School was out for the day, and I was observing the two of them through a pair of binoculars. If anyone had seen me, I would definitely have looked like, you know, a criminal. But! Let me explain. I swear there was a good reason for this.
It was right after we had accepted Cattleya’s request for help. She’d given us some more details about young Bruno and Annie. In fact, she’d opened a map right there on the table. “Bruno’s house is here,” she’d said. “He leaves at eight o’clock sharp every morning to go to school. Annie’s house is right near his, so they always walk together. They reach school at eight thirty. They go to their classroom and chitchat with friends until classes start. And then…”
She looked like a naturalist presenting the result of years of research on her subjects. You couldn’t do better than a childhood friend for inside info. We could already picture Bruno’s daily life in intimate detail.
When she had finished talking, I gave Cattleya a smile.
“You know so much, you almost sound like a stalker.”
“Stop that, MacMillia.”
But hey. Thanks to her, we knew exactly where Bruno would be and what he would be doing at every moment.
Hence me with the binoculars.
Bruno and Annie looked so comfortable together. They were currently walking home from school. It was practically routine now for Bruno to take them by the crepe stand, that most quintessentially adolescent of snack stop-offs.
I brought a teacup to my lips and said, “They’re in position, Miss Riviere!”
The teacup was one of the various sancta we had on hand at Riviere Antiques, a nifty little device that would carry your voice to whoever was holding the other teacup. I held mine up to my ear and heard Riviere whisper, “Roger that.”
A moment later, through the binoculars, I saw her slither up behind the young couple. Without a word, without so much as a suspicious tic, she fell into step behind them. It was so simple, so natural. Bruno and Annie never noticed her.
“Heh!” Riviere came back to me with a triumphant look on her face.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“A needle and thread.”
I looked at her, not understanding. I tilted my head as if to say, That doesn’t answer my question. But Riviere said, “Just watch,” and looked in the couple’s direction.
I peered back through my binoculars, and at just that moment, I saw that something had changed.
“Here! Say ‘Ahhh’!” Annie said, lifting her crepe to Bruno’s lips.
“Uh… Ahh,” he said, a little embarrassed.
What an idyll! A loving exchange that any couple anywhere might have. I watched them, almost feeling protective.
Except then, for no reason I could discern, Annie’s crepe shoved itself right into Bruno’s face.
For a second, they were both stunned into silence. Then Annie exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, Bruno, I’m so sorry!” and took out her handkerchief.
“Ah… Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Come on, don’t worry. You’re such a joker, Annie!” Bruno said, grinning in spite of the whipped cream all over his face.
“Urgh… I don’t know what came over me…”
Struggling to understand what had happened, she reached out to wipe Bruno’s face with her kerchief.
“Um… Annie?”
She started wiping.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Specifically, wiping his thigh.
“Yikes!” she exclaimed, turning beet-red. “I d-didn’t mean to… Er, I was just…” Even as she stuttered, her hand continued politely wiping Bruno’s leg. “Wh-what’s going on? This isn’t why I got out my handkerchief!”
“Ha-ha-ha…”
Bruno might make his servants do weird stuff behind the scenes, but outwardly he was an upstanding young man. Standing there, he looked just like a gallant lad laughing in spite of a measure of discomfort.
Suddenly, Annie was acting very strangely. What sancta had Riviere used? I looked at her.
She didn’t answer my question until after we got back to the shop. With today’s operation over, we were making our report to Cattleya.
“A needle and thread,” she said again, placing precisely those items on the table. She had stuck the needle to Bruno, and the thread to Annie. “You know how sometimes you’re trying to thread a needle, and you can see exactly where you want the thread to go, but you just can’t get it through? The sancta I used today works a lot like that.”
Nothing that the person with the thread on them tried to do to the person with the needle on them ever went quite right, and shenanigans ensued. For example, maybe the thread person tried to feed some crepe to the needle person, and it wound up on their face instead. Or maybe they tried to wipe the person’s face and ended up wiping their leg. The more touchy-feely they tried to get, the more it would backfire on them.
“I see,” Cattleya said. “And how did it go?”
Well? Did it go well?
What a question!
“Oh, gracious,” Riviere said, picking up her cup of dark tea and looking very pleased with herself. She took a sip, then said, “It failed completely.”
“Oh, what the shit!” Cattleya smacked the table with a bang. Yikes… “The way you built it up, I was sure it must have worked! How could it not? Seriously, the way you built it up, I was sure it must have worked!”
“You just said the same thing twice.”
“Shut up!”
“Complain all you like; it won’t change the fact that the plan didn’t succeed,” Riviere said, glancing away with a disinterested sound.
“Whatever! But don’t hurt Annie! What if she ends up with some weirdo trauma because of you?”
“Don’t worry. Nothing happened that would sully her reputation.”
“Does that include the part where she was wiping a guy’s leg with a handkerchief in public?!”
“I’m telling you, it’s fine. Everyone just thought they were a really close couple.”
“That’s exactly what I don’t want everyone to think! That’s why I hired you!” Geez! Cattleya was very upset. “Anyway, leave Annie out of this! She’s my best friend, remember!”
“But Bruno’s fair game?”
“Yeah, he’s okay. Did you know it says in the dictionary that there isn’t a decent man alive named Bruno?”
“I think there’s something funny about your dictionary…”
“Tell me how this strategy managed not to work out, though. If I wiped Bruno’s thigh, my hand would rot off, fingers first.”
“I think there’s something funny about your body…” Riviere was sounding more and more exasperated. Then she turned to me. “Care to explain, MacMillia?” Maybe she thought I could tell the story better, since I’d observed the whole thing through my binoculars.
I thought I would go with the very short version.
“They just laughed about it and seemed to enjoy the moment.”
“Oh, what the shit!”
Bam!
Cattleya puffed her cheeks out, furious. “I’ll thank you not to make things worse!” she said. That much, we could all agree on.