Page 108 of The Secret Dinner

A MERRY EVENING

1

I didn’t go back to our apartment. Arthur let me sleep over on his couch, and we talked until dawn without him ever once bringing up the Ruth subject. The next morning, Friday, he insisted I seat him at the dinner table that night. For the thousandth time, I explained that it was too dangerous: The guest list had been finalized for months, and any last-minute changes would be seen as a red flag.

“Are you going to have the balls to poison the food yourself?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say. In spite of everything, I wasn’t a murderer; I’d never killed anybody. It wasn’t going to be easy to poison the punch bowl. Even though the guests were a bunch of nasty motherfuckers, even though Umberto was the ringleader behind all that carnage … I couldn’t say for sure that I wasn’t going to chicken out when the time came.

“I’ll hide out in one of the bedrooms inside the villa,” Arthur insisted. “You distract the cook, and then I’ll put the seasoning on the food.”

I finally gave in. Since Hugo would arrive a little after noon, we needed to be at the villa early to avoid any trouble. We scarfed down our breakfast and I popped some tranquilizers in the hopes of controlling my jitters, then we got in an Uber. I had the keys to the main gate and the front door. At eleven, I went in to confirm the house was empty and signaled to Arthur that the coast was clear.

“This is it?” he said, taking in every inch of the dining room.

We did two full laps of the house and concluded the best hiding place was the guesthouse out back, where Cora used to do her butchering. Now that she’d been fired, the objects that had once been used to turn Ruth into chunks of meat were just gathering dust. Arthur studied the chainsaw and the bloodstained buckets with tears in his eyes but said nothing. It couldn’t have been easy for him. We agreed that when the grandfather clock in the dining room struck four, I’d call Hugo into the upstairs bedroom and Arthur would have about two minutes to climb the back stairs, dump the poison into the pot, and return to his hiding place.

“What’s on the menu tonight?” he asked me, squeezing into a gap between the built-in cabinets and plastic sheeting. “Is there a sauce?”

“Gravy. Made from drippings and bones.”

“It’s pretty dark in color, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“That’s the best option for hiding the poison.”

“Are you sure it won’t affect the flavor?”

“It kind of reminds me of almonds,” Arthur said. “By the time they realize something is off, it’ll be too late.”

2

When Hugo arrived, he was surprised to find me leafing through a magazine in the living room. He looked away and hurried into the kitchen. I followed him.

“Are you really going to just ignore me?”

“I don’t even know why you came.”

“I didn’t really have a choice, did I? Give me today’s guest list.”

Reluctantly, he grabbed a sheet of paper from the counter and handed it to me.

“Just let me get to work,” said Hugo, turning his back to me.

In the bedroom, I glanced at the seating chart. Umberto would be at the dinner. I felt an unspeakable pleasure at the prospect of that miserable old man choking on his plate of steak and gravy in his colorful bow tie. Almost everyone on the list had attended the first dinner at our apartment. Taking the place of the troubled couple, Kássio and Gustavo, were Maitê and Mateus Sampaio, a country music sister-brother duo who filled stadiums across Brazil. They’d attended previous dinners at the Jardim Botânico villa and were seagull meat aficionados. In Cecília Couto’s place was Heckel Axull, widely considered the best tax attorney in Rio de Janeiro, a miracle worker for the city’s business leaders.

I counted down every tick of the clock. At exactly one minute to four, I shouted out to Hugo from the bedroom. I had to call him twice more before I finally heard his footsteps on the stairs. I lay on the bed, pretending to be ill.

“I don’t feel well,” I said when he came in. “Do you have any medicine?”

Hugo looked me up and down. “What’s wrong?”

“Heartburn, nausea.”

“I have some antacids in the kitchen.”

He turned to leave, but I called him back. “Wait. I want to talk to you.”