Laura told Nina to lie down and put the wet handkerchief in her hand so that she could wipe her face. Nina asked her to unzip her dress, and Laura did so. She was not wearing any undergarments except the blue silk underpants, and Laura saw bruises on her skin: a yellowing one on her breast, a fresh purple one on her thigh. Laura straightened up and left the room, telling Nina she was going to get Blanchard.
Walking through the ballroom was like moving across a stage, through the colour and chatter of the crowd, with lines that seemed laid down for her. When she reached Blanchard, she bent down and whispered in his ear that Nina was ill and that she wanted her own doctor. Blanchard got up and Laura went with him, back up to Room 248. He seemed to take in Nina’s condition at a glance, and went to the telephone to call someone. As he did so, Laura went to Nina and wiped her forehead again with the handkerchief, asking, with exaggerated concern, whether she was feeling any better.
‘I’ll go now,’ she said to Nina, with honey in her voice. ‘You ring me if you need me. I’ll leave my number here,’ and she scribbled her telephone number on the pad next to the telephone, noting Blanchard watching her.
He followed her out into the corridor, then asked her exactly what she expected him to ask her, which was to say nothing to anyone.
‘What would I say?’ Laura said with false matter-of-factness, as though every day she saw a drugged girlfriend collapse in the ladies’ room of the Dorchester and left her in the care of her violent boyfriend. There was a total lack of surprise or concern in her voice; she was acting, in fact, as she thought Nina herself would act in a similar situation. Blanchard looked at her assessingly, and Laura looked back at him. ‘Maybe Nina needs a rest,’ she said in her blank voice. ‘She was talking about going to visit our friend Sybil in the countryside. It might be a good idea.’ Blanchard nodded. ‘I mean,’ Laura said, ‘I’ll miss her, obviously.’ And then she did something that was so out of character for her it made her feel momentarily dazed, as though she had lost her own sense of reality. As she said ‘I’ll miss her’, she stepped right up to Blanchard, so close her breasts almost touched his chest, and looked directly into his eyes. Then she withdrew and turned and walked down the corridor. She wasn’t quite sure what she had done, but somehow she knew she had made him an offer as directly as it was possible to make one, and had told him that Nina was too much trouble for him.
At the next meeting with Stefan, Laura said little about how things were going, only that she was trying her best. But less than a week later the telephone rang one Wednesday afternoon and Blanchard was speaking to her. ‘Little Nina is gone to the countryside,’ he told her, ‘and I wondered if you would like to have dinner with me?’ Laura agreed to meet him at the Dorchester at eight. As soon as he put down the telephone, Laura put on her coat, calling to Ann that she had to go out to buy some more cigarettes. She went out of the house to a telephone box, where she rang the cigar shop and left a coded message for Stefan. It was beginning to snow, and she felt foolish as well as freezing as she stood in the phone box in her old muskrat coat.
After ten minutes of tense waiting, Stefan called back and Laura told him briefly that she might be able to do it if he could detain Blanchard somewhere at eight.
Her voice was confident as she spoke to him, but as she came back into the house she wished she could pretend to be sick and go to bed and forget about the whole thing. She felt like trash, so she was careful to dress in a way that made her look as sleek as possible. She had bought a fox wrap second-hand a few weeks ago, and she wore it over a plain black dress that Cissie had given her, and a pair of perfect nylons Ellen had sent her. She had to carry a large bag in order to fit in the bugging device, rather than the little purse the outfit demanded. She put tissue paper around it and an American cake of soap in its box on the top. Then, if anyone looked inside, she hoped it might just look as though she had been shopping that day. When she got to the hotel, she leaned over the desk. ‘Mr Blanchard asked me to go up to his room.’
‘He is not there.’
‘He wanted me to wait for him there – Room 248.’