The Face Read Online Free

when the Face was in residence. Chef or cook would also prepare a plate of sandwiches or any other requested treat that Ethan might want to take back to his quarters.
    Of course, he could prepare meals in his apartment kitchen if he preferred. Mrs. McBee kept his fridge and pantry stocked according to shopping lists he presented to her, at no expense to him.
    Except for Monday and Thursday, when one of the maids changed the bedclothes—Mr. Manheim’s linens were cycled daily when he was in residence—Ethan had to make his own bed each morning.
    Life was hard.
    Now, after shrugging into a soft leather jacket, Ethan stepped out of his apartment into the ground-floor hallway of the west wing. He left his door unlocked as he would have done if he’d owned the entire house.
    He took with him a file that he’d made on the black-box case, an umbrella, and a leather-bound copy of
Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad. He had finished reading the novel the previous evening and intended to return it to the library.
    More than twelve feet wide, paved with limestone tiles featured through most of the main floor of the house, this hall was graced by softly colored contemporary Persian carpets. High-quality French antiques—all from the Empire period, and including the late-Empire style called Biedermeier—furnished the long space: chairs, chests, a desk, a sideboard.
    Even with furniture to both sides, Ethan could have driven a car through the hall without grazing a single antique.
    He might have enjoyed driving a car through the hall if he would not have had to explain himself to Mrs. McBee afterward.
    During the invigorating hike to the library, he encountered two uniformed maids and a porter with whom he exchanged greetings. Because he occupied what Mrs. McBee defined as an executive position on the staff, he referred to these fellow workers by their first names, but they called him Mr. Truman.
    Prior to each new employee’s first day on the job, Mrs. McBee provided a ring-bound notebook titled
Standards and Practices,
which she herself had composed and assembled. Woe be to the benighted soul who did not memorize its contents and perform always according to its directions.
    The library floor was walnut, stained a dark warm reddish-brown. Here the Persian carpets were antiques that appreciated in value far faster than the blue-chip stocks of the country’s finest companies.
    Club chairs in comfortable seating arrangements alternated with mazes of mahogany shelves that held over thirty-six thousand volumes. Some of the books were shelved on a second level served by a six-foot-wide catwalk that could be reached by an open staircase with an elaborate gilded-iron railing.
    If you didn’t look up at the ceiling to help you define the true size of the enormous chamber, you might succumb to the illusion that it went on forever. Maybe it did. Anything seemed possible here.
    The center of the ceiling featured a stained-glass dome thirty-two feet in diameter. The deep colors of the glass—crimson, emerald, burnt yellow, sapphire—so completely filtered natural light even on a bright day that the books were at no risk of sustaining sun damage.
    Ethan’s Uncle Joe—who’d served as a surrogate dad when Ethan’s real father had been too drunk to handle the job—had been a truck driver for a regional bakery. He’d delivered breads and pastries to supermarkets and restaurants, six days a week, eight hours a day. Most of the time, Joe had held down a second job as a night janitor, three days a week.
    In his best five years put together, Uncle Joe hadn’t made enough to equal the cost of this stained-glass dome.
    When he’d first begun to earn a policeman’s pay, Ethan had felt rich. Compared to Joe, he had been raking in big dough.
    His total income from sixteen years with the LAPD wouldn’t have paid the cost of this one room.
    “Should’ve been a movie star,” he said as he entered the library to return
Lord Jim
to the shelf from which