and, if they did notice, competent enough to mention it to the imperious monsieur.
I slipped out from behind the door, opened the bedroom door and got into the hallway. With the door shut behind me, I trotted down the hallway as quickly as I could without making any noise. I heard the butler thrashing about in one of the rooms. He was going to awaken the household, if anyone was still asleep. This hallway and the downstairs were going to fill up fast.
I heard someone climbing the main stair, so I ducked into the first room I could reach. It was a bedroom. Empty. I went to the window and looked out.
“Per, kill the computer,” I whispered into my headset.
“Done,” he said.
I opened the window and leaned out. The night man was at least a hundred feet away looking in a gazebo partially surrounded by evergreens. I didn’t see any dogs.
Now he was getting a cell phone call. It was so quiet out there in the country I could actually hear it ring. He answered it, muttered something and walked quickly away in the direction of the main gate.
When he disappeared around the corner, I dug from my backpack the controller/repeater we used to turn the bugs on and off and to boost their transmissions so that they could be received at a distance of several miles. I turned it on, then tucked it into the ivy vines as far as I could reach to my left. It appeared to be out of sight.
That done, I went out the window onto the sill. I managed to get the window closed behind me, then slowly put my weight on the ivy vines that had been using the wall for a trellis since Napoleon was in diapers.
If you’ve ever tried to pull ivy off a wall, you know how firmly it is attached. On the other hand, if you’ve ever tried to climb a wall covered with it, you know how loosely it is holding on. I got maybe three feet down when I felt the ivy starting to rip loose. I turned, pushed off and dropped the twelve feet or so to the flower bed. The dirt was soft, which was fortunate, yet there was a trimmed rose bush strategically placed that had carnal knowledge of me. Moments like that separate us real men from the wannabes. Blinking back tears, I inspected the tracks I had made in the soft, black, manicured earth, tracks Inspector Clouseau could have found.
There was a fallen limb lying nearby that the gardener hadn’t cleaned up, so I used it as a bunker rake. Did the best I could with it, tossed it aside and took off for the back fence, trying to stay behind evergreens as much as possible.
It wasn’t until I was over the fence that I keyed the mike and told Per Diem to turn on the guards’ computer again.
After I got cleaned up, Band-Aided and presentable, Speedo drove me off to the Paris World Hotel, where the Petrou function was to be held that evening, for my first day on my new job as a waiter.
Getting hired on the banquet service staff had taken some serious finagling, which meant that I had paid the head dog a large bribe. The unemployment rate in France is about 20 percent for young men my age, so I had to give him a really good reason to bypass all the people on the waiting list and hire me immediately even though I didn’t have a French work permit. I even agreed to provide my own uniform, which meant that a London tailor had to be flown to Paris and work all night. When I spend U.S. taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars, I go all out.
Of course, when I got to the hotel, the maftre d’, Henri Stehle, was nervous. I was worried that if I dropped any more cash on him he was going to smell a serious rat, so I told him that I desperately needed to make it in Paris to prove to my parents that I wasn’t the playboy they thought I was. “I’ve had experience in good restaurants”—what kind of experience I didn’t say—“and I can do the job. Just watch me. In a week you’ll think I’m the best employee you have.”
He wasn’t sure. He was a man of medium height, in his middle forties I would guess, who was trim without looking like a gym rat. “That work permit—” he began.
“I’ll have one by next week. I’ve already talked to the authorities.”
Mollified, he had me work with the people setting up for the banquet. It looked as if there were going to be about a hundred people at this feed; Madame Petrou, the banker, was picking up the whole tab. I figured it might be tax-deductible for her, so I wasn’t overwhelmed with envy.
The afternoon passed quickly. I learned how to keep the towel over my left arm, practiced serving the way the other waiters did and managed to fit right in. This wasn’t as easy as it sounded, because most of the staff were older than I and had worked at this hotel for years. In short, they were true professionals. They were also a decent lot and helped me with little tips. It was obvious to them that I was a neophyte, but I was hoping that only the pros would notice. I saw Henri checking me out a time or two, and he seemed less anxious than he was when I arrived earlier. He really didn’t have anything to worry about — any waiter could spill a bowl of soup in someone’s lap, and if it happened, he could soothe ruffled aristocrat feathers and fire the guilty worker swine. He knew that and so did I. Life would go on.
Henri had me carrying a tray of champagne flutes, full, when the first guests began dribbling into the room where the cocktail party was being held. A string ensemble was playing chamber music in one corner. I offered champagne to everyone; some folks took a glass, some didn’t. I worked the crowd, listening to the French, English and German flowing back and forth over the classical music, and tried to actually understand some of it. That effort, I found, interfered with my champagne duties, so I gave it up and concentrated on not spilling my tray, offering a drink to newcomers, and ensuring drinkers didn’t hold empty glasses very long.
I was hard at it when the Petrous came in. They had already shed their coats at the check rack outside, so I went over and offered champagne. I was hoping Marisa would make eye contact, but it didn’t happen. She was upper crust straight through to the backbone, a blueblood who ignored the help. She took a glass off the tray and never even glanced at my face. She smiled at someone she knew and held out a hand.
I offered Jean a snort of the bubbly, and he took a glass. His mother ignored me completely. I moved along. They wouldn’t have noticed me if I had had two noses.
My plan was quite simple: I wanted Marisa to notice me at some point in the evening, to actually see my face and recognize it as the mug of Tommy Carmellini, CIA officer. Then, when she got home, I was sorta hoping she would talk with her husband and mother-in-law about the fact that the CIA had someone at the party, in a place, of course, that our new microphones could pick up the conversation.
Once they all knew the CIA was interested in them, I thought things might happen. For one thing, Marisa might report that fact to Abu Qasim. Grafton was tired of waiting for something to happen — he expected me to force the issue.
Only Marisa didn’t cooperate. I would have bet my pension that she didn’t notice my face during the cocktail party.
When Henri announced dinner, the entire hundred must have been there. The buzz of loud conversation drowned out the chamber music. As the guests filed in to dinner, I ditched my tray and headed for the kitchen to help serve the first course, which was fish. Five or six of the guys were joking near the serving table in French, talking about the banker who had brought his wife and his mistress. I asked what he looked like, and he was described to me.
Then we were on. Out of the kitchen we marched, one behind the other, with three dishes on our left arms and two on our right.
I concentrated on serving, on doing the job I was supposedly hired to do. Every now and then I sneaked a glance at Marisa at the head table; she was never looking my way.
If she didn’t spot me, I was going to have to think up something that ensured she did. Not that I wanted to do that — I was hoping she wouldn’t think I knew that she had seen me.
When we were on the main course, which was beef, I realized that she might indeed have seen and not recognized me. The thought was a shock to my healthy male ego, yet I had to admit, it made sense. We’ve all run into someone from our past so unexpectedly that the face doesn’t register, right?
On the other hand, we did go to bed together once, and she certainly recognized me when she saw me in Paris for the G-8 conference; she was getting out of a limo and I was the last man alive she expected to see, yet she placed me immediately. Perhaps she had seen and recognized me tonight and didn’t want to let on, so was now studiously ignoring me.
I was cogitating on this when I almost put a carafe of water in a graying matron’s lap.
No doubt I was overthinking this. Truthfully, this whole gig was a half-baked idea. Grafton would have laughed if I had told him what I planned. The fact that Speedo Harris and Per Diem thought this plan was lousy was the real reason I insisted upon it.
After we waiters had served the main course and were again charging the wineglasses, I worked my way
