Free Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper Page B

that stifled small talk. In that high, smothered room Jagger had not only seen but felt him, like a hot wave that started just behind his eyes and flooded throughout his mind, examining every thought and approving them all. Every insight: approved. Every ambition: approved. Every aspect of himself was accepted, as he was, as he intended to be.
    A more fanciful man than Jagger might have made a story out of this, but despite all his reading, Jake had no imagination. He did not wonder about Webster’s psyche or substance. He simply told himself that a man with Webster’s wealth and power would be different from other men, and Jake revised his own expectations to accord with that difference. His rapidadvancement in the organization and his acceptance by Webster himself was proof that a relationship between him and Webster existed. If Webster didn’t want to talk about it or want others to know about it, fine. Jake could imagine some good reasons for keeping the matter private. He could wait.
    Two years later he knew his patience had paid off when, as a doggedly faithful, unquestioning member of the Alliance, he was sent to Santa Fe with the suggestion that he marry well, beget children, and become well-known. With the help of people Jake had come to know well and pay well, he had done so, picking a wife on the basis of her fortune, wooing her relentlessly, charmingly, as he had learned to do with possible candidates for membership. He had wordlessly and methodically raped her on their wedding night and thereafter as needed until two pregnancies—the first had resulted in a girl—had been achieved. As soon as the children were old enough, he had packed them off to the Alliance headquarters, where children of members were educated. He was not fond of them. They were only pieces in the game, the boy an elusive stranger and the girl a receptacle for which some use might eventually be found. Just as his wife, Helen, was a piece in the game for which some other use might be found.
    Below Jagger’s aerie a car nosed its way onto Hyde Park from one of the tangle of little streets below Gonzales. It turned upward, the headlights painting twin cones of yellow across the juniper- and chamiza-flecked hill. Without meaning to, without knowing he was, Jagger held his breath. The car slowed as it neared the entry to the hilltop complex, slowed even more, hesitated, then turned in to begin the steeper climb toward the house.
    Well. He lifted his chin, settling his collar, then smoothed his hair with both hands. It was good hair, graying but full, well cut, the forehead line echoing the line of his eyebrows, also gray and full. His face was heavy, but the heaviness was in the bone, in the prowlike thrust of the jaw, the impressive mass of the temples. Some might have judged the eyes too small for this face, too deeply set and veiled. No one would deny their concentrated alertness.
    He watched a moment longer, making sure the car was coming to this house, then strode to the door and waited just inside. To open it in advance would seem too eager. To be slow answering it would be impolite. He let the steps approach,the doorbell ring, then counted one, two, three, four, five before thumbing the latch.
    â€œMr. Jagger,” said an unfamiliar voice, coming from an unfamiliar person—a slight rumple-suited form wearing a creased, anonymous face behind thick-lensed glasses.
    Ah, but Webster was there also, almost invisible in the dusk, looming over the shoulder of the little man.
    â€œMr. Keepe is one of our people,” Webster said in his sonorous, hypnotic voice.
    â€œRaymond Keepe.” The smaller man nodded, bobbed, cocked his head, birdlike.
    Jagger stood aside, half bowing them in. Keepe divested himself of a wrinkled topcoat. Webster wore none. Jagger hung up the coat and led the way down the hall into the spacious room beyond, where lamplight pooled on saltillo tile and leather chairs, on Navajo weavings