At The Wayfare Tavern on Sacramento Street, the San Francisco Financial District lunch crowd thins out after their corn soup and Skuna Bay Salmon.
They are, for the most part, intelligent and accomplished people but the interest they once held for her has long vanished. Her luncheon guest, a competent but otherwise tedious community banking consultant who had driven up from Felton, has left.
Finally, free of obligations, she lingers.
This was where she could think. Where chair legs scraped on wooden floors and chinaware cleared from tables clanked, her mind opened. This unlocked and illuminated the finer points of the plan to embezzle her employer.
In the Bartlett Room at the Wayfare Tavern on Sacramento Street, she watched diligent busboys clear tables. She found herself exactly where she wanted to be, alone in the calming center of an early afternoon squall.
Brittle echoes and clatter helped her think. It was as if the restaurant rattle blocked distractions, allowing her to focus on a combustion of distrust between the two brothers.
It would not be difficult to lay the groundwork. The older of the two who ran the cartel would discover his younger brother was stealing from him.
She knew that truth mothers every seductive lie, how flawless deception flows from fact.
What was missing was the amulet that would distance herself from the most severe degrees of scrutiny, her clients’ most implausible yet hypnotic suspicions.
While the younger brother was rash, he was not stupid, not without cunning. With the first hint of trouble he would cast her as the villain, and not unconvincingly. She would be credibly cast as the conniving outsider who swept in to destroy a family and dismantle a lifetime of trust.
She returned to the certainty that the truth gives birth to every good lie, that every deception is rooted in fact.
A few gentle fabrications, the construction of delicate shadows, the patience to allow for discoveries to be made which could never be suspected of being planted, those were her tasks.
At The Wayfare Tavern on Sacramento Street she asked for another pot of green tea and lost herself in the brittle noise.
