T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

He must have stayed under that shower for twenty minutes or more, he who was always so conscious of wastage at home, who would bang impatiently on the bathroom door when Adam was a teenager and showering six times a day, who recycled and bought local and composted every scrap left on every plate in the house. But not now, not today. Now he needed to wash himself clean of the dirt of this godforsaken shithole he should never have come to in the first place. He lifted his face to the spray. Soaped up. Let the shower massage him, soothe him, coax him down off the ledge he’d been perched on ever since the bus had pulled into that mud lot. He was showering, all right? Was that a crime? When finally he did emerge, Carolee brushed by him without a word and locked the door behind her. An instant later she was in the shower too, the muted hiss of the water intimate and complicit.

He went straight to the phone to order a drink — a martini, two martinis, his and hers — and something to put on his stomach, something that didn’t involve tortillas, rice, beans or fish. Pasta, he was thinking. Pasta and a salad. And steak for her, filet mignon, rare. He dialed room service, ordered the drinks and food and went out in his robe to sit on the veranda and brood over the views of the city and the bright rippling dance of the sea beneath him, wide awake suddenly when all he’d wanted all day was a nap. He poured himself a glass of water and took a long drink, his throat parched, still parched, always and eternally, and when he set the glass back down he saw that his hand was trembling.

Carolee was still in the bathroom when the knock came at the door. Barefoot, cinching the robe around his midsection and smoothing back his hair — still wet because nothing ever dried in this humidity — he came in off the veranda and crossed the cabin to the door, expecting the room-service waiter. It wasn’t the room-service waiter, but a group of four, fronted by the fun director in her solid black heels. Beside her stood one of the ship’s officers — a man of forty, forty-five, wearing a deep tan to contrast with his whites — and behind him were two members of the Fuerza Pública, as rigid as wooden soldiers in their sharply pressed uniforms. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Stensen,” the fun director said, “but I wonder if I might introduce you to Senior Second Officer Potamiamos and Officers Salas and Araya of the local police force.”

“We just wanted a word with you,” the ship’s officer interjected, his English smooth and bland and with the faintest trace of an accent Sten couldn’t place, though he assumed it must have been Greek. “About today’s. . incident, I suppose you’d call it. We’ve interviewed some of the others and we’d like to have your version of events, if you don’t mind.”

Sten took a step back and held open the door. He wanted to bark at them, wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves and slam the door in their faces, but all he did was shrug. “No, I don’t mind,” he said.

The ship’s officer produced a smile, but he made no move to enter the cabin. “Fine,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “Very good. Excellent. But wouldn’t you be more comfortable in one of our conference rooms? Where we can sit at a table, have a bit more room? Get coffee. Would you like a coffee?”

“I’m not going to need a lawyer, am I?”

The fun director — her nametag read Kristi Breerling in gold letters against a glossy black background — looked as if she were about to burst into laughter over the absurdity of the proposition, but the cops never broke protocol and Potamiamos’ smile froze in place. “We just want your version of events, that’s all,” he said. “We’re cooperating fully with the local authorities, who, I’m told, are even now tracking down the other two criminals involved in this unfortunate assault on our passengers — on you . And your wife.” A pause. He glanced across the cabin to the bathroom door. “Is she present, by the way? We’d like to have her—”

“ Version of events, ” Sten put in, cutting him off. He didn’t like where this was going, didn’t like it at all. He was an American citizen. He’d been attacked. On foreign soil. And the Senior Second Officer was either going to throw him to the wolves or cover the whole thing up. Or both.

“Yes, that’s right,” Potamiamos said. “For the record. But wouldn’t you — wouldn’t we all — be more comfortable in a larger space?”

“I’m comfortable here.”

That was when the door to the bathroom clicked open and the cops snapped to attention. Carolee, barefoot and wrapped in one of the ship’s plush deep-pile towels, stood there gaping at them a moment before she recovered herself and ducked back into the bathroom, the door pulling shut behind her with an abrupt expulsion of air.

“Well, in that case, can we come in?” Potamiamos asked, and then he paused, as if thinking better of it. “Or should we wait a few minutes to give you and your wife a chance to dress? Five or ten minutes, let’s say? Would that be sufficient? We don’t want to be intrusive, but, you understand, these officers do need to make their report and the ship will have to stay in port until such time as this business is concluded.” The smile, which had gone up a notch when Carolee appeared, had vanished. The passenger was always right, that was the credo of the ship, of the whole cruise industry, but sometimes a passenger stepped over the line and the Senior Second Officer had to come down from the bridge or the casino or wherever he spent his time and address the situation in a way the usual ass-kissing shipboard smile simply wouldn’t accommodate. The cops just stared. The fun director looked embarrassed.

It came to him suddenly that he was in control here, that they were afraid of him, afraid of the stink he could raise— Tourists Mugged on Cruise —afraid of lawsuits, bad press, all the retirees of the world canceling their reservations en masse and nobody collecting the precious Yankee dollars that kept the whole enterprise afloat, the true trickle-down economy, from the old folks’ pensions and 401(k)s to the captain and his crew and the restaurateurs and shop owners and even the pickpockets and whores. “All right,” he said, “give us ten minutes.” He leveled a look on Potamiamos. “How about the Martini Bar? That work for you?”

That was the moment the room-service waiter chose to appear in the doorway, pushing a cart with the covered dishes and drinks set atop it. He was a Middle Easterner of some sort, judging from his nameplate, part of the international cast that ran the ship, from the Greek officers to the Eastern European housekeepers, one-point-three crewmembers to every two passengers, no amenity left unturned. When he saw the cops and Senior Second Officer there, his face fell, but Sten waved him in. “Put it there on the table, will you?” And then, turning back to his visitors, who couldn’t have all fit in the cabin at once even if they’d wanted to, he said, “Make that half an hour, will you?”

He wound up tasting nothing — not that it wasn’t good, all the food was terrific, first class all the way, but he was still sick in his stomach from the ice cubes or the dirty glasses or whatever it was, and worked up too over what was coming. He chased the pasta around his plate, the same lobster tortellini in cream sauce he’d practically inhaled the day before, and sat there sipping meditatively at his martini while Carolee dispatched her steak. She was a good eater, always had been since the day he’d met her, no nonsense, no lingering, address your food and put it away, and how many times had he glanced up from his plate in one restaurant or another to see that she was already finished before he’d had a chance to shake out his napkin? It was a sensual thing, he supposed, and that was all right because he was included in her range of appetites too, and who would have thought it would last this long? A lifetime. A whole lifetime.