Werner fights the instinct to run. The security door is still far ahead, but rushing will do nothing other than make him clumsy. The last thing he needs is to fall and hurt himself and lose what modicum of respect he has earned.
The cabin boy lengthens each stride and reaches the access door in record time. He swaps out the felt shoes for his loafers and steps back into B-deck, expecting there to be pandemonium. Instead he finds two stewards and a cook’s assistant loitering in the corridor between crew cabins. They have the restless look of men who would like to be on a smoke break but can’t afford cigarettes. One of them has made a lewd joke—the boy can tell by the color in their cheeks and the coarse laughter—but they do not look troubled about what has just happened. Nor do they share the punch line.
“What are you doing back there?” Severin Klein asks.
He lifts the empty bag. “Feeding the dog.”
“I thought that stupid mutt was going to bite me when we boarded it. I’d sooner shoot it than waste my time feeding it breakfast.”
“Do you know who it belongs to? Not the white one. The mutt.”
“No idea. I didn’t check. Why do you care?”
Werner doesn’t answer. He simply shrugs and continues down the corridor. But his adolescent mind has found a puzzle, and, as is typical of boys his age, he is fixated on solving it. He doubts Kubis will let him look at the manifests, but Werner has long since learned that the chief steward cannot be everywhere at once. The manifests are kept in his stateroom, and anyone with a bit of time and a master key can get in to take a look.
THE STEWARDESS
Emilie feels as though she is wound tight, ready to spring. She is a jack-in-the-box, locked inside a floating cage, waiting for disaster. She has grown familiar with calamity over the last decade, but still, this is too much. Bomb threats and confiscated papers. Arguments and intrigue. Every fiber of her body feels keyed up. Tuned in. It is exhausting. If she were at home, away from curious eyes, she would pace the walls and pick at her cuticles. As it stands, however, she forces herself to sit with the Doehner family, to stay relaxed. Amiable. Feet crossed at the ankles. Hands in her lap. Expression languid and unperturbed.
Yet it is this heightened state of awareness that enables her to notice the pencil. It falls, rolls to the edge of the table, and drops to the floor. Emilie stares at it, nearly oblivious to the shoving match that has ensued between Walter and Werner Doehner.
“You owe me five marks!” Walter shouts.
“Liar! It was my turn. You owe me!”
They roll on the floor like ferocious little octopi, arms and legs flailing. Something white—teeth maybe—flashes in her peripheral vision. One of them throws a punch, and Matilde Doehner rises with a sigh. She does not raise her voice, merely bends over the children, her fists propped on her ample hips. Emilie can barely hear her over the tumult.
“Stop it. This moment.”
Emilie once heard that a whisper is more effective than a scream when dealing with children, and this must be true, for the boys come apart and look at their mother warily.
“Sit on your hands. Both of you. And if you so much as blink before I give you permission…”
Matilde Doehner doesn’t finish the threat. She doesn’t have to. The boys drop to the floor like sacks of grain, their hands covered by their tiny rear ends. Matilde returns to her novel without giving them a second glance.
Matilde didn’t see it, Emilie thinks. Neither of the boys touched that pencil. Neither of them breathed on it. It fell on its own.
Emilie rises from her chair, walks to the observation windows, and leans over the glass. The view looks exactly as it has all morning; they are little more than a gray object in a gray mist over an invisible sea. But then something breaks the fog not twenty feet below the observation windows, like the arched back of a breaching whale. But this is dark and solid with a sharp edge and a soft green surface.
A cliff.
Moss.
Granite.
The floor tilts a bit beneath her feet. Emilie takes an involuntary step back and gasps. She turns in a circle, expecting a cry of alarm from the passengers at any moment. But they are all absorbed in their reading or writing. Curled up in chairs. Several of them are napping. A few converse in the low tones of a dreary morning. In seconds the fog has swallowed whatever ground lies beneath them.
A teacup clatters to the floor at Matilde Doehner’s feet and she turns her fierce gaze upon her sons. “Ten more minutes on your hands and then you’ll clean up every sliver of that broken cup. Do you understand?”