himself delivering it in a warmer tone, with less of an edge. “We’ll have to use as much of that as we can today. Lunch will be simple: cheese sandwiches, fruit salad, bags of chips, that sort of thing. As you all know, we can’t use the stoves. The desalination pumps are down, so we’ll have to ration whatever we have in the tank. Service will be paper and plastic from now on. For dinner tonight, we’re going to make a shitload of ceviche to use up as much of the seafood as we can. And salad, mostly lettuce, also cucumber and anything else that might spoil. We’re going to use the outdoor grills to cook meat, since we have plenty of charcoal left. But the main thing now is to figure out what goes bad first, and that’s what we’ll serve. Okay?”
There were nods all around, a chorus of “Yes, Chef.”
“Good,” he said, and found himself clapping his hands together and rubbing them, the way Laurens did at the end of staff meetings. “Let’s get to work.”
* * *
*
It had been her first night alone with Sasha in their shared cabin, and Miriam had spent most of it worrying about Isaac, down the hall in the cabin with Jakov. She missed him. She always knew how to comfort him, and he her. They would have kvetched and moaned together. Instead she had tried to match Sasha’s quiet forbearance all night. He had settled himself in their double bed and lain awake for hours, brooding in silence. He was always stoic and self-contained, philosophical about discomfort. When she tried to talk to him, to caress him, he responded at first but lapsed back into worried fulmination, so she left him alone. Maybe he had been thinking of his own wife. At some point it had hit her with sheepish sadness that she was being foolish; maybe she was too old to start over, too old to have a swooning new love affair.
Dawn came as a relief to both of them, it seemed to Miriam. As soon as it was light enough to see, they dressed wordlessly and left their cabin. The hallway, lit by windows at either end, looked like a lunatic asylum that had run out of medication: old people staggered around, some still in pajamas, others in misbuttoned shirts and rumpled shorts.
“Finally it’s morning,” a woman said, clutching Miriam’s arm. Her eyes were ringed with pigmented circles. Her lips were cracked and pale. “I was sick all night. I have nothing left inside to throw up.”
“Me too,” said someone nearby. “What was in our dinner last night?”
“The toilets aren’t flushing!”
“Mine’s all stopped-up!”
A bridge officer appeared in the hallway. “Good morning.”
“Can we get some breakfast, do you think?” said someone.
“Breakfast is being served in the buffet.”
“What about the plumbing? It’s broken.”
“We’re working on that,” said the officer. He looked painfully young to Miriam, mid-twenties at the most.
“Thank you,” she said to him as she walked by. “You’re doing a good job.”
“We’re trying,” he said
. “I am so sorry about this, it’s awful for you all.”
Isaac and Jakov’s room was the last door before the stairs. Miriam put her hand on Sasha’s arm for him to wait, and knocked. Jakov opened it. He wore pajamas and held a washcloth over his eye. “I knocked against something in the night,” he explained, disappearing into the small bathroom. Miriam stuck her head into the room. Isaac was sitting up in his own bed, his legs still under the blankets. “I’m glad to see you got through the night all right,” she said.
“This is not what I would call ‘all right,’ ” said Isaac.
“I know,” she said, feeling a rush of tenderness toward him. “Do you want to come with us now? We’re going to the breakfast buffet to see if there’s anything to eat.”
Isaac waved her off with a mournful expression. “Go, go,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
She nodded at him and went, shutting the door behind her. She joined Sasha and the rest of the herd as they went hobbling to the stairs, along a hallway, and into the breakfast buffet room. It was heartening to see the sunlight streaming in with fresh air through open windows, two staff members in uniform behind the long tables, breakfast arranged: small boxes of cereal, fruit, bread and butter and jam, cheese, napkins. Even the garish patterned carpet cheered her up a little. The storage refrigerator had been opened, and its drawers were filled with small, single-portion containers of milk and juice and yogurt. Most of the service tables, draped in white linen tablecloths and holding empty electric chafing dishes, had been pushed over by the open sliding doors to the balcony, through which fresh air blew steadily off the ocean.
“What, they can’t cook anything?” came a plaintive voice that belonged to an skinny elderly redhead in a flowered muumuu who could have been one of Miriam’s cousins.
“The stoves don’t work,” said Sasha. “They’re electric. We need the generators for them.” He turned to Miriam. “I’m going to go see if I can help fix them. I used to be a good mechanic, when I was young.”
“Yes,” Miriam said. “You should, of course you should.”
He gazed at her tenderly. “Will you be all right, my beloved? Can you eat something?”
Just like that, Miriam melted with love for him, all over again. “I’m perfectly all right,” she said.
He embraced her, and she clung to him for a moment, feeling all her fears and worries from the night before turning into fear for his safety. There might be another fire down there, some sort of catastrophe.
“Be careful,” she said, anxiously.
When he’d gone, she joined the crowd clustered by the food and collected a container of yogurt from the open refrigerator, a banana from the mound of fruit on the serving table, and a plastic spoon, and looked around for somewhere to sit. The cavernous table-filled space made her feel as if she were in school again, casing the cafeteria for allies. Then she spotted Rivka Weiss slumped all alone at a table by the window, her small head wrapped in a lime-green turban. Her face was averted, looking toward the ocean.
What was she doing here, Miriam wondered. Rivka never came to the breakfast buffet room. She and Larry had the palatial owner’s suite near the top of the ship, where she probably had her breakfast brought to her on a private balcony off her bedroom. Why had she come slumming it down here?
“Rivka,” said Miriam, walking up to her. “Good morning, how are you? Can I sit with you?”
Rivka looked up with a snap of her head. “I don’t mind,” she said automatically, before she’d even registered who it was. “Oh, Miriam,” she said, and turned back to look out at the bright water and hot sky.
Miriam was startled by her ravaged face, tormented and creased, probably by a pillowcase, without its usual artful makeup. Her arched, plucked eyebrows and downturned pale mouth, the turban swathing her coconut of a skull, made her look like an invalid in the immediate aftermath of major surgery.
“I’m so sorry about this mess,” said Miriam as she settled herself in the chair opposite her. “Have you heard anything more about what’s happening?”
“Larry is leaving the ship.” Rivka glanced at her again, her mouth working, saliva gathering at the corners, her eyes wide with pinpoint pupils. She had taken something, a sedative maybe. “He’s trying to get a military helicopter to come and get him. They only have enough fuel to take two or at the most three people at this range. I’m not going with him. I’m staying here. I can’t believe he would do this.”
“You should go,” said Miriam, feeling perversely charitable. “We’d all do the same if we were you, and no one will judge you.”
“He says it’s because he has an extremely important meeting with some Chinese investors,” Rivka said. “But that’s a big fat lie. He could reschedule it. He just wants to get out of here, that’s all. There’s no way the engines can be fixed. They’ll announce it soon.”
“Oh. I hope that’s not true,” said Miriam.
Rivka didn’t seem to hear her. “They came to get him last night to tell him the ship was on fire. And the first thing he did was to call for a helicopter.” She stabbed a bony finger at the table. “This is his ship! He’s responsible for it! For all of you!”
“But what can he do for us, really?”
“Stay here and suffer with the rest of us!”
Miriam was tempted to put her hand on Rivka’s to soothe her, but she was starting to feel angry at Larry herself.
“There’s a meeting with the captain and officers later this morning,” Rivka said. “Would you do me a favor, Miriam? Would you come with me? If I have to face Larry alone right now, I might kill him. Apparently the meeting is in a place called the ‘war room,’ which strikes me as appropriate.”
“I’d be happy to go with you,” said Miriam.
She couldn’t imagine what had changed overnight, why Rivka was treating her all of a sudden as a necessary ally, a confidante, even. For the first time ever, she almost liked Rivka for her staunch horror at her husband’s entitled defection from his own crippled ship. She remembered with disgust how Larry had herded her and Sasha out of the bridge last night, his hand like a sharp claw on her shoulder, the way he’d yelled at the bridge crew when it clearly wasn’t their fault. It made her sad, more than anything else, to see him behave that way, a man she’d liked and trusted for so many years. And it also made her feel queasy, that this was the person who had sustained the Sabra Quartet, provided the bulk of their livelihood and supported their performance career. She hated having to be beholden to such a jerk, having her outrage tempered by ancient loyalty and gratitude. Larry probably saw the Sabra as a tax deduction, a worthy cause to offset all the terrible things he did to have all that money. Well, the quartet was getting too old to play anymore. After their retirement, they could have nothing to do with Larry Weiss, ever again. Small comfort, but she’d take it.
chapter sixteen
The galley air was thick and sour, even though all of the ship’s doors and windows had been opened to let air circulate through the lower decks. Christine could feel occasional hot burps from outside permeate the inner crevices of the ship. It was no hotter today than yesterday or the day before. It was the lack of air-conditioning that felt strange, one more dubious luxury she had acclimated to in a few short days. In Maine, almost no one had it or needed it. Now, she felt its absence acutely as she stood at the prep counter, making cheese sandwiches. The cheese was sweating in the heat, half melted. The tomatoes and cucumbers were limp. It was a big comedown from the usual midday feast.
Working alongside her was a young married couple, Camille and Lester, who’d grown up together in a small village in the Philippines. Over the course of slapping hundreds of slices of cheese between hundreds of slices of bread, Christine learned that this was their first cruise working together in all their years with Cabaret, four for her, five for him. “So at least we’re together,” said Camille. She was a short, dark,
skinny girl with a round face, glasses, and heavy straight black bangs. She looked like a teenager to Christine, but she must have been at least in her mid-twenties.
Lester had small, darting eyes, a thick scar running down one cheek, and an angular, anvil-shaped head. His piratical looks were, Christine had realized within two minutes of talking to him, completely at odds with his personality.
“It would be terrible to be separated right now,” he was saying in a gentle, thoughtful voice. He was almost in tears, imagining this hypothetical separation from his wife. “Especially if she was the one stuck here.”
Camille put a latex-gloved hand on his shoulder. Lester covered her hand with his own latex-gloved one.
Christine looked up as Mick appeared by her side, handing out drinks. “You have to keep drinking,” he said, passing her a bottle of iced tea, still somewhat cold. “It’s hot down here, especially if you’re not used to it.”
“Thank you,” she said, blowing a lock of hair out of her face with a sideways grimace.
All morning, she had been trying to square this competent, thoughtful, caring man with the drunk meathead who’d hit on the waitress in the hotel bar, the showoff at the captain’s table dinner. He didn’t seem like the same guy at all. He had brought her into the galley crew effortlessly, without making her feel awkward or intimating to everyone that she was some sort of princess, slumming it.
When the sandwiches were done and stacked on a tray to be brought upstairs, Christine took off her latex gloves, scooped out a cupful of coffee from the pot she’d left to steep, and headed out of the galley to her cabin.
“This might be the weirdest coffee you’ll ever drink,” she announced, opening the door.
There was no answer. The lump in Valerie’s bed was, Christine assumed, Valerie herself, still sleeping, so she set the cup on their shared nightstand. Valerie groaned and sat up. “What time is it? What’s happening? Did they get the power back on yet? It’s so hot in here.”
The Last Cruise Page 19