Bon Bon Voyage

by Nancy Fairbanks

  Luz

  Evidently some guy lured Carolyn onto a treadmill and damn near killed her. I lent her some of my capsaicin cream to rub in where it hurt and helped her into bed while she muttered about someone named Crossways being the undercover killer of Mrs. Gross. I figured she just needed some sleep, so I didn’t wake her up until dinnertime.

  Dinner was great, as usual, but we got some bad news over the loudspeaker system. At least Carolyn thought it was bad news. We wouldn’t be stopping at Casablanca because there were fundamentalists rioting there, and the State Department had warned Americans off. Instead, we were heading for the Canary Islands, and if things calmed down, maybe we could stop at Casablanca on the way back. Fine with me. As soon as I heard I’d have to take my shoes off to get into this mosque Carolyn was so crazy to see, I lost interest in Casablanca. My first night barefoot on the boat was enough for me. I could just imagine a bunch of American-hating Arabs stepping on my toes to get even for me visiting their mosque.

  Carolyn took the news badly. She really wanted to see the mosque, even if she had to take off her shoes. After all, she said, they had carpets all over the place. Arabs and Persians were famous for their carpets, which meant, I figured, that she wanted to buy herself a carpet in Casablanca. And then there was Mrs. Gross, who was still missing. If Mrs. Gross was figuring on catching the boat at Casablanca, what was she going to do? Carolyn wanted to know. On the other hand, if the woman wasn’t getting on at Casablanca, she was probably dead—put off the boat by the cruise line or killed by this Crossways or a taxi driver.

  Harriet Barber thought the last was likely because she and her husband had been warned about cab drivers when they visited Russia. Carolyn nodded vigorously over her first dessert. She’d heard about Russian cab drivers. Harriet said she’d taken care of that by photographing their driver with her cell phone and sending his picture to the hotel in case they didn’t get back on time. Smart woman, Harriet. I had to like her because she’d pitched in and sat on the Barbary ape so I could handcuff him.

  The other interesting thing that happened at dinner was between Barney and Vera. Marshand, the cereal guy, got on Vera’s case because she was bitching about all the male stewards with not enough females to balance them off. That’s when Barney said to Marshand, “I have to say, Greg, that I like a smart, assertive woman who knows her mind and speaks it—a woman who can take care of herself.”

  Vera gave him a nod and said, “Well, I like a man who doesn’t try to comb his hair over a bald spot, which everybody knows looks ridiculous.” The point of this was that Barney had a bald spot, but what hair he had left was buzz cut, military fashion. No comb-overs for him. Marshand tried the comb-over, but it didn’t work and looked stupid. I wondered if Vera and Barney were sleeping together. And if they were, how Carolyn would react if she tumbled to it. Although I thought about asking her, just for the hell of it, she took off after her second dessert and only turned up a couple of hours later, really excited.

  “Guess what the man from Silicon Valley, Mr. Killington, just found out for me? Mrs. Gross never left the ship at all in Tangier. Someone hacked into the computer and made it look like she’d checked off the ship, but the entry was put in the night before we got to Tangier.”

  “How did the Silicon Valley guy find that out? And what’s with his ponytail?”

  “It’s probably the style in Silicon Valley. I’ve heard they don’t even wear suits to work, although some of those companies are worth billions, and their people earn lots and lots of money. Mr. Killington—John, I think—is an executive, but when I asked if he could find out for me, he was so excited. He said, ‘You mean hack into their system? Sure, I can. It’ll be like the old days in college,’ and I could hardly keep up with him when he headed for the computer room. It didn’t take him that long, and while I waited for him to finish, I went online myself and ordered a pair of stained-glass dresser lamps from the Smithsonian site. They look like something that architect—from the prairie school—might have designed. What is his name? Ah! Frank Lloyd Wright. Anyway, the point is, if she didn’t get off the boat, where is she?” Carolyn asked triumphantly.

  “Good question,” I had to agree, although I didn’t want to think about it just then because my knees were aching from hiking around the ship with Dr. Beau. He kept telling me that exercise was good for what ailed me. Maybe, but after all, Beau was a pathologist. I wasn’t dead yet, so what did he know?

  The Hijackers

  “So ve’re here,” said Froder. “Meeting so often is not gut idea. Look vat happened last time. So vat’s the problem?”

  “You mean besides the fact that I can’t get in touch with the helicopter pilots because the fuckin’ fundamentalists are keeping us from docking in Casablanca?” Hartwig snarled.

  “I can put you in touch with them if they’re online,” Patrick offered.

  “And leave footprints in the computer. Not unless we have to.”

  “Then, what?” asked Hanna.

  “Gross. Patek, why the hell did you have to kill the woman? There’s this food columnist the line gave a free ride in return for publicity. She’s chasing me around insisting that I call the consulate in Morocco to send out people looking for Gross. She even accused me of putting Gross off the boat at Tangier for causing trouble.”

  “I take care of her,” said Patek. “What name?”

  “Leave her alone,” Hartwig retorted. “For now.”

  21

  Searching by Telephone and Internet

  Jason

  I had slept badly in my room on the great plains of Canada, but I collected myself and gave an admirable paper, “A Theoretical Process for Using Toxic Mine Tailings,” which was well received by my colleagues and prompted lively discussion. Having finished what had to be accomplished at the meeting, I resigned myself to doing something about my disgruntled wife, although I knew my plan was going to prove costly and time-consuming. First, I made a long-distance call to the cruise line to get her itinerary, dates and places, and permission to join her on the boat in time for Mother’s Day, if that could be arranged.

  After increasingly long waits, which were costing me staggering international long-distance fees, the person taking my call said that there were already three people in my wife’s suite, a situation that made it unlikely that there would be room for me. Irritated and anxious to get to lunch, I informed the woman that she was mistaken; the only person in the suite with my wife was my mother.

  “Well, you’re wrong,” she said, “although for some reason I don’t have the other name. Still, we seem to have lost a passenger. If she doesn’t catch up with the ship soon, I suppose you and Mrs. Blue could use that cabin, but unfortunately, you’ll have to pay for the added accommodations. I see here that Mrs. Blue is sailing as a complimentary passenger and that the line has already agreed to add two other people to her status. I really have to say that one more would be asking too much of the company.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I snapped. “There’ll be a bed for me in the suite. Now where can I fly to get onto the ship before Mother’s Day?”

  “Ummm,” said the woman, whose name was Rhonda. “Well, you’ve waited a bit late to do this. I’d have suggested Casablanca, but we don’t know that they’ll be able to dock there. The first attempt had to be passed up because of the rioting.”

  “Rioting?” I felt like clutching my head and groaning. “My wife was caught in rioting?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Rhonda patiently. “The Bountiful Feast changed its itinerary and headed for the Canaries instead, hoping to stop at Casablanca on the way back to the Mediterranean, but only if it’s safe. We do not let passengers disembark at ports about which the State Department has issued warnings.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” I replied, thinking that if anyone disembarked during a riot, it would be my wife, whom trouble seemed to dog on her travels, with or without me.

  “I think your best possibility would be Tenerife, th
e second stop in the Canary Islands. You say you’re in Canada? The ship won’t leave Tenerife until three p.m. the day after tomorrow. Of course, that’s local time, but that’s the only real chance of arriving by Mother’s Day. On the other hand, Casablanca, the next day, is a possibility, but I can’t assure you that the ship will actually be able to—”

  “It has to be Mother’s Day. Do airplanes fly to Tenerife?”

  “I have no idea, sir. If passengers get off at Tenerife and don’t reboard, they’re more or less on their own.”

  “Wonderful,” I snarled. “I’ll pull up Orbitz. Maybe they can figure out how to get me there in time. And at least I won’t have to pay long-distance rates.”

  “We have a Web site,” said Rhonda defensively.

  “I tried it.”

  “Well, most people don’t want to catch a cruise on some island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Our Web site may not be set up for such an unusual request. I think you should consider meeting your wife at one of the Spanish ports that finish the cruise. I’m sure she’ll forgive you for missing Mother’s Day. I don’t see here that she has children along. Mostly people don’t bring children on our cruises because of the expense. Not that our cruises aren’t worth every penny. Condé Nast Traveller said—wait just a minute. I’ll look up that quotation. It was very—”

  I hung up.

  Carolyn

  We wouldn’t reach our first stop in the Canary Islands until tomorrow. In the meantime, what, if anything, could I do to find out the fate of Mrs. Gross? Of course, I could just wait until we arrived in the Canary Islands and see if she turned up there, but that seemed so unlikely. The islands are in the Atlantic Ocean, which was, as I noticed, bumpier than the Mediterranean. I’d even felt a bit queasy at breakfast, but that had passed.

  I consulted with Luz over waffles bathed in lingonberry sauce, but she said that ordinarily the thing to do would be to contact missing persons at the local police department after forty-eight hours had passed, or, possibly, the FBI, but since we were in the middle of the ocean and we didn’t really know how long Mrs. Gross had been missing, the whole thing was a puzzle. Then Luz went off to visit Dr. Lee in his clinic.

  I, having been given at least a few ideas, went to the computer room. There I accessed Google, where I got e-mail addresses for our state department in Washington, D.C., our embassy in Rabat, and our consulate, which was in Casablanca. Wouldn’t you know? The rioters might well have cut off communication to the consulate. Then I searched for the Tangier police department without much luck. I did learn that Morocco was the first country to recognize U.S. independence, and I found some articles about people being beaten up by Moroccan police, a rather discouraging piece of information. Did I really want to set a violent police department on the trail of poor Mrs. Gross?

  About then, an Irishman, who seemed to run the computer room, although he wasn’t always there, stopped by to ask if I needed any help. Since he was eyeing the page I had on the screen, the one about police brutality in Tangier, I asked how to find information on Casablanca, which I wanted to read since I might not get to go there. He immediately lost interest and went away, and I sent e-mails off telling the various American diplomatic sites my concerns about Mrs. Gross. I really doubted that my e-mails would do much good.

  After all, the government couldn’t even keep up with all the spy information they collected. Consequently, there was no reason to think they’d get to my e-mail about Mrs. Gross before both of us were dead of old age. But at least I was doing the best I could, and lunch was about to be served.

  22

  The Lone Detective

  Carolyn

  I’m not sure which I found more discouraging, the realization that my morning of computer research and messaging was probably a waste of time or the realization that the waistline of my slacks was still tight. At least I could do something about the latter. At lunch I had water instead of wine and a nice leafy salad instead of an entrée. I even gathered an interesting piece of information. While I was trying to talk Luz into joining me in detecting, for old times’ sake if nothing else, a lady interrupted us to say that she’d seen Mrs. Gross the night before she disappeared and that Mrs. Gross had announced her intention of going to find the ombudslady to complain about the alien hair in the shower.

  A lead, I thought, finally! I’d track down Sandy Sechrest to see if she could provide a later sighting of Mrs. Gross, but earlier than the fake computer entry that had her leaving the ship at ten thirty the next morning. Unfortunately, Luz refused to go with me. She said she was going to our suite to relax in the silk “robe-thing” the boutique had provided. So attired, she planned to finish off the rest of Vera’s bonbons and watch television. I tried to imagine my crusty friend devouring bonbons while reclining in a silk robe and watching some romantic movie, of which Herkule had mistakenly provided many.

  Then I discovered that the chef was offering seven flavors of freshly made gelato. All my good intentions about waist control fled, and I ordered small helpings of all seven, the four fruit varieties with strawberries and cream, the three others with chocolate sauce and nuts. Our waiter gave me a peculiar look but produced the requested dessert, and I must say, eating it made me feel much better, even considering the defection of my friend.

  Sandy was in her miniscule office, writing up a free facial for a customer whose silk sweater had been shrunk by the laundry service. When she heard my story about Mrs. Gross, she was, naturally, distressed, although she, too, thought Mrs. Gross would turn up sooner or later, even if it was in court bringing suit against the line for leaving her behind. “I do so try to keep everyone happy,” said Sandy plaintively, “but sometimes nothing I can do works.”

  “I know you do,” I replied consolingly. The poor girl looked on the verge of tears. “But did you see Mrs. Gross the night before we docked in Tangier?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said sadly. “She told me about some hair in her shower, which she insisted was not her own, and I offered to contact her steward the very next day, but that just wasn’t good enough. To tell you the truth, she seemed to have had a bit too much to drink. She was very aggressive; she even cursed and demanded that I write up her complaint, so of course I did. Then she decided to look for her own steward and give him a tongue-lashing, and if she didn’t find him, she said she’d find the head steward, Mr. Patek.

  “I really didn’t want her to do either. The poor stewards are, I’m sorry to say, badly overworked. If her steward had managed to finish for the night and get to bed, I hoped she wouldn’t wake him up. As for Mr. Patek, well, I don’t even like to take complaints to him myself. He can be very— well—abrasive. Goodness knows what he’d have said to her, and I’m the one who’d have had to calm her down.”

  Now that was interesting. “Where would she have found Mr. Patek?” I remembered him from the champagne reception. A dark-skinned, sour-looking man.

  “By that time, probably in crew quarters. He has his own stateroom—all to himself—but I didn’t tell her how to find it. Actually, I was lucky. She didn’t ask. She just went away, muttering to herself. Considering her condition, I imagine she went off to bed. I certainly would have, if I’d been that— well—inebriated.”

  I thanked Miss Sechrest again, was again urged to call her Sandy, and went in search of Mrs. Gross’s steward, not an easy task since no one would tell me the deck and number of Mrs. Gross’s room. I got that by asking Mr. John Killington to hack into the ship’s computer for a second time. He was glad to do it. With the information Mr. Killington provided, I found the room and the steward, but he said he’d remade her bed about eight thirty in the evening and hadn’t seen her since, although it looked as if someone had slept in the bed when he arrived to do the room the next morning. When I asked how late he’d been on duty that night, his face lit up, and he said he’d been in his own bed by midnight, and no one had paged him the whole night. Of course, I then asked how to find Mr. Patek, because John Killington hadn’t b
een able to find the chief steward’s office or cabin number. Mrs. Gross’s steward looked terrified and said he wouldn’t tell me if he knew.

  Since I had no more ideas to pursue, I went to our suite, where I found Luz sprawled on the couch in her silk robe, eating bonbons and watching not a romantic movie, but something that involved a lot of gunfire and wrecked, burning cars. “I don’t know what to do next,” I said woefully over the sounds of shouts and machine guns.

  “Sit down and watch the movie. It’s an old Bruce Willis flick. And I’ve got a cop movie with that Australian guy and his black partner to watch next.”

  “At least you could suggest something,” I said.

  Luz picked up the remote and turned the DVD off. “Hell, I guess keep following her trail. If she ended up in her room that night, that ugly brown dress and her ton of green rocks would be there.”

  “Emeralds,” I murmured. It was a good idea, if they’d let me into her room. However, if the steward was that afraid of Mr. Patek, he probably wouldn’t open the door.

  “If you’re not back in time to dress for dinner, I’ll come looking for you,” said Luz, grinning, and she clicked her movie back on.

  I decided to talk to my friend Herkule, thinking that perhaps he could help, and he did. As we took the elevator to Mrs. Gross’s floor, we discussed the desserts, the raspberry brûlée, the gelato—Herkule loved food, and even when he didn’t get to taste the exciting offerings prepared for the passengers, he always tried to slip into the kitchen to take a look. Not, he added, that the crew wasn’t well fed. He never went hungry, but the food for the passengers, it looked so succulent, which was one of his new words, yesterday’s actually. He mispronounced it, but I did admire his relentless pursuit of English.