Dark Passage

TWELVE

‘Passengers are lured to [cruise ship] auctions of supposedly investment-grade, collector art. Free champagne flows like water. Since the sales take place at sea, making claims under consumer protection laws is difficult. Buyers may have little recourse if the art is misrepresented. Cruise ship auctions sell the art on display, but the winning bidder actually receives a different (but supposedly equivalent) piece which is shipped from the auction company’s warehouse. Many art buyers at cruise ship auctions have later found that their shipboard masterpieces were worth only a fraction of the purchase price.’

www.Wikitravel.org, March 12, 2013

Apparently, Mother knew best.

Bright and early the next morning Julie was up, dressed in a pink-flowered sundress and white sandals, ready to join us in the Oceanus dining room for breakfast. Julie must have been hungry, because she ordered the farmer’s special – steak, pancakes, scrambled eggs and fried tomatoes – a breakfast so large and relentlessly American that it would even have pleased the lady toting the emergency tuna fish and Tang.

For several days, the cruise director had been touting an art auction. Over breakfast, we decided to check it out. Ruth and I waited in the atrium while Georgina escorted Julie up to Tidal Wave and supervised while Julie signed up to audition for a teens-only talent show followed by a pizza party.

‘Free champagne. What’s not to like?’ Georgina pointed out when she rejoined us in the atrium about fifteen minutes later. We snagged glasses of bubbly from a passing server. Earlier in the voyage, I’d passed through the art gallery on our way to check out our cruise photos; they’d planned it that way, of course. For the auction, however, space in the photo gallery had been appropriated to accommodate additional paintings, and others were displayed on easels arranged cheek by jowl, encircling the balcony.

Ruth consulted her brochure. ‘Tarkay, Fanch, Krasnyansky, Dali, Peter Max… I’ve heard of them, but who the hell’s Eslaquit, Tamrat and Loomis?’

I gestured with my champagne flute. ‘That’s an Eslaquit.’

We stared at the painting, an over-the-sofa-sized representation of a yellow-faced child wearing an electric-blue dress, posing in a field dotted with poppies. ‘My God,’ Ruth said.

‘And here’s another one,’ I said, moving on. ‘You can have a pair, if jaundiced children appeal to you.’

‘The brochure encourages us to bid on a piece of this valuable art to take home as a memento of our trip.’ Ruth considered me over the top of her reading glasses. ‘I didn’t see any psychedelic unicorns leaping over rainbows while we were sightseeing, did you? I’d rather take a photograph of Bermuda and have it framed as a memento, thank you very much.’

Artist Mikal Tamrat turned out to be primarily inspired by sunsets – or rises, it was hard to tell – thickly spread with a palette knife in oils of vibrant neon, although Loomis wasn’t too bad, if your taste ran to naked figures and disproportional body parts rendered in pastels.

Georgina considered a Loomis thoughtfully while sipping her champagne. ‘It’s a lot like a puzzle that has to be put back together,’ she said, tilting her head to one side. ‘Remove the arm from the tree, pick the breast up off the floor…’

‘Be careful with the bubbly, Georgina, or you might end up owning a painting of dogs playing poker,’ I teased, moving on.

Ruth poked me lightly on the arm. ‘Say, isn’t that what’s her name, the woman married to the frequent cruiser guy?’

I had to think for a moment, then it came to me. Nicole Westfall. The wife of Phoenix Cruise Lines’ most recent Gold Trident award-winner, Jack Westfall. Dressed in a black sheath, cinched in tightly with a wide gold belt, Nicole balanced on dangerously tall heels behind a French provincial credenza, talking earnestly with a passenger. As I watched, she bent over a notebook, her golden hair swinging loose, and tapped one of the laminated pages. ‘She must work for the auction house,’ I said as we drew closer. ‘This will be a busy day.’

‘… to be honest with you,’ I overheard Nicole tell the man. Ha! Honest people don’t feel the need to remind you of how honest they are, as my mother always used to say.

‘One must keep one’s head about one at an auction,’ Ruth announced grandly, ‘especially when the bidding is fueled by champagne. It’s my policy never to pay more than ten dollars for sad-faced clowns or starving orphans. For kittens or Elvis, I’m willing to go a bit higher, but only if they’re painted on black velvet.’

That made me laugh so hard that I sloshed champagne on the floor. When no one was looking, I rubbed it well into the carpet with the toe of my sandal.

‘This Dali isn’t too bad.’ Georgina was standing in front of a lithograph of two fishes, one red and one blue, entitled ‘Pisces.’ ‘I wonder how much it’s worth?’ She peered closer. ‘And, look, it’s even signed!’

‘If we were on land, I could answer that question,’ I said, thinking about how often I pull out my iPhone to Google something. ‘Maybe that’s why they charge so much for the Internet on board, and keep the speed so glacial. Makes it hard to do due diligence.’

None of us were the least bit interested in anything Nicole Westfall had on offer but we were curious, so when the auction began some ten minutes later, my sisters and I stood well back, casually observing what soon became a sort of well-orchestrated, inebriated sales hysteria. Works I wouldn’t have paid twenty dollars for – even if I’d had a place to hang them – went for prices in the thousands. ‘You may pay a thousand dollars for this painting today,’ Nicole drawled into her clip-on microphone, working the audience like a television evangelist, ‘but when you get it home, the price can only go up, up, up, and up! Ten, do I hear ten thousand?’

It was as bad as watching QVC.

When one of the Dalis went for twenty thousand, Ruth made quiet whoop-whoop-whooping sounds.

I sent an elbow into her ribs. ‘Shhhh.’

‘Just my bullshit detector going off,’ Ruth said. ‘And when that idiot gets his masterpiece home and reality sinks in… well, I don’t think there are any consumer protection laws out in international waters.’

We stayed a few minutes longer, watching in disbelief as Nicole knocked down a Peter Max and a Miro for more than it cost Georgina to send Colin to private school for a year. ‘These people are nuts,’ Georgina said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

We ditched our empty glasses on a tray on top of the piano and retreated to lounge chairs on one of the upper decks where we soaked up the sun, people-watched and read until lunchtime.

After lunch, while Ruth went to the library to return a book, Georgina and I rode the elevator up to Tidal Wave to pick up Julie. She wasn’t in the club room proper, nor in the video arcade, so we went looking for one of the youth counselors.

‘Maybe the pizza party isn’t over yet,’ I suggested.

Georgina consulted her watch. ‘It’s almost two. It has to be over by now.’

The youth counselor on duty behind the desk smiled as we approached.

Georgina squinted at the young man’s name tag. ‘Wesley, have you seen Julie Cardinale? I checked her in around ten.’

‘Cardinale?’ He bent his head, ran a finger down a list fastened to a clipboard.

‘Right.’

‘After the pizza party broke up, she went into the bar.’ He hooked a thumb to the right, pointing us toward Breakers!, the teen center’s juice bar.

The bar was crowded with young people, sitting on toadstools around small, round tables, enjoying sodas and fruit smoothies. A few were drinking coffee. Everyone was trying to talk over whatever racket passes for music these days. We stood in the doorway and scanned the crowd. ‘I don’t see her,’ I said.

Georgina took a deep breath and marched over to the bar. By the light of a colossal, blue-neon wave mounted and undulating overhead, one of the bartenders, a young woman, was busily filling a blender with ice, bananas and pineapple. The other was running someone’s sea pass through a scanner. ‘Excuse me,’ Georgina asked the guy manning the scanner, ‘but I’m looking for my daughter, Julie Cardinale. Have you seen her?’

Rohan from South Africa stared at my sister as if she’d just asked him to calculate the square root of pi out to twenty decimal places. Then he smiled. ‘We see a lot of girls here, ma’am. Can you be more precise?’

The blender began to whine and grind. ‘She’s fourteen, with red hair!’ Georgina yelled over the noise.

‘Looks just like her mother here,’ I pointed out helpfully.

The second bartender switched off the blender and grabbed a tall glass. ‘I mixed her a Virginia Colada about half an hour ago,’ she said as she poured. ‘She was sitting over by the window with a couple of other kids.’

Georgina glanced over her shoulder, turned her head back and said, ‘Well, she’s not there now.’

While Georgina continued to quiz the bartenders, I wandered over to the tables and asked if anyone had seen Julie. Several of the boys remembered seeing my niece sitting with a mixed group of teens, but hadn’t noticed when she left.

Back at the check-in desk, Georgina was having a fit. ‘I checked her in at ten-oh-five Wesley, and it was your job to keep an eye on her!’

To his credit, Wesley’s face was lined with deep concern. ‘I’m sorry ma’am, but the pizza party broke up about the same time as the movie was starting, and that coincided with lunch… I was totally slammed. You know, she’s probably just gone to the restroom, or back to your cabin.’

‘No, she wouldn’t do that. I was taking her for a pedicure at two o’clock. She was supposed to meet me here,’ she said, stabbing the desk with an index finger.

I laid a hand on my sister’s shoulder. ‘It’s not yet two, so why don’t you stay here in case Julie shows up, while I’ll go check the cabin, OK?’ When she nodded, I said, ‘I’ll be right back.’

But Julie wasn’t in her cabin, or in ours.

Thinking she might have gone to the Firebird for a quick snack, I made a circuit of the buffet before returning, empty-handed, to the Tidal Wave on the deck above.

When I got back, Wesley had found a chair for Georgina and had whipped his hand-held telephone out of its holster, using it to summon his supervisor. Over my head, an annoying squeal designed to attract attention blared out of a speaker, followed by an announcement. ‘Will Miss Julie Lynn Cardinale please report to Tidal Wave on deck ten immediately? Julie Lynn Cardinale, report to Tidal Wave on deck ten.’

‘Have you checked with the day spa?’ I asked hopefully.

Georgina nodded; her lower lip quivered. ‘Wesley called them. She’s not there.’

‘She has got to be on board somewhere!’ I insisted. ‘I’m going to get Ruth and we’ll comb the decks, beginning with the swimming pool.’

But I didn’t have to find Ruth; while I was reassuring Georgina, she appeared. ‘I was in the library when I heard them page Julie over the P.A. What the hell’s going on?’

As I filled Ruth in, Georgina began to weep openly. ‘What if she fell down and is lying hurt somewhere?’ Georgina turned her tear-stained face to me. ‘Oh, God, Hannah, what if Julie has fallen overboard!’

I knelt on the deck in front of my distraught sister. ‘It is the middle of the day, Georgina, and there are hundreds of people on deck. If anyone had gone overboard, they would have been noticed. Besides, there are CCTV cameras everywhere, and crew to monitor them. Julie did not go overboard. We’ll find her, I promise.’

The speaker squealed again with another call for Julie to report to the Tidal Wave. This time when she heard it, Georgina came unglued. ‘What is the goddamn point of checking children in if you’re just going to let them wander off whenever they damn well please?’

‘Settle down, ma’am,’ Wesley said.

Georgina’s pale face flushed dangerously red. ‘Settle down? I’ll settle down when Julie’s back with me safely, and not one minute before!’

Looking desperate, Wesley punched numbers into his phone and spoke urgently to someone.

‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ I asked him when he’d finished the call.

‘Security is on the way,’ Wesley explained. ‘They’ll know what to do.’

Wesley had called out the big guns: Benjamin Martin, Chief of Security, wearing a crisp white uniform with black epaulets, each bearing two broad and one narrow stripe. I had no idea what the stripes meant on a Phoenix vessel, but if Martin were in the navy, he’d be a lieutenant commander, the rough equivalent of an army major. Accompanying him was a female officer wearing two stripes on her epaulets – his lieutenant, I gathered – who made a beeline for Georgina and introduced herself. ‘I’m Molly Fortune. Let’s go someplace quiet where we can talk.’

Georgina looked up with red-rimmed eyes. ‘But Julie is expecting to meet me here!’

Officer Fortune took Georgina by the upper arm and gently helped her to her feet. ‘Wesley will stay here, don’t worry. And the rest of the staff is out looking for your daughter as we speak.’

Molly Fortune didn’t object when Ruth and I tagged along, following her into the elevator, and out onto deck eight. As we made our way along the corridors, we passed crew members wearing blue vests marked ‘security’ in yellow. They seemed to be in a hurry.

Fortune led us to an office tucked away between one of the higher end staterooms and the ship’s bridge. A desk dominated the room; three computer screens were mounted above it. If this was the Islander’s security command center, it was unimpressive. Officer Fortune indicated that we should sit down, then reached into a drawer and pulled out a box of tissues, which she handed to Georgina.

I remained standing. ‘Can Georgina stay here with you while I go help with the search?’ I asked the officer.

‘All passengers are being asked to return to their cabins, Mrs Ives, family included. That’s SOP. Standard operating procedure. We’ve launched a deck-by-deck, room-by-room search for your daughter,’ she added, speaking directly to Georgina. ‘Please, don’t worry. We’ll find her.’

‘But, even if Julie were in someone else’s room, why didn’t she answer when you paged her?’

I could figure out the answer to that, but Georgina was already so upset that I kept my mouth shut.

We were startled by a strident blast on the intercom, and a disembodied voice saying, ‘Code Adam, Adam, Adam.’

Georgina, who had to recognize the universal code for a missing child, began to wail. Ruth, sitting closest, wrapped Georgina in her arms and began briskly rubbing her back.

‘I’m doing nobody any good here,’ I said. ‘SOP or not, I’m going out to look for her.’

‘No, ma’am, you aren’t,’ Fortune warned. ‘We can’t have anyone wandering around the ship right now. Please sit down. We’ll keep you updated. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Water?’

We declined, sitting together as we had at Aunt Evelyn’s funeral, three silent and very distressed little monkeys, holding hands.

After what seemed like hours, but was probably only twenty or thirty minutes, the intercom crackled to life again: ‘Code Sierra, Sierra, Sierra!’

Georgina started. ‘What was that? Code Sierra. What does that mean?’

Fortune stiffened, used her phone to made a call and said, ‘What’s the situation?’ As she listened, her shoulders relaxed. ‘Good job, thank you. I’ll tell the family. They’ve found Julie,’ she said.