17. Dane #3
“The way you would have behaved before any of this started. You perform neither ignorance nor knowledge. Maria will perform for you. Let her. Don’t perform back.”
Cabot exhaled slowly.
“Eamon, my mother had a cook for thirty years. Her name was Brigid. She taught me how to crack an egg one-handed when I was six. Brigid is dead now. She died of cancer in 2014. I went to her funeral in Charlestown and stood in the back row and cried more than her own children did, because she had raised me on weekday afternoons while my mother was at her board meetings.”
He looked at his hands.
“I’m telling you because I want you to know what you’re asking me to walk past on Sunday.
Maria isn’t a stranger to me. None of these women ever are.
Women like her run the part of Boston I cover for the Globe, in kitchens like hers, and the families who employ them have been telling themselves a story about that arrangement for two hundred years.
I’m telling you that I know the story. I know who it serves, and I know what it cost Brigid.
And I am still going to walk into Maria’s kitchen on Sunday and take the coffee. ”
Wiley reached out and placed a hand on Cabot’s wrist.
“Thank you, Stanley,” Eamon said. “Dane will be in the room with you as your photographer.”
My mouth dropped. “I don’t take photographs.”
“You do as of Sunday. The Globe keeps a freelance photo pool. You will be drawn from it, and you’ll move with Stanley through the house. You photograph the cedar wall, the orchid corridor, and the catering vestibule. We will make sure you do not look like a tactical instrument.”
“You want Maria to see me?”
“I want Maria to see you. I want her to know The Guardians have decided to be visible. That information will alter her assessment of what she can do. A photographer she recognizes as an operator is a deterrent. She cannot remove you and Cabot in Eleanor’s house without burning her own cover.”
“You’re forcing her to hold the line.”
“I am forcing her to hold the line until federal moves on her.
“And if she doesn’t hold the line?”
“Then she moves before the wedding and we adjust. She has been inside the household for forty years without surfacing. We’re betting that doesn’t change.”
Eamon turned toward Farrow.
“You stay here. Wiley and Kohler are with you. Kohler is grieving. The two of you sit with him and let him talk. Write down what he says, but don’t push.”
“Understood,” Farrow said.
“And what will Eleanor know?” Cabot asked.
“Eleanor cannot be told yet. She wouldn’t be able to keep it from Maria. She hasn’t kept anything from Maria in forty years. Telling Eleanor is telling Maria, and that would mean losing everything we’ve built.”
“That conversation has to happen at some point,” Cabot said.
“It happens Thursday after the wedding, in a room she is led into by someone who isn’t Maria. That isn’t our job. Our job is to make sure she is alive to be there.”
Eamon turned to Wiley.
“You keep doing what you’re doing. You run Kohler’s account against the Onyx Bay map, and you run Maria and the story about her brother dying on the Gloucester boat. Build the spine of the piece you’ll write after this is over.”
“Done,” Wiley said.
Eamon laid both hands flat on the table.
“We need to find Maria’s people in the house and find the device. Then we neutralize it and set up federal to move on Maria without compromising the wedding itself.”
“And if we don’t find the device?” I asked.
He looked at me. “Then we tell Eleanor on Tuesday morning, and we cancel.”
“She won’t cancel,” Cabot said.
“Then we tell the bride’s father, who has been planning his daughter’s wedding for eighteen months and does not know any of this, and we let him tell Eleanor, and we let the family come apart in private rather than in public on a hall floor.”
“Six-day clock to a thermonuclear conversation,” Cabot said.
“Yes, but it’s all we have. Anything else?”
The room was silent.
Eamon stood, and the rest followed. The room emptied until it was only Farrow and me.
“You can shoot,” he said.
“My father had a Leica.”
He offered a small, brief smile.
“Tonight,” I said.
“Tonight.”
He came around the counter and stopped at my shoulder. He didn’t touch me, but he was close enough that I caught the coffee on his breath and the cherry vanilla cologne as he went past me to leave the room.
***
The day had been tense, but by midnight, the carriage house was quiet.
Samuel had walked in at six-forty p.m. with Vega behind him, carrying a cardboard box of cookbooks and a houseplant.
He looked at Wiley across the front room. Wiley stood up from the couch. They didn’t hug at first. They only looked at each other. Then Wiley crossed the room and put his face against the side of Samuel’s neck, and Samuel wrapped both arms around him.
Samuel was tall, slightly stooped through the shoulders.
He set the plant down on the kitchen island within ten minutes of arrival, found the largest pot in the cabinet, and started cooking.
He didn’t ask questions other than asking Vega where the salt was.
Later, he asked Kohler, who came down at seven still in his field-office clothes, whether he ate dairy.
The answer was yes. Kohler sat at the island and watched him work. Forty minutes in, he started crying quietly, without sound. Samuel didn’t turn around. He let Kohler cry.
Eamon left at eleven.
I came down the back stairs at midnight and found Farrow in the kitchen pouring two glasses of water. He’d changed into a clean henley and jeans. The sidearm was at the small of his back. He held one glass out to me without a word.
“Back step.”
“Yes.”
He pulled his coat off the hook by the back door and put it on. I took mine. We went out through the mudroom; Collins locked the inner door behind us, opened the outer one , and we stepped onto the brick step that ran the width of the back of the house.
The air was frosty. It was already December. We sat on a brick wall. It was cold through my jeans.
Farrow drank his glass of water and set it on the step.
“I keep seeing him in my head,” Farrow said.
“Henry?”
“Yes. He thanked the barista by name. I let him walk out the door.”
“Eamon and I let him walk out the door. You watched. There is no version of yesterday where you stand up from that café table and stop him from going to the hotel.”
“I know that.”
“Then it has to be enough.”
“It isn’t. Not yet.”
I drank a swallow of the water. It tasted like the pipes in an old house.
Farrow leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked into the dark of the yard.
“He burned his cover for Kohler.”
“Yes.”
“He could have stayed quiet and gone to the wedding. He could have watched Maria’s people walk through the corridor with the orchids and not said a word. Staying alive was an available choice.”
“Yes.”
“He did the math, Dane.”
“He did.”
Farrow was quiet for a moment. “I’d have done it for you,” he said.