Nightside 07 - Hell to Pay

ticket was coming from. I felt obscurely disappointed. Eleanor could have done better than Ramon.
    I headed straight for Eleanor’s table, and at every table I passed the conversation quieted and stopped, as the women looked to see where I was going and who I was going to talk to. By the time I got to Eleanor the whole Tea Room had gone quiet, with heads everywhere turning and craning to see what would happen. All the bodyguards had gone tense. For the first time I could clearly hear the classical music playing in the background. A string quartet was committing Mozart with malice aforethought. I stopped behind Eleanor, said her name, and she took her time turning round to look at me.
    “Oh,” she said. “It’s you, Taylor.” The careless boredom in her voice was a work of art. The infamous John Taylor. Again. How very dull…
    “We need to talk,” I said, playing it brusque and mysterious, not to be outdone.
    “I don’t think so,” said Eleanor, calmly and dismissively. “I’m busy. Some other time, perhaps.”
    The Tea Room loved that. The other women at Eleanor’s table were all but wetting themselves, silent and goggle-eyed, wriggling with excitement to see her so casually brushing off the disreputable and deliciously dangerous John Taylor. She couldn’t have impressed them more if she’d shat rubies.
    “There are things you know that I need to know,” I said, playing my role to the hilt.
    “What a shame,” said Eleanor. And she turned her back on me.
    “Your father had some very interesting things to say about you,” I said to her turned back, and smiled slightly as I saw it stiffen. “Talk to me, Eleanor. Or I’ll tell everyone here.”
    She turned around again and considered me coldly. I was bluffing, and she had to be pretty sure I was, but she couldn’t take the risk. The Ladies Who Lunch thrive on weaknesses exposed, like piranha thrown raw meat. And besides, I had to be more interesting than her present company. So she’d talk to me and try to find out exactly what I knew, while telling me as little as possible in return. I could see all of that in her face…because she let me.
    “If I must, I must,” she said, an aristocrat being gracious to an underling. She smiled sweetly at the women sitting all agog around her table. “Forgive me, darlings. Family business. You know how it is.”
    The women smiled and nodded and said all the right things in return, but it was clear they couldn’t wait for us to leave so they could start gossiping about us. All across the room, every eye watched as I led Eleanor to a private booth at the back and settled her in. Conversations rose slowly in the Tea Room again. The bodyguards relaxed at their tables, no doubt relieved they weren’t going to have to take me on after all. Ramon watched me with his cold, dark eyes, and his face showed nothing at all. I sat down in the booth opposite Eleanor.
    “Well,” I said, “fancy meeting you here.”
    “We do need to talk,” she said, leaning forward earnestly. “But you understand I couldn’t make it easy for you.”
    “Oh, of course,” I said, and wondered where this was going.
    “I wouldn’t want you to think I talk freely to just anyone.”
    “Perish the thought.”
    “Look at them,” she said, gesturing at her table. “Chattering like birds because I dared talk back to the infamous John Taylor. If I hadn’t, the gossip sheets would have had us in bed together by tomorrow. Some of them will anyway just because it’s such a good story.”
    “Perish the thought,” I said again, and she looked at me sharply. I grinned, and she smiled suddenly in return. She relaxed a little and sat back in her chair. “You’re easier to talk to than I’d thought, Mr. Taylor. And I could use someone to talk to.”
    I gestured at Ramon, sitting alone at his table. “Don’t you have him to talk to?”
    “I don’t underwrite Ramon’s considerable upkeep for his conversation,” she said dryly. “In many ways, he’s still a boy. Pretty enough, and fun to play with, but there’s not a lot going on in his head. I prefer my sweeties that way. The whole point of toy boys is that you play with them for a while, and when you get tired of them you move on to the next toy.”
    “And your husband doesn’t care?” I said.
    “I didn’t marry Marcel for that ,” Eleanor said, matter-of-factly. “Daddy wants me to be married, because he can still be very old-fashioned about some things. Hardly