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"Yes, sir. It certainly is that."
At twenty, Andrew Lloyd Blood was overweight, weak-chinned, and rather pasty,
but he made close to ten times the money that his older brother Michael made
as
Chief Inspector. He was in training for the family business, which meant that
he
was learning to become a shark, and he was an astonishingly quick study. He
was
not quite ready for the subtle world of investment banking yet, because those
polished predators took carefully selective bites and sheared the flesh off
very
neatly, whereas Andrew had a tendency to chomp at everything in sight as if in
a
blood-crazed feeding frenzy. So, appropriately, he had become a stockbroker.
Occasionally he even made some money for his clients. However, that was not
his
chief concern. Andrew was chiefly concerned with making enough money to
support
his hobby, which was self-gratification. Consequently he was eagerly looking
forward to the evening's entertainment, and especially to meeting the
mysterious
Lord Carfax.
It seemed that everyone who was anyone was talking about him, but no one
really
seemed to know just who he was. It was impossible to trace the fellow's
lineage,
which was a pity, Andrew thought. There was no help from anything like
Debrett's
anymore; the whole thing was so corrupt that one could practically rent a
peerage for a fortnight these days. A bloody fishmonger could print up cards
and
call himself Lord Wanking Bumkisser or whatever; even the House of Lords was
full of the worst sort of people nowadays. The only way that one could judge
anymore was by the way a fellow carried himself, by his manner and his sense
of
style, and if it turned out later that he was descended from a long line of
tradesmen, then one could always harrumph and raise one's eyebrows and say,
"How
shocking!" and hope that one's own pedigree was not too closely scrutinized.
Carfax, by all reports, was quite the real thing, and if he wasn't, well,
then
he should have been, which amounted to the same thing, more or less. He was
fabulously wealthy and old-school to the core, despite having grown up in
India
or Thailand or wherever, some damned wog country, but for all that, he knew a
thing or two the locals didn't. Yes, indeed, I'll bet he does, thought
Andrew,
living like some bloody maharaja in Kafiristan or wherever the hell it was he
came from. Handsome, young, elegant, and charming, Carfax was the epitome of
what the empire had stood for in the old days, and he was said to give
fantastic
parties.
Andrew had all this on the best authority. He'd heard it from one of his new
clients, a young chap named Joseph Lymon who'd come into a kingly inheritance
from an uncle in Los Angeles or something; it didn't really matter because he
was a splendid fellow who was well on his way to turning his apparently
considerable inheritance into a staggering fortune. He completely disregarded
all of Andrew's best advice and insisted on picking his own stocks, which
subsequently performed amazingly. In short order, knowing a good thing when
he
saw one, Andrew had hitched his star to Lymon's, buying when he bought and
selling when he sold, and invariably Andrew prospered. Andrew had cultivated
a
friendship with Lymon, sponsoring him into his club and introducing him to
all
the right people, and one night Lymon had confessed that he actually received
his stock-market tips from a friend of his named Lord Carfax.
This news had electrified Andrew, as he had been hearing fascinating things
about the young Lord Nigel Carfax ever since he had arrived in London from
Sumatra, or wherever it was he came from. No one really seemed to know,
though
everyone agreed that it was some far-off, exotic place in the Far East. Or
was
it the Middle East? No matter, the point was that everyone had heard of him,
yet
it seemed that few people had actually met him, though some people claimed
having been to his parties at his elegant Georgian town house in Charles
Street,
or at his .newly reconstructed medieval castle on the outskirts of London.
And
stories of these exclusive parties grew more and more fantastic with each
telling. Reportedly they were not parries quite so much as orgies, but orgies
of
a highly refined nature, admitting only the best sort of people and providing
only the finest sort of cuisine and entertainment.
And what entertainment! Andrew had heard incredible stories about the women
at
Lord Carfax's parties. The man was said to have a magnetic personality and a
voracious sexual appetite. Society women of Andrew's acquaintance were either
scandalized by these stories or slyly claimed to have attended his parties,
and
even if they hadn't, all of them doubtless wanted to. In any case, it seemed
that; everyone had been talking for weeks about the party Carfax was throwing
that night. It was to be a masked ball. And Andrew, thanks to his good
friend,
Joey Lymon, had received an invitation!
Andrew had dressed as Napoleon. Joey Lymon had arrived to pick him up dressed
in
a dark costume with a top hat and a long black cloak with a high collar.
"Who are you supposed to be?" asked Andrew.
Joey had smiled. "Can't you tell, Andrew? I'm the Ripper."
"Oh, I say!" Andrew had exclaimed, chuckling. "What a capital idea! Wish I'd
thought of it!"
"Well, we can't have two Rippers at the same party, can we?" Joey said,
opening
the car door for him.
"No, I suppose not," said Andrew. "Still, I ought to have done better than
Napoleon, don't you think? There're bound to be several Napoleons at the
party,
aren't there? I mean, it's sort of an obvious choice."
"Which may be precisely why most people would shy away from it," said Joey as
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