Page 52 of Peril in Piccadilly
He didn’t say anything, and I added, “I hope everything progressed all right with your business matter?”
“Of course. Merely a bagatelle.” He waved it away.
“I don’t think I’ve ever asked,” I said. “What is your business here?”
“Top secret,” Wolfgang said. I stared at him—truly?—and after a moment, he looked up and winked. “Diplomatic relations,mein Schatz. I go around London and make myself agreeable.”
“Do you really?”
“Of course.” He grinned. “I’m agreeable to you, am I not? And to your cousin? And his friend, the policeman? And Lord St George and his fiancée?”
Well, yes. Of course he was. With the exception of Crispin, of course, who didn’t find him agreeable at all. Or vice versa.
“The diplomatic corps?” I said uncertainly, and he chuckled.
“Nothing so exalted, I’m afraid. I’m just here as my lowly self, making connections with the British. To do my little bit to mend relations after the war.”
I nodded, even though his explanation explained very little. Then again, he was theGrafvon Natterdorff, so it wasn’t as if he had to have a job. The rest of us didn’t, either. I had tried for a while, right after we landed in London, but finding a position hadn’t been easy, and I had given up fairly quickly. Christopher had worked hard to talk me out of it—he’d rather have me at home where he could natter at me and I could take care of him, and if he had to support me financially to achieve that, then he was happy to do it—and I hadn’t had the heart to keep insisting.
On the other hand, it didn’t really explain what sort of business associate had communicated with Wolfgang the other day. If he had no official business interests, why would he have a business associate?
But before I could circle back to the question—or even ponder it further inside my own head—the waiter had arrived at the table, and it was time to order food. I ended up with an order of crab bisque followed by a prawn cocktail, while Wolfgang ordered a cup of soup of his own and then the wild turbot with mustard sauce. It was the most expensive item on the menu, and he didn’t even blink. Clearly money was no object, whether he was gainfully employed or not.
The waiter withdrew along with the menu cards, and Wolfgang smiled at me. “Where were we?”
I smiled back. “Regent Street, I suppose. Was that where your note took you after tea yesterday?”
Something flickered in his eyes, as if he didn’t like my harping on the note, but his voice was still pleasant when he told me, “Not at all. I was simply on my way out to dinner. I assume you and your friends were doing the same?”
“We were actually headed home,” I said, since that had been after Tom and I had extricated Christopher—or Kitty—from the Cave of the Golden Calf.
“And where was the Viscount St George? I don’t think you said.”
I hadn’t, in fact. I had said that he was coming, and so was Christopher, and then we had left without waiting for them. I wondered whether Wolfgang had looked back and noticed, or whether he was simply responding to my awkwardness about the whole thing.
When I didn’t answer, he added, “I didn’t think his fiancée went anywhere without him.”
“That—” It was on the tip of my tongue to blurt out that she didn’t, and that it hadn’t been Laetitia in the backseat of the Tender, but I bit back the impulse. “That’s mostly true, actually. She had mislaid him, and required our help to find him again. That’s why Tom and I were in our day-clothes and she was dressed for the evening.”
“Dear me,” Wolfgang said, “no one had taken him, I hope?”
“The way they took Flossie Schlomsky, do you mean? No, not at all. He had merely taken himself off to a place where she wouldn’t be welcome.”
He smirked. “A house of ill repute?”
I snorted. “Some people would say so, certainly. But it was simply an old nightclub down at the end of Heddon Street, and a private party. Christopher fetched him.”
“Your cousin? I didn’t see him there.”
“If you had stayed around another few minutes, you would have seen them both.”
He nodded, quite as if he believed it, although there was something in his tone, or perhaps his eyes, that indicated that he might not. He turned his spoon over in his hands for a moment, eyeing it, before he looked up at me. “May I be honest, Philippa?”
“Of course,” I said, even as my heart started to beat faster. It’s rarely good news when someone leads off with a question like that.
“For as long as I have known you, I have had the impression that your emotions have been engaged elsewhere.”
My… what?
