The silent dining at Kykuit was a silent suffering ritual. This once massive dining room that once appeared to be a throne room of his now became a mausoleum. The only note that filled the humongous cold space between his face and that of his wife was the tinkling of the silver on the china.
Alta watched him through the sheen of highly polished mahogany. She read about him in the papers, his name uttered on the same plane as senators and generals. She read about the empire that he was building, the factories and the laboratories that were revolutionizing the nation. She read the authority. But she didn't recognize the husband she'd been living with or even the theatrical, exotic stranger who'd taken his place. That stranger, at least, had met her eyes, had needed her trust. This newer man looked through her, his eyes fixed on some distant abstract horizon line that she didn't recognize.
"You were in the Times today," she said to him one evening, her own voice soft, trying to overcome the distance between them. "You opened the new aeronautics lab. You were next to the Vice President."
"That was a busy affair," said Ezra, his gaze never once leaving his plate. "Sterling's latest engine designs are coming in better than expected."
"I do believe they are," she said, a hint of steel entering her tones. "But, I do not look at you anymore, Ezra. I look at this... this splendid man on the public platform. A politician who schemes and plans from his study. But the man himself, the husband. who is he?"
Her question still hung in the room. He didn't have a response. He was becoming a function, a power algorithm, and the human toll of that transformation was the slow erosion of the very tie he'd fiercely maintained. The protective stronghold erected to shield them now trapped him -- and her.
He only had one true confidant, if that even existed, and that was the only being on earth who comprehended the extent of his ambition: his captive devil, Baron Friedrich von Hauser.
The debriefs within the secure complex once long ago exhausted the Third Reich material the Baron was familiar with. Now they became something else once more: incessant perverted lessons on the dynamics of power. The Baron, denuded of his own authority, seemed to take some sort of perverted intellectual delight in eviscerating the empire of Ezra.
"You see, the trouble that you've got yourself into," the Baron said on a late afternoon, a thin, compassionate smile distorting his mouth, "belongs to the world of Greek tragedy. You've somehow acquired the power of a Caesar, the ability to rouse nations and reverse the course of history. And still you possess the bourgeois desire to be loved like a common man. It's an unsolvable equation."
He pushed forward, his eyes gleaming with the passion of abstract analysis. "A throne of power is a lonely throne. It demands sacrifices. In order to be efficient, the top man must be willing to be feared, hated, misunderstood. He cannot be husband and king. He has to choose. Your brother-in-law, feeble as he is, understands this. He has chosen to be a popular philanthropist. You... you still want to be two things at the same time."
The Baron's words were a poison, but an enlightened one. He was a dark mirror holding up the merciless realities Ezra refused to confront. He began to whisper on the sly about the newest methods of concentrating power, eliminating political opposition, treating human relations as mere variables to be adjusted. He took pleasure in his own function as the devil on the shoulder of Ezra, the only entity who would never condemn him for his mercilessness but worship its pragmatism.
It was during this period of mounting individual isolation that Sullivan came to him with a fresh and troubling piece of news. It was a loose end, a ghost from the very beginning of his mission.
"It's the valet," said Sullivan in his gravelly growl. "The man who was with you at Kykuit the day you... returned. The same we released with generous pension some years back."
Ezra's focus became more acute. "What about him?"
"He's been talking," said Sullivan. "He's living in a boarding house in the Bowery. Drinks too much. Some of my men have been keeping an eye on him. When he gets long in his cups, he talks. Crazy stories, to anyone who will lend an ear. About his old boss, Mr. Prentice, going to bed a man and waking up another. How his voice was altered, his eyes. How he knew things no man knew."
It was a small inconvenience. The ramblings of a drunkard. But in Ezra's world now—a world of atomic secrets and shadow wars—there were no small loose threads. One thread, pulled by the right person—a nosy journalist, a competitor's gumshoe, an ambitious FBI agent—could unravel the whole package. The story was absurd, but it was true.
The old Ezra would have kept the valet in his sight, perhaps bribing him to remain silent. However, the new Ezra, the man who was responsible for global security, the man who was hearing the hard logic of the Baron von Hauser, saw the danger otherwise. He saw a parameter to be eliminated.
He looked over at Sullivan, his face impassive. He weighed the tremendous, world-building work that he supervised. He weighed the delicate peace of the world, a peace balanced on the secrets locked within his own bosom. He weighed the existence of a bitter drunkard of an old man against all of that. The reckoning was swift and pitiless.
He gave a chilly, silent command, his voice more or less a whisper.
"Just make the problem disappear, Sullivan."
He never elaborated. He didn't have to. The words hung between them, an order of hard and horribly specific detail. He didn't require information. He didn't want to know the mechanism. He just, for the first time, sanctioned a deed which went beyond corporate politics or calculated bombing or the abstract mathematics of war. It was a small dirty necessary murder to save a grand and beautiful plan.
Much later that night, he stood before the tall mirror in his own study in Kykuit. He looked into his own face. It was the same handsome patrician face of Ezra Parmelee Prentice as it was on that first terrifying morning. But the eyes looking back in the mirror were changed. They were colder and harder and emptier. They were the eyes of a man who'd used the last bitter arithmetic and found the worth of a human life wanting.
He recalled the valet whose name he could not even remember. He recalled Alta's tear-stained, miserable eyes down the dinner table. He recalled the sneering, knowing smile of the Baron. He had all that Jason Underwood had ever dreamed. He had power unspeakable to emperors and kings. But alone in the silence of his fortress, he knew the highest price of being a deity was the continual, deliberate surrender of his own soul. He had all the world's power and yet was more alone and more terrifying than ever.