A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  I listened intently, noting the sound bites that capture the soft-sold bigotry. Jared Tannhauser is really slick. When the conversation veered into personal excoriation of the undocumented, he was quick to chime in with, “Let’s keep it in the realm of policy.” He was also arrogant enough to assure his audience that “legal immigrants get the lifeboat metaphor, no question about it.” He concluded with a prediction that if Hispanic Americans were approached correctly, they would support firm and effective immigration reform, including “near-impregnable border security.”

  It is always particularly repulsive when Repugs try to enlist racial minorities, women, or gays and lesbians into the fold. With promises that conservative restraint will ensure the progress these groups have already made, which always suggests a backlash if we go too far. In effect, they’re saying Hispanics should support the exclusion of their countrymen, a people. Progressive women should shun the feminists who pillory Sarah Palin on fairness grounds, despite the fact that the best Palin can muster vis-à-vis the LBGT community is “tolerance,” which correlates to “distaste.”

  Most of the Rainier passengers are Western European stock, but there is a healthy representation of the Jewish faith onboard too. This strain of Judaism learned only too well from the Germans. They have become what they abhor. Many, in my opinion, have internalized the idea of a final solution.

  White faces, as far as the eye can see. They’ve got a smattering of non-Caucasians, but never underestimate their ability to exploit America’s fundamental racism and xenophobia.

  I’ve got to write an exposé that will set this crew back long enough to elect Barack Obama in November. I’ll make Imbroglio proud, and all of the leftist press. Surely Obama, too, will take note. Once he’s elected, things will never go back to the bad old days—we’ve got the numbers, 52–47. And they will only grow from there.

  Barb used to talk about it, this deep undercurrent of bigotry. She believes that even the most progressive white male is hardwired against miscegenation. “They talk the talk,” she always says. “Most of them would rather see you with another woman.”

  If only she--you Barb--hadn’t come at a time in my life when everything was a beginning, the time of my first two real loves, you and Senator Obama. Careful, Lara, my journal intones. I must see caring for you as being as dead-end as this conservative cruise.

  But I fear you will not leave it at that. I visited the site before we sailed, like opening a flood-borne refrigerator left to rust in a sunny vacant lot. You’ve taken the summer off and left things in Hailey’s capable hands.

  The conservatives amble about these decks in polo shirts with tiny alligators emblazoned upon their pockets. How warm it is, in the upper 60s at night. It must be 90 degrees in our Emerald City.

  You vowed to put me on Deathknell when I ran to Karen, who is waiting for my return. I have not told her about you. Wherever you are tonight, I pray to the cosmos that you will find peace.

  Melissa awoke with beads of sweat on her upper lip. Out her oval window, it looked to be another stunning summer day. A mirror in the dressing nook suggested that politics was a tough business, even at choir practice. She rubbed her temples and decided to order room service croissants and coffee from the Victoria Station Café.

  The pomp and circumstance of the first days at sea was transmogrifying into policy and platforms. Newt Gingrich—who Melissa vaguely remembered as foil to heartthrob Clinton—had delivered an upbeat if pedagogic send-off. Grant Sharpe brought celebrity gravitas up the gangplank. Captain Squier evoked real-world gravitas. Optics came courtesy of a bevy of take-no-prisoners righty-tighty babes. But now the party was over, at least temporarily. The less media-genic would have their say. They were the think-tankers, writers, and wonks whose jobs were to package celebrity conservatism into a smooth-running, ideologically explicable machine. Substance over style became imperative.

  Interestingly, and news to a backlogged Melissa, Captain Squier had set the Northstar to sail with two polar embodiments of the GOP’s future aboard: establishment conservatism and a marquee worth of restless factions. The Tea Party was becoming the umbrella designation, thanks to a broadcast moneyman named Sanchez who’d blown his cork while processing headlines from the Meltdown.

  Melissa hustled to get out the door in time to catch Grant Sharpe’s “Doing What Is Necessary.” She checked her email on her iPad—no reply yet from Lieutenant Beckman on the manifest and employment info requests. Cell service had become temporarily unavailable, so, consulting the ship’s directory, she dialed the comm. office number on a courtesy phone near flagship embarkation. After two rings, the call was answered by a crisp, well-spoken Beckman, whose diction was quite outside the spectrum of neocon precision and rural twang she’d grown used to on the cruise. Her intuition suggested that, while ostensibly neutral, Beckman could take or leave his conservative cargo.

  “Hi,” she said, trying to project moderate equanimity. “I’m Sue Ross, with the Lewis & Clark Pioneer Log.” She reiterated her request for records from the current cruise and also requested an interview with Captain Squier.

  “Yes, Ms. Ross,” replied the lieutenant, “we did get your email. We’re handling media requests as they come in, and I’m buried at the moment. Can I get back to you?”

  Melissa made time through opulent corridors. The Wapiti Room was standing room only, and the talk star proved worthy and riveting in live performance. He didn’t stride the stage—he stalked it. He bounced, weaved, fell back, as if the microphone were both his opponent and his best friend. Suffice it to say that the message about what was necessary got out. While Melissa listened, she took renewed measure of her dearth of political acumen.

  “We can’t count on them tripping up,” Sharpe told his audience, “even though we know they will.”

  After remorselessly cataloging Republican sins during Bush Junior’s terms, Sharpe reached for W’s saving grace, familiar even to Melissa, the balm those Bushies kept applying. “He kept us safe.”

  The summation was delivered with Sharpeian flourishes and reached the very last row with the quality of a voice in your ear. The prescription was for a fearless, no-holds-barred assault on the leftist monolith that was erecting behind the hypnotic speechifying of Obama.

  Deck runner Scott Miley whispered in Melissa’s ear as she sat engrossed in the Banff

  Theater watching Ronald Reagan: A Man and His Legacy. The film had just reached the point where Reagan tells Gorbachev, “Tear down this wall.”

  “Sorry to bother you, Ms. Ross,” said the deck man, “but Lieutenant Beckman wanted to let you know that he has your documents ready, but for hard copies of this material you’ll have to come down and sign our privacy agreement at the office.”

  She’d opted for the Reagan film, seeking comfortable associations from her childhood. She’d been a swaddling infant when the Iranian hostages were freed and was still in diapers when the insidious Hinckley struck. Another singular memory from her earliest girlhood was the shuttle Challenger suddenly blazing like a comet and splitting into two obscene billowing smoke trails. Her most grown-up image of the Gipper was his final walk to the presidential chopper, to a life of Rancho del Cielo brush clearing, Nancy, and his affliction with Alzheimer’s.

  Knowing how the Reagan story ended, Melissa rose from her seat and followed Miley out of the theater, thanking him once they reached the lobby. Lieutenant Beckman was every bit the professional sailor, his officiousness gone lukewarm at the comm. office front desk. He provided a Trans Oceanic folder and Melissa signed for the docs.

  “This is the full crew and passenger manifests for both 2008 and 2009, and this is the employment record for both years.”

  Melissa thanked him and headed for the Kodiak Room. She had arranged for dinner with some members of the Young Conservatives Club and was prepared to find that these mavericks on the near-edge of twenty knew a lot more than she did.

  After dinner she would begin the mechanical work of scouring the N
orthstar’s employee paper trail. She’d be looking for anything that caught her eye: discrepancies, irregularities, blank spaces. It would be dry reading compared to the political research she’d been doing, the Svenko case history she’d absorbed, and the morbid side trip she’d taken into Barb Stamen’s macabre hobbyhorse, but within its hard data, perhaps there would be a clue as to how the luckless journalist had died.

  The Young Conservatives spoke with the fervor of revolutionaries. Traditionalistic code surfaced periodically, but the thrust was relentlessly prophetic.

  Skilled at fashioning sound bites off the cuff, they sang the praises of a new talker, Glenn Beck. There was a whole range of social network weaponry available to them, undreamed of in the salad years of radio swamis and cable news celebrities. Had she not become embroiled in the drama of her late twenties, Melissa might have grown to be like them, so educated, so committed.

  Their server appeared, introducing herself as Maria. Maria Centavos read her nametag. Melissa knew the surname was the same as some Mexican currency denomination, but she wasn’t sure which.

  “May I take your order?”

  The woman, who took orders for salmon cake appetizers and drinks, was attractive, with an endowed figure, wide-set brown eyes, and a pretty coif of black-umber Latina curls. None of the conservative boys were looking. Throughout the dinner, which Centavos served impeccably, the server might as well have been a cart for busing the tables.

  Over steaks and lobster, her fellow diners knifed single-payer health care and mercilessly deconstructed the schematic of treating terrorists as criminals and not enemy combatants. “How’s the article coming, Ms. Ross?” asked a youthful Monica Crowley clone.

  Melissa, trying to track the conversation, made a rookie mistake and momentarily forgot her cover. Seconds passed awkwardly, but she rallied, warding off a case of upper-lip sweats with the mantra that worked like a secret handshake. “No worries. I came of age watching Fox News, fair and balanced from the jump.”

  Nobody opted for dessert, as a panel of deficit hawks was convening to conduct a symposium on Republican options with regard to the sea of red ink flowing from Obama’s policy choices. Maria Centavos took the four credit cards, Melissa paying with a specially issued pre-paid card in her undercover name. When the server returned, Melissa made a point of making eye contact. There was not a shred of resentment between them—server and assumed elite. Melissa thought Maria’s eyes seemed to grin and wondered if she was an American citizen.

  Back in her stateroom, Melissa eschewed the Rainier Policy Institute passenger lists that Lieutenant Beckman had provided, having zeroed the possibility of right-wing murderousness down to nothing. She was much more interested in the 2008 cruise employment records. They proved to be remarkably straightforward. It wasn’t until she got to an addendum page that things got interesting. There was an entry called Staff Change Notation, which showed that smack-dab in the middle of the 2008 voyage, one Ernesto Lambada, sauna technician, had fallen shy of a full cruise credit, the only staffer on that voyage to do so.

  The record showed that Lambada had left the ship in Wrangell, Alaska. Due to communicable illness, read the first sentence of a paragraph that had been handwritten into the blank box provided. But it was the second sentence that scraped over Melissa’s psyche like an inflatable raft against submerged rocks. Replacement sauna tech taken on at Ketchikan Port, name: Barbara Stafford.

  There’s a time in every investigatory thesis when it begins to demonstrably coalesce. But Melissa remained cautious. There was no telling who might become privy to the strengthening fabric of her theory should she start questioning higher-ups like Beckman. Her finger moved down the paper, tracing the staff list, the midshipmen, down through the techies, the runners, the onboard artisans who customized shipboard photos, arranged flowers, and offered tutorials on Inside Passage history. Down into the ranks of the food service people her finger descended, another hunch playing out like nothing so much as a mischievous spirit across a Ouija board.

  Maria Centavos: Server. She’d been aboard last year too.

  Melissa sought out the Northstar’s forward deck for an evening walk. The ship was making her way into evermore remote territory. What Melissa had earlier judged to be real wilderness in recollect seemed almost bucolic with its scattered human encampments and companionable watercraft. Off the deck rail now was impenetrable darkness, yet far above that dark void snowcaps rose in starlight, dwarfing her theory and the people trapped within it.

  There was a murmur at the rail, and Melissa saw that they were passing another pod of orcas. Not as big as the first one but just as relentlessly headed north.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Northstar was a symbol of obscene inequity, but Stan Hundtruk had to admit she ran like a maritime starship. They had entered the deep wilds of the Inside Passage and were gaining on Alaska right on schedule.

  It was so hot and bright on the white steel quarterdeck that Hundtruk felt stifled even in his light slacks and short-sleeved polo shirt. He knew about protective coloring in nature, and here among these right-wingers, that meant dressing as unprepossessing as possible. The government-issue sunglasses that hid his eyes and disappeared into the golden curls behind his ears were all that differentiated him as “not Republican.” He walked the opposition’s flagship secure in the knowledge that of all the players in this post-Obama drama, only Cornelius Scrimshaw knew the true purpose of his presence on the ship.

  Skip Scrimshaw had been a fearless captain in his day but saw the futility of resistance when Hundtruk and a flanking squad of newly installed social justice warriors paid him a visit. Hundtruk presented himself at the Charon offices as an officially nonpartisan operations analyst, and that was true enough. For decades now, his purposes had been masked to the extent that almost any bureaucratic title would get him within range of the objective. The cause of social justice and progressive hegemony was bigger than any one man or woman, but while always expendable, Hundtruk had a knack for making himself indispensible when it counted.

  Under pressure—an offer he couldn’t refuse--from the new administration’s welcoming committee, Scrimshaw had agreed to greenlight the placement of a governmental “secret shopper” on the Rainier cruise under a Charon-Svenko smokescreen. Melissa Blythe’s “Old Turtle” understood the tools available to the men who visited his office, an exhaustive internal audit among them, and had acted to sheild his company.

  Hundtruk smiled as he looked out over calm waters at the primordial forests encroaching from either shoreline. The nonexistent Jeff Griffin was just the man to size things up.

  It would almost be a shame, some part of Hundtruk knew, to nationalize such a gem of human endeavor. Sometimes life just came down to a matter of payback being a bitch. The right, receiving marching orders from people like Grant Sharpe, had succeeded in weaving the fables of governmental ineptitude into accepted truth. Sharpe had turned Ayn Rand’s polarization of individualism and collectivist groupthink into a standing indictment of the public sector. This ship and most of the people on it were about to get a double-down of public sector oversight. He’d sensed it in the hunter’s patience of those who had sent him on this mission: We can run Charon, the Northstar, even Trans Oceanic.

  Hundtruk removed the nondescript sunglasses and winced at the migraine-inducing level of refracted whiteness. An iced tea from Victoria Station Café was what he suddenly craved. Looking up, he saw Captain Squier out on the bridge foredeck, peering through binoculars as if the journey had reached a point of interest that must be observed. The Republicans were grooming him, but it wouldn’t do them any good. Hundtruk guessed that with the Democrats in charge of everything, most of the captain’s pursuers were candidates for early retirement.

  The roar of a jet aircraft came suddenly overhead, invisible against the oblique blinding of the sun. Nothing large, likely a corporate jet headed for Anchorage. At last he could see its dolphin-white fuselage lowering into the northern horizon
.

  Palin? He allowed the idea past his sun-beaten brow, laughed, and shook his head at how ridiculousness could become sublime. Maybe it was Sarah up there, that daft bird in flight. He reached in his pocket for one of the official Democratic National Committee handkerchiefs, reluctantly doled out to top operatives by Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz after Barack Obama’s triumph over Hillary Clinton in the primary, and swiped it across his perspiring brow. He dropped his sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose.

  Palin too, beaten back but sticking around, still a governor, was not long for the big picture.

  In his stateroom after iced tea and a light lunch, Hundtruk yawned. Melissa’s emails were routine info requests, nothing pressing for Scrimshaw, who answered through Ms. Claymore. But he would keep monitoring, keep listening. If his co-investigator had anything worth emailing about, he needed to know. Woven into the fabric of his larger mission was his duty to manage the secondary one, a death at sea. There were people who still cared about Lara Svenko. Justice for her with undiluted credit to President Obama’s justice department would gloss his résumé like the stamp of Caesar.

  The woman in the Siletz Springs Sauna Center, Barbara Stafford, had not checked out—her social security number had not matched up. And there was the unsavory matter of her cyber-identity—Barb Stamen—which turned out to be the woman’s real name, with a legitimate social security number, and her connection to a morbid website. Hundtruk wasn’t surprised as he perused the dark pages of Deathknell.com. He had drawn her virtual chalk outline at first sight, that night in the sauna: a debased, quite possibly whacked, low-information liberal. Stafford/Stamen was wrong somehow, yes, but other matters were far more pressing, and it was not like she was going anywhere. If Hundtruk’s gut feelings about her wrongness shook out, if her place in the circles of prioritization rose, he could always nail the chlorine-scented minx.