by John Straley
The big Caribbean man said, “It means ‘The Unknown of the Seine.’”
“Who is the girl in the drawing?” I asked, still nodding toward the party that wasn’t there now but rising above us.
“That is her, sir.”
“Who?”
“The Unknown, sir.” And he smiled broadly, showing two rows of perfect white teeth but for the one gold cap adjacent to the left canine.
I stayed in our room watching Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, while Jane Marie danced at the captain’s reception. The warm room and the rolling of the ship made me sleepy. I hardly woke when my roommates came in. They were laughing and telling stories. Todd threw off his suit and clambered up to the bunk above me. I watched Jane Marie take off her pearls and unzip her dress in the bathroom. She said nothing to me as she lifted up the blankets of her own bunk.
She lay there silently and after a few moments she said, “Goodnight, Cecil,” and then rolled over.
There was no port or natural light in our stateroom so I had no idea how late or early it was when my eyes came open again. I could not sleep soundly for fear of the strange dream I was having. It was something about the girl. The pale girl who had kissed me. The Unknown.
Sometime either late or early, Jane Marie woke up and went into the bathroom and threw up. I asked her if she was all right and she said something about seasickness, and the closeness of the room. I felt the room sway and closed my eyes against my own nausea.
When I next woke up, there was a slurred voice clipping through the public address system and there seemed to be a lot of commotion in the hall. People walking hurriedly and whispered voices outside our door. I pulled my pants and a T-shirt on and left the room. The fluorescent lights in the hallway buzzed like insects. I could hear the thrum of the engine somewhere deep in the body of the ship and there seemed to be more rolling to the hull. I definitely felt queasy. I padded down the hall.
I tapped softly on the door. When there was no answer I tried the handle; it turned easily. Inside I could hear chamber music playing. Vivaldi. The Four Seasons.
I opened the door and she was lying back with her head propped on four pillows. This time her IV was hooked up. There was a stand next to her bunk and the empty shriveled plastic IV bag hanging like rotten fruit.
Her wig was off and the light glared off of her scalp. She had an empty bedpan on her lap. Her bald head was bent back; her eyes were open and unblinking. She was quite dead.
4
Off the Coast
Cut the Miss Marple shit, Cecil.” Jane Marie shuffled through the wildlife books piled in front of her on the table.
It was morning. I had followed Jane Marie and Todd up to Flag Deck where the breakfast buffet was being served. We sat at a round table near a window on the starboard side watching the near shore of British Columbia slip past. Jane Marie stopped looking at her books and spread cream cheese on half of a toasted bagel. Todd sipped from a tankard-sized glass of orange juice, then suddenly lifted his camera to take a photograph of God knows what.
“This is not Miss Marple shit. I’m telling you this girl was dancing up on the Horizon Deck last evening and by morning she was dead.”
Jane Marie placed some salmon lox on her bagel. “Well then, did you tell anyone else about this . . . ghost woman?”
I speared a forkful of sausage patties. “Yes, Miss Employee of the Month, I did. I went to the doctor’s office. No one was there. I found a phone and reported it to the ship’s operator and they thanked me very much. Then I went back to the girl’s cabin. It was locked.”
“What room was she in?” Jane Marie asked. Her brow was furrowed and she looked as if she were working out a problem in her head.
“Acapulco 800, between our room and the clinic entrance. It’s still locked.”
“Have you spoken to Sonny Walters?” Suddenly she reached out and gripped my wrist. “800? Are you sure it was Acapulco 800?” Her grip tightened.
I tried to pull away and as I leaned back in my chair I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked straight up and saw the inverted image of Sonny Walters smiling down on me.
“Well, good morning, everyone. Sleep well?” His voice was bright in his stage whisper. As I looked around I noticed that at least two-thirds of the people eating in the buffet room had their eyes on Sonny. Men in golf clothes and older women with Cartier scarves all watched him walk and hung on his every word.
“Well, that’s just great!” he said, keeping up the patter even though we hadn’t answered him. Then in a lower voice he whispered to me: “Mr. Younger, I think we should talk in my office.”
“Moonlight Bay,” Jane Marie said loudly as it burst from her memory. Sonny Walters winced and I could feel his fingers tighten on my shoulder.
“Moonlight Bay . . . I heard someone say that over the public address system . . . ‘Moonlight Bay, Acapulco 800.’ I’m sure of it,” Jane Marie insisted.
Todd took his camera down and nodded at me in agreement.
“You know, come to think of it, Cecil,” Todd said slowly, “that is correct. I heard it very distinctly. ‘Moonlight Bay, Acapulco 800,’ just as Jane Marie has remembered. I thought it was quite unusual and that is perhaps why it registered so clearly in my memory.”
“Okay then . . .” Sonny’s voice was building in frustration and his hands were now pulling me by my armpits. I was being pulled to my feet and Todd snapped a couple of pictures of this. Sonny smiled winningly but said through his teeth, “Not here. Darn it. In the office.” It was eerie how he could communicate anger to me and hearty equanimity to the rest of the room. Several women in the far corner watched him and I could tell their hearts were melting as if they wanted to adopt him. Sonny had a strange effect on the majority of the cruisers. This was, I would later learn, part of the stock in trade of a perfect Cruise Director: complete and utmost control over everyone’s sense of happiness. A Cruise Director must radiate it: Fun, Adventure, Possibility. Fun was more like it. Fun as a religion.
As soon as he shut the door to his remarkably small office, he turned and his face both hardened and aged. “What in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?” he said as if he were holding a gun to my chest.
“I was eating my sausages and toast. Until you created a scene out there.” I pointed to the closed door, heightening my dramatic presence. I hoped.
“Oh . . . yeah,” Sonny said petulantly. He flipped over his trash can in one well-practiced move and sat on it. But in the next moment he paused. Then he looked worried. “I didn’t really make a scene out there, did I?” Now I had him worried. Even his perfect teeth seemed to pale, as if that were possible.
“Naw.” I waved a reassuring hand at him and sat down and put my feet up on his desk, thereby taking up most of the available space in the room. “Sonny, you hired me to look into—”
“I didn’t hire you,” he interrupted.
“Okay.” I held my hand up in my best “no argument” gesture. “Your boss hired me to look into the situation with the medical facilities on this boat. Well, the first day out I get drunk and there is a dead girl in Acapulco 800 and you are starting to lose your trademark good sense of humor. Now you can bounce me off the boat, but that won’t be until at least tomorrow when we get into Ketchikan. So why don’t you tell me just a little bit more about your problems?”
Sonny sat silently. Scowling, his boyish good looks turned down like a cracked egg: sort of a Pat Boone about to puke.
“I suppose I could talk to the captain . . .” I said finally.
“No!” Sonny said, both exhausted and pleading. “Don’t talk to the doggone captain!” He bent and flicked the tassel on his loafer. Then he straightened and brushed some imaginary crumbs off of his lemon-yellow crewneck sweater. “It wouldn’t do any good anyway . . .” He sighed, most of his anger gone now. “There are three companies that op
erate this ship, you see, Mr. Younger. I work for the cruise line company. We basically charter the vessel from a larger company. I work for the Great Circle Lines. We’re in charge of the ship’s itinerary and the entertainment. The captain and his crew work for the Empire Shipping Company. The captain operates the boat, and is in charge of all deck staff, crew and the ship’s officers. I am the head of the cruise line on board. I direct the entertainment, shore excursions, and the social staff. Then there is the hotel manager who is in charge of the accommodations and dining on board. You don’t have to worry about them because they really contract with us. So, in effect they report to me. But the captain—no, the captain works for Empire and he is very clear about his authority. You can’t go talking to him. The captain doesn’t even know about you, Mr. Younger.”
By now all petulance was gone and Sonny picked at the cuticle of his left thumb. He was clearly rattled and would not meet my eyes as he went on talking.
“My boss in Miami, the cruise line boss, directed me to report on the . . . Moonlight Bay situation . . . but he made it clear that Empire Shipping is not to catch wind of our investigation.” Sonny waved his hand around as if engulfed by a swarm of gnats. “Everyone is so, you know, afraid of . . . oh, I don’t know, bad publicity and lawsuits, that sort of thing. My boss wants me . . . and you . . . to handle this situation before it gets out of hand and the shipping company finds out and pulls out of our charter agreement.”
I nodded. “Okay, so the captain and the shipping company mustn’t know. Now, tell me about the Moonlight Bay situation.”
Sonny stopped picking at his thumb. He looked me square in the eyes in what could have been an exercise from one of his acting classes.
“‘Moonlight Bay’ is the term we use when we have had a death on board. We have a protocol, Mr. Younger. When there is a death, the stewards know to secure the room immediately. If there are relatives, we assign a member of the entertainment staff to comfort them. We take care of the body and the paperwork, and we try to do it without alarming any of the other passengers. Death on board a ship can ruin a person’s vacation experience,” he concluded grimly.
“I can imagine,” I said, sounding more sarcastic than I had intended.
“Listen,” Sonny said, and he lowered his eyes, “I know you think I’m ridiculous. I know that because I feel ridiculous when I do this job. Especially when I first started out. I mean . . .” He looked sadly at the clutter of schedules and contracts on his desk. His clothes hung on the edge of filing cabinets. “I mean, I had some luck in musical theater. I had been up for some good roles. I had a really decent cabaret act. I’ve always been old-fashioned . . .” His voice faded away. “I take this job seriously, Mr. Younger. Our passengers are not the super-rich. We are not a top-of-the-line tour. These people have saved a long time for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is just an iron tub floating around on the North Pacific, for gosh sakes. It’s up to me to make it . . . exciting, romantic . . . Whatever crazy expectations our passengers bring with them it’s up to me to make them happy. It’s my job. I do take my job seriously.” His voice had a quaver to it.
“So . . . a Moonlight Bay really fucks up your job,” I said sympathetically.
“To say the least.” He managed a weak smile. “And there are more and more of them. We had six on our last tour.” He looked up at me, his eyebrows arched and his eyes sad. “That’s six in fifteen days. Boy, oh boy, that’s tough, let me tell you.”
“What’s going on? Why the increase?”
“There is a trend everywhere. Of course, some of it is our demographics. We have over seven hundred passengers on ship right now. The median age is sixty-four years. We are bound to have incidental deaths. Elderly people who are not as well as they hoped to be for the trip, heart attacks, strokes, we’ve even had our share of ‘cafe coronaries.’ You know, choking on that last big bite of roast . . . But that doesn’t explain all of it.”
The ship started to roll from side to side; Sonny looked at his watch. “We’re headed for open water. We’ll have some motion for the next four hours or so.” He turned back to me. “AIDS has something to do with it. We started noticing a few years ago that we were getting younger men traveling alone and in pairs. This makes sense; cruising is a very comfortable way to travel. Particularly if you are taking medication and have to regulate your activity. We have more and more passengers who are ill. Men and women coming on board knowing they are approaching the final stages of their disease. We predicted this and tried to accommodate it. More cultural events, educational programs, more activities for the mind and the spirit, if you will. The medical facilities were upgraded. But recently . . .” Sonny stood and pushed past me to his desk. He lifted a sheaf of papers and flipped through them. “. . . we started noticing a pattern of nonpayment.”
“What?” I asked, not sure I was hearing him right.
“Nonpayment. People were going first cabin, Horizon Deck, and opening huge bar tabs, and then before disembarking they were choosing to end their lives. This is bad enough . . .” He paused. “But they’re putting it all on their credit cards,” he said with the kind of scolding tone of a schoolmaster.
“So they’re dying and stiffing you on their bills . . .”
“Worse,” Sonny said dramatically. “They’re stiffing the credit card company. Many of these passengers are single males. They’ve used up all of their money or dispersed it before they come aboard the ship. There is no estate to go after.”
“The card companies still pay you. Why is this a problem? . . . Well, other than it might dampen the festival atmosphere, with your passengers dropping like flies.”
“It’s much more serious than you may even imagine.” Sonny’s voice was headed up another octave. “The credit card companies are threatening to stop honoring our accounts.”
“So?”
“What do you mean—so? Mr. Younger, nobody writes checks for reservations. No one travels on money. If we couldn’t take credit cards, we’re basically out of business.”
The ship lurched once to port and a sheaf of papers fell off the corner of Sonny’s desk and scattered on the floor.
“The credit card companies are asking that we take steps to address the situation.”
“Can you stop people from killing themselves?” I held my hands out, palms up.
“There’s more to the picture. There are now tour groups. Groups dedicated to providing services specifically for this clientele.”
“L’Inconnue de la Seine.”
“Exactly. These travel companies are growing more and more popular. They help their clients prepare, and they find the right ships and tours to travel on. For some reason our ship, and particularly the Alaska voyages, has become more and more popular with these groups.”
“What does your ship’s doctor say?”
“Now we are getting to the point. The ship’s doctor is an officer of the boat. He works for the vessel company. He works for the captain. The doctor really is not very helpful to us.”
“He won’t answer questions?”
“Not about this subject.” Sonny shook his head sadly.
“So . . .” I spoke slowly and clearly, knowing this might be the only contact I would make with Sonny. “You want me to check out the ship’s doctor. You want me to find out if he is doing anything to encourage these . . . Moonlight Bays.”
“I think he gets a cut from these tour groups. I just know he is profiting from this.” Sonny was showing more peevishness now that the subject of death and credit card fraud was out in the open.
“And if you can take whatever dirt I come up with to the ship’s company, you might get him fired. Then you hopefully find a doctor who will make the ship a little less . . . hospitable for the death tour industry.”
“You have to understand, Mr. Younger. Everyone is welcome on our ship. We can’
t afford to get the reputation of being unfriendly towards passengers with special needs.”
When I had first met Sonny Walters I’d assumed he was what he appeared to be: a good-looking and shallow twit, in the mold of a singing towel boy who had been given too much authority. Now I was beginning to get the sense that there was something more going on with him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out what. “Why didn’t you just tell me this when we first spoke?”
“For one thing, I was hoping we wouldn’t really need you. I don’t know, I was hoping it would just go away. I wanted to get you on board and break you in slowly. On these two-week trips, you’ll see, there is a longer break-in period. A longer settling-in period. This death, this girl in Acapulco 800, came too fast. They don’t usually start dying until much later in the trip. Usually until after Ketchikan or Sitka.”
He smiled professionally.
I stood up and wiped my hands together, acting as if I were ready to go. Sonny sat quickly back on his overturned wastebasket and waved me to sit back down again.
“The culture on board ship is very interesting, Mr. Younger . . . Cecil, there are some things you should be aware of. The ship’s crew—that is the sailors and the officers, the people who actually make this thing move—these people are part of a union. No one else on board is union. Both companies, mine and the hotel contractor, have worked hard to keep it that way. The hotel and restaurant staff is made up largely of Filipino and Indonesian workers. On this cruise we also have a large number of Caribbean islanders. The Filipinos are great workers and they’re perfectly suited for the job but the thinking in the industry in the last few years is not to let the Filipino workers form a majority or you can see we’d be right back in the union problem . . .” Sonny stretched his hands out before him, as if imploring me.
“The ship’s crew is similarly a mix. The captain is a Serb, the first officer is Panamanian, the chief engineer is Polish, and there are a growing number of other eastern European sailors on board. The lower down you go into the ship, of course, the more islanders you’ll find.”