A Stillness in Bethlehem(37)
Stu sighted along the side of the barn, aiming at nothing in particular, wanting only to hit wood and cause damage. He pressed the trigger and listened to the splintering of wood in the darkness, the groaning of old boards, the moaning of the wind.
It had been two weeks now since his mother had died, and he had finally come to a decision, one of the few real decisions he had ever had to make in his life. He was going to have to go through with it no matter how Liza felt and without consulting good old Peter Callisher. He was going to have to do it on his own and that was all there was to it.
He pulled the trigger again, listened to the splintering of wood again, thought of them both out there in the snow with the small holes from .22-caliber bullets leaking blood into the ground.
He thought about himself out here shooting up the barn.
He thought he was probably going crazy.
Four
1
WHEN FRANKLIN MORRISON HAD first come up to Gregor Demarkian in The Magick Endive, Gregor had been sure that the man was just another avid reader of the local paper, a slightly less sophisticated specimen than either of his two waitresses who wanted to shake the hand of the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. It wasn’t the kind of thing Gregor had ever imagined happening to himself back when he was still with the FBI. While he was there, he’d made the media often enough—if you head task forces chasing serial killers in a country full of crime-story fanatics and horror-movie junkies, that is inevitable—but it had been as an officer of the organization, the designated human face of a faceless institution. What had been happening to him since he first walked into Bennis Hannaford’s father’s house three years ago and found a dead body lying on the study floor was different. If it had been just that body in Bennis Hannaford’s father’s house, it might not have mattered. Bennis Hannaford’s family was rich and well-connected—in Philadelphia. The rest of the country had been interested mostly because the Hannaford house had forty rooms and the Hannaford girls had all “come out” in extravagant style and one of Bennis’s brothers was what old George Tekemanian back on Cavanaugh Street called “a corporated raider.” It was the second extracurricular murder that really got the ball rolling. Gregor had taken that one on for a friend of Father Tibor’s. That friend just happened to be John Cardinal O’Bannion, the most publicly flamboyant and outrageously controversial Catholic prelate in the country. Gregor wouldn’t have guessed it beforehand, but Catholics are much better than debutantes at making a man famous. There are fifty-two million of them from one end of the country to the other, and even the ones who haven’t been to Mass in twenty years are passionately interested in the Church. A lot of other people are also passionately interested in the Church, either in romantic attachment to their prettified images of pre-Vatican II ritual or from outright hostility. The Hannaford murder had gotten him a two-page spread in People magazine. The murder he investigated for John Cardinal O’Bannion got him on the cover, and on the covers of Time, Life, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. It also got him on all three networks and into two of the three best-selling supermarket tabloids. After that, it really got crazy. More extracurricular murders. More publicity. Gregor thought every once in a while about the original Hercule Poirot, who had wanted so badly to be famous and who wasn’t, really. Poirot should have lived in America in the second half of the twentieth century, where the publicity machine is all cranked up and ready to go, where “legends” have become something Directors of Market Research invented three of before breakfast. Gregor seemed to have become one of these “legends.” Esquire wanted to interview him. So did Vanity Fair. He had received three invitations to appear on Ted Koppel’s Nightline. God only knew what any of these people expected him to talk about. He didn’t break confidences, his life wasn’t all that interesting and he couldn’t talk with any authority about the Catholic Church. He didn’t even believe in God. What frightened him was the way it had gotten out on the street, especially in smaller towns. People stopped him. People touched him. Once a man in a plaid sports jacket and high-top Reebok shoes had grabbed him by the lapels and demanded to know his “secret.”
Standing in The Magick Endive, watching Franklin Morrison talk to Bennis and Tibor with all the deference of a B-movie butler taking directions from the lady of the manor, Gregor had wondered uneasily if what was about to happen was going to be weird. Nothing very weird had happened to him so far, except for the man in the high-top Reeboks, but he had heard of such things. Actresses gunned down by men they had never met. Talk-show hosts invaded by deranged fans who knew how to use a set of burglar’s tools. A television anchorman assaulted in a manner so bizarre it became the stuff of real legend—not hyped—within hours of the anchorman’s escape. Fame was not only instantaneous in America, it was dangerous. It was especially dangerous for anyone whose name was connected in any way with violent death. The author of a series of best-selling novels about slash-and-run murders. The star of an Oscar-nominated movie about covert operations in Vietnam. The cop who had brought in the evidence that finally convicted a famous mob boss in Miami. It was sickening what had happened to some people—and always the wrong people. The last time the violence-sickened public had gone for the throat of a killer was when Ruby killed Oswald. Since then, the killers had been perfectly safe. The television newswoman who produced a ground-breaking report on battering had to have her mailbox checked routinely by the bomb squad. No one was out to assassinate Jeffrey Dahmer.