Free Bon Bon Voyage by Nancy Fairbanks

tank, pushed me off a downtown fire escape and sprained my shoulder. Of course I got right up and broke her arm, she went to jail for attacking a police officer, and I got a commendation and the massage. Not bad for a night’s work.
    While I was trying stuff on, with Babette’s help, Vera was telling Mrs. Gross and Ombudslady Sandy about a policeman she’d slugged in downtown Chicago for trying to arrest some little Chicano girl who was begging on the street, trying to get bus fare home. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t approve of hitting a cop, but the one Vera smacked sounded like an ass-hole. Probably hated Chicanos. Good thing I live in El Paso, where we’re mostly all Chicanos or illegal Mexicans. If I lived somewhere else, I might be slugging bigoted cops instead of having been a cop myself.
    So I ended up with all these clothes in “boutique bags,” lavender and white with a picture of the ship, and Herkule Pipa was called to carry them to the suite for me. Sandy helped him while Vera and I led the parade. Mrs. Gross, who figured she had done enough damage to the ship’s bottom line, hustled off in the other direction, probably looking for another bottle of wine.
    I had more clothes to hang in my closet than Carolyn had to hang in hers and wondered how she’d feel about that. Turns out she was delighted on the grounds that, looking so classy in my new stuff, I’d naturally give up foul language. Like that was going to happen!
    I was wearing slacks and a silk blouse, both of which had to be dry-cleaned, for Christ’s sake, because Vera insisted that I change out of my “tatty jeans.” Considering how old she was, she probably never wore jeans, so I forgave her, although my jeans were very comfortable. Pipa, the Albanian, had managed not to shrink them.

Carolyn
    The executive chef, Demetrios Kostas el Greco, was volatile, as advertised, but he never shouted at me, only at his underlings. In fact, he greeted me with a hug, the result of which was that his tall hat fell off, spraying the pins that had held it in place hither and yon. He roared, and a female sous-chef dashed over to scoop up the hat and pins and return him to his previous chefly glory. Then he and I paced up and down the aisles of his huge, modern kitchen while he shouted in Greek what I took to be foul language at his employees and chatted with me in English of a sort. The kitchen was a veritable Tower of Babel, different languages assaulting me from every side as they prepared lunch, which I certainly didn’t intend to miss.
    I was offered a sip of a wonderful melon soup, the melons for which had been flown to Lisbon from Israel; a smidgen of chicken in dill sauce; and a fingerful of frosting for an orange cake, the finger belonging to Demetrios. I can’t say that I appreciated having his sticky finger thrust in my face with the demand that I open my mouth, but the frosting, which was red-orange, tasted so smooth and so very orangey with just a touch of brandy, that I forgave him. After all, he probably washed his hands often.
    â€œBlood oranges?” I asked when I had savored the forecast of a dessert to come. “I’ve read that they were a natural mutation in Sicily.”
    â€œYes, yes. Absolute. We boil down the orange with the fine brandy, and then fold it by the hands with spoons into the sweet whipped cream.”
    â€œWonderful,” I exclaimed. “Do you know the myth about the naming of oranges? It’s said that in the very distant past in Malaysia, where oranges originated, an elephant discovered an orange tree and ate so many oranges that he exploded and died. Centuries later a human found the bones of the elephant with a grove of orange trees growing from the elephant’s former stomach. The man said, ‘What a fine naga ranga !’ In Sanskrit that meant fatal indigestion of elephants. Thus the name.”
    Demetrios gave me a puzzled look; perhaps he