“You may get to eat after all,” Svetlana called from the grill. “And speaking of that, can we start to cook?”
“Absolutely.”
[THREE]
The Lobby Bar
The Alvear Palace Hotel
Avenida Alvear 1891
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1955 7 February 2007
Ambassador Charles M. Montvale had liked the Alvear Plaza Hotel from the moment he walked in the door. He had liked it even better when, following a bellman to a very nice suite, he had walked past the Lobby Bar, an oasis of polished wood and brass, a vast array of liquor bottles, white-jacketed barmen, and a remarkable number of attractive women—at least three of whom were astonishingly beautiful.
“Tell you what, Truman,” he said to Ellsworth as their elevator rose silently. “Why don’t we have a quick shower and then go down to that bar for a little taste? God knows, it’s been a tough day. Say, thirty minutes?”
“Splendid idea,” Truman Ellsworth had replied. “I’ll see you there in thirty minutes.”
Ellsworth’s eye had also fallen upon the astonishingly beautiful women in the bar.
Neither had intentions of enticing one of the beautiful women to their suites, there to break the vow both had taken to keep only to the women who had marched down the aisle with them so many years ago.
But it never hurt just to look. Both of them would have agreed if God hadn’t wanted men to look at women, He would have made the female of the species flat-chested and given them green teeth and lizardlike skin.
But unexpected things did happen from time to time.
And they were, after all, human.
Ambassador Charles M. Montvale had just finished saying, “It’s been an awful day, and I think I’m entitled to another little taste,” when I. Ronald Spears appeared at the entrance to the Lobby Bar.
Montvale was not pleased to see him. He had really been looking forward to his second drink. The ceremony that went with the delivering of a Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks in the Lobby Bar of the Alvear was something, he had immediately decided, that the watering holes of the nation’s capital and his various clubs would do well to emulate.
First, the bartender laid a tray before his customer. It held a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch whisky; a larger-tha
n-to-be-expected squat glass; a bowl of ice; a silver pitcher of water; silver tongs; and what at first Montvale had thought was a tea strainer, but then he had seen that it had no holes. It was sort of a shot glass with wings.
First the bartender lifted an ice cube—not something spit out of an ice maker, but a real ice cube, about an inch square—with his tongs and dropped it into the glass. Then he picked up another and wordlessly asked if his customer wanted a second ice cube. Montvale had stopped this process at three ice cubes, using a gesture he had learned playing blackjack.
The bartender laid the tea strainer/shot glass on the whisky glass. Next, he picked up the bottle of whisky and with great élan filled the shot to overflowing. And then kept pouring. And then he tipped the wings of the shot glass, slowly emptying the contents into the glass over the ice cubes. Finally, with a silver gadget, he stirred the ice cubes gently around in the glass.
Montvale impatiently waved I. Ronald Spears over to the table.
“Mr. Ambassador, there are two telephone calls for you at the embassy.”
“Why didn’t you transfer them here?” Montvale snapped.
Even as he did so, he knew what the answer was going to be, and was: “Mr. Ambassador, they’re on a secure line.”
Montvale looked around first for the bartender, to cancel the order for the drink he would now not get to drink, and to sign the bill, and then for the Secret Service agents who were drinking Coke and tonic water elsewhere in the bar.
The communications officer told them he had two calls, one from Supervisory Special Agent McGuire and the other from John Powell, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Get McGuire on here first,” Montvale said as he picked up the secure telephone.
“I have Ambassador Montvale on the line. The line is secure.”