“Yes, another place as tangible as before,” Warren mused.

“Pardon me, sir?” A uniformed man walking by suddenly stopped.

“Nothing, I was just thinking aloud. A bad habit of mine,” replied before he walked away.

He avoided looking back at the confused crewman while focusing on the ship itself. He took in everything, getting a feel for his surroundings. The ship was not as he first imagined. In his mind, he thought of a large steam liner filled with people. His reality came back to an old freighter with the name SS Andes stenciled on the fading boat life rings hanging on the bulkhead.

From his walk, he found only a few outside cabins wrapped around the aft area below the bridge. When he reached the rear of the ship, he noticed steps leading up to the next level and a sign stating the area above was off limits to passengers. Looking at the structure above him, he viewed two stacks billowing dark smoke from the engines below decks.

Warren stepped back while looking up. He ran his leg into a lounge chair near the rail. A discarded newspaper blew around on the deck and he immediately fell to his knees to retrieve it. Normally, such a reaction would embarrass him. But Warren needed information. Still, he looked around, happy no one seemed to notice.

The man smiled to himself when he saw the English words and the banner. The Havana Post, dated May 25, 1935, was a potential gold mine with information at his fingertips. However, his howling stomach reminded him it was time to eat.

Refolding the paper and tucking it under his arm, Warren began his search for breakfast. He walked past a young couple staring at each other, smiling and laughing, oblivious to the world around them. Warren considered interrupting the newlywed couple for directions. However, he noticed a sign with the words ‘Lounge’ on the steel wall a few paces away. He quickly went to an open door by the sign.

Inside, he encountered a paneled room which looked as worn and tired as his room. The room gave the impression of being larger than it was. At one end stood the nearly empty bar, supported by a few early morning drinkers. The rest of the room contained small tables scattered haphazardly around. Worn linen cloth covered the tabletops, while each table had rusty chrome art déco condiment holders.

A bartender was busy mixing drinks for a man who appeared drinking early out of boredom. The two other men looked as if they were soothing their hangovers with a hair of the dog. Warren frowned at the idea, but it was their life, or afterlife.

A man dressed in an ill-fitting white jacket came out of a side door while balancing a tray with several large glasses. Warren guessed the server was helping bring another day of drinking to those inside their cabins. He smiled to himself, still trying to grasp how much drinking and smoking came with the era he now occupied.

Pulling a chair, Warren signaled to the bartender, who frowned as he extracted his massive girth from behind the bar. Warren bit his lip and busied himself with opening his paper to keep from smiling in amusement as the fat man limped over. He quickly learned that the bartender’s name was Hans, and he was the cook as well.

“Breakfast is eggs and bacon, with coffee,” he stated with a German accent. His tone showed it was the extent of the breakfast menu. Warren nodded, turning his attention to the newspaper. Hans hobbled back to the bar, shooing a small cabin boy out of the room.

Scanning the newspaper, Warren’s initial hope concerning the information he would find in the paper faded. Much of the news related to the local happenings within Cuba. A mention of Roosevelt’s Works Relief Program made the first page, along with Mussolini’s acceptance from the League of Nations. The new told Warren he was following a normal timeline. No screwy alternate worlds here. Well, beyond the fact that everything existed as a movie plot.

He skimmed through the paper, which revealed details about the Weyerhaeuser boy kidnapping. Also, some actress making a cross-country flight across the USA was in another article.

Warren paused when he noticed a Havana story concerning a jewelry heist and shootout with local police. The event occurred outside of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba a few weeks before.

The same hotel where his character stayed.

But the article only told him there was still no progress in the identity of the thieves. They made off with an undetermined number of rare jewels, which had recently arrived from Spain. According to the article, the police held suspects in custody. They identified them as Americans with gangster connections.

As he noisily refolded the paper to read the back pages, looking for the cruise departures, a boy came to the table where he placed a plate in front of Warren. His face fell as he ate the skimpy breakfast. He could barely describe it as edible. He drank a cup of boiling strong coffee, which helped mask the taste of nearly burned toast, heavily salted eggs, and greasy bacon. Baker hoped the food and the coffee would help ease his hangover. He guessed his meal wasn’t much different from what the crew dealt with daily. But it was hardly the meal Warren expected for a person with his folding money to be eating.

Wouldn’t his Baker character sail on a luxury liner?

The insight made him pause while wondering about his characters’ past. He needed more info about Warren Baker as well.

Returning his attention to the paper, he eventually found a small tidbit of news about his ship. The Andes left on May 25th, the same morning as the paper came out. Interestingly, the ship’s destination was Boston.

Consumed by his reading and thoughts, he briefly noticed a long, thin woman dressed in a yellow polka dot summer dress. She motioned to the small cabin boy by the entrance. The woman pointed to the table just across from Warren’s. He momentarily felt her stare through her oval tortoise framed glasses before he returned to his paper.

The woman passed him, taking up a position at a table a few paces away. Her escort quickly moved to the bar, then carried back a chrome coffee pot along with a filled coffee cup for the lady. The boy refilled Warren’s empty cup.

 “Nothing,” Warren said ruefully as he folded the paper and tossed it on the table.  

A swirl of random thoughts suddenly tried to poke through his headache. Maybe his character of one of those rich socialites. If so, it might help him. Warren remembered those old movies from his childhood where rich people teamed up to solve mysteries because they were bored.

Then, he came back to reality. So far, his purgatory role was always the victim, never the hero.

That’s my normal luck!

His mood soured again.

Drawing in a deep breath, Warren mulled over his present situation. His character had enough money to afford some luxury. It also gave him a spark of hope. The situation might be a benefit to him. Perhaps, this time, at least, he could piece together the direction of the story and its ending before it happened.

Warren’s expression turned thoughtful as he watched the coffee steam rise from his cup. He recalled his mistakes over the last few days in his guise as a private eye. Spending days and nights chasing the mystery woman, he made a note that it was his longest time surviving before his death.

He used the movies he recalled, which showed Marlowe or Sam Spade’s methods of piecing together the clues. While he lost, dying at the hands of the very woman he trailed, Warren took a bit of comfort in his ability to get to her. While he was the victim of a double cross, the man knew without a doubt, whoever ran these crazy film worlds did not play fair.

What’s next?

Warren recognized he needed to act like a fat cat of the times. He hoped he would do better trying to mimic one of the upper-class characters from an old movie he watched. As he thought about it, it would be difficult enough to keep ahead of death while maintaining such fiction. Still, the questions about his character tugged at him again.

Why would someone with loads of money leave the gambling Mecca like Havana on such an old tramp steamer?

He looked down at the advertisement in the paper showing Pan Am flying their Clipper airplanes back to the US. That type of travel better fit a wealthy bachelor. Just in appearance, taking cheap tug carrying freight along the East coast showed Baker had something else going on.

Why not take a plane to get back sooner?

He pressed his fingers to his temples, trying to get his brain to remember all the history he was happy to forget about. The only recollection he had about Cuba was gambling. It was a top destination place for those with money, but that was all he knew. Besides, genuine history had little to do with the make-believe world of old scripts. Warren suspected his new world was just another low budget lost film which nobody would remember. He just hoped his story would take him all the way back to his home in Boston.

So far, Warren learned that more time gave him a greater opportunity to survive. For the moment, he could only hope all his fighting meant something. Hopefully, his path was not just another one-way street to death, but Warren could only dream. He was not even sure if it was God or the Devil who was laying out the twisted path of his afterlife. To paraphrase an 80s alternative song,  

Whoever directed things must have a sick sense of humor.