button and the drapes swept across to put the room in shadow.
The man on the other side of the video call was square-faced, with thinning blond hair and an immaculate suit. If he found Adrian’s bath-robe odd for what was technically a business meeting, he didn’t say a word. The commissions probably ensured that, even for an anal-retentive German broker in Frankfurt.
“I believe the quarterly report is satisfactory,” M?ller went on. “Especially considering current market conditions.”
“It will stay satisfactory as long as my instructions are followed precisely,” Adrian said. “That was why I parted company with Willoughby’s in London. They took time arguing with me in ’09, and cost me a good deal.”
“There will be no problems of that nature with us, Herr Br?z?.” A hesitation. “Although I would appreciate some idea of the procedure you use for your selections.”
“I look at the listings and flip a coin,” Adrian said succinctly. “It’s a subconscious process.”
A slight sour smile rewarded him. “As you wish, Herr Br?z?.”
When the screen on the wall returned to its drifting colors he rose and walked down the long corridor to the pool room. It wasn’t large, but it did have a wave function that let you swim against an artificial current. And it was gratefully dim, which helped with his throbbing headache.
He’d tried to drown his sorrows in a bottle of Camus Cuv?e 3.128. Getting drunk on that miracle of the Grande Champagne country was mildly blasphemous, and hadn’t solved his problems. It didn’t make the house less echoingly empty, or chase away the shadows of Ellen’s presence that would haunt it now.
Cognac didn’t make me feel less cold.
But at least the brandy had delayed having to think about it, and the pain did the same now.
I wouldn’t have been good for her in the long run, anyway. You shouldn’t be around real people, Adrian. You know that. You know why you didn’t try harder to make it up. Keep that thought in mind. Ellen… deserves better. All you can do for her is let her go, and make it plain it’s all your fault.
“Which evidently she does. Throwing a decanter at your head is a hint, Adrian.”
He drank four glasses of water, did some stretches and slipped into the pool. Tylenol, rehydration and exercise made him feel“Halfway human,” he said as he toweled off, laughed and swept back the drapes.
He was still hungry after scrambled eggs with chives, three rashers of Canadian bacon and pumpernickel-rye toast.
“But then, I’m always hungry,” he murmured to himself, the habit of a man much alone.
The hunger never went away, but you could learn to act as if it had; just as he could put aside the ache that he’d never be seeing Ellen again.
“You have experience with enduring cravings that can never be satisfied, eh?”
His mood was mellow enough after the second cup of Blue Mountain coffee and first cigarette that he only cursed mildly when the door-bell rang. It was someone who knew the code, too.
There was a screen over the sink in the kitchen. He looked at the man standing outside his front door and sighed; medium-tall, tanned, cropped white-and-brown hair, very fit for sixty, dressed in jeans and boots and windcheater, and holding up an elevated middle finger to the should-have-been-invisible video pickup. Adrian sighed again and stacked the dishes in the washer.
“Harvey!” he said, opening the door without standing aside. “How not glad I am to see you again after so long!”
“You’d rather have a giant pink rabbit on your doorstep?”
“I can do that. You can’t.”
“Stop being an asshole and let me in, Adrian,” Harvey said.
The gravelly voice held a hint of Texas, smoothed and overlain by a lifetime of travel. His eyes went up and down the younger man’s form, from silk polo shirt to handmade kidskin shoes.
“Still dressing like an Italian pimp, I see.”
“Like a very expensive French gigolo, actually. Come on in, and don’t stay as long as you like. Mi casa es mi casa.”
Harvey Ledbetter walked through and stopped for a moment to look at a gold-and-umber-toned painting of a woman in a long dress, sitting with her back to the viewer and reading before a dresser.
“Souvenir from the London thing in ’02?”
“They’d only take it again if I returned it to the museum,” Adrian said.
Harvey grunted agreement, then went on into the glass-walled living-room.
“Still living in this silicon-birdcage piece of sub-Corbusier shit,” he said. “I wouldn’t, if I had your money.”
Looking down his gaze swept over a steep tumbled wilderness of ravines and pi?on and juniper and patches of old snow. In the middle distance two mule deer sprang out of bare cottonwoods along a creek, and a red-tailed hawk went by just below the retaining wall at the edge of the cliff. Beyond lay a ragged blue immensity, rising to the snow-capped Sangre del Cristo range.
“I send you a lot of my money. Besides, I’m a Shadowspawn, remember, Harvey? I’m evil. Of course I like Modernist architecture.”
“You bought it for the view. And you’re not evil, you just have a lot of relatives who are,” Harvey said.
A low table in rough-cast glass held a malachite box. Harvey opened it and took one of the slim brown-banded cigarettes within and lit it.
“And anyway,” he went on, sinking into a leather-cushioned chair.
“A lot of Shadowspawn hate Modernist stuff.”
“That’s the old Mustache Petes. Some of them still wear opera cloaks all the time. For God’s sake, Br?ncu?i sleeps in a coffin!”
“You’re not keeping up with the war news,” Harvey grinned.
“No, I’m not. I told the Brotherhood I was resigning after that monumental cluster-fuck in Calcutta and made it stick when they threatened me.”
“As I recall, I backed you up on that.”
“You did. I thank you again. You’re still not going to talk me into coming back. What part of retired don’t you understand, Harv? We’ve had this argument before.”
“Thought you might want to know about Br?ncu?i. He’s dead.”
Adrian raised an eyebrow. “He’s been dead since 1942, and it hasn’t slowed him down much.”
“No, I mean really dead, not just his birth-body. I took a team in there and we got some plutonium wedges into his coffin. That’ll teach him to use a mausoleum without an escape tunnel just because it’s authentic.”
Adrian froze for an instant. The ghost of a pain worse than silver shivered along his nerves.
“Christ. Now I’m impressed,” he said. “It’s been… a long time since the Brotherhood got one of the masters.”
“Since we got one, Br?z? and Ledbetter, best team in the business. Remember Zhuge Jin? Good times, right?”
Adrian remembered naked terror, the pain of knives slashing at his body, the rage that could not be contained and the face of a killer beast staring at him from his own mirror.
“Not exactly,” he said dryly. “And it didn’t accomplish anything. The bad guys won a long time ago. If you don’t believe me, I can turn on CNN.”
“You’re even more optimistic than usual, Adrian. What happened, a truck run over your puppy?”
Adrian went to stand before the window, looking over the hills and letting smoke curl out of his nostrils as the sight soothed him.
“Well, my girlfriend left me last night.”
“She throw a bottle of brandy at your head, or did you just crawl into one?” Harvey said, his nostrils dilating. “Smells like good stuff.”
“Both.”
“She’s OK?” Harvey’s voice was careful.
Adrian’s mouth quirked up. “As far as I know, unless she went off a curve driving back to town. And the police would have contacted me if that happened. Call it a learning experience.”
The other man relaxed. “And what did you learn?”
“That masochists don’t really want to be treated badly. They just want to play at being treated badly. And that the more I knew Ellen, the more I liked her; and the more I liked her, the more I knew I was bad for her. It’s… not
