Feast of Murder(49)

“I think Jon’s out of his mind,” Calvin said. “It’s prison that’s changed him, if you want my opinion. He doesn’t care about numbers. He does care about you. You know what he said to me just a little while ago?”

“No.”

“He said going to prison was a wonderful thing, if you knew how to go about it the right way. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Maybe.”

“I think it’s crazy,” Calvin said. “I think he came back addled, to tell you the truth. Before he went to jail, he would never have been so—so cavalier about these numbers. Even if they weren’t going to have any effect on anything we did. It’s the principle of the thing.”

“Mmmm.”

They were nearly at the stairs, a circumstance that made Calvin fussier and more prissily furious than ever. He, after all, wanted to go in the other direction. Gregor wedged himself into the stairwell and sucked in his stomach. Calvin squeezed by him, sniffed, and ran a hand through his hair.

“In the old days we never had strangers along for family holidays,” he said. “In the old days, we never had leaks, either.”

“Good for you,” Gregor said.

Calvin sniffed again, loudly enough, this time, to have qualified for a television commercial for an antihistamine. “Silly ass,” he said, presumably meaning Jon Baird. “If he goes along the way he’s been going, the whole company is going to fall into the sea.”

Gregor didn’t know about the company, but he did know about Calvin Baird. The man was a first-rate little prig, and if Gregor were Jon Baird he’d have done a good deal more to tweak his ears than suggesting that there might be some good in going to jail. He watched Calvin stomp down the narrow hall to a door that presumably opened on Calvin’s own cabin. Calvin opened it, stepped past it, and then closed it behind him. Gregor stared at the closed door and wondered if he ought to do what he really felt like doing—what he’d actually wanted to do since he first came out of his own cabin and headed upstairs—and that was to knock on the door just beyond Calvin’s now closed one and find out what Bennis and Tony Baird were up to. It was driving him crazy, just the way it had been driving him crazy all morning and all afternoon. It was going to go on driving him crazy until he dragged Bennis back to Cavanaugh Street or did something to confront the situation directly. He couldn’t drag Bennis back to Cavanaugh Street any time in the next few days. Even after they’d landed on Candle Island, he would be at the mercy of Tony Baird’s father’s boat for any trip he might want to take to the mainland. As for confronting the situation directly—Gregor had spent a great deal of his life in direct confrontation, not only with serial killers but with chairmen of Senate subcommittees and presidents of the United States. He had no idea how to proceed with a direct confrontation here. After all, what would he say? He wasn’t her father, her brother, her husband, her lover, or her son. She was a young woman who knew her own mind—or who said she did. He could hardly rise up righteous in the guise of a Victorian paterfamilias and tell her her present interest was much too young.

Much too young for what?

Gregor stomped his way up to the main deck, down to the stern, and up to the high rail there that was meant for observation. Then he leaned over it and contemplated the mobile black glass sea. He was still leaning over it, nearly two hours later, when the bell for dinner rang.

If he had come to any conclusions at all, about anything, he would have thought the time well spent. Instead, all he had really gotten out of it was a pair of frostbitten ears.





2


Like every other American who had been educated in public schools in the years just before and just after World War II, Gregor Demarkian had had a fairly elaborate introduction to the myth of the Mayflower. He had learned about rough seas and calm winds, cramped quarters and women screaming their way through labor into the howling winds of storms. He hadn’t learned anything at all about the mundane details of day-to-day life. What details he did know about living on a ship came from late-night flashlight reading of the sea novels that had enthralled him when he was ten. In those, stiff-spined officers with starched white shirts were served dried beef and venison on china plates by mess boys in pristine uniforms decorated with gold braid.

On the Pilgrimage Green, dinner was held in the officer’s mess, because on the original Mayflower there really hadn’t been a mess, properly speaking, for passengers. In this as in everything else except religion, the Puritans had been stiflingly conventional. First-class passengers had a room to themselves, tiny because there were so few of them to accommodate, that they used as both a lounge and a dining room. The rest of the passengers ate on their bunks or in the open air when weather permitted. The officer’s mess, however, was nothing at all like the ones in Gregor’s old books. For one thing, it was much smaller, meaning that the passengers on the Pilgrimage Green had to crowd in next to each other much closer than was comfortable. For another thing, the table and the sideboards and all the other furniture except the chairs were bolted to the floor. Maybe the furniture had been bolted to the floor in Gregor’s old books, too, but if it had, Gregor had never noticed it. There was something about this enforced immobility that made the cramped quarters feel even more claustrophobic than they really were. Then there was the large ship in a bottle tucked into the niche in the wall at the table’s rear. Surely that couldn’t be authentic to the Puritan experience. The Puritans had been Calvinists and distrustful of decoration.