They were rich in the way a magician is airborne: through constant, frantic, invisible effort to keep everyone from looking too closely at the wires.

Every extended deadline, every refinanced note, every friendly banker persuaded to wait one more quarter was a wire, and the whole glittering illusion of the yacht and the estate and the oysters on ice depended on those wires holding, and on no one ever being rude enough to cut one.

People had declined to cut them for forty years — out of deference, out of the assumption that a man who looked that solvent must be, out of the strange social rule that says you do not embarrass the powerful by asking them to actually pay.

I was not bound by that rule.

I had never been inside it.

To Theodora I was staff, and staff does not extend a gentleman his courtesies, and so I did the one thing no one in their world had ever been willing to do.