Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

After the last pallet went into the hold, he staggered behind it into the Queen Isabella and went along the wide central passageway. His quarters, he was sure, weren’t ready for him yet, so for now he’d have to improvise. Various crewmembers in uniform rushed by him, not registering his presence. He didn’t know the precise layout of this particular ship, but he could figure it out.

He climbed through the stairwell, up and up, then saw sunlight under the door marked EXIT, pushed it open, and found himself on an empty deck, of all the lucky breaks. It was lined with deck chairs. With any luck he could lapse into a restorative coma for fifteen minutes or so before anyone saw him. He walked swiftly to the end of the deck, ducked under a railing, and climbed into a private nook. He stretched out on a flat, cushioned deck chair, put one arm over his face to shield his eyes from the sun, and was almost instantly in a deep, animal sleep.

His dream was vivid and felt real. He was swimming underwater with a school of large fish who bumped up against him and blew bubbles in his direction but otherwise left him alone, as he did them. The water was bathtub warm. The sun shone high overhead, glinting on the surface above him, and he didn’t seem to need to breathe. That was it, the whole dream. It went on and on until a loud noise woke him up, a hollow metallic clang nearby.

His arm flew off his face and he sat up, wide awake, aware of where he was and why, being in the long-practiced habit of transiting from sleep to wakefulness in a split second. He replayed the noise in his mind as he scanned the deck: whatever it had been, the deck was still empty. He had slept a fairly long time, according to the position of the sun, which had thrown his balcony into shade as it rose. Maybe half an hour. Too long.

He leapt up off the deck chair and headed back to the door to the stairwell, hoping it hadn’t locked behind him. He’d been too tired to remember to prop it open. He checked his phone: 7:27. He was going to be a few minutes late to the first staff meeting, a serious offense. If the door was locked, he was fucked.

The door was unlocked: his second piece of luck of the day. He flung himself down the stairwell. His mouth was still dry, and his eyes burned. He wondered how his breath smelled and decided it was better not to think about it. His armpits, same thing. He burst through the lower door into what he hoped was the right corridor, and walked fast in the direction he hoped would take him to the meeting room. He ran his fingers through his hair and brushed his hands over his jacket to make sure it wasn’t askew. Equally crazed people rushed all around him. It was now 7:30 on the nose. He followed another guy in a chef’s jacket around a corner, up another flight of stairs, and down another corridor. The other guy pushed open some swinging doors and there they were, the galley crew, sitting in what looked like the breakfast buffet room around the longest table. Without the guy ahead of him, Mick never would have found this room. Now he was plausibly on time. He glanced at his savior’s face: very black, young, clean-shaven, with a close buzz cut. He’d thank him later. Maybe he’d find an ally. The guy wore a yellow neckerchief: chef de partie.

His neckerchief! The office manager had issued it to him just hours before, along with his checked pants and jacket and toque. Mick pulled it from his pocket and looked at it: it was black and silver, signifying his elevated status. He tied it around his neck as he slid into an empty chair between two kids in green neckerchiefs: low on the totem pole, one male, one female. They both gave him sidelong looks, ascertained his rank, and sat up straighter. For the first time, Mick fully grasped the fact that he was one of three sous-chefs who shared the second-in-command position here.

“Hello, everyone,” said the man who had to be the executive chef, because he was the only person in the room who didn’t have to wear a neckerchief. He didn’t look like much: slight and pale with a long, toothy face, freckled, bespectacled. “Welcome to the Queen Isabella. ” His accent might have been South African, maybe New Zealand, Mick couldn’t tell. “I will assume we’re all here. Because you don’t want to be late, ever, for anything, or I will cut off your head.”

No one laughed. No one was expected to.

Some poor straggler came in then. No one but Mick dared to turn and look. It was a girl in an orange neckerchief, he saw: poor sacrificial lamb. The rest of the staff stared at their leader, who pinned the latecomer with a laser stare.

“Well! And you are late because…?”

“I couldn’t find the room, Chef,” she said. “I got lost. I apologize and I promise I will never get lost again as long as I live.” She was cheeky, defiant, under a veneer of caution. Her accent was Spanish maybe, or Mexican or South American.

All the melodrama, the theater, the interpersonal power displays of the professional kitchen, Mick couldn’t stand any of it. He already hated this guy. She was one minute late, and this room had been hard to find. Why not let her come in and sit down quietly and get on with the fucking meeting?

“I will hold you to that promise,” said the executive chef. He stared at her for a couple of beats while she found a chair and sat down. “As I was saying. Hello, everyone. I’m Laurens van Buyten, as most of you know.”

Mick stared at him. That guy. Why hadn’t he realized? Why had no one mentioned it to him, the guy in the main office, the woman who’d given him his uniform and marching orders, anyone? Van Buyten was the most famous chef in the business. If cruise-ship chefdom had a movie star, this was the guy. He was Belgian, a hotshot, and he was young, Mick’s age. He’d come up through European fine-dining hotel kitchens and New York restaurants. Now he judged cooking shows and was rumored to be opening his own restaurant in Amsterdam. And he was maybe thirty-four.

Somehow Mick had managed never to land in Van Buyten’s kitchen before. He’d only heard about him from other chefs who’d suffered under him and lived to talk about it. He was one of those guys who watched you quietly while you dug yourself deeper into the weeds, just stood there seeming to grow bigger and bigger, swelling with power and swaying slightly like a king cobra, his tongue flicking in and out, while you burned yourself on a handle and fucked up the timing of a filet of expensive fish and dropped the ladle of sauce on your foot, then he struck like lightning and stopped your breathing with toxic venom and your eyes bugged out and you died. Or so the rumors went.

Of course now would be the first time Mick had to work directly under this sadist, these particular two weeks when he was wrung out and his brain was fried and he wasn’t even supposed to be on this ship. Of course.

Mick watched his new, temporary boss, trying to identify his tell or weakness—because everyone had one—in order to use it to keep him off-balance, to keep him from wielding too much power over him, since he already recognized him as someone who would do so any chance he got. Chef Laurens sat at the head of the table, leaning back in his chair with his left arm dangling behind him, holding a pencil in his right hand whose eraser he was using to trace circles on the tabletop in front of him while he looked waywardly through smeared glasses up at the ceiling, at the door, along the table, down at his hand holding the pencil, never directly at anyone. He spoke with a clipped, rushed cadence, as if he were carefully controlling a tumult in his head, parceling out a whole welter of stuff in pips and nuggets to keep the deluge dammed, controlled. So he was shy and emotionally chaotic. What chef wasn’t? Mick was too.