“So this is a ‘party’?” she laughed.
“It’s a ‘reception,’ ” he answered, “with all the stuffy implications that go with it.”
“You like these things?”
“It’s one of the things we’re paid to do. Does a dentist mind looking into people’s mouths? And as you ‘mix and mingle’ you can meet some interesting people outside your usual circle of contacts. It’s the receiving line I hate.”
Friedman glanced over to where the ambassador was already in place with the DCM and some other officers.
“Action stations!” Friedman said. “Have fun.” He turned and took up his place in line. Not a moment too soon, for an early guest was walking through the door.
The event was a cocktail buffet. The food was very good. It was set forth on a table while white-jacketed waiters hired for the occasion took plates of it around the room. Heavy trays laden with drinks followed. There were three open bars, but by late in the evening they were barely necessary.
The party took on a Ukrainian flavor, much encouraged by the popular American ambassador. The Ukrainians, like the ancient Romans, liked to drink in toasts, two sides taking turns. Someone silenced the room toward ten in the evening and proposed the first toast of Ukrainian vodka. Friedman pushed a drink into Alex’s hand.
When in Rome, Alex decided quickly, do as the Romans do.
“Guests are expected to shoot their shot,” Friedman advised with a smile. “Sipping is wimpy. You okay with this?”
“Someone else is driving me back to the hotel, right?”
“Yes, and it won’t be me.”
Three toasts went back and fourth. Alex bailed after that. Two more followed. Ambassador Drake set the tone by conspicuously leading the consumption of shots. It was no surprise that he was popular among the locals and his staff, as well as whoever sold the vodka to the embassy.
Toward 11:30, the party was still going strong. Richard Friedman, somehow still sober, guided Alex over to Ambassador Drake. By this time, in addition to the shots, Drake had found too many of the heavy trays laden with drinks. Small talk followed. He addressed her as “Anna” and asked her when she would be meeting with Yuri Federov. She said the next afternoon. He nodded and soon began to mumble about how beautiful Alex was. He followed that by mentioning that his wife was out of town. Some of his aides exchanged glances.
Nearing midnight, Drake, wobbly, noisily drained a gin and tonic and looked around for another. An aide quickly found him one. His assistants seemed to enjoy getting him toasted. As he sipped his ninth drink of the evening, Drake surveyed the sea of young people who were still partying, the advance team, for whom the party was given. Here were all the young folks who had been making his life impossible for the last five weeks.
“The ‘advance team,’ ” muttered the ambassador. “I’ve never cared for those little clowns. Anna? Know what my first run-in was with those people?”
Alex sipped her drink and waited. “What?” she finally asked.
“I was in Bonn twenty-two years ago, as chief of the Political/Internal Unit,” the ambassador said. “I was the event officer to a boat trip on the Rhine that President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl of West Germany were taking. The ‘romantic’ part of the Rhine, the part with the mountains covered with vineyards with ruined castles on top, starts upriver, south of Bonn. The idea was for the president to fly down to Oberwesel-that’s this picturesque little town where the romantic crap starts-and board the boat there, along with Kohl. They’d sail north and then get off.”
Oberwesel, he explained, had no Nazi baggage from World War II and made for a great photo-op. Alex sipped and listened. Other members of the embassy staff gathered, carefully keeping away any members of the advance team.
“Now, every lousy little German town has a so-called Golden Book,”the ambassador continued, “where honorary citizens are inscribed. Naturally, the mayor of Oberwesel wanted his filthy fifteen minutes of fame with a book signing next to the gangplank. So this clown from the Reagan advance team sneered, ‘Out of the question,’ except he used an extra word before ‘question.’ He cited security considerations and the need not to waste the president’s time on what he called ‘a bush-league event.’ Well, I tried to advise this jerk of the symbolic importance of the Golden Book in Germany and the fact that the mayor belonged to Kohl’s party, and I was told to ‘keep it zipped.’ ”
The ambassador stirred his drink with a swizzle stick as he nursed along his story.
“Well, Helmut Kohl’s whole career was based on networking and an incredible memory of people,” Drake continued. “The man was like an elephant. He’d remember folks he’d met ten years earlier while soused at some podunk wine festival. So when the disappointed mayor called Kohl, the head of his party, Kohl apparently called Reagan personally. Of course, Mr. Reagan approved it. He loved stuff like that. The Golden Book was on. You can imagine how I relished this.”
The ambassador grinned and lurched slightly. Alex, with a sweet and friendly smile, sidestepped his advance and escaped from under his thick arm.
“Anyway, when the event finally happened, there was press aboard the boat, but their access to Reagan and Kohl was supposed to be limited. Naturally, no good reporter abides by this kind of fence, and soon Mr. Reagan was chatting with them. A member of the advance, the same bozo who’d been giving me all the trouble, was fuming about this. So I went over to him. I said, ‘President Reagan looks happy. Why aren’t you happy?’ The advance guy looked at me as if I’d punched him in the nuts. That the president could be content with something that hadn’t been planned to the minute by his staff was incomprehensible.” He paused. “Those advance people are mostly a bunch of weenies,” he concluded. “They couldn’t organize a cat fight in a bag.”
As Alex and the embassy staff laughed, the ambassador finished his drink and found a final one on one of the last passing trays of the evening. Apparently, a wave of nostalgia hit him at the same time also.
“Ronald Reagan,” he said. “I miss the man. Reagan looked the part, he acted the part. Hell, he was the part! Now there was a president!” he said.
And he drained the rest of his glass.
THIRTY-FOUR
Lt. Gian Antonio Rizzo stood in his office in Rome the next morning, the ninth of February. Around him at a rectangular table, he had grouped four of the best homicide detectives in his bureau. Rizzo was now attacking the two linked double-murder cases with a vengeance, while at the same time trying to keep a lid on the inquiries from his superiors, official and unofficial.
One of the four men around him had been recalled from a climbing vacation in Switzerland. A second detective, a woman, came back two weeks early from her maternity leave. Another man was taken off a juicy assignment involving a local radio personality whose drunken semiclad wife had recently “fallen off” a yacht-or was it jumped or pushed?-that belonged to a Marxist member of the Italian parliament. And the fourth had been on a winning streak at a high-rolling chemin de fer table at Monte Carlo when the call had come from Rome to report back to Bureau headquarters immediately.