Sten remained seated. He looked to Carolee, who’d sat there wordlessly to this point. “It’s okay,” he said, “no worries. I’ll be right back.”
Potamiamos rose. He and the lieutenant exchanged a glance. The party seemed to be breaking up.
“All right,” Sten said, “I’ll take a look at him. But I’m not leaving this ship.”
“Oh, no, no.” Potamiamos very nearly clucked his tongue. “No, there’s no question of that.”
They walked down the corridor to the elevator, Potamiamos to his left, Salas to his right, and everybody, every reveler aboard, stared at him as if he were being led off to a detention cell somewhere, and he supposed there must have been a secure room down there in the depths of the ship to accommodate the occasional passenger or crewmember who drank too much or went floridly berserk. They had a sick bay, didn’t they? And a pharmacy. And just about anything else you could imagine. They were a small city afloat and all contingencies had to be anticipated and prepared for.
He was a head taller than either of his — what would you call them? — escorts, but still he couldn’t help feeling a sense of unease, no matter how many times he told himself he was in control, because he wasn’t, he wasn’t at all, and he half expected some sort of trick, a roomful of cops, handcuffs, the cloth bag jerked over his head and a quick hustle down the gangplank and into some festering hole like the one in Midnight Express. The tendon clicked in his knee again, once, twice, and then they were standing before the elevator and the doors were opening on a scrum of passengers in tennis togs, terrycloth robes, shorts and T-shirts, dinner jackets and cocktail dresses. The Senior Second Officer greeted them with a blooming smile and a cheery “Good evening, folks, enjoying yourselves?” while Salas held the door and shepherded Sten in amongst them. Most of the others were going up and Sten and his escorts made way for them as the elevator stopped at various decks, even as a fresh crew of tennis players, high rollers and shuffleboarders crowded in, and then they were going down, stopping at each floor, until they were belowdecks, in the crew’s quarters, where passengers were not allowed.
Sten had been arrested only once in his life, for a DUI after a wedding for which he’d stood as best man. John Jarvis’ wedding. J.J. They’d been in the Corps together, had seen some hairy and not-so-hairy shit, buddies over there and back here, and when they got home — the very week — J.J. had married his high school heartthrob in some wedding palace down in Carmel. Drinking preceded the ceremony, floated through it on fumes and quick nips from one flask or another, rose in a delirious clamor while the cake was cut and distributed and went on unabated long after the newlyweds had ducked away to do what they were going to do as man and wife in their room at the big hotel in the middle of town. He’d felt a bit hazy as he’d climbed into his VW Bug and started back up the coast, alone and missing Carolee, who was away in London for her semester abroad, but he had the radio—“Radar Love,” cranked high, he remembered that, and “Magic Carpet Ride” too — and he had the window rolled down though he was freezing, making it all the way up 101 and Nineteenth Avenue through the city and Golden Gate Park and back onto the freeway and across the bridge, feeling clearer and soberer by the mile.
That was when the flashing lights appeared in his rearview, a cop rushing up on him so fast he thought at first the problem must have been up ahead of him somewhere, the cop after somebody else in that streaming river of taillights that made the night so cozy and inviting. He was wrong. The cruiser rode up on his tail, but he told himself that didn’t mean anything, not necessarily, because maybe the cop was going to get off at the exit coming up on the right, an emergency there somewhere, an accident, a dog loose on the highway, a motorcyclist down, debris in the passing lane. . but then the cruiser swung out alongside him and it began to dawn on him that he was in trouble.
What he remembered of that night, aside from the wheezing and muttering of his fellow drunks and the reek of vomit that was so pervasive it seemed to arise from the walls themselves, was the helplessness he’d felt behind bars, locked up, incarcerated, in the can, no place to turn or even sit, except the floor — not in control, definitely not in control. He’d told the arresting officer he’d been to a wedding, the wedding of one of his service buddies—“You know,” he said, “the Marine Corps? Like I served my country. Like I saw some bad shit and I know I had a couple drinks, just this once, because it was a wedding, okay?”—but it didn’t do any good. He had a flashlight, the cop, and it was right there like a supernova bursting in Sten’s face, in his eyes, hot and probing. Cars hissed by. It was the strangest thing, but for a moment, just that moment, he didn’t seem to know where he was or where the light had come from or why it was punishing him like this. “You know you’re in no condition to drive, don’t you?” the cop said.
Sten just blinked at him. And then, very slowly, he began to nod his head in agreement.
But now he was in a corridor, deep in the underbelly of the ship, one man on his left, the other on his right. They walked along amiably enough, down to the end of the corridor, and then they swung into another corridor and another after that till he had no idea where he was or how to find his way back. He followed their lead, moving along blindly till Salas put a hand on his arm to guide him and they entered a room that smelled of food — of hamburgers, a mountain of hamburgers, fries, onion rings, beer — and he saw the light there, bright as the cop’s flashlight, and the man it illuminated till it seemed as if he were the only three-dimensional thing in the room. Everything else was flattened as if on a screen, tables, chairs, the counter where they must have served up meals to the crew. But the man — a Tico in an oversized T-shirt sitting at one of the Formica tables, his hands cuffed behind his back and his eyes cast down — seemed to leap out at him. He wore a goatee. He was skinny, puny, barely there. He might once have held a knife in his hand.
“Is this the man that attacked you?” Salas indicated the prisoner with a jerk of his head, his voice in official mode now, ripe with accusation and contempt. “Or one of the men?”
Sten saw now that there was another policeman in the room, a guard with a holstered gun leaning against the back wall in the shadow — or relative shadow — of the lamp. He saw too that the lamp, one of those shop lights with a clamp at the base of it, was fixed to the table directly across from the prisoner and arranged so that there was no way for him to escape the glare of it, and if he went outside of himself again to think of the movies, this scene he’d witnessed a hundred times on screens big and small, it was because the movies were his only reference point for what was happening to him. It was as if he’d entered some dream, some fantasyland where there was no sun, no sky, no mud lot or bus or ship, only this. Finally — and he was on his guard now, on his guard all over again — he noticed the square of white cloth smoothed out at the far end of the table. It was a linen napkin, one of the service items on pristine display at each of the ship’s restaurants and lounges, one of countless thousands that must have been washed, dried, folded and set out afresh each day. But this one was different. This one held — presented — three exhibits: a.357 Magnum revolver and two knives, switchblades with mother-of-pearl handles.