Pax’s first task is to poison the guests. (Okay, perhaps I’m being dramatic here, but it is nonetheless accurate.) He has procured some powdered mescaline from Annie Mike—yes, the same woman from the old neighborhood with the failed love potion. He mixes a hefty dose of the bitter powder into the horseradish sauce, sprinkles some into the chocolate fountain.
The guests ingest this drug, a powder crushed from dried peyote cactus. After thirty or so minutes, the guests begin to loosen, to open, to bloom, to hear colors and see music and smell candlelight.
They are hallucinating. They are free from the constraints they’ve consistently placed upon themselves. And they are very much enjoying this soiree.
Oh, I wish I could adequately explain what they see and how they feel. Every nerve ending on their skin is alight and alert, every emotion is amplified, and all their pretenses and façades melt away. They are free, Friends. Free and open and alive.
And don’t you see? This crowd has never been given a gift like this before. The gift of the complete release of inhibition, freedom from the shackles they’ve placed upon themselves as socialites in New York City. They did not know how desperately they needed this release.
(And soon the release becomes quite literal: the contents of one’s stomach, the contents of another’s bowels, emptied. Again and again. A pesky side effect of mescaline. Thus, the long, urgent line for the restroom.)
It is quite easy after drugging these guests to steal their valuables. (Indeed, if asked, many might’ve simply volunteered them. Release! Freedom!) Our merry band of bandits dumps all they collect into an empty paisley pillow sham—yes, a sham of a sham—sitting in plain sight, on Max Blanck’s leather couch.
Pax, laden with the valuables retrieved by the others and the Hope Diamond (which he retrieved through means of his own), studies the safe’s combination etched on a grain of rice. He uses a loupe—a jeweler’s eyepiece—borrowed from the burly Willamina.
While the séance takes place—and wow, what a spectacle! He underestimated Stella’s ability to create such a phenomenon!—he opens the safe and stows the valuables. Including the Hope Diamond, murky with Blanck’s fingerprints.
If any of the guests would bother to look across the foyer into the parlor, they would see all of this in plain sight. There is much you miss that exists in plain sight, Friend. Including We on the Other Side. (Look behind you.)
Instead, the guests are—ahem—distracted. Our magnificent Stella is creating such drama that no one pays Pax mind.
And oh! I watch the Dark Legion swell and pulse and dominate. I watch Stella’s Team of Light pull away, ignore her pleas. Is there anything more devastating than loneliness + hopelessness?
Indeed: Here, now, greed and anger and lust dominate. So now that the initial part of the plan is satisfied, Pax veers into his own realm of vengeance, one he has not confessed to a single soul.
Pax will murder Max Blanck.
THE EMPRESS
THE 3RD MAJOR ARCANA CARD
A woman sits sidewise on a throne, surrounded by trees and a waterfall. She wears a crown of stars and holds a wand.
Upright: creativity, nature, harmony, art, passion
Reversed: insecurity, overbearing tendencies, negligence
The lights extinguishing is not a planned occurrence. The crowd does what crowds do—they collectively panic. But three in the crowd see the darkness as opportunity:
Pax, who retrieves the gun from his waistband.
Kiyoko, who grabs a candlestick to continue this charade of a séance, planning next to rap messages “from beyond” underneath the table, during what she believes is simply a spectacular show.
And Evalyn Walsh McLean, who in her drugged state, thinks this would be the perfect time to dispose of the fake Hope Diamond she wears.
Ah, how clever she is! (She thinks.)
How delightfully cunning! (She believes.)
In the darkness, Evalyn crosses to the punch bowl in the foyer, dumps the fake necklace inside, and hopes the large blue sugar gem will disintegrate fully before the lights come back on.
But returning to the table in her hazed state is troublesome, and when she hears the gunshot, she trips over the shoe of someone nearby. She falls headfirst into the massive mahogany dining room table.
When the lights come back on, that is where the plan goes awry:
A gunshot, unplanned.
A bleeding head wound, unintentional.
