Stone snagged two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter, and they waded into the crowd.
“Well,” Tiffany said, “this is a good introduction to New York City. I recognize a lot of faces here; how many of them do you know?”
“Hardly any, except for the lawyers I run into in the hallowed halls of Woodman and Weld, but I recognize the same faces you do.” They were former cabinet members, politicians, a couple of United States senators, the mayor, the police commissioner and enough city councilmen, CEOs and movers and shakers that if laid end to end would reach somewhere into the northern regions of Central Park.
Bill Eggers elbowed his way through the mob and, ignoring Stone, gave Tiffany a big hug and kiss. “Welcome home, kiddo,” he said.
“Home?” Stone asked.
“I interned at Woodman and Weld for two summers during law school,” she said.
Eggers took her by the hand and led her up some stairs to a level overlooking the party. Somebody rang a silver bell, and the crowed quieted a bit.
“Good evening, everyone,” Eggers said. “On behalf of Woodman and Weld I want to welcome you all here to our annual profit-draining salute to our clients and friends. I will keep you long enough only to introduce you to the newest member of the New York legal fraternity, who has just been appointed the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Formerly, as a law student, she worked summers at Woodman and Weld, and I
firmly intend to use that connection every chance I get on behalf of our clients. May I introduce Ms. Tiffany Baldwin!” There was loud applause. Tiffany raised a glass to the crowd and mouthed a thank you, but said nothing. She descended the stairs with Eggers, and Stone could not get near her for an hour, such was the press to meet her.
It was not until he had been swept into the main dining room for dinner that he found her again, his place card opposite hers.
“I assume you met everyone in the place,” he said, sitting down.
“Twice,” she said, fanning herself with her hands. “What happened to you?”
“I was flotsam in the tide, but you were right, this event is an excellent introduction for you. Now half the movers and shakers in the city can say they know you when their friends say, ‘Who the hell is Tiffany Baldwin?’ ”
“Call me Tiff,” she said. “It takes some of the sting away.”
“What were your parents thinking?”
“Louis Comfort Tiffany was a distant relative by marriage,” she said, “and giving me his name gave my mother an excuse to tell people about the kinship every time she introduced me to someone. Never mind that trailer trash from Maine to California were naming their daughters Tiffany, even if they didn’t always spell it correctly. You’d be astonished at the number of ways the name can be misspelled.”
“What were you doing before your new appointment?”
“Well, until this morning I was an assistant attorney general.”
“So, you’re a Republican?”
“No, but the AG doesn’t know that, and my father is a major contributor to the party and a friend of the First Family, and that passes for political credentials.”
“You must have won a lot of cases for the Justice Department,” Stone said.
“Yes, indeed, and always the tough ones that the boys didn’t want to try. They were mostly during the Clinton years, though. The boys began to catch on that the tough cases got them noticed.”
“So, now you’re the one who’s going to try to put that nice Martha Stewart in jail?”
She raised her hands as if fending off the remark. “Nope, that one belongs to my predecessor and his chosen people. I wouldn’t touch it with a very long pole. I take it, from your view of the AG, that you’re a Democrat?”
“A Yellow Dog Democrat.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s somebody who would vote for a Yellow Dog before he’d vote for a Republican.”
“I wouldn’t say that too loudly,” she said, looking around. “This is a very Republican-looking crowd to me.”
“Nah, they’re mostly rich Democrats, though in a setting like this it can be hard to tell the difference.”
Her eyes were fixed on the entrance. “Well, it’s real hard to tell what that is.”