A Great Day for the Deadly(30)

With the light from the window streaming through it, the page looked flimsy and slightly oiled, as if whoever else had touched it had been sweating at the time. That could have been good news—body oils produced prints—except that the oiled smudges were much too big and had probably been smeared. Gregor put the page back on Reverend Mother General’s desk and took one of the Cardinal’s letters from his jacket pocket. There was no point in holding that one up to the light. It was only a copy, and a copy on photocopy paper, not computer paper, at that. He laid it down on Reverend Mother General’s desk next to her own letter and stood back to contemplate the two.

“Same printer,” Gregor said to himself, half out loud. Then he wondered how much difference that made. Computer printers were not like typewriters. Typewriters were eccentric. They took on individual characteristics in no time at all. Computer printers came with daisy wheels that could be changed at will, and that were discarded as soon as they showed any signs of wear or idiosyncrasy. What was worse, fresh daisy wheels produced printing identical to that produced by other fresh daisy wheels of the same type, so that two letters could look as if they’d been produced on the same machine when they had been written on two different machines twenty miles apart. Then there was the terminal factor: Just because two letters had been printed on the same printer didn’t mean they had been written by the same person. That was true of typewriters, too, of course, but computers made the problem harder to solve. With typewriters, you were at least sure that, for two people to have used the machine, two people had to have been at the machine. Large organizations with sophisticated computer setups, though, had terminals that could be plugged into their central printers from dozens of different locations and several miles away. Two letters printed by the same printer might have been composed by two different people, neither of whom worked anywhere near each other or the location of the printer itself. Gregor was getting the surreal feeling that investigating these anonymous letters was hopeless and that investigating anonymous letters was going to go on being hopeless forever more. Once the masses were thoroughly plugged into the system, anyone who wanted to could send nasty messages to anyone anywhere and be impossible to stop, in spite of the fact that those messages might be ruining lives, causing divorces, putting an end to international peace—

“I’m overdramatizing,” Gregor said. This time he must have said it more than half out loud, because it elicited a response. Although Gregor was facing the desk, he was still turned slightly away from the door. His line of sight was toward the window and the sun that seemed so strong and bright outside it. The cough he heard came from behind him. It didn’t sound like anything that could have been produced by Reverend Mother General.

He had picked up one of the anonymous letters while he’d been ruminating on the death by computer of Civilization As We Know It. He put it down again.

“It won’t do you any good to worry about it,” the voice of the cough said, deep and now unmistakably masculine. “Only way we ever catch these people, we pick them up for something else and find copies of the letters on their kitchen table. And we do pick them up for something else. Almost always.”

Gregor would have liked to dispute this observation—there was a great deal about it to dispute—but he was caught by the sight of the man who filled Reverend Mother General’s office door. Gregor Demarkian was a physically large male. He was over six feet tall. He wasn’t exactly fat, but he had a layer of middle-aged padding on him. He also had a pair of naturally broad shoulders that made him look a little too wild in the formality of suits. The man in the doorway was a giant. His body filled the door frame from side to side. His head came so close to the top of the door’s frame, Gregor almost thought he was going to have to duck when he came inside. He was at least six feet ten, and he had bulk to match, fat and muscle both. He was such an apparition, Gregor found himself stepping back instead of going forward to meet him.

Either the giant didn’t notice, or he was used to that kind of reaction. He marched into the office—not having to duck when he came through the door after all—and held out his massive hand.

“You must be Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “The Cardinal’s told me all about you. I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Pete Donovan.”

Pete Donovan’s voice was a good deep bass. It bounced from window to wall to ceiling like a Roman candle released indoors and made the windowpanes shake.





[2]


Later, Gregor Demarkian would look back on the first fifteen minutes he spent with Pete Donovan as one of the most highly efficient, well-organized introduction sessions he had ever had with a local police officer. Maybe because Gregor still thought in Bureau terms—the efficient is the dry, the well-organized is the linearly logical—it didn’t seem that way at the time. Pete Donovan shook his hand in great, ligament-wrenching arcs. Then he walked over to the desk, looked down at the two anonymous letters Gregor had laid out against it, and grunted. Then he retreated to a corner, to prop himself up against a wall. Gregor thought that was very sensible. There were chairs in Reverend Mother General’s office, but Pete Donovan didn’t look like he would fit in any of them. There was the desktop to sit on, but the desk’s legs didn’t look like they could hold Pete Donovan’s weight. Gregor was awed. Donovan was a young man, a good twenty years or more younger than Gregor himself. Middle-aged spread was still in the future.