The Face

spirit.
        Ghost Dad knew very little about the train room. He had spent enough money on the collection to purchase the entire nation of Tuvalu, but he rarely played here.
        Most people had never heard of the nation of Tuvalu. On nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean, with a population of just ten thousand, its major exports were copra and coconuts.
        Most people had no idea what copra might be. Neither did Fric. He’d been meaning to look it up ever since he’d learned about Tuvalu.
        The train room was in the higher of two basements, adjacent to the upper garage. It measured sixty-eight feet by forty-four feet, which amounted to more square footage than in the average home.
        [96] The lack of windows ensured that the real world could not intrude. The railroad fantasy ruled.
        Along the two short walls, floor-to-ceiling shelves housed the train collection, except for whatever models were currently in use.
        On the two long walls hung fabulous paintings of trains. Here, a locomotive exploded through thick luminous masses of fog, headlamp blazing. There, a train traveled a moonlit prairie. Trains of every vintage raced through forests, crossed rivers, climbed mountains in rain and sleet and snow and fog and dark of night, clouds billowing from their smokestacks, sparks flying from their wheels.
        At the center of this great space, on a massive table with many legs, stood a sculptured landscape of green hills, fields, forests, valleys, ravines, rivers, lakes. Seven miniature villages comprised of hundreds of intricately detailed structures were served by country lanes, eighteen bridges, nine tunnels. Convex curves, concave curves, horseshoe curves, straightaways, descending grades, and ascending grades featured more train track than there were coconuts in Tuvalu.
        This amazing construction measured fifty feet by thirty-two, and you could either walk around it or, by lifting a gate, enter into it and take a tour on an inner racetrack walkway, as though you were a giant vacationing in the land of Lilliput.
        Fric was in the thick of it.
        He had distributed armies of toy soldiers across this landscape and had been playing trains and war at the same time. Considering the resources at his command for the game, it should have been more fun than it was.
        Telephones were located at both the exterior and the interior control stations. When they rang with his personal tone, the sound startled him. He seldom received calls.
        Twenty-four phone lines served the estate. Two of these were dedicated to the security system, another to the off-site monitoring of the hotel-type heating and air-conditioning system. Two were fax lines, and two were dedicated Internet lines.
        [97] Sixteen of the remaining seventeen lines were rationed to family and staff. Line 24 had a higher purpose.
        Fric’s father enjoyed the use of four lines because everyone in the world-once even the President of the United States-wanted to talk to him. Calls for Charming-or Chan or Channi, or even (in the case of one infatuated actress) Chi-Chi-often came in even when he wasn’t in residence.
        Mrs. McBee had four lines, although this didn’t mean, as the Ghost Dad sometimes joked, that Mrs. McBee should start to think that she was as important as her boss.
        Ha, ha, ha.
        One of those four lines served Mr. and Mrs. McBee’s apartment. The other three were her business phones.
        On an ordinary day, management of the house didn’t require those three lines. When Mrs. McBee had to plan and execute a party for four or five hundred Hollywood nitwits, however, three telephones were not always sufficient to deal with the event designer, the food caterer, the florist, the talent hookers, and the uncountable other mysterious agencies and forces that she had to marshal in order to produce an unforgettable evening.
        Fric wondered if all that effort and expense was worthwhile. At the end of the night, half the guests departed so drunk or so drug-fried that in the morning they wouldn’t remember where they had been.
        If you sat them in lawn chairs, gave them bags of burgers, and provided tanker trucks of wine, they would get wasted as usual. Then they’d go home and puke their guts out as usual, collapse into unconsciousness as usual, and wake up the next day none the wiser.
        Because he was chief of security, Mr.