The Dream Vessel by Jeff Bredenberg Page A

had a theory that there were two sides to the mainhouse. Not like front door, back door. But two ways of viewing the mainhouse, two aspects, depending upon who you were.
    There was the illusory version that Big Tom and his wives and visitors saw—a breezy, open-air mansion, three tiers of polished wood, rattan and verandas. The servants saw the other side, of course—the whiskey bottles and vomit; the grain and fish and salted beef to haul up from dockside storehouses; the putrid garbage mound out back, fenced in and populated by a family of vulture macaws.
    It was a notion that Billister entertained as he made his rounds of the building, pushing his two-wheeled maintenance cart before him—trash bin in the center, wipe rags and spray bottles of wood oil and glass cleaner hanging off either side. Working the mainhouse, Billister imagined, was not unlike it would be working backstage in one of the New Chicago theaters that Jersey Saple spoke of. Clean this, fix that—create the illusion of luxury inside a pile of boards and stones and mortar.
    Billister had oiled the left wheel of his cart, for this was not a day to be making unnecessary noises around the mainhouse. Big Tom had finally slouched in from his office down the hill after a whiskey bender and, probably, a nasty measure of the powder. He had entered with his arms slung over the shoulders of two of his musclers, his feet dragging, nearly useless. He had been sweating like a docksman at noon, and his skin was fish belly white.
    Poor Big Tom, mourning his son so. And the loss of his newest skimmer. The man never showed any emotion but rage. Sorrow was vented with a good mind sopping.
    So Billister tip-toed in and out of the bedrooms emptying trash baskets, whisking at the floor with broom and dust pan, and wiping ashtrays. He could track an evening’s amusements throughout the house just by reading the cigarette butts—who was where for how long.
    In the pale half-light of the anteroom to Big Tom’s bedroom, Billister righted a mahogany end table. Probably it had been upended by the careening master himself. Cautiously he paced into the bedroom. The windows had been thrust aside to allow in the curing fresh air, and someone had graciously hoisted the mosquito netting over the four-poster. Big Tom lay there on his back, wheezing and oblivious to the midday light streaming in.
    Billister mashed his lips together and scanned the expanse of gleaming oak, trying to recall what areas of flooring would not creak as he went about his duties. He decided to empty the near trash basket, the one beside the headboard, and not risk venturing along the window side of the room. When Big Tom awoke, he would be in no condition to quibble about the housekeeping anyway.
    In the basket there was nothing but a half-dozen torn and crumpled pieces of a photograph. It would have to be one of the late Dr. Scaramouch’s works, of course—how odd to destroy one—and Billister felt a mournful unease settle into his chest as he knelt to remove the pieces. Sad, the murdered doctor. The houseboy sighed and the depression deepened in the tomb-quiet room when he realized what had been the subject of the doctor’s photograph. Each shard of gray mounting showed a different section of a sleek new yacht in dry dock—undoubtedly the Lucia, for no other skimmer was so experimentally broad. This would have to be that photograph the doctor delivered the very night he was killed in the chemical room below the infirmary, the darkroom he called it.
    What the trade master had obviously destroyed in a raging despair, Billister decided to make whole again and return to him at a happier hour.
     
    Tacked to the rough paneling at Big Tom’s left was the original blueprint of the Lucia. Pinned to the wall below that was a photograph of the same skimmer, once ripped into six pieces and now remounted, the pieces glued flat and meticulously realigned. The white tear-gaps that remained had been inexpertly