4

Off the Coast

Cut the Miss Marple shit, Cecil.” Jane Marie shuffled through the wildlife books piled in front of her on the table.

It was morning. I had followed Jane Marie and Todd up to Flag Deck where the breakfast buffet was being served. We sat at a round table near a window on the starboard side watching the near shore of British Columbia slip past. Jane Marie stopped looking at her books and spread cream cheese on half of a toasted bagel. Todd sipped from a tankard-sized glass of orange juice, then suddenly lifted his camera to take a photograph of God knows what.

“This is not Miss Marple shit. I’m telling you this girl was dancing up on the Horizon Deck last evening and by morning she was dead.”

Jane Marie placed some salmon lox on her bagel. “Well then, did you tell anyone else about this . . . ghost woman?”

I speared a forkful of sausage patties. “Yes, Miss Em­ployee of the Month, I did. I went to the doctor’s office. No one was there. I found a phone and reported it to the ship’s operator and they thanked me very much. Then I went back to the girl’s cabin. It was locked.”

“What room was she in?” Jane Marie asked. Her brow was furrowed and she looked as if she were working out a problem in her head.

“Acapulco 800, between our room and the clinic en­trance. It’s still locked.”

“Have you spoken to Sonny Walters?” Suddenly she reached out and gripped my wrist. “800? Are you sure it was Acapulco 800?” Her grip tightened.

I tried to pull away and as I leaned back in my chair I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked straight up and saw the inverted image of Sonny Walters smiling down on me.

“Well, good morning, everyone. Sleep well?” His voice was bright in his stage whisper. As I looked around I noticed that at least two-thirds of the people eating in the buffet room had their eyes on Sonny. Men in golf clothes and older women with Cartier scarves all watched him walk and hung on his every word.

“Well, that’s just great!” he said, keeping up the patter even though we hadn’t answered him. Then in a lower voice he whispered to me: “Mr. Younger, I think we should talk in my office.”

“Moonlight Bay,” Jane Marie said loudly as it burst from her memory. Sonny Walters winced and I could feel his fingers tighten on my shoulder.

“Moonlight Bay . . . I heard someone say that over the public address system . . . ‘Moonlight Bay, Acapulco 800.’ I’m sure of it,” Jane Marie insisted.

Todd took his camera down and nodded at me in agreement.

“You know, come to think of it, Cecil,” Todd said slowly, “that is correct. I heard it very distinctly. ‘Moonlight Bay, Acapulco 800,’ just as Jane Marie has remembered. I thought it was quite unusual and that is perhaps why it registered so clearly in my memory.”

“Okay then . . .” Sonny’s voice was building in frus­tration and his hands were now pulling me by my arm­pits. I was being pulled to my feet and Todd snapped a couple of pictures of this. Sonny smiled winningly but said through his teeth, “Not here. Darn it. In the office.” It was eerie how he could communicate anger to me and hearty equanimity to the rest of the room. Several women in the far corner watched him and I could tell their hearts were melting as if they wanted to adopt him. Sonny had a strange effect on the majority of the cruisers. This was, I would later learn, part of the stock in trade of a perfect Cruise Director: complete and utmost control over every­one’s sense of happiness. A Cruise Director must radiate it: Fun, Adventure, Possibility. Fun was more like it. Fun as a religion.

As soon as he shut the door to his remarkably small of­fice, he turned and his face both hardened and aged. “What in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?” he said as if he were holding a gun to my chest.

“I was eating my sausages and toast. Until you created a scene out there.” I pointed to the closed door, heightening my dramatic presence. I hoped.

“Oh . . . yeah,” Sonny said petulantly. He flipped over his trash can in one well-practiced move and sat on it. But in the next moment he paused. Then he looked worried. “I didn’t really make a scene out there, did I?” Now I had him worried. Even his perfect teeth seemed to pale, as if that were possible.

“Naw.” I waved a reassuring hand at him and sat down and put my feet up on his desk, thereby taking up most of the available space in the room. “Sonny, you hired me to look into—”

“I didn’t hire you,” he interrupted.

“Okay.” I held my hand up in my best “no argument” gesture. “Your boss hired me to look into the situation with the medical facilities on this boat. Well, the first day out I get drunk and there is a dead girl in Acapulco 800 and you are starting to lose your trademark good sense of hu­mor. Now you can bounce me off the boat, but that won’t be until at least tomorrow when we get into Ketchikan. So why don’t you tell me just a little bit more about your problems?”

Sonny sat silently. Scowling, his boyish good looks turned down like a cracked egg: sort of a Pat Boone about to puke.

“I suppose I could talk to the captain . . .” I said finally.

“No!” Sonny said, both exhausted and pleading. “Don’t talk to the doggone captain!” He bent and flicked the tas­sel on his loafer. Then he straightened and brushed some imaginary crumbs off of his lemon-yellow crewneck sweater. “It wouldn’t do any good anyway . . .” He sighed, most of his anger gone now. “There are three companies that op­erate this ship, you see, Mr. Younger. I work for the cruise line company. We basically charter the vessel from a larger company. I work for the Great Circle Lines. We’re in charge of the ship’s itinerary and the entertainment. The captain and his crew work for the Empire Shipping Company. The captain operates the boat, and is in charge of all deck staff, crew and the ship’s officers. I am the head of the cruise line on board. I direct the entertainment, shore ex­cursions, and the social staff. Then there is the hotel man­ager who is in charge of the accommodations and dining on board. You don’t have to worry about them because they really contract with us. So, in effect they report to me. But the captain—no, the captain works for Empire and he is very clear about his authority. You can’t go talk­ing to him. The captain doesn’t even know about you, Mr. Younger.”

By now all petulance was gone and Sonny picked at the cuticle of his left thumb. He was clearly rattled and would not meet my eyes as he went on talking.

“My boss in Miami, the cruise line boss, directed me to report on the . . . Moonlight Bay situation . . . but he made it clear that Empire Shipping is not to catch wind of our investigation.” Sonny waved his hand around as if engulfed by a swarm of gnats. “Everyone is so, you know, afraid of . . . oh, I don’t know, bad publicity and lawsuits, that sort of thing. My boss wants me . . . and you . . . to handle this situation before it gets out of hand and the shipping company finds out and pulls out of our charter agreement.”

I nodded. “Okay, so the captain and the shipping com­pany mustn’t know. Now, tell me about the Moonlight Bay situation.”

Sonny stopped picking at his thumb. He looked me square in the eyes in what could have been an exercise from one of his acting classes.

“‘Moonlight Bay’ is the term we use when we have had a death on board. We have a protocol, Mr. Younger. When there is a death, the stewards know to secure the room immediately. If there are relatives, we assign a mem­ber of the entertainment staff to comfort them. We take care of the body and the paperwork, and we try to do it with­out alarming any of the other passengers. Death on board a ship can ruin a person’s vacation experience,” he concluded grimly.

“I can imagine,” I said, sounding more sarcastic than I had intended.

“Listen,” Sonny said, and he lowered his eyes, “I know you think I’m ridiculous. I know that because I feel ridicu­lous when I do this job. Especially when I first started out. I mean . . .” He looked sadly at the clutter of schedules and contracts on his desk. His clothes hung on the edge of fil­ing cabinets. “I mean, I had some luck in musical theater. I had been up for some good roles. I had a really decent caba­ret act. I’ve always been old-fashioned . . .” His voice faded away. “I take this job seriously, Mr. Younger. Our passengers are not the super-rich. We are not a top-of-the-line tour. These people have saved a long time for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is just an iron tub floating around on the North Pacific, for gosh sakes. It’s up to me to make it . . . exciting, romantic . . . Whatever crazy expectations our pas­sengers bring with them it’s up to me to make them happy. It’s my job. I do take my job seriously.” His voice had a quaver to it.

“So . . . a Moonlight Bay really fucks up your job,” I said sympathetically.

“To say the least.” He managed a weak smile. “And there are more and more of them. We had six on our last tour.” He looked up at me, his eyebrows arched and his eyes sad. “That’s six in fifteen days. Boy, oh boy, that’s tough, let me tell you.”

“What’s going on? Why the increase?”

“There is a trend everywhere. Of course, some of it is our demographics. We have over seven hundred passengers on ship right now. The median age is sixty-four years. We are bound to have incidental deaths. Elderly people who are not as well as they hoped to be for the trip, heart attacks, strokes, we’ve even had our share of ‘cafe coronaries.’ You know, choking on that last big bite of roast . . . But that doesn’t explain all of it.”

The ship started to roll from side to side; Sonny looked at his watch. “We’re headed for open water. We’ll have some motion for the next four hours or so.” He turned back to me. “AIDS has something to do with it. We started noticing a few years ago that we were getting younger men traveling alone and in pairs. This makes sense; cruising is a very com­fortable way to travel. Particularly if you are taking medi­cation and have to regulate your activity. We have more and more passengers who are ill. Men and women coming on board knowing they are approaching the final stages of their disease. We predicted this and tried to accommodate it. More cultural events, educational programs, more activ­ities for the mind and the spirit, if you will. The medical facilities were upgraded. But recently . . .” Sonny stood and pushed past me to his desk. He lifted a sheaf of papers and flipped through them. “. . . we started noticing a pattern of nonpayment.”

“What?” I asked, not sure I was hearing him right.

“Nonpayment. People were going first cabin, Hori­zon Deck, and opening huge bar tabs, and then before disembarking they were choosing to end their lives. This is bad enough . . .” He paused. “But they’re putting it all on their credit cards,” he said with the kind of scolding tone of a schoolmaster.

“So they’re dying and stiffing you on their bills . . .”

“Worse,” Sonny said dramatically. “They’re stiffing the credit card company. Many of these passengers are single males. They’ve used up all of their money or dispersed it before they come aboard the ship. There is no estate to go after.”

“The card companies still pay you. Why is this a prob­lem? . . . Well, other than it might dampen the festival atmosphere, with your passengers dropping like flies.”

“It’s much more serious than you may even imagine.” Sonny’s voice was headed up another octave. “The credit card companies are threatening to stop honoring our ac­counts.”

“So?”

“What do you mean—so? Mr. Younger, nobody writes checks for reservations. No one travels on money. If we couldn’t take credit cards, we’re basically out of business.”

The ship lurched once to port and a sheaf of pa­pers fell off the corner of Sonny’s desk and scattered on the floor.

“The credit card companies are asking that we take steps to address the situation.”

“Can you stop people from killing themselves?” I held my hands out, palms up.

“There’s more to the picture. There are now tour groups. Groups dedicated to providing services specifically for this clientele.”

“L’Inconnue de la Seine.”

“Exactly. These travel companies are growing more and more popular. They help their clients prepare, and they find the right ships and tours to travel on. For some reason our ship, and particularly the Alaska voyages, has become more and more popular with these groups.”

“What does your ship’s doctor say?”

“Now we are getting to the point. The ship’s doctor is an officer of the boat. He works for the vessel company. He works for the captain. The doctor really is not very helpful to us.”

“He won’t answer questions?”

“Not about this subject.” Sonny shook his head sadly.

“So . . .” I spoke slowly and clearly, knowing this might be the only contact I would make with Sonny. “You want me to check out the ship’s doctor. You want me to find out if he is doing anything to encourage these . . . Moonlight Bays.”

“I think he gets a cut from these tour groups. I just know he is profiting from this.” Sonny was showing more peevish­ness now that the subject of death and credit card fraud was out in the open.

“And if you can take whatever dirt I come up with to the ship’s company, you might get him fired. Then you hopefully find a doctor who will make the ship a little less . . . hospitable for the death tour industry.”

“You have to understand, Mr. Younger. Everyone is wel­come on our ship. We can’t afford to get the reputation of being unfriendly towards passengers with special needs.”

When I had first met Sonny Walters I’d assumed he was what he appeared to be: a good-looking and shallow twit, in the mold of a singing towel boy who had been given too much authority. Now I was beginning to get the sense that there was something more going on with him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out what. “Why didn’t you just tell me this when we first spoke?”

“For one thing, I was hoping we wouldn’t really need you. I don’t know, I was hoping it would just go away. I wanted to get you on board and break you in slowly. On these two-week trips, you’ll see, there is a longer break-in period. A longer settling-in period. This death, this girl in Acapulco 800, came too fast. They don’t usually start dying until much later in the trip. Usually until after Ketchikan or Sitka.”

He smiled professionally.

I stood up and wiped my hands together, acting as if I were ready to go. Sonny sat quickly back on his overturned wastebasket and waved me to sit back down again.

“The culture on board ship is very interesting, Mr. Younger . . . Cecil, there are some things you should be aware of. The ship’s crew—that is the sailors and the offi­cers, the people who actually make this thing move—these people are part of a union. No one else on board is union. Both companies, mine and the hotel contractor, have worked hard to keep it that way. The hotel and restaurant staff is made up largely of Filipino and Indonesian workers. On this cruise we also have a large number of Caribbean is­landers. The Filipinos are great workers and they’re per­fectly suited for the job but the thinking in the industry in the last few years is not to let the Filipino workers form a majority or you can see we’d be right back in the union problem . . .” Sonny stretched his hands out before him, as if imploring me.

“The ship’s crew is similarly a mix. The captain is a Serb, the first officer is Panamanian, the chief engineer is Polish, and there are a growing number of other eastern European sailors on board. The lower down you go into the ship, of course, the more islanders you’ll find.”

“What about the doctor?” I asked.

“The doctor is an American,” Sonny replied without showing the least of a smile. “He stays to himself mostly. He eats the first few meals with the captain and passengers, but after that he has his own schedule.”

“Does he have a good record in treating most of the patients? I mean, is he good at what he does?”

“The passengers love him!” Sonny enthused. “That’s another reason we have to be extremely delicate in this mat­ter. He’s great with them. He’s treated all kinds of conditions and made people comfortable. Some of our wealthy passen­gers have even tried to set him up in private practice in their own hometowns. I mean, he has a following!” Sonny was wide-eyed.

The ship lurched again to port and Sonny stood up, looking again at his watch. “Listen. I’m sorry about our rocky beginning. Just try to settle in. Find out what you can about the doctor.” He pointed to the door and smiled. “I’ve re­ally got to be going. I’ve got a ten o’clock presentation and then some entertainment on the schedule. There are a mil­lion people looking for me right about now. It should tell you something that they’d never think of looking in my office, huh?”

I decided not to answer that question. Instead I asked, “What’s the doctor’s name, and where do I find him?”

“His name is Allen Edwards. Doctor Edwards. He keeps clinic hours. Get sick if you have to. You’ll find him soon enough.” Sonny opened the door and disappeared. The door closed.

I looked around his office and my eyes fell on a back-lit publicity photo of Sonny: Faded blue wash with a halo of light surrounding his boyish hair. The door opened again and Sonny himself stuck the hair back into the office.

“Oh . . . I forgot to tell you. Gee, I’m sorry but your bar privileges have been cut off, Cecil. At least until Ketchikan. We’ll just see where we are then. Okay?”

“You mean in Ketchikan?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s easy, Sonny. We’ll be in Ketchikan.”

He smiled winningly and pointed his index fingers at me, six-gun style. “Ouch . . . Good stuff.” He squeezed his imaginary trigger fingers, then disappeared again.

Out on the fantail, passengers were stepping through their paces at day one’s aerobic class entitled “Making Friends.” The song “Getting to Know You” was blasting out of a pair of speakers near the stern. Two dozen or so participants, mostly fiftyish white women, were stretching their arms above their heads and swaying. “Getting to Know You” shifted into a thumping disco beat and a slender, older woman with a remarkable helmet of yellow hair began to lead the group. The sign said she was our exercise “clinician,” Tricia. Tricia had the smallest, tightest butt I’ve ever seen. She snapped out cues to the assembled.

“Good now, two three, back now, four five, go nice and easy back to one . . .”

The sunlight was pale and milky. It was perhaps sixty degrees and it could rain at any time but that wasn’t a con­cern to the exercisers. We were outbound, past some rocky headlands. The ship had a gentle but pronounced roll. Gulls wheeled in the eddies of air behind the stern. Occasionally one would dive down into the foam, come up with something and then, working awkwardly to pull away into the air, glide back to the others.

Todd was exercising. He had his new tan slacks rolled up and his shoes off. For whatever reason, Todd is spectacu­larly uncoordinated. Although he tried to keep time with the disco version of “Getting to Know You,” he was consistently at least three commands behind the others. He waved and floundered around like a broken windmill but with each ef­fort Tricia would smile at him and give her own legs an ex­tra kick in his direction. “Good! . . . Good!” she told him. “That’s it. Perfect. Now up a little higher.” The song ended and everyone clapped and shook their arms to their side. The woman working out next to Todd was dressed in shiny tights and pink leggings with a T-shirt that read “I’m spending my grandchildren’s inheritance.” She patted Todd on the back and said, “You’re doing just great.” And Todd beamed at her as he awkwardly imitated the last of the stretching exercises. “I love doing this,” the woman gushed. “I just feel I can eat all that much more.” She laughed unashamedly and so did Todd.

The music changed to something by the Miami Sound Machine and I couldn’t bring myself to watch. Jane Marie was sitting in a straight-backed chair with her feet propped up on the port side rail. She wore a spaghetti-strap shirt with her sweater bundled in her lap. Her dark glasses were perched on top of her head and she scanned the ocean with her old green rubber-armored Zeiss field glasses. She looked like a movie star. Carole Lombard, maybe. I pulled up a chair next to her.

“I lost my bar privileges,” I said.

“Do tell . . .” She kept scanning the ocean. The shadow of a gull brushed the white skin of her shoulders.

“That’s not to say you couldn’t buy me a drink now and then,” I said out to the Pacific.

She put her field glasses down on top of her sweater and looked at me as if I had just peed on her foot.

“Not me, pal. I’m looking to keep my privileges. I’m going to meet some people on this trip.” She picked up the binoculars. “If you ask me, I’m pretty well positioned here to make some contacts. This is a good spot for a single woman.”

“Yeah, too bad you don’t know any single women.” I tried to sound amusingly sarcastic and confident at the same time.

I looked out to sea. The waves rolled in undulating columns with only a slight chop on top. The horizon was a wavering line dividing the gray sky from the gray sea. The sun was blocked by a cottony gauze. My eyes ached to find detail. It was a mild, mild day.

“There!” Jane Marie stood up and pointed.

Five hundred yards from the ship, the slick black form ploughed the surface of the sea. A quick puff of breath came from a blowhole just behind a round pumpkin of a head, then the dagger shape of a long dorsal fin.

“Killer whales! Port side. Nine o’clock, five hundred yards!”

About a dozen of the exercisers ran to the rail. The Mi­ami Sound Machine kept churning. Tricia kept right on with her routine. Several of the passengers kept doing their leg lifts standing at the rail. Back under the covered bar there was a flurry of activity and I heard someone call, “Whales? I’ll drink to that, by God!” and gales of laughter.

There were seven animals. One large male with the tall dagger-shaped dorsal fin. Two juveniles. Four females or per­haps young males. They traveled swiftly, on a course par­allel with the ship. As each came to the surface, the white of the head marking and saddle patches rippled through the green water. Their backs curved in a smooth muscu­lar motion. Dorsal fins sliced like blades into the surface. The whales stayed near the ship for perhaps forty seconds. Then they dropped behind, cut across the wake, and were gone.

A young woman stood with an older man near us at the rail. The woman had dark hair and eyes. She tried to keep her eyes on the whales long after they had vanished. “I’ve never seen anything like them . . .” she said softly, almost to herself.

A gray-haired woman in a turquoise workout suit lit a cigarette and looked at me quizzically. “Whales?” she said. “That’s it?”

I shrugged my shoulders apologetically and the tur­quoise woman drew on her smoke and walked back inside. I could hear her athletic shoes squeak on the decking.

Still scanning the sea, Jane Marie had walked to the other side of the ship. Off to my left was a woman with long frizzy dark hair. She was sketching in a book. Her hand worked furiously. I walked over and looked across her shoulder. She had scrawled several lines but, amaz­ingly, the lines captured the motion of the swells and the big animals cutting through without showing the whales themselves. It was as if she had drawn the sound of their breath. She looked up and caught me staring at her draw­ing.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” she asked breath­lessly.

She was not instantly beautiful. Her teeth were crooked and she was overweight, at least overweight for a fashion model. But her eyes were large and they had this crazy glitter to them. Instantly, I was almost afraid to look straight into them, worried that something would be looted clear out of my chest. Her face showed no hint of suspicion or distrust. The sun broke out from the clouds and I almost attributed the reemergence of light to some power in this chubby girl’s spectacular eyes.

“I mean whales!” She grabbed my hand. “Whales, on our very first day out. Can you believe it!”

“No, I can hardly believe it,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.

“I’m Rosalind Kench.” She twisted her hand around into mine, pumping a more formal handshake. “I used to live in New York. The City, right in the middle of the City, it’s incredible, isn’t it? I mean the City. Well, really it’s in­credible because I’ve just moved to Portland, Oregon. Lake Oswego really. It’s fabulous there. I never thought the world was so green, really I mean, it’s a different kind of green. Vermont, New Hampshire, of course, are both pretty green, but there is something about the light on the Pacific. The evening light especially, of course I love the light on the Cape, particularly in the morning, but this . . .” And Rosa­lind dropped my hand and spun around. Her arms took in all of “this,” which I guessed was the western edge of the Northern Hemisphere. “But this is, well, you know, differ­ent . . .”

Her voice trailed off and as she came around to face me again her expression fell. She stared down at my feet and I realized suddenly that her eyes had an odd kind of presence. As if they were flashlights that could only cast shadows. She bit her lower lip.

“I’m babbling, aren’t I?” Her voice was soft and she would not look at me. “Oh God, I’ve been babbling. Please say something quick so I won’t say another word.” Her hands started to shake.

“You have very strange and beautiful eyes,” I said with­out knowing why.

Rosalind Kench squeezed her eyes shut as if we were playing hide-and-go-seek and she was “it.”

“Ooooh, that’s . . . sweet, but now I know you’re mak­ing fun of me.” She kept her eyes closed and we stood to­gether on the deck silently. I started to shift on the balls of my feet thinking that maybe I was supposed to go hide now.

“My name is Cecil Younger,” I said and I took her hand as she had mine and pumped her forearm up and down in a greeting. Rosalind opened one eye a crack.

“Hello, Cecil. That’s a very interesting name. What kind of work do you do?” The other eye opened slightly and I could feel something in my chest fall into shadow.

“I . . . well, I . . . actually I’m retired.”

“Really! You seem young to be retired. You must have done very well for yourself, if you don’t mind me commenting, I don’t mean to pry. I mean . . . I’m sorry.” And she squeezed her eyes shut tight again.

“No. No, don’t worry. I don’t mind. I’m retired . . . I’m retired because of certain health problems.”

Rosalind opened her eyes and clutched my forearm with both her hands. I felt her breath on my neck. I didn’t dare look into her eyes.

“Isn’t that just the dickens?” she said.

“The dickens?” I echoed.

“Well, you know, the body. I mean, we’re all just ma­chines wearing out. I mean, if you think about it too much it just gets incredibly depressing.” She pulled on my arm to get my attention and unwittingly I looked down into her dark eyes.

“I know this is going to surprise you,” she said slowly and solemnly as if we were about to share a forbidden inti­macy, “but I’m not going to ask you about your health. I just hate that. I mean, I’ve been going through it myself and I hate to have to answer questions. Not that I mind sharing but it’s just when you tell people about your illness then they feel like they have to tell their own story and before you know it you’re talking about bladders or uterine cysts, for Pete’s sake.”

“I hate that.” I tried not to think about a uterine cyst, which was turning out to be impossibly hard for some rea­son.

“I’m just going to say one thing,” Rosalind continued in the same solemn tone, still gripping my forearm. “You look really good, Cecil. So just keep doing what you’ve been do­ing. It’s working.” And she winked, leaning back and giving me the covert thumbs-up of a co-conspirator.

I nodded toward her sketch pad. “What kind of work do you do?” The gulls whirled close to our left and she spun to see them. “You must be an artist,” I continued, awkwardly trying to look back into her eyes even though she had turned away.

“Oh Gawwd.” She brushed her dark hair out of her face. “I’m an illustrator. I mean, I do books. Well, now I’ve got just one book.” She turned back to me, smiling. “I mean, it’s really great. This is my very own contract. This book I’m doing now. It’s my own.” Her face fell again. “But I’m way behind on it. I mean, that’s what this whole trip is about. You see . . .” She looked out over the stern wake. “I’ve spent the whole darned advance on this trip. I thought, you know, it would be good for inspiration. But I don’t know. I’ve got all my stuff with me. I just don’t think I can do it.” The gulls banked to the west and receded into that gray horizon.

“What’s the book?” I asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know. It started out a good idea. I mean, they liked it. The editor liked it. She said the marketing people were wild about it.”

“Just what is it they are wild about?”

“Angels,” Rosalind said in a whisper. “The Encyclopedia of Angels. Portraits and descriptions.”

She said nothing for a while. I shifted on my feet again, scanning my knowledge for all the interesting conversational hooks I could use for “Angels.”

“Oh,” I said rather smartly.

“You’re right,” Rosalind said. “It’s a dumb idea. But I started it. I’ve been reading all the stuff. I mean, people are crazy about Angels. I’ve read all the stuff and I’ve gotten started. And now I’ve spent every cent of the whole gosh-darned advance and I don’t think I can do it.” Her voice disappeared into the wash of wind.

A large seabird came into view from our starboard: huge wingspan skimming the tops of the swells, curving and looping on the slightest change in the wind.

“Isn’t that an albatross?” I asked Rosalind.

“I think so.” Her eyes followed the invisible lines the bird’s wingtips cut into the wind. Her head turned with each curve the bird made across our wake. Rosalind followed the albatross so intently it was as if her own personality had dropped away momentarily.

“I understand they can go days without a beat of their wings,” she finally said.

“Angels?” I asked her.

“No, silly.” And she looked at me shyly. “Albatrosses. I don’t even want to think about Angels today.” The tips of her fingers brushed my wrist. “Do you know where the clinic is? I swear I was there once but I’m not sure how I found it.”

“I do.” I said this with the air of an old salt. “I’ll walk you down there.”

We walked past a group of people standing in the full wind on the back deck. A dark-haired woman with a silver scarf lashing the air around her head held a champagne flute in her thin hands. I heard her saying to the four men clustered around her, “Don’t even talk to me about hunt­ing. There is no literature of hunting. All of that fake sen­sitive crap about killing animals. It disgusts me. Same with the whining businessmen on the farms. This is no litera­ture of farming or hunting. It’s just boys being boys.” The men in the group stood silently as I walked past them. Rosa­lind came closely behind me. As we turned into a stairway, I turned and looked back at the group. The woman was flattening her hair and clutching the ends of her silver scarf as she finished the last of her drink. “Well then . . . what’s next, gentlemen?” The four men laughed. I closed the door behind Rosalind.

I swear I had to clear my ears, too, by the time we made it down to Acapulco Deck. The motion of the ship was an odd sway in gravity, making walking unsteady and tempting seasickness. I walked past my stateroom and down toward the clinic. I stopped at Acapulco 800, apparently too abruptly, for Rosalind bumped into me. She braced her hands against the foam-green walls.

“I didn’t know they even had rooms down here.” She had her eyes closed and I could tell she was trying to peel back the tentacles of motion sickness.

“I’m just going to try my room,” I told her and then tried to turn the knob of Acapulco 800. It was still locked.

“Damn! I forgot my key,” I said hurriedly and walked toward the clinic. The ship lurched to the port and our bod­ies pulled against the walls. We were both using the inside handrail when we turned the corner to the clinic.

Men’s voices were arguing. “Don’t tell me about the numbers. I don’t want to hear any of that.”

The door was open through to the examining room. There on the table was the pale girl from the evening before. She was dazzling in her colorlessness, as if she were already a spirit of pure light. Standing above her was the large white man with the graying beard I had seen with her last night. He had on a military-style mess jacket with braided epaulets. A stethoscope was draped around his neck.

He spoke and his voice was deep and soothing. “I understand, Isaac. Please don’t misunderstand me . . .”

Then the doctor saw me and he was clearly startled. He quickly turned and in one motion zipped up the green rubber bag in which the pale girl rested. Her hands lay crossed over her sunken chest. Somehow the light in the room seemed to dim. The doctor turned and swiftly kicked the door shut in my face and I found my nose within an inch of the metal door.

“Just one moment, please,” I heard the doctor’s voice say distantly behind the closed door. There was a long si­lence. Then the doctor walked out the door, pulling the bot­tom of his jacket down and rolling his shoulders to straighten the fit. “I’m very sorry,” the doctor said and he placed his hand reassuringly on my shoulder. “I’m dealing with an extremely serious situation. Everything is fine, but it just needs my attention. I’ll be able to get back to regu­lar clinic hours soon. I’m sorry, but why not check back with us later? Why not come back in say . . . forty-five minutes?”

“Was that girl dead?” Rosalind piped up over my shoulder.

The doctor winced ever so slightly. “It’s a very serious case. But actually it’s working out quite well. Everything is fine and I’ll be able to help you soon. Please just check back with us later.” And he stood silently in front of us. The conversation was clearly over.

“Right then,” I said cheerily and taking Rosalind’s hand, turned and walked away.

“Wow. She really looked dead to me,” Rosalind said in a stage whisper as we shuttled down the narrow hall. “I couldn’t see very clearly but it looked like—”

“I think you’re right,” I interrupted. I started fish­ing in my jacket pocket for my wallet. “Why did you want to see the doctor, anyway? Are you okay?” I asked Ros­alind.

Her eyes arched in sympathy and she touched my arm. “Oh, I’m fine really. I just . . . well, I just worry that I’m sick all the time actually. I mean, I just think about it a lot, you know. I mean, I’ve got my share of . . . but . . .” She held her palms up in front of her face as if fending the words off. “I don’t want to talk about it. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.” Then she hugged me quickly. “But thanks for asking, Cecil. That’s sweet.”

Together, we walked up to Acapulco 800. My State of Alaska Organ Donors card is the perfect laminated weight and flexibility for sliding against the latches of most old ho­tel rooms. I disentangled from Rosalind and fished my card out while at the same time trying to shade my hands from her. The bolt clicked and the door swung open with a slight pressure from my shoulder. There was no top bolt and no door chain. But what there was were four legs on the bunk near the back wall with a bright light shining down on them. A shiny black torso and muscular legs thrusting. Two thin shapely white legs topped with red patent leather pumps spread wide and forming a truncated “V” above the black man’s shoulders. His company-issue coveralls were down around his ankles. Her flowered panties were on the floor between us. He was too concerned with his own motion to hear the clunk of the door. Not so with the woman beneath him. The talons of her bright red fingernails flew against the skin of his back. Her eyes, wild and hazy with sex, cleared instantly with panic. His voice groaned, with intense expec­tation. She was pushing and sucking a scream between her teeth and into her lungs.

In two beats he opened his eyes and then followed her panicked gaze over his shoulder to me. Then he did an odd thing; instead of pulling up his pants, he dove into the bed and buried his face in the pillows at the foot of the bed.

The woman’s face came into focus. She tugged a blue raincoat down across her rumpled dress and thrust her hand between her legs to cover herself, but as she tried she was thwarted because the young man’s exposed bottom was lying across her lap.

“Excuse me!” she said with breathless dignity. “But is this your room?”

“No. It’s not,” I said and bumped squarely into Rosa­lind, who was pushing hard against my back and craning against me to see. Not wanting to miss out on the details this time.

I closed the door. Rosalind was breathing hard and balancing on the balls of her feet.

“Wow,” she said, “I guess you know where the excite­ment is on this ship.”