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until after dessert.”
    Chapel smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Where are my manners?”
    Fiona reached out and squeezed his bicep. His right one, the one that was still real. “You have Ygor beat, that’s the important thing.”
    The Russian snorted in derision, but then he slowly rose to his feet. “If we’re going to eat, let’s eat. I’m hungry now.” He stomped off toward the house, leaving them to follow.

 
    4.
    T he small dining room turned out to be, surprisingly, quite small. It was no bigger than the kitchen where Chapel normally ate back at his apartment in Virginia. Apparently the movies had lied to him, and rich ­couples didn’t eat at opposite ends of a table long enough to double as a shuffleboard court.
    They sat down to a salad of crisp greens, matched with a white wine that Chapel thought smelled a little like creosote. He smiled when Fiona asked him if it was to his taste—­he must have winced to get her to ask a question like that. He very much wanted to ask Angel if it was drugged or poisoned but there was no way for her to know—­as much as he thought his guardian angel was omniscient, she could really only hear what he heard. The hands-­free unit he wore didn’t even have a camera onboard. It was designed to be discreet, to look more like a hearing aid than a telephone accessory. Anything else would have been rude to wear to dinner.
    After the salad Favorov’s children came in to say hello. Angel guided Chapel through the delicate matter of greeting the children—­two boys, Daniel and Ryan, respectively aged ten and seven. The boys were politely introduced and Daniel came forward to shake Chapel’s hand. Ryan stayed close to his mother, even hiding his face in her skirts when Chapel tried to talk to him.
    Chapel looked up at Fiona and they shared a smile. “Do you have any children, Jim?” she asked.
    “No, no,” he said. “I guess I never had time.”
    “You should find it. These two mean the world to me. I never really understood what it meant to love someone until I met Daniel for the first time.”
    Favorov had no comment on that. Daniel just rolled his eyes, which made Chapel smile all the broader.
    The children were sent off to their room to get ready for bed before the salad course was finished.
    The second course—­Chapel would have called it an appetizer—­proved to be slices of duck in a fruit sauce. Chapel had never had duck before and found he actually liked it. Like a lighter cut of beef, he thought. “This is really delicious.”
    Fiona dabbed at her smile with her napkin.
    “Is she covering her mouth?” Angel asked. “I bet she is. It would be unseemly for her to react too much to a compliment like that. Especially since she didn’t cook your food herself.”
    Not for the first time Chapel wished he could speak back to Angel. But his hosts would wonder who he was talking to, and he wanted to preserve the illusion he was here alone.
    Before the main course the servants brought out a tureen of soup, a clear consommé. Chapel stared at the bowl placed in front of him as if it was full of snapping alligators.
    “You’re hesitating,” Angel said. “I know we talked about this before. It’s going to be okay. Just don’t slurp.”
    Chapel grimaced and picked up what he assumed was his soup spoon. It was bigger than the others. He glanced up and saw Fiona chatting pleasantly with Favorov about the weather.
    He lifted a spoonful of soup toward his mouth.
    It was important, he’d been told, that he keep the upper hand here. Hollingshead and the Pentagon didn’t really care if he ate his soup properly. They didn’t care if he picked up his dinner roll and threw it at Fiona’s head—­as long as he kept his authority intact. If he slurped his soup, if he came off like a clown, the actual business he’d come for would be much harder. He needed to make Favorov feel like he was talking to a social equal, or at least a man worthy of respect.
    He put the