The what?'
'Same colour as light Scotch. I'll get him on the phone.'
Emmanuel Weingrass leaned against the formation of rock on top of a hill belonging to Kendrick's 30-acre spread at the base of the mountains. His short-sleeved checked shirt was unbuttoned to the waist as he took the sun, breathing the clear air of the southern Rockies. He glanced at his chest, at the scars of the surgery, and wondered for a brief moment whether he should believe in God or in Evan Kendrick. The doctors had told him—months after the operation and numerous post-op checkups—that they had cut out the dirty little cells that were eating his life away. He was clean, they pronounced. Pronounced to a man who, on this day, on this rock, was eighty years of age with the sun beating down on his frail body. Frail and not so frail, for he moved better, spoke better—coughed practically not at all. Yet he missed his Gauloise cigarettes and the Monte Cristo cigars he enjoyed so much. So what could they do? Stop his life a few weeks or months before a logical ending?
He looked over at his nurse in the shade of a nearby tree next to the ever-present golf cart. She was one of the round-the-clock females who accompanied him everywhere, and he wondered what she would do if he propositioned her while leaning casually against the boulder. Such potential responses had always intrigued him but generally the reality merely amused him.
'Beautiful day, isn't it?' he called out.
'Simply gorgeous,' was the reply.
'What do you say we take all our clothes off and really enjoy it?'
The nurse's expression did not change for an instant. Her response was calm, deliberate, even gentle. 'Mr. Weingrass, I'm here to look after you, not give you cardiac arrest.'
'Not bad. Not bad at all.'
The radio telephone on the golf cart hummed; the woman walked over to it and snapped it out of its recess. After a brief conversation capped with quiet laughter, she turned to Manny. 'The congressman's calling you, Mr. Weingrass.'
'You don't laugh like that with a congressman,' said
Manny, pushing himself away from the rock. 'Five'll get you twenty it's Annie Glocamorra telling lies about me.'
'She did ask if I'd strangled you yet.' The nurse handed the phone to Weingrass.
'Annie, this woman's a letch!'
'We try to be of service,' said Evan Kendrick.
'Boy, that girl of yours gets off the phone pretty damned quick.'
'Forewarned, forearmed, Manny. You called. Is everything all right?'
'I should only call in a crisis?'
'You rarely call, period. That privilege is almost exclusively mine. What is it?'
'You got any money left?'
'I can't spend the interest. Sure. Why?'
'You know the addition we built on the west porch so you got a view?'
'Of course.'
'I've been playing with some sketches. I think you should have a terrace on top. Two steel beams would carry the load; maybe a third if you went for a glass-blocked steam bath by the wall.'
'Glass-blocked…? Hey, that sounds terrific. Go ahead.'
'Good. I've got the plumbers coming out in the morning. But when it's done, then I go back to Paris.'
'Whatever you say, Manny. However, you said you'd work up some plans for a gazebo down by the streams, where they merge.'
'You said you didn't want to walk that far.'
'I've changed my mind. It would be a good place for a person to get away and think.'
'That excludes the owner of this establishment.'
