*
A few hours and a second bottle of champagne later, they parted ways. Cyril left Cordelia with a promise to ring her up soon. She didn’t have a card, so she wrote her number and exchange on the back of one of Bellamy’s matchbooks and tucked it into his pocket. When she got close, he smelled cheap perfume and the faint chemical scent of her freshly dyed curls. She had a wrap around her arms, but it left her freckled shoulders bare.
“Will you be warm enough on the ride home?” he asked. “I like this suit, but I’d part with my jacket if your need was greater. As long as you promised to return it sometime.”
“Keep it, Mr. DePaul. I’ll be just fine.”
“It’s Cyril,” he said.
The trolley slipped by, speeding up as it headed west from the Armament transfer down the road. With the ease of a born Amberlinian, Cordelia stepped off the curb and reached for the handrail. In one smooth motion, she was up on the rear steps. She blew him a kiss as the trolley crested Seagate Hill. He waved back, but she had already disappeared over the rise.
He strolled home through Loendler Park, in the opposite of a hurry. Wandering led him to the famous lilac walk that lined each approach to the park’s central fountain. Decades of careful tending had produced four straight allées of uniform lilac trees. Their canopies burst like champagne from the necks of slender bottles. Fragrance from the drooping bunches of flowers lingered in the air, soft and sugary sweet. He tossed a coin into the rippling water of the fountain’s pool, checked his watch, and sighed.
Dusk had gathered by the time he arrived at home. He put down his post and poured two fingers of rye against the chill spring evening. The glass beckoned from the sideboard while he shucked off wet socks and outerwear in exchange for slippers and a smoking jacket. The post sat beside his drink, less inviting, but more important.
He turned the radiator valve, raising the heat in the drawing room, and put a record on the gramophone. With Aster Amappah’s clarinet crooning along above her big band, Cyril settled across his sofa. He propped his head up on a throw pillow, envelopes and telegrams piled on his chest. Bills and business correspondence he discarded for later perusal. There was a letter from his sister in Porachis, where she was stationed with the diplomatic corps. Her son had added a postscript in blocky child’s writing: a crooked heart in blue crayon, “Uncle Cy” cramped within its lobed confines. He smiled and almost laid the letter aside on the coffee table. But he saw what was behind it first.
The thick, plain envelope was addressed by typewriter. All his unionist communiques came like this—unidentifiable, in cheap but sturdy packets, with no hint about what lay within. No postage, either. Likely they came by courier, to avoid Foxhole interference.
The fine grain of Lillian’s letterhead lay against the Ospie envelope like silk against rough skin. He ran his thumb over the lines of his nephew’s drawing, fighting sudden apprehension.
They would be fine. They were far away. Lillian was high-ranking and very, very good at what she did. They wouldn’t approach her. And if they dared, she would maneuver neatly out of the trap. She had never gotten in trouble when they were children, even when she was naughty. It was always Cyril who ended up locked in his room without his supper, depending on Lillian to sneak him some.
Sighing, he set aside her letter and picked up his whiskey. After a drink, he tore the Ospie envelope open: fast, like removing a sticking plaster from a healing wound.
Another envelope fell out, this one soft and cream-colored, sealed with a gold stamp. It was wrapped in a piece of onionskin paper, spidery with writing. Cyril unfolded the note and read it through, then opened the second envelope.
It contained a heavy piece of card stock, velvety smooth and embossed with more gold. The Honorable Baroness I Fa requested the honor of his presence at a musical evening featuring the acclaimed Asunan contralto Ms. Srai Sin.
The party was in three days. The instructions said Cyril’s reply had gone out last week; of course he would attend. Deputy Police Commissioner Alex Müller’s wife was an intimate friend of the baroness. Müller would likely be accompanying her to the soiree.