Nico lowered his glass and smiled across Table Nine at the Kovac emissaries, at the Barone elders, at Aldo Ferrante, who owned Casa Loma and had given his word that this room was neutral ground. Then, in the pleasant voice of a faintly embarrassed host, he said, "Forgive me. Mr. Ferrante has just been told there may be a small problem in the kitchen. Nothing to spoil the evening, but he would like us all to humour him."
Ferrante rose at once. Harper, by the sideboard with a water jug she no longer trusted her hands to hold, watched the old man understand in a glance that he had not been told any such thing, and decide to play his part anyway.
"My friends," Ferrante said, spreading his hands, "this is my shame. The building is old, the cook is older, and the inspector left me a list as long as my arm. If we have a gas smell in the kitchen, we do the drill, properly, or my insurance man will weep over my grave. Through the kitchen, please, coats and all. Then we come back and eat like kings."
A ripple of laughter moved round the table. Chairs scraped, politely, not hurriedly. That was the art of it, Harper thought. No one must hurry. Hurry would tell everyone at that table that the danger was real, and men who had come in peace might reach for quite the wrong conclusions.
"Harper," Nico said quietly, as she passed. "Guide them."
"Yes, sir."
She set the jug down, lifted her chin, and made her voice carry the way it had been trained to carry, once, in a different uniform, a long way from Providence.
"Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll follow me, please. Straight through the kitchen and out to the yard. Mind the step by the ovens. No need to rush, it's only a drill. We do them all the time."
She lied smoothly and hated how easy it was. Behind her, she could feel Table Nine sitting empty, and under it a black box with a blinking light and wires, blinking still.
The Kovac emissaries rose last. The elder, a spare man with silver at his temples, looked at Nico for a long moment.
"You take a great deal of trouble for a drill, Mr. Barone," he said.
"I take trouble for Mr. Ferrante's insurance man," Nico said, "and for my mother, who taught me never to argue with a cook about gas."
The man considered that, then, to Harper's immense relief, nodded and followed his companions.
Bianca, Nico's niece, seventeen and wide-eyed, whispered, "Is it really a drill?" and was hushed, gently, and led on. One by one the guests filed through the swing door into the bright, steamy kitchen, where the staff stopped mid-task, startled.
Ferrante was magnificent. He clapped his hands, apologised to his chef, explained the drill again, louder, with jokes about his own drains, and shepherded his dangerous guests past the stoves as if this were a game he played every Friday. No one watching him would have guessed that his restaurant and his good name were sitting in the next room with something dreadful taped beneath its best table.
In the kitchen, Harper counted heads the way she had been taught to count anything that mattered. Guests. Then staff.
"Where's Tomas?" the chef said.
"Here," Tomas said, coming from the cold store with a tray of lemons, bewildered. "What is this?"
"Drill," Harper said. "Out to the yard, please, everyone. No going back for bags."
"This is ridiculous," the sous-chef muttered, but he untied his apron and went.
She counted again at the yard door. Kitchen staff, waiters, the two girls from the cloakroom, the pianist, who now stood holding his sheet music like a shield. The yard was cold and smelled of rain and rosemary. Guests stood in small, dignified groups under the awning, making the best of it, telling stories about other drills, other alarms, a hotel in Chicago, a theatre in Boston.
Only when the last waiter was out did Harper go back through the kitchen. Her shoes sounded too loud on the tiles.
Nico was still in the dining room, a good distance from Table Nine, near the corridor door, a phone in his hand, speaking low.
"— discreetly," he was saying. "No sirens in the street if it can be helped. You will be met at the service entrance. Yes, I will keep the room empty."
He ended the call and looked at her.
"Police," he said. "They are sending the people who deal with such things. No one is to go near the table."
"Good," Harper said. "That's good. That's exactly right."
"You should go out to the yard with the others now."
"No."
"Harper."
"I found it," she said. "I'll stay until they arrive and tell them where it is, then I'll go. Out there, someone will ask me questions I can't answer in front of the Kovacs. Here I'm useful."
He studied her, and something in his expression relented, not into softness, but into respect. "Stay by the corridor door, then. Not one step nearer the table. If I tell you to leave, you leave without argument. Agreed?"
"Agreed."
The restaurant, emptied, was a different place. Without voices, the room gave back small sounds: the tick of cooling glass, rain on the windows, her own breathing, too fast. A napkin had fallen beside Table Nine, white and ordinary, and Harper fixed her eyes on it because it helped not to look under the table at all.
That was when the panic came. Not in the moment of finding, when there had been work for her hands, but now, in the waiting. It rose from low in her chest, familiar and unwelcome — the thinned air, the ringing at the edge of hearing, the sudden certainty that Daniel was calling her name from another room she would never reach in time. Daniel, who had died overseas while she was still learning the names for things she was now too late to use.
Her hands shook. She pressed them flat against the wall, where Nico could not see.
Breathe in for four. Hold. Out for four. Name what you can see. Her instructor, a blunt woman from Ohio, had called it plumbing for the brain. Candle. Linen. Rain on glass. Her own shoes, planted square.
"Harper?" Nico said, without turning round. "You are quiet."
"I'm counting my breathing, sir."
"Ah," he said. "Then I will be quiet, too."
He was, for a full minute, and that kindness — letting her master herself unobserved — steadied her more than reassurance could have. The shaking eased. The room came back into its proper size.
"Thank you," she said at last, evenly.
"For what?"
"For not asking."
Outside, beyond the service entrance, came the soft arrival of vehicles, doors closing with care, low voices in the lane. Nico straightened his cuffs.
"They are here," he said. "Now we let them do their work."
Chapter 7: The Brass Token