Szabo rubbed his chin. “I was thinking I might grow the beard again,” he said.
“You should, sir, absolutely,” Bledsoe said straight-faced. “Totally changes your appearance—nobody can tell what you really look like, and that’s a good thing. Sir.” And before Szabo could reply, Bledsoe said, “Son-of-a-goddamn-bitch, that’s it—the fucking beard . . .”
“What’s wrong, Chief?”
“Nothing, just something about a beard,” he said. “How it changes your face.”
“Uh, yeah, it does. You just figure that out?”
“What I just figured out,” the chief said, “is whose face it changed. And where I seen it before . . .”
“Is there some kind of problem?”
Bledsoe shook his head. “Nothing I can’t handle,” he said.
CHAPTER
28
Katrina looked around the lobby with a satisfaction that almost overcame her weariness—almost. As she had known it would be, it was a true horse race to get ready and get back in time. But she’d made it, with twenty minutes to spare, and now she rewarded herself with a glass of champagne—a Perrier-Jouët Grand Brut, thank God. The cheap stuff gave her a headache. She sipped and waved at a prominent gallery owner as she passed by. The whole top echelon of New York society was here. They packed the lobby, and the marble walls echoed with their excited talk, the clink of glasses, laughter. A string quartet played in an alcove; Katrina was fairly sure it was Brahms, and that made her smile. The quartet had started with Bartók. Randall had flinched, looked up, and gone over to have a quiet talk with them, after which they’d switched to Mozart and other, mellower selections.
Katrina covered a yawn, thinking with warm pride of the amazing job Randall had done, even to the details like the choice of the champagne and the quartet’s musical selections. He really and truly had pulled off a miracle. Even Erik couldn’t possibly find fault. She turned her head and saw Erik nodding gravely to a congressperson, who had no doubt shown up because it was an election year.
But where was Randall? He had vanished a few minutes ago—Katrina didn’t know why or where he’d gone. There was no sign of him here in t
he lobby. She scanned the crowd for some sign of him, some gleam off his shaved head, but saw nothing. And then a scented hand flopped onto her shoulder. “Katrina, darling, what a marvelous thing you have done!” a voice cooed at her, and the search for Randall was forgotten as she turned to see a pompous aging woman who was a fixture of the art scene and a ubiquitous gossip. Her brother Tim called her the Dowager Empress.
“Galatea, so happy you could come!” Katrina said, accepting the woman’s embrace and cheek-kiss. And then Katrina was ensnared by the Empress’s monologue and could only hope that Randall would come back and save her soon.
* * *
—
Angela finished off a flute of champagne—her third. It was far too much if she wanted to keep a level head—she knew that—but in truth, she did not want a level head, which might make her think rationally about what she’d allowed herself to become enmeshed in. It couldn’t really even be called an affair. It was no more than a series of quick encounters in almost every closet or dark nook in the museum. She was allowing herself to be used—and even worse, she was positively loving it.
Angela had never before experienced anything like this. It just wasn’t possible for a rather plain British Midlands woman of her temperament. Such things simply didn’t happen, either because someone like Angela would never consider it or, more likely, because no one would ever ask. And yet she’d gone along with Walter without even a cursory objection. If she was honest, she’d gone along with enthusiasm, even while she knew it was stupid, wrong, whorish—
Angela took another flute of champagne from a passing waiter, sipped, and looked at her watch, feeling a flutter of excitement in her midsection. She’d agreed to meet him again, tonight, in five minutes—here at the gala, in the middle of an overflow crowd at a black-tie event. It was insane, stupid, absurd, and wildly exciting.
Sipping slowly, Angela worked her way toward the far side of the lobby. When she got to the large arched doorway, she finished the champagne, set down the glass, and slipped out of the lobby.
* * *
—
Katrina had finally managed to pry herself away from the Dowager Empress and was looking desperately for either Randall or a glass of champagne to help her recover. There was still no sign of her husband, but she had just snagged a new flute of champagne when all hell broke loose.
There was a sudden loud BLAM! down the hall, accompanied by a flash of hot blue light, and an earsplitting siren began to shriek, accompanied by a painfully bright flashing red light. For a moment, no one in the lobby moved. Then the murmur of conversation started up, pitched much higher, as the confused people in the lobby tried to guess what had happened and what to do about it.
But then there was a second explosion, and all the lights went out. Somebody screamed, and the stunned guests lurched into action and began a crushing stampede for the exit.
Someone shoved Katrina against a marble pillar, smacking her elbow hard and causing her to pour her entire glass of champagne down the front of her dress. She wanted badly to rush down the hall to see what had happened. It was a combination of her sense of duty and a biting worry that Randall might somehow have been there, been injured by whatever it was. But she was pinned to the marble pillar by the crowd. She struggled to break free but could not. And for a long moment the crowd kept her there, pressed against the pillar. Then a small break came in the mad rush, just enough to allow Katrina to slip through the horde and hurry for the hallway where the explosion had come from.
The hall was dark, but the emergency lights cast just enough dim light to allow Katrina to see at least a dozen guards, both American and Iranian, running toward the far end of the hall. She hesitated, wondering if she was charging headlong into danger. But she told herself that she was an Eberhardt, and this was her museum, and she hurried after the guards as fast as her spike heels would let her.
She arrived at the end of the hall to find all the guards standing in a half circle around the utility closet. The door was half open. Katrina could not see around the guards, but she could hear a muffled sound coming from the closet—a kind of hysterical mewling that was half sob and half wail. “Let me through, please,” she said, pushing her way through the guards until she was in front of them with a clear view of the closet. And then she stopped dead, stunned.
Angela knelt in the closet with her fist shoved into her mouth, the keening Katrina had heard coming out around her hand. And slumped on the floor of the closet beside her was a large body.