Weaveworld

I

TO SELL IS TO OWN

1

hat was the most important lesson Shadwell had learned as a salesman. If what you possessed was desired ardently enough by another person, then you as good as possessed that person too.

Even princes could be owned. Here they were now, or their modern equivalent, all assembled at his call: the old money and the new, the aristocracy and the arrivistes. watching each other warily, and eager as children for a glimpse of the treasure they were here to fight over.

Paul van Niekerk, reputed to own the finest collection of erotica in the world, outside the walls of the Vatican; Marguerite Pierce, who had with the death of her parents inherited at the tender age of nineteen one of the largest personal fortunes in Europe; Beauclerc Norris, the Hamburger King, whose company owned small states; the oil billionaire Alexander A., who was within hours of death in a Washington hospital but had sent his companion of many years, a woman who answered only to Mrs A., Michael Rahimzadeh, the origins of whose fortune were impossible to trace, its previous owners all recently, and suddenly, deceased; Leon Devereaux, who’d come hot-foot from Johannesburg, his pockets lined with gold dust; and finally, an unnamed individual whose features had been toyed with by a succession of surgeons, who could not take from his eyes the look of a man with an unspeakable history.

That was the seven.