a fornicator. He didn’t know anything. Still, what kind of lunatic would risk the electric chair to cover up a transgression as minor as infidelity? Maybe a Stent Mutton character. But no one in the real world. If only he could ignore the piano wire he’d heard tightening in her voice. ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, awed because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.’ That was Rilke. Obviously at some point old Rainer had crossed Dolores Mutton.
By now Loeser was all too familiar with California architecture and its vacuous hybrids of Gothic, Tudor, Mission, and so on, but the enormous red-roofed Gorge mansion was such an arbitrary and oxymoronic pidgin of styles that it might have been assembled as part of a game of Exquisite Corpse. Everywhere there were columns, turrets, arches, trellises, balconies, arabesques, and gargoyles, none of which seemed to have any reason for existence beyond making you thirsty for a tall glass of iced Gugelhupf. Still, it did have a strange charm, and the garden at the front of the house was elated with flowers. Waiting on the verandah after he rang the bell, Loeser thought for a moment that he saw someone watching him from the driver’s seat of a black Chevrolet parked at the end of the street, but before he could be sure the front door swung open and he was shown into the house by Gorge’s personal secretary, an epicene fellow called Woodkin.
‘Colonel Gorge is in his study, but he will be down in a moment. Please come through to the parlour.’
The previous afternoon, on his return to the Chateau Marmont, Loeser had been given a telephone message from Rackenham: ‘I’m having supper with Gorge tomorrow night and I’ve told him I’m going to bring a guest. Short notice but you have no friends here so I assume you’re available. Come at seven and try not to be too dour.’ Partly because of that last instruction, and partly because it would justify having accidentally packed the absurd item, he was wearing a tie his great aunt had given him, which had an ugly repeated pattern of clock faces. He didn’t really have a plan for the evening. (‘Yes, Colonel Gorge, I should be delighted to have a tour of the house. Will it by any chance include your legendary giant vault of “rare books”?’) ‘Am I the first to arrive?’ he said.
‘No, Mr Rackenham is already here. Would you like anything to drink?’
‘Whisky, please.’
‘I’m afraid Colonel Gorge does not allow liquor in the house.’ Woodkin’s diction was so gracefully servile that it didn’t sound like he was speaking out loud so much as just drawing your attention to a particular combination of semantic units that he wondered if you might find appealing.
‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.
‘No alcohol whatsoever. He’s very strict.’
‘O brave new world. Well, I mean, do you have any cologne? Surgical spirit? Cooking wine? Anything of that kind?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘What do people normally drink here?’
‘The Colonel prefers ginger ale.’
The ‘parlour’ was about the size of a cathedral nave. Rackenham stood at the opposite end, practically out of earshot, studying a portrait of a muscular grey-haired man with a grim, almost demented gaze and the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest. There were ten such portraits hung around the room, and as he waded through the thick golden carpet to join Rackenham, Loeser happened to pause and look around him, and realised that the steel spokes of their regard converged on an invisible axle precisely where he stood. He let out an involuntary squeak of fear and hopped out of the way, then hurried on. Rackenham nodded hello, and Loeser saw that the engraved brass label on the frame of the nearest portrait read ‘Hiram Gorge: 1854–1911’. He glanced at its peers on the left and right. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘The face in all of these paintings is the same. I mean, it’s not just a family resemblance — they’re identical.’
‘I’m sure you can guess the explanation,’ said Rackenham.
Loeser gasped. ‘
‘No, not quite. Our host can trace his ancestry back to the seventeenth century, but no original portraits survive. So he had all these commissioned when he built this house. He sat for all ten of them in different period costumes. The artist was rather good — you’ll notice the physiognomy does become subtly more atavistic as they go back in time. Of course, there’s also no hint here that his grandfather’s mother was a Mexican girl. Or that he has some Creole blood from a generation or two before that.’
Loeser trudged across the room to look at the portrait next to the door, the ‘oldest’, which showed Gorge in a powdered wig and lace cravat, with the label ‘Auguste de Gorge: 1638–1739’.
‘No! Gorge is descended from Auguste de Gorge?’
‘Yes,’ said Rackenham. ‘Most of us are, probably. De Gorge had an extraordinary number of children. Mostly illegitimate, however. Wilbur Gorge’s branch of the family tree was almost the only one to retain the family name.’
‘How can he have lived to be a hundred and one?’ said Loeser, trudging back again.
‘Old for his era, yes, but still no Dracula.’
‘I thought he was ruined after the Teleportation Accident.’
‘He was. It didn’t kill him, though. Very little did, it seems.’
Woodkin came in with Loeser’s ginger ale. When he’d gone out again, Rackenham took a pewter flask out of his pocket, unscrewed it, and poured a few measures of gin into Loeser’s glass. Loeser thanked him, sipped, winced, and gave the improvised highball a stir with his little finger. ‘This house is
‘It’s not even the biggest on this street. This is Millionaire’s Row.’
‘Still. Did he inherit the money?’
‘No. Gorge’s father died penniless in Albuquerque. Sky-Shine paid for this monstrosity.’
‘But how rich can you possibly get selling — what is it? Car polish?’
‘Of every ten tins of car polish that are sold in this country, Gorge’s firm makes seven, under various different brand names. “You doll up your wife, why let her ride in a shabby car?” And each tin sells for a dollar but costs ten cents to make. That’s what his wife told me. You can get unbelievably bloody rich selling car polish. But there’s no heir. The Colonel and his wife only have a daughter, and they haven’t shared a bed in a decade. No male cousins, either. The last one went down on the
‘So what’s it like? To “cuckold” him?’ He had never used the word in English before.
‘Have you ever persuaded anyone to betray their husband or wife with you?’ said Rackenham.
‘No.’
‘There’s really nothing more satisfying than the first time you manage it. I was fourteen, I think. After that it’s routine, of course, and Pasadena is a long drive for me. But the boys on Venice Beach don’t have any money, the cocaine trade here seems to be run by surprisingly circumspect Mexicans, and I’m not about to take a job for the first time in my life. Gorge’s wife likes to buy me things, but unlike the other women of Millionaire’s Row, she won’t ever give me cash, because she’s worried I’ll feel like a gigolo. As if I’d be measly-minded enough to give a damn. So I just pawn everything. She won’t come down tonight, by the way. Amelia doesn’t like to see her husband and me in the same room. She always counterfeits a headache.’
‘What’s the daughter like?’
‘Mildred? One of the most disagreeable females I’ve ever met in my life.’
‘Ugly?’
‘No, in fact she has rather a cud duck, as we used to say at school. It’s not that. You’ll understand if you ever meet her. Now, I may as well warn you, there is one other thing about Gorge,’ said Rackenham. ‘He’s not all there.’
‘What do you mean?’
Rackenham was about to explain when Woodkin ushered two more guests into the drawing room, so instead he just smiled at Loeser and murmured, ‘You’ll soon see.’
