Well.

Now you get to stand here and find out, in front of all of them, exactly what that pedigree is truly worth.”

Chapter 14 — Case 409

The senior court officer chose that moment to step forward, unhurried, and I have thought since that he had been waiting, with a professional’s sense of timing, for the right beat.

He drew a bright orange legal notice from the clip of his board, and he walked up the wide stone steps to the heavy oak front doors of the house, and he pressed the notice flat against the wood and fixed it there, and the sound of it — the flat slap of the paper against the old oak — was the loudest thing in that silent garden.

“By court order, under Case Four-Oh-Nine,” he announced, in a voice built to be heard across a courtroom or a lawn, “this property is under immediate corporate seizure.