A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  With the delivery of the entrée, Sharpe flawlessly pivoted to the persona of a witty, warmhearted, fabulously wealthy guy. Reminiscing about the phone call he received from Nancy Reagan three days after 9/11, the man of a thousand affiliates struck a note of humility. “She was just making some calls. Huge that Mrs. Reagan would think of me.”

  Rad glanced toward Briggs’s table. He was proving himself to be a well-behaved embodiment of the Democratic Party. At the next table over from Briggs’s, Alderson was making the best of having taken the place of Wayne Fero and his angioplasty. The intense Romanesque middle-management type sat across from Rad’s neighbor, somehow, in some way wrong. sipping water like a thin man at a weight-loss convention.

  As the plates were cleared, the late-blooming student of journalism got around to formally introducing herself.

  “Pleased to have you onboard, Ms. Ross,” Rad acknowledged.

  “I cut my teeth watching Fox News,” she whispered, “fair and balanced from the jump.”

  Rad caught a chuckle. “That’s all we can ask for.”

  As they finished the brandied flan and the end of the last sonata surged to quiet, Rad stood and signaled with an affectionate salute that his presence was required on the bridge. Just then, the maître d' rose to the bandstand holding a microphone, diverting attention in the opulent restaurant.

  “Ladies and gentlemen…”

  Reporter Ross took advantage of the shifting murmur, sidling closer to Rad and asking, “I’m hoping for a chance to interview you, sir.”

  “Contact my communications officer, Lieutenant Beckman.”

  All attention was now focused on the maître d' and his pending announcement. “Ladies and gentleman, I’ve just been notified by the bridge that we are passing an unusually large pod of orcas. If you’ll kindly step to the starboard rail, I think you will see something extraordinary.”

  Two hundred chairs pushed back against the polished hardwood floor. Scores of glasses were set on the linen tablecloths. There was a civilized urgency in the way the diners moved toward the side doors, which the deck runners had flung open.

  A not-quite-full moon had banished the overcast gloom and replaced it with crisp clearness, the stars dulled by the penumbral gray-white of moonlight. In any other year, such a clear night would mean a stark temperature drop, even at the height of summer. But tonight, the diners, slightly soused as they were, all wore shirts and blouses. Rad followed their gaze to the water, and though he did not let on, was startled, remembering the sailor’s adage, how every voyage contains something new on the earth.

  The Northstar was cruising in the company of what looked to be hundreds of killer whales. Off starboard they swam, fore, aft, and amidships, between the ship’s hull and a shoreline that betrayed no light of civilization. Hundreds of black backs, cutting dorsal fins, and spectral white markings rising and falling in the worried waves of the channel.

  Briggs was at Rad’s side. “What do you make of it?” Rad asked.

  “It would seem the whales are migrating north en masse about two months earlier than usual, and in unprecedented haste.”

  Ducking back into the dining room, Rad and Briggs made their way to the bridge via the service corridor. Navigator Holdren was seated at his console, transfixed by a billowing formation of tiny blips on his radar monitor. He rose to join the captain and cocaptain at the inch-thick plate glass.

  Orcas often swam deliberately in pods when migrating. But such a giant pod over this much water lent an aspect of collective protean intelligence at work, a telepathic convergence that equaled, in its way, the brainpower on the ship. For a full twenty minutes, the whales stayed abreast, till finally the gargantuan turbines left them in a wake of hell-bent determination.

  “Climate change?” Rad ventured to the men next in the Northstar’s chain of command.

  “It was 87 degrees in Juneau today,” said the believer, Briggs.

  “Global warming?” Rad posited.

  “Nonsense, sir,” said the skeptic, Holdren. “Global temperatures fluctuate, simple fact, and accredited climatologists have confirmed that we’re actually cooling off. If global warming—climate change or whatever—was anthropogenic, wouldn’t it have gotten progressively worse?”

  “Not necessarily,” shot back Briggs. “Climate science is extremely speculative once you go back millennia.”

  “OK, what’s your theory about the unseasonable orca exodus?” Rad asked the cocaptain.

  “They migrate to shed their winter-battered skin in warmer waters, right? My guess is they hit warm water sooner than usual this year, perhaps an El Niño effect, and are headed north early.”

  “Sounds like you’re making my point,” said Holdren.

  “Wait, there’s more,” replied Briggs, “and actually, it’s not a theory but a proven scientific fact about these mammals, studied and found credible, whether or not one believes in anthropogenic climate change. The northern ice cap is shrinking, there’s no debate on that. Put simply, orcas thrive in open water, and steer clear of pack ice and the vicinity of icebergs because such terrestrial features make it hard for them to hunt prey like seals and smaller whales. The more open water in the orca’s territory, the larger that territory grows, and the more uninhibited they can hunt.”

  “How does that explain an early northern migration?” asked Rad.

  “Well,” said the cocaptain, pleased to have the full attention of two climate change skeptics, “these creatures have been migrating for thousands of years, and are much attuned to their environment. Perhaps they sense, or know, that warmer southern waters mean warmer northern waters, less ice, and thus a vastly increased range and optimum feeding scenario.”

  “I’ve read reports, “the cocaptain continued, “that show that narwhales, one of the orca’s sustaining prey, may become endangered because of this unforeseen consequence. If the planet continues to warm, for whatever reason, we will see more climatic oddities, changes in the food chain, and who knows what behavioral adaptations, and extinctions?”

  Thank God that’s over.

  Stan Hundtruk had shed his evening suit for a towel and bathrobe and was making his way to the Siletz Springs Sauna Center, which was twenty doors and a long corridor down from his stateroom.

  At the Captain’s Dinner he’d sat so close to conservatism’s biggest bureaucrat basher that the glint off his flag pin flashed on and off like a beacon. Grant Sharpe, whose on-air yammering and insidious ideology had set the movement for economic justice back decades. Hundtruk would say this for Grant: he was consistent and nearly unequivocal in his condemnation of the public sector. He’d toss off the usual bromides about how he understands that “a lot of good people work for the government” then return to his relentless tarring of public enterprise as disingenuously inefficient, colossally wasteful, and out of sync with the dynamics of capitalism.

  President Obama’s germinating expansion of the public sector bumped ratings higher for conservative talk, but Hundtruk had detected desperation in Sharpe’s broadcasts of late. With all branches of government now seated on the left, Sharpe and his corps of angry white microphone jocks could be reliably cast as the whining remnants of a bygone era.

  The sauna center was deserted, so Hundtruk had his choice of rooms. He looked forward to sweating out the suppressed disavowal of everything he had seen and heard at the captain’s table.

  It had been obvious to Hundtruk from three tables over how hard the Republicans were grooming Captain Squier. Their pursuit of fresh faces was indicative of how devalued the brand was. They were on a mission to draft everyone from Iraq veterans to heroic pilots like Sully Sullenberger, even spinning allusive yarns about the original Midnight Cowboy, conservative actor Jon Voight.

  As cool water hissed over the rocks of the sauna, Hundtruk’s thoughts drifted to the odd assortment at his table. The captain’s pal, Alvin Alderson, embodied all that was securing the Republicans’ status as postmillennial Whigs. Of all the statements made
at the table that night, none of which Hundtruk considered to be remotely moderate, Alderson’s had been the hardest to absorb.

  Every conservative position articulated over the five-course meal this country-clubber reliably trumped. E-verify for undocumented aliens? How about mass deportation, anchor babies and all? Cap and trade? He’d rather burn. Health care? Without tort reform to emasculate the lawyers and enable interstate insurance portability, a public-option health care would happen over the cold dead corpses of staunch opposition.

  Then there was his co investigator, Blythe. All through the meal, her back had been to him, so all he saw was her sheen of Brooke Shields auburn hair. She may have guessed that her placement at the vaunted table had been every bit as ordained as Sharpe’s. She was there because Hundtruk had put her there. Whatever investigative grist she gathered and eventually delivered to Scrimshaw via her iPad would take a circuitous route through a government-issue laptop now comingling with the ship’s propulsive throb in Hundtruk’s room.

  When the whales came, Blythe had turned toward him, and eye contact was unavoidable. She regarded him with the same chilly expression she’d leveled that first time in the Charon offices, when she obviously feared he was coming to take her job. What a waste, this intelligent young woman, indoctrinated by her right-wing parents, pathetically lapsed and yet too caught up in the lie of American exceptionalism to break away.

  He had remained on the starboard deck long after the surging black humps of the orcas became indistinguishable in the moonlit water. Climate change, no doubt, and who knew what other mutations of the natural order could be expected? If allowed to regain power, the drill-baby-drill crowd wouldn’t rest till the seas rose and the ice caps melted like the cubes in Grant Sharpe’s whiskey rocks. Those killer whales knew something that very few people on this cruise had figured out yet.

  The sauna exhaled, and Hundtruk felt the beads of sweat distill the awful politics of the evening. The freshened sauna mist pleasantly blurred his perception of where the wood panels ended and the murmur of the ship’s running began.

  There was a light-but-intrusive knock at his sauna room door. Odd that someone would

  knock, as a full complement of steam rooms waited along a hallway near the Siletz Center’s faux-granite waterfall. Hundtruk spoke with a tone of low preemption. “Yes?”

  “Oh, sorry, sir. Housekeeping, sir.”

  His therapeutic purge broken by the knowledge that a female domestic lurked outside, Hundtruk reminded himself to be patient. There was a great reckoning eminent for this underclass. This multitude of faceless labor would soon help consolidate Democratic power for foreseeable generations. No matter how importune their interruptions, they represented the votes that gilded the path of progressivism and centralized power.

  “I’ll just be a few more minutes,” he called toward the cedar-paneled door.

  “Oh no, sir, please take all the time you need.”

  Hundtruk needed only ten more minutes, after which he stood, wrapped his towel around his waist, found his flip-flops, and left the steaming room. The center was still deserted as he began his walk past the lockers to the showers along a gender-segregating tiled wall. The smell of bleach and the sound of the recirculating waterfall splashing to its limpid pool seemed his only companions until he came to a sauna room door that was wide open. There, a youngish woman bent over the cool acrylic of an outsize sauna with a terry-cloth rag and pump sprayer. She was not the least startled when Hundtruk looked in.

  Too pretty, he caught himself thinking of her black hair with dirty-blond roots. Too pretty and too white.

  She spoke first as they locked eyes across the woody threshold. “How’s your sauna tonight, sir?”

  His instincts were surfacing despite the languor of the sauna, but he kept cool, not wanting to put the woman—Barbara Stafford was the name on her nametag—on alert.

  “Very nice.”

  “Is there anything else I can get you, sir?”

  “No, thank you, Ms. Stafford.”

  It was as if the surname fell anonymously on her ears.

  Back in his stateroom with heightened body temperature, Hundtruk wondered what her Form 1040 would show.

  Folding himself into his bed, he didn’t bury a sudden longing for Shirley into the ready hole of his subconscious. If operative protocol had somehow allowed for spouses to come along on secret assignments, their marriage might have survived. It was all that waiting at home that got to her. He’d met and dated women who worked the partisan trenches and back alleys like he did and held in high regard what he did for a living. They were used to waiting. But Hundtruk believed in the adage that opposites attract, and those women who were the same beast as he never clicked for him.

  One thing he knew for certain, divorce or no divorce. Back in the old days, happier times at least for him, he was certain that Shirley would have agreed with him about the strange woman in the sauna center.

  There was something not quite right about this worker bee.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In her quiet stateroom, the Captain’s Dinner entrée settling in her stomach and the sight of orcas swimming in her mind, Melissa slipped into a diaphanous sleep ensemble that worked perfectly for the unseasonably warm nights. She resolved to find time on the voyage to read-up on these magnificent sea creatures, referred to as killer whales in her youth. As she downed one Advil to pave the way to sleep, her thoughts turned to how she’d never for a moment believed that Lara Svenko had gotten drunk and fallen overboard. It just didn’t figure for a girl who’d grown up on the shores of Lake Stavack.

  Her research showed that teenage Lara had often accompanied her father on his hydraulic repair assignments over school holidays and summers. While Viktor worked, she frequented the local library and plopped herself in family restaurants to wait out the stultifying Augusts. Bored, she would venture beyond the crumbling concrete bulwarks and down onto the beach, where she would mourn the loss of the lake’s ecosystem to a series of industrial blunders. She could not know that a similar blunder was at the root of her mother’s wasting affliction. Nor could she have known that being away during the summers, when the air-conditioning often ran full blast from noon till midnight, likely saved her life as well as her father’s.

  Before settling into bed, Melissa emailed Communications Officer Lieutenant Larry Beckman with a press information request, her second in two days. To throw him off her scent, she’d first asked for the 2008 passenger list, which she’d previously received in Scrimshaw’s packet. Only in the second request did she ask for the crew manifest and employment roster for that year’s cruise. She wanted to wait until she’d seen those before formally requesting an interview with Captain Squier. When investigating deaths on seagoing vessels, you needed to know exactly who was onboard.

  Melissa curled under the covers. Her skepticism about the drunken-fall theory had aspects beyond Lara’s sea legs. It was a good bet that she had been tippling wine at the family table since age ten and that in her accumulated leagues across Stavack’s tempestuous stews with Viktor, she’d sampled the vodka that surely bolstered the spirits of captains and crews. While it had been reported that Lara imbibed two White Russians the night she disappeared, there was nothing in her profile that suggested a woman who would drink herself wobbly, especially while on professional assignment.

  The Captain’s Dinner also cemented Melissa’s impression that the deranged-Republican theory was even more far-fetched than a drunken-fall scenario. On display at the feast was a study in conservative propriety and high-caliber personage.

  That left two foul-play possibilities, employee or stowaway. Given what Melissa had unearthed about Svenko’s apparent love interest, webmistress Barb Stamen—her nature, her predilections—anything seemed possible.

  Melissa sunk down into the navy-with-white-piping berth blanket, the Advil kicking in. More and more insinuations of a crime of passion swept over her consciousness, the kind of crime she’d shown an aptit
ude for solving in the year—or was it the final fifteen minutes? —before the Meltdown.

  It was passion, not politics, that hastened Lara Svenko’s meeting with her maker in the salty deeps that the Northstar now cleaved.

  Across the troubled and transforming North American continent, at that hour Viktor Svenko found strength in strong coffee and carried his daughter’s laptop to a postage-stamp park so mundanely hemmed in, people avoided it.

  6/30/08. The only thing I can say about the perversely fascinating seminar I just attended is that Pat Buchanan would have loved it. The subject: “Immigration: Time for Zero Tolerance?” The speaker, a crypto-fascist Nordic blond from an Arizona think tank, prefaced his remarks with border hawk bullshit about the historical contributions of immigrants while baldly inferring that “that was then, this is now.” Jared Tannhauser—for those of you taking notes—projected the aura of country club Republicanism, but dig deeper and it is evident that his heart belongs to the far right. This evil man had the audacity to throw down the metaphor of the United States as a lifeboat capable of being swamped and sunk by a foreign invasion. “We can’t welcome a world of refugees to our shores without sacrificing our freedoms, our futures, our children’s futures, and their children’s futures.”

  Invoking the lifeboat, Tannhauser forgot that in Hitchcock’s film, it is the fascist U-boat commander who is shown to be unworthy after the humanist Judeo-Christians haul him out of the drink. The (I’m just gonna say it) racists at this seminar need to be made aware that people have different ideas about who should remain in the lifeboat and, like the humanists in Lifeboat, are prepared to take action.

  One crackpot stood up to clarify that his opposition to illegal immigration had nothing to do with racism, that he had nothing in particular against Mexicans, and would feel the exact same way if “an invasion of Canucks came down from the north.” This elicited a nod of agreement in the room.