Page 8 of Farkas: Gothika

“All right,” Lee said. “I can work with this.” It wasn’t going to be simple. A lot of property was involved, much of it held by corporations. Laszlo Farkas was the sole owner of those corporations. They all had bland names that gave no hint of their actual business—if they had any.

Vincent looked pleased. “Excellent. I will leave you to work, then. But if you do not mind, I will stay here in case you have questions. Do not worry; I will remain quiet if you do not need me. I will read a book over there.” He pointed at the armchairs.

As unsettling as Vincent’s company was, Lee decided it was better than being alone. “When can I meet your grandfather? I need to speak with him before I get too far into this stuff.”

“Soon.” It wasn’t a helpful answer, but then, Lee hadn’t expected one.

He settled in to his work while Vincent reclined by the fire. True to his word, Vincent spoke only if Lee asked him something, which was rare. It was easy to become fully engrossed in the legal phrases. Every now and then, Vincent poured him more wine, but it seemed to give Lee energy rather than making his mind fuzzy, and when he finally stopped to stretch his cramped muscles, he realized it was almost dawn.

“I’ve worked all night.” he said in wonder.

“I am not surprised. I was informed that you are very diligent.”

Lee rubbed the back of his neck and suppressed a yawn. “I think I should—”

“Get some rest. Of course.” Vincent closed his book, stood, and walked over to the desk. “Again I will not be free until dinnertime, but while I am gone, do not feel obligated to labor. Relax with a novel. Explore my home. Or simply remain tucked in bed. They are very nice sheets, are they not? They caress the skin like a lover.”

Apparently ignoring Lee’s shocked cough, Vincent made his way to the door. “Please leave your clothes outside the door for laundering.”

“Are there…. I haven’t seen anyone around. How many servants do you have?”

“I have an exactly sufficient number of people to serve me.” Vincent laughed and exited into the hall.

Chapter Five

That night—or more accurately, that morning—Lee dreamed that someone was in bed with him. He couldn’t identify the person right next to him, who was entirely shrouded in gray fog, but he could feel him. The person was most definitely male, and he trailed long, cool fingers over Lee’s jaw and neck, down his torso, across his lower belly.

Lee should have been alarmed or upset, but in the dream he pressed into the contact and protested with moans when the man teasingly took his hand away. The man fondled Lee’s hard cock, his heavy balls, and when the fingers delved even farther—into that most intimate of spaces between Lee’s legs—Lee shifted his knees wider apart and tilted his hips upward.

He couldn’t speak in this dream but his thoughts were clear. Yes. And, with a sense of certainty, I was made for this. Had he been awake, that idea would have terrified him, but in sleep it was comfortable and comforting, a sure knowledge, like an exam for which he knew all the answers.

Now two hands were upon him, one tugging firmly at his cock and the other teasing at his entrance. When a single finger entered Lee’s body, he gasped at the exquisite penetration and climaxed.

He awoke in bed alone, of course, embarrassed to have had a wet dream for the first time since he was a boy. But then he fell asleep again almost instantly, and this time he didn’t dream.

When he woke for good, he looked out the window and saw the sun high overhead, perhaps already sinking toward the west. But not finding his watch anywhere, he couldn’t be certain of the time. He showered again, mostly because the dream had left him feeling soiled, and dressed in his last remaining clean clothes. The dirty ones were gone from the hallway.

Food had appeared again. More cold meat, some of it chicken from the night before, a savory tart, a salad of roasted beets and crumbled cheese. Another carafe of orange juice and another pot of tea. Lee ate heartily.

He didn’t venture out of his suite that afternoon, although he couldn’t say exactly why. Anyway, he had work to do. He’d made small headway into the Farkas affairs the night before, but now he delved deeper. It was readily apparent that Laszlo Farkas was extremely wealthy. Not only did he own several sole corporations and this estate with its considerable grounds, but he also had fingers in a number of business ventures in California, elsewhere in the States, and abroad. Almost all of his outside interests were carefully concealed under layers of corporations and holding companies, but it was Lee’s job to peel these layers apart, which he did.

One discovery of note was that Laszlo Farkas owned interests in some of the same companies that Lee had been working for on the Bunker Hill project. That likely explained the Farkas connection to the law firm.

Lee was good at this sort of task: methodical, detailed work requiring sharp attention to minutiae. He was skilled at finding connections between things, at organizing scattered pieces of information, at ensuring all the seams were sealed and watertight. And he found such work soothing. It was as if by creating order out of someone’s legal matters he gained some control over himself and the world at large. When he was working, his own lack of emotional ties no longer mattered because he was a part of something.

His progress came to a halt after he opened a crumbling portfolio stuffed with papers in languages that weren’t English. He couldn’t identify some of the alphabets, which looked Asian; and although he recognized Cyrillic and Arabic, he couldn’t decipher a word. There were also documents in Italian, French, Spanish, and possibly Hungarian and Polish. He set all of them aside. The few that were in German he could read.

The Hasenkamps had spoken German at home. It had been his first language, which caused him trouble when he began school and could manage only a few words of heavily-accented English. The other children had teased him mercilessly, and his teacher had called him stupid. He’d learned English quickly, however. By third grade he was outscoring all of his classmates on spelling tests, and he’d progressed so far through the readers that his teacher assigned him to help tutor the other children instead.

But back home, Lee had continued to speak German with his parents and siblings. When his mother was tired at the end of a hard day, she would sit in her rocking chair darning clothes and have Lee read aloud from her Luther Bible.

Even though Lee’s German was a little rusty, he could understand the Farkas papers well. Most of them dated from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the language was old-fashioned, but not as much as his mother’s Bible. Apparently an ancestor of Vincent’s had done a favor for a Habsburg—it seemed to involve doing something nasty to Ottomans—as a result of which that ancestor had been granted a sovereign duchy. Lee couldn’t tell whether this meant Laszlo still held some kind of title.

The rest of the German papers were interesting too, although Lee doubted whether they were particularly important in modern times. A Farkas had owned some villages in Prussia. Another had built a palace in the Balkans. It was difficult for Lee to keep track of exactly what had happened. Partly this was because borders had shifted over the years and place names had changed. What had once been Belugrad became Karlsburg and then Alba Iulia. Equally confusing, all of the Farkases were apparently named either Laszlo or some variation of Vincent. He wished he had a family tree to refer to.

No women—wives or daughters—were ever mentioned in any of the paperwork, although that was not too surprising. In most cultures of the past, women would have been considered irrelevant to matters of ownership.

By the time he’d puzzled his way through the foreign documents, Lee was thoroughly off-task. Instead of piecing together the family’s complex holdings, he was daydreaming about dukes in ancient castles. He wondered if his own forebears had ever encountered Vincent’s. That was unlikely since, as far as Lee knew, he came from a long line of peasants. But the idea distracted him nevertheless.

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