Act of Darkness(14)

“Calm down,” Dan hissed. “What happened to grace under pressure?”

“I never had any,” Stephen said.

“I know it.”

Dan pushed him, hard. The next thing he knew, he was standing next to Janet. His knees were bumping against the coffee table. His arm was around his wife’s rigid, unyielding waist. The pricking feeling had moved into overdrive. Dan walked out in front of him and said, “All right, everybody. The senator has an announcement to make.”

Immediately, the room was warily still, and watchful, just in case? Stephen wished he had not reached that state of terror where the sweating stopped and the chills took over.

He forced a smile on his face anyway and started in.

“Well,” he said. “As most of you know, this morning the Washington Post—”

This morning the Washington Post. Yes, those were the words. They were there, out in the air, palpable, little drops of spit. And the words that came after them were there, too: ran a story. The problem was, the second set of words was not out in the air. They were inside his head. He kept trying to move his mouth and make them come out where people could hear them, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make it happen.

In fact, he thought, in growing panic, he couldn’t make anything happen. He couldn’t make his heart beat. He couldn’t make his chest heave to take in air. He couldn’t make his arms and legs move. He couldn’t turn his head. He couldn’t do anything. He had—stopped.

Stopped.

That was it.

He was fully, agonizingly conscious, but at the same time he seemed to be dead.

There wasn’t a single open patch of carpet anywhere in front of him, just a crowd of people all staring at him with increasing confusion, increasing contempt. He wished desperately to turn his head and see if Janet was worried about him, or just as amused as everyone else.

They think I’m drunk, he told himself. Either that, or they think I’m crazy.

Being neither drunk nor crazy, being not even dead, he fell forward in his limp paralysis and landed on the social reporter for that Moonie-owned bastion of conservatism, the Washington Times.





PART ONE


Oyster Bay, Long Island July 1





ONE


[1]


GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD ALWAYS thought of himself as a rational and self-controlled man. It was an image of himself he had held for so long, and with such conviction, that he tended to get a little scatty at any hint of the possibility that he might have been kidding himself. “A little scatty” was definitely what he felt on this hot early morning of the first of July, riding across the whatever-bridge-it-was that went from Manhattan to Long Island in the company of Bennis Day Hannaford, encased like a prize butterfly behind the smoked glass of a baby blue Rolls-Royce limousine. It was not, however, the limousine that was bothering him. Gregor had ridden in limousines before, although Bennis’s idea of one—which she persisted in calling a “car”—was a little like Jackie Onassis’s idea of a house. Bennis had grown up rich and then gotten even richer by her own efforts. She habitually translated “renting a little pied-a-terre in New York for the weekend” as “renting the entire top floor of the Trump Tower, with maid service.” Back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia—where Bennis didn’t live, but did spend most of her time; and where Gregor did live—she had just presented Gregor’s upstairs neighbor Donna Moradanyan (six weeks late) with “a pair of blue earrings” as a reward for “having done such a magnificent job going through labor.” The blue earrings had turned out to be classic cut sapphires surrounded by tiny diamonds, so blatantly expensive the sight of them had made even the parish priest, Father Tibor Kasparian, pale. Old George Telemakian’s grandson Martin, reputed to be the most successful stock trader in the history of Philadelphia, had taken one look at the things and decided he needed a drink.

Philadelphia. That, Gregor knew, was the problem. Cavanaugh Street was in Philadelphia, and Bryn Mawr, where Bennis’s mother had her house, was not very far away. By every discoverable principle of self-preservation and common sense, Bennis ought to be back there, writing another knights-and-unicorns fantasy novel and helping Gregor’s childhood friend, Lida Arkmanian, turn Donnas baby boy into a paradigm of spoiled imperiousness. That she would much rather be here beside him was not the point. Bennis, as Gregor had told Tibor, had no caution. Gregor had asked for her help once, with the case during which he had met her, and she had promptly exceeded his instructions, put herself in the worst possible position, and nearly gotten herself killed. To bring her into a house of evil—and that, after numerous talks with the uncomfortable Mr. Dan Chester, was what Gregor was sure Great Expectations was—was sheer lunacy.