A Great Day for the Deadly(29)

“And?”

“And now,” Hernandito said, “she has no more arthritis at all.”





Six


[1]


FROM TIME TO TIME over the years, Gregor Demarkian had amused himself by reading novels that were supposed to be about the FBI. It always shocked him how inaccurate they were. It wasn’t mistakes in procedure he minded. Procedure was like a Paris couturier. It changed its silhouette from year to year. It changed its preferences in colors and fabrics from region to region, too, although it often wasn’t supposed to. What surprised Gregor was how often popular novelists insisted on turning the Bureau into a spy organization. In the fifties, it had perhaps been understandable. With the Cold War going full blast and the country seeing saboteurs under every mulberry bush, there had even been a television program that turned the Bureau into a spy organization. What was wrong with writers of more recent books, he didn’t know. He liked the ones by Thomas Harris. As for the others, they were all the same. Agents prowled through the back alleys of urban slums in impeccable Brooks Brothers suits, infiltrating gangs of drug runners. Agents glided through those temples of vulgar luxury called Las Vegas casinos in impeccable Brooks Brothers suits, infiltrating the Mafia. Agents sat in the ranks at meetings of the Patriot’s League in impeccable Brooks Brothers suits, infiltrating the lunatic right. Agents did everything, in fact, except what they actually did do, which was mundane police work applied to cases under federal jurisdiction or with interstate implications. As to where they got all those impeccable Brooks Brothers suits, Gregor couldn’t imagine. In his twenty years with the Bureau, Gregor had only known one agent who owned a Brooks Brothers suit, and that had been a gift from the man’s father-in-law. The suit had ended up getting ruined when the agent it belonged to had been pushed off a cabin cruiser into the San Francisco Bay in 1967, victim of a practical joke by three other agents whose sartorial preferences ran toward what could be purchased at Sears.

Reverend Mother General had left her office soon after the snake had, making a single phone call first and looking agitated all the time. Gregor waited politely until she was gone and then got down to what he had been trained to do. The fact that he was not actually authorized to do it in this case didn’t matter. Either the Cardinal had been telling the strict truth, unadorned by flights of wishful thinking, and Gregor was authorized to do what he was doing, but hadn’t heard it from Pete Donovan yet—or the Cardinal was talking straight through his hat. If that was the case, it wouldn’t be the first time. As long as Gregor was on Church property, though, it was the Cardinal’s version of reality that would apply. He got the handkerchief out of his pocket, draped it across the palm of his right hand to serve as a shield, and went to work.

The Cardinal’s driver had taken Gregor’s luggage into town, to a place called St. Mary’s Inn, where Gregor was supposed to be staying but which he hadn’t seen yet. Knowing the Cardinal, Gregor had had the good sense to keep his papers out of his suitcases and tucked into the inside jacket pocket of his suit instead. He didn’t have the crime report there—when the Cardinal delivered a report, it had all the verbal economy of a novel by Robert Ludlum—but he did have his notes. What was more important, he had very good photocopies of the anonymous letters the Cardinal had received. He wished he’d had a chance to ask Reverend Mother General if the piece of filth that had landed on her desk today had been the first. If it wasn’t, Gregor hoped she’d had the sense to hold on to the others.

He picked up today’s missive, computer graphics genitalia and all, by the upper-right-hand corner. He picked it up with the tips of his thumb and the first finger of his hand, and with both these tips covered by his handkerchief. Then he held the letter up to the light coming from Reverend Mother General’s office window. In a way, the precautions he was taking were both useless and silly. Anonymous letters almost never came complete with fingerprints. Either their writer was smart and used gloves—or stupid and used disorganization. It was remarkable how smudged prints could get when their provider was manic and mentally out of control. Then there was the question of watermarks and other identifying signs on the paper itself. That sort of thing was bad enough on a traditional anonymous letter, because a traditional anonymous letter was either printed on cheap mass-produced notepaper or assembled from letters cut out of newspapers on construction paper or newsprint. There was no way to trace any of that except back to the manufacturer, and all the manufacturer could tell you was how many millions of pounds of the stuff he had shipped to how many different states. Gregor didn’t know much about computers, but he had a feeling that they were going to make matters worse. For one thing, they always did. For another, Gregor remembered hearing a lecture on the computer explosion at the Bureau once. The man who’d given it had claimed that thousands of pounds of perforated computer paper were being sold across the country every day—and that had been in 1978.