• • •
Lucas’s phone rang,and he frowned at the screen. “It appears to be St. Vincent.”
“Can I listen?”
“Why not?”
Lucas answered, put the phone on speaker and they bent over it to hear a woman’s voice: “Marshal Davenport?”
“Yes? You’re calling from St. Vincent’s phone.”
“Yes, from his office phone. I’ve been instructed to ask you back for the five o’clock meeting.”
Lucas didn’t have an immediate reaction. After a few seconds, he asked, “Are you sure?”
“I am absolutely positive.”
“We had a little…clash…this morning,” Lucas ventured.
“I’m aware of that. Should I put you down for attending?”
“He’s still a cheese-eating bureaucrat,” Lucas said.
“Is that a no?” she asked.
“Uh…no. I’ll be there.”
• • •
He rang offand Sherwood said, “Just for the sake of a little discretion, hold off on the media until we know what the meeting is about.”
“Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.”
“And maybe you can hold off on the cheese business.”
21
Lucas and Sherwood got off the elevator at the FBI building and stepped toward the meeting room and a man called from behind them, “Davenport!”
Lucas turned, shook his head and said, “Butter my butt and call me a biscuit, as Virgil Flowers would say. What are you doing here, Louis?”
Louis Mallard was walking down the hall toward them; a bulky man, mid-sixties, frowning, in an FBI-blue suit and rep tie, shoes that were possibly spit-shined. He was empty-handed, but trailed by a tall fortysomething woman who was carrying a leather briefcase that looked, from the slump in her shoulder, like it might be filled with rocks, or maybe anvil irons.
Lucas said, “Hello, Jane.”
“Go fuck yourself, Lucas,” the woman said.
“I thought you’d be over it by now,” Lucas said.
“I’ll never be over it,” she said.
Lucas said to Mallard, “She’s such a fussbudget.”
“Yes, but it works for me,” Mallard said. “I spent the last hour talking with the cheese eater. I wish you hadn’t run your mouth like that. It’s not helpful.”
“He is, and you know it.”
“He’s not, most of the time,” Mallard said. “Sometimes, with a difficult problem, and with unfortunate results, he can come across that way, purely out of disappointment. Administratively, he’s quite effective.”
