Lovers (45 page)

The first person to whom Ben introduced her in the converted warehouse in lower Manhattan was Erik Hansen, a man of sixty-three, the key man in the entire operation, head of the management team Ben had assembled.

Hansen, who had been hired away from the Royal Viking Line, was one of the three top executives in the cruise world. He had accepted this new job only because he faced retirement and had far too much energy left to consider leaving the business in which he was a king. The Winthrop Line had given him lifetime financial security as well as a ten-year contract. He was a man of medium size, a walking furnace of brisk purpose. He had a wiry build, wiry white hair, and a wiry grip. It came as a surprise when he gave her a quick, warm smile, suddenly a wiry grandfather.

“This is the man,” Ben told her, as they all had a cup of coffee in Hansen’s office, “who knew exactly which key men were worth stealing, and he’s already filled his wish list. When Hansen came calling, they listened.”

“Is that the way it’s done?” Gigi asked curiously. “Theft?”

“It’s the only way,” Hansen said. “Cruise ship owners, like Mr. Winthrop, raid the competition all the time when they build a new ship. There are just so many top men, and everyone wants them. Mr. Winthrop made it easier by giving me a free hand with salaries. We’re also planning the finest officer and crew accommodations and recreation space on any ship afloat, which will lure the best people from other lines, since their lives are spent on board.”

“Each executive we’ve hired brings his own following with him,” Ben added, “so we’ve almost completed our top and middle echelons. They’re all in this building now. Our hotel manager, Eustace Jones, who comes from a famous
British tea clipper family, is working upstairs, and so is Per Dahl, the Norwegian captain.”

“But why do you need them now?” Gigi asked. “The maiden voyage of the
Emerald
isn’t scheduled for a year.”

“They have to be consulted every step of the way,” Hansen answered. “The complications are endless. For example, the chief engineer, Arnsin Olsen, is all-important while the navigation, communications, electrical, and waste treatment systems are being designed. Since he reports to Captain Dahl, the captain is here too, to add his expertise. As we speak, André St. Hubert, the
chef de cuisine
, is breathing down the neck of the restaurant designer, Antonio Zamboni, to make sure that he doesn’t plan to install the dishwashers where the stoves should be. Although St. Hubert reports to Jones, the hotel manager, on the other hand, he must make his decisions with his chief chef, Paul Vuillard, and the head maitre d’hotel, Gianni Fendi, as well.”

“Fendi? Vuillard, St. Hubert? No Americans?” Gigi asked.

“Americans are singularly unsuited to an elegant restaurant atmosphere.” Hansen favored her with a wiry grin. “Cruise ships from all over the world go to Italy for their top service personnel—headwaiters, waiters, wine stewards, even busboys. They are simply the best. The Portuguese are good, the French are often too snobbish to do anything but cook, and the Spanish have no tradition. The stewards and chambermaids will be Scandinavian, the officers and captains Norwegian, Danish, or English, the hospital personnel Swiss. The casino is run, as everywhere afloat, by an Austrian company, just as the beauty salon is owned by an Englishman, who has concessions on all ships.”

“But won’t the
Emerald
fly the American flag?”

“The international flag,” Ben told her. “That gives us the right to hire who we please.”

“Aren’t you going to hire
any
Americans?” she demanded.

“Of course,” Ben answered, “for the orchestra, the entertainment staff, and the gym trainers. But I’m considering Greeks for the
corps de gigolo
. They have charm, enthusiasm, and endurance.” He winked at her look of outrage.

Hansen coughed, ignoring the interruption, and continued his point about the kitchens. “You see, Miss Orsini, the chief engineer, Arnsin Olsen, must work closely with the chief chef. There are vital matters such as the sizes of the meat lockers, the tanks to hold fresh lobsters, the caviar storage compartments, even the space allotted to breakfast cereals—pampered travelers cling to their favorite cereal, and there’s no shopping center in the middle of the South Pacific. The use of every inch of the ship is a subject of intense discussion. Every one of these men is a specialist, each one demands more space for his own supplies than is possible, and they all have to work together because each detail ends up connected to every other—the size of the wineglasses, for example, must correspond exactly to the size of the racks in the dishwashers.”

“Of course,” Gigi said, nodding as patiently as possible. Dishwashers? What was the ship going to
look like
, for heaven’s sake? A floating Kmart?

“It sounds like the United Nations,” she said. “Who’s the boss?”

“The owner, Mr. Winthrop, is the boss, and I report to him. He has to make all the final decisions, since he pays the bills. Naturally it would be easier if he could take a year off from his other activities and live in Venice, but since he can’t, we’ve brought Porta Margera to him. Once all the plans are completed and we have everything we need, down to those wineglasses I mentioned, the ship will be fitted out in the drydock.”

“I think Miss Orsini is going to faint unless she sees some designs,” Ben said, standing up. “I recognize a certain look in her eyes.”

“Not faint, scream,” Gigi whispered to him, as he took her arm to lead her out of Hansen’s office. They bypassed
the first floor, which was devoted to offices and accountants, taking a newly installed elevator up to the second floor, which was one vast space crowded by a hundred draftsmen working at computers.

They walked up and down with Arnsin Olsen, who showed them the way in which the lower part of the 540-foot length of the freighter was being used: fuel tanks filling the bottom of the ship, separated by a double bottom from the tanks of drinking water, bath water, and cooking water that filled the next deck. There was a complicated desalination system for treatment of sea water used in the air-conditioning system and for scrubbing the decks and doing the laundry.

Gigi looked at incomprehensible computer designs for the between-decks spaces that would contain all the pipes, electrical wiring, and telephone lines of the ship.

“I didn’t realize it was going to be so complicated,” she said to Ben, while Olsen’s back was turned.

“Neither did I,” he responded, “and we haven’t seen so much as a stewardess’s cabin yet. This stuff’s all below the waterline.”

“Can’t we—?”

“Not without being rude. Olsen is very proud of this,” Ben answered her unspoken question. “You started this, now be patient.” He put his arm casually around her waist, managing to give her a firm pinch on the ass in passing.

“Stop that!” she said in a low voice, conscious of the interested eyes of the squadron of draftsmen who were discreetly enjoying the novelty of this visit.

He gave her another healthy pinch. “Malls don’t have to cross oceans, carrying picky passengers. It takes at least fifty thousand computer drawings to plan one ship, and that’s only to help the engineers and designers find the best solutions to the space, not to replace the human design process, so you deserve far worse than a little pinch or two.”

“Miss Orsini, would you like to see the
Sizione Maestra?”
Olsen asked.

“That depends,” Gigi said cautiously. It sounded like the sewage system.

“The master section drawing, through the midship, deck by deck.”

“Please! Lead me to it!”

She and Ben took another elevator, accompanied by Hansen and Olsen, to the third floor, where even more draftsmen worked at even more computers. They went to a large office at the back of the room, where Gigi was introduced to Captain Dahl, Eustace Jones, and a third man, Renzo Montegardini, the naval architect in charge of all the design work necessary to turn the empty hull of a freighter into the finest cruise ship that had ever sailed the seven seas.

Montegardini, Gigi saw at once, was more central to this entire enterprise than anyone except Ben, who merely signed checks. Even Hansen deferred to this tall, gaunt man in his fifties, who wore clothes as well as Vito Orsini did, and had an immediate charm. As he bent over her hand to kiss it, she felt as if she’d been knighted.

“So, at last I meet the young lady whose genial inspiration caused me to leave my dear Genoa, my beloved studio, my apprentices, and my other clients.”

“You make me feel guilty,” Gigi said, using her eyelashes with unrestrained abandon.

“Do not waste your sympathy on me, most kind and lovely Miss Orsini. I am a convert to the New World. I love New York, my wife loves New York, even my wife’s cats love New York. And this is truly a magnificent challenge. Always before, I have worked on a ship from the first rough sketch. Here the problems are fascinating, but since the lines of the ship are splendid, there is no problem that cannot be solved.”

“Then you approve of the ship’s lines?”

“I salute them. I doubt that I could have done much better myself, and nobody in Italy has ever called me a modest man, except, of course, my wife, who knows my
inner self. However, all other things remained to be done. I started with the funnel—but you know that—”

“I know nothing!” Gigi exclaimed, and then remembered her manners. “Except about the fuel storage and the water storage and the kitchens …”

“Ah, these engineers, they always start with practical matters. A malady professional, even a mania, but we forgive them their obsessions, since a ship must sail. You see, Miss Orsini, the funnel is paramount. It sets the silhouette of the ship, the signature of the ship, the style and romance of the ship, much like the cut of your enchanting jacket from my wife’s friend Lagerfeld.” He turned to the back wall of his office, where a covered painting hung.

“Be still, my heart,” Gigi breathed into Ben’s ear.

“The funnel?”

“Renzo, you fool. He didn’t say he was married, did he?”

Ben planted his hand firmly on her ass and left it there while Montegardini drew back a cloth from a painting of the
Winthrop Emerald
. Gigi’s heart battered her chest in excitement and joy as she studied it and tried to see what it could possibly have in common with the gray freighters she had seen in Mestre.

Yes, the configurations of the bow and the stern were identical, but everything else belonged to another universe. Four new decks rose from the former main deck, sweeping back from the prow of the ship in one clean, positive line toward the great twin funnels that stood athwart the stern, their shapes a statement of adventure and grace she had never expected, and one that she recognized was entirely individual. The entire ship was white except for the single slash of emerald green that traversed every foot of the longest point of its hull, from prow to stern. There was a wide emerald green band on each of the white funnels, just below the round metallic smokestacks. Each of the four new decks was striped by a continuous line of blue window glass. In the middle of the topmost sun deck rose a tall structure like an angular open staircase, on which signal
flags were flying. Although the painting was made of the ship at rest on a still sea, it seemed to be plunging forward, as if it were a spacecraft rather than an object that had to obey the laws of gravity, yet at the same time it proclaimed man’s profound and simple relationship to the sea.

Suddenly, Gigi realized that she had been standing in a roomful of silent men, gaping without any verbal reaction at the picture of the
Winthrop Emerald
. She turned to Montegardini with a gesture of despair. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You’ve already said it,” he told her, smiling. “Four minutes of silence, that tells me I’ve succeeded.”

“Beyond any dream,” she told him.

“Gigi,” Ben said, almost impatiently, “I knew you’d love it, but you’ve got to look at the
Sizione Maestra.”
He held up a sheaf of large sheets of rustling paper, held tightly together by metal clamps at one end. “Until you’ve seen these, you really haven’t got a clue—”

“Ecco
, Bennito, I have a feeling that Miss Orsini has seen enough of these drawings for now,” Renzo Montegardini said. “She looks as if she may be suffering from the famous fatigue of the blueprint. Why don’t you show her the model suites, the fully appointed section of the restaurant, and the owner’s suite, and then come back downstairs, if Miss Orsini still cares to look at these master plans today?”

“It’s not blueprint fatigue, it’s bliss,” Gigi said. “But you’re right, I don’t want to spoil the impression of the painting by looking at the innards of that glorious ship right away.”

“Whatever you say,” Ben said, putting down the master plans reluctantly. “You coming with us, Renzo?”

“How not? I must see if
la bella signorina
approves.”

“You’ve made another conquest,” Ben muttered at Gigi as the parade of men followed them back to the elevator.

“How come he calls you by your first name and nobody else does?”

“He calls everybody whatever he chooses. He’s the naval architect, the artist, and we’re just the drones.”

“Poor darling drone. How I pity you. But after all, it’s your name on the side of the ship.”

“He allowed me that much,” Ben agreed, as they stood in the back of the small elevator, packed now by Montegardini, Olsen, Hansen, Dahl, Jones, St. Hubert, and Zamboni, none of whom intended to miss a moment of Gigi’s reaction to the model rooms. Ben’s hand was now pressed between the cheeks of her ass, although nobody could notice it, and his middle finger was moving firmly in an insistent rhythm, held back from its objective only by Gigi’s firmly clenched muscles and Monsieur Lagerfeld’s tweed.

“I won’t get out of the elevator unless you stop that,” she said, her low voice pitched to be unheard by the others, who were busily arguing all around them. “They’re so polite that they’ll stand back to let me go first, so we’ll be stuck right here into the middle of next week.”

Ben withdrew his hand as they stopped at the next floor. When they emerged, followed by the six men, Gigi looked around and, with a rapid glance, took in a group of model rooms that would take at least an hour to inspect in detail.