They looked back out over the water. The music still reached them. They listened to the song and Corrina tapped her feet.

“Heaven,” she sang along, “I’m in heaven/ And my heart beats so, that I can hardly speak.”

 

34

In the morning, Vera sat with them in the piano lounge. She too had been sick, and Travis was struck by how she’d wasted away. The winds were gone outside, and the air pressure seemed to change. Vera spoke.

“When I was a girl, I was in the Siege of Leningrad. For two years, we were alone, trapped by the Nazis and their bombs. My house was destroyed. My parents killed, my brother. I was spared. I wondered why. I tried leaving; there was a caravan crossing the ice of Lake Lagoda. The Germans bombed the lake. I fell in the water. It was a miracle. I survived again. I was a beautiful young woman- then I was an animal, living in rubble, scavenging.”

At first Vera had seemed focused, speaking slowly, as if considering how best to reach her point. But she began to seem tired and disconnected, rambling.

“Two years like this. The bodies littered the streets, dead from starvation, from the cold, from the bombing. You don’t imagine what you can think when you are so hungry, when death seems so certain, not just for you- for everyone.

She paused and considered what she had said.

“There were cannibals then. I wondered sometimes how we did not all kill each other. But we had the Nazis to hate. But why would any God have saved me from Nazis and winter and hunger to bring me here?”

While she spoke, Corrina had pulled Darren towards her, but he struggled away from her breast to face the old lady, listening seriously. When she finished, Claude looked at the boy.

“And your dad thinks I’m the party-pooper, huh Darren?” he said.

35

Days after Travis’s visit to the Bowels, Hesse found him at dinner and pulled him into the office.

“I need your help with something,” Hesse said.

Travis nodded.

“We’ve had suicides,” he paused to catch Travis’s eyes, then continued. “There’s a fair number that we know of, maybe a dozen. I’m sure we’ll find more. People come and tell us when they’ve found the source of the smell down the hall. There’s no way we can keep it from spreading. The rumors, I mean. That will make things worse. But we can keep people from seeing it, and seeing how many there are.”

“What are you asking me to do?”

“I need you to take a few guys who can keep their mouths shut and get rid of the bodies. Do it after the daytime crowd disperses and everyone’s in their hiding places.”

Hesse gave him a list with directions and a flashlight.

“What’s happening with the communications?” Travis asked.

“Soon,” Hesse said. “Soon.”

The same confident I’ve-got-a-plan tone he had for everything, Travis thought. But Hesse did have a plan. He’d expected this, too.

Travis took Claude and Gerry to visit the staterooms on his list.

There weren't any lights in the rooms. The emergency lighting only lit the hallways, and only enough to walk by. Gerry circled the first room with the flashlight.

“On the couch,” Travis said.

The man sat upright on the couch, his head at an awkward angle. They could see the blood, dried and browning. He had slit his own throat. The knife rested on the couch, just out of his grip.

“I suspect an inside job,” Claude said.

“No way,” Gerry said. “The butler, in the library, with a razor-sharp wit.”

Travis looked at the wound. He’d gotten the air pipe but not the arteries. This had been slow and painful, and he would not have been able to scream.

Travis wondered why Hesse had asked him to do this. What was there in Travis that he would be chosen out of everyone as the perfect guy to clean up suicides? The question bothered him.

Travis and Gerry took the arms and legs. This was a less expensive stateroom than Vera’s. There was no balcony to throw him off of, as there had been for Vera’s husband and the man who had killed him. The windows were sealed. Claude led the way with a flashlight, out of the cabin, down the hallway. There was no promenade or foredeck at all on this level, so up a flight of stairs they carried the dead man. It was heavy work, and they paused several times to rest and adjust their grips, but they met no other passengers on their route. Out on the deck, the soft rain and breeze cooled them satisfyingly. They hurried across the deck, and without pause, lifted the man over the rail and dropped. There was no sound after that except their own heavy breathing.

The next was a couple. They rotated so that they took turns with the body and the flashlight.

“There’s something romantic about a double suicide,” Claude said.

“I’m not that into commitment,” Gerry sputtered.

At the railing, Professor Claude said, “Why couldn’t they just throw themselves overboard anyways?”

“There’s something of the exhibitionist in a suicide,” Gerry said.

“Yeah,” Claude said. “They’re making an argument. We get it. Life sucks.”

As they walked back to the next spot, Travis shined the flashlight on Claude’s face.

“So who do you like in the World Series this year?” Travis said.

“I think we can pretty much eliminate the Yankees and Red Sox,” Claude said.

“And the Braves and the Orioles and the Marlins,” Gerry said. “Could be the Rockies' year. Remember how the Saints played a season away from home after Hurricane Katrina?”

“Yeah,” Claude said. “Ain’t life unfair?”

Next came the teenagers. They did not joke in that room. Two dead, and a lot of blood. They looked beautiful.

One had evidently killed the other, then done himself by the wrists. The knife was on the floor. It looked like his had been painful and slow. There was a balcony here, and the work was done quickly.

Travis wondered at the trauma he’d seen in the last few years of his work, the nightmare of Sudan and nightmares of it since, the loss of his love and family, guilt, and now this, and still he fought. His life had been unhappy for three years since he’d lost Corrina, but somehow he still fought for it. Would Corrina? They both had Darren to fight for. Kids didn’t kill themselves. Not often. He’d never seen one as a paramedic. Darren, the indestructible, saving all their lives.

The last one was at the opposite end of the ship. They were forced to take a circuitous route around the sealed compartment, outside again, inside again. The night was becoming late, the moon and a slice of star-filled night were just visible in a chasm in the cloud cover; the moonlight lit up the chasm walls so that they could see the full depth of the clouds above.

“They uncovered some archaeological ruins in northern Peru,” Professor Claude said. “The remains of a human and animal sacrifice. Fifty children and as many llamas. This village literally sacrificed its future. For something. What do you imagine was bad enough that they’d sacrifice their kids for god’s mercy?”

He laughed a haunted laugh. “Same DNA, same DNA.”

When they entered the final room the stench was horrible. This one had been sitting for days. They found him in the bed, killed with medication, an empty bottle on the nightstand.

“Oh,” Travis said, as the flashlight passed over the man’s face, “crap.”

The other two did not bother to ask, they waited.

“The ship surgeon,” Travis said.

“Huh,” Claude said. “Physician, heal thyself.”

On the walk back they realized they were passing by the Theater. They were outside the back doors and Claude held the flashlight on the sign for a moment.

“The next bodies we’ll be tossing will have bullet holes,” Professor Claude said.

“Just stop!” Travis said. “I hear this from you over and over, I’m sick of it. I feel your voice pecking at the back of my brain.”