Free Blood Ties by Warren Adler Page A

see she preferred to be ignored.
    The waiters cleared the table of the meat and vegetable
dishes and produced gleaming metal finger bowls and large long-stemmed glasses
in which they poured champagne from magnums of Dom Perignon. Again he looked
toward Olga and her eyes met his. He had dismissed Mimi's implication, but he
felt another kind of danger.
    How many dinners like this had he attended, Albert
wondered, searching his memory? Undoubtedly the ritual had its origins in some
feast of the Knights of the Order; they had probably broken bread together and
pledged everlasting fidelity in some remote castle on the edge of the Ostland.
If this elaborate charade was not taken seriously by the assembled group—except
his father—one would never know it. It was Karla who tapped the glass for
silence. The Baron waited until the lingering din subsided and the waiters had
disappeared. Even Hans had quietly faded from sight. Only the von Kassels were
present now. The family.
    The old man rose unsteadily. The color seemed to rise in
his cheeks, blending now with the patches of rouge with which Karla had
obviously tried to conceal his ebbing vitality. But standing now in the midst
of his progeny apparently gave him strength. He certainly seemed closer to his
prime now, more in keeping with the old memory of him as a pillar of strength,
burning with the zeal of his obsession. The von Kassels had not reached the
pinnacle of international power by accident. The Baron had breathed new life
into the shell of past glories, had reestablished the power of the family,
despite the loss of their lands, of their place in the Estonian firmament,
where wily Teutonic ingenuity had assured their survival through nearly eight
blood-soaked centuries. The von Kassels had always known that the land itself,
a sense of place, was not the only measure of power. The warehouses of the von
Kassels had always been stocked with arms and armor, the meat of other men's
folly.
    The Baron stood silently for a few moments. His sense of
drama was always instinctive and Albert had tried from his earliest days to
observe and emulate this quality. Command did not come only from within. One
had to project command through illusion, through the transmission of a
mystique. The rising tide of his old anxiety, which Albert had managed to
contain up to now, returned again. He could feel the pressure. He had
postponed, by will power and self-delusion, the consequences of what could be
coming in a moment. Watching his father, observing the feverish obsessive look
of the zealot, frightened him. Was he about to be called, he wondered, to
assume the role for which he had been groomed from childhood? It was the one
terror of his life.
    Not now, Father, he screamed within himself. I am not
ready. You know that.
    Across the table, Rudi, his fat face layered with shining
moisture, watched the old man. Rudi would accept the role without question. He
had coveted it. Even Siegfried, the rightful heir to this spiritual mace, might
be persuaded to accept it, if only to mock it by cynicism and ridicule. Albert
had few illusions of this life-long terror. It had nothing to do with the
business; he was ruthless about that. It was the secret fear that he could not
sustain the idea of the von Kassels, the sanctity of blood, the continuum of
genetic time. Could his father sense this failing in him, he wondered,
observing the old man's eyes search the faces of those around him, lingering it
seemed on each face, inspecting, perhaps assuring himself that the von Kassels
were prepared to go the next eight centuries without him.
    Surely everyone in the room knew that the old man was
dying. And all knew that he, Albert, would be anointed to replace the Baron, as
he had done in a business sense before he was thirty. It was as ordained as
night follows day. Would he choose this moment? Albert felt the pounding in his
chest. I can't do it, he wanted to shout. It doesn't matter as much to me. He