‘Could be, I’m afraid.’
She watched him curiously. ‘You don’t think he’ll be a good president?’
‘We haven’t had a good president for so long some of us have ceased to expect we ever will.’
‘You’re cynical about politicians,’ she murmured. ‘Me too.’
‘Yeah, well, I can see how you would be,’ he smiled. ‘I guess Gowrie’s no worse than any of the others. He’s certainly in front of the pack at the moment. A couple of years ago if he had made a trip to Europe nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice! He’d have gone alone. But he’s in a new league now.’
‘I didn’t realise any of the press would be going with him,’ she thought aloud. She must go. She had to talk to him and if she went to Europe she might get a chance. It would be an expensive trip, though, and she had to watch every cent she spent. As Vlad kept saying, the agency had to operate on a shoestring. He watched her expenses like a hawk. How could she persuade him to let her go?
What would it cost? A cut-price plane ticket from a bucket shop, a cheap hotel. She could save a lot by walking instead of taking public transport, buying cheap food to eat in her room instead of eating out. Oh, she could cut expenses to the bone. She was an expert at living on almost nothing.
‘I’m a mind-reader,’ Steve said and she started.
‘What?’
‘You mean to go on this trip, too, right?’
‘If I can talk Vlad into paying for it,’ she confessed. ‘Which will be like talking Dracula into giving me a blood transfusion from his own veins.’
Steve roared with laughter.
In the penthouse suite of the hotel Don Gowrie was talking on the phone. ‘Her passport details all check out, then? Born Prague, 1968. Parents, Johanna and
Pavel Narodni. Father dead, mother remarried, now has two younger sons. Mother still alive, then?’ He bit down on his lower lip. ‘I see. No, don’t bother with the Czech end. Leave it now; close the file.’ There was a murmur on the other end of the line. ‘No, I said close the file!’ Don Gowrie put down the phone with a faint crash, the hand that held it slippery with sweat, picked up a decanter from the antique black-lacquered Chinese-style table and poured himself a glass of whisky, then walked over to the window of the suite to stare down, down, down at the pale grey ants flickering along the street below. From up here on the sixtieth floor you couldn’t make out their sex, or what they wore, let alone their faces. It was hard to be sure they were human beings. Their life or death meant nothing at this height. If one of them suddenly fell down dead you wouldn’t even notice. Would any of the others hurrying past them stop to look, or would they just step over the body and rush on?
Behind him someone asked quietly, ‘Do you think she knows something that could be a problem?’
He shrugged without turning round or answering.
‘How serious a problem?’
‘I don’t even dare ask her. That serious.’ He swallowed the whisky and went back to pour himself another.
‘You haven’t forgotten you’re speaking tonight at that dinner.’
The soft reminder made him stop pouring. He picked up the glass, swirled the whisky, holding it up in front of the Tiffany lamp on the side-table. The art nouveau glass with its metal-outlined red roses and Celtic-styled green leaves gave the whisky a deep, alluring glow, but he barely saw it. His mind was too busy, considering solutions, rejecting all of them. There was only one way out and he knew it. She had to be silenced.
Behind him, his companion was thinking along very much the same lines. ‘We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t cause any trouble, then, won’t we?’
Don turned to stare, face furrowed, pale, set.
‘Be careful.’
Sophie felt the American watching her and glanced quickly at him, a frisson of warning down her spine. She must not let this man get too close, he could become a problem. She looked at her watch, ready to make her excuses and go.
‘Thank you for the drink, I must –’
His voice rode over hers. ‘So when did you move on to New York?’
‘A couple of months ago. Vlad decided that people in East Europe were fascinated by the American political process but unless they were political students they found it all too complicated. They wanted simple explanations. Vlad had started a bureau over here, which was run by an old friend of his, Theo Strahov – Theo is an American citizen now, but he was born in Prague, worked with Vlad there before he came to America. Theo retired from full-time work some years ago, but for Vlad he came out of retirement and started the new bureau. He has been running it singlehanded ever since. But he found it more and more tiring. So Vlad sent me to help out for a while, and then last week Theo collapsed in the street. He’s OK now, but the doctors say it was a stroke warning, and he must start to take it easy. So I shall be running the bureau from now on.’
She was telling him a lot, but telling him nothing, she hoped, nothing of any importance, about herself, about her life, about her world. But the cat-and-mouse game was more tiring than she had expected.
Quickly, before he could ask her any more questions, she asked him one. ‘Do you know Senator Gowrie’s wife? What is she like?’
‘Frail, sick, a lady who doesn’t always know what time of day it is.’