MICROCOSMIA
by Ron Sanders
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Copyright 2010 by Ron Sanders
cover art by the author
Chapter One
John
The old man rose through the darkness inch by inch, his fingers wriggling on the cold marble sink like maggots on hot china.
A muted click, and a bright pink light was blinking urgently on the bathroom’s ceiling. Security’s in-house monitors flashed back and forth, phones rang in staggered time. Resuscitation equipment kicked to life. A second later every alarm in the mansion was howling.
Old John stood clinging to the crystal faucet heads, horrified by his own reflection: sunken blue marbles for eyes, wasted nose plugged by dangling tubes, a gummy black gash of a mouth. In the strobelike light his lips writhed in slow motion, his eyes appeared to throb in their caves. Unable to turn away, he watched himself dissolve.
“Kaw,” he croaked. The room sank six feet. He tightened his grip and fought for breath. “Kaw!” A scarlet froth broke from his nostrils and oozed down the tubes. The left side of his face seized and relaxed. Seized again. His right arm kicked.
“Kawr!” he gasped. “Kawr, Kawr!”
John’s body rocked like a newborn foal. A long black drop trickled down his hollow cheek, seeming, in the panting light, to jerk as it rolled. His image swam in and out of focus. He coughed, hard. A second later blood was streaming down the backs of his thighs. With all his strength he filled his crepe paper lungs and cried,
“Karl!”
The big Austrian slipped between the door and jamb without appearing the least flustered, though he’d dropped everything and sprinted the moment he realized John was off his respirator. He calmly killed the alarm with one hand, turned the wall plate’s polished nickel knob with the other. An array of cream-colored spears emanated from recessed fixtures in the ceiling and walls. Overhead, a fan’s heart-shaped blades began swimming without a whisper, stirring a deep pink pile underfoot.
John staggered back from the sink, fluttering like a lame pigeon. With that same air of casual efficiency, Karl used a pink-on-cream bath towel to plug his master’s trembling bottom, simultaneously lifting him free of his bloodied and soiled pajamas.
He lifted him effortlessly.
At one hundred and three, John Beregard Vane weighed a mere sixty-eight pounds, so it was easy as pie for Karl, a former fullback forty years his junior, to scoop him into the Big Bedroom. Karl tenderly placed him on the silk-canopied bed, padded to the ruby-dusted bay window, and mechanically spread the room’s black shrouding curtains, all the while speaking as though the old man were a child.
“You are so bad to move, John! This I tell you many times. You must never leave the bed without you call me first. It is no trouble for me to come. But you are such a bad boy to move. What are you thinking? What will I do with you?”
Karl, now washed in bright California sun, crept back to the bed and pulled the cover to Vane’s chin. On the ventilator’s side-caddy were several bowls of pink roses surrounding a plush stuffed Winnie. Between the bear’s splayed knees was a ceramic pot labeled HONEY, and inside this pot rested the room’s fire engine-red rotary telephone. Karl pulled up a chair, reached into the pot, and lifted out the receiver.
“Kar,” John moaned, his head lolling on the pillow.
“Doctor be soon, John. This I promise.”
But John’s head only rolled harder. In mid-roll the head stopped and faced the ceiling. The rooster neck arched, the tiny Adam’s apple shuddered. “Chrisha,” the old man gagged. “Chrisha, Chrisha.”
Karl leaned closer, frowning. “John, this I now insist. Doctor Steinbaum here soon.”
John tossed his head wildly, clutching the cover’s hem and kicking his feet. “Christian,” he gasped. “Christian!”
Karl placed his big palm on John’s brow, lifted a withered eyelid with his thumb. He didn’t waste time on the pulse. He set the receiver on its cradle, immediately picked it back up, and dialed a new number without looking. “Simms! Wake! Find Cristian now! Bring here! And go hurry!” Karl’s pale blue eyes narrowed, his lips working hard as he sought words to explain the situation concisely and with finality. A storm brewing nigh on thirty years was about to break and take everything that mattered with it. He unclenched his toes, steadied his breathing, and pressed his lips against the mouthpiece.
“This,” he hissed, “is it,” and gently replaced the receiver.
Like a bright ballerina on a softly shaken carpet, a golden hump of spume was swept laterally by the tide. Wave by wave the delicate mold progressed, at last dissolving on the sand. Farther along, a new hump was born.
Twenty yards back, a quiet young man was observing this charming process as an event analogous to his own bullied existence. Like all depressives, he believed his personal fate was determined by a particularly cruel tide.
Cristian knew he too was being watched; he could feel it. He didn’t budge, he merely rolled his eyes. A glistening brown woman, wearing only a thong bikini and half a pound of cocoa butter, was studying his profile. Her hair was golden blonde, her bikini the pink of cotton candy. She was flawless.
“I know you,” she mumbled. “Don’t I know you?”
Cristian wagged his head. “I would have remembered. Definitely. Eternally.”
She leaned forward, palms on knees, intuitively going for the cheesecake close-up. “You’re in movies? A sitcom? Now where did I . . .”
Cristian’s finger shot to his lips and his eyes darted warningly. “Nothing solid yet. But my agent keeps me hopping. Maybe we met at casting. There’re just so many pretties.”
Perfect hands went to perfect hips. “Who’s your agent?”
“Ah-ah-ah.” He wagged that same finger. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The woman’s mouth fell open. Her nose turned up. “As if I need . . .” She straightened. “Just you . . . don’t you worry!” She took a few steps and whirled. Cristian could read her lips. His cheeks and ears burned. “Honey . . . Honey port . . . Honey pie. I . . . know you!” He watched her sashay up to her friends, looking back every other step. The women huddled. Their faces popped up, vanished, reappeared.
It was time to go. Cristian grabbed his gear and tramped across the sand, intermittently peering over his shoulder. The women were now squealing hysterically, their bobble heads grouped behind a sleazy gossip newspaper. He made his way along a lightly-traveled access road below Pacific Coast Highway, cursing all nosy women and their stupid supermarket rags.
Cristian Honey Vane’s ill humor, under Southern California’s golden therapeutic sun, was as conspicuous, and as incongruous, as his paranoia. He’d never lacked a thing in life. His health was good, his mind sound, his father staggeringly wealthy. He was moderately famous.
The fame came not from talent or hard work, but from bearing the surname of one of the richest men in the western hemisphere. It was a hollow fame. And although Cristian hated media attention with every fiber of his being, he was forced to acknowledge that he, and all resident Vanes, born “Vane” or otherwise, were fair game for periodicals preying on the rich and famous.
Not that his image was in such great demand; he wasn’t exactly handsome, nor was he particularly ugly. Cristian Honey, the enigmatic, camera-shy bachelor, was invariably captured mulling in a reasonably photogenic gray area, where Vane-watchers of either gender could love him or hate him, depending on the breeze. The rags delighted in spinning him both ways, portraying him as a hard-drinking womanizer to one audience and as a closet homosexual to the other. He was neither. Through no fault of his own, master Vane was that rare paradox, the compassionate misanthrope. Compassion was in his nature. The misanthropy resulted from nurture. Considering the bloodsuckers who made up his “family,” it was amazing he hadn‘t ended it long ago.
Cristian’s boom box died on a dime. He shook it, punched the compact disk player a couple of times, and began rooting through his backpack. Inside were tennis shoes, half a cheese sandwich, a bottle of warm beer, and a reminder to bring extra batteries. He was just knocking the bottle back when his attention was arrested by a racing engine on the highway, quickly followed by a shriek of rubber on curb. The front end of a hot-pink Town Car appeared behind an emerald patch of carpetweed, and a moment later the red round face of Paris Simms popped into view. There was nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide; Simms was already frantically waving his arms. With a jerky little cry he rolled down the grade, scraped himself up, and pawed at Cristian’s arm. Cristian shook him off. “You’d better have eight D cell batteries, Paris, or we’re done here.” He slapped on his sneakers.
Simms’s cheeks and forehead glistened below the bright pink limo cap. “H—” he managed. “H—”
“Heart attack? Hangover?” Cristian shook the driver’s pudgy shoulders. “Damn it, man! How many syllables?”
“No, Cris . . . hurry. It’s your father.” Simms wrapped his arms around a leg. “It’s time. We’ve got to go.”
“It’s always time. We’ve always got to go.” Cristian grabbed his stuff and the men staggered up to the highway like a couple of drunks.
The cream leather seats were handsomely polished, the interior gleaming with that all-around sheen only an intensely bored driver can produce. Usually the trunk would be agape; sanitized receptacles awaiting backpack, beach blanket, and sandy sneakers. The rear seat and carpet would be covered with fresh towels. An ice cold Grolsch and one of Cristian’s custom-made, exceedingly thin cheroots would be perched on the folding silver tray. Cristian would slide his bare feet into a new pair of sandals and sit low behind the compact pink limo’s tinted glass, quietly cursing the staring, grinning public.
But this time the trunk was closed, the interior unprepared.
Before his driver could waltz him in, Cristian twisted back an arm and wrestled him around, poising his rear end for a very rude entry. Simms squirmed out and slid to his knees, clinging. “Cris, let’s do it, man! Please . . . don’t fight me. Just get in.”
“Fight you?” Cristian hauled him upright with one hand, peeled off his cap with the other. “Paris, you know I’m a lover, not a fighter.” He shoved him in and kicked the door shut, placed the cap squarely on his own head and stepped around the car.
“I’ll drive, you ramble.”
John Beregard Vane’s American descent can be traced to one Bemford Pye V’aine, a wealthy colonist with interests in Connecticut potash, Jersey pig iron, and Chesapeake shellfish. Thanks to Bemford’s policy of disseminating deliberately conflicting accounts, the details surrounding his rapid acquisition of American capital will forever remain mysteries. What we do know is that Bemford, while still in his early thirties, was a ruthless industrialist, slave trader, and speculator playing both sides of the Atlantic. A virile and egocentric man, he kept eleven sons and four daughters in tatters while buying out every business he could get his hands on. Whenever he encountered resistance, V’aine hired gangs of hooligans to shut down competition. But he was no kingpin. The moment things got dicey he took his money and ran.
He ran west, always investing as diversely as possible, always moving on once he’d wrung all he could from a town.
His final breath came at the age of eighty-nine, in the high desert outside a frontier settlement named V’aineville. V’aine held commanding interests in over half that community’s profit-showing businesses. He owned the town.
A week before his death, knowing it was his time, Bemford Pye cashed the town out—sold every business, withdrew every cent. He converted his entire worth to bullion and disappeared in the dead of night with a buggy and horses. His remains were discovered a month later. But not a gram of gold.
Bemford’s surviving children, save one, thereupon entered the world in search of lives. That remaining one, young Milo, stayed behind into his late teens, caring for the ailing widow in the ramshackle, silver birch-columned three-story known as Old Spiderlegs. The woman’s dying wish was to be buried on-property, in a favorite outlook just at the shadow line of the Mighty Eagle Mountains. Her burial, spurned by the entire population of V’aineville, was witnessed by outlying officials and local reporters, and no one was more surprised than Milo when gravediggers encountered a space filled solid with Bemford’s bullion.
The young heir changed his name to Vaine, picked up his father’s reins and went west, buying and selling, cornering and calculating. He’d learned from the old man: Milo made sure he owned a piece of everything. Eventually his teams of agents formed a web over the waking continent, keeping a toe in every seaport, in every major city, on every railway. Wherever the land was fairest, there would the spider drag his web.
Unlike his father, Milo made an obscene spectacle of wealth; traveling like a prince, spending like a sailor: wives, children, estates, offices—all facets of his booming mien. His tremendous ego made him take tremendous risks, and he was, overall, tremendously successful. The Civil War was a godsend. Milo bent with the wind, profiting handsomely in Winchesters and whiskey, in cartwheels and coffins. The spider walked the line between North and South with vigor and with dash, all the way to the California lode. When he died, also well into the years, his was one of the first great migrating families to own a major piece of the sprawling bean fields that would one day become Los Angeles County.
A grandson, Timothy Thomas, devoted himself to business while his siblings spent themselves into obscurity. Timothy foresaw the age of technology, and with it the Great War: the United States government became his biggest customer. Eventually prestigious beyond self-censure, T.T. nevertheless dropped that gaudy i from Vaine as he groomed himself for a Senate run, and his insular adult son, John Beregard, for the top executive office of his global business empire. Timothy, busted purchasing votes on a Monterey stopover, had his head blown off by a disillusioned supporter.
John never married. And not until past seventy did he produce a child. In his prime his heart and soul were given entirely to business. Important men shared his time.
Vane got an early hand in movie studios, in amusement parks, in public transportation, in fast food. Everything was fast in California, and getting faster. Vane stepped on the gas. Like Milo, he maintained a system of agents at home and abroad, and, as computers took a greater part in the dissemination and retrieval of information, engineered a corporation that, in an electronic haze of checks and balances, ran itself—he instituted Automated Investment Management, taking the brunt of guesswork out of investing. The AIMhigh corporation was a maze of integrated computers walled behind a fairly large, elegant office front in Hermosa Beach. Its lobby’s walnut double doors featured carved profiles of facing eagles breaking into flight. AIMhigh in time became a solid institution employing over a thousand professionals devoted solely to the financial and emotional affairs of John Beregard Vane.
And John built a palatial residence on the California coast, a monument to money. He named the estate Raptor’s Rest, and made its imperial house a showcase of luxurious living.
To paint himself human, John purchased masterpieces for public exhibition. To paint that human a saint, he donated small fortunes to any institution willing to carry his name. Apparently the public was ready for a socially awkward, harmless old billionaire with an insatiable desire to impress. John caught on and, for a while there, the master of Raptor’s Rest was on top of the world. But as interest waned the old man’s fragile ego went right on down with it.
Although Vane tried hard to recapture his moment in the sun, advancing age and displays of desperation only made him look foolish. His mind crashed, and with it his health. And one particularly bumpy day he handed the reins to Karl, the Austrian fullback who had served him, with loyalty and with love, for almost forty years. Those many years ago, John had been standing at knifepoint in Kapfenberg when Karl, hobbling from a tavern on his career-ending shattered ankle, decided to take out his self-pity on a completely surprised pair of muggers, breaking the face of one and rearranging the spine of the other. One of those inexplicable friendships soon blossomed, and Karl and John eventually grew inseparable. And so great became Karl’s love for John that John needed merely speak it for Karl to make it so. Therefore, throughout Vane’s later deterioration, those lavish displays meant to impress the world continued to accumulate, and with a growing accent on the bizarre.
In his early seventies John took a prescribed vacation south of the border to recover from a series of nervous breakdowns. He returned a year later, sicker and loonier than ever, with an infant son he’d named Christian Honey after a messianic hallucination en route (the first name’s offending h was dropped by the boy at the onset of intellectual maturity, the mortifying middle name buried completely until dug up by gossip rags). On his arrival at Los Angeles International Airport, old John tearfully re-christened AIMhigh The Honey Foundation, ordered whipped cream pies all around, and collapsed in the arms of Karl. The eagle would soar no more. He was taken home to die.
Raptor’s Rest, a 318-acre estate overlooking the ocean, nestles in a broad line of salmon hills rising majestically above Pacific Coast Highway. Centered on a manufactured plateau, the Vane mansion is a six-armed pillbox virtually unnoticeable from the ground. From the air it appears as a gray and white asterisk with a gleaming hub. The asterisk leans to the sea, on a crazy checkerboard of green and brown.
The Rest boasts six professional tennis courts.
Nobody plays.
Someday spectators will surely admire signed glossies set in gilded frames hung beneath the banner names of tennis greats and celebrity sports anchors. But for right now those frames are empty. Never has a coiffed commentator or bare-kneed luminary posed jauntily amid the figs and periwinkles.
There’s a gorgeously manicured eighteen-hole golf course with a spiraling series of lakes, and a clubhouse containing all the amenities of a five star hotel. Yet that clubhouse is of little use other than as a winter stopover for swallows. And not a soul, other than staff, has set foot on the course since its construction.
A long wooded private drive leads from Pacific Coast Highway to West Portico, the mansion’s ocean face. Only permanent occupants and V.I.P. guests are authorized to use this road. Art lovers and Vane admirers, on that glorious day they finally show in droves, will make their way by monorail on a little shocking pink train embellished with fancily-painted flames. The rail’s station is just inside the highway gate, in a small clearing made up to resemble a Guatemalan arroyo. The station itself is a whimsical recreation of a miniature cantina, with a flashing neon sign above its swinging pine doors declaring, cryptically, Welcome to Rosie’s.
The rail climbs over groves of pink plantains into the denuded hills, curves above the La Bonita Hog Farm and Sausage Works, circumnavigates the sprawling Dulce Leche Honeybee Terraces, and concludes, after a dizzying glide through the Central American Flag Garden, on the mansion’s opposite side at East Portico’s equally whimsical Cinnamon Station. There delighted patrons will board a luxurious ten-wheeled tram, and so be delivered to the Corinthian-columned ramp leading directly to the spectacular los Visitors’ Lobby.
Once inside they’ll encounter the stirring self-tribute to John Beregard Vane; philanthropist, visionary, and durable bedridden addict of the Home Shopping Network. Vane’s Hall Of Many Treasures boasts the world’s largest cubic zirconium collection, and is crammed with everything from Thighmasters to chia pets, each article mounted and enclosed in its own velvet-lined niche. The Hall’s Wall To The World is an ongoing mural of the Raptor himself, posed with captains of industry, heads of state, and his hero, the Juiceman. John, far too weak to stand, is invariably pictured sitting, an unlit Havana in one hand, a banana daiquiri in the other.
After a safari-like tour of the eye-popping Vane Collection in Wings Northeast and Southeast, emotionally exhausted enthusiasts will one day embark upon an even grander return route; around the fantastic Mi Cara Firewalk, through Vane’s gilt-and-granite salute to great Guatemalan generals, and over an intricately tiled pink-and-cream wading pool for nonexistent children. The great man’s immense bedroom window offers a superb view of the monorail’s entire wending course. Sundays the little flame-covered train, stocked with gaily-dressed members of the groundskeepers’ families, makes several circuits for the ailing master. It works just fine.
Those four wings not dedicated to public art exhibits are assigned to the men and women who actually reside in the mansion.
The Southwest Wing houses the permanent Residents and their families. The Northwest Wing contains rooms for Help and Regulars, for the Raptor’s personal physician and nursing staff, and for Honey’s officers, both legal and security.
Between these arms, spread wide to brace the sea, is the magnificent ocean view West Portico, known by Residents and Regulars as the Sunroom. This unique structure is built entirely of curved glass panes twenty feet high by ten feet wide, utilizing chromed steel braces and struts. The room’s Plaza doors, smaller than their surrounding panes but similarly shaped, are fashioned of fused cut crystal. The Sunroom, illuminated throughout the day by natural light, is lit by four humongous Waterford chandeliers from the moment the Pacific takes its first bite of the wild California Sun.
Abutting the Sunroom is the Foyer, richly paneled and carpeted, featuring matching marble hearths on either side of an elegant, sausage-shaped arch leading into the Ballroom, the Rest’s great glass-domed heart.
This Ballroom is a stunningly beautiful chamber of polished cedar, designed to accommodate a small orchestra and hundreds of immaculately dressed dancers. Over ten thousand petite pink roses thrive in ornate marble troughs arranged in a sweet, room-embracing hedge. The great dome’s outer surface is ground to produce prismatic effects with the passage of sun, the inner surface feathered to scatter the radiance of a hundred solid gold candelabra at night.
But not a string has been plucked, not a keyboard played. Never has a couple graced that gleaming cedar floor. The Ballroom waits yawning, its candelabra cold.
The North Wing belongs to John, the south to his son Cristian. Taken together, these two wings effectively bisect the mansion and are therefore considered a unit, the Grand Hall.
The Grand Hall’s northern extreme contains the luxurious bedroom of the master, the rather austere quarters of his man Karl, and a number of rooms holding state-of-the-art test equipment and resuscitative devices.
Cristian’s bohemian suite occupies the southern extreme. Adjacent rooms include a library, a small gymnasium, and a miniature observatory half a million dollars in the making.
Stacked leaning between these extremes are the numerous genuine masterpieces and street-bought oddities which have transformed the splendid Grand Hall into an unruly and garish garage.
Even deep into Vane’s madness the Honey Foundation continued to blindly take orders from his Austrian manservant, vigorously accumulating great works of art through a ruthless team of auctioneers. Meanwhile Karl, forever loyal to his master’s senile whims, purchased countless rubbishy curiosities from hucksters on the Venice Beach strand, and grudgingly invited into residency any unsung street freak who took the old man’s fancy.
One by one these parasites contributed to the ever-swelling cast of Residents and Regulars. And piece by piece those many dear exhibits were mingled with all the worthless purchases, amassed side by side and heaped one on top of the other throughout the mansion. In the Grand Hall, in the Foyer, in the kitchens and bathrooms, near-priceless marble busts teetered between lava lamps and plaster waterfalls. Psychedelic posters and black velvet Elvises shared the walls with Monets and Eschers.
Into this growing maze came a pallid, skinny young woman in a beat-up canary-yellow Pacer.
Megan Griffin arrived in response to an ad in the Argonaut, one of several local papers utilized by Karl in his awkward search for a nanny. Once she realized the full measure of her staggering new circumstances, Meg got right to work on that flagging bedridden John. She insisted she was the boy’s actual mother. She nursed the idea . . . smuggled the idea . . . hammered the idea into his head: she and John had been intimate while cruising the Thames. Cristian was their love child. The Central American encounter was a fantasy, a filthy lie concocted by that devious schemer Karl.
Megan replaced her paisley granny dress with a long black strapless gown, let her raven hair grow to her waist. Everything about her became funereal, as though her very demeanor might encourage John into the grave.
Her one mistake was not covering her scent.
Within a year she’d been tracked down by ex-husband Richard, who let the cat out of the bag even as he made his own play. Richard flattered John shamelessly. Long hours were spent bedside, recounting tales of personal hardship and a fatherless existence. One night the Raptor, terribly moved, tentatively called Richard “son.” Right then and there Richard knew. He was in.
Richard’s awarded living chamber quickly turned into a teak-paneled, aquaria-filled weasel’s lair, where an endless parade of not-too-bright blondes were perpetually promised pieces of his assured inheritance. These used women, drunk and despondent, became temporary fixtures in the Foyer and Sunroom. Eventually, inevitably, they found their way to rehab, the gutter, or the morgue, and so passed forever from the mansion’s memory. Yet while in residency they made damned good spies: far from being the simple wry debauchee he appeared, Richard was in fact a cold-blooded compiler of gossip.
But then, one dreary winter’s eve, a bizarrely-dressed young psychopath blew in unexpectedly and made straight for the marrow, setting the stage for a chain of increasingly ugly power plays between this dauntless trio of vultures, the Big Three.
Jason Jute, or J.J., or simply Jayce, had been turning tricks for lines and drinks in a Santa Monica Boulevard parking lot when one of his backseat customers turned out to be a bitter young former AIMhigh attorney. Jayce became both live-in lover and partner in crime. With fraudulently notarized papers demonstrating Jayce’s incontestable claim to the Vane bloodline, the two quickly established a corner on John; one threatening Megan and Richard with bogus legal actions, the other with very imaginative feats of mayhem. Old John, relentlessly regaled with Jayce’s manufactured father-and-son anecdotes, miraculously began to remember. Two pairs of hands would joyously grip his; the tears would flow like champagne round the bed. But two clear blue Austrian eyes, staring coldly by the door, would remain dry.
To stack the deck in his favor, Richard began importing some of the rowdier members of his old crowd. Jayce responded with a gang of his own, comprised mostly of flashy, hard-boiled perverts. Their war became an immature contest of airs—a superficial show of sophistication on one hand, of ostentation on the other. Richard and his friends favored tuxedos and business attire. Jayce’s group dressed with a flamboyance designed to shock and inflame.
As word of the setup got around, the mansion became a magnet for ruffians and runaways, for hookers and drug addicts, for all manner of street people. Raptor’s Rest grew into a hangout, a home, and finally a battleground overrun by conscienceless marauders—dealing right from the premises, giving birth in bathrooms and tool sheds, warring amongst themselves in a setting luxurious beyond their imaginations. For the sake of party space they dragged statues, suits of armor, and bulky artifacts outside. Priceless items from the Vane Collection were left to the elements. Karl, reduced to a hulking eavesdropper, protected canvas and marble with raincoats, with garbage bags, with slabs of aluminum siding.
The threat was clear. But the more adamantly Karl objected, the more frantically the Raptor resisted. It was John’s first taste of family. Only when Karl began to seriously fear for his master’s safety did he make the situation clear to the Hermosa Beach office. A security team arrived, along with a small army of Guatemalan housekeepers and groundskeepers.
When old John learned he was about to lose his family a stroke nearly killed him. For his health’s sake, Residents and Regulars were permitted to remain, and the security team kept aboard on a permanent basis. The Raptor, convinced by Megan that Dr. Steinbaum was the angel of death, forever banned the man from residency. And Karl, fingered as a nark by Regulars, was ordered to keep his nose out of family affairs. It was a close call, but the scales had fallen from John’s sinking blue eyes. Only the Big Three could be trusted.
Megan, Richard, and Jason, although fiercely competitive, maintained control by coalescing, allowing the general population to institute a pecking order as their natures dictated. The lowest peckers gravitated to wing extremes, occasionally cropping up in the Clubhouse, Pro Shop, and monorail station. This is where the security team was most effective; smoking out homeless and substance-dependent parties using the estate as a crash pad.
Security was much less effective with Residents and Regulars.
In the first place, John positively forbade their harassment. In the second, Security soon formed an uneasy alliance with the Big Three—the recipients of outrageously generous allowances. A prison-like economy went on indoors, with favors and penalties filtering from hub to extremes. Security earned far more working for the Big Three than for Honey. And sometimes they could get downright vicious.
Curfew in the mansion began precisely when the Big Three were all turned in; anyone caught hanging about risked a godawful stomping. But every morning, punctually at three, the pink-and-cream gnomes appeared as furtive silhouettes against the greater darkness, whispering espanol into walkie-talkies, cleaning and folding by the yellow spears of pencil-beam flashlights.
As the months passed into years, the wings’ turf challenges were resolved through gang truces and Security beatings. Children were born and grew into their teens, relatives came and went.
And still the old man refused to let go.
On his centenary only the hardest of diehards celebrated with him. They included the Big Three, seventeen really bad-news Residents, a few of the scrappier Regulars, two masochistic transvestites brought in for kicks, and a roving pack of wasted bikers.
And so moved was John that, at the stroke of midnight, he demanded the residing legal team draw up papers adopting everyone present.
The celebrants, documents in hand, swaggered into the Foyer for drinks and petty squabbles.
And to wait.
Three long years more they waited, roasting birds in the Ballroom during the holidays, inviting in truckloads of buddies for beer bashes on hot summer nights.
But now the wait was over.
When Cristian reached the long private drive’s summit he was greeted only by silence. The tall rolling gates, with their matching wrought-iron descending eagles, were already wide-open. Not a soul was about. The polished cobblestones were clear all the way to West Portico Plaza, a circular tiled court under an enormous live oak. The limo was hearse-creeping along when Security guards, surreal in pink and cream, appeared out of nowhere. A hard face cut by dark glasses sprang at Cristian like a snake. “Move it, Fat Boy! What do you want, an escort?” When the face recognized Cristian it immediately became professional. “Sorry, Mr. Vane, sir. You’re cleared to go right through.” The face disappeared.
“Please, Cris,” Simms moaned. “Just for decorum’s sake.”
Cristian put the transmission in Park and climbed over the driver’s seat. Simms tumbled up front, slicked back his hair, and cruised up to the Plaza with as much gravity as he could squeeze out of a crawling hot-pink limousine. Before the car halted, the Sunroom’s crystal doors swung outward to reveal Megan in black, tiny on the glass bubble’s lip. An anxious crowd rolled behind her.
Cristian took the rounded steps one at a time, mindful of the occasion’s solemnity. He paused meaningfully at the entrance, but Megan reached right into his forced aplomb, embraced him possessively, and dragged him inside. His arms and chin fell lifelessly. Every face was dead on him. Cristian looked up to find himself surrounded by a pack of nervous hyenas.
He was home.
Chapter Two
Megan
As a lad Cristian was walked through these animals like a toy poodle through rottweilers, reminded again and again to distrust smiles and promises, to refuse treats and favors. Residents were introduced as aunts and uncles, Regulars as friends of the family, business associates, or art lovers. Each had capered for his affection, and perhaps he’d have leaned to one or the other, if not for the steely hand of Karl. For the longest time, even into his twenties, he believed that Karl was his true father, and that Karl’s own father was that festering nightmare in the Big Bedroom.
His only experience with Woman, discounting those unsettling glimpses of Richard’s strumpets collapsed in their fumes, was Megan.
Meg throve in the mansion; she blossomed, if that can be said of evil things. She became, in fact, extraordinarily beautiful, but not in a way that draws healthy men. Her face, a bone-white, eerily pretty, almost Oriental mask, possessed an apparent ability to absorb or reflect light according to mood. Sometimes circles appeared beneath her eyes, vanishing even as you stared. Her cheeks might be bruised one moment and alabaster the next. And her lips, poison and plum, could swell like leeches on a pig, or thin to two slowly pursing lines.
Cristian’s paternal influence came through Karl, who had Megan pegged. But he couldn’t keep her in check forever: the Raptor, more senile by the day, nevertheless realized his son would suffocate without something resembling a mother. So old John instituted rotating possession periods. Cristian was reared alternately by both a mother figure and a father figure, permitting neither to establish a permanent chokehold on his soul. Theirs was a war of iron wills. Once in a while, however, John drifted back into the real world long enough to demand the two put up a parental front. On these occasions they could be seen coldly escorting the boy, each holding a hand as though he were a wishbone, paying no attention to Richard and Jayce, or to the ever-changing field of junkies, petty thieves, and lounging whores. They merely strolled, quietly and mechanically, sharing a hatred so deep it was rumored to cast its own shadow.
Karl’s amazing self-control allowed him to respond to all things Megan with icy silence. He instructed the boy more as staunch lumbering mentor than as dedicated substitute father. Meg, for her part, possessed in spades the innate cunning of her gender—all those subtleties and sympathies and soft ways guaranteed to warp a sensitive youngster’s development. She practiced this ages-old witchcraft on Cristian with bloodless precision, from a possession period’s saccharine commencement to its histrionic demise.
Right off the bat Mommy exposed Karl as a very, very bad man—a monster, an inarticulate felon whose every word was a lie devised solely to destroy young Cristian. This scheming pervert kept a sick old man prisoner in the Big Bedroom; the same Sick Old Man Cristian was periodically forced to view; a man like a dying fish in a diamond bowl. Karl’s one great goal in life was to poison little Cristian’s mind with hypnotic stories and “facts” out of his dirty books, and so blind him to the warmth and love only a mother could provide. Megan fought ice with fire: she smothered the boy—massaged him and caressed him and hugged him and kissed him; did all those naughty and emasculating things Karl warned of. Cristian was always “Mommy’s little man,” his upturned face ever nestled between her tight white breasts. And as the youngster approached puberty, he found his face urged deeper, and felt those bruising lips fuller, and lingering.
The boy’s confusion and emotional scarring did not escape Karl. Unable to break through John’s delirium long enough to clearly describe Cristian’s danger, he could only respond with a greater emphasis on schooling. Karl’s possession periods became spartan affairs, Megan’s periods, in retaliation, brazenly sexual. Cristian Honey Vane grew into a morbid teenager trapped in a haunted house with an iron grip.
During these critical formative years, a second woman further muddled his impulses. This lady didn’t like Mommy at all. She would show at the mansion irregularly, usually during one of Megan’s possession periods, and argue shrewishly while Karl, cold umbrella that he was, corralled the boy in a Foyer corner and monitored the action like a cobra.
This lady, always dressed in a very severe woman’s business suit, didn’t want Mommy to hold Cristian too tightly, or to speak with him about Karl or the Sick Old Man. She could get really mad, and one day she made the staring men in the pink and white suits drag Mommy off. Once they were gone she held Cristian the way Mommy did, while Karl told him it was okay, okay, okay.
But it just wasn’t the same. Cristian eventually concluded that the suited lady was Karl’s wife, though she’d appeared young enough to be his daughter. Megan, stomping in the next day, solved the paradox. The Other Lady, Mommy explained, was a witch working with Karl, who was a kind of man-witch. They both lived in the Big Bedroom under the Sick Old Man’s bed. They wanted to steal little Cristian’s soul. They wanted to keep him hypnotized in a big box in the Big Bedroom, and take him out every day for miscellaneous tortures. But they couldn’t work their evil so long as the Sick Old Man was alive. Mommy was here to protect him. Richard and Jayce, all the bogus aunts and uncles, all the “Security” men, and all the little brown people in the pink and cream costumes were zombies, manipulated by the man-witch and that skanky, overdressed Other Lady. The Sick Old Man’s passing would be marked by a terrible battle of Good and Evil. It was up to Cristian to hang onto Mommy, to look at no one but Mommy, to trust no one but Mommy. Together they would destroy all the bad people and live happily ever after in the mansion.
That great battle had been slated to come any day.
But now Cristian was twenty-nine, and he was numbly enduring Megan’s penultimate Sunroom embrace. All traces of blue were gone. Her lips were plumper than ever, her cheeks dappled with rose. And this embrace was nothing like the chilly enclosure that had accompanied him on his uncertain path to manhood. It was a vital hold, full of tremendous anticipation. It was the grip of a woman with good news.
“Oh, Cris, oh . . . oh Cris! It’s John. He’s—I’m so afraid.”
Cristian gently pried himself loose. “We all are.”
A pair of middle-aged men, blocking the Foyer entryway like bodyguards, quietly watched him approach. They took their sweet time stepping aside. Megan hung back, her moist eyes hard.
Richard’s sideward pace was as suave as his expression. He smiled wanly and offered Cristian a facetious nod, swishing a bourbon on the rocks in one hand while tapping ash off a Parliament with the other. Richard was now fifty-one, having lived in the mansion since he was Cristian’s present age. But he no longer despised the younger man. He’d learned to observe the sole blood heir to the Vane fortune with cynical admiration, as an aloof fellow predator; one who would certainly receive the bulk of the inheritance, but would nevertheless deal the choicest cuts to those who knew him best. Besides, Richard had some really sticky stuff to sling against Cristian, against gay Jayce, and against that conniving witch Megan—and some inspired accusations to hang on Karl, if need be. He was sure Cristian would be positively relieved to have Honey’s legal dogs turn over control of a few mega-holdings, rather than spend the rest of his days denying perfectly credible tales of homosexuality and parental abuse. The Rest’s self-proclaimed Top Dog was trolling for a large piece of the corpse, and for a nice chunk of hush money on the side.
The other man’s step aside brought to mind the sideways advance of a slowly circling Sumo wrestler. Jayce was one of the scariest creatures the West Coast had spawned: obscenely tattooed and extravagantly pierced, with a face creatively slashed and sutured under a spiked platinum Mohawk. Scarier still was today’s choice of attire; a billowing silk apricot blouse draped by fifteen pounds of quarter-inch anodized steel chain, a blood-red miniskirt over leopard leggings and spurred platform shoes. On anyone other than Jayce the overall effect would have been supremely comical. But there wasn’t a damned thing funny about the man. Jayce hated Cristian, hated Richard, hated Megan, hated his gang almost as much as he hated himself. But no one on earth did he hate more than John Beregard Vane. He’d spent over two decades kissing up to that depressing cadaver, and he, like Richard and Megan, felt he’d done a sight more than the fair-haired son to earn the lion’s share.
Cristian’s impact on the crowd was that of a stone on still water. Residents backpedaled into the Foyer, stepped on darting children, collided with Help. Help, in response, backed into furniture, spilled into the Ballroom. For once, Cristian made sure he didn’t miss a single darting residential eye. He’d deliberately blocked out names and particulars, remembering Residents simply as Uncle Bungle, Aunt Fat, etc. They’d raised their families in the mansion. Their children and grandparents used the Sunroom and Foyer as dayrooms. He spread them all like a hot knife through butter, only to pause tellingly on the Foyer steps before strolling across the Ballroom into the Grand Hall. Cristian zigzagged between the leaning busts and bric-a-brac until he met a pair of cold blue eyes.
Karl unfolded his arms. The Big Bedroom’s heavy walnut door featured a gorgeous woodcut of an eagle in repose, its head buried between its wings. The Austrian lowered his head somberly and rapped twice.
Half a minute later the quickly-reinstated Doctor Steinbaum appeared. He glowered at Cristian, then at the faces of Residents peering round the Ballroom’s Grand Hall arch.
“Go ahead,” he sniffed. “I guess it’s too late for you to do any more harm.” The men avoided eye contact. “But behave yourself. I’ll stay well back against the wall; I’d be derelict if I left you two alone.”
The Big Bedroom’s antiseptic smell only exaggerated the underlying stench of extreme age: Karl had scrubbed the floor and bedposts with isopropyl alcohol while awaiting the doctor’s arrival, and Steinbaum had applied a merthiolate solution to scrapes incurred in the old man’s bathroom fall. Karl had closed the curtains, leaving only a crack. Very little sunlight found its way in.
John looked like he belonged on a slab instead of a bed.
He appeared exactly as a cadaver—blue and white, stiff and supine, with deep blotches on his face and arms. The only proofs of life were the oxygen tubes fitted to his nostrils, a pair of chattering machines connected for ventilation and dialysis, an intravenous drip attached to his left arm, and a collection of thin wires leading from his chest to a portable monitor beside Pooh. Even as Cristian stared, that emaciated chest quivered, slowly rose an inch, and collapsed. The event was accompanied by a small pinging sound, and by a corresponding spike of light on the monitor. It seemed to Cristian, standing quietly in the dim room, that almost half a minute passed between pings.
Steinbaum leaned back against the door and watched impassively as Cristian crept to the bed.
The old man came off pretty much like last time, except for a couple of details only apparent to the three men now controlling the room. In the first place, that nauseating bruised-albino look was now profoundly underscored by purple patches that appeared to well and snake. John was hemorrhaging even as his son stared. In the second place, it was the first time the old man’s lips were not moving. On past visits John’s mouth had worked convulsively, even during deep sleep.
As a child, a spellbound Cristian had observed that mouth in perpetual motion; sometimes operating thoughtlessly, sometimes reminding him what a good boy he was. Sooner or later John would begin to ramble. The rambling would diminish to jabbering, and the jabbering to silence. But still that mouth would writhe.
Now Cristian considered the mouth with morbid curiosity. He had no familial interest in the repulsive creature beneath him. Long ago any natural concern he might have harbored had been replaced by disgust and impatience.
The eyes rolled behind the lids. At last the mouth quivered. The eyes opened as if John had been kicked, and his chest filled with air. The eyes found Cristian.
Cristian watched the lips pull apart until there was only a black hole girded by gray, freely bleeding gums. The eyes became desperate.
“Please,” the corpse managed. “Say.”
There was an urgent exchange just outside. Cristian heard Karl open the door and realized that members of the Foundation’s legal staff were working their way in. A strange hubbub blew down the Hall. Karl squeezed around Littleroth’s enormous posterior and closed the door.
“I promise you, Father,” Cristian whispered, his eyes locked on John’s. “I promise to do you proud.”
John shuddered head to toe. His back arched and relaxed. A few seconds later his right arm rose and hovered a foot off the bed.
Karl, standing tearfully in the corner, punched a button on a wall plate. A fixture high on an adjacent wall immediately emitted a bright white beam that bathed John’s chest. As Karl continued to jab the button the beam rose slowly, an inch at a time, at last focusing on the old man’s twisted features. He depressed another button. The room’s lights dimmed until the Raptor’s purple face, flapping like a fish out of water, was cleanly lit for recording.
Sickened, Cristian took a deep step back. Littleroth oozed right around him, his usually heavy hands a blur; vacant one instant, occupied the next. In a single sinuous motion, he flipped open his briefcase, swept it onto the bed, and extracted a fistful of papers. He wiggled his fingers. A gold pen materialized out of nowhere. Thyme, video camera poised at eye level, waltzed around Cristian effortlessly and melted onto one knee. Bryant seemed to glide to the bed’s far side, where he produced a small DAT recorder from a vest pocket with all the facility of a magician plucking a rabbit from a top hat. He one-handedly played the instrument’s controls like a keyboard while whisking the recorder’s microphone to within an inch of John’s spewing lips. All three men had moved smoothly, and in concert.
The ghoulish precision made Cristian turn away, putting him nose-to-nose with Karl, instinctively advancing on these brutally efficient men surrounding his master. Cristian watched as a dark cloud cut off the light in those cool blue eyes. In slow motion Karl’s chin dropped onto the younger man’s shoulder. Cristian, reflexively extending his arms, found himself in an intensely uncomfortable embrace. He awkwardly patted the closest thing to a father he’d ever known. The room rolled backward. Karl’s arms fell to his sides, his chin to his chest. Both men listened to the small bedside sounds; the scuffing and shuffling, the whispers and whirrs, the painfully executed scratching of pen on paper. Karl stormed past with a little choking cry. There was the sound of paper being violently torn, a few mangled words.
Cristian unclenched his fists. Taking the deepest breath of his life, he turned back to face the room.
Chapter Three
Limo
Littleroth, Bryant, and Thyme navigated the Grand Hall, stamped resolutely across the Ballroom, and executed a no-nonsense parade rest on the Foyer steps. Cristian, for once the mansion’s dominant presence, took his final walk under the Ballroom’s gaping glass dome in an oblique shower of rose, his sneakers squeaking on the polished cedar floor.
He walked with affected slowness, halting two steps down to gaze pensively through the Sunroom’s segmented glass face. Under the live oak’s broad umbrella squatted the candy-striped carousel where he’d sat, rain or shine, as Karl’s shy attentive pupil. The carousel’s conical roof was of buffed copper. Its raised circular floor simulated a chessboard, utilizing contrasting squares of bleached Chinese ash and polished Burmese teak. No horses remained on the structure. A glass-enclosed library, a tall central gas lamp, and two steel folding chairs made up the floor plan. In the distance could be seen one length of the estate’s wrought iron fence. There were no walls, nor any trace of shrubbery; nothing to obscure a fraction of the eternal Pacific.
He stood casually, his hands folded on the small of his back, and waited. A child’s scream was followed by a quick double smack. A Resident’s son kicked a Regular’s daughter. The little girl shrieked and the crowd dissolved.
Cristian turned.
Uncle Goggle and Aunt Jabber peeled apart, allowing the bruised loveliness of Megan to slither through. She swayed hypnotically, wringing her pretty white hands and hyperventilating. Then she was all over him; clinging, smothering. Handling. Meg was Mommy again.
“Oh I know it, sweetheart! I know it, know it, know it . . . I can see it in your dear blue eyes. You poor, poor, innocent thing.” She dragged him down the steps, pulling his face right into her chilly white bosom. “It’s all better now, baby.” Megan closed her eyes and hummed in his ear, nibbling the lobe. “Congratulations,” she breathed, “to the richest and sexiest young man in America.”
Cristian grasped her shoulders and gently pushed her away. He looked around the room, said frostily, “Okay. The party’s over. As of right now you’re all off the Vane payroll.”
The Foyer’s interior became the conical guts of a kaleidoscope, the Sunroom’s face a segmented screen. The crowd blew apart. When the room came to rest the Residents were all lopsided; out of focus, out of options. Faces sought others in slow motion.
As the rooted centerpiece, Megan had not spun along. But her color had changed. Her face had run the entire range of blue, only the cheekbones and chin showing white. Something wild peeked from behind her eyes, retreated.
Cristian backpedaled up the steps, placing John’s blood and Honey’s reps in direct opposition to the crowd. Lumped in with the others, Megan went scarlet. This was a woman new to Cristian. His eyes flickered as her voice climbed an emotional ladder, stomping on rungs along the way:
“What the hell are you talking about? This isn’t about money. It’s about family.” She stood with one arm akimbo, a forefinger directed at the Big Bedroom like the finger of Death. But, unlike Death, Meg’s expression was defiant, as though a resuscitating charge crackled from that finger, penetrated the door, and shimmered around the departed. After so many years of urging John into the grave, Megan was realizing that, without him, she was utterly alone.
“That . . . man, who clung so bravely to this world, would have been outraged! How dare you speak of money in the midst of all this grief? Are you on drugs? Have you lost your mind? I think you owe us all an apology here. No, damn it, I think we should demand an apology!” The maternal charade was over. This performance was for the house.
“It’s a family of ghouls,” Cristian said through his teeth. “Don’t tell me this isn’t about money; you buzzards have been measuring my father’s pulse for almost thirty years.” He descended the steps with forced casualness, kicking a bright yellow beach ball across the Foyer. “That’s all history now. You won’t get a deed, you won’t get a dollar.
“Control over father’s holdings will be maintained by the Honey Foundation. The only difference is, I’m its new chief executive officer, and as such have final say over all transactions of moment. Meaning my word on this estate is final.”
Anodized chains rattled on one side of the room. Jayce pushed through his crowd until he was right in Cristian’s face, cocked his head, and whispered, “Cut the crap, Crissy.” Without looking away, he motioned his nearest partners nearer. “Can’t you see you’re spooking the happy campers?”
But it was Richard who broke the pack, smiling pleasantly while swirling the cubes hard against his glass. “C’mon, Honey. This is hardly the time for levity.”
Cristian held Jayce’s stare as long as he could. “It’s no joke, Dick. Father willed me the whole ball of wax. That means his properties and worldly possessions, along with every notarized item in his art collection. His stocks and bonds and futures, his holdings both foreign and domestic, the exclusive use of his personal name in each and every enterprise . . . in sum, everything.”
He raised his hands and retreated a step.
“As you are all rabidly aware, it was Father’s wish that the disposition of his estate wait until the very last moment. As you’re also aware, several documents were drawn up relating specifically to that last-minute decision.
“Each of these documents contained a different configuration, describing various holdings for potential heirs; both for individuals and for groups. His signature on any one legally voided the others. Several of these documents were quite complex, involving some very creative provisions and cross checks. By making certain all potential recipients were legally obligated to these conditions, Father was guaranteeing that no party or parties would piss away his hard-earned fortune on mindless, gluttonous frenzies.” He sneered as he looked round the room. “Imagine him thinking that.
“As you all know, there were also a few relatively simple documents, pertaining solely to three brutally-determined lampreys who’ve spent the last twenty-odd years convincing a sick and senile old man that they loved him dearly. These wills left all that was his to the aforementioned unmentionables.
“There were, additionally, two documents transferring everything Father possessed to either his manservant, Karl Günfel, or to his only genuine son, Yours Truly.
“Karl did the unthinkable. He tore up his personal will before my father’s dying eyes and told him he loved him.” Cristian looked out through the Sunroom, addressing the carousel. “John Beregard Vane has signed over the entirety of his estate to me. That miserable little ceremony, hardly a quarter hour cold, was witnessed by Littleroth, Bryant, and Thyme, along with Father’s lifelong physician Dr. Steinbaum, by his man Karl, and, of course, by me. The signing was recorded every which way.
“You are all more than welcome—indeed, you’re enthusiastically invited—to view this document prior to your being genially ushered from this estate by myself, or, myself failing, by whatever amount of purchasable muscle will see the job through.”
“Wait a minute.” Richard punched Cristian’s chest with his drink-fist. “What’s all this crap about stuff taking place behind closed doors? Don’t play with us, asshole.”
Jayce threw all his weight against Cristian. He and Richard physically moved him back up the steps, slamming him side to side. “What do you mean, ‘off the payroll,’ prick? Since when is anybody on your ‘payroll’?”
“Call it a fact or a figure of speech.” Cristian steadied himself against the top step. “You are now both on my property, and that’s all that matters, legally speaking. If you don’t, of your own volition, remove yourselves, I will have Security forcibly remove your selves for you.”
“I,” Richard gnashed, “want to see this evidence of a ‘will’ brought before a court of law. You orchestrated the whole affair, worm, and it won’t stand.”
Jayce looked one to the other, bristling at the phrase court of law. He backed off gradually, appearing to deliberate, then made a great show of signaling the Foyer barman. When he looked back his eyes had softened. “I suppose the cocktail onions are still on the house?”
“Help yourself.”
Richard smashed his glass on the steps and the Residents erupted like pigeons in the shadow of a tabby. Three security men immediately stomped over. He shook them off. “Gorillas! Touch me again, and I’ll not only have your jobs, I’ll have your ugly puppet heads!” The crowd broke into small circling packs. Richard shouldered his way into the Ballroom.
Cristian was trembling head-to-toe as he walked back down the steps and straight up to the small knot of Security. Their captain, with Honey from the beginning, had always treated him like a degenerate little snot. He waited in the stance of a gunslinger, his Honey cap tilted aggressively, the pink and cream uniforms coalescing behind him.
“William, I want your guys to clear this estate of all these bloodsuckers. Their claims and arguments are illegitimate. They are, as of this order, trespassers.” He snatched a framed photo from the south hearth and slung it like a Frisbee. “That means all the brats.” He slung another. “All the old goats . . . all the ‘in-laws’ . . . everybody!” Cristian raised his voice so that it scathed the house, one hand on a hip, the other pointing at the Big Bedroom in a childish impersonation of Meg.
“Allow me to clarify! Only myself, officers of Honey, and the occupants of that room, living and dead, are legally authorized on these grounds once the turds have been flushed. After that, you and your men can all go home: you’re relieved. You can discuss severance with Honey. The Foundation will, in my name, guarantee compensation and placement for every man who has served this estate so well. I’ll take care of Help, indoors and out.” He stuffed his shaking hands in his pants’ pockets and lowered his voice. “Now, I want to thank all you guys personally for your invaluable service here. It’s been a real pleasure and a great privilege.”
William stared back fiercely, his men’s eyes boring into the back of his skull. Cristian turned on his heel and raised his arms like a choirmaster.
“All right! Listen up, listen up! I want everybody packed and out of here by the time I get back. You are no longer residents of this estate. Mister Bryant will be handling any claims levied against the Foundation, and I’m assuming there will be many. But that famous ‘adoption party’ was a total sham, and you know it. Those wonderful signed documents attesting to your legal claims to the Vane name are about to come crashing down. You’re all about to receive a very rude introduction to reality. Brace yourselves.
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