“You were introduced to him, and he took your hand.”
Kathleen nodded. The expression on her face said she’d just turned over a flat rock and found something slimy and pallid underneath. “He certainly did . . . and as he clasped it, he used his middle finger to offer an invitation which I was not in the least interested in accepting.”
“Did he?” Bushell rubbed at his mustache. “That’s crude.” He ran the mental cinema forward a few frames. “You brushed against him as you walked past. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I do remember that.”
“No, he brushed against me,” she corrected. “I wouldn’t have thought much of that, either, except for what had just happened before, but he pushed his hips forward so that he brushed against my backside. It put me in mind of a dog in the street, if you must know.”
“Then what happened?” Bushell took a certain morbid delight in seeing Kennedy in a less than favorable light, and by talking about it Kathleen was venting some of the fury she’d bottled up all day.
“When he came around with the tea and put his hand on my shoulder, he just happened to slide it under the material of my dress and onto my skin. Purely a matter of chance, of course.” Her snapping eyes gave the lie to her words.
“Why didn’t you call him on it?” Bushell asked. “That was what, the third time by then?”
“What would the point have been?” she said with a bitter shrug. “I couldn’t prove anything, and all he would have done was apologize - most handsomely and most insincerely, I have no doubt. I’ve heard such before - “
“Have you?”
“Oh, yes.” Kathleen’s nod was emphatic; she was feeling the port. “Apologies of that sort aren’t worth having, and demanding them only makes you an enemy.” She laughed, briefly and bitterly. “Now you’re hearing the secrets of women in the professions. Any one of us could tell you the like.”
“Really? The first assumption is that because something isn’t talked about, it doesn’t happen. I suppose I ought to know what that one’s worth, being a policeman - of sorts. But, as you said, I’ve never looked for anything of the kind. Perhaps I should.”
“Yes, perhaps you should,” Kathleen said sharply. Then she bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean that personally, or at least not in the way it must have sounded. Heaven knows we’ve had our disagreements- “
“Really?” Bushell’s voice was bland. “I hadn’t noticed.”
She started to explode, then pointed an accusing finger at him instead. “No, you won’t get my goat that way; you’ve done it too often already. As I was saying - “ She waited for him to interrupt her again. When he didn’t, she went on, “We’ve had our disagreements, but you’ve been a gentleman about them.”
“And the distinguished publisher of Common Sense was not?”
“No,” Kathleen said, like a judge passing sentence. So, in a way, she was. The world was a smaller, quicker, more complicated place than it had been in the days of the two Georges or of Victoria, but the old standards of behavior still had some life in them. A man against whom the public rendered a verdict like the one Kathleen had delivered on John Kennedy would never again be taken seriously as a shaper of opinion.
At any other time, the prospect of that happening to the publisher would have filled Bushell with fierce glee. So it did now, but only in a small part of his mind. He said, “You’ve not had much luck with the male of the species, have you, Kathleen? Your fiancé and this and - “
“In the scheme of things, this was just a nuisance.” She cocked her head to one side, studying him. He hadn’t used her Christian name before. After a moment, she went on, “As for the other, he was handsome, he was persuasive, and I - “ She shrugged. “I was foolish.”
“If they built enough gaols to hold all the foolish people, the outside world would be a pretty empty place. Lord knows I’d be wearing the broad arrow myself.” Bushell was not usually a man in the habit of hesitating, but now he paused. After what he’d known with Irene had collapsed like a block of flats in a strong earthquake, he’d been hesitant (he wouldn’t use the word frightened, even to himself) about revealing much of himself to - leaving himself vulnerable to - anyone else. When he did speak again, it was almost abstractly: “I’ve often wished we’d met under other circumstances. It would have been interesting.”
“You use that word to serve such a lot of ends,” Kathleen remarked. She looked down at her hands.
“There have been times I wished the same thing myself.”
“Have there?” Bushell said. “I must say, you’ve hidden it very well.”
“So have you,” she answered. “I suspect our reasons aren’t very different.”
Bushell raised an eyebrow. “Is that so? You were afraid I sympathized with the Sons of Liberty, too?”
Kathleen stared at him, then started to laugh. “Oh dear, Tom,” she said after a moment. “You did get me that time.”
He set his hand on hers. “Not yet,” he said.
The waiter had been coming up to their table, no doubt to ask if they wanted anything else. He was well trained; seeing what looked to be unfolding ahead of him, he abruptly found something else to do. The unsleepingly observant part of Bushell noticed him sheering off out of the corner of his eye. He was forgotten an instant later.
“Well,” Kathleen said, as if it were a complete sentence. “Let me go powder my nose. I’ll be back directly.” She got up. “And then - “ That also might have been a full thought. No sooner had she headed for the door than the waiter appeared as if by magic, this time bearing the check: not only well trained but efficient. Bushell rewarded that efficiency with a tip larger than he usually paid. The waiter returned, scooped up the banknotes with a murmured word of thanks, and vanished once more.
Kathleen took longer to return than Bushell had expected. He drummed his fingers on the tablecloth. Had she decided he was as irksome as Kennedy and picked a discreet way of avoiding him, as she’d been discreet in the publisher’s office? Had she - ?
She came back into Parker’s then, and his worries evaporated. He got up and walked over to her. When he offered her his arm, she took it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They went over to the bank of lifts opposite the registration desk. “Fourth floor,” Bushell told the operator.
“Yes, sir,” the fellow said, touching a forefinger to the shiny leather brim of his cap. His eyes twinkled. He’d taken Bushell and Kathleen - and Samuel Stanley - down to Parker’s for supper. The two of them hadn’t been arm in arm then.
The fourth-floor hallway was long and quiet, the carpet thick and soft under Bushell’s shoes. The electric lamp fixtures protruding from the walls resembled the gaslights they’d replaced in the early days of the century.
Stanley’s room was closest to the lifts, Bushell’s next to it, and then Kathleen’s. They both smiled when they walked past Bushell’s room. Kathleen took the key to hers from her handbag, set it in the lock, and turned it. The door opened. She went in. Bushell followed her. He closed the door after himself and made sure it was locked.
Kathleen turned on a lamp by an overstuffed chair. The shade was of thick parchment. The light that came from the lamp was brighter than any candles could produce, but the shade gave it some of that rich, buttery quality.
Slyly, Kathleen asked, “What would Doyle and Shaughnessy say if they knew the chief investigator in this case was alone in a hotel room with someone he’d suspected of sympathizing with the Sons of Liberty? It sounds like a compromising position to me.”
“I don’t much care what other people say,” Bushell answered with a shrug.
“Yes, I had noticed that,” Kathleen answered as he took her in his arms. Some time later, Bushell leaned up on one elbow and studied Kathleen by the warm light of that one lamp. She stirred under his gaze, as if lying on a bed naked and lazy in the afterglow were somehow more intimate than the act itself. Maybe, to her, it was: while you were actually making love, you weren’t thinking about what you were doing and what it might mean. That came afterward. He stroked her hair, smiled crookedly, and nodded. Then he gave a gasp of theatrical exhaustion, flopping limply back onto the linen sheets.