“Yes.”
“Then what am I doing on the Vineyard Sunday?”
“You’re doing the wedding profile Eleanor invited you to do. She extended the invitation in good faith. If you decline it now, you tell Maria the Guardians have decided you are too valuable to risk. That’s information she doesn’t currently have, and I don’t want to give it to her.”
Cabot considered that. “And if I go?”
“You go as Stanley Cabot,Globereporter doing a wedding profile, and you walk through the house with Eleanor and take notes on the centerpieces. You let Maria pour your coffee. She will not act on you in Eleanor’s house in front of a photographer. The wedding is on Wednesday. She has six days of operational discipline to protect, and removing aGlobereporter from inside the family forty-eight hours before the ceremony is the one move she cannot make without surfacing herself.”
“You’re telling me I’m safer inside that house than outside of it?”
“I am telling you that for the next six days, you are safer in that house with Eleanor than you would be in any other configuration I can build. After Wednesday, the math changes.”
Cabot spread his fingers flat on the table.
“Eamon, she has fed me and poured my coffee. Two summers ago on the Vineyard she sent a plate of cookies up to my room because Eleanor mentioned at breakfast that I had a head cold.”
He stopped. His voice was steady, but pitched lower. “You’re asking me to walk into her kitchen, drink the coffee she pours me, take notes on the centerpieces, and let her look at me knowing what she is.”
“Yes.”
“And Eleanor?”
“Eleanor will read it as journalism. Maria will read it as something else. Eleanor’s reading is the one that matters, because Eleanor is the one who controls whether you are in the house at all.”
“And what am I bringing back?”
“Confirmation of three things. The cedar wall is where Köhler said it is. The orchid corridor runs where the architectural drawings show it running, and the catering vestibule has the access patterns we think it has. You’re not gathering intelligence. You’re verifying the architecture.”
“How do I behave?”
“The way you would have behaved before any of this started. You perform neither ignorance nor knowledge. Maria will perform for you. Let her. Don’t perform back.”
Cabot exhaled slowly.
“Eamon, my mother had a cook for thirty years. Her name was Brigid. She taught me how to crack an egg one-handed when I was six. Brigid is dead now. She died of cancer in 2014. I went to her funeral in Charlestown and stood in the back row and cried more than her own children did, because she had raised me on weekday afternoons while my mother was at her board meetings.”
He looked at his hands.
“I’m telling you because I want you to know what you’re asking me to walk past on Sunday. Maria isn’t a stranger to me. None of these women ever are. Women like her run the part of Boston I cover for theGlobe, in kitchens like hers, and the families who employ them have been telling themselves a story about that arrangement for two hundred years. I’m telling you that I know the story. I know who it serves, and I know what it cost Brigid. And I am still going to walk into Maria’s kitchen on Sunday and take the coffee.”
Wiley reached out and placed a hand on Cabot’s wrist.
“Thank you, Stanley,” Eamon said. “Dane will be in the room with you as your photographer.”
My mouth dropped. “I don’t take photographs.”
“You do as of Sunday. TheGlobekeeps a freelance photo pool. You will be drawn from it, and you’ll move with Stanley through the house. You photograph the cedar wall, the orchid corridor, and the catering vestibule. We will make sure you do not look like a tactical instrument.”
“You want Maria to see me?”
“I want Maria to see you. I want her to know The Guardians have decided to be visible. That information will alter her assessment of what she can do. A photographer she recognizes as an operator is a deterrent. She cannot remove you and Cabot in Eleanor’s house without burning her own cover.”
“You’re forcing her to hold the line.”
“I am forcing her to hold the line until federal moves on her.
“And if she doesn’t hold the line?”