Blood in the Water(81)

Except, of course, that Susan hadn’t been Susan then, any more than Caroline had been Caroline.

The two men made it all the way up to the deck itself, and Caroline made up her mind. She stepped out to where they were and waited until they were close enough to her so that she wouldn’t have to shout, even out here in the wind.

“Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “You may come inside.”

“Inside would be good,” the other man said.

Caroline turned to him. “I said Mr. Demarkian could come inside. I did not say you could. You can wait out here, if you like, or you can go back to where you came from, but you’re not going to enter my house without a warrant. Am I clear?”

“Oh, wait,” the other man said.

“I’m glad I’m clear,” Caroline said. She turned to Gregor Demarkian. “If you could come through here,” she said, stepping away from the sliding glass doors. “I’m afraid it’s a bit of a step. They’re a nuisance, these kinds of doors. I’ve never liked them.”

“See here,” the other man said.

“A warrant,” Caroline said, not bothering to look at him.

Gregor Demarkian stepped into the kitchen. Caroline stepped in after him and pulled the sliding glass door shut. Then, just to make sure, she locked it.

“We should go into the family room,” she said, waving to her left at the other end of the vast open space. “They were designed for young families, these houses. I’m sorry about your friend out there. I can never remember his name. Do you know mine?”

“I know both of them,” Gregor Demarkian said. “At the moment, you’re calling yourself Caroline Stanford-Pyrie. I think it’s an interesting name. Very distinctive. It’s not what I would have chosen under your circumstances.”

“Susan thinks like you,” Caroline said. “That’s why she calls herself Susan Carstairs. But I thought it would be counterproductive. One of my sons studied film in college. He says that what you call this, what you call what I’m doing with my name, is ‘hanging a lantern on it.’ If you want to get away with something very outrageous, something everybody is going to pick up on right away, then you call attention to it, and sometimes they don’t pick up on it. I don’t talk to my children anymore, of course. But I remember that.”

“Is that your decision or theirs?”

“Mine,” Caroline said. “I know who I am, Mr. Demarkian, in spite of going under a false name. I know who I am and I know what I believe. And one of the things I believe is that loyalty to family and then loyalty to friends must outweigh any other considerations of any kind whatsoever. Legal considerations. Moral considerations. My sons didn’t agree with me.”

“I think you’re being a little hard on them,” Gregor said. “It was the biggest con in history, the biggest financial scandal in history. They must have known that as soon as they discovered it was going on. It wasn’t going to stay hidden forever.”

“It had stayed hidden for nearly thirty years,” Caroline said. “Did you ever wonder how that happened, Mr. Demarkian? There was my husband, the great Henry Carlson Land, running this enormous business, with fifteen hundred employees, with trading partners all over the world. And he wasn’t being shy about being seen, or being quoted, either. I have a scrapbook full of pictures somewhere, of the two of us. Charity balls. Opera first nights. Movie premieres. Alison and Henry, Mr. and Mrs. Carlson Land. I liked being Mrs. Carlson Land. Did you know that?”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said. “But I could have guessed.”

“I was arrogant about it, too,” Caroline said. “Part of it was just—well, when I was growing up. Everybody was always saying it was impossible. With the tax laws the way they were, and inflation, and people having so many other options for work rather than going into domestic service. The world I was born into was dead as a dodo, nobody could live that way anymore. Or, if you wanted to, you had to marry one of these new people, who didn’t care about any of the things we thought were important. And then there was Henry, one of our own and still able to—well, able to.”

“I think there are lot of people who would be surprised to find that you think Wall Street bankers are doing all that badly in this economy,” Gregor said.

Caroline snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not that they’re doing badly. It’s that they’re thugs. That’s what you have to be to get along in the market these days. And Henry was a thug. I should have realized it. I should have realized that it was impossible for somebody to be, these days, what Henry appeared to be. Well bred as well as well heeled. Operating in the old way, in a gentlemanly way. Do you know he never went into the office until ten o’clock?”