The reaction at table seven was immediate and completely silent.
The guests looked at Dio, then at one another, their eyes moving quickly in the way people speak without words. A woman in a gold dress shifted her chair slightly to the left without seeming to realize she had done it. A man in a gray suit checked his phone. Another woman gave Dio the tight, closed smile people use when they do not know what expression they are supposed to wear.
Dio unfolded his napkin and laid it carefully across his lap. He looked at the food on the table.
Across the room, Baron watched everything.
Tico was already laughing softly to himself.
Baron watched the careful way Dio’s hands moved. He watched the guests at table seven rearranging themselves around the old man the way water moves around a stone in a river—slowly and without acknowledgment. He watched a waiter hesitate for a second too long before deciding to fill Dio’s glass. He noted all of it with the precise attention of a man who had spent decades studying how people behave when they believe the cost of bad behavior is low.
Dio ate slowly. He did not rush. He did not pile food onto his plate or reach across the table. He took small portions and chewed with care. He did not look embarrassed. He looked up at the chandeliers for a long moment, his eyes moving across the light in them the way a man looks at something beautiful that he has not seen in a very long time. He looked at the orchestra. His eyes moved around the whole room with a quiet, unhurried attention completely different from the way everyone else in the room was looking at him.
At table seven, a man named Klaus, a German property developer with offices in Nairobi and Lagos, finally turned to Dio and asked in a clipped, polite, clearly dismissive voice how he had come to attend the event.
Dio looked at him calmly and answered that he had been invited.
Klaus made a sound in the back of his throat that was neither agreement nor disagreement, then turned back to his plate.
