The Vices [antikvár]

On July 18, 200-, at 18:00 GMT, the Queen Mary 2 left Southampton with 2,912 passengers and roughly half as many crew. She arrived at the Brooklyn dockyards on the morning of July 24, with 2,911 passengers. In a brief wire service piece, the New York Times identified the missing passenger as "Oliver Vice, 41, a professor of philosophy at Harkness College in western Massachusetts." He was also my closest friend, and remained so, even after he ruined my marriage. Officials for Cunard, owner and operator of the QMz, prepared a meticulous account of Oliver's last hours. On the night of July 22, the QM2 passed seventeen nautical miles north of the point where, ninety years earlier, the Titanic had struck an iceberg. That placed her 150 miles south of Tilt Cove in Newfoundland, heading southwest at twenty-two knots. The evening's entertainment included a screening, in questionable taste, of the movie Titanic in the Queen's Room, and a performance of Hamlet, Condensed, in the Royal Court Theater on Deck 3, but apparently Oliver wasn't in the mood for either. He arrived promptly for the 20:30 seating in the Britannia dining room, joined by his mother, wearing the sapphire necklace that her second husband had