Stone was wakened at seven a.m. by the telephone.
“Hello?”
“It’s Carpenter.”
“Hello. How’d you know I was here?”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t because you called me, was it? You needn’t have spent the evening alone.”
Stone didn’t know what to say.
“A car will pick you up at eight-thirty this morning,” she said. “Please be out front. And think carefully before you speak.”
“Speak about what?” But she had hung up.
Stone had a full English breakfast, then dressed and went downstairs at the appointed hour. The doorman opened the door to an anonymous black sedan, a Ford, Stone thought, and he got inside.
“Good morning, Mr. Barrington,” one of the two men in the front seat said. His accent was Cockney.
“Good morning. Where are we going?”
“We have a twelve- or fifteen-minute drive, depending on traffic,” the man said.
“But where?”
“Please make yourself comfortable.”
Stone looked out the window as the car drove down to Berkeley Square, up Conduit Street to Regent Street, down to Piccadilly Circus, then Shaftsbury Avenue to Cambridge Circus. They turned off into a side street, then into an alley, and the car stopped.
The man got out, looked carefully up and down the alley, then opened Stone’s door. “Just here, Mr. Barrington,” he said, indicating an unmarked door.
Stone got out, and the door was opened for him just before he reached it.
“Please follow me,” a young man in a pin-striped suit said. His accent was upper-class. Stone followed the young man to an elevator with unmarked buttons, and they rode up a few stories and got out. He was shown into a small room containing a leather sofa and some chairs.
“Please be seated, Mr. Barrington. You’ll be called in a few minutes.”
“Called for what and by whom?” Stone asked, but the door had already been closed. He felt as if he were in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office.
Stone rummaged through a stack of old Country Life magazines and chose the most recent, which was more than a year old. He sat down and leafed through it, reading about country houses for sale in Kent and the Cotswolds. Perhaps twenty minutes passed and then a door at one side of the room opened.
A middle-aged man in a good suit stood in the doorway, holding a file folder under one arm. The shrink? “Mr. Barrington, will you come in, please?” He stood back to let Stone pass.
Stone walked into a conference room. Four men, ranging in age from their early fifties to their early seventies, sat at the opposite end of a table that seated twelve. A chair was pulled out at Stone’s end, and he sat down.
“Good morning,” said a gray-haired man seated down the table from Stone.
“Good morning,” Stone said. He had the feeling that either he was present for a job interview or he had done something terribly wrong and was being called to account. Then the man who had shown him into the room handed him a Bible and a sheet of cardboard.
“Please take the Bible and read aloud from the card,” he said.
Stone took the Bible and read, “I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I am about to give in this proceeding is the truth.”
The man took back the Bible and the card.
Was this a court? A grand jury? He noticed for the first time that a woman sat in a corner before a stenographic machine.
The man at the other end of the table answered Stone’s unasked questions. “This is an inquiry,” he said, “into the events which occurred at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City earlier this year in your presence, Mr. Barrington. Also present were a Lieutenant Dino Bacchetti and a person you know as Carpenter. Do you recall the occasion?”