—Now you talking!
—We should have some sounds all up in here!
Leonie turned round sharply.
—No beats. No music. No nothing. This isn’t some shitty beach party.
They had zero comeback. Not a squeak. For the rest of the short flight they sat and sullenly checked their phones.
We landed at a small airport somewhere outside Washington. The young bankers got into a waiting limo van, which Carter and Leonie ignored, stalking across the tarmac to a car rental place, where they picked up a little Japanese convertible. I crouched in the bucket seat with the bags, holding Leonie’s delicate hat on my lap to protect it as we drove at high speed out into the suburbs, past farmhouses and white fences and flagpoles flying the Stars and Stripes. Carter switched on the sound system and the car was flooded by the last thing I wanted to hear. Believe I buy a graveyard of my own. I asked if we could have something else, but Carter pretended he couldn’t hear me. Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own. Put my enemies all down in the ground. Eventually after a few repeats, Leonie leaned over and switched to a DC hip hop station.
Gradually the fences got higher and the houses vanished from view. At last, Carter took a sharp corner onto a side road, then up a driveway barred by a wrought iron gate. He spoke into an intercom and the gate slid back to reveal a scene like an eighteenth-century print, a tree-lined avenue winding away towards an unseen house.
Gravel crunched beneath the wheels; solitude unfolded over us.
To my surprise, when it revealed itself, the house was on a modest scale, more like a summer place than the enormous mansion I’d been expecting. Old, though. Not old-style or “olde” but actually old, with white plaster columns along a wide porch and little windows set in the gables of a tiled roof. A vivid lawn ran downhill towards woodland that blocked all view of the outside world. The earth rolled pleasingly, as if landscaped solely to frame that view. I think the meaning of private property had never quite sunk in for me until then; its weight, its peculiar authority. Privacy was disconnection, the power to take a section of the world offline.
—It’s not that we own it, said Carter, as if reading my mind. We’re just maintaining the asset for future generations.
We parked the car, and a man in a golf cart came to take our bags down to the guesthouse, a two-story building screened by trees. As we ambled down towards the pool, I wondered idly what kind of electronic security measures were in place. Did motion sensors cover the green lawn? Were there cameras in the hydrangeas? Whatever they had was artfully disguised. The pool itself looked like a pond in a fairy tale, with lily pads and a weeping willow and great rounded mossy boulders on its banks. Around it, thirty or forty people were hanging out on chairs and loungers. Most were in their twenties and thirties, dressed in casual clothes and swimwear. A few of the younger women wore bikinis, posing and laughing to attract the attention of the men, who were mostly engaged with their phones and their drinks. Here and there I spotted older faces, a cluster of substantial sixty-somethings at a picnic table, two skinny middle-aged women stretched out on loungers like a pair of lizards, eyeing up the boys from behind their dark glasses. A large grill was tended by three sweating black chefs, wearing tunics and white gloves to turn over steaks and burgers. At the bar, they were serving juleps and iced tea. Two men were lining up tequila shots, watching the girls in the pool.
—How many hours a week on the stair climber?
—Not enough.
—That one, though.
They looked Leonie up and down as we came in. She put on her hat and turned away from them, effectively masking herself from view. She was more beautiful than the women they’d been appraising, and they were offended that she was making no effort to please them. I watched their sexual interest curdle into a desire to hurt her, take her down.
—Where’s Corny, Leonie asked Carter, apparently unconcerned.
—Up at the house. He’s probably watching us through his binoculars.