The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [85]
“Sentimental, yes?” Von Holden smiled, looking at her.
“Sentimental? Yes, I suppose that’s a good word. I would have said beautiful.” Joanna’s eyes held Von Holden’s for the slightest moment, then she looked back to the others.
Next to her was a very attractive and obviously very successful young couple from Berlin, Konrad and Margarete Peiper. Konrad Peiper, from what she could gather, was president of a large German trading company and Margarete, his wife, had something to do with show business. Just what, Joanna wasn’t exactly sure, and it was difficult to ask her because most of her time was spent sitting back from the table talking on a cellular phone.
Seated across from her were Helmuth and Bertha Salettl, brother and sister. Both, Joanna guessed, were in their seventies, and had flown in that afternoon from their home in Austria.
Dr. Helmuth Salettl was Elton Lybarger’s personal physician, and Joanna had met with him four of the six times he had visited Lybarger at Rancho de Piñon in New Mexico. The doctor, like his sister now, had been somber and austere, saying little and asking only a few pointed questions regarding Lybarger’s general health and regimen. The fact was that although she dealt daily with the rich and famous who came to Rancho de Piñon to recuperate secretly from anything from drug or alcohol addiction to face-lifts, she had never encountered anyone like Salettl. His presence and entrenched arrogance frightened her. But she’d found as long as she answered his questions and acted professionally, everything would be all right because he would never be there for more than twenty-four hours.
Two tables away, Elton Lybarger sat talking with the plumpish woman who’d smothered him with kisses and called him “Uncle” at the airport. His .earlier fears about his family seemed to have faded, and he looked relaxed and comfortable, smiling and acknowledging the well-wishes of the others, who, during the course of the evening, stopped by to take his hand and say a few personal words of encouragement.
Next to Lybarger was a heavy-set and plain-looking woman in her late thirties, who Joanna learned was Gertrude Biermann, an activist for the Greens, a radical environmental peace movement, who seemed to take great pleasure in interrupting Lybarger’s conversations with others to engage him in talk herself. As the evening progressed, Joanna wished she wouldn’t be so insistent, and even considered going to her and mentioning it, because she could see Mr. Lybarger was beginning to tire. Why he would have a dowdy political activist as a friend was something that plucked Joanna’s interest. The idea seemed so incongruous with Lybarger and the rest there who seemed to represent some form or other of big business.
Holding court at the third table was Uta Baur, touted as “the most German of all German fashion designers,” who, after first being feted at trade fairs in Munich and Düsseldorf in the early seventies, was now an international institution in Paris, Milan and New York. Pencil thin, and dressed all in black, she wore little if any makeup, and her hair, cut almost to the scalp, was white blond to the roots. Were it not for her animated gestures and the sparkle in her eyes as she talked to those at the table with her, Joanna might have taken her for a female version of the grim reaper. She was, as everyone there knew and Joanna later found out, seventy-four years old.
Standing back, near the entry door, were two men in tuxedos who had earlier been in the dress of chauffeurs at the airport. They were lean, short haired, and seemed to be constantly watching the room. Joanna was certain they were bodyguards of some kind and was about to ask Von Holden about them when a waiter in lederhosen asked if he might take away the remains of her supper.
Joanna