Passenger 23

by Sebastian Fitzek

  He held Luke in both hands as if fearful that the Sultan’s airflow might snatch the teddy from his fingers and whisk it into the harbour.

  ‘Found it,’ Gerlinde replied tersely, fishing a packet of cigarettes and lighter from her tracksuit pocket.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the hands of a young girl.’

  She put a filterless cigarette between her lips. ‘Come with me. I’ll show her to you.’

  8

  Captain’s cabin, deck 14A

  ‘What? Stop the ship?’

  Daniel Bonhoeffer freed himself from her embrace and gave a resounding laugh.

  Julia felt like an idiot and just wanted to leave again.

  It had been a mistake to immediately go running to him.

  But she was desperate. Lisa hadn’t come back; in all likelihood she was still exploring the ship, which on a luxury liner of this size could take days. It was irrational; everything was probably fine. But after having watched that awful video, Julia’s entire body seemed to be quivering with worry, like the ship beneath her feet, which had been under tension since they’d left port. She felt little of the gentle undulations of the English Channel; now there was droning, whirring and hissing everywhere; the diesel generators lent a slight vibration to the walls and floors, while from outside the noises of the waves drifted into the cabin, albeit muffled by the large floor-to-ceiling windows.

  ‘Come on, don’t look so miserable. Let’s have a coffee,’ Daniel said with a wink. ‘I really ought to be on the bridge, but fortunately I’ve got superb watch officers.’

  He led Julia into the living room of his captain’s cabin which, if she wasn’t mistaken, was on the starboard side below the bridge. On the way here she’d lost her bearings somewhat. Not really a surprise on an ocean liner that had to be photographed from a kilometre away to fit the whole thing in the picture. From one end to the other it was the length of three football pitches, and if you stood on the top deck when arriving in New York you could look the Statue of Liberty in the eye.

  ‘So, how do you like my little realm?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Julia said, without looking properly.

  Like her cabin, this one was dominated by bright rugs and dark leather furniture, although it was much bigger. The décor was luxurious, but completely impersonal. Perfect for ten days’ holiday, but if Julia were living here permanently she’d have exchanged the bland prints on the wall for more individual pictures long ago.

  ‘When did we last see each other?’ Daniel asked, placing two cups under a coffee machine in the wall unit.

  As the machine vibrated into life, he ran his other hand through his blond hair, shaved at the back of the neck, where it seemed a little lighter than his eyebrows, causing Julia to wonder whether the colour was now coming from a bottle. Lisa’s godfather had always been hopelessly vain. She knew no other man who went so regularly to the hairdresser’s, for manicures and even to the waxing studio to have bothersome hair removed from his chest, legs and other parts of his body she’d rather not think about.

  ‘The last time I spent leave in Berlin was two Christmases ago, wasn’t it?’ he thought aloud. Daniel smiled nervously and suddenly Julia sensed she wasn’t the only one who had something on her mind.

  The captain was pale, almost grey around the corners of his mouth, like someone in urgent need of fresh air after a long illness. Standing lost in the room beside a wall unit of heavy mahogany, he looked, in spite of his impressive stature, like a man whose white uniform with the four golden stripes on the epaulettes had become too big. Fine blood vessels showed on his cheeks, making the skin beneath his tired eyes look like marble. At least those eyes weren’t swollen, a sign that he was still on the wagon.

  It was a miracle that he was still wearing the captain’s hat at all. Five years ago there had been an incident on the Sultan that Daniel had never wanted to talk about, partly because his contract apparently included a non-disclosure clause. All Julia knew was that the episode had hit him so badly that he drank himself stupid over it and was suspended from his job for a year. After coming off the booze he would most likely have turned up on some clapped-out freighter if his boss, the ship owner Yegor Kalinin, hadn’t also been a recovering alcoholic who preached the principle of a second chance.

  ‘Right then, say it all again, but this time nice and calmly,’ Daniel said. He put the china cups on a table by some chairs. The aroma of freshly ground coffee beans mingled pleasantly with the air freshener that was ubiquitous on board.

  ‘What did you mean when you said I had to stop the Sultan and turn back? Are you bored already?’

  He smiled uncertainly as he sat down on a chair with curved armrests. Julia huddled in her seat and wondered just how much she needed to tell Daniel for him to take her concerns seriously. She opted for the whole truth and thus spoke succinctly and soberly about her affair with Tom and Lisa’s problems. And about the video.

  ‘So now you’re worried that your daughter might commit suicide on my ship?’ Daniel asked when she’d finished. She’d hoped he’d laugh at what she said, as when he greeted her earlier. Tell her she was seeing ghosts or something else to dispel her fear. But Daniel had gone unusually quiet.

  He blew on the steaming cup in front of him and rubbed his finger over the cruise line’s logo, a bear surrounded by golden laurels with a stylised crown on his head.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said finally, sounding strangely sombre.

  ‘But—’

  ‘I know where Lisa is,’ he said, interrupting Julia’s feeble attempt to protest.

  ‘You know…?’

  He nodded. ‘She’s already come to say hello; she wanted to be on the bridge as we pulled out of port.’

  ‘You mean, she’s…’

  ‘Safe and in good hands, yes. I left her in the care of my hotel manager. As we speak she’s personally giving Lisa a tour of the ship.’

  ‘Phew!’ Julia exhaled audibly, momentarily closing her eyes in relief. Her pulse was still fast, but only because a huge weight had been taken off her mind. She thanked Daniel, who looked weary.

  ‘Lisa and suicide…’ he said, shaking his head and with a faint smile, as if repeating the punchline of an absurd joke. At once his smile froze. Wearing an expression that now looked as sad as that of a little boy who’s just heard that his favourite pet has died, he said, ‘Maybe it would be for the best if I jumped.’

  Julia blinked. She suddenly had the bizarre feeling that she was sitting opposite a complete stranger.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she said.

  Daniel breathed heavily. ‘I’m in trouble. Big trouble.’

  Julia suppressed the urge to look at her watch. Had five minutes passed already, or had Daniel succeeded more quickly this time in steering the conversation around to his own problems?

  The captain sighed, pushed the cup away and said, exhausted, ‘Damn it, I really shouldn’t say this to anyone. But at the moment you’re virtually the only person on the ship I can trust.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Julia asked, mystified.

  ‘You mustn’t tell anybody else, but we’ve got a Passenger 23 on board.’

  9

  Martin followed Gerlinde Dobkowitz from the balcony back into the suite.

  ‘If you’d please excuse us,’ the old lady said to the butler, pointing to her bed and winking. ‘Herr Schwartz wants to show me a new Kama Sutra position.’

  ‘Of course,’ Gregor answered, without batting an eyelid, and got up from the desk.

  Gerlinde shot Martin a look as if it were the butler whose mental state ought to be a matter of concern.

  ‘He’s completely humourless,’ she apologised with a whisper, yet loud enough that Gregor could hear. ‘But he’s helping me achieve my life’s work, aren’t you Gregor?’

  ‘I’m delighted to be of assistance, Frau Dobkowitz.’

  ‘Yes, yes. And chickens die of tooth decay.’

  She rolled he
r eyes and waddled, stooped, over to a globe screwed to the floor. Opening the lid she took out a bottle of advocaat. She put her cigarettes back in her pocket.

  ‘I know what people say about me,’ she said, after Martin declined the drink she’d offered him.

  He wanted answers, not alcohol.

  Gerlinde poured herself half a tumbler and took appreciative sips. ‘People think I’m frittering away my husband’s inheritance on the seven seas. But I was the one with money in the family. It was my construction firm. I only signed it over to the poor fool for tax reasons. Do you know what slogan we used for roadbuilding?’ She was already giggling at the punchline: ‘Dobkowitz – we put stones in your way!’

  Martin kept a straight face. ‘Very interesting, but you were going to…’

  ‘And do you know why I’m aboard this ship?’ Gerlinde took another sip of the viscous liquid that Martin had never been able to even contemplate drinking due to its pus-like colour.

  ‘Not to have a holiday. Not to squander my last days before they stick me in wooden pyjamas. But to toil away.’

  She fluttered her right hand in the air. ‘Tell him, Gregor, what I’m working on.’

  ‘I have the honour of assisting you in writing a book,’ the butler said obediently, seemingly uncertain as to whether he should go now or answer further questions.

  ‘And not just any old book!’ In triumph Gerlinde clapped her hands, which were adorned with thick rings. ‘But a thriller about crimes on the high seas that are hushed up. I’m so well informed because of my research. I have ears everywhere and every night I walk my patrols. Or should I say “ride” my patrols?’ She pointed at her wheelchair. ‘Whatever… I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.’

  ‘Seen what?’ Martin asked. By now his patience had run so thin that he felt like grabbing the old woman’s wrinkled neck with both hands and shaking the truth out of her about how she’d found the teddy.

  ‘The girl. To begin with they wanted to deceive me into believing that it was just a laundry bag. But since when have laundry bags been weeping on deck 3 after midnight, looking as pale as Jesus on Good Friday?’ She put her glass of advocaat down on a chest of drawers and pushed past Martin into the neighbouring room, through a lilac-coloured string curtain that divided the two parts of the suite.

  Martin followed her and found himself in another room that reminded him of the opening credits of a psychological thriller where the killer pins newspaper reports of his crimes to the walls and uses a carpet cutter to scratch out the eyes from the face of his next victim.

  ‘This is my research centre,’ Gerlinde explained succinctly. The room was dominated by a black filing cabinet that stood in the middle of the cabin like a modern kitchen island. Shelves stuffed with books and files filled three of the four walls. The external wall was coated with a green paint you could write on like a blackboard, interrupted only by a window. On it were photos, outlines of the ship, cabin floorplans, newspaper articles, Post-its and handwritten notes that Gerlinde had scribbled in white Sharpie between the documents.

  Martin saw arrows and lines. ‘Killer’ was inside a fat circle, as was ‘Bermuda Deck’, which he read three times.

  Opening one of the upper drawers, Gerlinde took out a thin hanging file, from which she plucked a newspaper article.

  ‘Missing at sea,’ read the headline from the Annapolis Sentinel, a local American paper.

  ‘One of the shareholders of this cruise line is a media mogul. He did all he could to prevent the story from being published everywhere. Apart from a few internet blogs, this is pretty much the only rag that reported on the case.’

  Gerlinde tapped her index finger on the photo of a mother with her daughter just before embarkation, at the bottom of the gangway where all the Sultan’s passengers had their picture taken so that they could later acquire an expensive photograph of themselves.

  ‘Didn’t your wife and Timmy disappear on the Sultan’s transatlantic crossing five years ago?’ Gerlinde asked.

  She tapped the photo in the article again. ‘Barely eight weeks ago Naomi and Anouk Lamar vanished into thin air, four days’ sail from the Australian coast.’

  Martin grabbed the article from her hand.

  ‘It’s happened again?’

  Another mother and child? On the Sultan again?

  The eccentric old lady shook her head.

  ‘Not again. It’s happening still.’

  10

  Julia put down the cup without having taken a sip and looked askance at Daniel. ‘A passenger what?’

  The captain gave a bleak laugh. ‘Of course. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? But believe me, that’ll soon change. The phrase will be on everyone’s lips.’

  Passenger 23?

  ‘I hope it’s not catching,’ she said, essaying a tired joke she didn’t even want to laugh at herself.

  ‘I need to fill in some detail for you to understand.’

  Daniel reached for a pilot case that he’d put under the bench. Julia heard the catches snap open, and soon afterwards a thin, black paper file lay on the table before her.

  He removed the rubber band that kept the cover shut and opened it up.

  ‘It happened two months ago on the leg of our world trip between Fremantle and Port Louis,’ he said, turning the file to allow Julia to see the postcard-sized colour copy that showed two faces. One was a laughing, suntanned woman with a pageboy haircut, who obviously spent a large proportion of her free time in the gym and never entered a supermarket without a calorie chart. She had her arm around a young, equally thin girl who reminded Julia of Lisa when she was ten: a serious but open face, with reddened cheeks and silky, shiny, windswept hair, each strand shimmering in a different, natural tone of brown, although none as dark as the eyes that captured the viewer’s gaze. The girl had slightly sticking-out ears, which she would ‘grow into with time’, to use a phrase she tried to comfort Lisa with whenever her daughter discovered something new about her body she didn’t like. And yet the defiant look the girl gave the camera suggested this flaw didn’t cause her to suffer.

  ‘That’s Naomi and Anouk Lamar,’ Daniel explained. ‘Mother and daughter. Thirty-seven and eleven, from America. Both of them disappeared from their balcony cabin during the night of the seventeenth to eighteenth of August.’

  Julia looked at the photo. ‘They disappeared?’

  Daniel nodded. ‘Like all the others.’

  The others?

  ‘Just hold on a sec.’ Julia gave him a sceptical look. ‘Are you trying to tell me that people vanish on the Sultan?’

  ‘Not just on the Sultan,’ Daniel replied, tapping his finger on the table top. ‘On all cruise ships. It’s a massive problem, but you won’t find a single word about it in any of the catalogues. Of course there aren’t any official statistics – this sort of thing mustn’t ever be made public – but at the last US Congress hearing the industry was forced to come clean. After much debate we admitted to the figure of 177 passengers disappeared without trace over the past ten years.’

  One hundred and seventy-seven?

  ‘So many? What happened to them all?’

  ‘Suicide,’ Daniel said.

  Her heart started beating faster and she felt her breathing getting more difficult.

  ‘That’s the official explanation, at least. And in most cases it’s true. Lisa’s liaison teacher is right. There’s no better place to commit suicide than a cruise ship. You don’t need razor blades, rope or tablets.’

  Julia’s throat grew tighter.

  Now do you understand why the two of you have got to get off that boat immediately?

  ‘Jump over the railings and it’s all done. No body. No witnesses. The perfect place to take your own life. Unnoticed on the high seas, preferably in the middle of the night; nothing can go wrong. At a little more than sixty metres, the impact alone is enough to kill you, and if not…’ Daniel said, assuming a pained expression, ‘then have fun with the propeller. The
best thing of all is that your nearest and dearest don’t have to be shocked at the sight of your dead body.’

  Julia glanced at the photo of Naomi and Anouk. Something in Daniel’s little performance didn’t quite fit.

  ‘Are you telling me that mother and daughter threw themselves overboard together?’ she asked him.

  ‘Obviously not hand in hand. In their cabin we recovered a cloth soaked in chloroform. Presumably Mrs Lamar put her daughter to sleep first and jumped once she’d thrown her overboard. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.’

  Julia nodded. She remembered a television programme about cases where parents first killed their children before killing themselves, which was ostensibly such a frequent occurrence that in forensic medicine they’d come up with a specific term for it: murder-suicide. She tried to imagine what must go through a mother’s head who chose to murder her own daughter, but found she couldn’t. ‘One hundred and seventy-seven suicides?’ she thought out loud, still astonished by this unbelievably high figure.

  Daniel nodded. ‘And those are just the ones we couldn’t keep quiet. Believe you me, the number of unknown cases is higher. Much higher.’

  ‘How high?’

  ‘If you take all cruise ships currently sailing across the globe, we estimate that each year an average of twenty-three people go overboard.’

  Passenger 23!

  Now she understood what Daniel was getting at.

  ‘Have you lost another one, then?’

  We’ve got a Passenger 23!

  ‘No.’ Daniel shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t be a problem. We’re well used to covering up that sort of thing.’

  Covering up?

  ‘Let me guess. It was something similar that almost cost you your job and your health back then.’