The Harder They Come (5 page)

It took him a minute, so much harder at his age to come back to the world, and then he sat up and gazed blearily round the room, his eyes shifting from Oscar’s face to Carolee’s before dropping to the watch on his wrist: 6:15. Was that right? He blinked at Carolee. Blinked at Oscar. “Jesus,” he rasped, “they going to make us wait here all day?”

Oscar—he’d been asleep too—rose from his chair, stretching. He was wearing shorts, plaid shorts, and below the hem of them his kneecaps were discolored, smudged still from where he’d knelt over the dead man in the mud. “I’ll go check at the desk.”

“No, don’t bother.” He was on his feet now too, a sudden jolt of anger searing through him as if he’d touched two ends of a hot wire together. “Come on, Carolee,” he said, reaching a hand down for her, “we’re out of here.”

“But Sten, they haven’t come yet. The police. They’ll think—I don’t know what they’ll think.”

He just shook his head, took her hand and pulled her up. “Sorry, friend,” he said, nodding at Oscar, and then he was guiding Carolee back across the waiting room, out the double doors and into the scorching stink of the evening, charcoal and dogshit and the fumes of the cars, fish, dead fish, and if he brushed by the pair of policemen in their pleated blue uniforms with the
Fuerza Pública
patches on their sleeves and their faces of stone, he really didn’t give a good goddamn whether they’d come to pin a medal on him or haul him off to Golgotha. He was out in the street, that was where he was, striding through traffic, calling—no, yelling, bellowing—“Taxi! Taxi!”

A
ND THAT WAS ALL
kinds of fun too, trying to communicate to the cabbie just where he wanted to go, and how did you say “boat”?
Barco,
wasn’t that it? He all but shoved Carolee into the backseat, then slammed in himself, twisting his neck toward the cabbie and in the process catching a glimpse of himself in the rearview. His eyes, furious still—burning, consumed—were sunk in a nest of concentric lines like pits on a topographic map, the eyes of a seventy-year-old retiree pushed to the limit. There were red blotches on his cheeks. His nose looked as if it had been skinned. And his hair, not yet gone the absolute dead marmoreal white of the rest of the duffers on the ship, but getting there, hung limp over his ears. But his eyebrows—his eyebrows were exclusively and undeniably white, and how had he never noticed that? White and pinched together with the glare of the sun that picked out the two vertical trenches at the bridge of his nose and ran them all the way up into the riot of horizontal gouges that desecrated his forehead. He was old. He looked old. Looked like somebody he didn’t even recognize. “
Barco,
” he announced to the driver. And then, to clarify, added the definite article: “
El barco
.”

The driver was dressed in shorts and sandals and the ubiquitous flowered shirt open at the collar and he wore some sort of medallion dangling at his throat. He didn’t have an iPod, but he sported the same wispy goatee as the bus driver and the two thieves in the lot—in fact, and this came to him in a flash of ascending neural fireworks, the guy could have been the bus driver’s twin brother, and if that wasn’t an irritating thought he couldn’t imagine what was. All right. They were in the cab, that
was all that mattered—but the cab wasn’t moving. The driver—the cabbie—was just staring at him.

“
El barco,
” he repeated. “I want to go to
el barco
.”

“The boat,” Carolee put in. “The cruise ship in the harbor. The
Centennial
?”

“Oh, the boat, sure, no problem,” the cabbie said, grinning, then he put the car in gear and started up the street. A joker. Another joker. He’d probably learned his English at Cal State.

“Ask him how much,” Carolee said. No matter the exchange rate or the deals she finagled in the shops, she was sure they were getting ripped off, especially by cabbies. Before they’d left, she’d gone online to browse the travel sites and make detailed lists of dos and don’ts: photocopy your ID, leave your jewelry aboard ship, avoid fanny packs (“one-stop shopping” in the thieves’ jargon), dress down, talk softly so as not to broadcast your nationality, stay sober, carry a disposable camera ashore, and always get the price up front before you get into a cab.

“How much?” he said, or croaked, actually, deep from the well of his ruined voice.

“Oh, it’s not much,” the driver said, accelerating, “nothing really. Only a mile or so. I’ll give you a break, don’t worry.” And he mentioned a figure—in
colones
—that seemed excessive, even as Sten tried to do the math.

“
Demasiado,
” Carolee said automatically.

The driver, and he was a cowboy too, swinging into the next block with a screech of the tires, glanced over his shoulder and said, “Maybe you want to go back to the clinic? Maybe you want to wait for some other cab?” The car slowed, made a feint for the curb as if he were going to pull over and let them out.

“
Demasiado,
” Carolee repeated.

Raising his voice to be sure he was understood, not simply by the driver but by his wife too, Sten said, “Just drive.”

The first thing he did when he got back aboard and passed through the gauntlet of rhapsodically smiling greeters, puffers, porters, towel boys and all the rest of the lackeys who were paid to make you feel like Caesar returning from the Gallic wars every time you set foot on deck, was step into the shower. He should have deferred to Carolee, should have let her have first shot at it—and he would have under normal circumstances, but he was too wrought up even to think at that juncture. He’d thrown some money at the cabbie while she stood there on the pavement fooling with her hat and bag, then he took her by the arm and marched her up the gangplank and into the elevator and on down the hall to their cabin, impatient with everything, with her, with the lackeys, with the card key that didn’t seem to want to release the lock—and was this the right cabin? He drew back to glare at the number over the door: 7007. It was. And the card did work. Finally. After he’d tried it backwards, forwards and upside down and angrily swatted Carolee’s hand away when she’d tried to help—and why, amidst all this luxury and pampering, couldn’t they manage to code a fucking key so you could get into your own fucking cabin you were paying through the teeth for? That was what he was thinking, cursing under his breath, but then the light flashed green, the door pushed open and before Carolee could pull it shut he was already in the bathroom, stripping off his putrid shirt and sweaty shorts to thrust himself under the showerhead and twist both handles up full.

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.

“They’re going to want to question me too, aren’t they?” she said, tucking away the last pink morsel on the tines of an inverted fork, a faint sheen of grease on her lips. She’d changed into a pair of jeans and a silk blouse—blue, with a scoop neck that showed off the topaz necklace she wouldn’t dare wear ashore. Matching earrings. A touch of makeup. She’d combed out her hair, which was darker when it was wet, but blond still and mostly natural, though the woman at the beauty parlor back at home touched it up every month or so.

“Yeah,” he said.

“What do I tell them?”

The question irritated him. “What do you mean what do you tell them? Tell them what happened. Three shitheads attacked us and we defended ourselves.”

She was chewing, the napkin suspended in one hand. A shadow flickered across the veranda, and it might have been a gull. Or no: more likely a vulture. Vultures were everywhere here, settling like collapsed umbrellas on top of every roof and telephone pole in town. “You think I’m dressed okay?”

He shrugged. He was in a pair of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, exactly what he would have worn if he were going to the bar for a cocktail and a little recreation, as he’d done every night since the boat left San Diego. “You’re fine,” he said. “You’re not on trial. And I’m not either. Everything’s fine, believe me.”

Her voice went soft. “I’m glad you were there.”