Margaret Maron: The Right Jack

As he stood there contemplating disaster, he heard the woman beside him say, "I've got an Eisaku Okawara. What about you, John?"

"Zachary Wolferman," he replied. "As in hungry as a. He'll probably swallow me whole."

"Don't be such a pessimist," said the woman. "And no fair playing to lose just because you want to get back to your lecture notes. We both stay till we both lose, agreed?"

"Agreed. Now let's go and see if their wine's worth drinking."

The couple moved off and Tillie suddenly wished Marian was here tonight, too.

"Sprechen Sie deutsch, by any chance?" asked Haines Froelick when his cousin presented him to Commander Dixon and Comrade Ivanovich and invited him to listen to her musical voice.

"Only enough to say nein " she smiled, revealing an unexpected dimple in her left cheek.

Mr. Froelick was even more charmed than his cousin. "Fraulein Schlaak!" he exclaimed. "Remember, Zachary? When we were eight? Higgins broke her leg and couldn't come to Europe that summer, so your parents engaged Fraulein Heika Schlaak as our nursemaid and she used to take us on picnics up to an Alpine meadow near a little waterfall. We've never again had such wonderful cream puffs."

"There." Mr. Wolferman nodded his dignified silver head emphatically at Commander Dixon. "I knew he would remember. Fraulein Schlaak," he murmured blissfully. "She was young and gentle and she told us the most bloodcurdling fairy tales in a voice just like yours while water gurgled down on the stones behind her like the chuckles of a dreaming giant."

Mr. Froelick and Commander Dixon were unprepared for Mr. Wolferman's sudden excursion into poetry. Even Vassily Ivanovich looked respectful.

Mr. Wolferman blushed. "That was what Fraulein Schlaak used to say. That the river giant was laughing at her stories."

The gray-haired Comrade Ivanovich remembered something similar from his own childhood and had begun to share the memory in somewhat awkward English when he was interrupted by the public address system. Turning expectantly toward the podium, they heard Theodore Flythe say, "Ladies and gentlemen, please take your places so that we may begin."

Ten long tables, each seating fifty players, had been arranged in a double row. Tables 1 and 6 were nearest the podium. Tables 5 and 10 were at the rear.

"I'm back there at Table 5," said Commander Dixon, offering her small hand to Mr. Froelick and Mr. Wolferman. "Good luck to you, gentlemen. Perhaps we'll meet again."

"I'm at Table 5, too," said Mr. Wolferman as the other two men turned away. "Number 101. Are we opponents?"

"No, I'm number 102, Against a Mr. Tildon, I believe."

As they started down the wide central aisle between the two rows of tables, the crowd parted briefly and Commander Dixon came face to face with a taller, younger woman who gave her a startled look, then quickly moved away through a swirl of people.

"A friend of yours?" inquired Mr.: Wolferman.

"I must have been mistaken," said the commander, but the expression on her face was puzzled.

At Table 5, Tillie had located board number 102, the second position at the rear corner table. Each long table was set with twenty-five ashtrays, twenty-five new decks of cards, and twenty-five cherrywood cribbage boards, each of whose six pegs were in starting position. Across the aisle from Table 5 was

Table 10; beyond 10 was another wide space and then, perpendicular to the playing tables, was the refreshment table, which ran the length of the room's side wall.

With ten years of police experience behind him, Tillie had automatically taken the chair with its back to the wall so that he could look out across the crowded ballroom. He recognized the player already seated at 101, diagonally across the table from him, as the man he'd seen earlier up by the seating chart. A John Sutton, according to the man's name tag.

He was disconcerted when another couple approached their end of the table and the woman smiled at him pleasantly. "Mr. Tildon? I'm Commander Dixon."

Tillie jumped to his feet. "Commander? I was expecting-" He hesitated, patently embarrassed.

"Someone with anchors tattooed on his forearms?" she dimpled, which made him abruptly conscious that her forearms were nicely rounded and absolutely bare of any tattoos.

Before he could answer, Ted Flythe was requesting their attention again.

As everyone settled in their seats, busboys in short green jackets swept through the aisles with their trays, clearing away abandoned glasses under the watchful eye of the room steward, who was very much aware of La Reine at the front of the room. Her attention seemed focused on the speaker, but he knew that if any of his people made the slightest slip, he'd get the cutting edge of her tongue before the night was over.

Pernell Johnson resisted tugging at his short green jacket. If anyone looked at him, he wanted them to think, 'Look how sharp that kid moves. Look how smooth he is with the tray.'

From dishwasher to busboy in two months. Not bad. Next stop, dinner waiter in the hotel's fancy Emeraude Room. That's where the good money was. Even after splitting with the busboys, bartender, and headwaiter, those guys went home with a wad of bills every night and it was going to take money, lots of money, to finance his new dream.

Scared the bejesus out of him when the Dade County police caught him boosting hubcaps off Ferraris. Scared Granny, too. 'I'm too old for this mess, boy,' she'd told him. 'Ain't no way I'm gonna let you turn into jail meat.' She'd shipped him right up here to Aunt Quincy, who spent the weekend putting the fear of God in him and then brought him down to work with her on Monday morning and talked to them about giving him a job in the kitchen.

Aunt Quincy'd gone from maid to assistant housekeeper at the Maintenon, so they'd taken him on. She had made a comfortable life for herself and when she saw that her nephew wasn't afraid of hard work, she'd immediately tried to open his eyes to bigger possibilities. She watched his growing fascination with the workings of the hotel, the smoothness with which the many operations meshed; and she casually planted in the boy's mind a vision of the small hotels all over Florida that were just waiting for a young black man with ambition and determination.

The seed had taken root. He worked diligently at the hotel and he'd even begun a night school course in hotel management. When an extra busboy was needed, she'd spoken the right words in the useful places. It wouldn't be long now before he'd be wearing one of those dark green jackets in the Emeraude Room.

Even La Reine knew who Pernell Johnson was. Scared everybody to death she did whenever she came poking and prying around the kitchens, but he just smiled and yes ma'am'd her like all bosses expected the help to do and she said, 'You're Quincy Johnson's nephew, aren't you?'

At first he'd thought the others were calling her La Wren behind her back; and from the way she looked at the sinks and opened cabinet doors and fussed about grease on the floor, it had seemed apt. Just like one of the wrens on his granny's back porch, she was. Nosiest bird God ever made. Always sticking its beak in every nook and cranny, pulling clothespins off the line, hopping in and out of the wash pans, chirping and tweeting the whole time.

Same bright eyes. Wasn't anything got by her. Look at old George and Ms. Baldwin-both of them standing there like they had corncobs up their asses just because Madame Ronay was up there at the front with that games man, looking at them… looking at him, too, he remembered, and gracefully swung through the open service exit with his tray balanced on his fingertips.

Lucienne Ronay stood to acknowledge Flythe's introduction and the great chandelier overhead caught every facet of her emerald and diamond jewels and made her taffeta dress smolder with green fire.