“Yeah,” I said, “now you are. And so what, Mr. Stone?”

“I have money. You name your price.”

I stood up and ground my heel on his cigar.

“My price is two billion dollars.”

“I only have one.”

“Oh, well,” I said and pushed him out of the study toward the stairs.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“Less than you deserve,” I said. “But more than you’re ready for.”

42

We climbed the grand staircase slowly, Trevor leaning on the railing and taking halting steps, his breathing labored.

“I heard you come in tonight and watched you walk across your study,” I said. “Your steps were a lot surer then.”

He gave me the tortured face of a martyr. “It comes in spurts,” he said. “The pain.”

“You and your daughter,” I said, “you never give up, do you?” I smiled and shook my head.

“To yield is to die, Mr. Kenzie. To bend is to break.”

“To err is human, to forgive is divine. We could keep going with this for hours. Come on. Your turn.”

He struggled up to the landing.

“Left,” I said and handed him back his walking stick.

“In the name of God,” he said. “What are you going to do with me?”

“At the end of the hall, take a right.”

The mansion was built so that its back faced east. Trevor’s study and his recreation room on the first floor looked out at the sea. On the second floor, the master bedroom and Desiree’s room did the same.

On the third floor, however, only one room faced the water. Its windows and walls could be removed, and in the summer a rail would be placed around the edges of the parquet floor, the slats in the ceiling removed to open up to the sky overhead, and hardwood squares fitted across the floor to protect the parquet. I’m quite sure it was no easy task to break this room down every sunny summer day, nor to put it back together and protect it from inclement weather at whatever time of night Trevor Stone chose to retire, but then, he didn’t have to worry about that. Lurch and the Weeble had to, I assumed, or whatever servants had been their servants.

In the winter, the room was laid out like a French drawing room with gilded Louis XIV chairs and chaises; delicate, embroidered settees and divans; fragile gold-encrusted tea tables; and paintings of bewigged noblemen and noblewomen discussing opera or the guillotine or whatever the French discussed in the numbered days of their doomed aristocracy.

“Vanity,” I said, looking at Desiree’s pulpy, broken nose and Trevor’s ruined lower face, “destroyed the French upper class. It triggered the revolution and sent Napoleon into Russia. Or so the Jesuits told me.” I glanced at Trevor. “Am I wrong?”

He shrugged. “A bit reductive, but it’s not far off.”