Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

“Now then,” he said. “No distraction. We talk. No, don’t pull out your drawings. We don’t need them. Relax. We are on the sea, on a glorious evening.”

“Denise said you had some problems with the drawings.”

“Problems. Yes, problems. Ray, you are a brilliant designer. Everybody says so. But-you bring me this house that looks like some science-fiction movie. Angles and concrete. Walls that appear and disappear. Don’t you know me better than this yet?”

“When you talked about it-my design-with Martin I thought he said-”

“It’s a beautiful design. But not for me. I want white columns, my friend. Through which I glimpse the infinite sea. A portico. A row of olives. A turquoise pool. You put in this long black skinny thing, Ray. It seems to be edged in metal. How can my family swim in that?”

“ Mediterranean,” Ray said, looking down. Boredom filled him. How many Mediterraneans had he designed in the last five years? They were all Mediterraneans. Every last jack one of them wanted a Mediterranean, and he was sick of designing them.

“You can redo the design? Along those lines?”

“Why not?” Ray said. “White columns, right?”

Antoniou’s face broke into a broad smile. “That’s a boy,” he said. “And one other important thing I didn’t mention to Martin. It just came to me, in fact. It makes me feel excited about building this home, Ray.”

Ray raised his eyebrows, smiled, looked accommodating.

“A man like me has needs beyond ordinary, you understand? I need a place where I can be myself. I never had one as a child. I’d like you to build me a secret room. A basement. An adult playroom. Stone walls, like a dungeon. A good lock on the door.”

“A dungeon?”

“For the ambiance. You know what I mean, Ray. I will tell you how to finish it later. Nothing illegal will happen there, I swear. Just personal play.”

“I know just the lock and key,” Ray said. “A big, ornate, medieval-looking key.”

“Only one key. And Ray-”

“Yes?” Ray, eager, at the ready to serve his master, listened carefully.

“I don’t want Martin to know.”

“Then I can’t put it on the official design, the plans. I can prepare you a private set of plans. I can help you get it built privately, yes.”

Antoniou smiled. “It’s fun, this idea, eh? I was hoping you were not the squeamish type.”

“You need two places to hang people upside down or one?”

“Ha, ha. That’s a boy. That’s a boy!” Then Antoniou leaned in with a serious expression and said, “Can you put a metal-you know, a hook sort of thing-in the mortar between the stones?”

“Sure,” Ray said. Consider it done, Saddam, he said to himself.

“And a safe for valuables?”

“No problem.” Now Ray thought of Esmé’s hidey-holes.

“I’m going to be grateful, Ray. You’ll see.” He sat back and had a drink, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “You know we meet again tomorrow, with Martin?”

“Okay.”

“Be ready for that.”

Ray removed himself, with the excuse that he needed to take a whiz in the boat’s tiny marbled head. When he came back, Antoniou was stuffing himself on canapés, bouzouki music playing softly in the background. His face in repose was sullen, the lines coming down from his nose to his mouth etched from decades exercising power. How had he ever mistaken this Marquis de Sade for someone who would allow him really to use his talents? Ray looked into the mirror above the sink, holding its sides, feeling trapped.

By now, the boat skimmed along the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The verdant hills displayed hundreds of Mediterraneans Ray automatically hated.

“Sit down by me.”

Ray obeyed. Water foamed alongside, making a rushing sound. Even through his sunglasses, reflections blazed like shots of lightning, so much so that he had to close his eyes.

Antoniou placed his hand on Ray’s thigh. He squinted up at Ray, who chewed on an olive.

Somehow, Ray had been expecting this. He didn’t flinch at the touch. Instead he took Antoniou’s hand in his own and held it. “Antoniou, if it was any guy, it’d be you, I swear. I’d be a lucky man. However.” He gave the hand a kiss, squeezed it again, and put it neatly back to rest on Antoniou’s own leg.

Antoniou, at first startled, began to laugh. “Lotta men like both, you know.”

“It never hurts to ask,” Ray agreed.

“At least I got a kiss out of you.”

Ray laughed. “Some big deal, huh?”

The client shrugged, totally accepting. For a while, they just drank and moved through the water, the clouds scudding by, the white foam spraying their faces, the sun going down. Then they moved down to the netting for a while, lying side by side, arms behind their heads, companionable, like a raptor and a naive proto-chicken. Ray felt thoroughly beaten. He kept his smile and told a few good ones even so.

Back on deck, Antoniou excused himself. He returned looking refreshed and perfectly pleased with his life of mansions and yachts and dungeons.

“I love it out here,” he said. “My wife expects me at nine, but let’s open another bottle. Now, I want to know more about you, Ray. I’m hoping this evening’s the first day of a beautiful”-he paused and waggled his eyebrows-“business relationship. You have any kids? Tell me about your wife.”

“No kids.” He talked about Leigh, taking care to say nothing real. He talked about her furniture-making, the church where they married, the vacation they had taken a few years ago in Brazil. As he talked, he pictured his wife; her gravity, hollow eyes, the way she would trace his eyebrow with her finger before leaning over to kiss him, the thrilling deep kiss. He remembered her complete abandonment in bed, her soft breasts-

But he told Antoniou nothing of this, nothing of the reality of his wife. This, the client had not earned.

“You continue to love her,” Antoniou said, pouring himself a final glass of champagne. “Lucky woman. And she loves you, I am sure.”

“Oh, yes,” Ray lied, relieved to see that Antoniou had now turned his regard toward the young chef, who, judging by the twinkle in his eye, welcomed the attention. Ray had been a passing yen and there were no hard feelings.

Later, as darkness came, driving home, Ray realized that he had returned to the tricks of his childhood, channeling another person. Not for the first time, he had mined Martin’s character, thinking, how would Martin handle this?

He wondered if this talent at impersonation masked an empty soul, as Leigh had once accused. Wasn’t he just calling up elements of himself to become other characters, tapping into places in his personality that lay undeveloped inside him? He couldn’t display grace under pressure, unless grace lurked somewhere inside there, correct?

He had kissed the client’s hand, pimped for the firm, saved the day. All right, it wasn’t grace he had displayed. Maybe he had been obsequious. He had nodded encouragingly while Antoniou talked about his columns and olive trees.

Leigh-her gray eyes. Her integrity. He swiped his fingers across his cheeks, erasing what he could.

Kat headed straight for the hospital. UCLA Medical Center held at least six hundred patients. Kat found the parking lot, vast, distant from the building, and tried to find a place as close to the palm-studded entrance as possible. Often, this counterintuitive action worked, and this time it did, when a blue Acura pulled out of a perfectly located spot not five spots from the front entry.

Kat let the Acura out, barely, then swerved her Echo into the spot it had left vacant, cutting off at least one other eager, possibly equally crazed, family member who would now have to spend the next hour cruising aimlessly.