“Huh,” she said, accessing her hard files, trying to figure out what horse’s feet were and whether a girolle was a bird or a mushroom.
“The oysters are excellent,” Cohen suggested.
“Fine.” She shut the menu. “Oysters.”
Cohen gave the order and leaned back, arms crossed. “Now then,” he said as calmly as if they were discussing the season’s gallery openings, “what’s so urgent that you have to hunt me down and interrupt a good meal to talk about it? Would it be foolish to imagine that it’s not unrelated to your little tête-à-tête with Korchow this morning?”
Li choked on her wine and coughed into her napkin. “Still spying on me, are we?” she asked when she could speak again.
“Don’t be snitty, darling. Technically, it’s Nguyen I’m spying on, not you. And anyway, it’s how I’m written. Naturally nosy. Neither of us can fight our code, can we?”
Li narrowed her eyes at that but said nothing.
“Oh dear,” Cohen said. “Here comes your thunderous, we’ll-deal-with-this-later look. Have some more wine. And tell me how you like it.”
Li took another sip of wine, still staring at Cohen unsmilingly over the rim of her glass.
“Well?” he asked, leaning forward.
“It’s good.”
“Good? That’s all you can say? I might as well pour it into the gutter.”
“You gave it to me,” Li pointed out.
“The more fool I.”
“Why were you spying on—”
“Madame’s oysters,” the waiter said, leaning over Li’s shoulder to set an immense plate before her. She looked down at it while the waiter served Cohen’s dish. Twelve fist-sized oysters glistened nakedly up at her under the spotlights.
“Are they dead yet?” she asked.
“They won’t feel a thing,” Cohen told her. “And do try to chew before you swallow. You’d be a much happier person if you just concentrated on your food properly.”
The oysters were fantastic, of course. Everything Cohen had ever fed her was fantastic. They tasted of salt and iodine and deep clear water. The taste of the sea, she supposed, though she had never seen a sea. She ate two plates of them, firmly repressing any thought of what they must be costing Cohen, and even in streamspace she felt stuffed.
“So,” she said when Cohen had finished his dessert and the waiters had brought coffee and pâte de fruits and elaborate petits fours. “Now can I ask why you’re spying on Nguyen?”
“You can ask,” he answered with a silken smile.
“It’s still about Metz, isn’t it?”
“If you know so much, why come to me?”
Li looked across the table at him, and he met her stare with bland equanimity.
“What happened to trusting each other?” she asked.
“I trust you completely. I always have. In this case, however, the question isn’t whether I trust you, but whether I trust everyone who has clearance to download your hard files.”
“Which brings us back to Nguyen. And Metz.”
“The thing about Helen,” Cohen said, carrying on as smoothly as if Li hadn’t spoken, “is that she uses people. It’s her job to use people. It’s what she is. You put yourself in mortal danger if you allow yourself to forget that.”
“Funny. She said the same thing about you.”
“Helen,” Cohen said firmly, “does not understand me nearly as well as she thinks she does.” He stopped and gave Li a shocked look. “You don’t believe her, do you?”
“I don’t know who to believe.”
Cohen looked down at his plate and smiled a tight little smile that was far too old to belong on Roland’s soft face. “Well,” he said, to no one in particular. “So.”
“Don’t guilt me,” Li said. “Nguyen’s earned my trust. You’ve earned… the opposite.”
“Helen does a very difficult job,” Cohen said after an uncomfortable pause. “And she does it very well. But she’s a technician, really. People are tools to her. You are one of her tools. I’m another—albeit a powerful tool that she knows can turn around and bite her if she doesn’t handle it carefully. But in the end, it’s the same. She has a job to do. She opens up her toolbox and pulls out the best tool for the job. If it breaks, that’s too bad, of course. But she can always get the Secretariat to buy her a new one.”
“Why do you work for her, if that’s what you think?”
He grinned. “The party favors, darling. Now tell me about Korchow.”
And she did, in spite of Metz and Helen’s warning and the voice inside her that whispered she was risking what she couldn’t afford to lose. She told him everything. Just like she always did.
“May I smoke?” Cohen asked when she’d finished.
She nodded, and he spent the next forty seconds choosing, cutting, and lighting a hand-rolled cigar with minute concentration.
“Nice lighter,” Li said.
“You like it? I found it in the back of a drawer yesterday. Must have been sitting in there since… well, before you were born, probably.” He flipped it open again, blinked at the blue flame, and handed it to Li to look at. “Present from my second husband. He had exceptionally good taste for a mathematician. Most of them shouldn’t be allowed to dress themselves.”
Li figured she was supposed to laugh at that, so she did, and then set the lighter on the table between them.
“So,” Cohen said, toying with the lighter, “have I ever told you the story of the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace?”
“The queen’s what?”
“ L’affaire du collier de la reine.” He sounded shocked. “Don’t humans teach history in those schools of theirs anymore?”
“Slept through it.”
Cohen sniffed delicately. Li had seen an old flat film once about French aristocrats on Earth. The men had all worn embroidered waistcoats and used snuff instead of cigarettes. Cohen’s gesture reminded her of the well-bred, dainty sniffs with which those long-dead aristocrats had taken their tobacco.
“Well,” he said, “here’s the short version. Try to stay awake for it. The place is Paris. The time, the eve of the Revolution. The players, the king, the queen, the Cardinal de Rohan. Rumor has it that the cardinal was also the queen’s lover… but I’m sure that had nothing at all to do with how things ended up for the poor fellow.
“In any case, our story begins with the arrival of a mysterious Jew. It’s always a Jew, you know. I could say more about that, but I think we can postpone a discussion of the roots of European anti-Semitism to a later date. In any case, my coreligionist arrived bearing princely treasure. To wit, one fantastically expensive diamond necklace of scandalously uncertain origin. No sooner had the queen seen this necklace than she knew she had to have it. Negotiations began. Eventually the queen and the Jew agreed on a rather substantial price. Two-thirds of the gross national product of France, to be precise.”
Li choked on her wine. “For a piece of jewelry? That’s ridiculous!”
“Mmm.” Cohen looked amused. “I seem to recall you spending a good six months’ pay on a certain original-issue hand-rebuilt Beretta, O Parsimonious One. What did you call it? Sweet?”
“That’s different,” Li protested. “Professional equipment.”
He puffed on his cigar, grinning. “Well, just think of diamond necklaces as professional equipment for queens.”
She snorted.
“Quite. Anyway, the queen asked the king to buy the necklace for her. The king must have shared your opinion about the value of diamond necklaces; he said no.”
“And thus the tale ends. Not much of a story, Cohen.”
“Don’t tease,” he said, smirking at her. “As you know—or would know if you had ever applied your considerable intelligence to anything but wreaking high-tech havoc—queens in those days didn’t have much practice in taking no for an answer. Thus, the queen decided to go behind her husband’s back.”