Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (44 page)

Tom nodded gravely, doing his best to convey that he was taking this matter very seriously. He knew that it would do no good to ask the man why on earth he had felt the need to carry five hundred dollars in cash during a cruise where he could pay for everything with his cruise card. Tom also knew that what he was going to say was not going to make the man happy.

“I can certainly understand your unhappiness, sir,” he said. “I want you to find him and arrest him,” the man said.

“I understand that,” Tom said patiently. “But I’m afraid that’s not possible. You see, nothing illegal has happened here. If two passengers wish to gamble privately, that’s not my business. Of course, we’d prefer you gamble in the casino, where the games are regulated. But if you choose to set up your own game …”

“He was cheating,” the passenger interrupted. “Some kind of a card shark, I’m sure of that.”

Tom nodded again. The man had lost and he was unhappy. Therefore, it must be someone else’s fault. That was human nature.

“I’m afraid that there’s nothing we can do to get your money back. But I would be happy to contact the other party and suggest that he confine his gambling to the casino.” Tom took out a notepad. He had started doing that after watching a number of Columbo reruns from the ship’s video library. He’d found that people seemed to find it reassuring when he wrote information down. “Did you get the other man’s name?”

Of course he hadn’t. The other fellow had said, “Call me Max,” and that was good enough for this fellow.

Tom got a description, which he patiently wrote down: the other player had been a man in his forties with brown hair and blue eyes. Medium height, a mustache but no beard, casually dressed. Then Tom listened to a great deal of bluster about how this sort of thing shouldn’t happen. Tom politely agreed that such things shouldn’t happen. The passenger, according to Company Policy, was always right.

Eventually, Tom assured the passenger that he would look into the matter and gently repeated his suggestion that the man restrict his gambling to the casino, where the
Odyssey
staff could ensure a fair game.

Ian was tapping furiously on his keyboard when Tom returned to the security office. Tom asked him to search the passenger list for anyone named Max, but the only Max on the list was Max Merriwell. The writer didn’t match the passenger’s description of the hustler. While Tom considered other possibilities, Ian continued to tap on his keyboard.

Tom reviewed the previous night’s security log to determine who had been patrolling the area where the incident had occurred. He called the guard who had been on duty. The man had noticed the card game, but it had appeared at that time to be a friendly game, involving no money. He had advised the players that gambling was restricted to the ship’s casino. The players had assured him that they were just playing for fun.

The guard was new. Tom advised him that there was no such thing as a friendly poker game. Of course they had been playing for fun. But invariably some people had more fun than others. The guy who lost didn’t have any fun at all. The guy who won had quite a lot of fun.

Tom hung up, shaking his head. He’d tell his staff to keep a better eye on the games room for other friendly games of poker. He’d check the casino for the alleged card shark and have a quiet word with the man if he found him. If a professional gambler was aboard, Tom wanted to advise the man that he was being watched before any more problems developed. Just a friendly tip—Tom figured that’s all it would take. Tom pushed his chair back, planning to take a stroll through the casino.

“Uh, Tom …” Ian held his cup of coffee in both hands, his eyes narrowed in concentration as he stared at the computer screen. “I didn’t find another Max, but I did find something else very interesting. I was checking the records for last night and I found an anomaly. Last night, at Aphrodite’s Alehouse, someone paid for a drink with a cruise card that isn’t in the system.” Aphrodite’s Alehouse was one of the ship’s eight bars.

Tom frowned at Ian. “A cruise card that isn’t in the system? What do you mean?”

Ian was smiling ever so slightly. He sipped his coffee. “A name that’s not on the passenger list. A cruise card that doesn’t exist in the system. There’s no record of the person with this cruise card getting on the ship. No photo on file.”

“How can that be? Someone has a counterfeit cruise card?” Tom shook his head. Ian’s computerized cruise card system was supposed to track who was on board and who wasn’t. Tom didn’t see the need for the new technology. The old method of controlling who was on board—a checklist at each gangway—had worked just fine from Tom’s point of view. But all the competitors’ ships had cruise cards, so the Company had decided that the
Odyssey
should have them, too. Now, after two shakedown cruises, Ian had found a problem.

Tom wasn’t worried: he had not yet discontinued the old checklist system. Don, his second in command, had insisted that they keep the old system going until they were certain the new system worked flawlessly. Don was an old Navy master-at-arms, and he tended to be conservative. So thanks to the checklist system, Tom knew who was on the ship. There were no extra passengers aboard.

“I don’t think it’s a counterfeit card,” Ian said, still smiling. “More likely it’s some kind of mistake. You see, the name on the cruise card is Weldon Merrimax.”

“That’s one of Max Merriwell’s names,” Tom said. “That’s right.”

“So where else has Weldon Merrimax been?”

“I can’t tell you. A card only shows up on the system when the person charges something. Since most of the ship’s services are included in the cruise, there’s no charge. I could have set up the system to track whenever a card was used to enter a stateroom, but some people were concerned about passengers’ privacy.” Ian shrugged. “You’ll have to wait until he buys something else.”

Tom frowned. “Gene Culver wanted Max Merriwell to teach that writing workshop as Weldon Merrimax,” he said. “Maybe Gene issued Max a cruise card in that name.”

“Maybe,” Ian said. “I can check into that.”

“You do that,” Tom said. “In the meantime, maybe I’ll ask Max if he charged a drink in Aphrodite’s last night.”

Ian consulted his computer screen. “His workshop is in the library,” Ian said. “He’ll be teaching for another half hour. You could catch him there.”

Tom nodded. “I guess I’ll do that.”

On his way to the library, Tom visited the accounting office where a clerk made him a copy of the charge slip that Weldon Merrimax had signed. The signature was printed more than written. “Weldon Merrimax,” it said, in square, angular letters. Tom noted the name of the bartender who had signed off on the tab, then pocketed the copy and headed for the library.

Susan sat in a comfortable chair in the ships library, listening to Max talk about writing.

The library was furnished like a gentleman’s club with upholstered easy chairs and oak tables. The windows along one wall looked onto the Promenade, where passengers strolled and jogged. The other wall was lined with bookshelves on which Max’s work was prominently displayed—books by Max Merriwell, Mary Maxwell, and Weldon Merrimax.

Max sat in an upholstered leather chair at one end of a heavy oak table. A dozen or so passengers sat around the table. Alberta was there. So were two little old ladies, one with her knitting and one with her embroidery. A brooding teenage boy with a ragged haircut and rumpled clothes slumped in his chair and glowered out the window at the joggers who passed on the promenade. Susan guessed he was a Weldon Merrimax fan even before she noticed the paperback copy of
Tell Me
No Lies on the table in front of him.

Cindy, a young woman wearing a Hawaiian shirt, turquoise blue trousers, and the blue blazer that served as the uniform of the cruise staff, had introduced Max with an air of breathless enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you all came to the first ever
Odyssey
writers’ workshop,” she said to the group. “I think it’s so exciting that we have an internationally known author here to teach us.”

“I want to introduce Max Merriwell, the author of many, many books.” It was clear to Susan that Cindy had not read any of Max’s books. The young woman seemed more impressed by the number of books than their content. “We are pleased and honored that he’ll be teaching this workshop,” she concluded.

Max regarded the group benignly. “It’s very nice to see you all here today,” he said. “You may think that I’m going to teach you to write, but what I’m really going to do is help you exercise your imaginations. I’ve found that relatively few adults ever exercise their imaginations at all, let alone give them the kind of strenuous workout that writing a story demands.”

He talked for a while about paying attention to the world around you, about learning to listen to your inner voice, about the power of your imagination.

“I assume that each of you is here because you have a story to tell. You may not know what that story is, but if you try, you’ll figure it out. Every one of us has many stories that make up our lives. I’m going to help you learn to tell those stories. So let’s get started. Everyone needs a pencil and paper.”

Some people had brought notebooks; others had not. Cindy bustled around, getting everyone what they needed. She was relieved, Susan thought, to have something to do.

“First off, I don’t want you to confuse me with your high school English teacher. I didn’t much like my high school English teachers and I certainly never wanted to be one. I’m not here to correct your grammar and put periods in the right places. I have a healthy respect for a well-placed period, but I don’t think the world will end if a period is out of place. I don’t even care much about the words. What I care about is the imagination. That’s what matters.”

“Now I want you to think about something that matters to you. An object of some sort that you have strong feelings about. Something you love or something you hate—I don’t care which—but something that matters to you. Write down what you are thinking about.”

In her notebook, Susan scrawled, “My wedding ring.”

“Write down a couple of lines about that object. Describe it. You don’t have to write in sentences. I don’t care about that. Just write something.”

Susan wrote: “Solid gold. Heavy. Valuable.” She hesitated for a moment, tapping her pen on the page nervously, then crossed out the word valuable and wrote “Expensive.” Not quite the same thing, she thought. It was worth money, but it wasn’t valuable to her, or she wouldn’t have thrown it away. She caught herself in the act of feeling for the ring with the thumb of her left hand, touching the callus where the ring had once rested. “Familiar,” she wrote. “Gone.”

“Now write a few words about how that object makes you feel,” Max said.

She stared at the page, her eyes focusing on the last word she had written. “Gone.” How did she feel? She remembered staring at the horizon as the ship headed across the ocean, far from land. “Adventurous,” she wrote. “Bold.”

“Don’t worry if some of the feelings are contradictory,” Max said. “That’s just the way it is, sometimes.”

“Afraid,” Susan wrote. “Lost. Confused.”

“All right,” Max said. “Now I want you to put all that together into a scene. A very short scene involving the object you have described. A scene that comes out of your feelings about the object.”

Susan wrote: “A woman stood on the deck of a ship, staring out at the ocean waves. In her hand, she held a golden ring, her wedding ring. Staring out at the waves, she threw the ring overboard, threw it as hard as she could. At the moment it left her hand, she wished that she could snatch it back. Too late. Her hand was empty; the ring was gone. She felt lost. She felt lonely. She felt like anything could happen.”

Tom stepped into the ship’s library and stood just inside the doorway. The class was ending. Max was saying, “Now, if nobody has any more questions, we’ll wrap it up for today.”

People stood, stretched, and began talking. As Tom made his way to the front of the room, he overheard a few comments about writing, but most of the people were talking about where they should go for lunch. That didn’t surprise him; in his experience, passengers talked more about food than about anything else.

Tom saw Susan and Pat standing by the table, gathering their things. Susan looked up, saw Tom, and quickly stepped toward him. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I thought about trying to talk Max into going to see you, but I don’t know if he would have. He got a strange note this morning.”

“A note? What sort of note?”

“A note with a hexagram from the
I Ching,”
she said. Tom frowned, and she explained a little more. “
The Book of Changes.
It’s a system of Chinese fortune-telling. Max said the note was nothing to worry about, but it seemed kind of threatening to me. Someone slipped it under his door last night.”

Seems like last night was a busy night, Tom thought. Max was talking to a frowning teenager, who seemed to be complaining about something.

“Maybe you could rescue poor Max,” Pat said. “He’s talking to a Weldon Merrimax fan.”

“That’s bad?” Tom asked.

“That would be my guess.”

From Max’s pained expression, Tom had to agree. “Better go save him,” Susan said.

Tom stepped toward the writer. “Max, I need to have a word with you.” He glanced at the teenager. “I hope you’ll excuse us.”

“Sure,” the kid mumbled. “I was looking for Weldon Merrimax, anyway.” He turned and walked away.

Max shook his head, looking unhappy.

Tom frowned. “I thought you were Weldon,” he said.

“I write as Weldon,” Max said. He was fumbling in his pocket. After a moment, he pulled out a pipe and a lighter.

“Remember, Mr. Merriwell.” Cindy’s clear voice came from the back of the room. “No smoking in the library!”

“Perhaps we could step outside,” Max said, glancing at Cindy with the weary expression of a smoker who had been denied too long. Tom followed Max onto the promenade deck.

Outside, Tom leaned against the rail, waiting for Max to fill his pipe. The sun was warm on his face. Joggers in brightly colored sweat suits pounded past him. Passengers aboard the
Odyssey
were always jogging. A nearby sign read: “Three times around the promenade deck is one mile.”