“So this thief we’re meeting,” Ascher asked. “What’s her story?”

“She used to belong to a gang called the Churchmice,” I said. “Specialized in robbing churches in Europe. Nicodemus hired them to swipe the Shroud of Turin for him a few years back.”

Ascher tilted her head. “What happened?”

“The three of them got it,” I said. “I suspect they tried to raise their price. Nicodemus and Deirdre killed two of them, and he would have killed Anna if I hadn’t intervened.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “And now Nicodemus wants her to help him?”

I snorted softly through my nose. “Yeah.”

Ascher studied me for a moment with her eyes narrowed. “Oh.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Just . . . admiring the manipulation,” she said. “I mean, I don’t like it, but it’s good.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Don’t you see?”

“I try not to think like that,” I said. The caterers uncovered the silver trays holding the meat, and a moment later the smell of roasted chicken and beef wafted up to my nose. My stomach made an audible sound. I’d been cooking for myself over a fireplace for a long, long while. It had been sustenance, but given my culinary skills, it hadn’t really been food, per se. The buffet smelled so good that for a minute I half expected to hear the pitter-patter of drool sliding out of my mouth.

“If you don’t, someone else will,” Ascher said. “If nothing else, you’ve got to defend yourself . . . Hey, are you as hungry as I am?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And we’ve apparently got some time to kill.”

“So it wouldn’t be unprofessional to raid the buffet?”

“Even Pitt and Clooney had to eat,” I said. “Come on.”

We raided the buffet. I piled my little plate with what I hoped would be a restrained amount of food. Ascher didn’t bother. She took a bit of almost everything, stacking food up hungrily. We made our way to one of many tables set up around the outskirts of the ballroom while the band went through another number. I picked one that gave us a view of the door, and watched for Anna Valmont to arrive.

She didn’t appear over the next few moments, though a few of Chicago’s luminaries did, and the numbers in the room began to slowly grow. The hotel staff began taking coats and drifting through the room with trays of food and drink, while the caterers began to briskly move back and forth through the service entrances, like a small army of worker ants, repairing the damage to the buffet almost the moment it was done. It seemed to mean so much to them that I was considering doing a little more damage myself, purely to give them a chance to repair it, you understand. I tryto be nice to people.

I was just gathering my empty plate to show my compassionate, humanitarian side when one of the hotel staff touched my arm and said, “Pardon me, Mr. Oberheit? You have a telephone call, sir. There’s a courtesy phone right over here.”

I looked up at the woman, wiped my mouth with a napkin, and said, “All right. Show me.” I nodded to Ascher. “Be right back.”

I got up and followed the staffer over to a curtained alcove by one wall, where there was a phone. We were more or less out of the way of everyone else in the room there.

“Miss Valmont,” I said to the staffer, once we were there. “Nice to see you again.”

Anna Valmont turned to face me with a small and not terribly pleasant smile. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been a peroxide blonde. Now her hair was black, cut in a neat pageboy. She was leaner than I remembered, almost too much so, like a young, feral cat. She was still pretty, though her features had lost that sense of youthful exuberance, and her eyes were harder, warier.

“Dresden,” she said. “‘Mr. Oberheit,’ seriously?”

“Did you hear me criticizing your alias?” I asked.

That got a flash of a smile. “Who’s the stripper?”

“No one you know, and no one to mess with,” I said. “And there’s nothing wrong with strippers. How’ve you been?”

She reached into her tunic and carefully produced a thickly packed business envelope. “Do you have my money or not?”

I arched an eyebrow at that. “Money?”

That got me another smile, though there was something serrated about it. “We have history, Dresden, but I don’t do freebies and I’m not hanging around for chitchat. The people I had to cross for this aren’t the forgiving type and have been on my heels all week. This envelope is made of flash paper. Cough up the dough or the data and I turn to smoke.”

My mind was racing. Nicodemus had set up a job for Anna Valmont—it was the only way he could know that she would be here, and that she would be meeting the guy with the sunset-colored rose. So it stood to reason that whatever information he’d had her take, it might be valuable, too.

I checked around me quickly. I couldn’t see the table from where I stood, but Ascher wasn’t in sight. “Do it,” I said, turning back to Valmont. “Destroy it, now, quick.”

“You think I won’t?” she asked. Then she paused, frowning. “Wait a minute . . . What’s the con here?”

“No con,” I said low. “Look, Anna, there’s a lot going on and there’s no time to explain it all. Blow the data and vanish. We’ll both be better off.”