He still had the clothing he’d worn when he’d come aboard the ship: decent tan slacks, maroon polo shirt, brown loafers. If he shaved more carefully than he usually did these days, if he spoke English, if he kept his nerve, there was no reason why he couldn’t pass as a passenger; there were a few Asiatics sprinkled among the mostly Europeans up there, along with some Americans and even the occasional black. If only the weather would be good next Tuesday; in high seas or driving rain, he wouldn’t be able to make the ascent.
Tuesday was beautiful all day, though Kwan had no way to know that without going out onto that aft deck. By nine at night, the deep black sky showed a million pinholes of stars, with a half-moon low in the east, forward of the ship, where its light would not touch a man climbing the stern ladder. The only truly tricky part was to edge past that picture window, but the crowded bar was filled with people in boisterous conversation, who had long since learned that what they mostly saw at night in that window was their own reflections, and so no longer looked over there.
Hugging the metal wall, Kwan climbed past the window, past the laughing, chattering, drinking people inside, and went on up and up. To stop, and wait, at the very top, while a loving couple with their arms around one another strolled with infuriating slowness past the spot where he crouched. At one moment, he could have reached out and clawed the woman’s ankle.
Gone by at last. Using the rail for support, slipping beneath its lowest crosspiece, he rolled out onto the deck, stood, brushed himself off, and went for his first stroll in the free air.
There were still at this hour people in the dining room, but they had also spread into the lounges and the half dozen bars and the two casinos. Passing through one bar, Kwan picked up an unattended drink and carried it off with him, more for protective coloration than anything else. He was not a drinker, never had been, didn’t believe in it.
But it was impossible to carry the glass around like that without finally at least sipping from it. The taste was sharp, not very pleasant, but as he strolled he continued to sip the drink, and in a surprisingly short time there was almost none of it left.
He was in one of the casinos when he realized he had to either stop drinking or walk around foolishly with an empty glass in his hand. The trouble was, he’d been concentrating on the passengers and on the simple pleasure of walking among ordinary people, and had been paying too little attention to himself.
The passengers. Those in the bars were mostly European, tanned, rich looking, young to middle-aged. Those playing cards in the lounges were mostly American, older and not so prosperous looking. And the casinos seemed to attract a generally older crowd.
Though not entirely. Here and there in the casinos, too, were attractive younger people, like the deeply tanned blonde he now found himself standing next to, watching the action at the craps table. She looked to be in her late twenties, tall and slender and bored, observing the dice and the players with a jaundiced eye. Kwan became aware of her, covertly watched her a while, and then said, “Excuse me.”
She turned her head, raising a skeptical eyebrow: “Yes?”
He gestured at the table: “Do you understand the rules of that game?”
She had known, of course, that he was somebody trying to pick her up, but she hadn’t expected this. She gave a surprised snort of laughter, and then said, “I’m afraid I do, yes.”
“Afraid you do?” Kwan echoed, and vaguely moved the glass: “I’m sorry, my English—”
“Is as good as mine,” she informed him. “Where are you from?”
“Hong Kong.”
“I am from Frankfurt,” she told him, and nodded toward the table. “That is my husband with the dice. You see? There he throws. He’s trying to match a certain number. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses.”
Kwan said, “Do you play?”
“Oh, no.” She shrugged. “I could, but I’m not interested. It is Kurt’s vacation to play, and my vacation to watch.”
“Well, at least it’s a vacation,” Kwan said.
Again she looked at him, with more curiosity. “Aren’t you on vacation? Or are you with the ship?”
“Oh, no, not with the ship,” he said, and went into the spiel he’d worked out while waiting for Tuesday. “I am a maritime student, I am doing my thesis on these ships, the company very kindly permitted me to come aboard.”
“Your thesis? About the ships?”
“Well, they have no real transportation purpose,” Kwan told her. “No one is here to travel to a destination.”
“No, of course not,” she agreed. “It’s a vacation.”
“So the competition,” Kwan pointed out, “is not airplanes, but islands.”
She laughed. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“So the thesis,” Kwan went on, beginning to half believe his own story, “is about why people choose this sort of vacation.”
She pointed at the craps table. “That’s your answer, right there. The casinos. No law against gambling on the high seas.”
Smiling, he said, “I’ll need to fill my paper with more words than that.”
“Yes, I suppose you will. I am Helga.”
“Kwan.”
“How do you do?”
Her hand was dry, cool, strong. With a knowing look at him, she said, “Isn’t this when you invite me for a drink?”
In honest confusion, not at all feigning, Kwan said, “Oh, I wish I could, I’m sorry, I—”
“An impoverished student? Really?”
“That’s so.” There was something about being in the presence of a beautiful woman that always turned Kwan into the most supple and glib of liars. Showing her his glass, he said, “I only permit myself one an evening.”
“In that case,” she said, “let me buy you a drink. Is that Scotch?”
He looked at the dregs in the glass. “Yes,” he hazarded.
He’d been wrong. When they settled at a tiny booth in one of the quieter bars — but still lively — and he tasted the tall Scotch and soda the red-jacketed waiter placed before him, it was a very different taste. No telling what that first drink had been.
And no matter. He was seated at a comfortable banquette in a happily humming bar, beside a good-looking woman who kept smiling around her drink and eying him with speculation, he was speaking English, flirting, happy, pretending to be himself at last (much more himself than that kitchen slavey he counterfeited daily down below), and even drinking a second Scotch though he never drank and his head had already begun to swim. But what release was this!
She leaned closer to him, lowering her voice but making sure he could still hear her. “The casino closes at two. Kurt never leaves before it closes, and I can’t possibly stay here that long. Walk me to my cabin, will you?”
“I will,” he said.
She woke him with sharp fingers and sharp shakings: “We fell asleep!”
At a loss, he stared up at this naked woman bending over him in the amber light, narrow strong breasts presenting themselves but angular face filled with urgency and rejection. “You have to go, it’s nearly two o’clock!”
He remembered. He remembered that body from before, when he’d first seen it, slender and muscular with its bathing suit bands, when all of that beauty and strength had been only for him, to enclose and engulf him. He had been away from women so long that the first look of her had been like the jolt of a drug, a sudden hollowness in his stomach as though the sight of Helga had burned him empty, seared him, and left him trembling but pure. Touching her, smelling her, pushing into her...