More than her question, her look invited him. “Hello, handsome. What’s on your mind?”
Felix looked in vain for a mirror, to confirm the receptionist’s compliment. “I have something to sell.”
“I like things free,” said the secretary, grinning like the Cheshire cat, and Felix took as a good sign the blonde’s unconscious literary allusions.
“I’d like to see your boss.”
The feline blonde pouted. “Oh. You’re really on business, are you? Whom shall I say is calling?”
“The White Knight.” Felix smiled.
The secretary stared at him suspiciously and automatically slid one hand beneath the desk; her magazine fell open to a nude man sitting in a swing. “Bossman busy right now. Take a seat,” the blonde said coldly, hastily closing her magazine.
“Tell him I’d like to join the tea party,” said Felix, approaching the receptionist’s desk.
“You get away from me, you dirty Mex, I know your kind, all glitter and no gold. You ain’t foolin’ this little girl.”
With his best James Cagney grimace, and wishing he had a grapefruit in his hand, Felix Cinema-buff flat-handed the dish face of the jittery blonde, now more humiliated than Mae Clarke; he pressed the button she was trying to conceal beneath a freckled hand that revealed both her age and her intention, and the leather-covered door swung open. The secretary shrieked an obscenity, and Felix entered an office even colder than the reception room.
“Good afternoon, Señor Maldonado. We were expecting you. Please close the door,” said a man with a head too large for his medium stature, a leonine head with a lock of gray hair falling over a high brow. Fine, arched, playful eyebrows lent an air of irony to icy gray eyes, brilliant behind the thickest eyelids Felix had ever seen outside the cage of a hippopotamus. The body was strikingly slim for a man of some sixty years, and the blue pin-striped suit was expensive and elegant.
“Please forgive Dolly,” he added courteously. “She’s stupid, but lovable.”
“Everyone seems to be expecting me,” said Felix, looking toward Rossetti, still in white, perched on the arm of Angelica’s light leather chair. She was disguised in black sunglasses, her hair hidden beneath a silk kerchief.
“How did you…?” said Angelica in alarm, her voice harsh from having swallowed so much chlorine.
“We were very careful, Trevor,” Rossetti said, hoping to divest himself of any blame.
“Now you know my name, thanks to our friend’s indiscretion.” The man with the thin lips and the curved nose of a Roman senator spoke with edgy affability. Yes, that’s what he reminds me of, Felix thought. Agrippa Septimus & Severus fortuitously dressed by Hart, Schaffner & Marx.
“I thought you were the Mad Hatter,” said Felix in English, in response to Trevor’s unidentifiable, too-perfect Spanish, as neutral as the speech of a Colombian oligarch.
Trevor laughed and said in an impeccable, British public-school accent, “That would make him the Dormouse and his spouse a slightly drowned Alice. Drowned in a teacup, of course. And you, my friend, would have to assume the role of the March Hare.”
His smile was replaced by a tight, unpleasant grimace that transformed his face into a mask of tragedy. “March Hares are easily captured,” he continued in Spanish. “The poor things are trapped between two fatal dates, the Ides of March and April first, the day of fools and dupes.”
“As long as we stay in Wonderland, I don’t give a sombrilla what the dates are.”
Trevor laughed again, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his pin-striped suit. “I adore your Mexican sayings. It’s true, of course. An umbrella is of very little value in a tropical country, unless one fears sunstroke. On the other hand, in countries where it rains constantly…”
“You certainly should know; the English even sign their peace treaties with umbrellas.”
“And then win the war and save civilization,” replied Trevor, his eyes invisible behind thickened eyelids. “But let’s not mix our metaphors. Welcome to Wonderland. I congratulate you. Where were you trained?”
“In Disneyland.”
“Very good. I like your sense of humor. Very like ours. Which undoubtedly explains why we chose such similar codes: we, Lewis Carroll, and you, William Shakespeare. On the other hand”—he stared scornfully at the Rossettis—“can you imagine these two trying to communicate via D’Annunzio? Out of the question.”
“We have Dante,” Rossetti countered weakly.
“Oh, be quiet,” said Trevor, the threat underlined by the immobility of his hands in his jacket pockets. “You and your wife have done nothing right. You overplayed everything, as if you’d wandered into an opera by Donizetti. You completely missed the point that the only way to proceed secretly is to proceed openly.”
He reserved particular scorn for Angelica. “Disguising yourself as Sara Klein so no one would know you’d left Mexico, and hoping everyone would be racking their brains looking for a dead woman. Bah! Balderdash!” Trevor’s Spanish was curiously archaic, as if he’d learned Spanish watching comedies of manners in Madrid.
“Maldonado was in Coatzacoalcos, and getting close to the ring. He’s a wild man, Trevor; you should have seen him in my house the other evening, the way he treated Bernstein. He was mad about Sara, I only wanted to stir him up a little,” said Angelica, with strident and artificial energy.
Trevor withdrew his hand from his pocket and slapped Angelica squarely across the mouth; her jaw dropped open as if she were again drowning, and Rossetti jumped to his feet with all the indignation of a Latin caballero.
“Imbeciles,” said Trevor, through tight lips. “I should have chosen more efficient traitors. My own fault. The lady allows the ring to be taken from her while she’s imitating Esther Williams. The gentleman doesn’t dare strike me because he’s hoping to collect three ways, and the money means more to him than his honor.”
Rossetti, pale and trembling, resumed his position beside Angelica. He tried to put his arm around his wife, but she shrugged him off.
Trevor turned to Felix as if inviting him to a cricket match. “My friend, that ring holds absolutely no value for you. I give you my word of honor.”
“I place about as much stock in the word of an English gentleman as in that of a Latin caballero,” Felix commented with the counterpart of English phlegm — Indian fatalism.
“We can avoid many disagreeable scenes if you return it to me immediately.”
“You surely don’t believe I brought it with me.”
“No. But you know where it is. I trust your intelligence. Try to get it back for me.”
“How much will my life be worth if I do?”
“Ask our little pair here. They know that I pay better than anyone.”
“The stakes may go up,” Rossetti managed to say with painful bravado.
Trevor looked at him with amazement and scorn. “Do you think you can collect four times? Greedy little bastard!”
Felix observed the Director General’s private secretary with interest. “That’s right, Rossetti. You can collect from the Director General because you convinced him you were informing on Bernstein’s activities; you collect from Bernstein because he believes you were his accomplice, and for revealing the Director General’s plans to him; you collect from Trevor here by informing against your other two benefactors. And if you really want to sing, I’ll pay you more than the other three together. Or are you planning to return to Mexico, inform on us all, and get out of this with both your honor and your bankroll intact?”