Chapter Twenty-Three
I reached the mansion only five minutes early, which was, to my taste, cutting it a bit close. I immediately noticed that the gate now held three guards, not two. Jonathan Roth waited in the entrance and tried to hurry me inside, but the guards checked my ID meticulously, and verified my name was on the list. There would be no mistakes tonight. As Jonathan briskly led me to the dining hall, muttering angrily that I could have been a bit earlier, I noticed there were two patrolmen with dogs walking alongside the outer wall. They didn’t want anyone crashing this party. We went past a hostess standing by a table with dozens of seat placement cards, around through the back door, and into the kitchen.
“Each table needs to have a bread basket and a bottle of wine before the guests show up,” Jonathan told me. “Each bread basket should contain a dozen buns. After that’s done, we begin setting the salads. Hurry, the rest of the staff are already working at it.”
I joined the waiters in the dining hall. Sally, a nice waitress I had befriended the day before, whispered that Jonathan had already changed his shirt once. Apparently, this was his first big banquet, and his armpits were drenching his suit. Though he was a thoroughly annoying individual, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.
Going to the farthest table, I took out my phone and logged into our voice chat.
“I’m here,” I murmured. “Baroness Fleurette? How are you doing?”
“Wonderful, darling,” Sinead’s voice rang with a rich Dutch accent. The engine of the car hummed in the background. “I am on my way in our lovely car, driven by my ravishing butler, Bente Visser.”
“Hardly ravishing,” Kane’s voice interjected.
“You’re just upset because I made you leave that ghastly coat of yours behind,” Sinead said, her baroness accent becoming even more pronounced.
I stifled a smile. “And your personal assistant?”
“I’m here,” Isabel’s voice was soft. “Looks like we’ll get there at eight sharp.”
“No rush,” I murmured. “Reception is until eight-thirty. You can be ten minutes fashionably late. Harutaka?” He was supposed to be in the nearby mansion, monitoring us.
“Right here,” he said. “Watching you through the security camera. A waiter behind you is checking out your ass.”
“Well, if she’s wearing her black pants, her ass looks delicious in them,” the baroness said.
“Yes, thank you for keeping this chat professional,” I muttered. “Okay, I’m going to set some tables. Baroness, remember, once you’re here, you need to order a—”
“Bloody Mary, yes darling. You’ve only told me eleven times.”
I placed twelve buns in the bread basket, and moved to another table. In the background, Jonathan was yelling at a waiter that there were no bathroom breaks until nine o’clock. I tuned his nasally voice out, feeling irritated.
Something nagged at me, but I wasn’t sure what. Had I forgotten something? I made sure that I had the potions and the lockpicking kit. Setting a bread basket on another table, I began going through the plan. The baroness and her entourage would get here in their car. They would go to the front gate, give the invitation to the guard. The guard would verify that the baroness is on the guest list, then usher her in. She would sit at her table, and order a Bloody Mary. I would serve her the drink after adding the potion to it and—
She would sit at her table.
“Harutaka,” I said quietly, my lips hardly moving. “Did you add the baroness to the seating arrangements?”
A few seconds went by. I counted twelve buns. Put them in a bread basket.
“No,” Harutaka finally admitted. “I didn’t think of that. I’ll do it now.”
“It’s too late now,” I said, feeling the blood leaving my face. “The seat placement cards are already outside, waiting for the guests.”
“You’ll have to switch them,” Sinead said urgently, the Dutch accent gone from her voice.
I glanced at Jonathan, who watched the action around him, his eyes intense. “Yeah. Leaving might be tricky, but I’ll have to try.”
My mind whirled, trying to find a good excuse to leave the dining hall.
“Sinead, don’t show up until I tell you to,” I finally said. “I’ll fix this.”
Jonathan’s garment bag hung on one of the chairs. I went over to it, carrying a bread basket. Once at the table, I set the basket down, glanced around to verify no one was looking, and quickly grabbed the garment bag. Marching quickly to the corner, I slid it under a table, dragging the tablecloth slightly so it hid the bag.
Then I went back to work, eyeing Jonathan and repeatedly checking the time. We began setting the salads. Six dishes to each table, each portion fit for a king. I checked the time. Almost eight. There were two large matching stains on Jonathan’s armpits, but he was distracted by the salads and didn’t pay attention.
I went over to him. “Um, Jonathan? The tomato salad with the leaves—”
He rolled his eyes. “The insalata Caprese?”
I glanced at his armpits for a fraction of a second. “That’s the one. Should it be placed by the salad with the lettuce and bread bits—”
“Good god, were you born in a barn? Those bread bits are croutons, and the salad is called Perigourdine.”
I eyed his armpits again, then quickly glanced away. “Right, Perigourdine. So should it be to its right or—”
“Like I said before, the order of the salads is, in a clockwise direction, the insalata Caprese, the Rojak, the Taramasalata, then the Perigourdine…” He slowed down, seeing my eyes as they dipped to his armpits again. “The, uh… Cappon magro and finally the Karedok. Clockwise. Do you know what clockwise means?”
“Sure, thanks!” I said brightly and strode away. From the corner of my eye, I saw him check his armpits, then hurry to the chair where his bag had been. He looked around frantically, checked under the table, then circled around several other tables.
I had expected him to go look for it somewhere else—in the bathroom or in his car—giving me time to sneak away, but he seemed to be circling the same tables over and over, his eyes widening in panic.
I sighed and approached him. “Is everything okay?”
“My bag! It was right here! Did you see it?”
“Did you check the kitchen?” I asked. “Or maybe the bathroom?”
“I would never leave my bag in the kitchen. And I wasn’t even in the bathroom today.” His voice croaked and a sad little squeak emitted from his nose.
“Hang on, is that the big gray bag?”
“Yes!”
“The one you had on your shoulder when you met me at the gate?”
“Yes… I mean… What?”
“You had a big gray bag on your shoulder. Remember?”
His eyes were unfocused as he tried to recall it. “I must have left it there,” he said miserably.
“Yeah.”
He glanced around him. “It’s eight o’clock,” he whispered. “The guests…”
“Do you want me to go grab it for you real quick?” I asked.
He gave me a sharp, grateful nod.
I ran outside and down the gravel path to the entrance. The first guests were already milling in, grand-looking men and women, some fussed over by personal servants, all dressed in fancy clothing and glittering jewelry. I approached the table with the seat placement cards. They were situated in rows on the table in front of the hostess, each folded into a neat looking V. A small stack of empty cards stood in the corner of the table, probably for last minute changes.
The hostess faced an elderly man, his arm intertwined in the arm of a woman about my age with an enormous cleavage.
“Name?” she asked.
I walked by the table and tripped, colliding with the young woman and knocking down some of the cards on the table. The woman shouted in outrage, while I stood up, apologizing profusely, helping the hostess rearrange the cards. I carefully palmed one of the empty cards, as well as a filled one, and the pen from the table. Then I slunk into the shadows. Hidden in the darkness, I took a look at the card in my hand. It said “Mr. Boris Vasiliev, Table Eighteen.”
Copying the flourished handwriting as well as I could, I wrote “Baroness Fleurette van Dijk, Table Eighteen” on the empty card, and folded it into a carefully shaped V. I shoved Boris Vasiliev’s card into my pocket. Then I returned to the table, where the hostess had just handed the placement card to the old man.
I approached the young woman, sidling by the table. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry again.” My fingers flicked the V-shaped card onto the table. “I hope you’re all right.”
The woman shot me an icy look and nodded. I gave her an embarrassed smile, and then glanced at the hostess. She peered at me as if I was a snail inside her shoe. I’d made good impressions all around.
Walking back, I murmured, “Okay, Baroness, you’re good to go.”
“Wonderful, darling,” Sinead’s Dutch-inflected voice answered. “You heard her, Bente, you can start the car.”
“Harutaka,” I said. “Find the seating arrangement file and change Mr. Boris Vasiliev’s name to the baroness. He was at table eighteen.” That way, when poor Boris got here and began shouting for his seat, they wouldn’t find out about the switch even if they checked with the computer.
“On it,” Harutaka said.
I slunk back into the dining hall, where the first guests were already being seated. Unseen, I removed Jonathan’s garment bag from under the table where I’d hidden it, and then sauntered over to him carrying it over my shoulder.
“There you go,” I said. “It was right where you left it, by the front gate.”
“Thanks,” he muttered. “I’ll just be a moment.”
He rushed to the kitchen to change his shirt, and I took a long breath. The night was just getting started.