The Butler(42)

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Olivia bought business class tickets for both of them. They sat together, and watched movies and slept on the plane, and didn’t exchange much conversation. She had brought her notebooks with her and made numerous notes about the chateau on the flight.

When they landed in New York, they had to go through separate lines at immigration, since she was a citizen and he wasn’t. He had gotten an ESTA visa for the trip online. The lines for foreigners were so long that an Air France ground crew member told Joachim to go through immigration with Olivia, since they were traveling together.

    They were still standing in line, waiting, chatting with each other, when two huge Homeland Security officers approached them and asked to see Joachim’s passport. He handed it to them, and looked very respectable, traveling in a suit and tie. Olivia was nicely dressed too. The senior of the two officers studied his passport closely, and then nodded at his partner, and addressed Joachim and Olivia.

“Come with us,” they said curtly. It had never happened to Olivia before, and she had no idea why they were being removed from the line. It didn’t look like some kind of ground assistance to her, it seemed more like a detour and neither of the men had been friendly. She wondered if Joachim’s visa was in order.

They were led to a small office behind immigration. The officers waved them into two chairs and took Olivia’s passport too. Then they left them sitting there for half an hour, and returned with two more officers, one of whom had a file in his hands. Neither Joachim nor Olivia could guess what it was about. They both looked like ordinary business people, not terrorists or smugglers.

“Why are you coming to the United States?” the senior officer asked Joachim, and Olivia thought his tone was unnecessarily harsh, since Joachim hadn’t been aggressive with them, or even complained about the delay. He knew better. Customs in any country were not people to quarrel with, and he never did.

“I’m here to assist my employer,” he said simply.

“And who is your employer?” one of the other officers asked.

“Olivia White.” He pointed to her.

    “What are you assisting her with?”

“I’m going to help her ship some furniture to Paris.”

“What kind of furniture?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.” Joachim remained calm and polite.

“Where is it located?”

Olivia spoke up then, and she had a slowly forming knot in her stomach. She had a feeling that this was about more than her mother’s furniture. And why had they singled Joachim out? “The furniture was my mother’s. She died recently. It’s at Franklin Storage on the Lower East Side. I’m sending it to Paris, and I asked Mr. von Hartmann to help me. Is there a problem?” The agent didn’t answer her question.

“What is his job as your employee?” he fired at her.

“He’s my butler,” she said, sure that it sounded odd to them, it did to her too.

“And what does he do?”

“It’s a temporary position. He helped me move into a new apartment in Paris.”

“And what do you do?” they asked her.

“I’m currently unemployed. I owned and ran a magazine that went out of business a few months ago. I’m between jobs at the moment. I’m doing some freelance decorating in Paris. Mr. von Hartmann is my assistant.” They stepped out of the room and conferred in whispers for a minute and then returned and focused on Joachim again.

“What do you do as a regular job?”

“I’m a trained butler. I’ve been employed by the Marquess and Marchioness of Cheshire for sixteen years. The marchioness recently died, and I accepted a temporary position with Ms. White in Paris, as she described.” There was a deadly calm about Joachim. He refused to let them rattle him, and if they had, it didn’t show, despite their decidedly aggressive tone as they fired questions at him. The impression they gave was that they didn’t believe him.

    “You’re traveling on an Argentine passport,” they said accusingly. They had gotten their information from the manifest. The passenger list of all flights into the United States was carefully checked against the FBI’s No Fly List before they were given clearance to take off. Passengers on the list were removed from the plane before departure or sent back to the country of origin when they landed. And those on a questionable list were interrogated on arrival, as they were doing with Joachim.

“I was born in Argentina. I’m a dual national, with French citizenship as well, and I have legal residency in England, where I work.” They flipped through his passport and looked at the stamps in it without comment for several minutes.

“You were recently in Argentina. Why?”

“I hadn’t been back in twenty-five years, and I wanted to see it again. After my previous employer’s death, I had the time.” His answers were straightforward and honest, but Olivia noticed that he was perspiring, and so was she. The room was small and hot, the lights were bright, and there were six of them in it, she and Joachim and the four Homeland Security officers. She was nervous, and frightened, and hoped she didn’t faint, which wouldn’t look good to them.

“Did you see relatives in Argentina when you were there?”