“Oppressive. We’re not being watched, but the feeling is almost the same.”
“More than that,” she said. “Different. The world has changed—or the way I look at it.”
“Me too.”
“Something’s been . . . lost.”
And we’ll never find it again, he thought.
The Ritz-Carlton was a remarkable hotel, exquisitely tasteful, with generous applications of marble, limestone, granite, quality art, and antiques throughout its public areas. The enormous flower arrangements, on display wherever one turned, were the most artfully fashioned that Oslett had ever seen. Attired in subdued uniforms, courteous, omnipresent, the staff seemed to outnumber the guests. All in all, it reminded Oslett of home, the Connecticut estate on which he had been raised, although the family mansion was larger than the Ritz-Carlton, was furnished with antiques only of museum quality, had a staff-to-family ratio of six to one, and featured a landing pad large enough to accommodate the military helicopters in which the President of the United States and his retinue sometimes traveled.
The two-bedroom suite with spacious living room, in which Drew Oslett and Clocker were quartered, offered every amenity from a fully stocked bar to marble shower stalls so spacious that it would have been possible for a visiting ballet dancer to practice entrechats during his morning ablutions. The towels were not by Pratesi, as were those he had used all his life, but they were good Egyptian cotton, soft and absorbent.
By 7:50 Tuesday morning, Oslett had dressed in a white cotton shirt with whalebone buttons by Theophilus Shirtmakers of London, a navy-blue cashmere blazer crafted with sublime attention to detail by his personal tailor in Rome, gray wool slacks, black oxfords (an eccentric touch) handmade by an Italian cobbler living in Paris, and a club tie in stripes of navy, maroon, and gold. The color of his silk pocket handkerchief precisely matched the gold in his tie.
Thus attired, his mood elevated by his sartorial perfection, he went looking for Clocker. He didn’t desire the big man’s company, of course; he just preferred, for his own peace of mind, to know what Clocker was up to at all times. And he nurtured the hope that one blessed day he would discover Karl Clocker dead, felled by a massive cardiac infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, or an alien death ray like those about which the big man was always reading.
Clocker was in a patio chair on the balcony off the living room, ignoring a breathtaking view of the Pacific, his nose stuck in the last chapter of
After failing to respond to Oslett’s first “good morning, ” Clocker replied to the repetition of those words with the improbable split-finger greeting that characters gave each other on
The day was warmish, already seventy. Blue skies and balmy breezes were a welcome change from the chill of the previous night.
Promptly at eight o’clock—barely in time to prevent Oslett from being driven mad by the lulling cries of sea gulls, the tranquilizing rumble of the incoming combers, and the faint laughter of the early surfers paddling their boards out to sea—the Network representative arrived to brief them on developments. He was a far different item from the hulking advance man who’d driven them from the airport to the Ritz-Carlton several hours earlier. Savile Row suit. Club tie. Good Bally wingtips. One look at him was all Oslett needed to be certain that he owned no article of clothing on which was printed a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared.
He said his name was Peter Waxhill, and he was probably telling the truth. He was high enough in the organization to know Oslett’s and Clocker’s real names—although he had booked them into the hotel as John Galbraith and John Maynard Keynes—so there was no reason for him to conceal his own.
Waxhill appeared to be in his early forties, ten years older than Oslett, but the razor-cut hair at his temples was feathered with gray. At six feet, he was tall but not overbearing; he was slim but fit, handsome but not dauntingly so, charming but not familiar. He handled himself not merely as if he had been a diplomat for decades but as if he had been genetically engineered for that career.
After introducing himself and commenting on the weather, Waxhill said, “I took the liberty of inquiring with room service if you’d had breakfast, and as they said you hadn’t, I’m afraid I took the further liberty of ordering for the three of us, so we can breakfast and discuss business simultaneously. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Oslett said, impressed by the man’s suave-ness and efficiency.
No sooner had he responded than the suite doorbell rang, and Waxhill ushered in two waiters pushing a serving cart covered with a white tablecloth and stacked with dishes. In the center of the living room, the waiters raised hidden leaves on the cart, converting it into a round table, and distributed chargers-plates-napkins -cups- saucers-glassware-flatware with the grace and speed of magicians manipulating playing cards. Together they caused to appear a variety of serving dishes from bottomless compartments under the table, until suddenly breakfast appeared as if from thin air: scrambled eggs with red peppers, bacon, sausages, kippers, toast, croissants, hot-house strawberries accompanied by brown sugar and small pitchers of heavy cream, fresh orange juice, and a silver-plated thermos-pot of coffee.
Waxhill complimented the waiters, thanked them, tipped them, and signed for the bill, remaining in motion the whole time, so that he was returning the room-service ticket and hotel pen to them as they were crossing the threshold into the corridor.
When Waxhill closed the door and returned to the table, Oslett said, “Harvard or Yale?”
“Yale. And you?”
“Princeton. Then Harvard.”
“In my case, Yale and then Oxford.”
“The President went to Oxford,” Oslett noted.
“Did he indeed,” Waxhill said, raising his eyebrows, pretending this was news. “Well, Oxford endures, you know.”
Apparently having finished the final chapter of
They pulled up three straight-backed occasional chairs and sat down to breakfast. Clocker didn’t take off his hat.
As they transferred food from the serving dishes to their plates, Waxhill said, “Overnight, we’ve picked up a few interesting bits of background on Martin Stillwater, the most important of which relates to his oldest daughter’s hospitalization five years ago.”
“What was wrong with her?” Oslett asked.
“They didn’t have a clue at first. Based on the symptoms, they suspected cancer. Charlotte—that’s the daughter, she was four years old at the time—was in rather desperate shape for a while, but it eventually proved to be an unusual blood-chemistry imbalance, quite treatable.”
“Good for her,” Oslett said, though he didn’t care whether the Stillwater girl had lived or died.
“Yes, it was,” Waxhill said, “but at her lowest point, when the doctors were edging toward a more terminal diagnosis, her father and mother underwent bone-marrow aspiration. Extraction of bone marrow with a special aspirating needle.”
“Sounds painful.”
“No doubt. Doctors required samples to determine which parent would be the best donor in case a marrow transplant was required. Charlotte’s marrow was producing little new blood, and indications were that malignancy
