The chandeliers were dripping with crystals that reflected sparkles all over the groaning board of the massive dining room table sitting on a huge Oriental carpet in the Kuomintang government of China's embassy in Kalomara, the diplomatic section of Washington, D.C. The room was permeated with the sound of the lilting laughter of the most expensively gowned, bejeweled, and coifed grand dames of the nation's capital, taking the edge off the guffaws and boisterous self-important statements of some of the most powerful government leaders and diplomats who could be gathered between Paris and Tokyo.
Anyone who was looking down on this demonstration of conspicuous consumption and excess would not, in their wildest imagination, have guessed the purpose of this gathering. It had been arranged by the Chinese leader's personal emissaries, the Kuomintang foreign minister, T. V. Soong, and his delicate yet steely celebrated sister, May-ling, better known to the world as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the ruler of China. All of this ultraexpensive wining and dining was being done to convince the United States to make good on its promises to underwrite the relief of the starving Chinese people, who were already in a deadly two-pronged war with the invading Japanese and the inside-the-tent Chinese communists. Thus far the Chinese were taking the brunt of the actual warfare unleashed by the combined Axis powers, and they were campaigning heavily to convince their allied governments that, if these forces weren't stopped in China, the fighting would soon flare across the world.
Ada Walker, the newly popular bride of the new U.S. ambassador-designate to Malaya, Stanfield Walker, was seated between Seni Promoj, the Thai ambassador to the United States, and a Thai prince in his own right, and the congressman from her own state, who had been invited because he sat on the powerful House Foreign Relations Committee, and thus would be either an ally of or barrier to T. V Soong's plans. The Walkers were there as much because Ada had taken the capitol city by storm with her forthright western manner and her brilliant table conversation as because her husband was about to take a diplomatic post in East Asia. It hadn't hurt either that she knew all of the leading writers and artists in the country and was an artist of national fame herself—not to mention that, at fifty, she was one of the most beautiful and intriguing women in the city.
Throughout the meal, Ada, somewhat nonplused by the seating arrangement, had focused her attention on Seni Promoj, to her left, who had proved to be a delightful conversationalist and someone who Ada had immediately warmed to, as he obviously had done to her as well. This had fit perfectly with the dinner partner on the congressman's right, the exotic and alluring May-ling Soong, because her assignment for the evening was to seduce Congressman Peter Fair. Stanfield Walker and the congressman's wife were seated across from Ada and Peter, but the table was much too wide and the conversations around them much too loud for any discussion in that direction. This was just as well for Ada, because as hard as it was to be seated next to her oh-so-recent and long-standing lover, who had abandoned her to pursue his political ambitions, it would have been excruciating to have to chit chat with his wife. Ada and Peter's wife had never met, but Ada knew much of the woman and there wasn't anything about her that Ada could find to like. Ada briefly pitied her husband, who had to converse with the woman tonight, but Stanfield was a trained diplomat, and Ada reasoned that he would be able to cope.
Madame Chiang was using her most powerful wiles on the young congressman from Colorado. The intelligence on this man that the highly sophisticated Chinese intelligence had been able to dig up and pass on to T. V. Soong was that the man was a notorious skirt chaser, that he couldn't keep his cock in his pants for very long. Madame Chiang had no intention of letting the man bed her, but she knew how to enflame a man to do her will. There were many who said she controlled all of China with her beauty and her woman's technique—neither one of which would have gotten her far in the staid Methodist women's seminary she had attended in America's South.
She spent much of the meal using this technique on the congressman, and eventually to letting her hand do her talking for her under the tablecloth. She was sure that she would have no difficulty luring Fair into private discussions with T. V. Soong—and into a compromising position, if that was necessary—whenever her brother considered that would aid the Chinese cause in Washington. And she was enflaming Peter Fair all right, but not exactly with the results she had intended.
As the meal was concluded and the guests were rising to reform either in the lounge to listen to the usual string quartet that had been brought in to entertain them or to various smaller meeting rooms in the building to plan or cajole or be cajoled concerning the various crises affecting their respective nations, Peter rose, took the hand of his dinner partner on his left who had said barely a word to him, and whispered in her ear. He did not let go of her hand until she had acceded to his request.
They met at one of the French doors to the walled garden in the glass conservatory that ran across the garden façade of the embassy building, the former town house of a nineteenth-century robber baron.
"I only came here, Pete, so that there wouldn't be a scene in the dining room. We have nothing to say to each other."
"Oh, I think we do," Pete said. "You know I didn't want to leave off with you. I was forced to. I wouldn't be here if I hadn't."
