Bon Bon Voyage (17 page)

What a pretty town! I took pictures of everything— gardens, government buildings, old town, until we came upon a restaurant that advertised Canarian dishes. Terribly hungry, I peered in the windows while a man in black sandals, shorts, baseball hat, and a lime green shirt began to harangue Owen with descriptions of all the wonderful dishes to be had inside. I knew that Owen wanted to move on. Didn't the man ever eat anything but breakfast? I couldn't recall seeing him at any other meal. I suppose I might have allowed myself to be dragged away, had I not spotted Luz, Vera, and other people I knew inside.

I dragged Owen in, pointing out my friends, exclaiming about how interesting the food sounded, and inviting the two of us to join them. Chairs were dragged over for us, and once we were seated, Vera said, “Well, I'm glad to see that you haven't disappeared as well, Carolyn. You weren't back yet when I got up this morning. You weren't on the tour. Have you been with Mr. Griffith here since you left dinner last night?”

I can't think of when I've been more embarrassed or indignant. “I spent the whole night in my own bed,” I retorted angrily. “When I got up, you had company in
your
room, so I was discreet enough to leave immediately.”

“I'm a consenting adult and unmarried,” said my mother-in-law, “so don't be a prude, Carolyn.”

Consenting adult? I had to assume that meant she was actually having an affair with her submariner. Good heavens.

“As for you, my girl, you
are
married, and to my son.”

“I thought it was against the feminist credo to call women
girls
,” I retorted, “and I doubt that Jason would be upset that I had breakfast in the dining room and toured Las Palmas with Mr. Griffith when they'd lost my registration for the tour.”

“Christ, we're back to
Mr. Griffith
,” said Owen. “For those of you who don't know me, I'm Owen Griffith. You can call me Owen. Everyone does but Carolyn here, who keeps forgetting. If I'd been so fortunate as to get her into bed, she'd probably have called me Mr. Griffith then, but you can rest easy, madam.” This to Vera. “Because she hasn't cuckolded your son that I know of.”

I sent him a frown and continued to my mother-in-law, “Not as upset as Jason would be to hear that you and Commander Levinson—”

“So what did you think of Las Palmas?” Luz interrupted quickly. “And by the way, I did spend the night out, so I can't vouch for your presence in our room, Caro, but I believe you. You obviously don't know what a prissy lady—”

“I am not,” I snapped.

“—your daughter-in-law is, Vera, so lay off her.”

“So that's why you won't call me Owen,” said my companion for the morning.

“I'm not prissy,” I muttered.

Randolph Barber was filming the whole thing, and I thought, for the first time, that his equipment might record voices too. How embarrassing. The strange waiter in the lime green shirt arrived in time to break up the impending quarrel and introduce himself as Vladimir Putin. After insisting that he really was Vladimir Putin, asking if anyone was interested in buying a missile, and receiving negative answers all around the table, he proceeded to translate the menu.

I ordered a wonderful piece of tuna in a green sauce made of cilantro and garlic, among other things, and I convinced Owen to try
Ropa Vieja
, which translates into “old clothes.” As I found out later, the dish was called that because some of the ingredients were taken from leftover chickpea stew— namely the carrots, chickpeas, and meat. It wasn't bad—spicy and red from the paprika. Because Owen didn't care much for it, I had to give him half of my tuna and eat the rest of his
Ropa Vieja.
Vera muttered something about trading food being very cozy.

Harriet Barber had been reading up on Canary cuisine and said we had to try the Canarians' favorite dessert, fig cake, which the locals liked so much that many took it to South America when they emigrated. Since I intended to write about my experience with the local cuisine, I could hardly object, but truthfully, I don't like figs, and this recipe is made with very, very ripe figs, nuts, and not much else. And as I later discovered, it sits around for eight days before it's ready to serve. The recipe does not mention refrigeration. It's a wonder we didn't all end up in our rooms, sick as dogs.

Incidentally, there were statues of those native dogs in the town, and they looked large and mean. Owen said he thought that was the breed that killed a lawyer in a hall outside her apartment in San Francisco. They'd escaped from their owners. Frankly, I'd just as soon the islanders kept their dogs and their fig cakes at home.

After lunch we had to hurry to take cabs to the port so as not to miss the boat and tomorrow in Tenerife. I was really looking forward to seeing the golden Virgin of Candelaria and the
guanche
mummies in a museum there. The Stone Age natives had actually mummified their dead. How very interesting!

25

Deep in thought, Bruce Hartwig sat alone in his office, chair tilted back, feet on his utilitarian desk. After the unexpected detour away from Casablanca to the Canary Islands, things were working out again. The riots in Morocco had been controlled, which meant that the men he had hired in Casablanca should have no trouble getting the helicopter and themselves away from their army base to pick up the hijack team from the boat.

With several hours before the passengers began to return to the
Bountiful Feast
, Hartwig decided to go ashore and put through an untraceable call from a public telephone to his two pilots. If he didn't reach them today, he'd try again at Tenerife. Only after two misses would he risk connecting with them from the ship. After Tenerife would be the big Mother's Day dinner. The liquor would flow, and the passengers would stagger back to their cabins, only to be warned of heavy seas and given the “seasick” pills. Then he'd take over the ship in the night and keep it out in the Atlantic until the third morning, when the money would be in the Swiss account and he and his cohorts gone.

He was rising to go ashore when Umar Patek entered the office, unannounced, saying, “We have two problems.”

“Tell me later. I need to call Casablanca from the docks.”

“I tell you now. One is bad. Other is worse.”

“Well, what?” asked Hartwig impatiently, thinking everything was going well. He didn't need any late-breaking trouble.

“Your comp passenger, Mrs. Blue. She stop me this morning. Sechrest told her Mrs. Gross was looking for me the night she disappear.”

“So? I hope you told her Mrs. Gross never found you.”

“I told her, but she get closer. A persistent woman, I think. Maybe we should do something about her.”

“Like what? Break her neck?” Hartwig asked sarcastically.

“We're in this for the money, not dead bodies, even if you do have a hard-on for killing women.”

“Women. Men.” Patek shrugged. “I kill both in my time. Worse problem is chef. He decides lamb for Mother's Day. Goes in meat freezer.”

“Christ! He didn't have lamb on the menu until after we took the ship.”

“So he sees lamb tag, finds Mrs. Gross inside plastic bag. Runs out yelling for doctor.”

Hartwig slammed his hands on the desk. “Let's hope the doctor's ashore. As security officer, I can take charge of the body.”

“Doctor is nap in office. Had tiring night with roommate of troublemaker Mrs. Blue.”

“Did he figure out what killed her? Like a broken neck? Administered by you?”

“Last he cannot know. Neck, probably. He is pathologist. Should be able to tell.”

Hartwig swore again and dropped into his chair. Patek sat opposite, silent and expressionless while several minutes passed. “So we take the ship tonight instead of tomorrow night,” Hartwig decided. “Now I
have
to get that call through to Casablanca. And you, you see if you can't get the body back in the freezer and out of the doctor's hands. Then pass the word to the others that we're moving up the schedule.”

Nobody was very talkative at dinner. For one thing, the food tasted like something from a school cafeteria. And Beau, who usually kept the conversation from dying, hadn't said a word and hadn't even asked anyone to dance. Maybe all the jokes about his dancing had hurt his feelings. I could tell the others that he might not be a Fred Astaire, but he sure was good in bed. Then again, since he did look a little peaked, maybe I'd been better than he was. “So you think the chef 's on strike or something?” I asked, pushing away a limp salad that had followed a soup so boring I couldn't tell what kind it was. He gave me a really shocked look, like the chef was his brother and I'd insulted the guy.

Down the table, Carolyn was telling Greg, the golfer, and Randolph Barber about some opera-loving, Metropolitan-Opera-ticket-holding couple she'd met in the bar. Now that was weird. She'd gone to the room when we got back to the ship, and instead of taking a nap or reading her book from the library, the one about Casablanca, she took a shower, got dressed for dinner, and left. Mad at Vera for the showdown they had at Vladimir Putin's restaurant? That guy was a character. Or maybe Carolyn was shocked at me for staying out all night. Christ! She wasn't my mother. She'd have to get over it.

“And then in the scene when Manrico walks out of the convent, the giant cross fell down and just missed him. They said it was the strangest performance of
Il Trovatore
they'd ever seen, and the tenor's voice wobbled for the rest of the scene.”

“Don't care for opera myself,” said Greg.

“Okay, Beau, what's bothering you?” I asked. I'd just been served a steak that was brown all the way through with some frigging sauce on it that tasted so bad I had to scrape it off.

My vacation lover sighed and put his fork down. “You can't blame poor ole Demetrios for the food. He had a shock this afternoon that would shake any man, an' he's on the hysterical side at the best of times. I've already had to give him anti-anxiety pills to keep the whole kitchen staff from walkin' out.”

“Okay, so he's nuttier than ever. What happened to set him off? A soufflé fall or something?” I grinned at Beau, hoping to cheer him up.

“You can't tell anyone this,” Beau all but whispered.

“Okay.”

“He found a corpse in the meat locker.”

I had to squelch the urge to say the locker was probably full of corpses, animal corpses, so no big deal, but Beau didn't look like he was in the mood for jokes.

“Mrs. Gross,” he whispered.

Oh shit,
I thought. “What happened? Did she get locked in and freeze to death?”

He sighed again. “She was wrapped in a full-length, plastic bag marked
lamb
and hung from a hook.”

I gulped. Not that I hadn't seen some corpses in my time, and Beau must have seen ten times that many, but he looked pretty shook up, and I was too. “Any idea how she died?”

“Broken neck.”

“Accident?”

“I doubt it.”

Oh man. I was going to have to tell Carolyn, promise or no promise, and then the two of us were going to have to find out who broke Mrs. Gross's neck. As for why, it could have been anyone; it's not like the woman wasn't a royal pain in the ass. “Was she wearing anything besides the bag?” Carolyn would have questions. Might as well find out.

“That ugly brown dress, the one she always wore to dinner.”

“Right. So she must have been killed, or at least died, between dinner and morning when she stopped showing up for anything. What about the green jewelry? Emeralds, Carolyn told me.”

Beau shook his head and then invited me back to his cabin, but somehow I felt like I should stay with Carolyn that night. I didn't know when I was going to tell her—tonight, tomorrow morning, whenever—but she was going to be upset, and she was going to want to see justice done and all that idealistic crap. Some vacation! Here I'd found myself a nice man for the duration—it wasn't like I had any long-term designs on him—and instead I'd get to go after another murderer with Miss Prissy. That may sound like I don't like her, but to tell the truth, I kind of get a kick out of her, as long as she doesn't burst into tears about my language.