He took another sip of water from his goblet, which a servant had refilled. Then he went on. “Unhappily, our nation has been woefully unprepared to wage this kind : of warfare. Happily, Commander Fleming and some of his colleagues in England are very skilled at it, indeed, and have graciously agreed to help us put matters right.”
Meanwhile, as this talk of spying was going on about the table, a truly clandestine action was starting to happen beneath it.
During the crab cocktail, Sue-Ellen Chambers, apparently mistaking Canidy’s foot for the table leg, stepped heavily on his instep. He waited until the opportunity presented itself, then moved his feet far out of her way.
During the entree, leg of lamb with oven-roasted potatoes, her shoe again found his, and again he moved it. He looked up in some surprise, for his foot was some distance from where hers should have been. When his glance reached her face, she looked directly nto his eyes again.
It was, he told himself, his overactive imagination that suggested she was anything different from what she claimed she was: a mother of two, who had come to Washington only because “the way things are” it was the only time she got to see her husband.
There was Brie and toasted crackers for dessert, along with a very nice burgundy. While Canidy was spreading a cracker, he felt a tug at his pants leg, and a moment later there was the unmistakable pressure of the ball of Sue-Ellen Chambers’s stockinged foot against his calf.
When he looked at her this time, she was smiling at him, and the tip of her tongue was peeping out from between her lips.
Jesus Christ! Was she drunk, or what?
There was to be bridge after dinner, but Mrs. Chambers asked to be excused. She had things to do in the morning, she said, and she really wasn’t used to the late hours everybody up north seemed to keep.
“Dick will take you to your hotel, Sue-Ellen,” Chesty Whittaker said.
“Oh, he can just see me to the car,” Sue-Ellen said.
A god damned tease is what she is. She had no intention of delivering what she seemed to be offering. If I made a pass at her, she would act like a goosed nun.
“I had to send the car to New Jersey,” Chesty said. “Dick will take you in the station wagon “If you’ll just call me a cab,” she said.
Fuck you, lady. Now it’s my turn to tease.
“I wouldn’t think of it, Mrs. Chambers.” Canidy said. “I’ll drive you home.”
And I won’t go within three feet of you. But I’ll give you a chance to worry a lot about whether or not you’re going to have to fight me off.
“Would you get Dick the keys to the station wagon, Cynthia?” Chesty said.
She sat as far away from him as she could, against the door of the three-year-old but immaculate Ford station wagon. He drove down New Hampshire Avenue to Washington Circle, and then down Pennsylvania Avenue.
As they passed between Lafayette Square and the White House, shelaughed.
“You’re not going to make a pass at me, are you?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Because you’re afraid Mr. Whittaker or Colonel Donovan might find out? Or because you’re afraid of me?”
He didn’t reply.
“I knew,” she said, “Chesty Whittaker being what he is, that he would not send me home alone.”
He looked at her as he turned down Fifteenth Street. She was fishing for something in her purse. She threw something in his lap. He felt for it. It was a hotel key.
“When you come up for a nightcap’ ” she said, “try to make sure no one sees you.”
When he didn’t respond, she added, “If I don’t appeal to you, or if you can’t work up the courage, drop it in any mailbox. They guarantee postage.”
He let her out in front of the Willard and started back across Washington to the house on Q Street.
He got as far as Washington Circle before he changed his mind. There he made a complete circle and went back to the Willard. He put the station wagon in a parking garage and entered the hotel.