So after a couple of days, they send out helicopters to that stranded ship—but are they rescue helicopters? No. Instead they air-drop SPAM and Pop-Tarts, I guess to trick the passengers into thinking they had somehow sailed into hell.
Eventually they managed to tow the ship into port, and all these smelly SPAM-fed refugees got free cruises for life.
Even worse than that was some Italian ship that got a massive hole ripped in its side by rocks and keeled over sideways in a bay that was shallow enough to keep it partway above water but deep enough to drown about a dozen people. When the media asked the captain why he abandoned ship with people still on board, he told them he “tripped into a lifeboat.” Right.
Knowing what happened on those other ships, people onboard the Plethora were understandably worried. A sandbar, however, is not like a hole in the hull. A hole is a crisis. A sandbar is an embarrassment.
“These things happen,” Captain Pajramovic was quick to announce, although he was a bit sheepish about it. “We have determined that there is no damage to the hull, so it is only a matter of time until the tide rises and the sea graces us with a wave large enough to dislodge us and send us on our way.”
Yeah, good luck with that. We were already at high tide, according to some know-it-all on deck. As for waves, the sea was like a bathtub, and that so-called storm was so far away there weren’t even any clouds in the sky. Bottom line, we could be stuck here for days.
Howie had already gone into survivalist mode. “If we run out of food,” he said, “we could always eat the petting zoo.”
The cruise director had quickly wrangled one of the ship’s bands. They took the main stage on the Lido Deck and played classic songs with newly tweaked lyrics, like “Run-a-ground Sue” and “Beached Baby.”
I decided to go looking for Tilde, because this was a monkey wrench I knew she didn’t need. I found her pacing in the hallway outside of Bernie and Lulu’s cabin.
“We’ve got to get in there,” she said. “I’ve got to get to the lifeboat, but none of these people are leaving their cabins!”
“Maybe it’ll be okay—it’s not like we’re abandoning ship.”
“No, you don’t understand. On this ship there’s a procedure for everything—even running aground. Each lifeboat is lowered to the muster stations and checked for seaworthiness. They’re almost done with the port-side boats, and in a few minutes they’ll be coming to this side. We have ten minutes to get everyone out.”
CHAPTER 21
THE SHEEP IN THE PETTING ZOO AND IN MY HEAD AREN’T THE ONLY THINGS THAT BLEAT
THE PLAN TILDE AND I CAME UP WITH, WHICH WAS no plan at all, was to draw Bernie and Lulu out of their cabin in a way that wasn’t suspicious, and if we couldn’t do that, we’d try the cabin next to theirs, then the next, then the next.
“Then we’ve got to hide every single stowaway,” Tilde insisted.
“Why not just hide them in plain sight?” I suggested. “They’ve got fake keys, right? They could sit on deck with everyone else, drinking mimosas and dancing to “Sand by Me.”
She shook her head. “Security found their pictures in the system. Right now the security chief thinks it’s just a computer glitch—people who didn’t get wiped off the system from a previous cruise—but if they start seeing the same faces around the ship, then it’s over.”
I thought that maybe I could hide them in my suite . . . but to do that, I would need everyone’s cooperation. Howie, I wasn’t worried about. I could tell him I was an undercover operative in a government conspiracy—and Christina was always bribable. But breaking the news to my parents that I was involved in an international smuggling operation? I might as well just bury myself at sea right now.
Then I realized that I did know a place we could hide them—and so did Tilde. A place that no one would go looking. Except for maybe a certain ghost . . .
• • •
“Hello. Dis is guest service desk on phone. Is dis Mr. Bernard and Miss Lulu?” I didn’t do a very good unidentifiable foreign accent on the phone, but if I was lucky, Bernie was not too sophisticated.
“That’s us. What y’all want? Are ya gonna ask me to do my contest-winning belly flop off the ship and splash us off dat dere sandbar?”
I guess I was in luck. “We are needing you both to sign signature, please. To prevent fraud in casino, please.”
“Fraud? Whatcha mean, fraud?”
“Is just precaution. Please come, or fraud will result.”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll be right there.”
I hung up the phone, and Tilde and I waited by the elevator bank until they came out. Bernie was a large guy with a belly that could win any competition, and Lulu had such big hair it wouldn’t fit on a smaller cruise ship.
The second they were in the elevator and the doors closed, Tilde and I went into their cabin. I stood guard, shielding my eyes from the sun, which was now low on the horizon, shining through the tiny, unobstructed part of Bernie and Lulu’s obstructed view. Tilde went over the railing and into the lifeboat, then a few moments later the first stowaways started to come out, while inside the rest were probably scrambling to hide the stockpiled food beneath the benches, leaving no evidence that they had been there. I climbed over the railing to help them onto the balcony one by one. In less than a minute, they were all in Bernie and Lulu’s room, with Tilde bringing up the rear. It would have all been fine except that she left the hatch open.
“I’ll get it,” I told her. I jumped to the lifeboat, quickly closed the hatch, and took a moment to look down the line of lifeboats. The setting sun was making their bright yellow shells glow even brighter . . . and just a few yards away, the next boat over was being lowered for inspection. We had made it with minutes to spare.
Once we were out in the hallway, the group looked kind of conspicuous, but only to someone who was looking for something unusual. Everyone stayed quiet. We passed Bernie and Lulu, who were already on their way back to their cabin, complaining about the guest services agents, none of whom had a clue about any sort of fraud.
“These people don’t know their arse from their elbow,” Bernie complained to anyone who would listen. “Can’t even sail the boat right.”
Once we reached the stairwell, Tilde made a quick decision. “We can’t take the main crew hallway to get to the Viking ship,” she told me. “Too many crewmen. We’ll have to go through the galley.”
We went down to Deck One, then through a pair of swinging doors and entered a surreal stainless steel hallway. Even the ceiling was stainless steel.
Tilde checked ahead and told us all to crouch low so we’d stay out of view. We made it down the hallway and into one of the food preparation stations. The food prep area was huge, and although there was galley staff preparing food, they were so absorbed with what they were doing, they didn’t know we were there. The roar and rattle of the huge industrial dishwashers masked the sound of our footsteps.
We quickly went down a food service escalator that wasn’t moving and out onto a crew deck. Now we were in a narrow corridor that led to the main crew hallway, but we only had to cross it to get to the series of narrow, winding passageways that led to the Viking ship.
We broke into groups of four, hiding until the coast was clear, then darting across the hallway like it was an interstate.
Once we were all across, Tilde breathed a huge sigh of relief.
“Thank you, Enzo,” she said, and gave me a peck on the cheek, which Jorge snorted at. “I’ll take it from here. You can go now.”
“Go? Where can I go? I’m in the crew area.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It happens all the time. If someone sees you, just tell them you’re lost and they’ll take you back to the passenger decks.” Then she disappeared down the winding passageways with her nine stowaways.
• • •
The sun was belo
w the horizon when I got back to the passenger decks. Now that everyone was convinced they wouldn’t die, the entire ship seemed to be in this wild sandbar tailgate party. Waiters were handing out free drinks, and every band, whether they were scheduled to perform or not, was somewhere on the ship making music. It was all so well organized, you’d think getting stranded on a sandbar was just part of the Plethora experience.
I found Lexie lying on a lounge chair with Moxie by her side, even though the sun was long gone from the sky. “Starring herself” she called it. Because “sunning” was too harmful to her delicate skin, she much preferred to lie out in starlight and feel that “sultry” Caribbean breeze. I thought Lexie might still show signs of her encounter with Gustav—kind of like post-traumatic schmuck syndrome—but she seemed back to her old self.
“I’m beyond it,” she told me, and offered nothing more.
“So, then . . . you’re okay?”
She sighed, pretending to be irritated. “Yes, I’m okay, thank you for asking; now can we just move on?”
“Nope, we’re on a sandbar,” I said.
I wasn’t entirely convinced that she really was okay, but I knew she didn’t want to revisit that uneasy place inside, where parents forget you exist and you throw yourself at slimeballs in muscle shirts. I suspected she needed some of her own parallax before she could think about it again. If not visual, then a sort of mental 3-D perspective on the situation. For now it was best to leave her alone.
I had to admit that my stress bomb meter was dropping from the red into the yellow. Things were finally starting to calm down. Lexie was bouncing back, the lifeboat crisis was averted, and my parents were even getting along with Crawley. I was beginning to think being stuck on a sandbar was not such a bad thing after all . . . until I got back to the suite and saw Howie looking like he had just seen Jorgen Ericsson’s ghost.
“Antsy, I think you gotta look at this.”
“I’m not really in the mood, Howie,” I told him. “You kept me up half the night talking about shipwrecks, giant squid, and the Sydney Opera House. Now I’m taking a nap.”
“No,” he said, “I think you really need to see this.” He turned up the TV to reveal a CNN news report. Vanderbilt Hooper, the big shot CNN reporter, was on screen with a picture of our ship on the screen behind him, taken in happier days.
“. . . and sources have confirmed that the Plethora of the Deep is in fact lodged on a sandbar off the coast of Cuba.”
I grinned. “No way! We made the news. How about that?”
“Yeah,” said Howie. “Keep watching.”
“We’ve been receiving bleats from people on the ship all day, including images and videos,” continued Vanderbilt. Then the screen behind him began to show those bleated videos.
“Ha,” I said, amused, “that’s instant communication for you. Using the ship’s own satellite link to send out the SOS.”
“Keep watching,” said Howie again.
“This is what you might expect from a ship stranded at sea,” Vanderbilt said, “but there’s one bleat we found particularly interesting, and more troubling each time we look at it. Here it is again.”
Then the screen filled with a video of one of the Plethora’s lifeboats—a video taken from a deck somewhere above it. I watched with that special brand of horror reserved for slasher films and life-altering moments as the long line of stowaways climbed out of the lifeboat and were helped over a balcony railing by a boy whose back was to the camera. The image was shaky. Faces couldn’t really be made out, but it was very obvious what was happening. I stared in disbelief, trying to wrap my head around the fact that our secret wasn’t just out to some guy with a phone camera—it was now being broadcast to millions of homes across America. For all I knew, it was on the Jumbotron in Times Square.
“It appears to us,” said Vanderbilt, “that these people are being smuggled into the United States via Caribbean Viking lifeboats—and there’s already speculation that this is not an isolated incident, but part of a much larger smuggling operation.”
Like everyone else, the last person out of the lifeboat could not clearly be seen. But it was obvious that it was a girl, and she had left the hatch open. Then the boy by the railing jumped onto the lifeboat to close the hatch, and, like the idiot that he is, he looked up. Not high enough to notice the camera, but high enough to clearly show his face.
“Antsy,” said Howie, “I don’t know how to tell you this . . . but I think that’s you.”
CHAPTER 22
“ATTENTION! ATTENTION! THIS IS CAPTAIN PAJRAMOVIC. WILL ENZO BENINI PLEASE REPORT TO THE BRIDGE IMMEDIATELY.”
I HAVE A LONG, SAD HISTORY OF BEING CALLED into the principal’s office. Stupid stuff, mostly. Cracking a joke at a teacher’s expense. Smacking somebody who truly deserved to be smacked. I’ve even had the occasional fistfight, although those were pretty rare.
But having your international crime broadcast on national television and then moments later being called to the bridge by the captain of a ship takes it to a whole new level. I mean, a captain can perform weddings, right? Which means that at sea, he has the legal authority of a judge, so he could also probably pronounce the death penalty, like maybe they still made people walk the plank.
Regardless, this was definitely going on my permanent record.
CHAPTER 23
A HUMORLESS BROUHAHA OF GLOBAL PROPORTIONS MAKES ME THE MASTERMIND OF A DRUG CARTEL ACCORDING TO SOME TOOL IN OMAHA
IT TOOK ME A WHILE TO FIND THE BRIDGE, NOT just because I was freaked and frazzled, but because there was no way to get there from the passenger areas. I had to first figure out which deck it was on and which of the No Admittance doors would lead me there.
When I got close, there was a bridge officer in the hallway who looked at me with this cool judgmental I’m-all-dressed-in-white-and-you’re-not kind of gaze.
“Enzo Benini, I presume?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I said.
“Captain Pajramovic is waiting for you.” Then he opened the door and let me in.
The bridge was this huge, glass-fronted room as wide as the ship. It was full of navigational computers and stuff that didn’t really look like it needed human beings to operate—and yet it still couldn’t keep the ship off a sandbar. Must run Microsoft programs, I guess. Warning! Sandbar Error! Reboot Cruise Ship Now!
With so much technology, there weren’t many officers on the huge bridge, and when the captain saw me, the bridge officers left, like townsfolk hiding from a shoot-out.
As I came around a computer console, I saw he was standing in front of Tilde, who sat in a chair, looking at her toes. CNN was playing on an overhead TV screen. Vanderbilt Hooper was having a phone conversation with an immigration expert in Nebraska (like, why would they even have an immigration expert in Nebraska?). She said this whole cruise line smuggling operation was clearly masterminded by one of the big drug cartels.
Tilde looked up at me sadly. “Hello, Enzo.”
But her father didn’t let her say another word.
“First of all,” he said to me, “there is no Enzo Benini on the ship’s roster. It doesn’t surprise me that you’re using an assumed name, considering what you’ve been up to. Your real name, please?”
“Anthony Bonano, but . . .”
“Well, Anthony, it seems you and my daughter have created quite the international brouhaha.”
“Uh . . . does that mean it’s funny?”
“It couldn’t possibly be more serious.”
No matter how much he tried to wilt me with his gaze, I refused to look down at my toes. What is it they say? Never let ’em see you sweat? But in this humidity, it was a losing battle.
“With all due respect,” I told him. “We’re not the ones who landed us on a sandbar.”
Point for me. He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably, like he’d
just been stung in a place he couldn’t reach. “Yes, it would be bad enough if this ship was just the laughingstock of the fleet, but now thanks to you and my daughter, it’s at the heart of an international scandal.”
“It’s not his fault,” said Tilde.
“He chose to help you! That makes him equally to blame.”
“These things happen?” I offered.
The captain was not amused. “It would be better for all involved if you told me right now where the stowaways are.”
“Don’t tell him, Enzo!”
“Tell me, Anthony.”
I looked up at the TV screen. They were playing the video of the stowaways climbing out of the lifeboat again—this time with the expert from Omaha giving commentary, like it was a football game.
“I’m waiting, Anthony.”
And so I said what my brother, Frankie, told me to say if I ever found myself in an impossible situation.
“I want to speak to a lawyer.”
The captain let off a growl that was eerily werewolf-like, then ended with a resigned sigh. “Did either of you even once think of the consequences of what you were doing?”
“It is all I thought about!” said Tilde. “And I decided a long time ago that it was worth the risk.”
“Was it?” said her father, “Well, let me be the first to inform you of the real-world consequences, because I know a little bit about international law.” He turned to me. “You, Anthony, will be looked upon by your country as a victim and will be given a slap on the wrist in the form of six months to a year in a juvenile detention center.”
“What? I’m going to juvie?” Somehow, that didn’t seem like a slap on the wrist to me.