“Oh, I’m in favor of that, all right. Stephen’s act is federal aid for campaign contributors. You must know that. Are you going to find out what’s been going on with Stephen?”
“Well,” Gregor said cautiously, “it depends on what you mean—”
“Oh, stop it,” Janet said. “The first time he keeled over, he did it practically in my lap, at a cocktail party in Washington. The second time he keeled over, I was only two or three feet away. Everybody knows what’s going on with Stephen.”
“Everyone knows he’s keeling over, as you put it.”
“Dan Chester thinks there’s something sinister about it,” Janet said, “but Dan thinks there’s something sinister about everything. I still think it’s something neurological—”
“If it is something neurological, Mrs. Fox, I’d think that would be serious enough. Anything organic that could cause the symptoms Mr. Chester described to me would be—let’s just say ‘sinister’ would be an understatement.”
“I know. I know. But don’t you think that makes more sense, as an explanation, than some kind of weird political plot? Dan Chester did the oddest thing after Stephen got out of the hospital after those tests. Do you know what?”
“No.”
“Stephen was challenged in his last election by a real right-wing nut, the kind of person who wants to ban all abortions and castrate all rapists and murder all murderers and then nuke Moscow for good measure. Nobody took him seriously at the time, not even Dan, not even after we realized the man had five million dollars to spend. But after those tests came back, Dan had him followed.”
“By a private detective, do you mean?”
Janet’s smile turned cynical. “I mean by one of your former colleagues in the FBI. Dan must have been frantic. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard of. Stephen can crash around all he wants to. That’s no long-term problem for Dan. People will just say Stephen self-destructed. But if anybody ever found out about Dan putting the arm on the FBI—”
“‘Putting the arm?’”
“My mother’s been in a lot of Mafia movies. But you see what I mean. Putting the arm on the FBI and having one of Stephen’s opponents investigated. Political suicide.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I do see.” He did, too. It was the stuff of which serious political scandals were made, the perfect fodder for righteous news stories and the perfect rock on which to wreck a career. It was also an unlikely project for the Bureau to agree to, especially these days. Gregor wondered if Carl Bettinger was the “former colleague” Janet was talking about, and felt immediately uneasy. “It doesn’t sound like the Dan Chester I’ve had described to me,” he told Janet. “It doesn’t sound anything like him at all.”
“It doesn’t sound anything like him to me, and I’ve known him for twenty years. At least. And I’m worried about Stephen, Mr. Demarkian. While Dan’s chasing right-wing terrorist fantasies, Stephen is very probably ill. Maybe terminally ill.”
“You said he’d had tests. They didn’t turn up anything?”
“He had four days of tests and they came back clean. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything physically wrong.”
“No,” Gregor agreed. “But it’s a good start.”
“Stephen needs to go back into the hospital and I need to get him there. Will you try to talk some sense into Dan Chester?”
“I think he intends to try to talk some sense into me.”
Janet turned around, in the direction of the room that wrapped toward the back of the house. “The Mondrian study is down there,” she said. “You go all the way to the end, turn the corner, and keep going until you’re in a big room with glass doors. That’s the beach room. Off to the left of it there’s a hall with doors on both sides. Dan is behind the third door on the left. Just like the five hundred cans of cat food in the showcase round on Let’s Make a Deal.”
[2]
Dan Chester was not actually “behind” the third door on the left in the small hall that led off the wraparound room. He was in the middle of it, leaning against the doorjamb with a cup of coffee in his hands and an abstracted look on his face, like a small dark muscular Cerberus dreaming about heaven. It took a while for Gregor to realize what Chester was looking at. There was a television placed between the two windows that looked out on the beach. On it was a videotape machine with its red power light glowing. Chester was watching a tape of Stephen and Janet crossing a wide room. Janet was wearing a neat little politician’s-wife black knit dress, disfigured by a large red heart-shaped brooch placed high on the left shoulder. The brooch looked like Victoria’s own—expensive and real—but too heavy, so that it pulled against the dress and made it sag.