“Do you have a lot of that kind of trouble with your books?”
“I didn’t used to. I had a wonderful copyeditor for years, but she took a job as an editor at Random House. The new ones all think of themselves as the thought police.” Bennis bent over, got her handbag off the floor—more Chanel, Gregor noticed, wondering why he hadn’t noticed before—and got out her cigarettes. Smoking was one thing even Donna Moradanyan and Father Tibor hadn’t been able to talk Bennis out of.
“What about you?” she asked him. “You’ve been looking sicker by the mile.”
“I’ve been feeling sicker by the mile,” Gregor said. “I told you all about it back in Philadelphia.”
“I just think it’s ridiculous, that’s all. You must have spent the last ten years of your career dealing with politicians.”
“I also spent the last ten years of my career dealing with three simultaneous ulcers in three different parts of my body. And don’t say that was because Elizabeth was dying, because it wasn’t. Elizabeth’s dying gave me different physical symptoms altogether.”
Bennis looked up at the ribbon of smoke curling out of her cigarette and the column of ash growing at the end of it and tapped out in the ashtray at her side. Mostly, they didn’t talk about Elizabeth, Gregor’s wife of thirty years, dead of cancer before they had ever met. They both acknowledged, tacitly, that they never would have met if Elizabeth hadn’t died, because if she hadn’t Gregor would never have resigned early from the FBI and come back to live on Cavanaugh Street, and if those things hadn’t happened—it was too complicated to go into. Like Bennis’s problems with her mother, dying slowly out in Bryn Mawr of multiple sclerosis, the subject of Elizabeth was too painful to turn into conversation.
“The thing is,” Bennis said, “I’ve been going over and over this cover story you thought up, and I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“No?”
“Stephen Fox isn’t the kind of candidate I’m likely to give money to. I mean, I do give money to candidates—”
“You gave money to the Save the Minks Party in 1985 and the Snoopy for President Party in 1988.”
“Well,” Bennis said, “that’s exactly what I mean. Stephen Fox is for real. He may even be for real for real. I mean, he may even get elected.”
“He has been elected. He’s the senior senator from the state of Connecticut.”
“I mean elected president. Good God, Gregor. I can’t even vote for presidents. I tried it once, in 1980. I voted for Carter over Reagan. Then I walked around feeling absolutely suicidal until I found out Reagan won.”
“You wanted Reagan and you voted for Carter?”
“I didn’t want either of them. I just figured that I voted for Carter and Reagan won, so no matter what Reagan did, at least it wasn’t my fault.”
Stephen Fox isn’t going to be elected president if he keeps keeling over at cocktail parties. Which, as far as I can figure out from what Mr. Chester told me, seems to be becoming a habit.”
“Maybe all that’s becoming a habit is getting drunk,” Bennis said. “I’ve heard all those politicians drink like fish. If I were a politician, I’d drink like one.”
Actually, Gregor thought, he would bet that most politicians these days drank very little, if at all. There were too many specters to contend with, trailing along the banks of the Potomac in the alcoholic mummy-wrap of their ruined careers. Besides, what Dan Chester had told him about Stephen Fox didn’t sound like alcohol.
“What I want from you,” he told Bennis, “is a fair job of acting. Just convince everybody that you think Stephen Fox will make Camelot rise again, and that should do.”
“I don’t know how I’d feel about Camelot rising again. Considering what we know now.”
“As far as you’re concerned, we don’t know anything now. Flash your money around. Flash your background around. Outdress the senator’s mother-in-law. And please, dear sweet Lord please, stay out of the rest of it.”
“How?” Bennis demanded.
“By using your common sense instead of your imagination, for once. I don’t like the way this sounds, Bennis. I think this could be dangerous.”
Bennis shrugged. “You always say that. You went up to Colchester without me and you said that. So what? Out here, nobody’s even been murdered yet.”
“If I find you within half a mile of Stephen Fox’s problem, somebody will be murdered and it will be you.”
“Gregor! You sound just like a mystery book—”