Finally, he said, “This moment was inevitable. One can only contend with the likes of Blackwood and his ilk for a finite period before they turn on one like the wild animals they are. I’d considered moving overseas, somewhere with a more hospitable clime. No use, my enemies will never cease to pursue, and I’d rather die in my home. Well, Eadweard’s, technically.” Conrad Paxton’s face was long and narrow. His fingers were slender. He smoked fancy European cigarettes with a filter and an ivory cigarette holder. Too effete for cigars, I imagined. Well, me too, chum, me too.
“Maybe if you hadn’t done me and mine dirt you’d be adding candles to your cake for a spell yet.”
“Ah, done you dirt. I can only imagine what poppycock you’ve been told to set you upon me. My father knew your father. Now the sons meet. Too bad it’s not a social call—I’m hell with social calls. You have the look of a soldier.”
“Did my bit.”
“What did you do in the war, John?”
“I shot people.”
“Ha. So did my father, albeit with a camera. As for me, I do nothing of consequence except drink my inheritance, collect moldy tomes, and also the envy of those who’d love to appropriate what I safeguard in this place. You may think of me as a lonely, rich caretaker.”
“Sounds miserable,” I said.
Afternoon light was dimming to red through the trees that walled in the unkempt concourses of green lawn. Some twenty minutes after our arrival, and still more Model Ts, Packards and Studebakers formed a shiny black and white procession along the crushed gravel drive, assembling around the central fountain, a twelve-foot-tall marble faun gone slightly green around the gills from decades of mold. Oh, the feather boas and peacock feather hats, homburgs and stovepipes! Ponderously loaded tables of hors d’oeuvres, including a splendid tiered cake, and pails of frosty cold punch, liberally dosed with rum, were arrayed beneath fluttering silk pavilions. Servants darted among the gathering throng and unpacked orchestral instruments on a nearby dais. Several others worked the polo fields, hoisting buckets as they bent to reapply chalk lines, or smooth divots, or whatever.
Dick and Bly, resigned to their fate, loitered next to the punch, faces gray and pained even at this hour, following the legendary excesses of the previous evening. Both had cups in hand and were tipping them regularly. As for Paxton’s goons, those gents continued to maintain a low profile, confined to the fancy bunkhouse at the edge of the property, although doubtless a few of them lurked in the shrubbery or behind the trees. My fingers were crossed that Blackwood meant to keep his bargain. Best plan I had.
A bluff man with a pretty young girl stuck on his arm waved to us. Paxton indolently returned the gesture. He inserted the filter between his lips and dragged exaggeratedly. “That would be the mayor. Best friend of whores and moonshiners in the entire county.”
“I like that in a politician,” I said. “Let’s talk about you.”
“My story is rather dreary. Father bundled me off to the orphanage then disappeared into Central America for several years. Another of his many expeditions. None of them made him famous. He became famous for murdering that colonel and driving Mother into an early grave. I also have his slide collection and his money.” Paxton didn’t sound too angry for someone with such a petulant mouth. I supposed the fortune he’d inherited when his father died sweetened life’s bitter pills.
“My birth father, Eadweard Muybridge, died in his native England in 1904. I missed the funeral, and my brother Florado’s as well. I’m a cad that way. Floddie got whacked by a car in San Francisco. Of all the bloody luck, eh? Father originally sent me and my brother to the orphanage where I was adopted by the Paxtons as an infant. My real mother named me Conrad after a distant cousin. Conrad Gallatry was a soldier and died in the Philippines fighting in the Spanish-American War.
“As a youth, I took scant interest in my genealogy, preferring to eschew the coarseness of these roots, and knew the barest facts regarding Eadweard Muybridge beyond his reputation as a master photographer and eccentric. Father was a peculiar individual. In 1875 Eadweard killed his wife’s, and my dearest mum, presumed lover—he’d presented that worthy, a retired colonel, with an incriminating romantic letter addressed to Mrs. Muybridge in the Colonel’s hand, uttered a pithy remark, and then shot him dead. Father’s defense consisted of not insubstantial celebrity, his value to science, and a claim of insanity as the result of an old coach accident that crushed his skull, in addition to the understandable anguish at discovering Mum’s betrayal. I can attest the attribution of insanity was correct, albeit nothing to do with the crash, as I seemed to have come by my moods and anxieties honestly. Blood will tell.”
“You drowned a boy at your school,” I said. “And before that, your stepsister vanished. Somewhat of a scoundrel as a lad, weren’t you?”
“So they say. What they say is far kinder than the truth. Especially for my adopted Mum and Da. My stepsister left evidence behind, which, predictably, the Paxtons obscured for reasons of propriety. They suspected the truth and those suspicions were confirmed when I killed that nit Abelard Fries in our dormitory. A much bolder act, that murder. And again, the truth was obfuscated by the authorities, by my family. No, word of what I’d really done could not be allowed to escape our circle. You see, for me, it had already begun. I was already on the path of enlightenment, seeker and sometimes keeper of Mysterium Tremendum et fascinans. Even at that tender age.”
“All of you kooky bastards in this county into black magic?” I’d let his insinuations regarding the fate of his sister slide from my mind, dismissing a host of ghastly speculative images as they manifested and hung between us like phantom smoke rings.
“Only the better class of people.”
“You sold your soul at age nine, or thereabouts. Is that it, man? Then daddy came home from the jungle one day and took you in because…because why?”
“Sold my soul? Hardly. I traded up. You didn’t come to me to speak of that. You’re an interesting person, John. Not interesting enough for this path of mine. Your evils are definitely, tragically lowercase.”
“Fine, let’s not dance. Word is, you did for my father. Frankly, I was attached to him. That means we’ve got business.”
“Farfetched, isn’t it? Didn’t he choke on a sandwich or something?”
“I’m beginning to wonder. More pressing: Why did you try to have me rubbed out? To keep me in the dark about you bopping my dad? That wasn’t neighborly.”
“I didn’t harm your father. Never met the man, although Eadweard spoke of him, wrote of him. Your old man made a whale of an impression on people he didn’t kill. Nor did I dispatch those hooligans who braced you in Seattle. Until you and your squad lumbered into Ransom Hollow, I had scant knowledge and exactly zero interest in your existence. Helios Augustus certainly engineered the whole charade. The old goat knew full well you’d respond unkindly to the ministrations of fellow Johnson Brothers, that you’d do for them, or they for you, and the winner, spurred by his wise counsel, would come seeking my scalp.”
“Ridiculous. Hand them a roll of bills and they’ll blip anyone you please, no skullduggery required.”
“This is as much a game as anything. Your father was responsible for Eadweard’s troubles with the law. Donald Cope is the one who put the idea of murder in his head, the one who mailed the gun that Eadweard eventually used on the retired officer who’d dallied with my mother. Eadweard wasn’t violent, but your father was the devil on his shoulder telling him to be a man, to smite his enemy. After pulling the trigger, my father went off the rails, disappeared into the world and when he returned, he had no use for Helios Augustus, or anyone. He was his own man, in a demented fashion. Meanwhile, Helios Augustus, who had spent many painstaking years cultivating and mentoring Eadweard, was beside himself. The magician was no simple cardsharp on a barge whom your father just happened to meet. One of his myriad disguises. His posturing as a magician, famous or not, is yet another. Helios Augustus is a servant of evil and he manipulates everyone, your father included. Donald Cope was meant to be a tool, a protector of Eadweard. A loyal dog. He wasn’t supposed to dispense wisdom, certainly not his own homespun brand of hooliganism. He ruined the magician’s plan. Ruined everything, it seems.”