Beneath the Wake, page 9
Maureen nodded.
Natasha lifted the portrait from the table, held it to the light, and studied it closely. The resemblance was surreal and sent shivers across her shoulders. The face in the photograph had two things Natasha’s didn’t: a small beauty spot on the right cheek and a delicate cleft in the chin. The university hood draped over the young woman’s shoulders was red and gold. Natasha’s had been red and white.
“I miss her very much,” Maureen said. “Though we came from different backgrounds — her family is Lebanese — she was the only person I could confide in.”
Maureen dabbed at her eyes and sat down on the bed. She motioned for Natasha to sit closely beside her. “Mark’s downstairs in the infirmary.”
“Oh my gosh,” Natasha said. “What happened?”
Maureen wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Lou Gehrig’s is what happened. Do you call it ALS or motor neuron disease up in Canada?”
“ALS.”
“Mark’s is what they call the familial form. He got it from his dad. One of his uncles and a couple of cousins passed away from it.”
“How awful.”
“We watched his dad go downhill and die in seven horrible months. That was soon after we were married.”
“Did Mark know for sure he had the gene?”
“We waited to have kids until they developed a test. And then he tested positive and that was the end of any children in our future.”
Natasha couldn’t imagine living under such a sentence. First, the anxious uncertainty of whether or not you had the gene, then the excruciating certainty that you had it for sure. She had no idea how she’d have coped in a similar situation. Would she have bothered to put so much of herself into her career? And would she have made the same choice, never to have children? She knew she wanted children of her own, and the way Zol guided Max with wisdom, humour, and deep-seated love, she couldn’t imagine finding a man who’d make a better father. Even if her mother would balk, at least initially, at his European ancestry.
“The heat has been getting to him real bad,” Maureen said. “And the humidity. It’s as if his muscles melted away in the hot sun. Well, what little he had left of them after five months of symptoms.” She dabbed her eyes with a balled-up piece of Kleenex she pulled from her pocket. “Ever since we docked in Adelaide, a few days before Perth, he’s lost ground real fast. He’s no longer got enough strength in his arms to shave himself. And you saw me feeding him at dinner.”
Natasha put her arm around Maureen and squeezed.
“It’s the difficulty swallowing that terrifies him,” Maureen said. “He’s certain he’s going to choke to death.”
“Did his father—?”
“Right in front of us.” Maureen turned to the window and allowed the tears to flow undisturbed down her cheeks. “Something you never forget.”
Natasha spotted a box of tissues on a shelf beside a photo of a robust version of Mark holding up a freshly caught fish. No man had ever looked prouder. She took two tissues for herself and handed the box to Maureen.
“What are they doing for him in the infirmary?”
Maureen went quiet. She looked down at her hands for several moments, eyeing them as if they held the key to the Rosetta Stone. When she looked up, her face said she hoped Natasha was ready for this. “They’re preparing to grant his final wish.”
Natasha felt herself stiffen. Had she heard Maureen correctly? She couldn’t have. But then she remembered what the woman in the floppy sunhat had said when she realized poor Mrs. Weyburn had dropped dead on the sundeck: She wasn’t supposed to go yet. Not today.
Maureen wiped her tears, and then, as she was blowing her nose into a large wad of tissues, she searched Natasha’s face with her eyes. The woman was sending a signal. She was asking whether Natasha understood. And if she did, was she okay with it.
“Are . . . are we talking about what they do in Oregon?”
“So you know about the secobarb protocol?”
When Zol’s mom had been in the final, painful stages of her lung cancer, Colleen had confided that Zol was exploring the possibility of taking his mom to Oregon. But the legal and logistical barriers had proven overwhelming. And the cost of the “final” dose of secobarbital, $3,000, was a barrier that most people would have found more than a bit daunting. By the time Zol got serious about taking his mother out of province, no matter what the cost, the poor woman was in no shape to travel. “Oh, yes,” Natasha told Maureen, “I’m quite familiar with it.”
“When we left home, we knew he wouldn’t make Singapore. But we were expecting to defer until after Indonesia. We wanted to visit Bali’s rice terraces together, and we figured they’d be accessible by van because they’re not that remote or on that big a scale. It would be sort of a re-creation of our honeymoon.” She stopped again and sobbed quietly for a long time. Once she’d finally collected herself she explained, “You see, we honeymooned in the Philippines and hiked all over the Banaue Rice Terraces. You wouldn’t believe all the shades of green on the hillsides. Some people call the terraces the eighth wonder of the world. Since then, we’ve gone on a major hiking holiday every year. The Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Trail, Monument Valley, the Cinque Terre villages in Italy, and lots of day hikes around your Banff and Jasper. Mark said he could go in peace if . . .” Her shoulders heaved as another storm of sobs passed through her body like sharp ocean waves. “. . . if we could have one last trip, one last moment together among the rice terraces, just like we began.”
Natasha felt a punch of guilt at her own disappointment that the ship would be bypassing Bali. She’d been angry about missing the silversmithing workshops and the outdoor markets for which the island was famous. Especially in the tourist town of Ubud that everyone on TripAdvisor said shouldn’t be missed. Now it all seemed empty and frivolous.
Maureen’s sobs gradually subsided. “Would you come with me?”
“Where?”
“To the infirmary.”
She couldn’t be part of the couple’s last moments together. It wasn’t her place. She and Maureen had met only a few minutes ago, and she’d not so much as waved hello to Mark.
Maureen sensed her hesitation. “All I need is for you to walk me there. I can’t go down there on my own. I’m not asking you to stay. Once I’m there holding Mark’s hand, he’ll give me the strength I need.”
Sweat itched the back of Natasha’s neck. But, she told herself, as long as she went only as far as the door, as long as she didn’t witness the proceedings, she could give this woman the support she desperately needed. “Okay, I’ll come with you. You won’t be alone when you walk through the door.” She pointed to her own sweaty leggings. “Only, I need to change. I can’t go down there dressed like this.”
“Me too. It’s going to take me half an hour to get ready.” She stood up and walked to the vanity. Her hands trembled as she opened a drawer and took out a small paper bag. As she handed it to Natasha its contents rattled. “Put these in your purse and bring them with you. I don’t want to have to fuss with my tote.”
CHAPTER 17
“Il dottore, he still ’ere?”
“Yes, Captain Mario,” Noah heard Anya reply from the reception area at the front of the infirmary. “Dr. Ferguson is in his office.”
“I need speak to him.”
From the tone of his voice and the weight of his footsteps, Noah knew the captain’s hard edge was about to descend.
“You are still writing your report?” he said as he strode into Noah’s office. “Tell me, ’ow is it coming?”
“Nearly done. I’ll get it off to the coroner this afternoon.”
“And the causa di morte?”
Noah hadn’t decided yet about the cause of death. And at this point, the report wasn’t as straightforward as the captain would want. “Well . . .”
“Maledizione! You gonna tell your coroner you maybe suspect un antigioco?”
“Well, there could well have been foul play. We saw signs of a struggle.”
The debris Cornelia scraped from Qurban’s fingernails did show skin cells. Noah had seen them under the microscope. Stained with a few drops of the cochineal food colouring, the strips of epithelial cells lit up by the dozens. Like lights along an alley of Balinese bordellos. The question still remained: Whose cells were they? Were they Qurban’s because those three deep scratches on his chest were self-inflicted? Or had he got a good swipe at his assailant? Without a DNA test, no one would ever know.
“Of course he struggle,” said the captain. “The orfano, he struggle to breathe. He panic, he knock over the Scotch, he pull off his tie, he rip his shirt, he choke to death.”
“As far as the coroner is concerned, choking on his vomit is the mechanism of his death. To issue a death certificate, the coroner needs his cause of death.”
“Meccanismo? Causa? What’s the difference?”
“We need to determine the reason he threw up. Was it epilepsy, intoxication, stomach flu, a punch in the gut? Any one of those could be the cause of death required by the coroner.”
“Nobody punch him. He drink the Scotch, he throw up, he choke.”
“I’m not so sure he drank the Scotch.”
“Of course. The smell, it was everywhere.”
“But not in his stomach.”
“Scusi?”
“We took a sample from his stomach and couldn’t find a trace of alcohol.”
“You have a machine, it test for alcohol?”
Noah felt the wind going out of his sails. “No.”
“So how you do this analisi?”
“The sniff test.”
“Sniff? Like a dog?”
He was losing the argument.
“Dottore, you gonna tell your coroner you suspect your foul play because you no smell Scotch inside a dead man’s stomach?”
Noah hated to admit it, but the captain did have a point. Without formal laboratory analysis of the stomach contents, it was a bit of a stretch to report that the boy had not ingested any alcohol. “Has anyone interviewed the fellow who discovered the body?”
“Prem, he interview the young Bangladeshi who found it. An apprentice engineer. He also interview the maintenance engineer who the apprentice bring to the apartment after he find the body.”
“Tony Castillo?”
The captain nodded.
“What was a junior engineer doing in the apartment?”
“He change a lightbulb.”
Noah pictured the scene: A young lad stumbling upon the dead body of a buddy and recognizing right away that his fellow countryman had been up to major no-good in the big boss’s luxury apartment. Scared shitless, he runs to his department to get his supervisor, a sympathetic man known to be fair to his staff.
Poor Tony. What a scene to come across. If anyone had doused Qurban’s uniform with Lagavulin, Noah found it hard to believe it had been Tony Castillo. He was altogether too decent.
“I tell you what gonna ’appen if you tell your coroner you suspect your antigioco. First, we have a dead body and no death certificate because your coroner, he don’t like foul play. Next we have the Indonesian authorities in Komodo crawling on our ship. Who they gonna talk to? Every one of the crew? Every guest? How long that gonna take? Especially now, with security all jumpy after the Bali attack. Then they find Mr. Aksoy’s gay porno movies, so what? This is Southeast Asia, it runs on porn. But the whole ship gonna find out. What’s Mr. Aksoy gonna say to me?”
“But—”
The captain held up his hand. He hadn’t finished.
“Then they take the orfano off the ship. Komodo is a tourist island. Nothing there, just the dragons. No one can do an autopsia as good as you already did. So they fly the orfano to Jakarta. And we stay anchored off the coast of Indonesia for how long waiting until they agree the boy wasn’t murdered. Nothing ’appens fast in this part of the world. We miss our berths at Semarang and Makassar. And maybe we arrive late in Singapore. And I have a ship full of angry guests. They want their money back.
“And for what? The authorities in Jakarta are still gonna get their baksheesh, they still gonna fill out the death certificate that say he drink too much Scotch and choke on his vomit. And what ’appens to the body? The orfano have no relatives to receive him in Bangladesh, so he gets buried in Indonesia. Nobody there give a shit or say goodbye or mark his grave.”
It all sounded so bleak and cynical. And, sadly, realistic. Qurban could be given a respectful burial at sea in the company of friends, or he could be handed off to strangers like a piece of inconvenient cargo. Either way, his death certificate would say the same thing. The difference was whether it was printed in Indonesian or English.
The collection of porno videos bothered Noah as much as the Scotch. The nude lads pictured on that DVD cover had looked awfully young. Was there kiddie porn in Aksoy’s collection? Noah could never live with himself if he colluded in a cover-up for a jet-setting pedophile. “You’re right,” he said. “Things are different in this part of the world. But kiddie porn is a major crime no matter what waters we’re sailing in.”
“What are you talking about, kiddie porn?”
“I just need to be sure that Aksoy’s collection is legit. Adults only. No kids under eighteen.”
“Mr. Aksoy, he may play for the other team, but he never bring children on my ship. Puttana la miseria, dottore. I know that for sure.”
“Can we make a deal?”
“What you mean?”
“You and I check every DVD in Aksoy’s library. If nothing looks like kiddie porn, I’ll come right back and send a nice simple report to our coroner in Anguilla. Cause of death — alcohol intoxication. Mechanism of death — aspiration of vomit. How does that sound?”
“What is this aspiration? Does it mean the orfano, he choke?”
Noah nodded. “In doctor speak.”
“Bene. I meet you at two.”
CHAPTER 18
Zol could feel the chardonnays cascading through his brain like spirited mountain streams. Rambo had done a nice job of the tasting, although Zol would have preferred he’d done it blind. It wasn’t fair to set a pricey Montrachet Grand Cru against bargain offerings from Bulgaria and the Maipo Valley. At least, not without masking the labels. As far as Zol was concerned, wines were judged more often by the preconceptions of a capricious brain than by the honest perceptions of a humble nose and mouth. In an hour, he’d be ready for a nap. Wine in the afternoon did that to him. But at the moment, it was wonderful to be alone here with Tasha in the elegant quiet of Oceans Restaurant. Most of the other passengers were upstairs crowding the sundeck where the buzz and jostle in the lunchtime buffet line would be too much to bear.
“What tempts you?” he asked her.
Something was wrong. She looked drawn and subdued. “Nothing much.”
“Then how about something light? The lobster caesar?” She never turned down his caesar salad. Roasting the garlic made all the difference.
“Maybe just a bowl of soup.”
“Good idea. I’m going to start with the forest mushroom. And for my main I’ll have the strip loin on sourdough.” He would ask them to double the portion of caramelized onions. “Which soup looks good to you?”
She made a face.
He put down his menu. “Okay, Tasha. Tell me what’s wrong.” She’d looked tired during the wine tasting. But it wasn’t fatigue that was bothering her now.
She turned her head and gazed out the window.
Had he been too much of a showoff at the tasting? No one else had responded to the questions Rambo kept putting to the audience. Zol figured he was doing the guy a favour by coming up with the answers. And the more wine he drank, the better they got. The sommelier had looked pleased to have an ally, and there was no denying that the repartee between them had kept the event rolling. “Was it something I said? At the tasting?”
“It’s not about you, Zol.” Her tone bordered on hostile, but her face was reflective, not angry.
“So what is it?”
“I did something this morning that was either a monumental kindness or a conspiracy to a felony.”
“That’s an easy one.”
“Don’t mock me, Zol. I’m serious.”
“I’m serious too. Whatever you did, it wasn’t a felony. I know that for sure.” Her unfailing integrity was one of the many reasons he had fallen in love with her. “You always do the right thing.”
She stared stone-faced at the gold-rimmed charger plate in front of her.
He reached for her hand. “Tell me about it.”
It took her a while. She was interrupted when the waiter came with the ice water and again when he arrived with the bread basket. And yet again when he took their orders. But bit by bit, the story came out.
“How can you be sure it was secobarbital in the paper bag?” he asked.
“It rattled like a bottle of pills. And Maureen seemed wary of it, reluctant to touch it.” She toyed with the tiny baguette on her plate. “What else could it have been?”
He’d researched the protocols for medically assisted death when his mother had been dying and her pain so poorly controlled. He knew that a full bottle of secobarbital capsules made sense if the man’s ALS was as far advanced as his wife had described. He would drink the powdery contents of one hundred capsules dissolved in water, all at once. His falling asleep and never waking up would look like death by natural causes. No one would dream of running toxicology on his blood. Certainly not here. “Barbiturates are so dangerous they don’t sell secobarbital in regular pharmacies anymore,” he told her. “Except in states like Oregon, Washington, and Vermont, where they have death-with-dignity laws. But to purchase them there with a prescription, there’s a catch.”
