“That is good news,” Miriam said, hoping, for Sasha’s sake, that the parts would come. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“We’re okay here,” said Kimmi. “But you could try the infirmary.”
“I will,” said Miriam.
She left the three of them on the bridge, staring out together at the barren wasteland of water, and made her way down to the promenade deck. In the infirmary, she found the ship’s medic, Mike Pruitt, whose brushy light-brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses made him look more like a pastor or a tax accountant than a doctor.
“How are things down here?” she asked him.
“Pretty bad,” he said. His glasses were slightly fogged. He looked harried and out of his depth and apologetic. “And with norovirus, there’s not much you can do for it, medically. Time, hydration, rest. Keep it contained. But on this scale, it’s pretty intense. It’s a bad one.”
Miriam looked at all the dozens of deck chairs lined up against the inner wall of the promenade deck, a long row of field cots filled with people who were clearly suffering, some in stoic silence, some vocally. She heard sighs and groans of pain and muttered laments. Several people, pale and agitated, waited by the doors to the two bathrooms with working toilets, the only two on board. She felt nervous, being here, and frankly terrified of catching this awful thing herself.
“Can I do anything to help?” she asked.
“Try Flaminia,” he said. “She might be able to think of something.”
A couple of days ago, when the norovirus epidemic became serious, a retired nurse named Flaminia had come out of the crowd of passengers to offer her services. She was a glamorous seventyish Italian woman who seemed far more confident than Mike Pruitt. She collected asthma inhalers, unused pain medications, antibiotics, and anti-diarrhetics from the crew and passengers, and was now rationing them to the patients who needed them the most.
Miriam found her in the little room off the grand hallway that had been turned into the makeshift dispensary.
“Antibiotics,” said Flaminia, holding up a bottle as Miriam entered. “Look, here, how much is left in this bottle. They took half the course and then they stopped taking them. Very bad practice. Not that these are any use against this virus.”
“I came to see if I could help you. I’m Miriam. I’m with the string quartet.”
Flaminia gazed at her for a moment as if skeptically assessing her potential usefulness. “The restaurant crew brings water, the stewards help with cleaning,” she said. “But maybe…”
“I have no nursing training, but I did raise two children,” Miriam added.
“There is really very little we can do for them,” said Flaminia. She added in a half whisper, “Three people already have died.”
Miriam stared at her, horrorstruck. “People died?”
“Shhh,” said Flaminia, putting a finger to her lips, glancing at the open door. “The crew doesn’t want us to know. They’re afraid of panic. They even tried to hide it from me, but how could they. I saw them, removing the bodies, very early this morning. This is a terrible epidemic. More will die tonight. Nothing we can do about it.”
“Where did they put the bodies?” said Miriam, aghast.
Flaminia gave an expressive, pragmatic Italian shrug. “Maybe overboard, who knows?”
“Oh, how awful.” Miriam braced herself with a hand on the table. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise. But what can I do? What do you need?”
“Play something, maybe. Music. For the patients.” Flaminia ticked her tongue against her front teeth and nodded. “Yes. Some music might be very nice for them. Make them forget they’re sick.”
“I’ll go and get my violin,” said Miriam. “I’ll be right back.”
She hurried out and climbed the stairs back up to the owner’s suite. There she found Isaac and Rivka exactly where she’d left them earlier, sitting side by side on the main balcony, staring in silence at the horizon.
“Isaac,” she said. “Come. I need you. Get your viola. We’re going down to play for the sick people, the nurse asked me.”
He made a face like a fussy baby confronted for the first time with a new food. “Right now, you want to do this?”
“What, you’re too busy? Yes, right now!”
“The two of us? Play what?”
“Anything. One of the five thousand pieces we know. These people are dying, Isaac!” He eyed her, hesitating. “Forget it,” she said.
She turned back into the suite, fetched her violin out of the closet, and went out along the catwalk. When she got to the top of the stairway, she stopped and turned back to see Isaac, lumbering toward her, shading his face with his hand to block the sunlight, carrying his bulky viola case. In that moment she felt that in all the years they’d been together she had never been happier to see him.
As soon as Christine left the galley with her friend, Mick’s mood dropped. He felt sluggish, depressed, on the verge of unleashing his pent-up anger. They should have been in Honolulu days ago. He’d been eligible for shore leave on this cruise. But instead he was stuck in this dark, airless, infernally hot kitchen while food supplies steadily dwindled. He didn’t know where else to go.
Kenji had been hit by the norovirus two days before, and had joined all the other quarantined sick people writhing in deck beds on the promenade. So Mick was in charge. But there was so little left for anyone to do that the crew had started spending most of their time up on the main deck with the walkouts, doing nothing, waiting. Christine was the only one who came down to the galley regularly. And now that she was gone…
The dark galley air felt thick with a residual static-electric energy, reverberated with all the furious work that had gone on down here before the engines died. So many people, so much heat. It made him weirdly nostalgic. He almost wanted to crawl into a supply closet and hide there, like a little kid, hoping that if he squeezed his eyes shut and counted to three, it would all be the same again when he came out, the galley full of people, food, action, with bright lights gleaming on stainless steel, the air roaring with the vents and air-conditioning, the stoves flaming with heat.
He remembered the captain’s table dinner, when he had given that impromptu speech about Chef Viktor, how Laurens had reacted, the withering scorn. Save your private memoirs for old age.
Was his story really so boring? So inappropriate? All Mick had done was to put the dish into a personal context. It had taken less than a minute to tell. For the first time, instead of shame, he felt a hot tongue of rage. He hadn’t deserved that rebuke. He should have walked out proudly, unfazed, happy with the success of his dish. Instead, he’d felt crushed. And why? Because some Belgian prick’s ego couldn’t handle someone else stealing his spotlight for one measly second? What did it really matter?
He poked his flashlight into the dry-goods storage room to see what else he could salvage from the old cases of canned fruit cocktail, Spam, deviled ham, and Campbell’s cream soups, asparagus and mushroom and celery. Mick had no idea why most of this stuff was on board. Laurens had insisted that everything be made fresh, from scratch. Maybe the stores were meant to feed the crew, or to fulfill special requests from homesick American passengers who needed a room-service fix of the supermarket foods they were used to. Whatever the reason, Mick was glad to have it, even though much of it probably dated back to the Cold War. He hoped it wouldn’t give everyone botulism, because they would need all of it, starting now. Subtracting the norovirus victims, and counting the entire crew, including the walkouts, there were almost five hundred people on board to feed. Even the canned food wouldn’t hold out for long.