SIX
‘My God,’ breathed Robin. ‘She’s just so beautiful!’ And, right at the back of her mind, was a wicked little thought that, compared to her current quarters aboard Queen Mary, this was very much more like the steely, stark twenty-first-century ambience of the Hyatt or the Westin up in LA that she hankered after in spite of Richard and his boyish enthusiasm for the bygone age that Queen Mary represented.
The neat little Bell settled on Maxima’s helipad like a dragonfly, its tail pointing out over the edge of the third upper deck, snub-nose pointing at the smoked glass doors into the rear bridge deck and the ladder up on to the flying bridge that bisected them. Everything aboard seemed to be white paint and blond wood, from the golf balls of the navigation equipment she wore like a crown at her highest point to the sections that folded out and down to water level. Robin loosened her safety belt and slid the door open, pulling off her headset as she did so. The noise of the motors died, leaving only the slowing thrum of the idling rotors. A breeze brought to her nostrils not the smell of avgas or dock water she had expected, but something like the aroma of a Rolls Royce car salesroom. She climbed out, stooping automatically and running a thoughtless hand through her hair as the downdraught undid what little coiffeur she had bothered with after her shower this morning. Equally automatically, she crossed to the rear of this deck to pause beneath the Bell’s tail rotor and look down.
Immediately below her the second deck stepped out towards the stern, the pale wood of its flooring lost under a confusion of deck chairs and tables. Then the main deck stepped out and back sternwards again, at its centre a swimming pool whose forward edge was lost underneath the overhang of the gallery above it. And, beyond that, the whole of the yacht’s aft section had been folded out, providing a platform a foot or so above sea level from which swimmers could enter the ocean or sailors could climb aboard the motor boats and jet skis clustered there. Though there were, in fact, no bathers. And the men beside the boats and skis seemed to be crewmembers running checks and maintenance. Even from the outside, the extravagance was astonishing. In any other context it would have been offensive to see this much money squandered on a rich man’s toy.
But Nic was old money, thought Robin with unusual indulgence. His forbears had rubbed shoulders with the Astors, the Livingstons, the Roosevelts, the Dudleys and the Winthrops: Uncle Tom Getty and all. His father’s summer home was in Hyannis Port, next along from the Kennedy compound. It was in the waters of Nantucket Sound that the old man had taught his granddaughter Liberty to sail, a skill which she in turn had taken to Olympic standard. Now she and her all-female crew were getting ready to give Katapult8 a really tough shakedown run south towards Mexico tomorrow. With Maxima in close pursuit, if she could keep up.
Nic had used the fortunes of Greenbaum International to enormously good effect. It was he who funded initiatives like Self-help International, giving men and women in an astonishing range of countries the chance, the skills and the tools to work their way out of poverty. He was behind the MicroBank projects that loaned tens and hundreds of dollars at no interest to women all over the world who were fighting to start their own micro-businesses and earn enough to raise and educate their families. Not just money either — schooling where it was needed, too, not to mention peer-to-peer tutoring and business advice. Everywhere from Mauritania and Manila to the Maldives and Mexico, women who had lost their husbands to war, drugs, AIDs, the lure of big cities, restless feet or roving eyes were supported in their attempts to work and trade themselves out of poverty, and to teach their own sons and daughters through their experience and their example to follow in their footsteps.
But on the other hand, it was also Greenbaum International that gave tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands annually to projects designed to combat a range of diseases, including AIDs, tuberculosis and the creeping danger of malaria as global warming spread the climate that deadly Anopheles mosquitoes could live in wider and wider, higher and higher. Year after year, Greenbaum International won the International Ethical Industry Award — the Nobel Prize for businesses.
It had been Nic — and Richard — who had funded the project where Liberty and Robin exercised their love of sailing as they raced in opposite directions across the Pacific, in specially designed yachts, to bring the world’s attention to the dangers of the rotting rubbish floating in the Sargasso Sea at the heart of the Northern Ocean. A dead sea of rubbish and plastic the size of Texas and growing. There was hardly a cause or an initiative designed to protect nature and support those fighting to live well within it anywhere in the world that was not getting support, guidance or expertise from Greenbaum International.
So if Nic wanted a new toy, he was welcome to it in Robin’s book. Even a toy that must have cost a good deal more than Sulu Queen herself. There had been something like this at the last International Boat Show Robin had visited, priced at a cool fifty million pounds. ‘A little extravagant, eh?’ asked Nic quietly, appearing like a genie at her shoulder. ‘What do you Brits say? Over the top? Is that what you’re thinking?’
‘Something like that,’ she allowed grudgingly.
‘It kept half of the shipwrights in Istanbul employed for the better part of a year,’ he exaggerated cheerfully. ‘Not to mention designers and interior decorators from all over the world.’
‘Money well spent, then.’ She shrugged.
‘Money well invested …’ he teased. ‘A bit like the old Cunard Line keeping John Brown shipyards on the Clyde busy during the great depression of the nineteen thirties with your current accommodation.’
‘Your magnanimity knows no bounds,’ she riposted — and then felt that she had gone too far, for the phrase came out more tartly than she had meant.
But he didn’t seem to notice. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he continued. ‘When we go below I’ll show you my pictures of Dahlia Blanca. Get you ready for the other part of this little jaunt.’
‘Dahlia Blanca?’
‘Named for the national flower of Mexico. Kept half of the builders in Jalisco busy for the better part of a year. Architects from Guadalajara to Mexico City, interior designers, painters, carpenters, tilers, rug-weavers, antique dealers, artists, landscape gardeners, plumbers, electricians, pool installers, cooks, house staff, grounds staff, security staff … Not to mention the guys who’ve built the marina and secure accommodation waiting for this little lady down there. And, of course, land agents, estate agents, local government agents, central government agents and lawyers from Chihuahua to Cancun. Heaven alone knows how many Mexican families will make it through to the next Dia de Muertos because of Dahlia Blanca and Maxima.’