Gift of Gold

object as if it were a woman he was thinking of bedding. “Early sixteen hundreds. Beautifully crafted. Did you know that in one form of Italian swordplay the stiletto was used in conjunction with a rapier? The stiletto was for parrying and the rapier for thrusting, you see.”
    “It sounds like it would have been a difficult skill to acquire,” Hatch volunteered neutrally.
    “It was. The dual style required a great deal of training. But then, the men of the time had ample motivation. Just going to church was a dangerous business. Assassination was a national pastime in Italy during the Renaissance. Rather like kidnapping today, I imagine.”
    “I see.” Hatch winced at his own banal words. But he could hardly say that he thought his employer looked a little too enthusiastic about such murderous pastimes.
    Every so often Hatch caught a glimpse of something in Kincaid’s eyes that made him very uneasy. It was nothing he could define, but Hatch knew instinctively that whatever it was, it went beyond the acceptable levels of the kind of cutthroat enthusiasm associated with the American way of business. If he’d been forced to put a name to what it was he sometimes sensed in Kincaid, Hatch would have labeled it lust. But it was a lust Hatch did not understand. The secret lust that Kincaid harbored was neither gay nor straight in orientation. Hatch suspected it wasn’t sexual at all but something far less wholesome.
    “The stiletto is interesting. Italian, you said?” Hatch asked politely.
    Kincaid’s head came up and Hatch found himself staring into those soulless, unreadable eyes. It was always an unnerving experience, even for Hatch, who, having worked for Kincaid for two years, knew he should be accustomed to the jolt.
    Damon Kincaid was nearing forty but his body was in excellent shape; lithe, thin, and strong. It was the kind of body that could have belonged to either a professional dancer or an expert fencer.
    Anyone who assumed that Kincaid was a dancer was either dumb as a brick or blind. Kincaid preferred physical activities that had a lethal edge to them. Fencing, not dancing, was one of his passions. A stuffed dummy used for practice was suspended in the corner of the office. It looked like a dead man swinging from the end of a rope.
    Even without the strong, lithe build, Kincaid would have been a striking man. He was tall, with features that would have suited some Renaissance sculptor’s idea of a natural nobleman: strong-boned and austere yet refined. His eyes were the only unsettling elements in the physical landscape of his face. They were an indeterminate shade between blue and gray and frequently appeared silver.
    What made the eyes unsettling was that they rarely reflected any emotion except that occasional hint of unnatural lust that Hatch had glimpsed once in a while. Kincaid’s gaze was strangely superficial; completely unreadable and never illuminating. Hatch had learned to use other cues in his employer’s personality to help predict and interpret Kincaid’s responses. It wasn’t an easy task and Hatch had been wrong more than once. Right now he groaned inwardly, wondering if he hadn’t appeared sufficiently impressed by the four-hundred-year-old stiletto.
    “Yes, it’s Italian,” Kincaid said, but he did not berate his assistant for failing to perceive the true beauty of the object. Instead he put the old weapon down on a marble table and walked across the office to take the high-backed leather chair behind the inlaid mahogany desk. The desk had no file drawers. That single fact instantly told a visitor just how powerful Damon Kincaid was. He ran his corporate empire with an aristocrat’s disdain for the niceties of modern business.
    The office was empty of furniture, except for Kincaid’s elegant desk and thronelike chair. Anyone who was shown into the room was forced to stand while he conducted his business. It ensured that Kincaid retained the psychological edge. As the only one who could sit down, he was clearly the most important man present at all times. Hatch was forced to admire his boss’s intuitive understanding of human nature.
    Kincaid, himself, was unreadable but he had an uncanny ability to assess others and figure out how to use them. It was a talent that served him well in business.
    The floor of the office was polished marble. There was no rug to soften the impact of the cold, hard, brilliant finish of the stone. On the walls hung a variety of swords,