The Oceans and the Stars by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

COMPAGNIE NAVALE FRAISSINET

Well before Rensselaer met Katy when he was in New Orleans fitting out Athena, the Marseilles director of the Compagnie Navale Fraissinet, as he often did, had lunch one day in the Old Port. Headquarters in Paris had been swallowed by a huge German conglomerate that, emphasizing Fraissinet’s tanker and bulk carrier fleets, was undecided about its cruise business, which operated three 150-passenger specialty ships out of Marseilles. The director feared that despite the recent program of steering other than French holiday-makers his way, the Germans wanted to get rid of his ships so as to concentrate upon their core business. This, as well as the fact that he was now working for Germans, was the cause of ever-increasing resentment.

But because the spring sun was out, the colors were bright, the sea opalescent, and his bouillabaisse excellent, he was momentarily untroubled by his troubles. While tearing apart a baguette, he felt a very, very slight movement of air across the bridge of his nose. Looking up, he saw a butterfly passing before him so closely that he thought it would collide with his face. It made him smile. This caught the eye of a woman at the next table, who thought his smile was directed at her. Shy by nature, he could never have managed such a self-possessed and confident expression had he merely willed it himself.

She returned his unwitting flirtation with a look so hot and easy that he felt a kind of jolt. Like him, she was about forty-five, and her chest and firm cleavage was freckled and dark with sun, for him a sign of maturity’s slow sexual burn, which he found irresistible. They began their affair almost immediately. It was exclusively sexual, and because both were married it could take place only in hotels. Because she was wealthy, he felt constrained to carry on in the top establishments and to give her gifts he couldn’t afford. And because he had trouble understanding that Germans were actually people, he felt no guilt in appropriating from corporate accounts to support his trysts. Increasingly obsessed with her almost savage eroticism and the bronzed and freckled bosom that contrasted magnificently with his gift of a turquoise and silver necklace arrayed upon it, he embezzled to the point where the theft was almost as exciting as the illicit sex that made it necessary. The cruise subsidiary was doomed anyway.

But these were Germans, and they had German accountants. As German accountants inevitably and ineluctably would, the German accountants sensed that in Marseilles the figures were not always right. So, not surprisingly, the German accountants scheduled an audit. Relatively panicked (he was so far gone anyway), upon realizing that he might go to jail the director put his affair on hold and concentrated upon a scheme to refill the accounts before the German accountants arrived.

After visiting Australia, French Polynesia, and India, the ship l’Étoile Océanique, carrying 124 passengers and 52 crew, had made its most recent stop in the Maldives. Scheduled

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