In the massive dining hall the banquet was laid on for half-past nine-an early hour to dine in Spain but many of the guests had distances to travel home.
The assassin found himself seated between a pair of very old men who accosted each other with delight: “My God, Leonid, I thought we were both dead.” One of them wore the white uniform of an admiral in a navy that had not existed for twenty-one years.
The table sat six guests at each side and one at either end; there were four rows of four tables each with white-draped serving tables along the walls. The White Russians were serving a seven-course meal to more than two hundred people and the assassin was mildly impressed by the sheer dimension of it.
There were empty seats at the favored tables and that confirmed his expectation that the men in the drawing room did not intend to interrupt their closed meeting to attend the dinner. He had ample time and it would be an excellent meal; there was no reason for concern. He laid his napkin across his lap and masked his face with a benign politeness when the vintner across the table addressed him.
The room was yellowed by the warm glow of crystal chandeliers and tapers and brightened by the spectacular coloration of the ladies’ gowns. It all made a pleasing contrast to the drabness he had left four days ago-the rubble and dust of London’s blacked-out streets.
There was a cheer and a standing toast when the Grand Duke was wheeled in to take his place at the head of the main table. An Archbishop took the dais, dressed in rich vestments and swinging a censor, flanked by bearded priests in black robes and caps and a pair of nuns in black habits and white babushkas. One of them handed a triple-barred Byzantine cross to the Archbishop and the holy man began to chant in the Slavonic archaisms of the Old Church. The assassin understood none of it but a word now and then; his Russian was passable but this was the Latin of the Orthodox Church, the language of ritual and antiquity. When the ceremony was finished, the next ritual began-the drinking of a great many toasts in vodka. They began with the memory of the Czar and the health of the Grand Duke and went on from that to whatever came to mind: the Admiral beside him lifted his glass toward the vintner’s wife and proclaimed with gallant cheer, “To the purest and holiest of Russian womanhood!” And the woman who was nearly as fat as her husband acknowledged it with a polite dip of her head and a twinkle. Occasionally the assassin heard the smash of a glass although the practice had dwindled because of the in creasing difficulty of replacing crystal.
The Luger was a hard pressure against his rib. He shifted his seat to ease it.