“Okay. By the way, I was fitted by a very attractive young woman. I think she was impressed with my physique.”

“Uh-huh. Six at the 600-hunk!”

Smith went home before meeting up with Annabel, to feed and walk Rufus, their blue Great Dane. As he prepared to leave for the restaurant, directly across from the Center and a popular hangout for people working at that sprawling monument to JFK, Harriet McKay was on the phone in Takoma Park trying to find out why Charise Lee hadn’t shown up for her five o’clock fitting. Christopher Warren had arrived on time, but there was no sign of Ms. Lee.

“She wasn’t in Italian class today,” Warren told Harriet. “Yesterday, she said she was getting a cold.”

“She could have at least called,” Harriet said, not attempting to hide her pique.

“If our agents are in town, they might know what happened,” the pianist offered.

Many in the class had already hired agents, and Charise and Warren ’s reps had accompanied them to Washington from Toronto. Agents accompanying young artists to the WNO program were viewed with a certain disdain, seemingly always in the way, demanding things for their young clients, hovering over their chicks like mother hens. Of course, there was no way to banish them. They came on their own and paid their own way.

Charise and Warren ’s agents, Philip Melincamp and Zöe Baltsa, had seen to it that their promising young stars were properly settled in a secure, two-bedroom apartment they shared, with a pullout couch for guests. When the agents weren’t in D.C., they were back in Toronto at the agency bearing their names, their client roster a mixed bag of young, somewhat talented opera singers with potential fame and fortune on the horizon and second-tier veterans whose better singing days were behind them, yet who still managed to land supporting roles with companies around the globe.

Naturally, there was some resentment of Warren and Lee’s situation. Most of the other students were expected to pay their own rent and buy their own food out of their $1,900 monthly stipend. It wasn’t a secret that Melincamp and Baltsa were picking up their two clients’ tabs, which left the young Canadians with spare cash with which to enjoy the city’s abundant nightlife.

“There’s no answer at the apartment,” Harriet said. “Thanks for being on time,” she told Warren. “If you see or hear from Ms. Lee, please urge her to call me. I’m under enough pressure without having to deal with no-shows.”

Later that night, as she sat in her living room with her husband, Harriet felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air-conditioning.

“Something wrong?” he asked, noticing that she’d wrapped her arms about herself.

“No,” she said. “I just have a bad feeling.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know.”

Her husband frowned. Over the twenty-three years of their marriage, Harriet had displayed occasional moments of what she called “visions,” premonitions of misfortune befalling others, family members, friends. She’d been right on at least two occasions, awaking in the middle of the night with a vision, then receiving a call the following morning confirming it.

“Like a little brandy?” he asked, touching her hair as he passed on the way to the kitchen.

She grabbed his hand, looked up, and smiled. Her husband’s answer to almost everything was a little brandy.

“That would be nice,” she said.

He continued into the kitchen, leaving her alone with her chilling vision.

The 600 Restaurant, at the base of the Watergate complex, was bustling as Mac walked in. The vast, three-sided bar was lined with stagehands, electricians, carpenters, basses and baritones, cooks and painters, and sopranos and mezzos from the performing arts center across the street, and Watergate residents for whom the restaurant was a neighborhood haunt. Ulysses, the bartender, was a large, gregarious man wearing a large, gregarious green-and-white-striped shirt and a flamboyantly colored tie and suspenders. He moved with a dancer’s grace as he took drink orders, mixed, stirred and shook, delivered the concoctions, and engaged in a nonstop dialogue with his customers without missing a step.

Mac spotted Annabel at the far end of the bar chatting with another woman. He joined them and was introduced to Genevieve Crier. “Genevieve is in charge of supers for the Washington Opera,” Annabel told her husband.

“Aha,” he said. “So you’re to blame.”

She feigned dismay, laughed, and said, “Guilty as charged, although I’m incapable of demonstrating remorse.” Her accent was British, her easy laugh universal. “No matter, I’m absolutely delighted that you’ve joined the cast for Tosca.” She took a step back and slowly, deliberately looked him up and down. “You’ll make a fine monk, Mr. Smith, and we all know that monks get by on very little money, which is good because we pay our supers very little.”

“I get paid, too?” he said.

“A fortune for a monk. Twenty-eight dollars a performance, eight dollars per rehearsal. There’ll be eight rehearsals. Eight times eight is sixty-four dollars. Egads, you’ll be the richest monk in the monastery. Of course, a whole world of college kids ate off the two bucks they were paid as supers at the Met years back.” To Annabel: “The money will make up for your darling hubby’s commitment to celibacy, I’m sure.” She scooped an oversized purse off the bar. “Must run. See you at seven. Delighted to meet you, Mackensie Smith. Your wife is one of my favorite people in the world.”

“I like your friend,” Mac said, taking a stool next to Annabel.

“She’s a dynamo. Used to be an actress in London and Hollywood.”

“We’d better get something to eat,” Mac said. “I’d hate to make my stage debut on an empty stomach.”

Genevieve Crier had instructed all supers to enter through the Opera House’s stage door, just inside one of the main entrances to the Kennedy Center. Annabel gave their names to an older gentleman manning the door, who dutifully checked them off against a list on a clipboard and told them where the supers were congregating. This turned out to be a large dressing room one level below the theater itself. Genevieve was already there with two men, whom she introduced to the Smiths. The rest of the supers drifted in over the next fifteen minutes-a navy commander; an orthopedic surgeon; a Department of Agriculture auditor; two housewives from WNO’s vast corps of volunteers; a nightclub bouncer; a retired botanist; Mac’s college colleagues; Christopher Warren, the Canadian pianist from the Young Artists program; and someone Mac hadn’t seen in a couple of years, Raymond Pawkins, a retired Washington MPD Homicide detective.

Their paths had crossed a number of times when Smith was representing criminal defendants, and Pawkins had been the lead investigator in those cases. Of all the Homicide detectives Smith had run across in his previous career, Pawkins stood out from the crowd. A tall, beanpole of a man with a prominent hooked nose beneath which a dark gray moustache was carefully trimmed, he wore khaki slacks with a razor-sharp crease, a blue button-down shirt, a white linen sport jacket, and loafers shined to a mirror finish. Smith remembered only too well those times when Pawkins testified against his criminal clients, always impeccably dressed and well spoken, terse or almost effete at times, answering Mac’s cross-examinations with deliberate care, never exaggerating and always on-message. He was impossible to fluster on the stand, not only because of the impressive image he presented to juries, but because he’d gone by the book in his investigations, missing little in the way of evidence and organizing his findings with exquisite attention to detail. After shaking hands and introducing Annabel to him, snippets of Pawkins’ life came back to Mac. They’d had lunches and dinners together at the conclusion of a few cases, the outcome now a matter of public record, their opposing views left back in the courtroom.