“Naturally. And the American said?”
“He said he was sorry and left. But it was what he said as he was leaving that is the point.”
“What was that?”
“He says, ‘Ask your captain why this passage is taking so much longer than usual.’ He says, ‘Ask him about the other boat, the one that met us last night, and the people who got on and off.’”
“What?”
“That’s what he said.”
“He is a lunatic.”
“But it is taking longer.”
“Conservation of fuel. Budget cuts. Low-paying passengers. I was up all night. There was no other ship. He reads too much.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“Michel, do not be a fool. We are in the middle of the ocean. And we are heavy, too. And the wind is against us, and it is autumn.”
“It is taking longer than usual.”
“When we land, you’ll see that nothing has changed.”
“Let’s hope.”
“Your hope will be rewarded.”
So in addition to being surly and rude, Lee was a sneak, probably a thief. And crazy. You could never know what someone was up to. What was this business about Russia? What could Lee have been drawing in his notebook? What was he always writing in those journals? This nonsense about another boat meeting up with them? Why did he have that tiny camera? Joe Bill was sure now that what he had seen fall from Lee’s bag that first day on board was a camera. It was no bigger than the pack of cigarettes he now pulled from the inside pocket of his overcoat. Again he struggled to light his smoke.
After a couple more cigarettes, Joe Bill went back inside. It was still too early for bed, and he wasn’t tired, but he was going to go into his cabin and read in his bunk until he fell asleep. He didn’t care if Lee was in there anymore. He was tired of feeling like he was the one who was wrong, like he was the intruder. He wasn’t some boy to be pushed around; he was a man, and it was his cabin, too, and if Lee didn’t feel like sharing it in a civil manner, that was his problem. But when he brusquely opened the door of the cabin, Lee was not inside.
When you’ve lived in a place so small for as long as they had (how long now?), you can feel before you even see it that something is out of place. Joe Bill took off his overcoat and loosened his tie and looked around the cabin. It just felt wrong, but only barely wrong, like the motion of the ship had shifted things around. He sat down on the bottom bunk to unlace his shoes, then quickly kneeled on the floor to check his luggage. It was there, securely strapped just as he’d left it. He stood again and unbuttoned his sleeves, took off his shirt and hung it by the collar from the hook at the foot of the bunk, and when he did, he saw what was out of place.
One of Lee’s journals was lying open on the desk. They usually sat, carefully locked, one atop the other in perfect order, but tonight he could see the words on the page, if not make them out.
This was not good. Lee never left the journals opened. Every time he got up for even a moment, he’d close and lock the tiny hasp of the journal and return it to its spot at the edge of the desk.
Had he just gone down the hall to the bathroom and forgotten to lock this one? Or was it some sort of a trap? There was no right thing to do. If he closed and locked the hasp and returned the journal to its place, Lee would know. If he left it there and Lee hadn’t done it on purpose, he’d think Joe Bill had opened it. If he just got dressed again and left the cabin, acted like he’d never been there? This might work, but what if Lee should walk in while he was dressing, and wonder why, and see the journal open there?
He’d never been like this before this trip with the lunatic Lee. He’d never had to worry about being a sneak or a louse because he wasn’t one, and so he had no idea how to get out of looking like one now. There was no reason for anyone to be suspicious of Joe Bill, but Lee certainly would be. There was no reason for Joe Bill to be suspicious of himself. Lee had done this to him, with his sneaking around and disappearing and never talking to anyone except to say something awful and rude and arrogant, and how could anyone get along with someone like that?
Well, damn it all. He’d walk over there like a man and close the damn journal, and if Lee so much as asked him about it, Joe Bill would let him have it, but good. Or to hell with it, leave it open, just like he found it. No, close it. That’s the thing to do. That’s what a man would do, and if he were asked about it, he wouldn’t let Lee have it. He’d calmly tell Lee that he’d left the journal open—or anyway, that the journal was open on the desk when he came in, and he’d simply closed it out of respect for Lee’s privacy, because two men sharing such close quarters should have respect for each other. That was the idea. He walked to the desk.
And he wouldn’t have read a word if the first thing he saw hadn’t been this:
I here by renounce my citezanship in the United States. I take this action with all understanding. I am not doing this lightly or with out thought. I plan to seek citezanship from the suepreme Soviet in the USSR. I have made my desision for political reasons and it is final.
Joe Bill began to flip through other pages in the journal. Each page he saw was a variation of the same theme, the same message, the same erratic spelling. On other pages was writing that Joe Bill recognized as Cyrillic, in the same hand—row after row of the same words, also in slight variations, which Joe Bill knew were conjugated verbs. So Lee had a secret language, too—Russian. There was a loose scrap in the journal that said: S. Bulgakhov, svt emb, Helsinki. On another page was row after tighter row of signatures: Alek Hidell, Alek J. Hidell, Alex Hidell, A. J. Hidell. On a page near the end he read: The actions of nations can be easally understood, but the actions of human beings are unfathamable.
It was one thing to talk about communism, even one thing to be a communist or a Marxist or whatever Lee was. It didn’t bother Joe Bill, at least not to the extent that it had bothered Colonel Wade. But for a man—especially a veteran—to defect to the Soviet Union, this was another thing altogether. For a man to have contact information at a Soviet embassy. And that little tiny camera, and sneaking around the boat, and who was Alek Hidell? And now the question was, what to do about it? He could go to the ship’s captain, explain the whole thing, how the notebooks were open and he had never meant to look at them, but now that he had, the captain had certain responsibilities. He could wait until the ship docked—surely it wouldn’t be but another few days—and go to the first US consulate he could find, tell them about Lee and his plans. Or he could go to Colonel Wade and see what he thought. He was still flipping through the pages of the journal when he heard Lee say, “I haven’t been reading your Bible, Joe Bill.”
He turned to find Lee standing right next to him, practically over his shoulder, and Joe Bill realized that at some point, without knowing it, he’d actually sat down in the desk chair to read the journals. Now he stood, too quickly, and the chair fell back against the floor. Lee was standing close, and Joe Bill tripped over the chair and bumped into Lee as he stumbled past. Lee calmly went to the desk, looked at the open journal for a moment before looking back to Joe Bill with just the barest hint of a smile. He did not speak.
“I’m sorry, Lee,” Joe Bill said, trying to get his legs beneath him for the fight he was sure was coming. “I came in and the thing was sitting there open, and I know you never leave them open, and I was going to close it when I saw . . .” He was silent then.
“What did you see?” Lee said, after several long seconds passed.
“I saw what you’d written there.”
Lee looked again at the open journal, the Cyrillic words. “You saw where I was practicing my Russian?”
“Yes,” Joe Bill said, slowly balling his fists.
“I