“The same pleasant thought had crossed my mind, yes,” Bushell said. “But all the luck we’ve had on this case has been bad.” He’d worried about getting stuck on the Queen Charlotte Islands without any idea of where to go next. If you had to get stuck somewhere, Boston was a more pleasant place to do it, but the idea of getting stuck now, with time growing short so fast, chilled Bushell’s blood. He was glum and quiet when he, Sam, and Kathleen went back to the Parker House. Not even the prospect of supper at Parker’s, the restaurant attached to the hotel, did much to cheer him, though Major Harris had implied that you’d die happy if you shuffled off this mortal coil right after a meal there. When he and his companions walked into the dining room, the maître d’ handed Kathleen Flannery a red rose and Stanley and him a cigar. Had it been done showily, he would have thought it theatrical and cheap (though the cigar was anything but cheap). As it was, the man gave the impression that the flower and tobacco were gifts due anyone entering his domain, to be taken for granted. Such understated luxury made Bushell nod in approvaclass="underline" this was how the best places did things. The waiter brought over butter and a wicker basket of rolls. Bushell stared at them. One eyebrow rose. He looked up at the waiter. “These wouldn’t be - “
“Parker House rolls? Why, yes, sir, as a matter of fact they would. This is where they got the name.”
Whatever you called them, they were good. Bushell ate one and sipped at a glass of Jameson. When the waiter returned, he ordered medallions of lobster Parisienne. Samuel Stanley chose Dover sole, while Kathleen ordered scrod. “It’s something you can’t get anywhere but Boston,” she said.
“Oh, you can,” Bushell said, “but they call it young cod anyplace else.”
He took another sip of his Irish whiskey and admired the dining room. They’d had the sense to leave it alone when the Rococo Revival swept through the rest of the hotel. The walnut-paneled walls, well over a century old, complemented the earth tones of the decor. You didn’t want to hurry anything here, not even drinking. Fine English hostelries were supposed to have an atmosphere like this. Bushell hadn’t thought its like existed on this side of the Atlantic.
“Boston has more than three hundred years of history behind it,” Kathleen said when he remarked on that: “time enough for tradition to have taken root here. Oh, set against London, three hundred years isn’t much, but it’s very old compared to most of the NAU.”
“Practically prehistoric when you set it against New Liverpool,” Bushell said. “The Empire’s only been in the southwest a little more than a hundred years. Hardly anything left of old Franco-Spanish Los Angeles, either: street names, not much more.”
Kathleen nodded. “I saw that. I think it’s a pity. If you don’t remember the past, how can you hope to make sense of the present?” She looked down at her gin and tonic. “Spoken like an art curator, I know.”
“It makes sense, any which way,” Bushell said. Samuel Stanley raised his mug of John Adams ale in salute and agreement.
The waiter came back with their suppers. Deft as a surgeon, he boned Stanley’s sole right at the table.
“Something more to drink, madam, sirs?” he asked.
Kathleen Flannery nodded again. “Maybe a little later for me,” Bushell said; his glass remained a quarter full. Sam Stanley looked at him as if wondering if he was well. He grinned at his adjutant. Maybe he wasn’t perfectly predictable after all.
With the first taste of lobster, worries about predictability vanished from his head. For the next little while, a rapturous silence enfolded the table. When at last plates were empty, Stanley raised his mug again: “To two fish and a lobster that did not die in vain.” They all drank, Bushell finishing the last couple of drops of Jameson he still had left.
Instead of signaling for another, he chose a glass of port to go with the tray of cheese and fruit the waiter brought after clearing away the dishes that had held the entrees. After a glance toward Kathleen, Bushell and Stanley lit the cigars the maître d’ had given them. Bushell savored the fine, rich smoke. “The animal part of me is about as content as it could be,” he said.
“Amen to that,” Samuel Stanley declared. “I don’t remember the last time I had a finer meal. All the same, though, I’m going to cut things short, if you’ll forgive me. I want to go upstairs and ring up Phyllis. It’s been too long since I’ve talked with her.”
Bushell waved indulgently. “Go on, Sam. I just hope she knows what a lucky woman she is, to have you still wanting to talk with her after all these years.”
Stanley laughed at that. He rose, dipped his head to Kathleen Flannery, and hurried out of Parker’s. Bushell sampled a ripe Stilton, then took another sip of port.
He glanced over at Kathleen, who had fallen back into the silence that had gripped her since she left the offices of Common Sense . “If you’re content, Dr. Flannery,” he remarked, “you conceal it very well.”
She had a glass of port in front of her, too. It was more than half full. She lifted it and knocked it back as if it were a shot of rotgut. Bushell flinched; discontented or not, she had no business treating the lovely stuff that way. “Why on earth shouldn’t I be, Colonel?” she said. “It’s not every day, after all, that I have the privilege of abandoning my own will and following someone else’s.”
“We’ve been over that ground before,” he said. “If you’re going to help with the investigation - and you have helped, and I thank you for it - you need to come along with Sam and me so - “
“ - So you can take me to be pawed like a cut of meat, and a cheap one at that,” she broke in.
“Going in to talk with Tony Rothrock was your idea, not mine,” Bushell said, “and you told me he hadn’t pawed you, just made himself otherwise offensive. If we’d known differently, we’d have - “
Kathleen interrupted him again: “Rothrock? I’m not talking about Rothrock. I’m talking about John Kennedy this morning. Didn’t you notice anything, Colonel?” By her tone, her opinion of his skill as an observer had just dived like a submersible.
“I saw he was attentive to you, but - “
“Attentive!” Kathleen said, loud enough to make people a couple of tables over look her way. Bushell resigned himself to never getting a word in edgewise, which had happened before in conversations with Kathleen. She went on, “I’ve not been treated like that in - oh, a very long time,” and then added, in what was not quite the non sequitur it first seemed, “I shall have my father cancel my subscription.”
Bushell scratched his head. “How did I miss this? I was in the same room with you, and I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.”
“You wouldn’t have,” Kathleen said. “For one thing, you weren’t looking for anything like that, and for another, he’s smooth. Usually, those unwelcome approaches are much more blatant.”
Instead of salving Bushell’s pride, that irritated him further. He made his living by noting what others failed to see. Now he had failed. “What the devil did he do?” he asked, and then held up a hand before Kathleen could answer. “Wait.” He called up the mental image of them going into Kennedy’s office.