Act of Darkness(22)

The most obvious thing about her was that she was still a beautiful woman, in spite of her age, and without that plastic strainedness around the eyes and jaw that was the mark of too many tucks and too many lifts. Gregor supposed she must have had both, at least once. Gravity was inexorable, and he’d never met anyone, male or female, who’d had a throat that smooth after the age of forty-five. Plastic surgery was not one of the things Gregor Demarkian approved of. To him, it spoke of panic and self-delusion, a desperate desire to pretend that there was no such thing as death. Still, he had to give Victoria Harte credit for being intelligent about it. He’d known too many women who ran off to clinics in Beverly Hills as soon as they turned thirty-five, and every eighteen months after that. By the time they were fifty, they looked like something not quite human.

The second most obvious thing about Victoria Harte was that she was, in the old-fashioned sense, a personality. She was the kind of woman who commanded attention even when she was doing nothing more dramatic than standing still. As Gregor knew, all movie stars were supposed to have that quality. As he also knew, having been assigned to kidnapping detail during his first years at the Bureau, and having met a few, most of them didn’t. It was remarkable how rabbity and inconsequential most movie stars seemed, met in the flesh. Victoria Harte could never have seemed rabbity or inconsequential to anyone.

He looked to see if Bennis was taking any of this in, and found that her new persona had cracked a little. She was staring at Victoria Harte through two layers of smoked glass and biting her lip and shaking her head. She caught him staring at her and said, “Great Aunt Eulalie.”

Gregor raised his eyebrows. “Great Aunt Eulalie,” he repeated. “Your own Great Aunt Eulalie, I take it.”

“My father’s father’s sister.”

“Did you like your Great Aunt Eulalie?”

“She was my father’s father’s sister,” Bennis repeated, as if that explained everything. “She terrified me.”

Maybe, Gregor thought, being old Robert Hannaford’s father’s sister did explain everything. He’d never met the man alive, but he’d met a lot of people who had. The Hannaford side of Bennis’s history was full of—personalities. And he could appreciate Bennis’s point, applied to Victoria Harte. There was something oddly anachronistic about her, something belonging more properly to the generation before his own. He wondered where she’d picked it up. From the little he knew about her background—he should have listened more closely to Tibor; he always got in trouble when he didn’t—she hadn’t come by it naturally.

The car jerked to a stop, far less smoothly than a Rolls was supposed to, and their driver got out, meaning to open their doors. He never got a chance. Victoria Harte was out from under the portico before anyone really saw her move. She was at Bennis’s door, the one closest to the curb, before the driver managed to get there. Then the door was yanked open and a wave of heat poured in, sticky and wet and fetid, like spoiled mayonnaise.

Victoria Harte took Bennis’s arm, pulled her out of the car—by main force, as far as Gregor could see—and leaned in to see what else she had. She found Gregor and smiled a little, showing too many teeth.

“Mr. Demarkian?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“That’s who the gate said you were. But you can’t be too careful. We’ve had five gate-crashers already this morning.”

“Gate-crashers,” Gregor repeated, trying to give himself time to think.

But Victoria Harte had no time, or at least no time she was willing to take. “You ought to get out of the car,” she told him. Then she got out herself, and slammed the door after her.

Gregor felt himself go suddenly chill, assaulted by a wave of air-conditioning that poured out at him through the vent under his seat.





[3]


Out on the drive, Bennis Hannaford and Victoria Harte were standing together, not so much making small talk as trading monosyllables. Neither of them was looking at the other. Gregor got the distinct impression that they’d each decided to loathe the other on sight.

Gregor brushed the wrinkles out of his trousers and came around the car to the two women, feeling like a ball of wax melting under the heat of a flame. It was quarter after nine, and the temperature had to be well above the seventy-eight degrees it had been at eight o’clock. It might even be over eighty-eight. The air felt as thick as half-set Jell-O.

He held his hand out to Victoria Harte and said, “What kind of gate-crashers?”

Victoria Harte smiled. “It’s only on holiday weekends,” she told him. “They know Stephen and Janet will be here, and probably bringing a pile of friends, and they think with the confusion—”