CV

10

The long murmuring corridors were carpeted in different colors, blue for port, red for starboard, shades of violet and purple in between, so that it was easy to tell where you were in Sea Venture. Stevens roamed the vessel, watching the crowds. Most of the passengers looked Middle American, overdressed and overjeweled, but there was an exotic sprinkling of saris and chadors. He sunned himself beside the pool on the Sports Deck and cultivated a nodding acquaintance with some of the young bathers. He visited the casino in the evening and lost a few hundred dollars at roulette. He sat in the lounge with the older passengers, looking at the sky and ocean in the television screens that cleverly counterfeited windows. Several times as he strolled down the corridors, he saw a gray head over the back of a wheelchair, but when he caught up, it was always an old woman.

From his room Stevens called the operator and was told, not to his surprise, that no Paul Newland was listed among the passengers. In the interest of thoroughness, he asked for Harold Winter, the young man who was known to be traveling with Newland; Winter was not listed either.

Stevens was present for every meal in the Liberty Restaurant: breakfast, the ten-o’clock snack, lunch, four-o’clock tea, dinner, the midnight munch. The man he was waiting for did not appear. Evidently he and his companion were taking all their meals in their room. If this state of affairs continued, it would be seen as a blunder that he had not tried to book a suite on the Signal Deck; but there was nothing to be done about that now.

Meanwhile, both for his own comfort and for professional reasons, he needed a companion: to be alone in Sea Venture was to be conspicuous. For that very reason, there were few unattached women. Stevens narrowed his choice to three, all passably attractive young women traveling with their parents. In casual ways, as opportunity presented itself, he got on speaking terms with all three families. One of them took to him more cordially than the other two: Mr. and Mrs. Prescott and their daughter Julie. The Prescotts had spent some time in Europe, where Prescott had been the art director of an automobile company; they were able to share recollections of Paris. Lausanne. Madrid. In response to their delicate queries, he told them that he was a naturalized American citizen, an executive with a family-owned investment firm, taking a sea cruise for his health. In return, they intimated that the daughter, who was fair-haired and sad, was recovering from some ruptured romance. She had given up a job as a graphics designer, and thought she might paint, or go into social work.

Gradually he became a member of their group; they went to lectures together, dined together, strolled on the Promenade Deck. By occasional glances Stevens indicated that he was more than politely interested in Julie, but he made no overt gesture. Presently the parents began to display a kittenish insistence on throwing the two young people together. One evening, when the elder Prescotts had retired early, pleading fatigue (“It must be the sea air!” said Mrs. Prescott, with a girlish laugh), Stevens took Julie to the Quarter Deck Bar and spent an hour with her exchanging confidences. There had, in fact, been a tragic romance; the man had died. There seemed not to be any particular meaning in life, Julie said, but she knew that she had to go on. He took her back to her suite and left her with a European bow and a chaste kiss on the knuckles. Patience was everything; there was plenty of time.

He took her dancing on the following evening, and they stopped for a nightcap in the Liberty Bar. It was quite late. The only other customers were three couples, one drunk and argumentative, the rest too drunk to talk, and a large young man who sat by himself in a comer, nursing a tall drink. Stevens recognized him instantly from his photograph: it was Harold Winter.

Stevens took Julie home, kissed her goodnight, and went back to his cabin to think about methods. His instructions were to dispose of his victim in such a way that the crime could never be solved; it was to remain a mystery. Since it never would have crossed his mind to conduct himself in any other way, Stevens had accepted this without comment, but he had thought about it a good deal and had drawn a conclusion from it, which was that his new clients were not merely interested in the death of Professor Newland: they wanted the crime to remain unsolved, not out of any solicitude for Stevens, to be sure, but because they wanted the blame to fall on someone else. These were merely speculations, and had nothing to do with him as a professional, but he also noted that appropriations bills for the space-colony program were coming up in Congress, and it occurred to him that if the revered leader of the L-5 movement were to be murdered aboard Sea Venture, it could hardly fail to cause a public outcry which might sway a vote or two. Therefore he thought he knew who his new clients were; the knowledge gave him a certain private satisfaction.

At any rate, he wished to do his job in a way that would be pleasing to his clients, and he was beginning to see the possibility of a pattern: the young nurse-companion who never leaves his employer’s side except when the latter is asleep. If that could be established, the first part of his problem was solved, that was to say, the isolation of the victim. The rest was merely a matter of ingenuity, of finding the most elegant solution.