That was unusual.

The Larssons' youngest had a cat carrier on her lap; the beast's bulging yellow eyes shone through the bars, radiating despair and outrage. It wasn't taking the trip well; cats seldom did, being little furry Republicans with an inbuilt aversion to change. Judging from an ammonia waft, it was-literally-pissed off.

The kid was unusual as well, all huge silver-blue eyes and long white-blond hair, dressed in some sort of medieval-looking suede leather outfit, her nose in a book-an illustrated Tolkien with a tooled-leather cover. She had an honest-to-God bow in a case leaning against her chair, and a quiver of arrows.

She kept her face turned to the print, ignoring him. He'd been raised to consider that sort of behavior rude, but then, she was probably used to ignoring the chauffeur, and his family hadn't had many employees.

Havel grinned at the thought. His dad had worked the Iron Range mines from the day he got back from Vietnam and got over a case of shrapnel acne picked up at Khe Sanh; his father had done the same after getting back from a tour of Pacific beauty spots like Iwo Jima, in 1945; his father had done the Belleau Wood Tour de France in 1918 before settling down to feed the steel mills; and his father had gone straight into the mines after arriving from Finland in 1895. When the mines weren't hiring, the Havel men cut timber and worked the little farm the family had acquired around the turn of the century and did any sort of honest labor that fell their way.

Kenneth Larsson matched the grin and stood, extending a hand. It was soft but strong; the man behind it was in his fifties, which made him twice Mike Havel's age; graying blond ponytail, shoulders still massive but the beer gut straining at his expensive leather jacket, square ruddy face smiling.