I found that a truly astonishing story and wasn’t sure that I believed it, but my thoughts were interrupted by the computer man, John Killington, who said, “That lady is really asking for trouble if she hops a taxicab in Tangier. That’s not something you do in third-world countries. The first thing I was told when I went to Russia on business was to avoid taxis you hadn’t called yourself. The gypsy cabbies will take you out into the country, rob you, and toss you out of the car.”
“You’re right,” I agreed morosely. “Almost that very thing happened to me in Barcelona.” Then the pianist began singing “September Song.” That was really too much. Here were Jason and I, getting older—certainly not November old, but perhaps October, which the song skipped, and free to enjoy traveling in each other’s company before we reached December and were too old—and what was Jason doing? Talking toxins in the middle of the Canadian wheat fields. I could have wept. Instead I excused myself and went to my room. My empty room.
As I passed out of the nightclub, I heard Mrs. Gross, who had joined another table, saying that she’d found hair, not her own, in her shower, and she intended to lodge a complaint. Now that was really disgusting, if true, I thought, so I stopped and advised her to talk to Ombudslady Sandy Sechrest.
“I’d say that’s a made-up name,” muttered Mrs. Gross. “She probably picked it out to make herself seem more nautical and less like all the other perky cheerleader types.”
I thought of warning Mrs. Gross about her chances of being charged with mutiny by the cruise line and put off the ship or robbed and dumped by a third-world cabbie, but I doubted that she’d listen since she’d paid no attention to my advice about seeing the ombudslady.
Once back in our suite, I put on my nightgown, ate a package of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts from the room bar, and finished my column—there’s nothing like chocolate to chase away the blues—but still my friend and my mother-in-law hadn’t returned. Feeling very lonely because they both seemed to have acquired male companions, and I was all by myself, I went to bed. This was not turning out to be as much fun as I had expected. But tomorrow was Tangier, which sounded so exotic. Probably the food would be, too, and having had much more sleep than my roommates would get, I’d be ready for the adventure instead of tired and grumpy.
I woke up only once, and that was when Commander Levinson and Jason’s mother came in talking about Mrs. Gross, who had staggered off with a bottle in her hand and taken the elevator to the wrong floor. I buried my head under my pillow and went back to sleep.
15
Uninvited Down Below
The Hijackers
Bruce Hartwig dropped into a chair in the officers’ section of the crew dining room and blew out an angry breath. “We’ve got a goddamned old feminist crone on board. Raised a ruckus at the show tonight, and I had to drag the comedian out in the middle of his act. Marbella’s on his high horse and laid into the show director, so she got pissy and said she’d pull all the entertainers if we dumped Russell.”
“Russell is disgusting—not at all what’s appropriate for this group,” said Hanna. “I find him offensive myself.”
Hartwig shrugged. “We’ve also got a thriller writer called the Wild Welshman—Owen Griffith. Anyone ever heard of him?” No one had. “Well, let’s hope he doesn’t think he’s some Murder-She-Wrote type who wants to solve real crimes.”
Froder laughed. “So ve give him some thrills. Maybe he is never hijacked before. He can write a book, und ve sue him for some of der money.”
“We’ve better things to worry about, me darlin’s,” said the Irishman. “Just received a bulletin. We’ve got a deadbeat on our passenger list. Queen of the Southern Seas passed the word. A woman named Gross, R. L. Gross, is suing them for poisoning her on a cruise from Singapore to Hong Kong. Their ship’s doctor says there was nothing wrong with her.”
“You call that a problem?” snapped Hartwig. “Let her sue the line. Won’t make any difference to us once we’re gone. But if the entertainers quit, we’ll have a load of angry passengers before we ever hijack the ship. We need to keep them happy until we clear the Canaries. After that, we’ve got a day or two before they get really mad and think about making trouble.”
“The guns will take care of that,” said Hanna disdainfully. “It’s not as if we’re hijacking two hundred commandos. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the passengers, Bruce.”
“Well, he should be,” said a croaking voice from the doorway, taking them all by surprise. “Because I intend not only to sue, but to tell the captain your plans.”
“That’s her. The deadbeat,” said the Irishman. “Southern Seas sent a photo.”
Bruce Hartwig stood up and walked toward Mrs. Gross, who had forgotten completely that she had come to complain about alien hairs in her shower. “Stay away from me,” she said, “or I’ll sue you personally and have you arrested as well.” Her voice had climbed from a low croak to a high one and reminded Hartwig of a parakeet his mother had let loose in the house when he did something to irritate her. He’d hated, and still did hate, birds. He reached out for the woman’s arm, thinking that there was no one in the brig. They could drug her and hide her in there until they took over the ship. Since he controlled the brig, it shouldn’t be a problem.
“Look, Mrs. Gross,” he said with the smile that always disarmed people, even on his admittedly ugly face. He could see Patek coming up on the other side of her. “You must have misunderstood—” The old bitch kicked him in the knee.
Before Hartwig could get control of his temper, Patel slid between her and the door and wrapped his arm around her neck. When she struggled, they all heard the sharp crack of brittle bones breaking, and the old woman slumped, head askew, against the head steward.
“Dead?” asked Froder calmly.
“She better not be,” snarled Hartwig.
“Alive, she is problem we can’t solve. Dead she is no worry.” Patek let her slide to the floor and rubbed his hands against the legs of his uniform as if disposing of any essence she might have left on him.
“Hell, all we had to do was drug her and hide her until—”
“No, Bruce. Better she is dead,” said Patek as he locked the door to the dining room. “We dump her overboard and—”
“—risk her getting caught in the propellers?” asked Froder. “Then she vould be discovered. Broken neck und absence of vater in der lungs vould be necessary to explain.”
“Well, we can’t keep her on board dead,” protested Hanna. “That’s disgusting. She’ll start to smell.”
“Maybe not,” said Hartwig thoughtfully. “I can take care of it. But, Patek, I give the orders here. You’ve screwed things up, and I don’t like it.”
Patek said nothing. He sat down and resumed sipping his cup of tea.
“Don’t know what you’re planning, laddie,” said the Irishman to Hartwig, “but people are going to notice she’s missing.”
Absently, Hartwig scratched the chest hair that showed above the open shirt of his tux. “So, you fix the computers, Patrick. I want them to show that she left the ship in the morning and never returned.”
Hanna nodded. “Very good. She says to people in the club that she won’t take our tours. She’ll get a taxi to take her around Tangier. It’s cheaper. Who knows what might happen to an old woman in an Arab taxi in an Arab country.”
Hartwig nodded. “So after the tours return, we use the loudspeakers a couple of times to ask passenger Gross to call the desk, and then we leave.”
“Will she be aboard or dumped in Tangier?” asked the Irishman. “Southern Seas will think we wouldn’t let her back on, laddie.”
“Cut the Irish crap,” Hartwig replied. “The whereabouts of Mrs. Gross will be my business. Mine and Patek’s.”
“Just make sure she doesn’t start to smell,” murmured Hanna. “Housekeeping doesn’t want to deal with a rotting corpse.”
“We’ll need some of those black plastic bags,” said Hartwig when everyone
but Patek had gone. “The heavy ones we use to get rid of medical waste.”
16
Off the Coast of Morocco
Carolyn
Because I’d gone to bed early, I woke up early, or maybe it was jet lag still playing havoc with my internal clock. At any rate, I could see light through the drapes, and Luz was fast asleep, as well she might be. I’d never heard her come in. The ship was almost motionless in the water, so I assumed that we were off the coast of Morocco. After dressing quickly in the lightest, whitest outfit I had, I applied more sunscreen than makeup and tiptoed to the sliding balcony doors. And there it was: rippling blue water lightly shaded with pink from the rising sun, and the white, flat-roofed buildings of Tangier climbing away from the Strait of Gibraltar—the Barbary Coast, pirates, souks. I tiptoed back for my wide sun hat and scuttled out of the suite. We were scheduled for the nine o’clock tour, but that didn’t mean I had to sit around waiting for Vera and Luz to wake up. What if they decided to sleep in? Well, not me.
Herkule—Didn’t the man ever sleep?—caught me on my way to the elevator and whispered conspiratorially, “You know lobster?” I had no idea what he meant. Was Lobster someone on the boat? If so, how unfortunate to be named for such a tasty but unattractive creature.
“Lunch is lobster. With pastas. I have snipples from kitchen once. Is many tasteful, so yummy.” He sighed rapturously. “Not to miss.”
Not that I didn’t like lobster pasta, but I wasn’t cutting short my time in Tangier to get back for it. I thanked Herkule for the tip about lunch—hoping we’d have lunch in Tangier— and took the elevator to the dining room, which was almost empty, only three or four people. During breakfast and lunch, we could sit wherever we pleased. I chose an empty table with a view of the city, shivering with delight at the exotic scene before me.
After glancing over my menu, I settled on crab Benedict, which evidently substituted crab for the Canadian bacon in the traditional recipe. If Herkule asked me about lobster, I could talk about crab. After all, they’re both shellfish. With the table to myself, I opened my Eyewitness Travel Guide: Morocco. I’d hardly ordered and read my way through the eighth-century Phoenician settlement at Tangier, the later Carthaginian and Roman towns, all BC, and the AD 711 gathering of Arab and Berber forces to sail the Strait and conquer Spain, when the Crosswayses invited themselves to join me.
I’m sure they’re very nice environmental types, but I really would have enjoyed my crab Benedict more if it hadn’t been accompanied by their agitated descriptions of all the awful things that cruise ships dump into the sea—sewage full of fecal matter and dangerous bacteria, petroleum waste that leaves nasty slicks, dirty gray water from dishwashers and laundry facilities with the accompanying chemicals in the detergents, not to mention other toxic substances. Jason would have been enthralled.
“When we have vacation time, we cruise to see what they’re up to,” said Kev.
“But don’t tell anyone,” Bev added. “They’d put us off the ship. All they care about is money.”
I gulped down my last bite of crab Benedict, took the last sip of coffee, left the toast, although a luscious looking jam in a pretty periwinkle pot accompanied it, and promised to be circumspect about their mission, whatever it was, aboard the Bountiful Feast. Having escaped, I checked my watch, assured that I’d never again feel comfortable swimming in the sea, and just when I was beginning to recover from a terrifying experience of an aquatic nature in Northern France.
With an hour and a half before the tour left, I went back to the suite to see if anyone had awakened. Both Vera and Luz were gone, which made me a little sad, so I wrapped a few of Jason’s bonbons in Kleenex and tucked them in my purse, unplugged my laptop, and left to find a nice deck chair on a nonsmoking deck.
I’d consumed a bonbon and written two paragraphs about crab Benedict when a somewhat ursine-looking man plopped himself down beside me and opened his own laptop. “You a writer?” he asked.
“Food columnist,” I replied, peeking at him out of the corner of my eye as I continued to type so that he’d know I wasn’t interested in conversation. He was stocky and muscular with rather dark skin, wild black hair, and an English accent. Actually a rather nice-looking man in a rough sort of way. His clothes certainly needed ironing. Perhaps he’d packed for himself. “The ship will iron your clothes if you like,” I couldn’t resist telling him.
“I never allow my clothes to be ironed,” he replied. “It’s against my principles as a thriller writer and international adventurer. Owen Griffith.” He lifted a broad hand from his keyboard and shoved it in my direction.
Obviously I was meant to shake it, so I did. His grip and handshake were so vigorous I felt that he might have dislocated my elbow, so I withdrew my own hand hastily.
“Food columnist? Doesn’t sound like much fun,” he remarked.
“It’s my first job, and I like it very much. I even get paid for it,” I replied defensively. I’d heard of Owen Griffith and thought he was a best-selling author, although I’d never read any of his books. “If you’re an international adventurer, perhaps you can tell me if a single, elderly woman hiring a taxi in a third-world country would be putting herself in danger.”
“I wouldn’t call you elderly,” he replied. “In fact, you’re bloody good-looking and younger than I am, I’d guess. What’s your name?”
“I wasn’t referring to myself as elderly. I’m worried about an acquaintance who plans to skip the tour and—”
“Right. Then she’d be an old fool. Tell her to forget it. It’s a bloody stupid idea.”
“Just what I thought,” I replied as I mused on his use of the word bloody and came to the conclusion that it must derive from an ancient blasphemy such as God’s blood, which morphed over time into s’blud and so forth. After frowning at Mr. Griffith, I saved my two paragraphs and closed my computer. Perhaps I could catch Mrs. Gross before she embarked on a foolish expedition.
“Where are you going?” he called after me. He sounded rather peeved at my abrupt departure. Ah well, I’d introduce myself properly and explain the history of the adjective bloody if I ever saw him again. Perhaps he’d want to excise it from his vocabulary. With only two hundred passengers on the ship, I’d no doubt see him one of these days.
I put a call through to Mrs. Gross’s room since the perky young woman at the desk wouldn’t give me her room number. However, no one answered. Then I searched for the gangway that led off the ship. There was a desk with a sign that advised passengers to have their personal identification cards swiped before leaving the Bountiful Feast. Besides the uniformed officer behind the desk, the ugly security chief was lounging against a wall. He seemed like the right person to talk to, so I approached, introduced myself, and explained my worries about Mrs. Gross.
“Gross? She’s that tall, elderly lady who wears a brown dress to dinner?” I nodded. Mr. Hartwig said she hadn’t left while he’d been there. “You got a Mrs. Gross signed up for any of the tours, Mark?” he then called out. Mark checked his computer and shook his head.
“Oh, dear,” I murmured. “I’ve been told that it’s dangerous for a single, elderly woman to hire a cab and go off sightseeing on her own. Perhaps you could keep an eye out for her and warn her of the possible consequences.”
“Sure, but she strikes me as a cantankerous old lady,” he said. “She’s not likely to listen.”
Remembering my few encounters with Mrs. Gross, I had to agree. Then I recalled hearing my mother-in-law and Commander Levinson talking about how drunk Mrs. Gross had appeared the night before. Perhaps she’d been in her room sleeping off a hangover when I called. She might sleep right through the day and miss Tangier entirely, which, for her, would certainly be the safest thing. How sad that a woman her age, evidently a wealthy woman who could afford anything she wanted, was an alcoholic. “I do appreciate your concern, Mr. Hartwig,” I said politely, and turned to make my way back upstairs. Did one say “upstairs” on a ship? Or was there
some nautical term?
17
“Hitler in a White Dress”
Luz
Last night Dr. Beau and I had gone off to the outdoor bar to toss down a few drinks and swap stories about grisly corpses. I stayed up way too late, slept late, and would have missed the tour if Vera hadn’t dragged me out of bed. I didn’t catch up with Carolyn until we walked down to the gangway that put us on shore. From there, a bus picked us up and chugged off to a neighborhood that was really crowded— narrow, crooked streets stuffed with people. Tourists, guys in robes, women in tents. And it was hot. Damn. I was going to sweat on today’s fancy—Babette called them casual—clothes.
Our guide was a little guy with a white beard, a white robe, leather shoes that curled up at the toes, and a fancy little hat—not one of those black-and-white checkered Yasser Arafat deals. This one was like a beanie that stuck up a couple of inches and had colored designs. Looked like something my tia Guadalupe might have crocheted. The guy’s voice rattled and grated like my car the time some neighborhood kids loaded the hubcaps with gravel. Little bastards. That was when I was still married to my ex and still a cop.
The guide had a whistle around his neck and told us—I think; I couldn’t understand him very well, although he mostly yelled—that we had to line up and stay in line so he wouldn’t lose any of us in the alleys or the . . . soup is what it sounded like. Carolyn said it was souk, like market. Then he handed out scarves to all us women and said we had to put them over our hair. Vera, who was wearing this little cotton hat with a brim, griped about the scarf, and he blew his whistle in her face. Before she could tear the guide’s head off, the commander grabbed her arm and told her not to make trouble in a Muslim country.
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