Lasher

of the picket gates along the flagstones beside the pool.

The house seemed to grow brighter, more distant against the deepening violet. A deep blood-red aurora began to rise slowly to the far right. You never really knew east from west in New Orleans, until the sun came, or the sun went. Well, here it was coming, glorious and not altogether silent. It seemed the birds heard it; the birds were incited; and all the thick shaggy leaves around her were rattling and alive.

It made her happy to see it, incompletely and impatiently happy. It made her feel alone. Designee of the legacy. Lauren had said in a low whisper, “This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to you. It’s a matter of lineage. You traced it yourself in your computer. We’ll explain it all. I cannot talk about it while Rowan lives and breathes.”

There will be a Mayfair Medical, Rowan. That will be your legacy, and we will take our secrets with us into our own private and ultimately dispensable history, but the stones of Mayfair Medical will stand firm for all to see.

She felt dizzy suddenly. Kind of sick. She really hated being awake at this time of morning. Always had. And when Mona was little, Alicia had always wanted to go to Mass. Drunk or sober the night before, didn’t matter. Alicia had to get up and go to Mass. They went uptown to Holy Name on the streetcar. Mona always felt bad like this, headachy with a bad taste in her mouth. That had only stopped in the last few years when Alicia was drinking in the morning, finally, and was already with a beer in her hand, sitting on the back steps, when Mona came down.

But it wasn’t so bad being awake now, seeing this deep red color rising miraculously, seeing it turn to gold. The sheer excitement of the last few days rendered things so precious, so clear. Look at this garden, never forget to look at it. The legacy. Christ, Mona, this is your garden! Or soon will he!

No wonder she couldn’t sleep. She had tried. Best to use this time for thinking, for planning, for laying out in orderly fashion the thing that had begun to obsess her, the location and the structure of Mayfair Medical, where the word Heal would be written. In stone? In stained glass?

Pierce would be her strongest ally; he was of the same conservative ilk as Ryan, but the idea was dear to him; he wanted it to work. The last two months, he had kept the plan alive. With a little pushing, he could be made to formulate, imagine, envision. It would all work out, the conservatives in the firm holding them back a little, and their insistence to be bold, to think big, to dream.

Pierce lay asleep not very far away in one of the many scattered lounge chairs, his jacket over his shoulder. He had wanted the bracing air, he said. He was near the pool. He couldn’t take the stuffiness of indoors. He had looked like a baby when she passed him.

We’ll do it, thought Mona. It’s more than a childish resolve to go around the world before I am twenty, or dig a tunnel to China, or start the most successful mutual fund in the international stock market. Designee of the legacy. All things are possible, that is the key thing to remember.

Not Alicia’s view as she sat with her beer on the step. “I’m too tired to do anything anymore.” Don’t think about her in a freezer drawer. They don’t really freeze people in the morgue, do they? Don’t they just keep them cold?

All those books on hospitals, where had Mona seen them? In Rowan’s room, when Mona had been plotting to seduce Michael. Those books were in the nightstand by the bed. Mona would read them later, study the entire project. That was important-have an advanced scheme before you bring them to the table; run the meeting like an ad for new computers, with all those shiny laser printouts of floor plans, and spreadsheets and lists.

Finally she closed her eyes. She could feel the sun now. Didn’t have to see it.

She would play a little trick on herself that always made her sleep. Her mind was going a mile a second, and so she made it do something: decorate the lobbies and offices of Mayfair Medical-made it pick colors, made it hang drapes, made it choose paintings for the interior, paintings that would make waiting patients happy, paintings that would give overworked doctors and nurses a moment of illumination when they stepped into a corridor or into a stairwell, or came in the front doors.

Representations of healing, something like that beautiful painting by Rembrandt of the Anatomy Lesson. She opened her eyes with a start. No, they wouldn’t want to see that, nothing that terrible. Think of other things, the passive and beautiful faces of Piero Delia Francesca, the soft sweet eyes of Botticelli’s women, soothing fancies. Things that were better than real.

She was so sleepy. She was trying to remember all the people in that big Medici painting in Florence, the one with Lorenzo looking out of the corner of his eye. She’d been five when Gifford took her to Europe the first time.

“Mothers and babies!” she’d said as they went through the Palazzo Vecchio. She’d so loved to skip and twirl on the stone floors. She had never seen so many pictures of that one grand theme. Gifford had whispered sternly, “Madonna with Child.”

Gifford bent down to kiss her. Go to sleep for a while.

Yes, think I will. I didn’t mean to, I mean with Michael, I never meant to…

They know that. It doesn’t matter now. It’s small. You are so like a Mayfair, to want to be fierce and reckless, and then be guilt-ridden! Don’t you know that’s how it is with us? Nobody gets off light.

Are you certain she wouldn’t hate me for it? That it was so small? I didn’t think you would think it was small. That’s the whole trick of it, deciding what is small and large.

It’s small.

Finally, her head against the rough bark of the oak, she slept.

Thirty

HE LIKED THE house. It stood on the street, that is Esplanade Avenue, rather like a palazzo in Rome or a town house in Amsterdam, and though it was brick stuccoed over, it had the appearance of stone. It was painted in Roman colors, the dark Pompeian red, with a deep ocher trim.

Esplanade Avenue had seen better days. But it was architecturally fascinating to Yuri, all these marvelous vintage buildings, amid the other commercial makeshift trash. He’d enjoyed his long walk through the Quarter, meandering, and then coming upon this house just as he reached the border of the district, the grand avenue which had once been the high street of the French and Spanish, and was now still full of mansions such as this. Of course two men were following him. But so what?

He felt the big heavy gun in his pocket. Wooden handle, long barrel. All right.

Beatrice let him in.

“Oh, thank God, darling, Aaron is on tenterhooks. What can I get for you?” She glanced past him. She saw the man under the tree across the street.

“Nothing, madam, thank you,” said Yuri. “I like my coffee very black and strong, and I stopped for a nice quick shot of it in one of the little cafes.”

They stood in a massive center hall, with a grand stairway flowing up beyond them, branched at its landing, sending narrow stairs up the right wall and the left. The floor was mosaic tile and the walls were like those outside, a deep terra-cotta red.

“That’s exactly the kind of coffee I make,” said Beatrice, taking his raincoat from him, virtually helping him out of it. The gun was in his jacket, thank God. “Brewed regular but from espresso roast. Now go into the parlor. Aaron will be so relieved.”

“Ah, then I will accept, thank you,” said Yuri.

Parlors lay to the left of him and to the right. But he could feel the warmth coming from the one just before him, and then he saw Aaron in one of his worn gray wool cardigans, pipe in hand, standing by the fire. Again, he was impressed with the vigor in Aaron and how it seemed mingled with his anger, and his suspicion. There was a hard line to Aaron’s mouth but it made him look more the conventional man.

“We have a communication from the Elders,” said Aaron without preamble. “It came in on the fax line at the Pontchartrain Hotel.”

“The Elders used such a means?”

“It’s written entirely in Latin. It’s addressed to us both. There are two copies, one for each of us.”