The Book of Fate - Brad Meltzer [44]
“Deal,” she said as she started rifling through the thick stack of invites on the far corner of her desk. Opening concert at the opera. The annual craft bazaar at the Sailfish Club. Baby naming at the Whedons. It had to be here somewhere . . .
“So my breakfast with Dreidel . . . ?” Wes asked.
Still flipping through the stack, Lisbeth was barely paying attention. “Breakfast? Come now, Wes—why would anyone care what two former staffers had on their morning toast? Consider it officially dead.”
Manning’s surprise party—and her promised five minutes—weren’t for at least another month. But that didn’t mean she had to stay away until then. Especially when there were so many other ways to get in close. Slamming down the phone, Lisbeth never took her eyes off the stack. Reception for the Leukemia Society, Historical Society, Knesset Society, Palm Beach Society, Renaissance Society, Alexis de Tocqueville Society . . . and then . . . there . . .
Lisbeth yanked the rectangular card from the middle of the stack. Like every other invite, the design was understated, the printing was meticulous, and the envelope had her name on it. But this one, with its cream-colored card stock and twirling black calligraphy, also had something more: An Evening with President Leland F. Manning. Benefiting 65 Roses—the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Tonight.
She didn’t mind the fake stalling from Wes and Dreidel. Or the nonsense about Manning’s so-called surprise party. But once Wes asked her to kill the piece . . . Sacred Rule #6: There were only two kinds of people in a gossip column—those who want to be in there, and those who don’t. Wes just put himself on the don’t side. And without a doubt, the don’ts were always far more interesting.
Picking up the phone, Lisbeth dialed the number on the invite.
“This is Claire Tanz,” an older woman answered.
“Hi, Claire, this is Lisbeth Dodson from Below the Fold. I hope it’s not too late to RSVP—”
“For tonight? No, no . . . oh, we read you every day,” the woman said just a bit too excited. “Oooh, and I can call the President’s staff and let them know you’ll be there . . .”
“That’s okay,” Lisbeth said calmly. “I just got off the phone with them. They’re already thrilled I’m coming.”
23
Three and a half minutes, Nico told himself as he watched the gray Acura cut through the snow and pass along the service road just outside his second-story shatterproof window. Pulling up the sleeve of his faded brown sweatshirt, he glanced down at the second hand on his watch, counting to himself. One minute . . . two . . . three . . . Nico closed his eyes and began to pray. His head bobbed sixteen times. Three and a half . . . Rocking slowly, he opened his eyes and turned to the door of his room. The door didn’t open.
Perched atop the rusted radiator just inside his window, Nico continued to rock slowly, turning back to the falling snow and bowing the A-string of his well-worn maple violin. The violin had a tiny four-leaf clover inlay in the tailpiece, but Nico was far more interested in the way the fiddle’s strings perfectly crossed the ebony bridge as they ran up the fingerboard. When he first arrived at St. Elizabeths, he spent his first two weeks sitting in the exact same place, staring out the exact same window. Naturally, the doctors discouraged it—“antisocial and escapist,” they declared.
It only got worse when they examined Nico’s view: on his right, a burned-out brick building with an army crest on it (“too symbolic of his military past”); on his left, the edges of the Anacostia River (“don’t reward him with a quality view”); and in the far distance, at the very edge of the property, half a dozen fenced-in fields with hundreds of crumbling headstones from the Civil War to World War I, when army and navy patients were still buried on the property (“death should never be a focal point”). Yet when Nico mentioned to a nurse that the dogwood tree just outside his window reminded him of his childhood home in Wisconsin, where his mother played cello and the wind sent the tree’s branches swaying to