"Machines, mostly. Components. Things that go inside other things and have to work every time."
"Engines?"
"Some engines."
Chad's face lit with the joy of a man who has found the thread of his own story in somebody else's life, which was the only place he ever looked for threads. "Engines! He's an engine man, and he's in this house. You know this family started with engines? Pemberton engines. My great-great — one of the greats — grandfather. We powered New England. Textile mills. Ice houses. We're practically cousins, you and I. Yours is a — what would you call it — a repair business? Service? You keep them running?"
"Something like that," Isaiah said. "I keep them running."
"A repair business." Chad savored it, turning it for the circle, and the circle obliged him with the first, experimental laugh. "A little repair business. Coleman, I love that. Do you know what this family spends keeping this house running? The boiler in this place is older than the state of Connecticut and has the temperament of a bishop. You should leave a card. No — wait — " He was laughing now, properly, the joke assembling itself in the warm bath of his own amusement. "I should put in a word for you. With the family. Our facilities department — I'm serious, I'm being serious — they're always looking for good help. Always. You can't find people who'll actually fix things, everybody wants to consult about the boiler, nobody wants to bleed it. I could get you looked at. I mean it. The Pembertons take care of people who take care of the Pembertons. It's feudal. We're basically feudal with better wine."
The circle laughed — the woman in red with her head back, one of the men into his glass — and Isaiah understood, watching them, that they were not laughing at the joke. There was hardly a joke. They were laughing at the cue, the way an audience laughs for a headliner whose name is on the building, and their eyes kept sliding to Chad's face to check the temperature of their own amusement. It was the most expensive sound in the world, laughter bought at that rate, and the saddest, and Isaiah had heard it in rooms on four continents and it never changed key.
"I appreciate that," Isaiah said. "A word from you would carry weight."
"It would! It would carry tremendous weight. I am a Pemberton. My word is basically a forklift." He clapped Isaiah on the shoulder, hard, collegially, a man sealing something. "Stick with me, Coleman. By dessert I'll have you a contract and a parking space."
"Chad." Naomi's voice arrived with the temperature of good gin. "You're very kind. Isaiah's hopeless without a project. He gets restless."
"Restless!" Chad pointed at her as at a witness for the prosecution of his own brilliance. "She knows. Wives know. Restless hands. That's the repairman in him. Bianca—" His sister had drifted within range, phone raised, filming the room in a slow arc the way a lighthouse sweeps, and Chad raised his voice for the lens. "Bianca, I'm hiring. I'm expanding the empire. This is Coleman, he fixes engines, he's our people now."
Bianca Pemberton lowered the phone an inch and regarded Isaiah over it with eyes that were — he noted it with interest — not bored at all, whatever the rest of her was performing. She was thirty-three, dark where her brother was fair, in black silk cut like a decision, and she had the stillness of a person who watches rooms professionally. "Is he," she said. "Our people."
"From the engine side. Distant cousins."
"Fascinating." She raised the phone again, and the sweep continued, and Isaiah had the distinct sensation of having been photographed twice: once by the camera, and once, more accurately, by the woman behind it.
"Come," Chad said, "both of you, when dinner's called you must sit near me, I insist, I'll rearrange the — Mother has a seating plan like an invasion map, but I'll mutiny—" A gong sounded somewhere below the music, the deep, civilized note of a house announcing dinner, and Chad was arrested mid-mutiny by a touch on his elbow: his mother, arrived among them without seeming to cross the room.
Eleanor Pemberton was seventy-one and made of the same material as the house — good stone, well kept, load-bearing. Where Reginald's authority was a portrait's, hers was architectural. She wore gray silk and a necklace of old jet and she surveyed the gathering with the calm of a general reviewing a campaign she had designed in an earlier, quieter room. Her eyes went over Chad — and softened, and hardened, in a sequence too fast for anyone not watching to catch — and over Naomi, with a small, exact inclination of the head, and over Isaiah, where they paused.
Just paused. A half-second's appraisal, thorough as a hand on a banister.