‘She’s swallowed it!’ the worker shouted unnecessarily.
‘Fuck! How did that happen?’
Maybe because you stuffed a fucking shard of glass in the chambermaid’s mouth and she gagged on it?
Shahla had fallen to the ground and Tiago couldn’t see her any more. He could only hear her. She sounded worse than a minute ago, when she’d been punched.
‘What are we going to do now?’ the taller man said anxiously. The officer ran a hand through his ruffled hair. ‘I’ll be fucked if I know,’ he said. ‘Let’s chuck her out.’
The worker looked at the balcony. ‘At this time of day? Are you out of your mind? What if someone sees us?’
The officer shrugged. He didn’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that a woman at his feet was either suffocating or bleeding to death internally.
Or both, by the sound of it.
Finished. All over.
Tiago didn’t know what he could do to put an end to the nightmare he’d become embroiled in, but nor could he hide on the floor like a coward any longer. He stood up, which Shahla, battling suffocation, didn’t notice. Unlike the two thugs.
The one with the pout screamed like a girl watching a horror film, which might have looked funny from a safe distance, likewise the reaction of the officer. He couldn’t close his mouth and stared at Tiago as if he were a ghost who’d just escaped from his bottle. ‘Fuck… What…?’
Tiago went over to Shahla, who was huddled on the floor between the bed and the television set. Grabbing her under her armpits he lifted her up, to which she offered no resistance. Her vitality was starting to ebb away, but she hadn’t yet been able to spit anything out of her mouth, save for foam.
‘Take it easy,’ Tiago ordered her in English, with an eye on the door and the two men who continued to stand there immobile with astonishment.
Tiago stepped behind Shahla, just as the thug had done a minute earlier, but he was trying to move the chambermaid into a position that could save her life.
If only you’d just bend forwards.
It took a while for Shahla to lower her torso, and this probably wasn’t a voluntary movement, because her knees gave way too. Tiago had to muster all his strength to hold her up by wrapping his arms around her stomach like a belt and pulling his clasped hands into her diaphragm with a powerful jolt.
One.
From the corner of his eye he could see the two men watching him, but they weren’t coming any closer.
Two.
Shahla’s throat had stopped rattling and she seemed to be getting heavier.
Three.
He tried the Heimlich manoeuvre a fourth time, unsure whether he was doing it right. He pulled again, this time even more powerfully, and…
It worked!
Accompanied by a shower of vomit, the glass shot out of Shahla’s mouth, flew half a metre through the room and landed right beside the worker’s feet.
When Tiago let go of the chambermaid she collapsed to the floor again, wheezing, but at least she was breathing, and thus her condition had improved substantially.
The same could not be said of Tiago’s situation. When the glass was freed, so were the two men from their paralysis.
They launched their attack without conferring. Without uttering a word. The men worked in sync like a well-honed team, which is what they probably were. While the worker leaped at him over Shahla, the officer dived headlong across the bed.
Tiago would not have been able to say who hit him first. Or which punch ensured that he yanked the television with him as he fell to the ground. This is it, was the thought that entered his head as he saw the fist hovering above his face. He was expecting to hear his teeth crunch and feel his jawbone shatter. But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the fist vanished from his sight and he heard a woman’s muffled voice call out from a distance, and in German, ‘Lisa, are you there?’
He hurriedly pushed the television set away from his aching upper body and scrambled to his feet.
‘Go!’ he heard Shahla say. She was still unable to stand herself. Blood was running down her chin, her eyes were flooded with tears, but the skin on her face wasn’t so blue any more.
She looked at the connecting door, which had closed again from the movement of the ship. The knob turned slowly.
‘May I come in, Lisa?’ the woman behind the door asked, knocking. Tiago had only a few seconds to copy the crew members and make himself scarce.
He leaped over Shahla’s head to the door, which after the men’s escape was about to close again, wrenched it open, dived into the corridor and didn’t turn back to the voice coming from behind him. It was Lisa’s mother, yelling after him, ‘Stop! Stay where you are!’
He darted left down the short, empty section of the corridor, turned into the nearest stairwell and, without thinking about it, ran up six flights till he got to deck 11, where he dashed outside, bursting into a group of laughing holidaymakers who’d formed a semicircle for a group photo.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled to the overweight man holding the camera, and looked around. It was just after half past nine, and most passengers were still busy with the breakfast buffets or looking on deck 15 for a place in the sun, which today was struggling to break through the cloud cover.
In front of him a steward was cleaning the planks; behind him the wall beneath the chimney was being repainted. No sign of the two madmen. Or of the mother. Yet his pulse refused to calm down.
What on earth did I get into there? he wondered.
Five minutes ago he’d still been a small-time crook, carving out an easy life for himself with a little charm and a few tricks. Now he was fleeing two madmen who shoved broken glass into their victims’ mouths and had no scruples about watching them choke to death. Men who’d threatened to kill him because he’d witnessed an attempted blackmail he didn’t understand, during the course of which he’d learned a secret that made no sense at all.
Tiago leaned against the rail and stared at the choppy sea deep below. Dark clouds were gathering, which at that moment seemed like a grim omen.
So what am I going to do now?
Feverishly he weighed up how he was going to hide on board from the two men for the next five days. He didn’t even know who they were. Where they worked. And in which part of the ship they had their refuge, where they were deliberating how to get rid of him most easily.
For whatever reason.
Tiago was sure the officer would be able to work out his identity as soon as he took the time to trawl through the ship’s computer. Every guest was noted on the passenger list, complete with photo, and the number of young, dark-haired Latinos under the age of thirty on this leg of the trip must be quite small. Feeling his trousers for his key card, unsure when he could dare return to his cabin, he came across an unexpected item in his back pocket.
The envelope.
From the safe. From Lisa Stiller.
In the rush Tiago had stuffed it into his pocket without noticing.