“Christine. Where are you?”
“I’m over here,” Christine called out.
She turned to see Valerie standing at the end of the prep station. “Come upstairs with me,” she said. “There’s a party going on, some people hanging out.”
“Oh. I’m okay here,” said Christine.
“Come on, you need some fresh air. Hey, Chef, can she take the day off?”
“She can do whatever she wants,” said Mick, who was going through a box of spices at the end of the counter.
“Want to come with us, Chef? You look like you could use a drink.”
“I have to make lunch,” Mick said.
“What’s on the menu today?”
“Irish tea crackers and peanut butter,” he said.
“Mmm,” she said, smacking her lips, flirting with him. “Sounds delicious.”
Christine felt churlishly glad when Mick turned away from Valerie and moved down the counter.
chapter nineteen
Passing the open entryway to the bridge, Miriam caught sight of Kimmi sitting behind the steering console. She was swiveling her chair back and forth with one foot on the ground, the other tucked up underneath her hip, staring straight ahead through the windows, although there was nothing but the static shock of brightness outside. Two young crewmen in rumpled white uniforms stood on either side of the room, flanking her, looking out at the horizon.
“Nothing,” Kimmi said, without turning her head as Miriam went in to stand next to her. “Not even a seagull. Gosh, it’s empty out here.”
“Where’s the captain?” said Miriam.
“Sick,” said one of the crewmen. “He’s in the infirmary. Along with most of the bridge crew.”
“It’s norovirus,” said the other crewman. “This thing is bad.”
Miriam shook her head. “We’re cursed,” she said. “The fire, then this norovirus. And half the crew quit.”
“Trouble comes in threes,” said Kimmi somberly.
“I hope that means there won’t be any more of it,” said Miriam.
One of the young officers bestirred himself, looked across the bridge at the other one. “As long as there’s no storm,” he said. “As long as they get here in time.”
Miriam felt a cold grip of dread in her chest. A storm would be very, very dangerous without propulsion or navigation. The Isabella would be helpless.
“So they’re letting me hang out in this chair,” said Kimmi. “I’m keeping watch for any sign of life out there. That’s my job right now.”
When Kimmi turned, Miriam was shocked: her eye sockets were hollow, her heart-shaped face a puzzle of hard planes. Her lips looked painfully chapped, dusted with dried salt from the air.
“Have you seen anything?”
“Not one thing,” said Kimmi. “No plane, no ship, nothing but floating garbage.”
Miriam looked out with her. Far below, on every side, the ocean ran ceaselessly on, a vast, slow system with its own pulses and energy and no land to interrupt it for a thousand miles or more.
“At least the garbage gives us something to look at besides water,” said Miriam.
Kimmi gave a small, dry laugh. “I’m glad you came in. Eduardo and Ivan and I have run out of things to say to each other. Right, guys?”
Miriam looked at the two young officers. The port one was short and dark and moonfaced, the starboard one tall and blond and long-faced. She recognized them, but only vaguely. “I’m Miriam, by the way,” she told them. “I’m a violinist with the string quartet.”
“Eduardo,” said the tall fair one. “Safety officer.”
“Ivan,” said the short swarthy one. “Deck cadet.”
“Last men standing,” said Kimmi. “The senior officers are all sick, so these boys have the bridge, what’s left of it.”
“Maybe you should give yourselves promotions,” said Miriam.
“Oh no,” said Eduardo earnestly. “We can’t do that.”
“This is only my first year,” said Ivan.
“They can’t even joke about it, God bless ’em,” said Kimmi. “It’s no fun at all. They’re fine with me sitting in the captain’s chair and pretending I’m in charge, but they won’t let me call them my staff captain and first officer. The guys on night watch are just as bad. Sticklers for protocol. Cabaret trains them to be as loyal as soldiers.”
“Why are no other Cabaret ships coming to help us?” Miriam asked. “Or anyone?”
“There’s no one else out here,” said Ivan. “This California-to-Hawaii route isn’t well traveled, not by cruise ships or container ships or tankers, not even airplanes. Cabaret doesn’t do this route very often. This cruise was special.”
Miriam cleared her throat to steady her voice. “So why doesn’t the U.S. Navy send a carrier ship to pick us all up? Why doesn’t another Cabaret ship come and get us?”
Ivan and Eduardo exchanged a look, as if they were trying to gauge how much to reveal.
“I want the truth,” said Miriam. “Please. I can take it.”
“There’s an old saying,” said Eduardo. “ ‘The safest ship is the one you’re already on.’ ”
“ ‘The safest ship is the one you’re already on,’ ” Miriam repeated. “You mean it’s dangerous to move people from one ship to another?”
“Very dangerous,” said Ivan. “Hundreds of people, in the open ocean?”
“Not to mention expensive,” said Eduardo. “That’s the main thing, I’m sorry to say. In emergencies, they charge you ten times as much because they can get away with it. And the lawsuits if there were any accidents…which is highly possible, in fact it would be unusual if there weren’t some accidents, given how many people we are and how perilous the maneuver would be. It’s a different matter if there are only ten or twenty trained crew on a stranded ship and another one nearby, that’s worth the odds. But Cabaret can’t risk it for us, for all these reasons. We’re much better off floating here until the tugs can come get us and tow us home.”
“But what if a storm comes?” Miriam said. “What if we capsize?”
Ivan and Eduardo exchanged another look.
“That’s why we have lifeboats,” Kimmi said with bright assuredness. “But don’t worry, we won’t need them. The tugboats will come soon. For sure.”
Miriam looked back at Eduardo. “When are they supposed to get here?”
“A day or more,” said Eduardo.
“How long will it take them to tow us into port once they finally get here?”
“A while,” said Eduardo. “Maybe five, six days.”
“There is an airdrop of supplies coming today,” said Kimmi. “On the plus side. Food and water and maybe engine parts, I don’t know for sure.”
“That is good news,” Miriam said, hoping, for Sasha’s sake, that the parts would come. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“We’re okay here,” said Kimmi. “But you could try the infirmary.”
“I will,” said Miriam.
She left the three of them on the bridge, staring out together at the barren wasteland of water, and made her way down to the promenade deck. In the infirmary, she found the ship’s medic, Mike Pruitt, whose brushy light-brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses made him look more like a pastor or a tax accountant than a doctor.
“How are things down here?” she asked him.
“Pretty bad,” he said. His glasses were slightly fogged. He looked harried and out of his depth and apologetic. “And with norovirus, there’s not much you can do for it, medically. Time, hydration, rest. Keep it contained. But on this scale, it’s pretty intense. It’s a bad one.”
Miriam looked at all the dozens of deck chairs lined up against the inner wall of the promenade deck, a long row of field cots filled with people who were clearly suffering, some in s
toic silence, some vocally. She heard sighs and groans of pain and muttered laments. Several people, pale and agitated, waited by the doors to the two bathrooms with working toilets, the only two on board. She felt nervous, being here, and frankly terrified of catching this awful thing herself.
“Can I do anything to help?” she asked.
“Try Flaminia,” he said. “She might be able to think of something.”
A couple of days ago, when the norovirus epidemic became serious, a retired nurse named Flaminia had come out of the crowd of passengers to offer her services. She was a glamorous seventyish Italian woman who seemed far more confident than Mike Pruitt. She collected asthma inhalers, unused pain medications, antibiotics, and anti-diarrhetics from the crew and passengers, and was now rationing them to the patients who needed them the most.
Miriam found her in the little room off the grand hallway that had been turned into the makeshift dispensary.
“Antibiotics,” said Flaminia, holding up a bottle as Miriam entered. “Look, here, how much is left in this bottle. They took half the course and then they stopped taking them. Very bad practice. Not that these are any use against this virus.”
“I came to see if I could help you. I’m Miriam. I’m with the string quartet.”
Flaminia gazed at her for a moment as if skeptically assessing her potential usefulness. “The restaurant crew brings water, the stewards help with cleaning,” she said. “But maybe…”
“I have no nursing training, but I did raise two children,” Miriam added.
“There is really very little we can do for them,” said Flaminia. She added in a half whisper, “Three people already have died.”
Miriam stared at her, horrorstruck. “People died?”
“Shhh,” said Flaminia, putting a finger to her lips, glancing at the open door. “The crew doesn’t want us to know. They’re afraid of panic. They even tried to hide it from me, but how could they. I saw them, removing the bodies, very early this morning. This is a terrible epidemic. More will die tonight. Nothing we can do about it.”
“Where did they put the bodies?” said Miriam, aghast.
Flaminia gave an expressive, pragmatic Italian shrug. “Maybe overboard, who knows?”
“Oh, how awful.” Miriam braced herself with a hand on the table. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise. But what can I do? What do you need?”
“Play something, maybe. Music. For the patients.” Flaminia ticked her tongue against her front teeth and nodded. “Yes. Some music might be very nice for them. Make them forget they’re sick.”
“I’ll go and get my violin,” said Miriam. “I’ll be right back.”
She hurried out and climbed the stairs back up to the owner’s suite. There she found Isaac and Rivka exactly where she’d left them earlier, sitting side by side on the main balcony, staring in silence at the horizon.
“Isaac,” she said. “Come. I need you. Get your viola. We’re going down to play for the sick people, the nurse asked me.”
He made a face like a fussy baby confronted for the first time with a new food. “Right now, you want to do this?”
“What, you’re too busy? Yes, right now!”
“The two of us? Play what?”
“Anything. One of the five thousand pieces we know. These people are dying, Isaac!” He eyed her, hesitating. “Forget it,” she said.
She turned back into the suite, fetched her violin out of the closet, and went out along the catwalk. When she got to the top of the stairway, she stopped and turned back to see Isaac, lumbering toward her, shading his face with his hand to block the sunlight, carrying his bulky viola case. In that moment she felt that in all the years they’d been together she had never been happier to see him.
* * *
*
As soon as Christine left the galley with her friend, Mick’s mood dropped. He felt sluggish, depressed, on the verge of unleashing his pent-up anger. They should have been in Honolulu days ago. He’d been eligible for shore leave on this cruise. But instead he was stuck in this dark, airless, infernally hot kitchen while food supplies steadily dwindled. He didn’t know where else to go.
Kenji had been hit by the norovirus two days before, and had joined all the other quarantined sick people writhing in deck beds on the promenade. So Mick was in charge. But there was so little left for anyone to do that the crew had started spending most of their time up on the main deck with the walkouts, doing nothing, waiting. Christine was the only one who came down to the galley regularly. And now that she was gone…
The dark galley air felt thick with a residual static-electric energy, reverberated with all the furious work that had gone on down here before the engines died. So many people, so much heat. It made him weirdly nostalgic. He almost wanted to crawl into a supply closet and hide there, like a little kid, hoping that if he squeezed his eyes shut and counted to three, it would all be the same again when he came out, the galley full of people, food, action, with bright lights gleaming on stainless steel, the air roaring with the vents and air-conditioning, the stoves flaming with heat.
He remembered the captain’s table dinner, when he had given that impromptu speech about Chef Viktor, how Laurens had reacted, the withering scorn. Save your private memoirs for old age.
Was his story really so boring? So inappropriate? All Mick had done was to put the dish into a personal context. It had taken less than a minute to tell. For the first time, instead of shame, he felt a hot tongue of rage. He hadn’t deserved that rebuke. He should have walked out proudly, unfazed, happy with the success of his dish. Instead, he’d felt crushed. And why? Because some Belgian prick’s ego couldn’t handle someone else stealing his spotlight for one measly second? What did it really matter?
He poked his flashlight into the dry-goods storage room to see what else he could salvage from the old cases of canned fruit cocktail, Spam, deviled ham, and Campbell’s cream soups, asparagus and mushroom and celery. Mick had no idea why most of this stuff was on board. Laurens had insisted that everything be made fresh, from scratch. Maybe the stores were meant to feed the crew, or to fulfill special requests from homesick American passengers who needed a room-service fix of the supermarket foods they were used to. Whatever the reason, Mick was glad to have it, even though much of it probably dated back to the Cold War. He hoped it wouldn’t give everyone botulism, because they would need all of it, starting now. Subtracting the norovirus victims, and counting the entire crew, including the walkouts, there were almost five hundred people on board to feed. Even the canned food wouldn’t hold out for long.
“Right in here,” he heard a familiar voice saying behind him. It was Consuelo. “I think there’s at least three cases.”
“Let’s take two of them,” came the French-accented voice of Jean-Luc. “It’s ours as much as theirs.”
“Hey,” Mick said, turning to flash his light on them. “What are you doing?”
Consuelo jumped a little. Her hair was loose, hanging in wild dark strings around her face, which was dark from the sun. Her arms looked sinewy and tensed for trouble. She wore a sweat-stained T-shirt and a pair of grubby trousers. “We’re running low on food,” she said. “We’re hungry. We need supplies.”
“And you were planning to just come in here and steal mine?”
“It belongs to everyone,” said Jean-Luc. He looked as disheveled as Consuelo. His scalp hadn’t been shaved in a while, and his short thick hair stood in a fluffy black skullcap, just beginning to curl. “We’re only taking Spam. Maybe some soup. The passengers, they don’t eat that shit, non?”
“The passengers are going to have to eat that shit,” said Mick. “Starting tonight. Besides, there’s an airdrop coming.”
“Yeah right,” said Consuelo. “I don’t trust those pendejos.”
The two rogue chefs faced him wordlessly, their hands hanging at their sides wi
th incipient threat, their faces hard. Mick looked back at them, ready to take them on if he had to, but far from sure that he could. They inched closer to him, crowding him, forcing him back into the storage room. Jean-Luc picked up a case of Spam. Consuelo took one of soup and hefted it as if she were planning to throw it at him.
“I don’t want to fight you two for some stupid Spam,” said Mick, talking fast, holding his ground. “But you can’t steal from me. You should have asked me for it. Are we enemies? Why? I did nothing to you. The passengers, they did nothing to you. We’re all stuck here together. Why are you making this a war? Put those down. I mean it.”
Jean-Luc hefted his heavy box. “We are taking these and leaving those for you.”
Consuelo hesitated. Mick saw something in her face. Maybe she was remembering how he’d stuck up for her, treated her fairly. He decided to assume he had an opening and press it hard. He looked at her, ignoring Jean-Luc’s mouth-breathing hotheadedness, and said, “We’re all stuck out here in the middle of the ocean, and we’re running out of food. Can we pool our resources instead of fighting over them? Let’s work together, this is stupid.”
Consuelo said nothing. She turned and walked out with her box of cream of celery soup. Jean-Luc followed behind her with his box of Spam, and Mick was alone again. He turned off his flashlight and stood in the dark. He wasn’t even mad. He felt nothing, in fact. All those years, every day, he had hurled himself into the kitchen at dawn, gone sleepless on the night crew, worked long extra hours without overtime pay, just for the private, dumb satisfaction of flaying himself on the wheel of the mill. He’d seen it as a badge of honor, an accomplishment of will and dedication. He’d believed, stupidly, that he’d be rewarded for it. He’d assumed that there was a point to it, that it would lead somewhere better. Now the whole idea seemed like the punch line to an unfunny cosmic joke on Mick.
The Isabella moaned, deep in her belly, somewhere just below his feet: an eerie, prolonged, echoing underwater squeal. It sounded to him like friction and torque between her ribs and her keel, straining at her bolts in different directions, as she rocked gently in the shallow swells. He could feel rumblings along with the noises, the tremors of her discomfort, as if she were waking up from a long deep sleep to discover she was in pain.
The Last Cruise Page 23