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“Damn straight,” Tonya said as Cara opened her door.
It was Mr. Benz, as if Cara had conjured him, as if thinking the wordsroadblock number threehad summoned him from his apartment above the stable, which for all she knew was a Batmanesque lair full of high-tech gadgets he used to survey the kingdom.
“The king has asked that you join the family for dinner.”
Ugh. She would much rather have ordered something from the menu, called her parents, and spent the rest of the evening working. It had been a long, public-facing day, and she was not in the mood to be “on,” any longer. But of course one didn’t decline an invitation to dine with one’s client at the outset of a project.
She opened the door wider and motioned Mr. Benz inside and toward the sitting area. “If you’d just give me a moment.” She held the phone back up to her ear. “Tonya? I’ve got to go.”
“I heard. Dinner with the king! Good luck, and I’ll speak to you again soon.”
“So, dinner,” Cara said to Mr. Benz, who, naturally, had not taken a seat as she’d indicated he should. “Give me a minute to change?”
“Of course.”
She went to the bedroom, and as she reapplied her lipstick she considered what to wear. She was a superlight packer and generally brought a skeleton wardrobe of business clothes, a pair of pajamas, a pair of jeans, a pair of yoga pants, and a comfy old T-shirt. She was wearing the yoga-pants-and-T-shirt combo now, having thought she was off duty for the day. For this trip she’d also thrown in a dressy jumpsuit, reasoning that she might have to attend the odd event that would call for something a step above her work suits. Was the jumpsuittoodressy for dinner, though, she wondered as she stepped into it. Maybe the suit she’d been wearing earlier was better? She’d ask Mr. Benz to opine. Put his know-it-all tendencies to work for her.
“What should I be wearing to this dinner?” she asked, when she returned to the sitting room. “Is this okay?” He blinked, and his gaze slid down her body. The jumpsuit was a simple black, scoop-neck, crepe number, and she’d belted it with a dark green belt that was, for her, a rare pop of color.
Mr. Benz’s eyes had gotten stuck at her feet. Did she have a run in her stockings? She rotated her ankles—the pants were fitted and came to just above her ankles—one at a time to check, which seemed to have the effect of sending his attention back upward.
He cleared his throat, and there was a pause before he said, “You look fine.”
“Are you sure?” That pause had planted a seed of doubt.
“Yes,” he said brusquely, but he kept eyeing her like something wasn’t quite right.
“So . . .” He seemed a little stuck. If she hadn’t met him earlier and been presented with ample evidence to the contrary, shemight have thought him a bit slow. “Dinner?” she prompted when he still didn’t say anything.
That seemed to dislodge him. “Yes. Right. I’m here to collect you for dinner, but I came a little early because I thought you might want to see the portrait gallery.”
Cara was, in fact, indifferent to the portrait gallery, but the invitation didn’t seem like something she should refuse, so she said, “Sure,” and let him lead her up to the third floor and down several long, empty corridors until one of them widened into a doorless room that was indeed full of paintings of people.
“Oh, there’s the king, right?” She pointed to an oil painting of what looked like a younger Emil.
“That’s his father.” Mr. Benz walked over to the painting and looked at a small gold plaque on it. “He would have been about twenty at the time of this painting. Right about the age at which he met Emil’s mother, Celeste.” He pointed to the next portrait, which was of a fair-haired, unsmiling woman. “She was French.” He paused. “She was famously blunt. That’s what everyone always said, anyway, but I think she was...”
“What?” she prompted when he trailed off, seemingly censoring himself. She had the sense that Mr. Benz knew things, and that the things he hesitated to say were probably the most useful things he knew.
“I was going to say she was misunderstood, but I never had the pleasure of meeting her. She was a friend of my grandmother’s, though.” He moved on to the next portrait. “Here she is with her children.That’sEmil, and those are his two sisters. You can see that Celeste is wearing a Morneau in this painting. In fact, if you look around, you’ll see a lot of watches in these paintings, goingback generations.” He crossed to the other side of the room. “This is Arthur, the king’s great-great-great-grandfather. He’s wearing an Abendlied.”
“Morneau still makes that model,” she said. “The Evening Song, I believe it translates to?”
He glanced at her, looking a little startled. He shouldn’t be. She was the kind of person who did her homework. Homework was the path to success. She’d known that since she was a little girl. You win the geography bee, they give you a medal. You win the Rotary Club essay contest, they give you a scholarship. You do enough good work, they make you a partner. Eventually. Hopefully.
“Yes,” Matteo said, “and that particular watch is still in the family. Emil wears it sometimes on ceremonial occasions.”
“Here’s Princess Marie, I think?” She pointed to what must be a wedding portrait. “And this must be Prince Leo?”
“Leo, yes, but not a prince. He refused the title when he married Marie.”
“He’s from New York, too,” she said, to cover the fact that she’d gotten something wrong. She’d read up on the royal family but she hadn’t realized that the husband of the princess wasn’t a prince. This stop in the portrait gallery wasn’t going to be a waste, after all. It was good to get the lay of the land. This was exactly the kind of information she’d been hoping Mr. Benz would share with her on the car ride from the airport.
“Yes. You’ll meet him at dinner.”
She did, and meeting Leo Ricci was like meeting an old friend. Not only was he from New York, he was from the Bronx.
“I was born and raised a few blocks off Arthur Avenue,” he said. “I’m basically an Italian stereotype.”
