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Show Acting Alone Page 96 across Europe and America, it was that you can't really function to your fullest capabilities without making some gesture regularly to appease your conscience. It would eat you up otherwise. So he had seen to it that those books would be preserved if something did happen to the Trianon. This is not to say, mind you, that the building at Saint Paphnutius to which the books had been moved was not itself a firetrap in the same specialized sense that the Trianon was. (Here's where the esoteric part of the Elder's job came into play. He glanced at his secretary, sat down behind his chrome and black glass desk and put his hands in his lap.) The convent out there on the side of Cheyenne Mountain was a very nice place indeed. Very well accoutered, for a nunnery. Besides the wonderful old books in their special collection room, the nuns were in possession of an exact duplicate of one of Marie Antoinette's favorite chandeliers, which they kept hanging in their chapel. The chandelier was donated, as one might expect, by a very rich Catholic convert from Saudi Arabia, who'd evidently missed the whole point of what it means when women take a vow of poverty and join a religious community. A renegade among the three thousand nephews of Prince Faisal, he had been educated in Europe and America, just as all his brothers and cousins had been, but had fallen in love with Catholicism as the absolute distillation of European culture, the West par excellence. So he'd converted; and now he traveled around donating preposterous things to convents, refusing to leave his oriental grandiosity behind, refusing to acknowledge any difference between a nunnery and a luxuriously well-appointed harem. He had caused the priceless bauble |
