Free Airborn by Kenneth Oppel Page B

prefer the smoking room where they could take their drinks and talk about important matters like profits and the price of things.
    At a table by the windows sat Miss Simpkins and Kate de Vries. I was stunned at the way Kate looked. Kate was like a different person altogether in her silk gown. She wore her hair up this evening, and around her throat was a simple sparkling necklace. Her shoulders were showing. When I’d met her this morning she’d been a girl, and now she was suddenly too much like a woman. Beside her, drinking tea, sat Miss Simpkins, her hair in some kind of terrifying hive. Kate saw me and smiled, and her smile I recognized at least. I nodded as I made my way to the bar to replace Jack Mobius.
    “Watch out for the woman with the scary hair,” he whispered to me as we traded places.
    “I know all about her,” I whispered back.
    “Said her tea tasted like a fish had bathed in it.”
    “Should have taken the poor fellow out earlier,” I told him. “Then she wouldn’t have known.”
    “Night, Matt,” he said with a laugh.
    Baz came up later to play the baby grand. A marvel it was, all alumiron if you can believe it, and weighing only a few hundred pounds. And Baz was a wonder himself, the way his hands waltzed and tangoed across the keys.
    “This music’s too loud,” I heard Miss Simpkins complain. “It’s too raucous. Completely inappropriate for young ears.” A few minutes later, she stood to leave, and Kate reluctantly stood as well. Kate caught my eye and held it for a moment, like there was something she wanted to tell me. Miss Simpkins, I noticed, took her time walking out, pausing to look at the paintings and glance at the last red wash of the sunset on the ocean. She walked like someone who expected people to watch her, and funnily enough, a few of the men were. They seemed to find her pleasing, and I suppose she was an attractive woman. I guess they hadn’t talked to her yet. Maybe they didn’t think her hair was as scary as I did.
    Kate had a lot of lovely mahogany hair, and it was piled up on the back of her head. But it was her eyes I liked best, the way there always seemed to be something going on behind them, sparks and swift gusts. A right little thunderstorm in her head.
    A table of gentlemen had struck up a conversation with Miss Simpkins about one of the paintings, and Kate casually left her chaperone’s side and walked across the lounge to the bar.
    “Good evening, Mr. Cruse,” she said.
    “Would you like anything to drink, miss?” I said. “Hot chocolate, tea, brandy?”
    She smiled. I decided I’d try to make her smile as much as possible.
    “How long are you on duty here?” she asked.
    “Till midnight, miss.”
    I was trying to stay polite and professional.
    Over her shoulder, I saw Miss Simpkins turn and see Kate. She came striding over.
    “Shall we retire, then, Kate?” she said, cocking a suspicious eye at me, as though I’d just tried to drug and kidnap her young charge.
    “Good night, Mr. Cruse,” Kate said to me.
    “Good night, ladies. Sleep well.”
    I was sad to see her leave—and frustrated too. How was I supposed to find out more about her grandfather at this rate?
    The evening went on. The lounge filled as people arrived from the smoking room and cinema after the late show ended. I served coffee and tea and then more port and sherry and scotch and brandy. Baz’s playing got more and more passionate, and there was ragtime and honky-tonk, and then Mr. Lisbon whispered in his ear, and Baz began playing Bach funeral music, sitting stiff and waxy and doing his best to look like a cadaver. One by one the passengers left the lounge to return to their staterooms for the night.
    Midnight was coming on, and I was alone in the lounge, wiping down the counters when I heard a thunk in the message tube. I lifted out the canister and saw from its markings it was from the Topkapi stateroom. I unscrewed the top and unrolled the note.
Two hot chocolates,