Нил Шустерман - Shuttered Sky

“What makes you say that?”

“I know all the ships that come in: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity. But this one. She not supposed to be here.”

Winston pulled out his wallet and fanned out the corners of several bills. “Dime lo que sabes,” he said in perfect Spanish, "y te pagare por la informaçIón.” The boatman was caught off guard. Not necessarily by the money, but by the accent. Winston smiled knowingly. People were always surprised when he spoke their language, whichever language that happened to be.

The boatman then gazed forlornly at his glass-bottom boat. Busi­ness had obviously been slow. The man stared at the money in Win­ston’s hand, then sighed. He shoved the bills in his pocket. “Yesterday, four men from the cruise line come in by helicopter,” he explained. “Fancy suits, very important-looking. A friend of mine, he takes them out there, and as soon as they get near the ship, three of them pass out cold, like someone poisoned them or something. The one man left—he is the one they let on the ship. My friend waits and waits in his boat, but the man doesn’t come back, and the other three, they don’t wake up. Then he hears the man screaming on the ship, he doesn’t wait anymore. He comes back, goes home.”

“And the other three men?”

The old man shook his head. “The hospital. Still they don’t wake up.”

Winston pulled out a roll of bills, and handed the boatman a twenty, but kept his billfold out. “How much for you to take me out there?”

The boatman shook his head. “I told you—I don’t go out there.”

Winston slowly began flipping twenties. “You’re telling me you’re afraid?”

The boatman began to scratch his beard stubble, thoughtfully at first, and then nervously, as the number of bills increased. “It’s drugs. Some drug lord took over that boat. You go out there, he cuts your throat—maybe mine, too.”

“I thought you said it was haunted.”

“That, too.”

Winston had flipped four bills, he flipped a fifth to make it an even hundred. The boatman began to sweat. “¿Estas loco, eh?”

Winston flipped another bill. The boatman took one more glance at his passengerless boat, and sighed. “Ai, mierda.” He took the money, and let Winston on board.

They pulled away from port, leaving behind the commotion of tourists. The sea was calm, and although the glass-bottom boat wasn’t the fastest vessel, Winston was grateful for the time it gave him to prepare for what he might find. As they got closer and closer to the white behemoth, Winston could hear music growing louder as they drew nearer. Upbeat salsa. Cruise music. The kind of music that sum­moned images of streamers and balloons, and drunk couples sweating a hot lambada. He could see people on deck now, leaning on the guard rails. Bathing suits, sun hats, and everyone seemed to have a drink in their hand.

“If that’s haunted, the ghosts must be having a hell of a time,” said Winston. The boatman reserved judgment.

The ship loomed before them now, a massive thing that just kept growing as they got closer. The anchor was down, but the lower gangway doors were all closed. “No way on, my friend,” said the boatman.

“Go around a few times.”

Reluctantly the boatman turned the wheel, and began to circle the great ship.

Winston moved out to the center of the boat, where he could be seen from the Horizon’s deck. It also made him a target, but he was willing to take that chance. The boat circled twice, and by the time they came around to the starboard side for the second time, the aft lower gangway door was opening.

“Now they kill you,” said the boatman. He set his engine to an idle, and they coasted to the gangway door. Just inside, two unusually corpulent crewmen greeted them with disapproving frowns.

“She says you’re not welcome here,” barked one of them.

Winston grinned in triumph. So he was right—it was Lourdes! “Tell her she owes me five minutes of her time.”

“I suggest you turn your boat around, and go back where you came from.”

The boatman looked first at the guards, then at Winston. His eyes were pleading.

The men wore earpieces. Winston guessed that they must have been getting their orders straight from the horse’s mouth. He won­dered if Lourdes could hear him as well.

“Tell her,” said Winston, raising his voice, “that she’s a stubborn bitch without a shred of sense.”

The boatman took a deep breath and crossed himself. The crew­men hardened into a battle stance, and then a voice came down from heaven.

“Fine. Let him on.”

Winston looked up in time to catch a glimpse of Lourdes looking down on him from the railing seven decks above, before she backed out of view.

The two-man welcome wagon wasn’t thrilled about it, but they obeyed their orders, reached out and helped him aboard.

Winston turned to tell the boatman not to wait, but he was already pulling away.

The two overweight crewmen led him to a glass elevator in a six-story atrium of brass rails and polished marble. He passed several stew­ards on his way, noticing the air of despair that pervaded their eyes. They, too, were obese—so much so that they bulged painfully out of their uniforms. He looked at the ample gut of one of his escorts. “Cruise food?”

The escort said nothing.

As soon as they stepped out onto the pool deck, the weighty sense of oppression permeating the lower decks was blasted away by a party that stretched from stem to stern on the ship’s open-air decks. It was a fiesta of slim, beautiful people. The pool deck was a contagion of indulgence. On a dance floor past the pool, at least a hundred people sated their senses to the beat of the brightly frilled band, which, in spite of a cool ocean breeze, kept insisting it was “hot-hot-hot.” Gor­geous women in designer bathing suits that left nothing to the imag­ination sipped tall cocktails in every color of a neon spectrum. The beat of the music pulsed in the teak wood of the deck, and whoever wasn’t dancing was luxuriating on lounge chairs, or partaking of a sumptuous buffet. The atmosphere was so intoxicating, Winston forgot for a moment why he had come. Until he saw her.

Lourdes sat on her own private verandah one deck up, with a grand view of the partying pool deck below.

Pushing past the gyrating bodies on the dance floor, he made his way toward her, noticing that among the perfect physiques on this pleasure cruise were reminders of that other class that inhabited this ship. A towel boy with an unpleasant bloat about him, lumbering like a troll on the perimeter of the deck. A worker polishing the brass railings with turgid limbs and fleshy folds, his body drenched in acidic, malodorous sweat. These were members of a bizarrely obese servant class that greased the machine, and kept Lourdes’s movable feast afloat.

Winston climbed to Lourdes’s private deck perch. She reclined on a plush lounge, and was attended by two topless men with pectoral muscles the size of turkey breasts. Although she saw Winston approach, she made no attempt to acknowledge him. She simply waited for him to come to her. She had never looked better. Not exactly svelte—her frame would never allow that—but shapely, and well-contained within the smooth blue satin of her bathing suit. He now noticed that the two dark-haired, dark-eyed glamour boys who attended her were, in fact, twins. They threw him a disinterested gaze before returning to their duties. One rubbed Lourdes with tanning oil, the other dipped shrimp in cocktail sauce and held them to her lips.

“Cleopatra, I presume?” Winston said.

Lourdes bit the dangling shrimp off at the tail, and her shrimp boy dropped the tail into a silver bowl already brimming with them. “She was just Queen of the Nile,” Lourdes said. “I’ve done a bit better.”