The usual Saturday-night eaters and drinkers filled Belmont. Cars honked, crowds spilled across sidewalks into the streets. As we crawled east, I kept looking out the back, wondering if the law was following me, but the SUV immediately behind us made it hard to see anything else. I finally decided it didn’t really matter if the FBI knew I was going downtown and dozed off again until we reached the hotel.

The Drake’s lobby is at the top of the kind of staircase Audrey Hepburn

was always climbing in Roman Holiday or How to Steal a Million. A princess could negotiate those stairs in high heels with ease, but a tired detective had trouble lifting one leg after the other. “I could have slept all night,” I sang to myself, “and still have begged for more.”

Harriet and Amy were on a couch in the small lobby at the top of the stairs. When she spotted me, Harriet sprang up to greet me, clasping both my hands in her own, then exclaiming remorsefully when she saw the purple hollows under my eyes.

“This is the second time I’ve called you late after you’d been wearing yourself out on my family’s account; I’m so sorry-this could have waited until morning.”

I smiled in reassurance. “Something came up tonight that you should know about, anyway. Where can we talk quietly? Your room?”

“Mother keeps coming into my room if I’m there. She and Daddy are thinking of flying home Monday, regardless of what Dr. Vishnikov discovers, and she’s fretting about the travel arrangements.”

We found a corner table in the Palm Court, which was kept dark in the tradition of the old bars of the fifties. We sank into velvet plush and tried to see each other by the light of little tabletop fixtures. When a waitress materialized out of the gloom and Harriet ordered herbal tea, I started to follow suit, then realized I wanted whisky. Black Label might put me to sleep before we finished talking, but I wanted that glow of warmth to soften the knots between my shoulder blades.

We talked idly while we waited for our drinks. Amy had spent the afternoon hiking in the dunes southeast of the city; Harriet and her parents had met Aretha Cummings, Marc’s research assistant. Aretha had brought them some of Marc’s private things from the office. A nice young woman, clearly grief-stricken, Mother had wondered if Marc and she had been dating.

“And me, I spent the day dodging shots from three law enforcement agencies.” The drinks arrived and I took a welcome swallow. “If you heard the news, you may know an Egyptian kid was hiding in the house on the estate where Marcus died. The police and the Feds now are imagining that the kid, his name is Benjamin, killed Marcus. And since that’s the track their minds are running on, they will be looking for a connection between

the two. They’ll wonder if Marcus was writing about would-be terrorists in Chicago; they’ll wonder if Marcus had a political involvement with a terrorist group.”