Working Title: “Slow Boat, Bitter End”

A Rony Boston mystery by RJ Stewart

(Note to my readers: You are amazing. So far you’ve read close to 10,000 words of the first of many, many — or maybe just one — Rony Boston Mystery novels. You’ve followed along, wondering WTF? Some of you have warmly encouraged me, some have made suggestions, and some may have wondered if I’ve lost my mind. How much of this is true? You did go on a Turkish gulet, didn’t you? So who do you have in mind when you create these characters? Is there a plot? How does it fit together? To answer, I say this is a work of fiction. Names, character businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author isn’t Rony Boston. On another question, 10,000 words amounts to about 60 pages in an average novel. Some people use the “60-page rule” to determine if they will continue reading. If the first 60 pages doesn’t have them hooked, they’ll happily put the book down and look for something worth their time. So, this is a good time to evaluate your interest and my ability as a writer. Lastly, what follows is a recap. Those interested in re-reading the narrative can do so here as a single post. The changes you’ve suggested should be included unless I goofed. I will resume installments next week. BTW, Tnx!)

1

Going to Sea

IN HINDSIGHT, I see what was scarcely hinted when she stepped up the gangway and on to stern of the gulet at the Turkish port city of Marmaris. She just wanted it to end, wanted it expired, wanted no additional moment for any of it. Shut the door. Draw the curtain. The End.

She presented a collection of questions mostly, but certainly compelling enough to help me forget why I’d come aboard this improbable ship. I had been thinking of Conrad, who went to sea perhaps for adventure but more likely to end his own sadness in Eastern Europe. He invented Marlow and let him talk. Lies of course, in the sense of something invented rather than reported. Lies that told a truth, as a literary man whom I knew in the city liked to say. I had left my own despair in the sunless slot canyons of Manhattan. My divorce to a woman who I thought loved me set me back. Let’s just say I slipped into a small depression, and I’m not talking about a New York sidewalk. What’s more, my profession, Investigative Reporter for the New York Daily Tribune, had suddenly eroded thanks to the internet and its insidious appetite for market dominance and greed. I needed a break.

I had hoped that Aegean waves would wash my depression away. I packed a suitcase with clothes and a small case with books, regarding myself, I suppose, as a kind of Hamlet, taking arms against my sea of troubles, heroically self-doubting, tragically incapacitated, hopelessly adrift. Reboot yourself! Oppose trouble like a knight in armor. Be a martyr for everything good and proper. Have a new beginning. I even hoped to write about it, to tell my own story, not in the first person –- boring – but with imagined realities, a heroic tale of a foundering soul. I thought that fictionally disclosing my innermost feelings would lend legitimacy to my failed persona, a kind of con, a self-swindle.

And then I met her. Griselda Lomi, a stunning American woman of Italian descent who had only the day before arrived from her home near Los Angeles. She wore improbable clothes: a long, fur-lined coat over tight white jeans, a loose camisole held above her breasts by the thinnest of straps, Mediterranean blue espadrilles with wedge heels, dark glasses and a brimmed straw hat pulled low, as if she hoped not to be noticed. If she were trying to look Mediterranean, she failed, because her American pretense almost glowed. Now in hindsight, I will say she had no idea of how to be unnoticed. She was unavoidably the center of attention.

If her clothes weren’t noticeable enough, I soon turned to the object she carried. Dangling at the end of her fingers like a shopping bag was an odd relic I supposed she had purchased at a bazaar. Its bas relief figures seemed to dance in the April sunlight, but of course they were frozen in brass or bronze or whatever. Whether it was the forms, the sunlight, or the carefree way she toted it all, the figures seemed in imminent peril, as if they might fall to the deck. It had the look of something old, perhaps Grecian. Only later would I put it together. She was going to sea for personal reasons far more creative than my own. She carried an urn.