1

His uncle died in a hotel lobby in the fall of 1927. James Herbert Hunt. He complained to the desk clerk of a pain in his chest and the clerk later said the man could not so much as loosen his tie before he collapsed, red-faced and writhing on the polished stone floor. Herbert was a wealthy man. Had made his fortune in the Texas oil rush at the turn of the century, but in the end all his wealth and success didn’t matter. He died without dignity, surrounded by strangers.

Albert would think about that often. On long nights when he could not sleep. How quickly and unjustly life can arrive at its end.

He had not spoken to his uncle in ten years and had few memories of the man, but the few he did possess were good ones. Uncle Herb, as he knew him. Immaculately dressed. A thick black moustache. Always smiling. Always somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Herb spent his life prospecting new leases and tending isolated wells out in the wilds and those who knew him said he had oil in his veins and adventure in his heart. He was a rare sight at family events and was never present when they ended.

The notification came by mail in the spring of 1928. That Albert was a beneficiary. His uncle had left him passage aboard the Gallant Dixie, an oil steamer of the Southern Pacific Company, due to sail out of Boston that August. A voyage around the world. All expenses paid.

Herb had meant to give it to Albert in person when he turned twenty-five. He had no children. He had never married, though there was many a hounding suitor. Herb was fond of his only sister, Albert’s mother, and possessed a great love for her children in his own absent way.

It was the manager of the estate who handed Albert the ticket. A grey-haired trustee with gnarled fingers and round silver spectacles that sat halfway down a beaked nose.

‘It was a firm belief of your uncle’s,’ he said, ‘that only when a man reaches his twenty-fifth year does he shed the foolish and lustful confusion of youth.’ He placed the ticket on the desk before Albert. ‘Such follies, he felt, kept a man from acquiring any true wisdom.’

Albert took the ticket and the trustee watched him with great care as if he expected him to drop it.

‘I, sadly, do not agree,’ said the manager and ran a bony finger under his nose. ‘Some men never break the bonds that keep them so tightly lashed to that madman.’

💀

Albert boarded on the morning of August 15th, three days after his twenty-fifth birthday. His mother cried. His sisters waved and laughed. His father shook his hand and looked at his watch. Albert crossed the gangplank with a vim that he did not try to hide. He arrived at his room and looked it over. Simple in its comforts and well-to-do. Timber lined and brass fittings and scented with tobacco smoke and the sea. He stowed his belongings and took up the room key and placed it in his breast pocket before heading to the top deck to stand at the rail.

The engines fired and the horn blew. The sound of it was thunder. He waved to the crowd at the port, and they waved back and he knew none of them. Boston shrank. The sea opened vast and welcoming before him, and he watched until the city was a grey line on the horizon and then nothing at all.

That first night they steamed south for New York. Dinner was served in the upper deck’s dining hall, a long white room with white tables and arched windows that held the last of the setting sun. Peach and amber light that caught in shifting beams that lanced the smoke-filled air. As Albert ate his roast duck and broiled potatoes and carrots the table filled around him.

The first to join him was a man who sat directly across from him and nodded but did not speak. It wasn’t until Albert introduced himself that the man did likewise.

He was Professor Winston Barrette. Head of ancient history at the University of Boston. A man of anthropology and archaeology. He had spent most of his career performing field research in Central America. Documenting the customs and history of the Aztec civilisations.

Barrette was rugged and brawny in that thin way that often hides the strength of men. He had dark eyes and a strong jaw and was twice as old as Albert. A sheathed knife rode his belt in a brown leather holster engraved with an Aztec demigod, half man and half hawk. Albert took him for a man of honest labour at first. A man that put his hands to work. The kind of man other men followed without being asked.

It was not long before the table filled with other diners and conversation had drawn out their introductions. Barrette quickly became the favourite, and the talk seemed to find its way back to him and his profession. He deferred and shifted attention elsewhere, but they persisted.

‘What is it that interests you so much about them?’ said Mr Hauser. ‘The ancients you’ve spent your life studying.’

Barrette wiped his mouth with the napkin and thought about it. ‘I suppose it’s how sophisticated they were,’ he said.

‘Sophisticated?’ Mr Hauser scoffed.

‘Yes.’

He frowned. ‘In what way were they sophisticated?’

‘Perhaps, I’m overstating it.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Hauser, ‘don’t back down so easily. You said sophisticated, so I assume that’s what you meant.’

‘Thomas, leave the professor alone,’ said Mrs Hauser. ‘Perhaps he would prefer to set his work aside, he’s on vacation like the rest of us.’

Mr Hauser didn’t look at his wife or even acknowledge that she had spoken. He simply smiled at Barrette and ashed his cigar. ‘I mean, it’s just an odd way to describe them.’

Mrs Hauser failed to restrain her embarrassment and looked apologetically across the table to Barrette.

‘Well,’ began Barrette and smiled at her. ‘The Mesoamerican civilisations undertook enormous enterprise, at great effort, to satisfy their beliefs about the world. Basalt temples and shrines built over centuries by skilled masons. That’s the sophistication that comes to mind.’

Hauser drew on his cigar and grinned. ‘Sophisticated,’ he mused, as if Barrette had not replied. ‘You know, I’ve never heard that one before.’

Hauser was a banker from Providence. Honey-blonde hair, blue eyes, and a frame that threatened obesity.

‘I always thought they were primitives,’ said Hauser and blew smoke across the table.

‘In some ways, by way of comparison, they were primitive. But where able, I try and avoid comparison. It can get in the way.’ Barrette searched the empty plate before him. ‘It can unsettle,’ he said and failed to hide his desire to change the subject.

‘What do you mean, Professor?’ said Mrs Hauser. ‘That it unsettles?’

Her husband turned to her. Surprised she had spoken at all. She was delicate where he was large and soft where he was harsh. She would smile after each of his quips in the way she thought a good wife should.

Barrette took a long breath and leaned back in his chair. ‘It’s not exactly dinner conversation,’ he said and smiled emptily. He reached for his glass on the table and turned it one way and then the other.

‘Politics and religion,’ said Mr Hauser.

‘No, not exactly,’ said Barrette and winked at him.

‘Well now, you simply must tell, Professor,’ said Mrs Tait. She had been married for as long as Barrette had been alive and her husband had died that spring. She decided to go abroad to escape her grief, hoping that she could. She had curly white hair and a haunch that meant she had to walk with a cane. But her blue eyes were the same as they were when she was sixteen. She had fixed herself to a Mr Mitchell, a retired physician, she had met in the hall that afternoon. He sat beside her that first night and would do so every night until the end.

Barrette looked around the table. ‘I really, ah,’ he broke off.

‘I don’t know about them, but I don’t shock that easy,’ said Mrs Tait.

‘It’s something wretched, now, isn’t it,’ said Mrs Hauser. ‘Well, don’t listen to them. Things like that are for the birds.’

‘Violence,’ said Albert.

After a moment Barrette nodded. ‘Sacrifice.’ He cleared his throat. ‘To be precise.’

‘Good God,’ said Mr Mitchell.

Mr Hauser chuckled, ejecting a plume of cigar smoke. ‘Come on then, tell us. Full moon and a goat, hmm? That about the shape of it?’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Mitchell. ‘I don’t want Mrs Tait to be deprived a good night of sleep due to this kind of talk.’ He wiped his moustache with his napkin and looked at her with an almost parental concern. She was his senior by two decades.

‘Oh, I’m quite alright, Ernest,’ said Mrs Tait. ‘I’ve always had a morbid curiosity about this kind of thing.’

‘Best you watch out for her, Ernest,’ said Hauser and drove his elbow into the man’s ribs and laughed.

Barrette seized his moment. ‘Tell me, Albert, didn’t you say you just celebrated a birthday?’

‘Yes,’ he began but was cut off by Mr Hauser.

‘No, no. I’ve spent enough time around lawyers to see that for just what it is,’ he said and pointed almost menacingly at Barrette.

‘And what is it, Thomas?’ chastised Mrs Hauser.

‘It’s a worm, is what it is. A wriggle. Now, back to it. What did they get up to in their basalt temples?’

Barrette searched the faces at the table for an expression he could form an alliance with but there was none, they were all eager to hear it.

‘Children,’ said Barrette.

‘What about them?’ said Mr Hauser.

‘Dozens of them.’

‘The children?’ said Mrs Hauser.

‘Yes, some as young as two or three years old.’

They were all silent.

‘They sacrificed children?’ said Mrs Tait. ‘That’s what you’re telling us?’

‘Yes.’

‘My word,’ said Mr Mitchell.

‘But why?’ said Mrs Hauser.

‘Their tears were thought to help bring the rains.’

The table hushed. Barrette began to swivel his glass again.

Mr Hauser puffed on his cigar and did not speak. He wore a large grin of satisfaction.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Tait. ‘Consider me shocked,’ she said.

‘Sophisticated,’ said Mr Hauser.

‘That’s enough, Thomas,’ said Mrs Hauser.

‘You’re right, I’m sorry I asked. Tough stuff, I agree.’ Mr Hauser turned to Albert. ‘So, I hear you’ve celebrated a birthday?’

Albert anticipated they would not dine together again. That the conversation had taken such an unpleasant turn that none would care to risk a repeat. Yet to his surprise it was the opposite. The six seemed drawn back together, and together they shared their meals and all meals hence. They sought each other out, as if the uncomfortable ritual of that first night bonded them in some strange custom. They had shared some trial of discomfort and come through it and that meant something. They avoided the topic, never mentioned it again, like it had never happened. They ate and laughed and discussed the world and its history and the destinations that awaited them. The hours spent at that table were as good as any spent ashore. Barrette never let them bait him again.

💀

They put in at New York and Charleston and Miami and then turned south for Havana. The first port outside the contiguous United States. Albert walked the shorefront for days. The old Spanish architecture. The quaint shopfronts of the Prado. Swimmers crowded the beaches and the water was turquoise under a radiant sun. He didn’t enjoy it as much as he should have. He held himself back and didn’t know why.

They left Havana on a pleasant afternoon and crossed the southern expanse of the North Atlantic, bound for Freetown on the west coast of Africa. The seas grew rough. The water grew deep and dark. For the first time one could see no land on the horizon. Only ocean. The passengers kept to the dining hall and the game rooms. Crib and conversation. Fine lunches and dinners. Six days of weather and then it cleared and they were back on deck in the sun and the warm breeze.

They were the best days of the voyage. Albert would look back on them with longing.