Act of Darkness(15)

It made no difference how many times he told himself, in how many different ways, that bringing her along made sense. The argument was spurious. Yes, it was true that she was young and beautiful and rich, exactly the kind of woman Stephen Whistler Fox liked to have around and liked even better as a campaign contributor. Yes, it was true that she made him look foolish, the way older men (Gregor was fifty-five) always look foolish when they seem to be besotted by much younger women. It was even true that she was great cover, since she was not as stupid as her beauty made people think (why was it beautiful women were always assumed to be dumb?) and he was not besotted with her. All the rationalizations broke to shards on the unyielding rocks of plain reality, and the plain reality was this: under no other circumstances, in no other situation involving no other kind of people, would Gregor Demarkian even have considered taking Bennis Hannaford along. Gregor and Bennis were riding together to Victoria Harte’s estate on the shores of Long Island Sound for one reason and one reason only: because Gregor had an aversion to politics and politicians that amounted to a phobia.

Gregor pressed his face against the smoky glass of the window beside him and looked out on the scattershot shabbiness of Queens. It was odd, he thought, that it was politics and politicians that had ended up getting to him. He had spent twenty years in the FBI, more than half of that time dealing exclusively with serial murderers. He had met men who murdered, maimed, mutilated, and then went out for a good dinner. He had spent countless hours with people who honestly saw nothing wrong with a little blood sport and who considered him stuffy, conventional, and maybe a little stupid for taking the opposing view. He had met psychopaths both criminal and untouchable, from Ted Bundy to good old J. Edgar Hoover himself. None of these people had done to his gut, his nerves, and his primal superstitiousness what any ordinary United States senator could do to all three by simply walking into a room. If he had been Tibor, he could have understood it. Tibor had barely escaped with his life from Soviet Armenia after a lifetime of summary arrests, gratuitous tortures, and quasi-official death threats. The priest was politically libertarian to the point of anarchy for good reason.

Gregor, on the other hand, had never come to any personal harm by the actions of any particular politician. He had never even been treated badly by one. He had known four presidents—Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan—and they had all been genial, gracious and solicitous men, at least while he was watching them. And that, in the end, had been the problem. At least while he was watching them. Sometimes Gregor thought he hadn’t escaped at all from the peasant voodoo mentality of the immigrant household in which he’d grown up. He’d simply shifted the focus of his dread from random and inexplicable disasters to the persons of the men who made the calculated deliberations on Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill.

He turned his head away from the window—he wasn’t paying attention to the scenery anyway; it was all hot and sweaty and tired and cramped—and looked at Bennis, sitting with her legs stretched out across the center aisle and her stocking feet propped onto the rumble seat. It was, Gregor realized, the first time he had ever seen her “dressed.” He didn’t think it suited her. She had abandoned her ubiquitous jeans for a Chanel suit and her usual stuck-up-any-which-way top-of-the-head knot for a professionally constructed chignon, but she still sat and moved like someone who didn’t have to worry that her posture might expose her underwear. He thought she would probably correct that when they got to Great Expectations, because Bennis was always so good at adapting herself to her environment. He didn’t think he was going to like the change when it came.

He tapped the stack of papers on her lap and said, “How’s it going? You don’t seem to have gotten very far.”

The papers were the copyedited manuscript of the novel Bennis had delivered to her publisher barely two weeks before the mess had started out in Bryn Mawr, the case that had brought her and Gregor Demarkian together. To say she hadn’t gotten very far with it was gross understatement. They had been traveling for two days, and she was barely a third of the way through.

Now she frowned dubiously at the papers, shook her head, and put them away from her, beside her on the seat. Then she looked at Gregor and sighed.

“I got a fanatic,” she said. “Every time I used the generic ‘he,’ she changed it to ‘he or she.’ Every time the knight in shining armor saved the damsel in distress, she wrote, ‘Change this please. Sexist.’ I mean, for God’s sake. The idiot thing is set in 1153.”