Zechariah, meanwhile, had been far too busy bragging about his proof that he was most certainly not a confirmed bachelor. Look at his children! Look at his trophy wife! Look at all his ill gotten money! And while he never made direct reference to it: look at his manly trade! A stack of hard-won credit to being a … well, not proper gentleman, but a gentleman nonetheless. Proper was never in the cards for him, now, was it?

It was not a man’s job to rear the children, and so he did not push the issue … at first. But he returned to a holiday rental home where he expected to hear the fruits of his finagling labor: crickets in the corridors instead of cries of triumph.

What were his children doing growing up in a brothel?

Zechariah still dressed the part of a drab lawyer by day, with an extra jaunt to his step. It was as though he harbored a terrible (terribly lucrative!) secret at night – but this one, lawful! So he ruined young gentile women’s lives before they even started. It was a petty enough vengeance for his love being a crime. It was at night that the best suits (that hadn’t ‘disappeared’ on Ruth) came out once more. He wore half as much jewelry as a mobster, and a larger-than-life bucket hat rather similar to Oscar Wilde’s before he was taken away. (Sometimes, much to many a prying Englishman’s consternation, Zechariah spoke nothing but broken French in the brothel and feigned selective ignorance of the English language.) On top of it all: a decadent fur coat, and a bejeweled cane for fashion. His apparently giant prick was, alas, swallowed up by the fur trim.

“Esau! Jacob!” he called jubilantly as he tapped down the hall. “Mes enfants!”

The door knob turned at once, then refused to budge. Zechariah furrowed his brow, then fished through his key ring for the key he’d had snatched and copied on the sly.

Swinging the door open, Zechariah’s eyes skipped from one of Sonia’s arms to the other. Easing the door shut behind him, he smiled.

“My sons,” he said, then scooped up Esau to sit him on his knee.

There he was, with his sons … and his wife. Perhaps if he did not make eye contact, he could simply imagine her nodding along.

“I was looking at a few homes on the west side,” Zechariah mused. “With more than enough room for a family of four to entertain.”

All of them with too many guest rooms, but he was hoping to find a way to trade the beds out for things not even Uriel would see fit to sleep on.