Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality

by Pat Murphy

  FOUR

  “In a just universe, I would never win at cards,” the man said. “Fortunately this is not a just universe.” He laid his cards on the table and smiled.

  —from Here Be Dragons

  by Mary Maxwell

  The Odyssey, the sole cruise ship of Odyssey Lines, was a temporary resting place for cruise industry workers who were on their way up or on their way down. Take Gene Culver, the cruise director. This man was pictured in every Odyssey brochure, wearing a smile that displayed far too many teeth. Gene Culver believed he was on his way up. Gene believed in himself with the confidence of a graduate from a Dale Carnegie course.

  In the first issue of the Ship’s Log, the Odyssey’s daily newsletter, Gene’s “Welcome Aboard” letter explained that the Odyssey was on the cutting edge of cruise ship entertainment. On this cruise—on this very cruise! passengers would be treated to two “innovative concepts in cruise entertainment.” One was a Gold Rush-style melodrama, staged in honor of the convention of California historians that was on board. The other was the Star Ship Odyssey, an original work created just for the Odyssey. Gene’s letter promised that passengers would be amazed, would be astounded, would be delighted by the show.

  Gene was frantic in his desire to be noticed by the Powers That Be at Celebrity, at Princess, oh, even at Carnival Cruises (known in the industry as Cannibal Cruises). To that end, Gene had brought aboard entertainers (“talent” as they say in show biz) that offered something other than run-of-the-mill cruise entertainment. That was why Max was on board—Gene thought that offering a writing work shop by a popular novelist would attract the attention of those who mattered.

  But passengers wouldn’t miss out on more typical cruise fare: a magician who did card tricks, a hypnotist who told bad jokes; lounge singers and their backup bands, Vegas-style stage shows with more than their share of sequins and feathers. Gene was trying to strike a delicate balance, getting the attention of the Big Boys with his innovations while hiding any disasters that resulted from his experiments. Maintaining this balance made Gene very nervous.

  At the other end of the spectrum was Antonio, the man in charge of fruit sculptures, ice sculptures, and the champagne fountain that was required on every luxury cruise. Antonio was on his way down. He had worked for Celebrity Cruises for many years, but he had quit after an altercation with a French chef.

  For the final dinner on a two-week Celebrity Cruise, Antonio had planned an elaborate fruit sculpture of a dragon, complete with flaming breath. Antonio had planned to carve the flames from mango, a fruit with precisely the right color and consistency. He had personally selected a case of mangos, choosing fruit that would be ripe, but not overripe when the time came to carve them. He had checked to make sure that the case of mangos was on board and properly stored in the galley’s supply room.

  But when Antonio went to get the fruit and begin work on the carving, the case of mangos was nowhere to be found. It seemed that the French chef had appropriated them for a special dessert sauce. When Antonio confronted the chef, the man dismissed Antonio’s concerns.

  “But what about the flames,” Antonio protested.

  “Carve them from cantaloupe,” the chef said with a Gallic shrug. His tone dripped with contempt. “What difference does it make?”

  Antonio was an artist. Antonio would not substitute cantaloupe for mangos—carefully chosen mangos, his very own mangos. Antonio would not tolerate disrespect from a French pig of a chef who thought of food only as something to be eaten, not the substance of art.

  They argued. Somehow, the argument, which began with mangos, delved into the role of Italy in the Second World War, into the cowardice of the French, into the personal habits of the Italians, into the sexual impotence of the French, into any number of subjects that might seem, on first examination, to have little to do with mangos or dessert sauce or fruit sculpture.

  The galley of a cruise ship was no place for a such a heated argument. At some point, Antonio grabbed his carving knife. The chef snatched up a cleaver. There was much shouting and waving of blades and ship’s security intervened.

  Though Antonio explained that the Frenchman was at fault, Antonio was blamed for the fight. A fruit sculptor, however talented, was more expendable than a French chef. Bitter and angry, Antonio left Celebrity Cruises and signed on with the Odyssey.

  People on their way up and people on their way down. And a few, just a few, people who liked it right where they were. Tom was one of the latter.

  Being the security chief on a cruise ship was a bit like being the sheriff of a town with a population of just over two thousand people. Three quarters of the population were passengers; the other six hundred and some were crew members who were working hard to keep those passengers happy.

  The Odyssey was an incredibly diverse small town. Tom had counted fifteen different nationalities among the crew, last time he had bothered to check. Most of the officers were British or Italian. Most of the passengers were American, as was the purser’s staff. Galley staff tended to be French and Italian. The dining room staff came from all over—Italians, Greeks, Arabs, a few Irish, a few Scots. The staff in the ships many bars were Irish and Scottish and English and Australian with one Norwegian and one Dane. The accommodation staff the stewards and butlers who tended to the staterooms and room service—were Filipino, for the most part, with a few Mexicans. The casino manager was American, the head of the beauty salon was Dutch, the manager of the boutiques was Swiss, and the ship’s doctor was German.

  Occasionally, the diversity lead to trouble—an American woman became upset at the way an Italian man hit on her; a Greek and a Turk were unable to work in the same department; a French woman flirted a little much with an Australian man and had her intentions misunderstood. Many members of the crew were young, out to see the world and have a good time. There were cabin parties and drinking that sometimes got out of control.

  But generally, Tom had little trouble dealing with the crew. Members of the crew respected him; when he shut down a cabin party, he rarely had to return and do it again.

  The passengers were another story. They expected luxury. They expected the crew to cater to their every whim. To “pamper” them, to be exact—the advertising brochures promised that all the Odyssey’s passengers would be “pampered.” The passengers read these brochures and believed them. The crew did their best to meet passengers’ expectations of pampering.

  Except for Tom. Tom was the one who had to intervene when the shouts of a squabbling couple disturbed passengers in the adjoining staterooms; when a drunken passenger insisted on picking a fight; when a party in a passenger’s stateroom got out of hand. Unlike the crew, the Odyssey’s passengers did not always accept Tom’s authority gracefully. They felt entitled to whatever they wanted—and Tom occasionally had to be the one to tell them that they couldn’t have it.

  Fortunately, Tom was an even-tempered, easygoing sort of guy. He did his best to smooth over any minor difficulties, and there was rarely any real trouble.

  When Tom woke on the second morning of the cruise, he was hoping for a quiet day at sea. Since they wouldn’t be landing in Bermuda until the next day, he had no port officials to deal with, no visitors and passengers coming and going, no new paperwork cluttering his desk.

  He got to the security office before Ian arrived. He filed all the paperwork related to their departure from New York Harbor. He was checking to make sure that their forms were in order for entry to Bermuda when his phone rang.

  It was the purser’s office, letting him know that a passenger complaint required security attention. The games room, a lovely, little, wood-paneled room that was occupied each afternoon by blue-haired ladies playing bridge, had apparently been the site of a poker game on the previous evening. A passenger was complaining that he had lost a lot of money and was demanding that the purser do something about it.

  Tom went to the purser’s office and talked with the passenger, a square-jawed, white-hai
red man who seemed accustomed to getting his own way. “My wife was in the theater watching the show,” the man told Tom. “I was heading for the casino when I ran into this fellow. We had a drink at the Alehouse, then decided to play a friendly game or two.” The man frowned. “He took me for five hundred dollars.”

  Tom nodded gravely, doing his best to convey that he was taking this matter very seriously. He knew that it would do no good to ask the man why on earth he had felt the need to carry five hundred dollars in cash during a cruise where he could pay for everything with his cruise card. Tom also knew that what he was going to say was not going to make the man happy.

  “I can certainly understand your unhappiness, sir,” he said. “I want you to find him and arrest him,” the man said.

  “I understand that,” Tom said patiently. “But I’m afraid that’s not possible. You see, nothing illegal has happened here. If two passengers wish to gamble privately, that’s not my business. Of course, we’d prefer you gamble in the casino, where the games are regulated. But if you choose to set up your own game …”

  “He was cheating,” the passenger interrupted. “Some kind of a card shark, I’m sure of that.”

  Tom nodded again. The man had lost and he was unhappy. Therefore, it must be someone else’s fault. That was human nature.

  “I’m afraid that there’s nothing we can do to get your money back. But I would be happy to contact the other party and suggest that he confine his gambling to the casino.” Tom took out a notepad. He had started doing that after watching a number of Columbo reruns from the ship’s video library. He’d found that people seemed to find it reassuring when he wrote information down. “Did you get the other man’s name?”

  Of course he hadn’t. The other fellow had said, “Call me Max,” and that was good enough for this fellow.

  Tom got a description, which he patiently wrote down: the other player had been a man in his forties with brown hair and blue eyes. Medium height, a mustache but no beard, casually dressed. Then Tom listened to a great deal of bluster about how this sort of thing shouldn’t happen. Tom politely agreed that such things shouldn’t happen. The passenger, according to Company Policy, was always right.

  Eventually, Tom assured the passenger that he would look into the matter and gently repeated his suggestion that the man restrict his gambling to the casino, where the Odyssey staff could ensure a fair game.

  Ian was tapping furiously on his keyboard when Tom returned to the security office. Tom asked him to search the passenger list for anyone named Max, but the only Max on the list was Max Merriwell. The writer didn’t match the passenger’s description of the hustler. While Tom considered other possibilities, Ian continued to tap on his keyboard.

  Tom reviewed the previous night’s security log to determine who had been patrolling the area where the incident had occurred. He called the guard who had been on duty. The man had noticed the card game, but it had appeared at that time to be a friendly game, involving no money. He had advised the players that gambling was restricted to the ship’s casino. The players had assured him that they were just playing for fun.

  The guard was new. Tom advised him that there was no such thing as a friendly poker game. Of course they had been playing for fun. But invariably some people had more fun than others. The guy who lost didn’t have any fun at all. The guy who won had quite a lot of fun.

  Tom hung up, shaking his head. He’d tell his staff to keep a better eye on the games room for other friendly games of poker. He’d check the casino for the alleged card shark and have a quiet word with the man if he found him. If a professional gambler was aboard, Tom wanted to advise the man that he was being watched before any more problems developed. Just a friendly tip—Tom figured that’s all it would take. Tom pushed his chair back, planning to take a stroll through the casino.

  “Uh, Tom …” Ian held his cup of coffee in both hands, his eyes narrowed in concentration as he stared at the computer screen. “I didn’t find another Max, but I did find something else very interesting. I was checking the records for last night and I found an anomaly. Last night, at Aphrodite’s Alehouse, someone paid for a drink with a cruise card that isn’t in the system.” Aphrodite’s Alehouse was one of the ship’s eight bars.

  Tom frowned at Ian. “A cruise card that isn’t in the system? What do you mean?”

  Ian was smiling ever so slightly. He sipped his coffee. “A name that’s not on the passenger list. A cruise card that doesn’t exist in the system. There’s no record of the person with this cruise card getting on the ship. No photo on file.”

  “How can that be? Someone has a counterfeit cruise card?” Tom shook his head. Ian’s computerized cruise card system was supposed to track who was on board and who wasn’t. Tom didn’t see the need for the new technology. The old method of controlling who was on board—a checklist at each gangway—had worked just fine from Tom’s point of view. But all the competitors’ ships had cruise cards, so the Company had decided that the Odyssey should have them, too. Now, after two shakedown cruises, Ian had found a problem.

  Tom wasn’t worried: he had not yet discontinued the old checklist system. Don, his second in command, had insisted that they keep the old system going until they were certain the new system worked flawlessly. Don was an old Navy master-at-arms, and he tended to be conservative. So thanks to the checklist system, Tom knew who was on the ship. There were no extra passengers aboard.

  “I don’t think it’s a counterfeit card,” Ian said, still smiling. “More likely it’s some kind of mistake. You see, the name on the cruise card is Weldon Merrimax.”

  “That’s one of Max Merriwell’s names,” Tom said. “That’s right.”

  “So where else has Weldon Merrimax been?”

  “I can’t tell you. A card only shows up on the system when the person charges something. Since most of the ship’s services are included in the cruise, there’s no charge. I could have set up the system to track whenever a card was used to enter a stateroom, but some people were concerned about passengers’ privacy.” Ian shrugged. “You’ll have to wait until he buys something else.”

  Tom frowned. “Gene Culver wanted Max Merriwell to teach that writing workshop as Weldon Merrimax,” he said. “Maybe Gene issued Max a cruise card in that name.”

  “Maybe,” Ian said. “I can check into that.”

  “You do that,” Tom said. “In the meantime, maybe I’ll ask Max if he charged a drink in Aphrodite’s last night.”

  Ian consulted his computer screen. “His workshop is in the library,” Ian said. “He’ll be teaching for another half hour. You could catch him there.”

  Tom nodded. “I guess I’ll do that.”

  On his way to the library, Tom visited the accounting office where a clerk made him a copy of the charge slip that Weldon Merrimax had signed. The signature was printed more than written. “Weldon Merrimax,” it said, in square, angular letters. Tom noted the name of the bartender who had signed off on the tab, then pocketed the copy and headed for the library.

  Susan sat in a comfortable chair in the ships library, listening to Max talk about writing.

  The library was furnished like a gentleman’s club with upholstered easy chairs and oak tables. The windows along one wall looked onto the Promenade, where passengers strolled and jogged. The other wall was lined with bookshelves on which Max’s work was prominently displayed—books by Max Merriwell, Mary Maxwell, and Weldon Merrimax.

  Max sat in an upholstered leather chair at one end of a heavy oak table. A dozen or so passengers sat around the table. Alberta was there. So were two little old ladies, one with her knitting and one with her embroidery. A brooding teenage boy with a ragged haircut and rumpled clothes slumped in his chair and glowered out the window at the joggers who passed on the promenade. Susan guessed he was a Weldon Merrimax fan even before she noticed the paperback copy of Tell Me No Lies on the table in front of him.

  Cindy, a young woman wearing a Hawaiian shirt, turquoise
blue trousers, and the blue blazer that served as the uniform of the cruise staff, had introduced Max with an air of breathless enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you all came to the first ever Odyssey writers’ workshop,” she said to the group. “I think it’s so exciting that we have an internationally known author here to teach us.”

  “I want to introduce Max Merriwell, the author of many, many books.” It was clear to Susan that Cindy had not read any of Max’s books. The young woman seemed more impressed by the number of books than their content. “We are pleased and honored that he’ll be teaching this workshop,” she concluded.

  Max regarded the group benignly. “It’s very nice to see you all here today,” he said. “You may think that I’m going to teach you to write, but what I’m really going to do is help you exercise your imaginations. I’ve found that relatively few adults ever exercise their imaginations at all, let alone give them the kind of strenuous workout that writing a story demands.”

  He talked for a while about paying attention to the world around you, about learning to listen to your inner voice, about the power of your imagination.

  “I assume that each of you is here because you have a story to tell. You may not know what that story is, but if you try, you’ll figure it out. Every one of us has many stories that make up our lives. I’m going to help you learn to tell those stories. So let’s get started. Everyone needs a pencil and paper.”

  Some people had brought notebooks; others had not. Cindy bustled around, getting everyone what they needed. She was relieved, Susan thought, to have something to do.

  “First off, I don’t want you to confuse me with your high school English teacher. I didn’t much like my high school English teachers and I certainly never wanted to be one. I’m not here to correct your grammar and put periods in the right places. I have a healthy respect for a well-placed period, but I don’t think the world will end if a period is out of place. I don’t even care much about the words. What I care about is the imagination. That’s what matters.”