The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,462

advice?” asked Randall, his voice deeper and rougher than that of Ryan, but equally patient in its mellow southern cadences. “You’re paying for it, actually, so you might as well have it.”

She opened her hands. “Please.”

“Go back to being a neurosurgeon; draw an income for anything and everything you will ever need; and forget about understanding where the money comes from. Unless you want to cease being a doctor and become what we are—people who spend their lives at board meetings, and talking to investment counselors and stockbrokers and other lawyers and accountants with little ten-key adding machines, which is what you pay us to do.”

She studied him, his dark unkempt gray hair, his droopy eyes, the large wrinkled hands now clasped on the table. Nice man. Yes, nice man. Man who isn’t a liar. None of them are liars. None of them are thieves either. Intelligently managing this money requires all their skill and earns them profits beyond the dreams of those with a taste for thievery.

But they are all lawyers, even pretty young Pierce with the porcelain skin is a lawyer, and lawyers have a definition of truth which can be remarkably flexible and at odds with anyone else’s definition.

Yet they have ethics. This man has his ethics; but he is profoundly conservative, and those who are profoundly conservative are not interventionists; they are not surgeons.

They do not even think in terms of great goodness, or saving thousands, even millions of lives. They cannot guess what it would mean if this legacy, this egregious and monumental fortune, could be returned to the hands of the Scottish midwife and the Dutch doctor as they approached the sickbed, hands out to heal.

She looked away, out towards the river. For a moment her excitement had blinded her. She wanted the warmth to die away from her face. Salvation, she whispered inside her soul. And it was not important that they understand it. What was important was that she understood it, and that they withheld nothing, and that as things were removed from their control, they were not hurt or diminished, but that they too should be saved.

“What does it all amount to?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the river, on the long dark barge being pushed upstream by the shabby snub-nosed tug.

Silence.

“You’re thinking of it in the wrong way,” said Randall. “It’s all of a piece, a great web … ”

“I can imagine. But I want to know, and you mustn’t blame me for it. How much am I worm?”

No answer.

“Surely you can make a guess.”

“Well, I wouldn’t like to, because it might be entirely unrealistic if viewed from a … ”

“Seven and one half billion,” she said. “That’s my guess.”

Protracted silence. Vague shock. She had hit very close to it, hadn’t she? Close perhaps to an IRS figure, which had surfaced in one of these hostile and partially closed minds.

It was Lauren who answered, Lauren whose expression had changed ever so slightly, as she drew herself up to the table and held her pencil in both hands.

“You’re entitled to this information,” she said in a delicate, almost stereotypically feminine voice, a voice that suited her carefully groomed blond hair and pearl earrings. “You have every legal right to know what is yours. And I do not speak only for myself when I say that we will cooperate with you completely, for that we are ethically bound to do. But I must say, personally, that I find your attitude rather morally interesting. I welcome the chance to talk with you about every aspect of the legacy, down to the smallest detail. My only fear is that you’re going to tire of this game, long before all the cards are on the table. But I am more than willing to take the initiative and begin.”

Did she realize how very patronizing this was? Rowan doubted it. But after all, the legacy had belonged to these people for over fifty years, hadn’t it? They deserved patience. Yet she could not quite give them what they deserved.

“There really isn’t any other way for either of us to go about it,” Rowan said. “It isn’t merely morally interesting that I want to know what’s involved, it’s morally imperative that I find out.”

The woman chose not to respond. Her delicate features remained tranquil, her small pale eyes widening slightly, her thin hands trembling only a little as they held the pencil at both ends. The others at the table were watching her, though each in his