Blood Ties by Warren Adler Read Free Book Online

him
sternly.
    "You won't get soused?" she said, hissing the
words through a fixed smile aimed at cousin Adolph, who was waddling toward
them.
    "How then to endure," he answered, forcing his
teeth to show.
    "Siegfried, dear Siegfried," Adolph fawned,
kissing Heather on both cheeks.
    "And how is Asia?" Siegfried asked, noting that
Adolph's face had dissolved into a soft puddle of flesh. You've become a
pudding, he wanted to say.
    "Blood hot." He grabbed Siegfried's upper arm and
brought his scented face close to Siegfried's ear.
    "They are fucking themselves to death," he
chuckled. "But it is good for business. Soon all governments will
encourage riots just to eliminate the population growth." He laughed, a
silly revolting high-pitched sing-song which hinted at his sexual preferences.
When he had recovered, he moved away to greet Rudi and his wife Mimi.
    "She looks like a painted witch," Heather
whispered watching her sister-in-law. Siegfried nodded. Despite her German
antecedents, Mimi had become thoroughly Latinized, her eyes heavily mascara'd
in the fashion of Latin women. She wore diamond earrings and a ruby and emerald
necklace that stretched over her ample bosom. The twins in crisp crinoline
dresses played tag along the golden rope. They had already overturned a
stanchion, which had made a loud noise falling on the stone floor, startling
them all. Rudi had scolded them.
    "When the Baron comes down you are not to make a
sound, not a sound."
    After the rebuke, Rudi turned and the twins stuck out their
tongues and made faces at his broad soft back.
    The drive from Amsterdam had been devised more as a
punishment for Heather, merely to string out the time, so that she would have
to miss the annual meet at Bath. Ordinarily, she would have put teeth behind
her protest by refusing to accompany him. But she dared not so close to a
reunion. She had, at least, a fair portion of good practical British common
sense. If he became too riled, he would be truly awful at the reunion, which
could be dangerous to their security, her horses, the country house, the
stables and their ample staff of servants.
    The alcohol was already beginning to blunt the edge of his
tension, sharpening, he imagined, his powers of observation. Always, after the
second martini he could feel the wings of his intellect flap. His mind, he
imagined, became a camera, the lens capturing details that, sober, might have
escaped his view.
    He could, for example, feel tremors of expectation as each
new participant arrived at the high arched entrance, captured in a kind of
medieval time warp, since beside the entrance were two standing
"Knights" in full regalia, their shields emblazoned with the
ubiquitous Teutonic symbols. Eyes would shift swiftly. The drone of
conversation would diminish perceptibly. Then the assemblage, having satisfied
the brief curiosity, would return to its original pursuits.
    The most telling detail, observed when Siegfried reached
this state, was the sense of time. Reunions normally were held at three-year
intervals, and this reunion held six months early was an aberration, providing
the gathering with an unusual sense of tension. But the aging process was still
visible and the perceptible changes in others made him wonder why he did not
see these changes in himself.
    His brother Rudi was running to fat, the red glow in the
face deepening, the hairline receding despite his efforts at covering the
patches with a new hairdo. His wife, Mimi, was expanding, balloonlike, into the
conventional matriarchal posture of a Latin oligarch, gluttonous and arrogant.
And the other von Kassels fawning and scraping. Each tried to outdo the other
in ingratiation. One could see the transparency of their approach in little
things. Cousin Frederick would click his heels and bow in the old manner when
greeting the brothers. With Albert, who had not yet arrived, as if the protocol
demanded a later entrance for the favorite son, he would bend deeper; the click
would be