Murder in Foggy Bottom by Margaret Truman Page B

Campari—she’d ordered them ever since.
    She tasted her drink and looked at her watch. He was late; no surprise. He’d made the reservation for seven; it was a quarter past. Then, she saw him enter. Escorted to the table by the maître d’, Max Pauling leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, slipped into the chair opposite, and said, “Sorry I’m late.”
    “For you, this is early,” she said pleasantly.
    “Having your usual?” He nodded at the drink.
    “Yes,” she said, thinking: I give up. “They’re good here. The splash of club soda in summer makes a difference.”
    “So you always say.”
    Pauling ordered a Bloody Mary without the vodka—a “Virgin Mary” in America, a “Bloody Shame” in England.
    “On the wagon?” she asked.
    “For tonight. Hate to dull the senses when I’m with you.”
    They raised their glasses and touched rims.
    Pauling took her in and liked what he saw, as he always did. He considered Jessica Mumford a strikingly beautiful woman, although such an evaluation, he knew, was highly personal, the eye of the beholder and all that.
    He’d first seen her a year ago across the John Quincy Adams State Drawing Room, one of several opulent diplomatic reception rooms on the eighth floor of the State Department. The rooms, wonderfully handsome compared with the building as a whole, house one of the nation’s greatest collections of American antiques and antiques accessories, valued at more than $50 million. The rooms’ perpetual renovation and the addition of rare items were funded by wealthy members of State’s Fine Arts Committee. A paid curator manages what is, in reality, a museum.
    Pauling had been back from Moscow only a few months and was still getting his bearings at State when he attended the reception for the new Russian minister-counselor of trade assigned to their embassy. He didn’t know many people, and spent the first half hour browsing the room’s treasures under the watchful eye of a dozen uniformed security guards—a precious Philadelphia highboy, yellow-and-red-damask-covered eighteenth-century furniture, rare Oriental rugs, and three huge crystal chandeliers. He’d stopped to listen to what the string quartet was playing—a Russian piece he’d heard at Moscow concerts, a Borodin theme based upon an Asian melody?— when he saw a woman talking with a trio of Russian diplomats wearing dark suits and dark expressions. He was instantly attracted to her, a visceral reaction; she was an inch taller than the men surrounding her, with blond-and-silver hair worn short and wet, high cheekbones, a nose long and fine and slightly arched, a clean purity to her profile. He wouldn’t have moved to her if she hadn’t glanced across the room and locked eyes with him, as though sending a signal that an overture would not be dismissed, provided it was an intelligent one. Not a woman who suffered fools easily, Pauling thought, but this fool will try, as he navigated knots of people and stopped a dozen feet from her and the Russians. She graciously concluded her conversation and came directly to him.
    “Hello,” he said.
    “Hello,” she said, a smile passing across her lovely face. “Buy me a drink?”
    “The price is right,” he said.
    “A Negroni,” she said. “Dry.”
    “You like to challenge bartenders?”
    “I
love
to challenge bartenders, and others,” she replied.
    Drinks in hand, they moved to a relatively quiet corner of the room.
    “I’m Max Pauling,” he said.
    “I’m Jessica Mumford. You work at State?”
    “I think so. I’ve been here a month.”
    “What division?”
    “Counterterrorism, Russian desk.”
    “You work for Barton then.”
    “
Colonel
Barton.”
    She winced. “Yes,
Colonel
Barton. Where did you come from?”
    “Moscow. I was with the embassy, a trade rep.”
    Her expression said she knew what he really did in Russia.
    “You?” he asked.
    “An analyst, Russian section. I also teach at GW.”
    “Took some courses there before