Bon Bon Voyage (6 page)

Captain Gennaro Marbella was a very handsome man in his perfectly ironed white uniform with periwinkle trim and gold epaulettes, his black hair handsomely streaked with white, a tanned face, and a melting smile. He seemed to prefer to have his picture taken while each lady, looking bemused by his charm, was encircled in his arm and her male escort, if any, stood beside them looking awkward. After the introductory handshake, Luz snuggled up against him for the picture while he smiled down at her cleavage. Then she whispered to him, loudly enough for me to hear, “If you people don't find my luggage, I'm going to sue your asses off.”

I groaned and helped myself to a third glass of champagne. The captain stared at her in astonishment. “No luggage?” he asked.

“You lost it,” she replied.

“Get Patek!” he roared. Crewmembers scrambled, and in no time at all, a slender man with dark hair and skin and an officer's uniform, but with less decoration than the captain's, presented himself. “This lovely lady says she has no luggage,” the captain growled. “You lost it.”

“I am aware one passenger—”

“What do you intend to do about it?” demanded the captain.

“I have already been in touch with Lisbon, Captain.”

“Not good enough,” snapped Gennaro. “Passengers on my ship do not sail without their luggage.” He turned to Luz. “My most lovely signora, tomorrow morning the ship's boutique will outfit you for your passage. With our compliments. Choose what you will, and accept my apologies. Even without your clothes, you look beautiful.” He scanned her cleavage and belly button. “Most enchanting.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Luz.

I was up next, horribly embarrassed. My hand was perspiring when he shook it. At a loss for conversation while the photographer was aiming at us, I asked the captain if he came from Naples. “Holy Blessed Virgin!” he exclaimed with delight as he embraced me with both arms and asked how I knew.

“San Gennaro, the-the patron saint of Naples,” I stammered.

“You have been there?” he asked. When I nodded, he kissed me on both cheeks, and the photographer took our picture. I wouldn't be able to take that one home to Jason. On second thought, maybe I should.

When the last of the two hundred passengers had been embraced and photographed—no one else got kissed—the captain introduced his staff to the crowd: Martin Froder, ship's engineer, a wiry fellow with short blond hair and a sour expression coupled with a German accent; Bruce Hartwig, chief security officer, American, burly, ugly, and sort of scary looking, although he had a nice smile and aimed it at the guests; the ship's doctor, Beaufort E. Lee, whose gray hair hung in untidy curls on his forehead; Umar Patek, the chief steward, who seemed unruffled after his brief tongue-lashing from the captain; Chef Demetrios Kostas el Greco, round, flushed, and sporting a two-foot, cylindrical chef 's hat set slightly askew; and Hanna Fredriksen, the blonde, Amazonian hotel manager, who gave the captain a killing look when he asked us to note what a luscious figure she had. Although the woman was standing, like a good soldier, straight with shoulders back, feet braced apart, and hands behind her back, I think the captain tried to pat her on the fanny.

“Ha!” said my mother-in-law. “That woman needs to be told she doesn't have to put up with sexual harassment even if he is the captain. And why was he kissing
you
, Carolyn? Obviously, I'm going to have to keep an eye on you.”

I tried to rush Vera and Luz toward the dining room before Vera could make a feminist scene, but we were waylaid by a couple who could have been brother and sister with their light brown hair, suntanned faces, and matching greenish suits. “Kev Crossways,” said the man, and offered me his right hand to shake and, in his left hand, a small tray of fried cheese balls speared with toothpicks. He must have snatched them from a waiter.

“Bev Crossways,” said the woman, shaking all our hands before tossing back a flute of champagne, unadulterated with any of the colorful liquors being offered. “Adjunct professors at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.”

“Did you notice how many pictures they took at this party?” Kev demanded. “Over four hundred. Four hundred! Now they'll develop them in their photo shop, sell them to you at outrageous prices, and pour the developing chemicals overboard.”

“Those chemicals are toxic,” said Bev. “Dangerous pollutants.”

“Really?”
Too bad Jason isn't here,
I thought.
He'd be interested. In fact, he'd probably know more about the toxicity than she did.

“Take a picture. Kill a fish,” said Kev, looking outraged.

“A whole school of fish,” Bev predicted.

“Well, let's hope we won't be eating any of them tonight,” said Vera. “And speaking of eating—”

“A pleasure to meet you,” I said politely to the Crosswayses and let myself be shepherded away by my sour-faced mother-in-law.

“Heads up, Luz,” Vera called over her shoulder to Luz, who had bent over to readjust the bow on her left foot.

8

People actually believed that I was a fashion designer from Madrid wearing one of my own outfits. How dumb was that? I got stopped and gushed over by women who probably
were
wearing designer stuff, so I played along by answering in Spanish while Carolyn squirmed and her mother-in-law had a great time translating my remarks. I found out after the first translation that Vera didn't know a word of Spanish. She just improvised. For instance, she told some blue-haired snob from Connecticut that high heels were definitely out now that everyone knew heels were the result of a plot by the patriarchy. The woman looked pretty surprised and seemed to think the “patriarchy” had a connection to terrorism.

The dining room was something else—big framed panels of silver and light purple silk and velvet stuck up on the walls, crystal chandeliers, silver carpet so soft the stuff inched up between my toes and knocked my toe bows cockeyed. I got my feet under the table as fast as I could because I kind of enjoyed playing Spanish designer. The tables seated eight, with velvet armchairs, white tablecloths, candles, china, place cards with our names written in old-fashioned script, and waiters who directed us to our seats.

We got the doctor's table. I had a sneaking feeling that wasn't a plum assignment. The captain's table had the blue-hairs and their well-fed husbands. I was next to the doctor, and on his other side were a really tall, busty, middle-aged black lady and her large, black husband—Randolph and Harriet Barber. He owned a string of funeral homes. How the hell he got so big is a mystery, because he had a video camera and took pictures of everything and everybody, pretty much ignoring dinner, while his wife talked about the Republican Party and her years at some fancy eastern girl's university where she was one of the first African-American students.

Carolyn was squeezed between the black mortician and a bald guy named Greg Marshand, the VP of a cereal company in Iowa. He'd retired to Florida to play golf and wanted to tell her in excruciating detail about every hole he'd played at the Boca Raton Club in the last five years. That was until he found out that she was a food critic. Then he told her more than she ever wanted to know about what kind of corn made the best dry cereal. Jesus Christ! If I'd had to sit next to him, I'd probably have slumped headfirst into my soup, which was pretty good. Pumpkin with flowers floating on it. Carolyn said they were edible, so I ate mine, but they didn't taste like much.

The mother-in-law sat next to Mr. Cereal and wouldn't even talk to him beyond giving him a lecture on some famous golf club that wouldn't let women join. Between her and me was a short, stocky guy named Commander Bernard Levinson, ex-
jefe
on a nuclear submarine and Mr. Cereal's golf partner. They were both Florida widowers, and Barney was seriously pissed off that after all those long tours underwater, with his wife at home raising the kids and taking care of everything else, she died on him when he finally retired so they could take cruises
above
water together. He seemed like a pretty good guy.

I wasn't sure what to make of the doctor. Beaufort E. Lee? What kind of name was that? He said he was from Atlanta, Georgia, and went cruising for a month each year, free of charge because he took over as ship's doctor. This was his first time on the
Bountiful Feast
, and he liked it—fewer people and a newer ship meant less chance of stomach viruses flattening all the passengers and ruining his vacation. If that was his bedside manner, I planned to stay well on my own.

Vera asked him if he knew what to do for someone who'd had a heart attack, which she'd had before Christmas. He told her she didn't have to worry because he'd seen hundreds of dead heart attack victims. “Young man,” she said, “if I have a heart attack on this ship, I expect you to keep me alive, not add me to your list of dead heart patients.” Then she waved a Caesar salad crouton at him and demanded to know what he'd do if she had a second heart attack.

“Why, ma'am,” he said, “Ah'd try to keep you alive until the helicopter showed up to take you to the nearest hospital.”

That's when he asked me to dance. Evidently he was expected to dance with all the ladies at the table. He'd asked Harriet Barber first, before the soup. They didn't seem to do too well until she started leading. I got asked during the salad and tried to get out of it, but he wasn't having any of that. So I let him step on my bare toes once, but when he gave me a twirl and knocked his knee into mine, that was it. “Doctor, you're one hell of a bad dancer, and I've got rheumatoid arthritis. You're doing me some serious damage here.”

He stopped dancing and looked me over. “Sorry about that, ma'am. At least you are a very good lookin' cripple. What prescriptions are you on?”

So we sort of swayed in place to the music and talked about my meds. Turns out he was a pathologist, and he said I wouldn't be wanting him to give me any shots unless I was desperate. Medical examiner for the city of Atlanta. When I told him I'd been a cop, we got on just fine. I did warn him it might be a bad idea to mention his specialty to other people. After all, Vera hadn't taken it very well when he'd brought up all the heart attack corpses he'd seen.

My first dinner aboard the
Bountiful Feast
, and it was very good. An excellent pumpkin soup to start, flavored with ginger, if I was not mistaken. Then a Caesar salad that was a little heavy on the anchovy paste in my opinion, but Mr. Barber, who sat next to me, liked it a lot. He told me that he'd kept jars of anchovies in his room when he was a literature student at Howard University and had loved to snack on the anchovies while reading Milton. He sounded rather sad about the whole thing, although he had met his future wife there. I asked how he happened to get into the mortuary business after he'd majored in English.

It was a sad story. He'd received a Rhodes scholarship and gone on to Oxford while his future wife attended graduate school at Radcliffe. Then while he was enjoying his second year in England, his father and brother were killed in a collision with an eighteen-wheeler on the beltway around Washington, D.C. With no one left alive to take over the business his father had founded, he'd been forced to leave England and run the chain himself.

“Randolph had a duty to our people,” his wife Harriet informed me. “We provide affordable, dignified, Christian funerals for African-Americans in ten of the major metropolitan areas, and we are expanding our services every year.”

Naturally I expressed my admiration for their good works and then studied my entrée, a lovely piece of medium-rare New York strip steak edged by garlic mashed potatoes decorated with thin fried onion straws, broiled tomatoes, and crispy green beans.

“We do not do Muslim funerals,” said Mrs. Barber decisively. “I feel that compassionate conservatism should not extend to Muslims, and I'm sure the president and the Party would agree with me.”

Mr. Barber sighed and said, “I rather imagine, Harriet, that we bury the odd atheist from time to time.”

My steak had been seared with spicy herbs and was absolutely mouth-watering. I'd have to visit the chef tomorrow to talk food and recipes for my column, “Have Fork, Will Travel.” I'd only managed two or three bites when the doctor, a rather peculiar man with a pronounced Southern drawl, a distant relationship to Robert E. Lee, and waves of dark and silver hair falling over his forehead, asked me to dance. I really did want to finish my entrée, but dancing with the ship's representative seemed to be obligatory, so I accepted. He was a dreadful dancer, and after having my toes stepped on three times, I became very worried, not only about the safety of my own feet, but also that of my barefooted friend, Luz.

The doctor told me to watch my purse in Tangier, where purse-snatchers thronged the crowded streets, and also in Gibraltar, where the so-called Barbary apes were prone to snatching handbags, hats, jewelry, food, souvenir bags, and anything they could run off with. I did not find our conversation particularly reassuring. I had been looking forward to North Africa and Gibraltar. Thank goodness Dr. Lee had no warnings about the Canary Islands or the Spanish ports we'd visit on the return to Barcelona. Or perhaps he was saving those for another dance. If so, I might be forced to take over any future conversations.

Also, he was very tall, perfect for Luz, except for the damage he might do her feet; my nose was below his shoulder, and I don't consider myself a short woman. Goodness, I'm just about Jason's height. We dance very well together.

When the doctor and I returned to the table, my mother-in-law was demanding to know whether the Navy had female sailors on their submarines. Commander Levinson said not when he was captaining nuclear submarines, but he thought women would be less likely to come back to port pregnant from submarine duty than, say, aircraft-carrier duty, since it would be very hard to have sex on a submarine without an audience. Much to my astonishment, Vera laughed. They both laughed.