He countered with a four-paragraph retort that boiled down to: the ends justified the means. But he hadn’t published further.

Fertility and abortion.

Neurath giveth; Neurath taketh away.

Power on an intoxicating level. Power lust loomed as the motivating force behind so many of the lives that had brushed up against Sharon’s.

I wanted very much to speak to Dr. Donald Neurath. Looked him up in the current County Directory and found nothing. I kept backtracking. His last entry was 1953.

Very busy year.

I searched the Journal of the American Medical Association for obituaries. Neurath’s was in the June 1, 1954, issue. He’d died in August of the previous year, age forty-five, of unspecified causes, while vacationing in Mexico.

Same month, same year as Linda Lanier and brother Cable.

The effects of gonadotropic hormones…

Ahead of his time.

Pieces began to fall into place. A new slant on an old problem- improbable, but it explained so many other things. I thought of something else, another part of the puzzle crying out for solution. Left BioMed and headed for the north side of campus. Running, feeling light-footed, for the first time in a long time.

The Special Collections Room was in the basement of the research library, down a long quiet hall that discouraged casual drop-ins. Smallish, cool, humidity-controlled, furnished with dark oak reading tables that matched the raised panels on the walls. I showed my faculty card and my requisition slip to the librarian. He went searching and came back shortly with everything I wanted, handed me two pencils and a pad of lined paper, then went back to studying his chemistry book.

There were two other people hunkered down for serious study: a woman in a batik dress examining an old map with a magnifying glass, and a fat man in a blue blazer, gray slacks, and ascot, alternating trifocaled attention between a folio of Audubon prints and a lap-top computer.

By comparison, my own reading material was unimpressive. A pile of small books bound in blue cloth. Selections from the L.A. Social Register. Thin paper and small print. Neatly ordered listings of country clubs, charity galas, genealogical societies, but mainly a roster of The Right People: addresses, phone numbers, ancestral minutiae. Self-congratulation for those whose fascination with the us-them game hadn’t ended in high school.

I found what I wanted quickly enough, copied down names, connected the dots until the truth, or something damned close to it, began to take shape.

Closer and closer. But still theoretical.

I left the room, found a phone. Still no answer at Helen Leidecker’s. But a sleepy male voice answered in Port Wallace, Texas.

“Brotherton’s.”

“Is this the post office?”

“Post office, tackle and bait, pickled eggs, cold beer. Name your game, we’re game.”

“This is Mr. Baxter, State of California Bureau of Records, Los Angeles Branch.”

“L.A.? How’s the quake situation?”

“Shaky.”

Hacking laugh. “What can I do for y’all, California?”

“We’ve received an application from a certain party for a certain state job- a position that requires a full background check, including proof of citizenship and birth records. The party in question has lost her birth certificate, claims she was born in Port Wallace.”

“Background check, huh? Sounds pretty… covert.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Brotherton-”

“Deeb. Lyle Deeb. Brotherton’s dead.” Chuckle. “Unloaded this dump on me in lieu of a poker debt, three months before he passed on. Got the last laugh.”

“I’m not at liberty to say more about the details of the position, Mr. Deeb.”

“No prob, Cal, love to help a fellow civil-servicer, ’ceptin’ I cain’t, ’cause we got no birth certificates in Port Wallace- not much of anything other than shrimp boats, black flies, and wetbacks, and the Immigration playing grab-ass all up and down the river. Records are up in San Antonio- you’d best check there.”

“What about hospitals?”

“Just one, Cal. This ain’t Houston. Dinky place run by Baptist naturopaths- not sure if they’re even legit. They service mostly the Mexicans.”

“Were they servicing back in ’53?”

“Yep.”

“Then I’ll try there first. Do you have the number?”

“Sure.” He gave it to me, said, “Your party in question’s born down here, huh? That’s a real small club. What’s the name of this party?”

“The family name is Johnson; mother’s first name, Eulalee. She might also have gone under Linda Lanier.”

He laughed. “Eula Johnson? Birth in 1953? Ain’t that a hoot, you folks getting all covert and everything? Meanwhile it’s public knowledge. Hell, California, you don’t need no official records for that one- that one’s famous.”

“Why’s that?”

He laughed again and told me, then said, “Only question is, which party you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and hung up. But I knew where to find out.

32

The same vine-crusted fieldstone walls and mentholated air, the same long, shady stretch past the wooden slab sign. This time I was driving- L.A. legitimate. But the silence and the solitude and the knowledge of what I was about to do made me feel like a trespasser.

I pulled up in front of the gates and used the phone on the stand to call the house. No answer. I tried again. A male mid-Atlantic voice answered: “Blalock residence.”

“Mrs. Blalock, please.”

“Who shall I say is calling, sir?”

“Dr. Alex Delaware.”

Pause. “Is she expecting you, Dr. Delaware?”

“No, but she’ll want to see me, Ramey.”

“I’m sorry, sir, she isn’t-”

“Tell her it concerns the exploits of the Marchesa di Orano.”

Silence.

“Would you like me to spell that, Ramey?”

No answer.

“Are you still with me, Ramey?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course, I could talk to the press instead. They always love a human interest story. Especially one with heavy irony.”

“That won’t be necessary, sir. One moment, sir.”

Moments later the gates slid open. I got back in the car and drove up the fish-scale drive.

The verdigris roofs of the mansion were gold at the peaks where the sunlight made contact. Emptied of tents, the grounds looked even more vast. The fountains threw off opalescent spray that thinned and dissipated while still arcing. The pools below were shimmering ellipses of liquid mercury.

I parked in front of the limestone steps and climbed to an immense landing guarded by statuary lions, recumbent but snarling. One of the double entry doors was open. Ramey stood holding it, all pink face, black serge, and white linen.

“This way, sir.” No emotion, no sign of recognition. I walked past him and in.

Larry had said the entry hall was big enough to skate in. It could have accommodated a hockey stadium: three stories of white marble, rich with moldings, flutings, and emblems, backed by a double-carved white marble staircase that would have put Tara to shame. A concert-hall-sized chandelier hung from the gold-leaf coffered ceiling. The floors were more white marble inlaid with diamonds of black granite and polished to glass. Gilt-framed portraits of dyspeptic-looking Colonial types hung between columns of precisely pleated ruby velvet drapes tied back with beefy gold cord.

Ramey veered right with the smoothness of a limousine on legs, and led me down a long, dim portrait gallery, then opened another set of double doors and showed me into a hot, bright sun-room- a Tiffany skylight forming the roof, one wall of beveled mirror, three of glass that looked out onto infinite lawns and impossibly gnarled trees. The flooring was malachite and granite in a pattern that would have given pause to Escher. Healthy-looking palms and bromeliads sat in Chinese porcelain pots. The furniture was sage and maroon wicker with dark-green cushions, and glass-topped tables.