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getting their orders straight from the horse’s mouth. He wondered if Lourdes could hear him as well.
    â€œTell her,” said Winston, raising his voice, “that she’s a stubborn bitch without a shred of sense.”
    The boatman took a deep breath and crossed himself. The crewmen hardened into a battle stance, and then a voice came down from heaven.
    â€œFine. Let him on.”
    Winston looked up in time to catch a glimpse of Lourdes looking down on him from the railing seven decks above, before she backed out of view.
    The two-man welcome wagon wasn’t thrilled about it, but they obeyed their orders, reached out and helped him aboard.
    Winston turned to tell the boatman not to wait, but he was already pulling away.
    The two overweight crewmen led him to a glass elevator in a six-story atrium of brass rails and polished marble. He passed several stewards on his way, noticing the air of despair that pervaded their eyes. They, too, were obese—so much so that they bulged painfully out of their uniforms. He looked at the ample gut of one of his escorts. “Cruise food?”
    The escort said nothing.
    As soon as they stepped out onto the pool deck, the weighty sense of oppression permeating the lower decks was blasted away by a party that stretched from stem to stern on the ship’s open-air decks. It was a fiesta of slim, beautiful people. The pool deck was a contagion of indulgence. On a dance floorpast the pool, at least a hundred people sated their senses to the beat of the brightly frilled band, which, in spite of a cool ocean breeze, kept insisting it was “hot-hot-hot.” Gorgeous women in designer bathing suits that left nothing to the imagination sipped tall cocktails in every color of a neon spectrum. The beat of the music pulsed in the teak wood of the deck, and whoever wasn’t dancing was luxuriating on lounge chairs, or partaking of a sumptuous buffet. The atmosphere was so intoxicating, Winston forgot for a moment why he had come. Until he saw her.
    Lourdes sat on her own private verandah one deck up, with a grand view of the partying pool deck below.
    Pushing past the gyrating bodies on the dance floor, he made his way toward her, noticing that among the perfect physiques on this pleasure cruise were reminders of that other class that inhabited this ship. A towel boy with an unpleasant bloat about him, lumbering like a troll on the perimeter of the deck. A worker polishing the brass railings with turgid limbs and fleshy folds, his body drenched in acidic, malodorous sweat. These were members of a bizarrely obese servant class that greased the machine, and kept Lourdes’s movable feast afloat.
    Winston climbed to Lourdes’s private deck perch. She reclined on a plush lounge, and was attended to by two topless men with pectoral muscles the size of turkey breasts. Although she saw Winston approach, she made no attempt to acknowledge him. She simply waited for him to come to her. She had never looked better. Not exactly svelte—her frame would never allow that—but shapely, and well-contained within the smooth satin of her bathing suit. He now noticed that the two dark-haired, dark-eyed glamour boys who attended her were, in fact, twins. They threw him a disinterested gaze before returning to their duties. One rubbed Lourdes with tanning oil, the otherdipped shrimp in cocktail sauce and held them to her lips.
    â€œCleopatra, I presume?” Winston said.
    Lourdes bit the dangling shrimp off at the tail, and her shrimp boy dropped the tail into a silver bowl already brimming with them. “She was just Queen of the Nile,” Lourdes said. “I’ve done a bit better.”
    A few feet away was a very large man in an expensive suit that was four sizes too small. Like the crew, he had that bloated look, but instead of being flushed, his face was a pallid shade of green.
    Winston indicated her twin studs. “I see you’re into matching luggage