Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“Bien sûr,” the young woman answered, her eyes shifting over the rest of the room in embarrassment, “je lui écoute toujours,” and Clare had to suppress a smile.

Aperitifs were passed around but not hors d’oeuvres, as these had already been served at the embassy cocktail party beforehand and they would sit down to eat shortly. Reverend Newhouse grappled nuts into his hand from one of the silver trays on a side table. His wife helped herself to a few also. Clare saw Amélie slip from behind the kitchen door into the dining room. She looked at Clare across the rooms, and Clare nodded. With dinner preparations completed and her job done, Amélie would go home now and soak her sturdy legs in the half tub her apartment probably sported, or whatever she did when she was away from the Residence. Her cousin and the waiter would stay until the end of the meal, helping Mathilde prep, serving the meal, clearing the table, and seeing that the last of the dishes were washed and restacked in boxes. Like the captain of a ship, Mathilde would not leave until the very last course had gone down and all that was left of her glorious meal was a wreckage of cake crumbs and lettuce.

The bell rang again. Unlike cocktail parties, where she and Edward would stand near the butler as he opened the door and retrieved outerwear throughout most of the evening, so as to greet guests as they filed in and thank them as they left, dinner parties required a continuous stirring of the pot, with both of them at the soiree’s center. They couldn’t afford to linger in the hallway in between arrivals, but they reconvened in the foyer to greet the last of the evening’s dinner guests, the ministre délégué au commerce extérieur and her husband, Sylvie and Christian Picq. Pleasantries were exchanged, and kisses and handshakes. Clare noticed a strain on their faces; undoubtedly the assassination.

Still, the evening was going well. People needed to gather when they were in shock or mourning, and why shouldn’t this be at the Residence? What mattered was that no one was giving off an air of wishing to be elsewhere. She moved to join them in the living room.

“Clare,” Edward said in a low voice, stopping her at the living room’s threshold.

She started. Edward wasn’t supposed to speak to her one-on-one like this once they had guests. They were to radiate through the group, maximizing their resources. “Jamie’s still not answering his phone,” he whispered.

She smoothed her suit and exchanged a smile over Edward’s arm with Bautista LeTouquet, wife of the directeur général at the Quai d’Orsay. Tutto è bello! Bautista mouthed from across the room. Grazie mille, she mouthed back. Bautista was gathered by the mantel with the permanent under-secretary, the directeur général, and Hope Childs. The P.U.S. was wearing a reddish tie; a fat petal from the calla lilies, radiant in the evening light, brushed his eyeglasses. Theirs wasn’t the ambassador’s breathtaking residence but, as Bautista said, everything did look beautiful.

“I’ve talked to him. Don’t worry. He’s squared away for the moment.”

He shifted, blocking her view of the living room with his shoulder. “I don’t see how you can be so blasé. He was caught in her room. He had the key to the lab. The school is sure he stole the chemicals.”

Clare felt the air swish out of her, as though she’d been punched in the stomach. She swept the room with her regard, trying to slow things down, like dropping a sailboat keel. Madame de Louriac was standing empty-handed, and she caught the eye of the waiter and gestured. What was Edward saying? “Chemicals? You mean drugs?”

“Clare!” Edward caught himself. He glanced at the room over his shoulder to make sure no one had looked their way. “ Clare. I thought you said you had spoken with him. And Barrow.”

“Yes, but—”

“Did you?”

“Yes. But…not about everything. He just told me he had been caught cheating again, and hadn’t been allowed to hand in his science lab. That’s about all.” She hesitated. “And that this girl’s name is Rian.”

“ Cheating? Who said anything about cheating?”

“Jamie. I mean—”

“This had nothing to do with cheating. Did he say that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, yes. I mean, I thought so. Look, you know Jamie. He didn’t want to tell me anything. I couldn’t get anything out of the school either — I called but the headmaster wasn’t there, and I could only get the secretary. And then I didn’t want to call back before I’d heard Jamie’s side of the story. I did my best, Edward. It was a busy day; I was really trying to make this dinner work. And…” It all raced through her head: Finding Jamie lying on his bed, reading; seeing the Turk’s face flash up on the television screen; Niall sitting there waiting on that bench for her. She leaned a hand against the wall. “And, things didn’t go quite as planned.”

Edward bowed his head towards her. He spoke very softly, barely moving his lips. “There was no cheating. The girl is part of an antiwar group. They’re planning a disturbance near Ten Downing Street: Chinese party poppers with flash powder for a bang and antiwar flyers shooting out. That’s what the chemicals were for. To create an extra bang.”

“Chinese party poppers?”

“They call themselves the FFF. Fight Fire with Fire.”

There was a buzzing in her head, a lightness. “Fight Fire with Fire?”

“ Yes. The girl claimed they weren’t planning any actual damage — but according to what I’ve found on them, the group’s leader was arrested just before the invasion, on suspicion of attempted arson. At Whitehall. This is no ordinary grassroots student organization. And even if they were just poppers, can you imagine? In this atmosphere? The police aren’t fooling around in these times, especially not around the prime minister. They’re carrying loaded weapons.”

Arson? Explosives? She tried to grasp what Edward was saying. There will be gates, there will be grounds, he had said about sending Jamie to boarding school, then reached for the newspaper. Jamie was supposed to be safer over there. That was the whole point of this miserable transfer to boarding school.

“And the girl? This Rian?” she said.

“Ireland. County Mayo. She’s related to one of the teachers, studying art in London, and was granted a staff room in exchange for working as monitor at the sports center. When they found the two of them yesterday evening in her room, they dismissed her on the spot and told her to be off the grounds by nine this morning. Barrow was looking into having her deported on the basis of antigovernmental activity, but when they called me, we agreed, as there wasn’t anything actually illegal in her room, just illegally procured, and not by her but by our son — indeed, the only person who’d already broken any laws was our son, stealing from the laboratory — it might cause more trouble than it was worth to get the police involved. I’m working on that still.”

She nodded, stupefied. Thank God for Edward; thank God he acted swiftly. Barrow wouldn’t want news of what had happened to get around or their name in the papers.

But. If Barrow decided to bury the whole incident, there’d be nothing to stop Jamie from continuing to be involved with this organization. Certainly not from becoming further involved with this older girl. A week would pass. He’d go back to Barrow. The girl would still be there, somewhere, in London. He would find her. Or she would find him.

“What did they catch them doing? I mean, in her room.”

“Making flyers.” He shook his head, looking at a complete loss, and repeated, “Making flyers.”