The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

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

  “Me too.” He stared down at the floor, his feelings too complicated to put into words. They’d been lucky, he knew that. And she must have known it too. “But I’m not going to be around forever,” he said, lifting his eyes to hers. “You’ve got to learn to watch out for yourself.”

  “No more nature walks, is that what you’re saying?”

  “It’s no joke, because it’s not just money they’re after, you know that, don’t you? Anything can happen. Bad stuff, real bad stuff.”

  She didn’t answer. She looked beyond him, out the open door to the bay and the sepia blur of the city that was like some fungus sprung up around a band of pale eroded beach and hacked green palm. He pushed his plate away. What he wanted was a cigarette, and he’d actually reached for his shirt pocket before he caught himself—he hadn’t smoked in ten years now. It was times like this he missed it most. Smoking had given him something to do with his hands, the whole ritual of it, from sliding the cigarette from the pack to tamping it on the nearest hard surface, to cupping the match and drawing in the first sweet sustaining puff. The thing was, his hands had become too busy, manipulating up to two packs a day, his fingertips stained yellow with nicotine and his lungs as black as the bricks of the fireplace back at home. That was all behind him now. Now he was healthy. Now he rode a stationary bike and got out in the woods two or three days a week, keeping his hand in with part-time work for the lumber company, looking out for trespassers, squatters, marijuana growers—patrolling, if that was what you wanted to call it. The way he saw it, he was getting paid to go hiking, simple as that, best deal in the world.

  Carolee set down her fork and laid her napkin across the plate, where it instantly began to color with the juices gathered there—blood, that is, and why should that bother him? A basket of bread stood beside her plate, untouched. A carafe of water. The grated Parmesan the waiter had left for him, yellowing in its stainless-steel bowl. Flies were at it now, Costa Rican flies, wafted in through the open door to the veranda. She reached for her martini glass, which bore a smear of lipstick on the rim, a transparency of red wax and the faintly striated impress of her lips, and it touched him somehow, this trace of her there, DNA, a code to outlive us all. There was a dead man in the morgue, but she was alive and he was alive too, alive together, come what may. He watched her lift the glass and finish what was left of her drink. “I needed that,” she said, her voice flat and deliberate. She looked tired. “It’s been a day, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s not over yet.” He wanted to add, “Some vacation, huh?,” but restrained himself. Rising from the chair, he felt something click in his right hip, a tendon there, one more thing he’d managed to aggravate. He threw back his head to drain his own glass, best painkiller in the world, then patted down his pockets to be sure he had everything he was going to need, or potentially need: cellphone, wallet, passport, card key. At some point in the progression, he realized he was still holding the glass and that the glass was empty, useless, one more irritation, and without giving it even the flicker of a thought, he swiveled round and flung it high out over their private veranda and into the bright glittering sky beyond. Carolee just looked at him as if he’d gone mad till he snatched her glass up off the table and tossed it out the window too, and then he turned his back on her, rotating his wrist to consult his watch. And yes, he was angry, furious all of a sudden, as if he were back out there grabbing hold of that jerk with the gun, the dead man, the man he’d killed with his bare hands, and why couldn’t the fool have picked some other group, another bus, another day?

  He was squinting at his watch—half an hour, was half an hour up?—but he couldn’t seem to make out the position of the hands, his eyes going on him now too, along with everything else. Jesus. Jesus Fucking Christ. If they offered him a drink he was going to refuse it, no matter how badly he wanted it—and he wasn’t going to volunteer anything, just the facts. He smoothed down his shirt, took hold of the doorknob and shot a look over his shoulder to where Carolee still sat lingering at the table as if they had all night, as if they could have another round and order up dessert and coffee like normal people on vacation. “Come on,” he said, flinging open the door on the corridor, “let’s get this over with.”

  4.

  IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN his imagination, but as they walked down the corridor to the elevator he couldn’t help feeling people were making way for him, eyes meeting his and dropping to the floor, conversations suddenly hushed, men unconsciously hugging their wives closer as if he were some sort of feral beast, and what was that all about? Had the captain made an announcement? If not, he was going to have to at some point, the cruise delayed here in port for another day, at least a day, and of course everybody had cellphones, BlackBerries, iPads, all rumor consolidated into news and all news instantaneous. They knew. The whole ship knew.

  Potamiamos and the two cops were waiting for them in the scoop-backed lounge chairs in a corner of the Martini Bar, the fun director off somewhere else now, her duties in the present circumstance having extended no further than applying her knuckles to the door of cabin 7007 and making the introductions. All three were sitting stiff-backed in the chairs, glasses of iced tea sweating on the table before them. They rose when he and Carolee crossed the room, even as a pair of waiters materialized from the shadows to pull out chairs for them. “And what will you have, ma’am?” one of them asked, bending over Carolee. Sten tried to warn her off with his eyes, but she was looking to the waiter. She emitted a little laugh, self-conscious all at once and maybe a little tipsy too, and said, “When in Rome . . .” And then, catching herself: “Just water, thanks.”

  “Sir?”

  “Water. Out of a bottle. No ice.”

  The waiters withdrew and a moment of silence descended on the table before the Senior Second Officer turned to the cop on his left, who for some reason was now wearing a pair of sunglasses, though they were indoors and the lighting was in no way intrusive. “Lieutenant Salas, perhaps you’d like to begin?”

  “Yes, certainly,” Salas said, his voice a creeping baritone, heavily accented. He shifted his gaze to Sten, or seemed to—you couldn’t really tell what he was looking at, which, of course, would have been the point of the dark glasses. “Why don’t you, sir, begin by giving us an account of events, what did you see, what did you do, et cetera.”

  Sten told him. He had nothing to hide. He’d done what anybody would have done, anybody who wasn’t a natural-born victim, anyway. There was no need to go into detail about the trip itself, the state of the roads or the recklessness of the driver—not yet—so he began with the bus pulling into the lot and how everybody had descended into the sun, guidebooks, binoculars and birding lists in tow, and how he’d gone across the lot to the fat woman’s palapa.

  “And why was that?” Salas had produced a pack of Marlboros, shaking one out for himself and offering the pack to Sten, as if this were the interrogation scene in a police procedural, and that struck him as funny, so he laughed. “This is amusing?” Salas said. “The recollection? There is something amusing about the death of a man in my jurisdiction?”

  “No,” Sten said, waving away the pack as Carolee sat there tight-lipped beside him and Salas struck a match and touched it to the tip of his own cigarette. “No, not at all. I was thinking of something else, that’s all.”

  The moment hung there. Potamiamos, handsome as a cutout from the cruise line brochure, tried to look stern—or worried, maybe he was worried. The thought caught Sten up and he felt the smallest tick of apprehension.

  “You went to the palapa. And why was that?” the lieutenant repeated on a long exhalation of smoke.

  “I was thirsty. It was a long ride. I dry out easily.” He smiled, but it was a smile that gave no ground, lips only. Lips and teeth. “I’m old. Or didn’t you notice?”

  Salas nodded. “And then you went behind the stall, did you not? Into the jungle there?”

  �
��Right. I had to piss. You know, pressure on the bladder?”

  There was a moment of silence. Salas, his face unreadable, turned to the cop beside him. “¿Qué dijo?”

  The second cop flicked his eyes at Carolee, then leaned forward, cupping one hand to his mouth. “Para orinar,” he said.

  “Ah, I see,” Salas said. “It all comes clear now—you were urinating.”

  The Senior Second Officer rediscovered his smile and now they were all smiling, smiles all around, urinating, the most human thing in the world, and what had they thought—that he was an accomplice? That he’d been hiding? That he’d worked all his life and paid his taxes and retired to come down here to this tropical paradise and mug tourists? “Yeah,” he said, smiling still, but there was an edge to his voice, “I pissed on a tree back there. Any law against that?”

  Apparently not. No one said a word, but the smiles slowly died all the way around. He wanted to go on, wanted to get things out in the open, wanted to throw it in their faces: All right then, charge me, you sons of bitches, go ahead, but I’ll make you regret it, all of you! The words were on his lips when Carolee raised her water glass, ice cubes clicking, and took a quick birdlike sip. They seemed to have arrived at some sort of impasse. The room expanded, then shrank down again till it fit just exactly right. Finally, the lieutenant ducked his head to remove the dark glasses, revealing eyes that were darker still, eyes that were almost black, heavy-lidded and set too close together. “We are not here to accuse you,” he said. “We are here to assist. And to clear up any difficult feelings or dissatisfactions you or your wife may have. We are gravely sorry for what has transpired and we extend our sincerest apologies.”