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mind. I row the Thames nearly weekly back in London. Weather permitting, of course.”<br />
“Indeed?” said Rayley, with some surprise. For all their professional collaboration, he knew<br />
very little about what Trevor did in his private hours. Rayley leaned back against the side of the boat<br />
to regard the Winter Palace which, if possible, looked even larger and more imposing from the angle<br />
of the water. When the two men had wandered down to one of the docks they had been promptly<br />
issued this small red rowboat and Rayley had to admit there was a kind of peace here along the river.<br />
Trevor braced the oars and settled back as well, lighting a cigar and letting the current simply pull<br />
them.<br />
“Is there more to confide about your evening in the men’s enclave?” Trevor inquired with a<br />
deceptive nonchalance.<br />
“It’s exactly as I told you,” Rayley said. “We were invited there apparently for no other reason<br />
than for Filip Orlov to impart his heavy handed and self serving theories about who might have killed<br />
the ballet dancers and Mrs. Kirby. The fact that his wife is having an affair with the dark eyed dance<br />
master only makes Filip’s true motives even more transparent. At this point I’m inclined to see<br />
Konstantin Antonovich as simultaneously our only named suspect and the least likely person in the<br />
whole Winter Palace to have committed the crime.”<br />
“But you think Emma is safe alone with him?”<br />
be.”<br />
Rayley indulged a slight smile. “I’d agree with Tom that she’s precisely as safe as she wishes to<br />
Trevor exhaled a puff of smoke, coughing slightly with the effort.<br />
“We can talk of personal matters, you know, Welles,” Rayley finally said. “I’d like to think that<br />
if my misadventures in Paris served any purpose, it’s that the door to greater conversational intimacy<br />
now stands open between us.”<br />
“Then you must share with me the details of your evening in the men’s enclave, even those too<br />
bizarre for our young teammates. All I can gather is that you smoked opium, frolicked with women<br />
from the orient, and let men oil you up and beat you with bulrushes.”<br />
“I assure you no man has ever beaten me with a bulrush and I find ‘frolick’ a rather imprecise<br />
verb.”<br />
The two men chuckled, Rayley also digging in his vest pocket for a cigar. All right, so Trevor<br />
was as disinclined as ever to speak of his true affections for Emma, an attraction which Rayley feared
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