A man in a splendid red uniform opened my door. I levered myself out of James’s car, crooked my finger good-bye, and struck out for the hotel reception.
“Schuyler. Vivian Schuyler,” I told the dainty red-suited woman at the desk.
“Ah. Yes. Miss Schuyler. Your luggage has already been delivered. The Imperial suite, I believe.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Imperial suite. Is something wrong, Miss Schuyler?”
“I’m afraid there’s some mistake. I reserved a single bedroom, no view.”
She looked down at the papers on her desk. “It seems your reservation was changed two hours ago. Will this be a problem?”
“Not at present, but it will be a significant problem in a few days, when I come downstairs to settle the bill.”
“Oh, the room’s been paid for already, Miss Schuyler, as well as any additional charges.” She smiled her apple-cheeked English smile at me as if I were the first and honored concubine of the King of Morocco.
I removed my red leather gloves and tucked them into my palm. “In that case, there’s no problem at all.”
Now. It was almost worth the trouble of being kidnapped by the various loving arms of Her Majesty’s snoopy government to walk through the double doors of the Imperial suite and see, foremost, a foil-topped champagne neck poking through a bucket of ice in the center of a mahogany table, and, hindmost, Buckingham Palace flirting wickedly through the bare gray trees. My luggage had been unpacked and put away in the closet. A room-service menu lay open next to the champagne. In the bedroom, a vase of pink-and-white stargazer lilies perfumed the air, newly spread, about as subtle as a banana dipped in honey. A note lay inside: With gratitude. James. How I loved a man of three words.
I opened the champagne with an expert whisper of a pop and ordered myself a breakfast of imperial proportions, even though it was one o’clock in the afternoon. It arrived a quarter hour later in silver domes. I tossed the waiter a few bob. Hoped I wouldn’t need them later.
I ate every crumb of my imperial breakfast, including the parsley, and drank half the champagne, and then I fell face first on the imperial bed and didn’t wake up until the sky was black.
? ? ?
TRUE TO HIS BOND, James was waiting for me in the hotel bar. Two drinks sat in front of him: not martinis, either shaken or stirred, but good old-fashioned whiskey. He pushed one glass in my direction. “I thought about ordering you a champagne cocktail, but reconsidered at the last minute.”
“Good man.” I sipped. “You have the suitcase?”
He patted the lump next to him. “Right here. Everything’s inside, exactly as it was. Except the papers in the lining, of course. I hope you don’t mind if we keep those.”
“All right. Now suppose you start from the beginning, like a clever boy.”
He smiled, all thin-lipped and masculine. “Has anyone ever told you you’re the most extraordinary woman to cross an interrogation room since the Mata Hari? I don’t suppose you’re in need of employment.”
“Now, James. Don’t try to change the subject.”
He gave my glass a little clink and drank his whiskey. “All right. I’ll jump right in. The document you were carrying in your aunt Violet’s suitcase, this document which has apparently been sitting in a godforsaken Zurich government warehouse for the past half century, is one of the most significant finds in the history of military intelligence. That document, if delivered to the British consulate in Switzerland as intended, might conceivably have prevented the outbreak of the First World War.”
I might conceivably have coughed up a drop or two of whiskey. James might have been forced to pat my back.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “One piece of paper? There was no way to prevent the war. The . . . the dominoes . . .”
“There’s no way to know for certain, of course. But that was the idea. That was why Lionel Richardson fled Berlin at the end of July 1914. He was trying to reach Switzerland before war was irrevocably declared.”
“Lionel Richardson was a spy.” I said it flatly, as a fact. Because I’d had several hours now to accustom myself to that conclusion, the only possible conclusion from the moment that envelope had been extracted from Violet’s suitcase.
Unless Violet herself was the spy.
James nodded. “One of our best operatives in those years. He’d gone to Germany that summer to investigate Dr. Grant, who was supposed to be gathering information for us, but who we believed—correctly, as it turned out—was actually working for the Germans.”
“Oh, stop. Walter was a double agent?”
“Yes.”
I lifted my glass, but it was empty. James signaled the bartender.
When I didn’t speak, he went on himself. “We’d heard that the marriage was an unhappy one, that Dr. Grant was . . . well . . .”
“A philandering pig.”
“As you say. So Lionel was sent to . . . well, to work his way into the confidence of Dr. Grant’s wife, to engage her trust.”