So much for all the people who’d be in earshot of Richard. From there the seating arrangement propagated down the table according to someone’s notion of hierarchy and precedence. The menu was middle-European hunting-lodge cuisine as reinterpreted by the culinary staff that Richard and Chet had drawn to the place over the years. The venison, for example, was farm raised, therefore certifiably prion-free, ensuring that Corporation 9592 would not go belly-up in a few decades as its entire senior echelon was struck down by mad cow disease. The wine list made a diplomatic nod or two in the direction of British Columbia’s nascent viticultural sector and then lunged decisively south of the border. D-squared made some insightful remarks about a nice dry Riesling from the Horse Heaven Hills and Devin requested a Diet Coke. Lots of curiosity was expressed, on all sides, about the Schloss and how Richard and Chet had come to build it. Richard explained that it had originally been put together from bits and pieces of three different structures in the Austrian Alps, which had been bought by a certain Austro-Hungarian mining baron ( literally a baron). He’d caused the pieces to be shipped down the Danube to the Black Sea and thence all the way around the world to the mouth of the Columbia, then up to a place where the stuff could be loaded onto a narrow-gauge mining railway that no longer existed, whose right-of-way, now a bike and ski path, ran through the grounds of the Schloss. Then fast-forward to its discovery and prolonged rehabilitation by Richard and Chet. Richard left out all material having to do with drug money and motorcycle gangs, since that was amply covered by the Wikipedia entry that all present had presumably read and perhaps even edited.