“I’d give anything to be a fly on the wall,” Kit said. “It’s going to be a hell of a party now. Asher better have food tasters on hand. I’m sure there are a lot of people who are ready to do him in. Take notes, will you?”
Someone’s phone rang.
“Mine,” David said and answered. “Yo, man. What’s up?”
He flipped to a clean page in his notebook and began scribbling.
“Right. Thanks. I’ll be there. I owe you, man.” He hung up. “They just pulled a body out of the Potomac. Not sure if it’s male or female.”
I reached for my coffee cup on the parapet and knocked it over. It was empty and I caught it just before it fell off the bridge into the creek.
David leaned over and squeezed my shoulder. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I find out anything. Maybe it’s not her.”
Or maybe it was.
Chapter 23
From the moment Mick and I walked up the sweeping granite staircase of the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson Building, I knew this evening was going to be about money and not philanthropy. Last Saturday at the Pension Building gala the Ashers had been honored like royalty. Tonight the beautiful Italian Renaissance–style library, with its paintings, mosaics, and statuary depicting mythology, legend, and flesh-and-blood icons of poetry and literature, could not have been a more ironic setting to mark the beginning of Tommy Asher’s fall from grace.
As the saying goes, success has a thousand fathers but failure is a motherless child. Mick and I joined the queue to pass through security and enter the Great Hall as the streetlights came on for the evening and, on the other side of First Street, the floodlit Capitol dome looked timeless and serene. While we waited on the stairs I overheard snatches of conversation that made it clear many of tonight’s guests were clients of Thomas Asher Investments—those who desperately needed reassurance that all was well and everyone else who knew the game was up and wanted their money back.
I’d learned which camp Mick was in an hour earlier on the drive from Atoka to Washington. He still believed in Tommy Asher. I also found out why: The alternative was too terrible to contemplate. In the cocoon of his sleek black Mercedes listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane on the satellite radio, I discovered the real reason Mick had asked me to be his date tonight, why he’d been so persistent—the early morning phone call the other day. He needed me as a business partner. Would I buy the grapes from the ten acres he’d planted and bottle the wine under a new label? The price, he promised me, would be a steal.
“Why?” I’d asked. “This fall would be your first harvest. After all you’ve been through for the past three years, why not make your own wine?”
“I don’t have the head for it. Takes too much of my time and energy. I need to choose between horses or grapes.”
Even I knew that was a Hobson’s choice for Mick. Riding, hunting, polo, and raising horses were in his blood. Growing grapes and making wine had been part of the romantic fantasy he harbored of becoming a gentleman farmer, until he found out how much work it was, how tedious the chores—and, unlike horses, that it wasn’t terribly glamorous or exciting.
“Does this have anything to do with investing with Tommy Asher? How much have you lost, Mick?”
He kept his eyes focused on the road. “More than I’d care to say. Simon tells me it’s going to be okay if I sit tight. Not to be like the folks who panicked after the NASDAQ bubble burst in 2000 or Black Monday back in ’87. Wait it out and ride it up again. He says in six months it’ll all be tickety-boo and everyone who bailed will be holding an empty bag.”
I doubted that. Boo-hoo was more like it. “And you believe him?”
“Yes.” He still didn’t look at me. “I do.”
I wondered whom he was trying to kid—himself or me?
“What about the grapes, Lucie? It’d make sense for you to do this, especially since the land sits on our common boundary.”
I couldn’t think straight.
“I need to talk to Quinn,” I said.
“Can you give me an answer soon? If you turn me down, I’ll go elsewhere, love. Not a threat, but I just need to know.”
He must need the cash urgently or he wouldn’t press me so hard. Maybe he was in danger of losing the horses, too.
I could have told him the last thing I wanted was to expand since we had our own new varietals, like the Viognier, that we were just beginning to introduce. But maybe I could use Mick’s proposal to tempt Quinn to stay on. He’d know I couldn’t handle something this big on my own. Like Frankie said, it was an ill wind that didn’t blow somebody some good.
Mick and I spoke no more about this or about Tommy Asher for the rest of the drive into D.C., but when the music slid into Billie Holiday crooning “Stormy Weather” in her haunting, raspy voice, he reached over and savagely punched the button, turning off the radio.
He parked behind the library on one of the residential streets and we walked to the Jefferson Building. On Wednesday, when I’d met Summer Lowe at the Capitol, I’d entered through the basement carriage entrance. Now the enormous bronze doors at the top of the main staircase, which were usually closed for security reasons, had been thrown open in honor of the evening’s event. Light from the two large outdoor candelabra at the head of the staircase and a golden shaft of light spilling onto the plaza from inside the building gilded the long line of guests in tuxedos and evening dresses as though we were one of the carved marble friezes gracing the exterior of the building.
“I need a drink,” Mick said after we shed our coats in the vestibule where, from every corner, statues of the Roman goddess Minerva, patroness of knowledge and protector of civilization, watched us. More irony. I wondered if Tommy Asher would share any new information tonight or if he’d continue to stonewall his clients. The only person he was protecting now was himself.
We walked through a marble archway into the Great Hall. I’d been here before, but I gathered Mick had not because he stopped, openmouthed, in the middle of the room and stared. A docent tried to hand him a glossy brochure with a black-and-white broadside cartoon depicting the burning of Washington and “The Asher Collection at the Library of Congress” written in swirling calligraphy on the cover. I took the brochure and thanked her.
“First time here, huh?” I said. “It’s pretty spectacular.”
“Reminds me of the opera house in Paris. The Palais Garnier. Have you ever been?”
“I’ve only seen it from the outside when I used to visit my grandparents.”
“It looks like this on the inside.”
A waiter with a tray of glasses offered us drinks. Mick took two champagne flutes and handed one to me. I took a sip. It wasn’t Krug.
“Shall we look around?” I said. “The library owns a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. And we ought to go upstairs to see the Asher Collection.”
Mick nodded. “Crikey. Look at everyone, will you? Every woman is dressed in black, except you. All the men in tuxes. I feel like I’m at a bloody funeral.”
My gown was the color of spring sunshine. He was right. Everyone else was wearing black.
I slipped my arm through his. “Let’s not get into metaphors, shall we? You brought me here. Now at least go see the exhibit with me.”
Two marble staircases on either side of the Great Hall swept up to the second-floor galleries. At the foot of one of them a small knot of people had gathered in a semicircle.
“What do you bet Tommy’s at the center of that scrum? I wonder where Simon is?” Mick said.
“He’s there,” I said. “On the stairs by the statue.”
