Darth Plagueis - James Luceno [79]
Working on her third glass of wine since dinner began, she interpreted his ready smile as permission to turn fully toward him. “Not too gamy?”
“Scarcely a trace of the wild.”
A dark-haired human beauty with big blue eyes, she was attached in some way to the Eriaduan consulate on Malastare—host of the gala at which the Dug winners of the Vinta Harvest Classic were being feted.
“Are you on Malastare for business or pleasure?”
“As luck would have it, both,” Palpatine said, patting his lips with a napkin. “Kinman Doriana and I are members of Senator Kim’s party.”
He indicated the clean-shaven, slightly balding young man in the adjacent seat.
“Charmed,” the woman said.
Doriana smiled broadly. “You’re not kidding.”
Her gaze moved to the neighboring table, where Vidar Kim sat with members of the Gran Protectorate and politicians from nearby Sullust, Darknell, and Sluis Van.
“Senator Kim is the tall one with the quaint beard?”
“No, he’s the one with the three eyestalks,” Doriana said.
The woman blinked, then laughed with him. “A friend of mine was asking about Senator Kim earlier. Is he married?”
“For many years, and happily,” Palpatine told her.
“And you?” she said, turning to him again.
“Frequent travel forbids it.”
She watched him over the rim of the wineglass. “Married to politics, is that it?”
“To the work,” he said.
“To the work,” Doriana said, raising his glass in a toast.
Just twenty-eight, Palpatine wore his reddish hair long, in the tradition of Naboo statesmen, and dressed impeccably. Many who encountered the ambassador described him as an articulate, charismatic young man of refined taste and quiet strength. A good listener, even-tempered, politically astute, astonishingly well informed for someone who had only been in the game for seven years. A patrician at a time when few could claim the title, and destined to go far. Well traveled, too, courtesy of his position as Naboo’s ambassador-at-large but also as the sole surviving heir to the wealth of House Palpatine. Long recovered from the tragedy that had struck his family more than a decade earlier, but perhaps as a result of being orphaned at seventeen, something of a loner. A man whose love of periodic solitude hinted at a hidden side to his personality.
“Tell me, Ambassador,” she said, as she set her glass down, “are you one of those men with a friend in every spaceport?”
“I’m always eager to make friends,” Palpatine said in a low monotone that brought sudden color to her face. “We’re alike in that way.”
Taking her glossy lower lip between her teeth, she reached for her wineglass once more. “Are you perhaps a Jedi mind reader disguised in ambassadorial robes?”
“Anything but.”
“I’ve often wondered whether they have secret relationships,” she said in a conspiratorial voice. “Gallivanting around the galaxy, using the Force to seduce innocent beings.”
“I wouldn’t know, but I sincerely doubt it,” Palpatine said.
She looked at him in a calculating way, and raised her hand to caress his chin with a manicured forefinger. “On Eriadu some believe that a cleft chin identifies someone the Force has pushed away.”
“Just my luck,” he said in mock seriousness.
“Just your luck, indeed,” she said, sliding a flimsi-card across the table toward him. “I have hostess duties to attend to, Ambassador. But I’m free after midnight.”
Palpatine and Doriana watched her walk away from the table, teetering slightly on high heels.
“Nicely played,” Doriana said. “I’m taking notes.”
Palpatine slid the flimsi-card toward him. “A gift.”
“When you earned it?” Doriana shook his head. “I’m not that desperate. Yet, anyway.”
The two of them laughed. Doriana’s engaging smile and innocent good looks belied a sinister personality that had brought him to Palpatine’s notice several years earlier. A Naboo, he had a troubled past and, perhaps as a consequence, talents that made him useful. So Palpatine had befriended him and clandestinely drawn him into his web, in accordance with Plagueis’s instructions that he always keep an eye out for allies and would-be co-conspirators.