“What?”
“Early this morning. A stroke. Henry? You still there?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, looking across the patio of the student union to the courtyard. There were three flag poles there, one for a flag of the United States, one for a flag of California and the third for the university’s flag. Having spent most of the day on campus I’d passed those poles maybe four or five times not noticing until this moment that the three flags flew at half-mast.
8
There was a burst of organ music as the doors to the chapel opened and the archbishop of San Francisco, flanked by red- skirted altar boys, stepped blinking into the bright light of midday. The university security guards who had been lounging in the vicinity of the doors now closed ranks, forming a loose cordon on either side of the funeral procession.
I was standing against a pillar next to a camera crew from a local T.V. station. A blond woman spoke softly into a microphone. The television lights exploded at the appearance of the first dignitaries emerging from the darkness of the church.
The mayor of San Francisco, an alumna, came out on the arm of the president of the university. Following a step or two behind came the governor, a graduate of the law school, walking alone, working the crowd with discreet waves and a slack smile. Next came a coterie of old men who, even without their robes, had the unmistakable, self-important gait of judges. For a moment afterward the threshold was empty. Then came eight elderly men dressed in similar dark suits, white shirts and black ties, shouldering the gleaming rosewood coffin.
Inside that box were the mortal remains of Robert Wharton Paris, who had been eulogized that morning by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the most distinguished Californians of his time. No mention was made that the judge’s sole surviving descendant, his son, was locked up in an asylum in Napa. Instead, the newspapers looked back on what was, inarguably, a dazzlingly successful life.
Robert Paris, who was born into a poor family of farmers in the San Joaquin valley eighty years earlier, worked his way through Linden University, went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and returned to the United States to take a law degree from Harvard, all before his twenty-fifth birthday. Hired as an instructor in property law at the university law school he quickly rose to the rank of full professor. In the process, he married Christina Smith, the granddaughter of Grover Linden and daughter of Jeremiah Smith, the university’s first president.
Paris left the law school to form, with two of his colleagues, a law firm in San Francisco that now occupied its own building in the heart of the financial district. He resigned from the firm to accept appointment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was a distinguished jurist frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court but he was too conservative for the liberal Democrats who then occupied the White House. When he was finally offered a position on the Court by a Republican president, he was forced to decline, citing age and physical infirmity. Shortly afterwards he left the court of appeals and spent the last decade of his life in virtual seclusion. Now, he was dead.
Greater than the man was what he represented, the Linden fortune. The media estimated the extent of that fortune at between five-hundred million and one billion dollars, but so cloaked in secrecy were its sources and tributaries that no one really knew. There was so much money that it had acquired an air of fable as though it were stored not in banks, trust companies and investment management firms, but hidden away in caves as if it were pirate treasure.
Famous money. Money gouged out of the Sierra Nevadas by the tens of thousands of picks that laid out the route of the transcontinental railroad. Ruthless money. Money acquired at the expense of thousands of small farmers forced from their farms by the insatiable appetite of Grover Linden’s land companies.
Corrupt money. Money paid in subsidies to Grover Linden’s railroad from the Congress in an era when the prevailing definition of an honest politician was one who, when bought, stayed bought.
Endless money. Money flowing so ceaselessly that during a financial crisis in the 1890 ’s, Grover Linden essentially guaranteed the national debt out of his own fortune and the government averted bankruptcy.
Robert Paris was steward to that fortune and only I, and perhaps one or two others, knew at what cost he had acquired his stewardship. I watched them carry him across the courtyard, and I was thinking not of the family of a nineteenth-century American railroad baron but of the Caesars, the Borgias, the Romanovs. Only on that dynastic scale could I begin to comprehend how a man might kill his wife, his child, his grandchild to satisfy an appetite for power.
I remembered a painting by Goya that I’d seen, years earlier, in the Prado called Saturn Devouring His Children. Saturn consumed his sons and daughters to avoid the prophecy that one son would reach manhood and depose his father. The mother of Zeus substituted for the infant Zeus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which Saturn ate. Hidden away, Zeus grew and ultimately fulfilled the prophecy. Had Robert Paris feared the same end from his male descendants? Or was he simply mad? Or had that family of farmers in San Joaquin been poorer than anyone could imagine?
Meanwhile, the funeral had become a party for the rich. The crowd spilled out from the church, sweeping across the courtyard of the Old Quad to the driveway where I had earlier observed a fleet of limousines lined up behind a silver hearse. So loud and jovial were the mourners that I expected, at any moment, to be offered a cocktail or a canape from a roving waiter. There were no signs of real grief; only, now and then, a ceremonial tear dabbed at with an elegant, monogrammed handkerchief. The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs from which every trait has been bred but anxiety. The body was to be interred in the Linden mausoleum, a quarter-mile distant, fudging from the snarl of cars in the driveway, I’d be able to walk there before the internment began.
The heat was slow and intense, a pounding, relentless, unseasonable heat. I set off down the road sweating beneath my fine clothes like any animal. In a way it was pointless for me to have come to the funeral. Lord knows there was nothing more to be done about Robert Paris except, perhaps, drive a stake through his heart.
I beat everyone to the mausoleum but the press. This was a historic event. No one had been laid to rest in Grover Linden’s tomb since the death of his son-in-law, Jeremiah Smith, first president of the university, fifty years earlier. The lesser members of the Linden-Smith-Paris clan, including the judge’s wife and eldest son, were buried in a small graveyard two hundred feet away. Hugh, however, was not there. I had never learned what became of his ashes.
I removed my jacket, positioned myself in the shade of an oak tree and studied Grover Linden’s resting place. The legend was that Linden wanted his tomb patterned after the temple of the Acropolis. What he got was a much smaller building constructed from massive blocks of polished gray granite adorned on three sides with Ionic columns. At the entrance there were two steps which led to a bronze screen and beneath it two stone doors. On each side, the entrance was flanked by a marble sphinx.
In front of the tomb was an oval of grass bounded by a circular pathway, a tributary of the footpaths that crisscrossed the surrounding wood. That wood was a popular trysting place, and it was not unusual to find the grounds near the tomb littered with beer cans, wine bottles, marijuana roaches, and used condoms. Today, however, the grounds keepers had been thorough.
I heard cars pulling up and then the cracking of wood as people surged forward from the road trampling the dry grass and fallen twigs; the more-or-less orderly procession across the Old Quad had become a curiosity-seeking mob, red-faced and sweaty, converging from all directions as the university security guards fought to keep open a corridor from the road to the steps of the tomb. I watched a photographer shimmy up one of the venerable oaks and stake out her position among its branches.
Finally the pallbearers appeared, walking slowly and stumblingly across the uneven dirt path. They were preceded by the school’s president, who climbed the steps of the tomb and opened the doors. As he fiddled with the locks, one of the pallbearers, an old man, started to sink beneath the weight of his burden. Two security guards hurried to his side and propped him up. His mouth hung open and a vein beat furiously at his temple.
“Welcome to necropolis,” a voice beside me murmured. I turned to find Grant Hancock standing beside me, cool and handsome in a light gray suit. “Do you see that gentleman there?”
