Bon Bon Voyage (28 page)

“People walking around with guns on a cruise ship,” said Sven. “That's strange.” He led the ace of diamonds.

“No one in the gym or spa,” agreed Frieda. “Unions, maybe.”

“We're not getting into contracting out to cruise ships,” said Sven. “You can forget that, Frieda.”

They took eleven out of twelve tricks and agreed to throw in with us on the counterhijacking. “So,” said Sven, when we'd explained the situation as we saw it, “shouldn't be a problem.”

“Only four of them with weapons,” agreed his wife thoughtfully. “Hell, Sven and I could take them on our own, couldn't we, big guy.”

He nodded. “Bad food. Big price.” Then he turned to me. “You didn't have to play so bad. I don't like a scam on me. Don't have to win at bridge to help. Police should be more honest.”

I had to laugh. “Honestly, I'm a crappy player,” I assured him.

“You can say that again,” Frieda agreed. “So when do we go after them? After the tournament? And what if they're not passed out? I just saw that ugly security guy stick his head in here.”

Beau didn't like that. Neither did I. If the avocado soup hadn't worked, we were going up against four people with automatic weapons. Maybe we needed a new game plan.

Bruce Hartwig was disgusted with himself by the time he'd finished his steak and fries, followed by a big piece of apple pie with ice cream. He was falling asleep in his chair. He'd only been sleeping in catnaps since they took the boat, but that was no excuse. He'd been known to go for days without sleep in Africa during mercenary contracts. Mow down a bunch of ragtag rebels in the bush and head out in search of more. Lousy working conditions, but good pay.

He sighed and stood up, stretching, and walked out of the dining room briskly to get his blood circulating. He'd better take a look at that bridge tournament. The writer had organized it. Hartwig didn't consider a writer much of a threat, no matter what kind of books the guy wrote, but you never knew who your enemy was. In Africa, the people who employed you had been just as likely to shoot you as anyone. So he looked in. A wimpy-looking bunch, drinking and slapping down cards like there was money on the games. The crew was grumbling because the passengers were still drinking up the liquor. Afraid it might run out.

Hartwig yawned. Tomorrow he and the others would be gone, and the crew and passengers could go after each other. The idea amused him. He spotted the writer, who was talking his head off to some guy who looked to Hartwig like a New York Jew. He'd lived in a Jewish neighborhood when he was a kid. Used to make money pushing the elevator buttons for them on high holy days or whatever. And some of the kids he could bully out of lunch money. But there was one who caught him at it and beat the shit out of him. Never liked Jews after that. Probably some bastard who grew up and immigrated to Israel to beat the shit out of Arabs.

Not that Hartwig liked Arabs, either. He particularly didn't like Patek, and he didn't even know what Patek was. Or O'Brien. O'Brien pissed him off with all that Irish blather and computer gabble no one could understand. Now Froder was more like it. Tough. Not much to say. He figured he could count on Froder in a pinch. Froder would probably have been a Nazi if he'd been old enough to join up. Hartwig had always figured he'd have made a good Nazi, but they might not have let him join. He'd never known who his father was. Bound to be better than his mother, whoever the old man had been. She was as mean as a woman could be. Always pounding on him when she was drunk, until he got big enough to kick her teeth in and take off.

Suddenly he found himself in front of his office and couldn't remember heading there. Well, good thing. He needed a cup of coffee.

43

“Sorry about that,” I murmured to Owen as we stayed at our table and the winning couple moved on.

“Carolyn, love. You were perfect. I set it up so we'd get to talk to the likely winners from the next table. Luz did well, too. They lost, and the Barbers are in. Harriet seemed downright bloodthirsty.”

“Not surprising. If I were black, and Mr. Hartwig muttered
damn niggers
under his breath when I asked why he was carrying a gun on a cruise trip, I'd be angry, too.”

“Randolph seemed more interested in filming the whole thing,” Owen observed, “but if he's willing to use that equipment as a weapon if necessary, he could knock someone right off the boat.”

“He'd never endanger his camera. Imagine having to look at everything he shoots when they get home. You know, I think that's the first time I've said the
n-word.
Mr. Hartwig is
not
a nice man. The sooner we have him in the brig, the better.”

“Sh-sh,” hissed Owen. “Hi, I'm Owen Griffith, and this is my partner, Carolyn. You'd be the Povrays, right?”

“That's us,” said a tall, rangy man with white hair and one of those string ties held in place by a gold, horny-toad ornament. I hadn't seen anything like that since I met a drug lord at a Juárez mariachi club.

“This here's Wanda Sue, an' Ah'm Hank.”

I estimated that Wanda Sue was a good twenty to twenty-five years younger than Hank, but she still had a sort of leathery, rancher look. Still, maybe hers came from sitting by a pool while he was out admiring his cattle.

Since we were the losers, Owen dealt the cards, while Wanda Sue admired my “tan.”

“Oh, I'm just naturally dark-skinned,” I said.

“Why, honey, are you a Meskin?”

“Greek,” I replied. “Carolyn Metropolis. I'm a chef in New York, and I'm here to get some pointers from my cousin Demetrios, the chef on the ship.” I could see that Owen was choking back laughter while I calmly arranged my cards. “Are you fond of Greek food?”

“We-all, no,” drawled Wanda Sue. “Ah'm a lover of French food.”

“French food is nice,” I agreed, and returned Owen's three clubs with a six-club bid. If he wanted to lose, I felt obligated to do my part. I hate those three-club bids. Who ever knows what they mean? Everyone looked taken aback at my six clubs, including Owen.

“Well, hell,” said Hank, and bid six hearts. That closed the bidding, except for the doubling and redoubling.

Wanda Sue said, “Hank is so impulsive, an' not just at bridge. We went to this big ole cattle sale before we left, an' he bid enough money to keep me in clothes for a year on the ugliest bull you ever did see.”

“That there bull's goin' to make us rich,” said Hank, leading from the dummy hand.

“We're already rich, honey,” Wanda Sue protested.

“We're gonna need to be richer if you keep buying them trees an' dawgs an' spores an' the like. Wanda Sue is aiming to grow truffles in Texas. They're somethin' that tastes like dirt an' grows in France.”

“Truffles are delicious!” I exclaimed.

“Why, do y'all use truffles in Greek food?” she asked me.

I had no idea, but I gamely said, “They're wonderful in rabbit stew,” and had to promise to send her a recipe. Actually, her scheme sounded very interesting to me. She was planting the right kind of trees to nourish truffles in their roots and raising dogs to sniff out truffles that she imported and buried in the ground for training purposes. She wanted the dogs to be ready when she harvested her first truffle crop.

“Takes a hell of a lot of good water to keep those truffle trees goin',” said Hank. “Never goin' to make money in the long run. Still, Ah'm a man who likes to keep mah little lady happy, don't Ah, sugah?”

She giggled and leaned across the table to give him a quick kiss. “Ain't she the sweetest thang?” he exclaimed.

I could have swatted the two of them.
Keep the little woman happy?
For once, I thought of my mother-in-law with affection. If she'd been here, she'd have taken a layer off Mr. Povray's leathery Texas hide. All I could do, being given to polite refutation of outrageous statements, was to say, “You don't know what fresh truffles would bring per pound in the States. No one grows them here.”

“Well, why don't you tell me, Miz Metropolis,” he said with genial condescension.

“If they're seven hundred Euros a kilo in France, which is a quote I saw on the Internet, they'd be twice that here.”

“Well, Ah'll be double-damned,” he exclaimed. “But then Ah always did say mah little bride here has a head on her shoulders.”

After that the men starting talking about something else, and Wanda Sue told me all about importing large trees from Italy and France along with gardeners to tend them. She herself was running the truffle-dog training program. “They took right to it,” she claimed. “Ah'm selling some of mah dawgs in France. Plenty of people just don't like pigs around, so the dawgs are gettin' popular, especially with women who own truffle forests. Pig shit, now that does smell bad, but dawg shit, it just dries up an' hardly smells at all, long as it don't rain. You ever visited one of those pig farms in the Carolinas? Ah went looking at pigs when Ah first started out, but the smell, oh mah—”

“Well, Owen, you got yourself a deal,” said Mr. Povray, interrupting not only Wanda Sue and me, but people for tables in every direction. “That's the best offer Ah've had this whole dang cruise.”

Owen gave him the eye, and the rancher quieted down, while I realized that my partner had lost any chance of making a reasonable showing at bridge since I inadvertently trumped his trick, but he'd still managed to recruit another counterhijacker.

“Wanda Sue, honey,” Mr. Povray whispered. “We are gonna have
some
fun tonight! Don't you worry, Owen, if you need any shootin' done, Ah'm your man. Been shootin' all my life an' then some. Fact is, they say my ma shot a twelve-point buck not five minutes before she went into labor. Ah was born in a deer blind while they was out huntin'.”

“Glad to have you aboard, Hank,” said Owen. “You too, Wanda Sue. I hear you're a crack shot yourself.”

“Well, Ah am, honey. But what are we shootin' at? Not fish, I hope. Bullets do tend to ricochet off water.”

Since it was time for the Povrays to move on, having beaten us abysmally, doubled and redoubled, we had to wait until after the tournament to explain our mission to Wanda Sue, but Owen did congratulate me on trumping the only trick he had a chance of taking.

I shrugged. “I can't listen and play bridge at the same time, and Mrs. Povray is a talker.”

“She is, and I wasn't being sarcastic, love. Because of you, they set us doubled and redoubled. Hank was, as he put it, ‘pleased as a pig in slop.' ”

At the end of the tournament, those who hadn't been recruited went off to bed, and the rest of us split into teams to check dormitories for sleeping crew members, hunt down unconscious carriers of guns, see if we could find the captain, tie up those we thought should be tied up, and so forth. We took down all the fancy drapery ties in the Grand Salon just to be sure we were well provided with binding materials.

44

After two hours of bridge, I felt like going to bed. It was more exhausting than physical training had been at the police academy, but no one, well no one we recruited, was going to bed until we had taken back the ship, and then we'd have to work shifts until we could get some help. As Barney said, he couldn't run a whole damn ship by himself with a couple of landlubbers as crew, and we didn't know who we could trust among the real crew. The idea was to lock them in their dormitories.

Some of the people bitched about ending the tournament after three hours, but Owen and Beau said that was the deal, so they straggled away. With any luck, they'd head off to bed so they didn't get in our way when we went after the four or five conspirators. We couldn't agree about the Irishman because we'd never seen him with a gun. On the other hand, we had seen him whispering with the four who did carry guns: Hartwig, Patek, Froder, and Fredriksen.

I was looking over the recruits, and I'll tell you I wouldn't want to serve on a SWAT team with any of them. Randolph Barber didn't expect to do anything but film the takeover. His wife said she was along to take care of Beau, who was her dancing protégé. Crap. Our raggle-taggle group of bridge players would probably end up against the wall with four automatic weapons pointed at us. Tossed overboard, maybe. Carolyn had told me about Hartwig throwing the Crosswayses over, and then the damned Crosswayses wouldn't even help us take back the ship. Thankless turds thought they had better things to do with their time. When it was my turn to take them food, I didn't do it.

Patrick O'Brien solved the problem we had with him by staggering into the Grand Salon and telling Beau he was sick. Beau said, “You look sick, fella. We better head for my clinic. Luz?” Evidently I was supposed to lead the Irishman off to be treated, though God knows what Beau had in mind for him. Beau made a quick stop beside Owen and said, “Start organizing them into teams. I'll be back in about five minutes.” Then he caught up with us.

By the time he opened the clinic, I was holding O'Brien up, while he mumbled, “Don't know what's wrong. I've had five cups of coffee, and I'm still . . .”

Beau had him on the table with his shirt off before he could tell us his symptoms. “Holy, Magnolia!” Beau exclaimed, standing behind O'Brien. “Luz, look at this rash.”

I went around to look, but O'Brien's back was smooth and white except for some freckles on his shoulders. Beau nudged me, so I said, “Really awful, man.” And to Beau, “Anything we can do for the poor guy?”