Page 92 of Under Her Protection

Vivienne walked back into the Salle des Fêtes at her usual pace. The Belgian collector caught her eye from across the room, and Vivienne returned the look with a half count and the small private nod she used in this room, and resumed the sentence she had, by any account Leo was prepared to sign, planned to finish before the end of the evening. The crystal on crystal went on. Somebody at the piano was now playing Debussy. The photographer from Le Figaro, at her right elbow, took the picture, and moved on.

Leo stood three paces behind her.

One pace behind her inside every room.

Her hands were steady again by ten-oh-four. Not before. She clocked them at each handshake and they were at the lowest vibration through the conversation with the husband of the patron, and through the four-minute conversation with the Norwegian ambassador, and through the short French exchange with the foundation's youngest trustee, and they were, by ten-oh-four, back where they lived. Leo, who had been taught at twenty-two by an instructor in a base in Germany to count the ticks back to baseline after a spike, counted tonight's at twenty-eight minutes. She would have called that a respectable number nine years ago. She would not, at thirty-eight, call it good. That was a data point. She put it under the left lung with the other data points.

At the table, Vivienne was seated next to the British cultural attaché. Her dinner plate came out. On the plate was a crab remoulade, not a folder. Vivienne picked up her fork. She did not look up at Leo, three paces behind her against the panelling, and Leo, at that, permitted herself the second almost-smile of the evening.

The chandelier light was forgiving.

The Satie had become a Poulenc.

The evening would be, in the editor's summary of Le Figaro tomorrow morning, a triumph.

Petit was in a Blackthorn car on the quai Anatole-France on his way to a police station in the seventh arrondissement, with a folder on the seat beside him that a police technician would be photographing, and a man named Bertrand was already giving up a second name on a second SIM in a second police station on the other side of the river. The circle around Lara Kossek was three names smaller at the end of the foundation gala than it had been at the beginning, and none of the two hundred guests, Leo registered privately, would ever know why their patron had set down a glass at nine thirty-one and picked up another, fresh, at nine thirty-nine.

That was, in this line of work, what counted as a good evening.

Leo permitted herself a small private almost-smile at the back of the room and watched the woman in the black silk run her foundation.

At eleven she caught Avery on the earpiece again. "Bring the Blackthorn car forward at eleven thirty. We will be out on the quai at eleven thirty-two. Home by eleven forty-eight."

"Copy."

"Avery."

"Yes."

"Good work on the catering shift."

"Mm."

"I owe you a bottle."

"A bottle and a conversation."

"Copy."

Vivienne caught her eye, across the room, once, from the centre of a small group of three patrons, and did not acknowledge it beyond the quarter-inch incline of her head, and Leo returned the quarter inch. That was what they had, in the Salle des Fêtes of the Musée d'Orsay, in front of two hundred people. It was enough for tonight. The photograph that would run in Le Figaro at six a.m., wired through AFP by two, would show Vivienne Strauss at the top of the steps of the Musée d'Orsay in black silk with the attaché at her right and the patron's husband at her left, unruffled, hosting. It would not show a walk-in pantry in the basement, or a folder on a seat in a Blackthorn car, or a hand, lowest-vibration, on a concrete wall. That was the work. That was how it was supposed to look.

17

They came through the gate on the rue de Chaillot at eleven forty-nine, and Vivienne, who had been silent for the whole of the quai Anatole-France and the quai de la Tournelle and the pont Neuf and the avenue Montaigne, spoke for the first time on the gravel of her own courtyard.

"Mademoiselle Cole."

"Madame."

"The library."

"Now."

"Yes. Now. I am not going to bed."

They went into the library.

Beaumont had the fire lit. Vivienne did not, at other times in the year, have the fire lit at this time on a Thursday, but Beaumont had taken a view tonight, and Vivienne, who had been grateful for the quai photograph and grateful for the south-east door, was also, privately, grateful for the fire. She did not say so. She took off her coat and handed it to Guérin, who was in the hall in the soft shoes she did not normally wear before her arrival hour, her hair pinned up faster than she pinned it on a regular morning, and who was not, tonight, going home. Guérin took the coat without speaking. Guérin put a small silver tray with a carafe on the low table between the oxblood chairs. Guérin left.