Chapter 20: The Gala at Casa Loma
Casa Loma in gala dress was, Harper thought, arriving at four with her blacks over her arm and her shoes in a bag, the restaurant equivalent of a woman who knows exactly what the lighting does for her. The long room glowed. Every table wore white to the floor and a low arrangement of roses that Rosa had approved stem by stem, the chandeliers burned at the flattering setting Ferrante guarded like a state secret, and on the banquet platform, where six weeks of rumour said a peace might be signed after the speeches, the string quartet's chairs stood in their arc like a drawn breath. By six the service door had a queue of agency staff being checked against Sylvia's list, name by name; by seven, the first donors were coming through the main door into press light, smiling the fixed smile of people being photographed giving money away.
Harper worked. That had been the agreement, and she held to it fiercely, because working was the one grammar in which she was fluent in this room. Water, wine, bread, the cleared plate taken at the correct angle, the guest's chair eased with a knuckle's discretion — her hands knew all of it without consulting her, which left her eyes free. She had told Nico, truthfully, that she would not spend the evening hunting faces; she had not promised, because she could not, that she would not see. Scanning was a habit now the way locking a door was a habit, bred in training rooms and one terrible dinner service and a photograph of a fire: faces, hands, the service door, the swing of the kitchen pass, the undersides of things. She checked the underside of Table Nine at five o'clock, in front of Sylvia and one of Okafor's officers, all three performing the check as casually as a tablecloth adjustment, and found linen, wood, and nothing else, and felt her shoulders come down an inch.
Okafor's people were good. Harper, who had a professional's eye now for the breed, spotted perhaps four of them and suspected she was meant to spot exactly those four, as a comfort. A silver-haired man laughing a fraction late at every joke at table twelve. A woman in green at the bar who nursed one drink with a nurse's dedication and never once looked at her phone. The rest were architecture. Sylvia, in midnight blue, with the staff list on a board and a pencil behind one ear that entirely ruined the effect of the dress, ran the back of the house like a courtroom in session, and Ferrante, in his own house, in a dinner jacket of heroic antiquity, moved from table to table being proud and nervous in equal measure and concealing both under flattery. "My room," he told Harper, passing with a tray he had no business carrying, simply to have a reason to cross the floor and inspect it. "Look at her. She has been waiting sixty years to be this well lit and this well behaved." He glanced, once, at Table Nine. "Both of us have."
Rosa arrived at seven-thirty on Nico's arm, in black and gold, erect as a standard, and the room, which knew perfectly well whose charity this was and whose family stood behind it, made its small, respectful weather around her. Bianca came behind them in a dress the colour of champagne, her confirmation bracelet — Stefano's gift — bright on her wrist, her hair up, looking seventeen and twenty-five at once in the way that alarmed every adult who loved her. She caught Harper's eye across three tables and mouthed, with enormous solemnity, waiter, and Harper, balancing six glasses, mouthed back, guest, and nearly laughed into a donor's consommé. For whole minutes at a time, in the warmth and the music and the clink and murmur of four hundred people being publicly good, Harper could almost believe the evening was only what it claimed to be.
Almost. The Kovac party came in at eight, a table's worth of dark suits and one magnificent old woman in grey silk who moved through the press light at the door as if cameras were a weather she had survived before, and a silence went round the tables like a draught and was papered over, bravely, by the quartet. Nico rose. Hands were shaken — in public, in the light, photographed — and Harper, refilling water two tables away with her face arranged in professional blankness, felt the whole mad, fragile architecture of the last six weeks take the weight of those handshakes and hold. Hold, she thought, at it, the way she had once thought it at a table with something beneath it. Just hold.
The speeches began at nine. Rosa, brief and devastating, on the children's hospital. The hospital's director, less brief. The bishop's niece, surprisingly funny. Harper kept working the edges of the room through all of it, because staff who stopped moving attracted the eye, and because Sylvia's rotation had her on the far sections until the signing itself, when she was to take the station nearest Table Nine — Sylvia's placement, deliberate as everything of hers, a witness positioned by right rather than by accident.
It was during the director's speech, in the kitchen, waiting on a tray of petit fours while the pass steamed and shouted softly around her, that Harper saw the board.
Sylvia's staff list hung where it had hung all evening, by the kitchen door, under its clip, in her immaculate hand: names ruled in, names ruled out, agency confirmations ticked in red with the small, satisfied ticks Harper had watched her make at check-in. The list had been complete at seven. Harper knew it had been complete, the way she knew the covers in her section — forty staff, counted and recounted, every relief waiter telephoned twice by a recognised human voice, exactly as planned.
There were forty-one names on it now.
The last line was not in Sylvia's hand. The writing leaned the other way, hurried, smaller, pressed too hard — a name added below the ruled foot of the list, in the narrow space Sylvia would never have used, with no red tick, no agency mark, nothing. Harper read it twice. It was an ordinary name, a forgettable name, the kind of name a relief waiter might reasonably have. It belonged to no one she had checked in, no one she had passed a tray to, no one whose face she could summon out of the forty she knew.
And with the director's voice rolling warmly on beyond the door, and the tray growing heavy in her hand, Harper looked up from the board into the moving crowd of the kitchen — staff she knew, staff she almost knew, a tall relief waiter crossing at the far end with his head turned away toward the service door, his face in the shadow of the stacked glass racks, beyond placing, beyond quite seeing — and felt the evening narrow, very quietly, to the width of one unfamiliar line of handwriting.