Nine
The Peninsula is one of the ritzier of the ritzy hotels in Chicago, and it has a grand ballroom measurable in hectares. The serious events of Chicago’s nightlife rarely start before eight—you need time for people to get home from work and get all pretty before they show up looking fabulous—so when we arrived around seven thirty, Ascher and I were unfashionably early.
“I’m going to be right down here on the street,” Karrin said from the front seat of the black town car Nicodemus had provided. She had checked it for explosives. I’d gone over it for less physical dangers.
“Not sure how long it will take,” I said. “Cops going to let you loiter?”
“I still know a few guys on the force,” she said. “But I’ll circle the block if I have to. If you get in trouble, send up a flare.” She offered me a plastic box with a boutonniere made from a sunset-colored rose in it. “Don’t forget your advertising.”
“Not like I need it,” I said. “I’ll recognize her.”
“And she’ll recognize you,” Karrin said. “If she doesn’t know she’s supposed to talk to you, she might avoid you. It’s not exactly hard to see you coming.”
“Fine.” I took it, opened the box, and managed to stab myself in the finger with the pin while trying to put the damned thing on my lapel.
“Here,” Ascher said. She took the flower, wiped the pin off on a tissue, and passed it to Karrin, along with whatever tiny bit of my blood had been on it. Then she fixed the flower neatly to the tux. She wasn’t making any particular effort to vamp, but her dress was cut low, giving me several eyefuls during the process. I tried not to notice and was partially successful.
“Here we go,” Karrin said, and got out of the car. She came around and opened the door for me. I got out, and helped Ascher out, and she flashed enough shapely leg to keep anyone on the hotel staff out front from noticing me except in passing. Karrin got back in the car and vanished with quiet efficiency, and I gave Ascher my arm and escorted her inside.
“Try not to look like that,” Ascher said under her breath, after we were in the elevator.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like you’re expecting ninjas to leap out of the trash cans. This is a party.”
“Everyone knows there’s no such things as ninjas,” I scoffed. “But it will be something. Count on it.”
“Not if we do it smooth,” Ascher said.
“You’re going to have to trust me on this one,” I replied. “There’s always something. It doesn’t matter how smooth you are, or how smart the plan is, or how plain the mission—something goes wrong. Nothing’s ever simple. That’s how it works.”
Ascher eyed me. “You have a very negative attitude. Just relax and we’ll get this done. Try not to look around so much. And for God’s sake, smile.”
I smiled.
“Maybe without clenching your jaw.”
The doors opened and we walked down a hallway to the grand ballroom. There were a couple of security guys outside the door dressed in the hotel’s colors, trying to look friendly and helpful. I breezed up and presented them with our engraved invitation and fake IDs. I’d say this for Nicodemus—he didn’t do things halfway, and his production values were outrageous. The fake driver’s license (in the name of Howard Delroy Oberheit, cute) looked more real than my actual Illinois driver’s license ever had. They eyed me, and then my license, closely, but they couldn’t spot it as a fake. Ascher (née Harmony Armitage) gave the guards a big smile and some friendly chatter, and they didn’t look twice at her ID.
I couldn’t really blame them. Ascher looked like exactly the kind of woman who would be showing up to a blue-chip evening event. In me, the hotel’s thugs recognized another of their kind—and one who was taller and had better scars than they did. But with Hannah on my arm, they let me pass.
The interior of the ballroom had been decorated in a kind of Chinese motif. Lots of red fabric draped in swaths from the ceiling to create semi-curtained partitions, paper lanterns glowing cheerfully, stands of bamboo, a Zen garden with its sand groomed in impeccable curves. The hotel staff was mostly women in red silk tunics with mandarin collars. Caterers in white coats and black ties were just getting a buffet fully assembled. When we came in, I couldn’t see them, but I could hear a live band running through a number—seven pieces of brass, drums, and a piano, playing a classic ballroom piece.
I scanned the room slowly as we entered, but I didn’t see Anna Valmont standing around anywhere.
“So this thief we’re meeting,” Ascher asked. “What’s her story?”
“She used to belong to a gang called the Churchmice,” I said. “Specialized in robbing churches in Europe. Nicodemus hired them to swipe the Shroud of Turin for him a few years back.”
Ascher tilted her head. “What happened?”
“The three of them got it,” I said. “I suspect they tried to raise their price. Nicodemus and Deirdre killed two of them, and he would have killed Anna if I hadn’t intervened.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “And now Nicodemus wants her to help him?”
I snorted softly through my nose. “Yeah.”
Ascher studied me for a moment with her eyes narrowed. “Oh.”
“What?” I asked her.
“Just . . . admiring the manipulation,” she said. “I mean, I don’t like it, but it’s good.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Don’t you see?”
“I try not to think like that,” I said. The caterers uncovered the silver trays holding the meat, and a moment later the smell of roasted chicken and beef wafted up to my nose. My stomach made an audible sound. I’d been cooking for myself over a fireplace for a long, long while. It had been sustenance, but given my culinary skills, it hadn’t really been food, per se. The buffet smelled so good that for a minute I half expected to hear the pitter-patter of drool sliding out of my mouth.
“If you don’t, someone else will,” Ascher said. “If nothing else, you’ve got to defend yourself . . . Hey, are you as hungry as I am?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And we’ve apparently got some time to kill.”
“So it wouldn’t be unprofessional to raid the buffet?”
“Even Pitt and Clooney had to eat,” I said. “Come on.”
We raided the buffet. I piled my little plate with what I hoped would be a restrained amount of food. Ascher didn’t bother. She took a bit of almost everything, stacking food up hungrily. We made our way to one of many tables set up around the outskirts of the ballroom while the band went through another number. I picked one that gave us a view of the door, and watched for Anna Valmont to arrive.
She didn’t appear over the next few moments, though a few of Chicago’s luminaries did, and the numbers in the room began to slowly grow. The hotel staff began taking coats and drifting through the room with trays of food and drink, while the caterers began to briskly move back and forth through the service entrances, like a small army of worker ants, repairing the damage to the buffet almost the moment it was done. It seemed to mean so much to them that I was considering doing a little more damage myself, purely to give them a chance to repair it, you understand. I try to be nice to people.