“Let’s get out of here,” Stone said.
“I can’t; I’m a guest of the ambassador, and it would be rude.”
“Dinner tomorrow night?”
“Where?”
“The Connaught restaurant, at nine?”
“You’re on.”
She put her head on his shoulder, and he whirled her happily around the floor.
Stone looked back at table twelve; the man was still not there. “If you jiggled the place cards, you must have access to tonight’s guest list,” he said to Arrington.
“I suppose,” she replied.
“Do you think you could get me a list of the people at table twelve, with their positions marked?”
“I suppose so, but not tonight.”
“Will you bring it with you tomorrow evening? It’s important.”
“Anything for you,” she said, and let her tongue play lightly over his ear.
Stone didn’t complain.
37
STONE WAS ALREADY AT AN ALCOVE table in the Connaught grill when Stanford Hedger arrived for lunch. Hedger sat down and ordered a pink gin, something Stone had never heard an American do.
“What is a pink gin, anyway?”
“Gin with a dash of Angostura bitters,” Hedger replied. “I doubt if you’d like it.”
“I doubt it, too,” Stone replied, sipping his Chardonnay.
“Did you enjoy your evening?” Hedger asked. “I saw you and Mrs. Carter dancing.”
“Yes, thank you, and thank you, too, for the use of the ambassador’s car.”
“Any time,” Hedger replied. “When the ambassador’s not using it, I use it myself, sometimes. Tell me, is it hard to dance with someone’s tongue in your ear?”
“On the contrary,” Stone replied. “It helps.”
Hedger laughed. “I never saw your little bald man, you know; are you sure he wasn’t a figment of your imagination?”
“Isn’t his presence why you had me invited?”
“Well, yes; but I fully expected to see him, if you did.”
“Why did you think he’d be there?”
“Just a hunch. Last night’s dinner, if you didn’t know, was for the foreign diplomatic corps. I reckoned if he was anybody important in an embassy, he’d be there.”
“Good guess,” Stone replied. “And why did you think he’d be somebody important in an embassy?”
“His accents, as you described them, one overlaid on the other. Eton is a very exclusive school, you know, and everybody who spends his youth there comes out with that accent, even the foreigners. Remember Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the UN?”