Act of Darkness(25)
“What did you want to tell me?” he said. “If you came to give me another lecture about Patchen Rawls, you could have saved yourself the trip.”
“That Demarkian man’s here. I just saw him get out of his car.”
For the first time, Stephen looked interested instead of distracted, almost focused. He sat down on the bed and contemplated his feet.
“What’s he like? Is he wearing a gun?”
“Why would he be wearing a gun?”
“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “I thought all those FBI guys wore guns.”
“He’s not in the FBI anymore, Stephen. He’s retired. I told you that. And I don’t know what he’s like. I didn’t meet him. I just saw him.”
“You’ve talked to him on the phone.”
“That was weeks ago. I told you everything we said over the phone.”
“Well, I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea that somebody is trying to kill me.”
Stephen’s window looked out on the long weathered expanse of dock that ran from Great Expectations’ boat house to the deeper waters of Long Island Sound. Through it, Dan Chester could see that a length of clothesline had been strung up and festooned with tiny American flags, but not what the clothesline was anchored to.
There was a single chair, modernized to the point of absurdity, shoved against the wall next to Stephen’s bureau. Dan pulled it out and sat down in it.
He had been avoiding the knowledge for weeks, but he could not avoid it now. Stephen was cracking up. Dan had expected it, but actually having to deal with it made him even more nervous than Janet did. It confirmed something he had always believed, but never let himself consider: for Stephen, everything but the purely physical—culture, self-control, knowledge, ideas, style, ambition, hope—was a game to be played only in moments of relaxation. Stephen had less self-discipline than a kitten. His concentration could be broken by the slightest distraction. Faced with something much worse than a slight distraction, he was splintering.
It had taken Dan Chester twenty-five years to invent Stephen Whistler Fox, twenty-five years of training, twenty-five years of lecturing, twenty-five years of trying to force simple common sense into a brain so fragmented it was no better than a sea of disconnected molecules creating chaos in a void. He suddenly found it unbearable, the idea that it was all going to go to waste.
Dan Chester considered himself a practical man, free of sentimentality and clear-sighted in his ambition. He was beginning to wonder if he was something else as well: a fanatic in the service of a religion that had no name, no rituals, and no moral code, but whose god looked disturbingly like the midnight fantasies of Mary Shelley.
The chair turned out to be impossible to sit in. Every time he moved, it poked him. He got up and crossed the room to look down at Stephen on the bed. Think, he told himself. Stephen has two emotions, greed and fear. Right now you have to work with the fear.
“I do not,” he said, “think someone is trying to kill you.”
“What do you think?” Stephen asked him. “Why would you bring that Demarkian man here if someone wasn’t trying to kill me?”
“Because I think someone’s trying to ruin you.”
“What’s the difference?”
Dan Chester wanted to point out the obvious—being ruined meant walking around without a job in the U.S. Senate; being dead meant lying six feet underground in Brainard Green—but he didn’t. He sat down on the edge of the bed and started talking about coincidences instead.
[2]
Clare Markey had never been afraid, really afraid, until she’d woken up in bed at five o’clock this morning, stared up at the ceiling of her room in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, and realized that she desperately, undeniably, unequivocally wanted a drink. The incident was all the more terrifying because she didn’t really drink. Once a month or so she’d take a glass of white wine while watching the eleven o’clock news, and every two years she’d pour herself a glass of Scotch while watching the House election returns, but on a day-to-day basis she stuck with fruit juice and Perrier. A lobbyist who drank was a liability. Nobody got paid what she got paid for wandering around cocktail parties in less than full possession of her faculties. Besides, she had never liked liquor. It tasted terrible and very small amounts of it made her fuzzy headed and nauseated in the morning.
Still, she had lain in the great double bed and contemplated the hanging lamp and thought about being drunk—if thought was the right word for it. It was more as if she had willed herself into being drunk, tried to reach oblivion by force of imagination. When that hadn’t worked, she had found herself thinking about liquor stores and Times Square, what would be open and what would not, where people went when they needed a good bolt of Scotch and it was outside legal hours. Then it had occurred to her that she was in New York, where the bars opened at eight o’clock, and she’d jumped up and headed for the bathroom.