of this size you must have a trusted servant or two, or this young woman completely out of her own generosity will become a drudge."
"Absolutely," said Reuben. He blushed. He didn,t want to think he,d been exploiting Laura, forcing her into any domestic role. He wanted to protest, but now was not the time for it.
He had a dream in his heart that these men would never leave.
He did not know how to bring them back to the subject of Dr. Klopov. But Laura did it for him.
"Was it in the Soviet Union that Klopov held you captive?" she asked.
"It began that way," said Felix. "We were betrayed into her hands in Paris. It was quite a maneuver. Of course she had help from a very dear member of my own family and his wife."
"Marchent,s parents," said Reuben.
"Correct," said Felix. His voice was even, without rancor or judgment. "It,s a long story. Suffice it to say we were sold to Klopov and her cohorts by my nephew, Abel, for a fantastic sum. We were lured to Paris, with a promise of archaeological secrets discovered by a Dr. Philippe Durrell who was supposed to be working on a dig in the Middle East on behalf of the Louvre." He sighed, then went on:
"This Durrell, he was a genius of a conversationalist, and dazzled us over the phone. We converged on Paris, accepting his invitation for accommodations in a small hotel on the Left Bank."
"The trap had to be sprung in a very crowded city, you see," said Thibault, clearing his throat, his voice deep as always, and his words coming with a little more emotional resonance. "We had to be where our senses would be overwhelmed with sounds and scents so that we wouldn,t detect the people who were closing in. We were narcotized individually except for Sergei, who managed to escape, and never after gave up the search for us." He glanced at Felix who gestured for him to go on.
"Almost immediately Durrell and Klopov,s team lost their government funding. We were smuggled out of Russia to a grim and ill-equipped concrete prison-laboratory near Belgrade, where the battle of wits and endurance began." He shook his head as he remembered. "Philippe Durrell was brilliant without doubt."
"They were all brilliant," said Felix. "Klopov, Jaska, all of them. They believed in us completely. They knew things about our history that astonished us, and they had immense scientific knowledge in areas where more conventional scientists refuse to speculate."
"Yes, my mother was confused by that brilliance," said Reuben. "But she became suspicious of Jaska early on."
"Your mother,s a remarkable woman," said Felix. "She seems utterly unconscious of her own physical beauty - oblivious as if she were a disembodied mind."
Reuben laughed. "She wants to be taken seriously," he said in a small voice.
"Well, yes," said Thibault, interrupting gently. "She would have found Philippe Durrell even more seductive. Philippe had immense respect for us, and for what we might willingly or unwillingly reveal. When we refused to manifest in the wolf state, he resolved to wait. When we confided nothing, he engaged us in long conversations and bided his time."
"He was intrigued as to what we knew," Felix offered gently. "By what we,d seen of this world."
Reuben was fascinated as to what this might mean.
Thibault continued:
"He treated us as delicate specimens to be pampered as well as studied. Klopov was impatient and condescending and finally brutal - the kind of monster who pulls apart a butterfly the better to know how its wings work." He paused as though he did not like to remember the details now. "She was hell-bent on provoking the change in us, and when occasionally we did change, in the beginning, we learned quickly enough that we could not escape, that the bars were too strong and the numbers too overwhelming, and we then refused to manifest at all." He stopped.
Felix waited, then picked up the thread.
"Now the Chrism cannot be extracted from us by force," he explained, glancing from Laura to Reuben and back again to Laura. "It cannot be withdrawn with a hypodermic or a sponge biopsy from the tissue in our mouths. The crucial cells become inert and then disintegrate within seconds. I discovered this long ago in my own stumbling fashion in the early centuries of science, and only confirmed it in the secret laboratory in this house. The ancients knew this from trial and error. We were not the first Morphenkinder ever imprisoned by those who