“You’ve been reading the movie magazines,” she said.
“Newspapers,” I said.
“All lies.” She turned her face to me.
I didn’t answer.
“Willful,” she added.
“The only kind you can trust,” I said.
“Can you get me a cigarette and my wrap?”
“I’m happy to smoke with you, but can’t I look at you a little longer?”
“I’m cold,” she said.
“All this will end too soon as it is,” I said.
She smiled. “Okay. The cigarette will do.”
I moved to the other bed where she and I had thrown the pieces of my tux. I found my cigarettes and matches in my coat and turned back to her. I was also still naked and she was looking at me openly. Was this a pleasure for her — I’d never really considered the possibility of this impulse in a woman — or was she just instructing me some more? I took a step toward our bed and the kimono was lying crumpled on the floor. I bent to it, picked it up, straightened. I was facing her and feeling pretty uncomfortable now, to be dangling nakedly before her watchful eye, which is what I figured she intended.
She did not take her eyes off the center of me. And she whispered, “I said the cigarette will do,” but in the actress way that filled the room, that would reach the back of the mezzanine. In the way that sounded as if she were lying. I was sorry we’d talked about lies.
But I dropped the kimono at my feet and stepped naked to her and I offered a cigarette, and she lifted her gaze from my body to my eyes, and she took a cigarette and put it between her lips, and I bent to her and I lit it and she sucked deeply on it, keeping her eyes fixed on mine, and then she turned her profile to me as if I’d just asked about the secrets of her life, and she blew a long, thin slip of smoke into the room.
I sat down beside her, putting my back to the wall as well. I lit a cigarette, and we smoked for a few moments, and then she said, “Have you ever killed a man?”
I’d been around a lot of killing in my professional life. And in Mexico last year it had finally become necessary that I do some myself. I’d not been asked this question before, and I found the simple, true answer difficult to speak. It had been necessary. I had done it without pleasure. But I had done it. More than once. My hesitation now was that killing a man was a private act. Even if it was done publicly. It was between him and me. But I would not lie. And to stay silent, as I was now doing, was also an answer, except it implied things about the doing of it and the having done it that were not true.
“Yes,” I said.
Selene took a drag on her cigarette. She held the smoke inside her for a long moment. Then she exhaled slowly, filling the air directly before her. “Why?” she said.
I was not getting into this. “It had to be done,” I said, hoping this would be sufficient for her.
It seemed to be. She nodded. She said nothing more.
We sat side by side in silence for a long moment, and I realized she was trembling slightly.
I touched her quaking arm. “You’re cold.”
“I believe I mentioned that before,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said, and I instantly got up from the bed and picked up her kimono and turned back to her.
She’d risen to her knees, and she took the wrap from me, the cigarette dangling at the corner of her mouth like she was a Chicago street thug. “You stopped looking anyway,” she said.
I was surprised to realize that she was right. I didn’t know how to explain that. It was the pound-and-sleep in me, I supposed. I didn’t know how to explain that either. So I said nothing.
She pulled her kimono around her tightly, her hands crossed on her chest.
I went to the other bed and put on my pants and shirt.
When I returned to her, she was still holding her wrap against her. She did not look up. I understood I was supposed to go.
I picked up the rest of my clothes and threw them over my arm.
I stopped before her one last time.
She lifted her face to me. The tears had returned to her eyes. But she said, “It’s all right. Thank you for tonight.”
I nodded and I left her there on the bed, where she held herself close and said nothing — but at least was not lying — where she was perhaps trying to forget whatever it was that she remembered.
And as I stepped into the empty corridor and closed Selene Bourgani’s door, I could not help but wonder who she might be thinking of killing.
8
She remained invisible again the next day. I did not question that all along she’d intended for me to touch her only once. Did I therefore think of her as fallen? No. I thought of her as an actress. I roamed the A Deck promenade in my shirt sleeves in the cold late afternoon to get my body square with how I was thinking about her.
Brauer and Cable were invisible as well. Brauer’s suite had its PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the doorknob both times I checked, midmorning and midafternoon. One stateroom on B Deck — Cable’s, I’d’ve been willing to bet — also had its sign on the door. Both men were sick, or hungover. Something.
I dressed for dinner that evening, and I arrived deliberately a few minutes late. I stepped in through the starboard doors and discreetly looked across the room and into the corner. The two men had recovered and were in their places, just commencing to touch their wineglasses in a toast.
I backed away and out of the dining room and I went up the Grand Staircase to A Deck and into the starboard corridor and down to Brauer’s door. I already had my set of lock picks in my pocket.
I stood before the door, and a man and a woman suddenly emerged from the forward en suite stateroom. They were all decked out for dinner, and Madame’s liveried personal maid trailed behind them, her mistress ragging her for having buttoned too slowly. The man locked the door as the maid vanished in the other direction and I slipped the tools into my pocket. The couple hurried toward me. I knocked on Brauer’s door. “Walter?” I said.
The couple passed and I nodded at them. They ignored me. They were late. She was blaming her maid. It occurred to me that Selene seemed not to be traveling with a maid. And that calmed my still niggling unease at our having sex and then her disappearing on me. A woman like her was used to having people around who helped her with every commonplace thing. She obviously wanted to be alone on this trip from the start. I thought: I should be glad to have gotten what I did from her.
The tardy couple disappeared around the corner, and the corridor was empty. I withdrew the two implements I needed and bent to the lock. I inserted the shorter, bent end of a torque wrench into the hole and then I slid the pick inside and gently worked it farther and farther along, lifting each tumbler in turn, sensing them with my fingertips, and then I felt the last one lift for me and I turned the wrench and the bolt yielded and I stepped inside Walter Brauer’s suite.
I’d noted in Selene’s suite which part of the wall to move to and where to put my hand. I found the key in its ceramic mounting and I turned it. All the lights on their sconces flared up brightly through the sitting room.
The place was similar to Selene’s in period replication, and, indeed, to most of the rest of the done-up parts of the ship: early neoclassic — sofa, small desk, three-drawer commode, an overstuffed chair and a smoking table — but with a green and yellow motif in place of rose, and with the electric lights on the wall not pretending to be candles.
I focused exclusively on Brauer’s things.
In this room, a box of Spanish cigars on the table.
On the desk a couple of books, one on top of the other.
No other signs of habitation. Very neat. The DO NOT DISTURB sign must have gone up after the stewardess cleaned the suite this morning.