“No.”
Amanda rearranged a few things on her desk. She had gone back to it after she’d found Timmy’s coat. She looked slumped, sitting in the chair. There was nothing on her desk to rearrange.
“I know what you were talking about when she was here,” she said. “You were talking about lawsuits. Like Tisha Verek’s lawsuit. And about how Gemma was going to file one.”
“So?”
“So that was what started all the trouble the last time, wasn’t it? I mean, with Dinah dead and all the rest of it, people seem to have forgotten all about it. And they gossip. They really love to gossip. So they keep talking about who was sleeping with Jan-Mark and who wasn’t—”
“Maybe that’s the connection,” Peter said. “Maybe they’re both dead because they were sleeping with Jan-Mark Verek.”
Amanda shot him another strange look and then got up again. With one thing and another she had been bopping up and down like one of those flamingo water dolls. She shoved the papers on her desk into the long center drawer and said, “I think I’m going to go back to sleep now. For at least a couple of hours. Are you going to tell Gregor Demarkian what she came here for?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell him she was sleeping with Jan-Mark Verek?”
“Yes again.”
“That’s good,” Amanda said.
She went to the side door without bothering to pick up her coat—she was going upstairs, not outside—and stepped just into the vestibule, where a small manila envelope lay, the one with the single copy of the paper the printer always sent over before delivering the bales. It must have been there last night when Peter came in, but he hadn’t noticed it.
“Throw that to me,” he told her, and she did. Then she gave him another of her odd looks and said, “I think you ought to tell Gregor Demarkian everything. I really think you should.”
Peter didn’t know what exactly that was supposed to mean, but he was much too tired to care.
2
When Jan-Mark Verek first started his affair with Reggie George, he thought no more of it than he would have thought of deciding to have a banana for breakfast instead of an apple. In the New York City art world scheme of things, where Jan-Mark had spent almost all of his adult life, that was about the level on which such a decision would have to be considered. Jan-Mark had had affairs with a lot of people, male and female, over the years. It had annoyed him no end that Tisha had refused to do the same. To Jan-Mark, sex was a wonderful game with lots of variations to keep it from getting boring. It wasn’t so much natural—the natural was always boring, like tofu and alfalfa sprouts—as naturally available. To be attractive and refuse what attractiveness offered you was like winning the lottery and refusing to pick up the money. It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t even make any sense when picking up the money was dangerous, as it was with Reggie. Jan-Mark was beginning to think Reggie was very, very dangerous. He hadn’t thought so in the beginning. There was nothing about Reggie to remind him of the few examples of rough trade he’d picked up in the Port Authority back in the days when he hadn’t been so all-fired paranoid about AIDS. At the start, Reggie had seemed to Jan-Mark like just another rustic country boy who swung both ways, not so unusual this close to the third millennium. After a while, Jan-Mark had begun to pick up little things. An attitude here. A comment there. A sudden swift kick to the side of a table that resulted in a broken table leg. They had been going at it for six months now and Jan-Mark Verek had to admit it. Reggie George was a certifiable mess.
Lately, Jan-Mark had begun to wonder if Reggie might be dangerous in a way more subtle than the obvious one, if what he had to fear from this yokel was less an outburst of rage—although that was coming; that was surely coming—than an indiscretion. Bisexuality might be par for the course in SoHo, but Jan-Mark was not stupid enough to believe it would be accepted with equanimity in Bethlehem, Vermont. It would be a wonderful excuse for an orgy of released repressed hostility, if that was the way to put it. Everybody up here hated him anyway. They’d just love to find a way to make his life a living hell. They’d made it hard enough over his affair with Gemma, which he had always known was an open secret, even if she had not. They probably hated art. Jan-Mark thought it might be about time to go back to the city, where homosexuals were of the out-of-the-closet, unconflicted, normal variety and bisexuals were as common as fast-food joints on an urban strip. He wished Tisha were still alive, so that he could tell her all about all of it and be comforted by the familiarity of one of her patented tantrums.