The Face

you be steadfast and resourceful in your work if you petition him?”
        Smiling thinly, Dunny says, “Is that so? Ironic, huh?”
        Patting Dunny on the arm, Typhon reassures him: “From everything I’ve seen, you’re an amazingly resourceful man to begin with.”
        Dunny communes with the Pinot Grigio for a while, but then says, “Do you think he’s going to come through this alive?”
        [219] After finishing his last oyster, Typhon says, “Ethan? To some extent, that’s up to you.”
        “But only to some extent.”
        “Well, you know how these things work, Dunny. More likely than not, he’ll be dead before Christmas. But his situation isn’t entirely hopeless. No one’s ever is.”
        “And the people at Palazzo Rospo?”
        With his white hair, plump features, and sparkling blue eyes, Typhon is but a beard away from being Santa Claus. His sweet face isn’t made for grim expressions. He appears disconcertingly merry when he says, “I don’t think any experienced oddsmaker would give them much of a chance, do you? Not against the likes of Mr. Laputa. He has the violent temperament and the reckless determination to get what he wants.”
        “Even the boy?”
        “Especially the boy,” says Typhon. “Especially him.”

CHAPTER 33
        
        FED, FRIGHTENED, AND FRUSTRATED, FRIC WENT directly from the wine cellar to the library, proceeding by an indirect route least likely to result in an encounter with a member of the house staff.
        Like a spirit, like a phantom, like a boy wearing a cloak of invisibility, he passed room to hall to stair to room, and no one in the great house registered his passage, in part because he carried a rare gene for catlike stealth, but in part because no one, with the possible exception of Mrs. McBee, cared where the hell he was or ever wondered what the hell he was up to.
        Being small, thin, and ignored was not always a curse. When the forces of evil were rising up against you in vast dark battalions, having a low profile improved your chances of avoiding evisceration, decapitation, induction into the soulless legions of the living dead, or whatever other hideous fate they might have planned for you.
        The last time that Nominal Mom had visited, which wasn’t quite as far back in the mists of time as mastodons and sabertooths, she had told Fric that he was a mouse: “A sweet little mouse that no one ever realizes is there because he’s so quiet, so quick, so quick and so [221] gray, as quick as the gray shadow of a darting bird. You’re a little mouse, Aelfric, an almost invisible perfect little mouse.”
        Freddie Nielander said a lot of stupid things.
        Fric didn’t hold any of them against her.
        She’d been so beautiful for so long that nobody really listened to her. They were overwhelmed by the visuals.
        When no one ever listened to you, really listened, you could begin to lose the ability to tell whether or not you were making sense when you talked.
        Fric understood this danger because no one really listened to him, either. In his case, they weren’t overwhelmed by the visuals. They were underwhelmed.
        Without exception, people loved Freddie Nielander on sight, and they wanted her to love them in return. Even if they had listened to her, therefore, they wouldn’t have disagreed with her, and even when she made no sense whatsoever, people praised her wit.
        Poor Freddie didn’t get any truthful feedback from anything but a mirror. No explanation short of a miracle explained why she hadn’t gone as crazy as a nuclear-waste-dump rat a long time ago.
        Arriving in the library, Fric discovered that the furniture in the reading area nearest the entrance had been slightly rearranged to accommodate a twelve-foot Christmas tree. The fresh forestal smell of evergreens was so strong that he expected to see squirrels sitting in the armchairs and busily storing acorns in the antique Chinese vases.
        This was one of nine massive spruces erected this very evening in key rooms throughout the mansion. Flawlessly shaped, perfectly symmetrical, greener-than-green clone trees.
        Each of the nine evergreens would be decorated with a different theme. Here the subject was angels.
        Every ornament on the tree was an angel or featured an angel in its design. Baby angels, child angels, adult angels, blond angels with blue eyes, African-American