Chapter 11

Contents of a Lifeboat

We went out on the veranda deck.

The wind was strong; after a moment you could taste the salt on your lips. She took my arm and the ocean wind blew the scent she was wearing my way. It was dryly, understatedly pungent. I thought of her entrance and that elaborate hairdo.

“This may not do your coiffure any good.”

“Klára can redo it in a few minutes.”

It was cold, though. I thought of what she had on underneath that dress. Except her, there was almost nothing, obviously.

“Remember, I’m going to search your cabin,” I said.

“Now?”

I wondered if she thought she was reading my mind. I wondered if she was.

“After a bit.”

“Why?”

“I have the feeling it may be bugged.”

“Who would do it?”

“That’s a little hard to say.” If she couldn’t guess, why alarm her? She was having a good evening, and she deserved it.

“It is cold.”

“Yes. In for another dance?”

“Let’s. But you warm up with a drink if you like. I don’t want one.”

“I don’t need one. I have on more clothes than you. At least, I think.”

She smiled up at me and wrinkled her nose and somehow wiggled. Everything wiggled.

I dropped her off at the captain’s table.

We danced and sat for a little while. Twit-Twit occasionally looked at me out of her eye corners, but she said nothing. We sipped brandy between dances and Tom went on about his student life in Paris and I occasionally glimpsed Merrilee, dancing with closed eyes and open mouth. At least she wasn’t worrying about children falling overboard.

The friendly first officer, the one who had danced with Twit-Twit, came up to our table.

“M’sieu Deacon?”

“Yes.”

“May I ’ave a word?”

“Mais oui.”

He led me out to a passage that connected the grand salon with a sort of serving pantry. Both were empty.

“M’sieu? You are a friend of Mademoiselle Moore?”

“I am.”

“Something ‘as ’appened.”

He was being reserved, but his eyes were alarmed. Something had happened. I guessed what it was.

“A friend of Mademoiselle ’as—’ad an accident. Someone close to her. The friend ’as been found.”

“Where?”

“In a lifeboat, m’sieu.”

I was right.

“Who—what happened? Who is this?”

“I don’t know whether to tell her or not, m’sieu. The captain ’as commission—’as asked me—that is why, I thought, if you are a close friend, I would avail myself of your advice.”

There were little windows in the swinging doors of the pantry entrance. Through them I could see the dance floor, and even as I looked I saw her for a moment, dancing with the captain, smiling, oblivious to the dark present.

“My advice is at your service. If it will help you.”

“Perhaps you would tell her, m’sieu? Break the news?”

“Does it have to be broken? Now, I mean?”

“I do not compre—understand.”

“She is enjoying herself. Look out there. Must we spoil her evening? Even though a corpse has been discovered?”

“A corpse?”

“A corpse. A body. The dead person.”

He looked strangely at me, and for the second time during the brief period I’d spent on the ship I felt something cold crawl down my spine.

“M’sieu,” he said. “The person is not dead. Not yet, at least.”

I don’t know how long the millennium actually lasted, but during it I couldn’t breathe.

“Perhaps you had better explain.”

He said, “Perhaps you would be so good as to accompany me and see for yourself.”

I said, “Sure,” thickly, and followed him through the pantry to a service stairway and up a flight of stairs and then up some more and out onto the boat deck, all the time wondering what in God’s name had happened.

For we went to a lifeboat. But it wasn’t the right lifeboat.

The tarpaulin had been thrown back, and two men stood in the boat, one in a white medical jacket. They were struggling with something. A crewman, standing by attentively, snicked on a flashlight and shone it on a stretcher at his feet. The two men in the lifeboat raised something heavy. We both looked in.

The crewman flashed his light into the lifeboat, and we saw what they were lifting. It was a body, all right.

But it wasn’t Jones’s body.

It was the maid, Klára. She muttered something and her eyes rolled strangely under half-open lids in a way that did not suggest life as much as it convinced you of death.

“We’ll take her to the infirmary at once,” the man in the white jacket said. “If she lives that long.”