Expiration Date

  He expelled the last exhausted air in his lungs in croaking to Elizalde, “Get the gun!”

  Her nostrils were whitely pinched and her eyes were teary slits, but she nodded and quick-stepped to crouch by where Obstadt and Oaks, linked, were writhing in the wet, smoking mess. Elizalde snatched up the .45 without difficulty and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans, pulling the untucked sweatshirt hem over it.

  “Out,” she barked, leading the way out the door and into the hallway.

  Sullivan couldn’t tell how much of the screaming racket in his ears was external and how much was just the internal overload-protest of his eardrums, but at least the appalling smell seemed to be keeping deLarava’s employees back at the garage end of the hall.

  Then he did hear something, from back in the direction of the garage—a familiar wailing laugh.

  Elizalde was hurrying down the hall away from the garage, in the direction deLarava had gone, and Sullivan and Kootie and Bradshaw went stumbling hastily after her.

  The Jeep had been parked well in, right up against the inboard bulkhead of the garage area, and the trucks had parked behind it. At the boom-and-echoes of the gunshot, Strube’s guards had climbed out and rushed toward the hall; but they had been stopped by the fumes, and had joined the general rush out into the fresh air on the sunlit loading dock. Some men in undershirts had come inside from the dock carrying a burlap sack with a baseball cap on it and something thrashing inside it, and they hurried into the vacated hall.

  Strube didn’t mind the smell. He hiked his left arm behind himself until he could reach the door handle with his right hand, and when he had timidly opened the door and stepped down to the deck, he wandered down the hall himself—slowly, so that any of deLarava’s men who might see him would be likelier to yell at him than shoot.

  But apparently no one saw him. He walked past an open doorway and glanced in at two men rolling in a black puddle. The odd smell was strongest here, and one of the struggling men had only one arm, but Strube wasn’t curious. If he kept walking, he was sure to find an elevator or stairway that would lead him up to the tourist decks, where he could surely get someone to call the police for him; maybe he would be able to get a security guard to unlock the handcuffs.

  And then what? He could refuse to press charges, and take a cab back to Twenty-first Place, where he had left his car. Then he would drive back to his office, to think. His venture into show-business law was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated.

  CHAPTER 45

  “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  BY THE FLUORESCENT TUBES overhead, Sullivan could see that the hallway broadened out ahead of Elizalde—the port walls slanted outward with the hull, and were riveted steel with vertical steel crossbeams welded on, and the edges of the empty doorways on the inboard side were knobby from having been cut with torches—and in the far bulkhead, beyond a row of wheeled aluminum carts, he saw a tiny recessed booth with accordion bars pulled across it.

  “Whoa, Angelica!” he called. “That’s an elevator.”

  Elizalde nodded and skidded sideways and sprinted to the elevator. By the time she had pulled back the bars from the little stall, Sullivan was right behind her, and he took her arm as the two of them stepped into the telephone-booth-like box.

  The walls were paneled in rich burl elm that was dinged and scratched at the tray-level of the wheeled carts. He folded up a hinged wooden seat and flattened himself against the elevator wall to make room for Kootie; and over the boy’s head he saw Bradshaw shuffling slowly across the deck.

  “Come on, Nicky,” Sullivan called, thinking of the winged bag that had flown after them in the cemetery yesterday. “Hurry!”

  “I don’t,” said Bradshaw, scuffling to a stop. “Feel so good. Motion sickness. I’d throw up in there. I’ll meet you. Later.”

  The ringing in Sullivan’s ears had decreased to a shrill whining … and he was suddenly aware of an airy absence. He slapped his chest, feeling the angular hardness of the brass grave-portrait plaque, still in his scapular. “My father!” he said. “Is he with you, Nicky?”

  Bradshaw paused, then shook his head. “But I’ll watch for him,” he said. “Go on now.”

  Sullivan bared his teeth and clenched Houdini’s fists. His father might be anywhere down here: deLarava might be anywhere down here. “Nicky, get in the elevator!”

  Bradshaw smiled. “You know I won’t, if I say I won’t.”

  “—Okay.” There’s nothing I can do, Sullivan thought. “Okay. Vaya con Dios, amigo.”

  “Y tu tambien, hermano,” said Bradshaw.

  Sullivan pulled the folded gate out again across the gap until it clanged shut, and said, “We’ve got to go down a deck.”

  “Down?” panted Elizalde. Her breaths were frightened sobs. “No, Pete—up! Sunlight, normal people!”

  “I should have thought of this before,” said Sullivan. “Kootie, do you remember how Alice’s coronation ceremony got wrecked?”

  The boy’s brown eyes blinked up at him. “The food at the banquet came to life,” he said, “and it didn’t want to be eaten.”

  “Right, the leg of mutton was talking and laughing and sitting in the White Queen’s chair, and the pudding yelled at Alice when she cut it, and—and the White Queen dissolved in the soup tureen, remember? The bottles even came to life, and took plates for wings and forks for legs. And Queen Alice was knocked right out of the Looking-Glass world.” He punched the button that had a downward-pointing arrow on it. “We’ve got to find the after steering compartment.”

  The little booth shook, and then with a hydraulic whine the deck outside started to move upward; before his vision was cut off by this ascending fourth wall, Sullivan heard the sirenlike laugh again, closer, and he saw Bradshaw shift heavily around to face the way they had come.

  The bare bulb in the shelved, inlaid elevator ceiling made the faces of Kootie and Elizalde look jaundiced and oily, and Sullivan knew he must look the same to them.

  Elizalde was shaking. “Goddamn you, Pete, what’s in this after steering compartment?”

  “The degaussing machinery,” said Sullivan, trying to speak with conviction. “They’d have had to install it when the Queen Mary was a troopship during the war, to keep her hull from attracting magnetic mines, and there’s no way they’d have gone to the trouble of tearing it out, afterward. And the after steering room is the electrical spine of any ship—there’d have been a diesel engine there to run a sort of power-steering pump, so they could steer the ship from down there if the bridge was blown away. It’s the backup bridge, in effect, and I don’t suppose they’re using the real one for anything at all now, with tourists dropping snow cones all over everything. There’ll be live power down below still.” It’s certainly possible, he thought.

  “So what?” Elizalde was leaning against the back of the car, her sunken eyes watching the riveted steel of the elevator shaft rising beyond the frail bars of the gate, and she spoke quietly in the confined space. “What the hell good is this old anti-mine stuff going to do us? Jesus, Pete, tell me you know what you’re doing here!”

  “How did this apparatus keep the ship from attracting magnetic mines?” asked Kootie.

  Sullivan looked down at the boy. “The mines had a specific magnetic polarity,” he said. “Once that was known, it was easy enough to forcibly reverse the ship’s own natural magnetic field by passing a current through a set of cables around the hull.”

  “But it’s turned off now?”

  “Sure, it’ll be disconnected, but it’ll still be there.”

  “And you think there’ll still be power there too. So you’re planning to reconnect it and crank up a big magnetic field; and,” it was Kootie’s little-boy cadences that went on, “you’re gonna wake up every dinner aboard.”

  “It’ll draw ’em out,” Su
llivan agreed. From the walls, he thought, from the closets in the old staterooms, from the deck planks weathered by three decades of sunny summer cruises and North Atlantic storms. “And none of ’em will want to be eaten. It’ll be a mass exorcism.” Once drawn out, he thought, they’ll dissolve away in this alien Long Beach air. He remembered Bradshaw’s explanation of the L.A. CIGAR traps, and he hoped the dim old ghosts might somehow understand that this was … rescue? Liberation? Finishing the job of dying, say.

  A breeze on his ankles made Sullivan look down past Kootie, and he saw that an edge of the elevator shaft had appeared down by their feet; the gap below it rode up until he could see another deck, dimly lit by electric lights somewhere. The elevator floor clanged against the painted steel deck, and he pulled the accordion gate aside. The bulkheads of the silent old corridors were ribbed and riveted, painted gray below belt-height and yellowed white above.

  “This has got to be as close to water level as you can get,” he said, instinctively speaking quietly down here so close to the sanctum sanctorum of the vast old liner. “It’ll be right behind us, directly over the rudder.”

  “Get these cuffs off us,” said Kootie.

  “Oh, yeah.” Sullivan took out his comb, broke off another narrow tooth, and quickly opened the handcuff that was still on Kootie’s right wrist; then he did the same for Elizalde.

  “Where did you learn that?” Elizalde asked as the cuffs clanked to the floor and she massaged her freed wrist.

  Sullivan held up his hands, palms out, and wiggled the fingers at her. “If you hadn’t glued that plaster finger back on, I’d be missing one right now.” He started down the corridor toward the stern. “Come on.”

  Ancient bunks, with brown blankets still tumbled on them, were bolted on metal trays to the steel bulkheads down here, and as he led Elizalde and Kootie past them Sullivan shuddered at the thought of coming back this way if he got the field up and at maximum intensity.

  “That’s serious electrical conduit,” said Kootie, pointing at the ceiling.

  Sullivan looked up, and saw that the boy was right. “Follow it,” he said.

  A few steps farther down the hall the conduit pipes curved into the amidships bulkhead over a dogged-shut oval door, and Sullivan punched back the eight dog clips around the door’s perimeter; the door rattled in the bulkhead frame, and Sullivan realized that the rubber seal had rotted away. He prayed that he wasn’t the first person to open this door since the ship was docked here in Long Beach in 1967.

  But there were lights burning inside the twenty-foot-square room beyond the door when he pulled it open; and they were new fluorescent tubes, bolted up alongside the very old lights, which were hung on C-shaped metal straps so that the recoil of the big wartime guns on the top deck wouldn’t break the filaments.

  A diesel engine the size of a car motor sat on a skid supported by two I-beams laid down near the left bulkhead, with two banked rows of square batteries on shelves behind it; and Sullivan saw a new battery charger bolted to the bulkhead over them.

  “They’re live!” he said, his shoulders slumping with relief. “See? This must be the ship’s backup power supply now, in case the AC from ashore goes funny. UPS for their computers, uninterrupted power supply so they don’t lose their data.”

  “Groovy,” said Elizalde. “Hook it up and let’s get out of here.”

  “Right.” Sullivan looked around and identified the reduction-gear box and the steering pump and the after steering wheel to his left, and so the three-foot-by-four-foot box on the right-hand bulkhead had to be the degaussing panel. He walked past it and began unlooping heavy coils of emergency power cable from the rack riveted to the bulkhead.

  Sullivan was remembering another exorcism he had helped perform, at the Moab Nuclear Power Station in Utah in 1989.

  The Public Utilities Commission had claimed that it would be cheaper to produce power elsewhere than to spend the millions needed to bring the reactor up to current safety standards—but the real reason had been that the site had become clogged with ghosts attracted to the high voltage. The things had clustered around the big outdoor transformers, and some had got solid enough to fiddle with the valves and switches and steal the employees’ cars.

  The power line from the degaussing panel had been cut, just beyond the breaker, disconnecting the panel from the rest of the ship; but a post stuck out above the hacksawed conduit, and Sullivan pulled the dusty canvas cover off the emergency power three-phase plug on the end of the post.

  “They call these things biscuits,” he told Elizalde defiantly.

  “Call it a muffin if you like,” she said, “today I’m not arguing.”

  He picked up one end of the cable and separated the inch-thick wires protruding from the end of it. The red one he shoved into the positive hole in the biscuit, and the black one he shoved into the negative hole. They fit tightly enough to support the weight of the cable. He would be getting direct current from the batteries, so he let the white wire hang unconnected.

  The Moab station had in its time produced more than fifty billion kilowatt hours, enough power to light half a million homes for a quarter of a century. But he had stood in the control room and watched the dials as the power had fallen from fifty to twenty to three percent of capacity, and then a voice on the intercom had said, “Turbine trip,” and Sullivan’s gaze had snapped to the green lights on the control panel in the instant before they flashed on, their sudden glow indicating that the circuit breakers were open and no electricity was being produced.

  And as the superintendent reached for the switch that would drive the cadmium rods into the reactor core, killing the uranium fission, Sullivan alone among the technicians in the control room had heard the chorus of wails as the resident ghosts had faded into nothing.

  He was setting up the same devastation now. The current he would shortly be sending through the degaussing coils in the length of the hull would wake up all the dormant, undisturbed ghosts aboard the ship; focused, they would venture timidly out of their housekeeping-tended graves, only to evaporate into nothingness when the drain on the batteries outstripped the ability of the recharger to counter it, and the magnetic field collapsed.

  Perhaps sensing his unhappiness, Kootie and Elizalde wordlessly stepped aside as he dragged the other end of the cable across the painted steel deck to the stepped ranks of batteries against the left bulkhead.

  Steel bars connected the terminals of each battery in a row to the next, and he wedged the inch-thick end of the red wire under the bar on the first battery in the top row, then did the same with the black wire to the first battery on the bottom row. He had now hooked up the degaussing panel, at the expense of the diesel engine’s starter motor.

  As he straightened up, he softly whistled, in slow time, the first notes of reveille.

  He walked back across the deck to the panel and, with a sigh, pushed the master switch up into the on position. There was a muffled internal click.

  The needle of the first DC voltmeter on the face of the panel jumped to 30, but that one was only indicating full power from the batteries. Then he took hold of the rubber-cased rheostat wheel and started turning it clockwise; the second voltmeter’s needle began to climb across the dial toward 30, as the needle on the ammeter next to it moved more slowly up toward 150. For the first time in more than forty years, current was coursing through the wartime degaussing cables that ribbed the hull all the way from back here by the rudder to the bow a thousand feet north of him.

  The deck had begun to vibrate under his feet, and a droning roar was getting louder; when he had cranked the wheel all the way over as far as it would go clockwise, the noise was so loud that Elizalde had to shout to be heard.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled. “You’ve turned something on!”

  “My God,” said Kootie, loudly but reverently, “that’s the noise of the screws. You’ve waked up the ghost of the ship herself!”

  CHAPTER 46

  “What ma
tters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied. “There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  “OH,” ELIZALDE MOANED, “LET’S get out of here!”

  Sullivan backed away from the panel, and even Houdini’s hands were trembling. “Yes,” he said.

  Sullivan led the way out of the after steering compartment and back down the corridor toward the elevator. The hallway reeked of sweaty bodies now, and he could hear a scratchy recording of Kitty Kallen singing “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” echoing from somewhere ahead of them.

  Bony figures were shifting among the blankets on the bulkhead-hung bunks as Sullivan and Elizalde and Kootie hurried past; hands still translucent groped at Elizalde, and voices blurred by unformed mouths mumbled amorously at her.

  The elevator motor was buzzing and rattling when they rounded the corner, but the car was coming down to this deck—and through the bars Sullivan saw the burlap sack with the black Raiders baseball cap on it slumped on the elevator floor, shifting furiously and yowling as if it were filled with cats.

  Before he could grab Kootie and Elizalde and run, the cat noises stopped and the front flap of the bag fell away, and as the car clanked down to the deck a naked young woman, slim and dark-haired, stood up in it and blinked through the bars at Sullivan and beyond him. Her body wasn’t solidified yet—ribs showed faintly through the white softness of her breasts, and her loins were a wash of shadow.

  Her eyes were bewildered brown depths, and already solid enough for Sullivan to see tears on the lashes. “Es esto infierno?” she asked.

  Elizalde pulled back the gate. “Esto es ninguna parte,” she said. “Y esto pasara pronto.”

  Is this hell? the ghost-woman had asked; and Elizalde had told her that this was nowhere, and would soon pass. Sullivan stared at the woman nervously, remembering the thing that had flown over the grass at the cemetery yesterday, laughing and clanking metal wings—and she stared back at him without any recognition, her imprinted malice having fallen away with the burlap sack under her bare feet.