The man’s tall, blonde, decorously glamorous wife, a lump of polished diamond on her ringer glittering at him like the eye of a snake, appeared bored, hanging on the man’s arm like a cloak to be wafted enticingly in the face of all the bulls in the world.
Lock tried to smile disarmingly, but the woman was proof against everything unordained by her husband.
‘I know what you mean,’ he offered, ‘but it’s just not as simple as that’
‘Simple, hell! It’s not any real problem/ the man replied, and Lock witnessed his tame lobbyist sidling unobtrusively towards them, calculating the worth in nanoseconds of a conversation with a roving junior executive from the State Department. ‘Just let us in there, with a free hand!’
At once, before he could adjust his governmental mask. Lock snapped: ‘I remember a whole bunch of Indian agents used the same argument, Sam.’
The wife’s eyes flickered, momentarily, with amusement.
Before the man could respond, Lock smiled affably and said:
‘Sorry, Sam, we’ll have to debate capitalist ethics some other time. I think my brother-in-law needs me.’
The lobbyist was assuring Sam that Lock was unimportant even before he was out of earshot. Sam seemed to think that Lock had been infected by some of the crazy ideas over there, and then they were gone, and his enjoyment was undisturbed. Any Washington party was a swim in the open ocean where one encountered the expected sharks and suckerfish and octopoid residents of the political deep. He assured himself he had gotten used to it, without any more longing for pot parties where Frank Zappa or The Grateful Dead blared from the hi-fi system, and the world seemed simple, its problems easily solved.
That past life was something still fondly remembered. He recalled parlies in other parts of the world, from his time with the Company as well as his time with State. They marked his gradual maturity with their increasing glamour and formality.
Until the only parties he ever seemed to attend were grand black-tie occasions like this, beneath high ceilings and surrounded by jewellery and painting-cluttered walls. The parties and the world’s problems continued, unchanging.
The noise in the dining room, voices above cutlery and crystal, dinned around him; a coterie. Every Washington party was the same, people came just to find themselves in a coterie, among the familiar, inhaling the incense of power and money. He sidled through lobbyists, businessmen, the occasional hemmed senator or congressman. He queued behind plump, bare shoulders at the buffet, and smelt expensive perfume and cigar smoke as he was helped to caviar, prawns, salad, quiche, salmon and a glass of good claret, before the caterers turned away to the next customer.
Then he moved towards his brother-in-law and Turgenev, after checking Bern’s whereabouts automatically. Her slim arms waved above her head and the heads of those who surrounded her. The pleasure was genuine, not fuelled by drink or coke, the extroversion her own and not implanted by an analyst.
‘John-boy!’ Billy was his effusive self.
He turned to his brother-in-law, whose gaze flinched away momentarily, as if he always remembered Lock’s angry, violent Words when they had finally quarrelled about Billy’s infidelities and the havoc they were wreaking in Beth. While she was having her stomach pumped at Walter Reed, Billy had confessed that Beth was too hard to live with and too hard to live without. Billy had never really held that night against him, but there was always this fleeting shadow of it whenever they met.
The chandeliers dripped diamond glass. Real diamonds on pale, dark and black throats were offered up towards those peculiar, vast, imported ikons suspended from the ceiling. The dining room had a cupola of stained glass.
‘Billy — Pyotr.’
‘It’s Pete here, surely,’ Turgenev retorted with a smile.
‘Fora lot of these guys, Pyotr would require a brain transplant,’ Billy offered as Lock shook hands with the Russian.
‘You’ve been in Phoenix?’
‘Let me tell you, John-boy. We had a presentation to major stockholders — what Grainger-Turgcnev is doing, how we see the next five years, the whole bit.’ Billy had been drinking, though not heavily, and his broad hand patted regularly on Lock’s shoulder.
‘How’s Vaughn?’
‘Dad’s just a little tired. I guess Beth told you, uh? No need to worry, John-boy — he’ll outlive both of us!’
Sharks and smaller fish nibbled at the edges of their group.
Turgenev, who was CEO of GraingerTurgenev in the Novyy Urengoy field, had three or four other Russians with him, vaguely known to Lock. There were two of Billy’s executives, one a youngish woman wearing a stunningly peeled-away black dress sparkling with diamante, as well as himself and Billy.
Billy’s party had moved with the eddies of favour and debt, money and influence, back and forth along the dining room’s length during the last hour and more. Beth performed circles and pirouettes with her friends or amid audiences more academic or more impressed by academe. The activity around her was less intense than that which followed and surrounded Billy like the debris of a comet. For Billy was into Russia, had congressmen and even the occasional senator in hand; Billy had government funding coming out of his ears. Billy was a buzzword.
Turgenev was taller than Billy, less powerfully built. They might have been a double-act for a buddy movie — which, in a way, was what they were; Billy short, dark, broad, Turgenev slim, pale-skinned and pale-eyed.
‘How are you, John? Sorry I wasn’t in Novyy Urengoy when you were last there. But Phoenix is warmer at this time of year — any time of year!’
The tide of the room was already beginning to eddy Billy and Turgenev away from him, and Lock was prepared to let them go. As they moved, away, Turgenev’s face became suddenly intent, as if a mask of affability had been removed, and he bent to say something to Billy; something peremptory and demanding.
There was shock on Billy’s face, as if he had been informed of Vaughn’s death or the collapse of Grainger Technologies’ stock on the Dow. It was the kind of disquiet he had seen on Billy’s slowly comprehending features when he had finally confronted him on Beth’s behalf; as if he had been shown something unacceptable, even despicable, about himself.
‘Something wrong, Billy — Pete?’ he called.
‘No — no,’ Billy replied,waving the matter aside but unable to remove it from his eyes.
It couldn’t be Rawls’ murder. Billy had told him of it earlier, and had been surprised, even shocked. But not moved in the way he was now. He’d just said, The guy spent all those years in Washington only to get himself murdered in God-forsaken Siberia … eaten by a wolf, maybe, but mugged to death? Rawls was replaceable, he wasn’t family.
Billy had still not recovered from whatever he had been told, but Pete Turgenev was smiling and there couldn’t be anything really wrong. Their party, shepherded by pilot fish towards other sharks, drifted amenably, knowing its power.
‘Catch up with you, John,’ Turgenev called.
The noise of the party gusted against Lock as he was left, for a moment, on his own tiny area of carpet. Food had been trodden into it, near his shoe. Beth wouldn’t worry; this was the party carpet, after all, the one put down for such functions.
Normally, the long dining, room gleamed with polished wood blocks, flared with huge old Persian rugs.
Hurriedly, he picked at the caviar and the salmon and sipped his claret. Red wine with fish, dear me, he observed. But it was room temperature and best French. Billy-boy, you’re throwing one hell of a party for my sister’s birthday! Even if it was maybe a kind of belated apology for fooling around and ignoring her for years …