Читать книгу An Affair of State онлайн

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"As a matter of fact, he doesn't. When he takes you out you feel that he's wearing you like a carnation in his buttonhole. He'd never do anything so crude as make a pass. Fred's a perfectionist. I don't know exactly how he'd go about having an affair with a girl, but I have a hunch the preliminaries would be sending orchids, and introducing you to his mother."

"He didn't look so damn safe to me," Jeff said. Keller was spare and tanned, still a bachelor at forty, and rich enough to have twelve acres in Berwyn, a shooting box on the Eastern Shore, and an ocean-front villa near Palm Beach. He had once been runner-up for the national squash title, and in 1947 had been picked as one of America's ten best-dressed men.

"Maybe you're right. Maybe he's not safe," said Susan Pickett, and Jeff knew she was not speaking of her relations with him, but of something else.

"Go on," he said.

"Nothing, except sometimes he gives me the shivers. He's so casual about war. When he talks about atomic bombs his mouth waters as if they were lemons."