Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

It was a massive Tudor with countless gables, oak crossbeams, and steeply pitched roofs that stretched for almost two hundred feet. While the house was enormous, its whimsical style gave it a less imposing feeling. Most of the numerous windows on the first two floors were lit, warming the damp evening with a pale radiance. Mercer counted eight chimneys before pulling his car up to the covered entrance.

A valet met him and swung open the long door of the XJS Jaguar. Mercer noticed several dozen limousines lined up at the side of the house in parade formation. He stepped from the car, allowing the young valet to slide into the leather bucket seat.

From within the home, Mercer heard the solemn vibrato of a cello accompanied by a violin and what sounded like a harpsichord. He could not name the piece, but he appreciated the beauty with which it was being played. Beneath the cuffs of his tuxedo, his beaten TAG Heuer was strapped firmly to his wrist. Nine-thirty. Perfect. The dinner, a boring affair he was sure, was over, and the real reception was just beginning.

He handed his invitation to a somewhat fuddled footman. Mercer was hours late, and the servant regarded him warily, his drooping eyes scanning the card and Mercer with equal suspicion.

“I fell into a bottle of vodka and couldn’t get up,” explained Mercer as he brushed past the doorman.

The entry hall was a story and a half high with wide plank floors and a plaster ceiling. A cherry wood table sat in the center of the foyer, its gleaming top nearly hidden by a beautiful arrangement of cut wildflowers. The room was scented by their subtle perfume. Above the table, a glittering crystal chandelier hung like a fragile stalactite.

In a room to Mercer’s right, servants were preparing the dining table to become a dessert buffet. Tortes, cakes, mousses, and numerous other sticky sweet creations covered the table that could easily seat thirty people. The classical strains of the trio grew louder as Mercer wandered through the dining room. The nine-foot doors at the far end led to a living room larger than most suburban houses.

The furniture was all nineteenth-century revival, Duncan Phyfe and John Henry Belter mostly. Four separate conversation areas quartered the huge space, couches, love seats, and chairs arranged around identical tables like defensive fortifications. The paintings were predominantly American primitives with the exception of a portrait by Sargent of a mother and daughter and a Grant Wood landscape. A bar had been set up along one wall, guests lined up and chatting away their wait for service.

The musicians were in the center of the room. Mercer watched them for a moment. There was something erotic about a female cellist, he thought. This one, not particularly pretty but eye-catching nevertheless, wore a deeply slit cream gown. Her stunning legs were wrapped around her instrument like a lover’s embrace. He felt like a voyeur as he watched her fingers working the strings and turned away before his expression got him into trouble.

Through the series of French doors at the far end of the room, Mercer saw a huge marquee tent and clusters of tables that the two hundred guests had used for dinner. He was just noticing that the bartender had lime juice to make a vodka gimlet when a hand grasped him on the shoulder.

“What’s a rogue like you doing at a place like this?”

Mercer turned, smiling as he recognized the distinctive voice. “Looking to ravage a Cabinet-ranking bureaucrat.”

Connie Van Buren stretched up to give him a kiss on the cheek. “God, you’re good-looking, and you smell nice too.”

“Ah, but Connie, you’re married.”

“My husband’s in New Mexico,” she teased.

“And my libido’s in storage.”

“Forever the bachelor,” she chided him mildly. “When are you ever going to get married?”

“I’ll marry the first woman who leaves the seat up for me.”

They had first met years before when Connie was working at the Interior Department and Mercer consulted for a German mining concern called Koenig Minerals. At the time, she was devoting a great deal of energy to blocking the company from opening a mine in Utah. They had one of the worst environmental records in the world. Mercer had stepped in at Koenig’s request and to Interior’s great relief, smoothly worked out a compromise that was acceptable to both parties. Connie and he had stayed in touch, keeping track of each other’s rise through their chosen professions.

“I noticed you were absent from dinner. You were supposed to be on my left side. Instead, I had to suffer through some mealymouthed lawyer who spoke in press releases.”

“I figured it would be bad, but I never imagined Max would invite the lawyers too.”

“Max invited everyone he knows in the city. It’s not every day you endow a forty-million-dollar think tank, and he wants to make sure no one forgets it.”

Mercer looked around as more guests filtered in from the tented patio. Connie was right. The room was filling with some heavy hitters. The Speaker of the House was deep in conversation with the President’s Chief of Staff, and behind them, several nationally recognized television journalists were hanging on the words of a very drunk senior senator. The Johnston Group was certainly getting a big endorsement from Washington’s elite.

“Where’s our host?” Mercer scanned the crowd, looking for Max Johnston.

“Oh, he’s here, basking in the glow. He and the President played golf this afternoon, and the Old Man gave his official endorsement. Max is throwing this party just to let everyone else kiss his ring.” Connie paused as she recognized a man tracking across the room toward her. “Damn. Robert Baird.”

“Who’s he?” Mercer noted the man striding through the crowd.

“He’s a lobbyist for the nuclear research division of Petromax Oil, one of Max’s lackeys trying to curry favor. Excuse me while I duck into the ladies’ room.”

Baird actually made an “aw shucks” arm gesture as he watched Connie’s ample bottom waddle from the living room. He looked at Mercer for a moment, deciding if he was someone worth presenting his case to since he had been talking to the Secretary of Energy. Mercer flashed a dull smile, and Baird went in search of more powerful prey.

Mercer was watching him slink back through the center set of French doors when he saw her. Her back was toward him, angled away as she spoke with last year’s Nobel Prize winner for chemistry. In the staid Washington social circuit, a revealing dress was seen as an affront to everything the city stood for. The women present, though formally dressed, still exuded an air of conservatism that precluded any ideas of sex.

But she looked as if she’d just come from a Hollywood awards show. Her dress, deeply black against her white skin, was cut so low in the back that with a little imagination, Mercer could almost visualize a shadow where the two halves of her buttocks split into tightly rounded hemispheres. The skin on her back was flawless. She was tall, but her height was not a distraction; rather it was a pedestal to admire her from. She turned and he saw her eyes.

The mineral beryl is a relatively common stone of little or no interest; in fact it’s considered a by-product of mica and feldspar mining. Yet when aluminum is present in its makeup, beryl becomes aquamarine and is considered a semiprecious stone. And when nature adds traces of chromium rather than aluminum, beryl becomes emerald, one of man’s most coveted gems. The depth of an emerald’s color is determined by the amount of chromium. Too much and the stone is dark, inky, and dead. Too little and an emerald is pale and faded. This color difference is called kelly. A perfect stone, one with depth to its color while maintaining its brilliance, is considered to have good kelly, and its value soars proportionately.