“Flesh peddler?”
“Yair. You had her right, didn’t you? She had all the earmarks.”
She laughed. “Some of those convention cut-ups, off the legal leash?”
“You’d make some man very happy,” I told her, “if you didn’t know so much about sex.”
The service elevator zipped me up to the sixth. The Crystal Room was thick with smoke, loud with chatter and clatter.
Our caravanserai is too high-priced to cater to run-of-the-mine conventions. But we take a few where the foregatherers are not the type who go for snake-dancing in the lobby. Doctors, scientists, economists, upper-bracketeers, mostly. The bunch in the Crystal Room were pollsters, the boys who guess ’em wrong at election time. Public pulse-feelers. That’s what the publicity stated.
Possibly a hundred left in the room. Most of them clustering at tables or huddling in groups. At the far end, a tall, high-domed individual up at the speakers’ table was urging those present to “get behind this thing solidly — back it with your utmost energy and enthusiasm—” I didn’t listen.
Armand was in charge. Emile hovered around the door to the banquet kitchen to see everything went smooth and serene. There were about thirty mess-jacketed waiters pouring demitasses, passing coronas, collecting spumone saucers, so on. I didn’t see Auguste.
Tim wasn’t visible. But Hacklin was. Giving Armand that elbow grip. Our dapper-dan banquet maître didn’t care for any part of it. I could interpret his Gallic gestures clear across the Crystal Room.
I went over.