After dinner, Jack Allen, the ship’s cruise director, sprawled comfortably in a chair on the lower promenade deck, enjoying his first few minutes of solitude for the day. In the west, the sun was getting ready to make its exit in a technicolor spectacular. Already, the sky was a blaze of red and the billowing water picked up the rosy glow and seemed to catch fire.
For the past ten years, the winters had all been like this for him. The days hot and the perspiration dried on his skin by the trade winds, the evenings ushered in by pyrotechnical displays like this one, the nights cool and black.
But it hadn’t always been so. His mind went back to the winters of his childhood on the East Side of New York. The cold winds that blew off the East River sent the kids running off the streets to hud
