Act of Darkness(38)

After Dan Chester left the Mondrian study, Gregor had turned to the medical file, flipped through it, and found what he had been sure would have to be there, a paraphrased account of the senator’s symptoms. It was written in the usual medical jargon, meant to be “scientific,” rendered only obfuscated and dim. Fortunately, he’d had long experience reading this kind of thing. He even had a certain amount of talent for it. And the facts, once untangled from declarations of “perceived cardiovascular hyperparalysis” and “apparent pulmonary function cessation,” were interesting.

    In the first place, as Dan Chester had said, the attacks started with a tingling sensation over the entire surface of the skin, as if—to lean on Chester again—the senator’s entire body had “gone to sleep.”

    In the second place, the gone-to-sleep feeling escalated into something far more painful, something the senator described as “being stabbed by a hundred million sewing needles.” This was quoted directly, and footnoted to indicate that the words were the senator’s own. Possibly, Gregor thought, the symptom was so bizarre, the scientific types hadn’t been able to come up with a polysyllabic substitute for it in time for the writing of the report.

    In the third place, the senator’s vital functions began to shut down, or the senator began to believe his vital functions were shutting down. His heart stopped beating. His lungs stopped pulling in air.

    In the fourth place, the senator lost the use of his muscles. This part was written in language even more circumlocutory than usual, but as far as Gregor could tell it wasn’t meant to describe paralysis in the ordinary sense. The senator didn’t feel his muscles “lock,” the way someone would if they were frozen by fear. He didn’t feel them at all.

    In the fifth place, at no time did the senator lose consciousness. He was aware of everything that was happening to him from beginning to end.

    In the sixth place, when he fell, he felt pain, even if he didn’t come out of the paralysis until several minutes later.



Gregor closed the folder and tapped his finger against it, irritated. It was this last point, number six, that was so disturbing. All the others were consistent with a diagnosis of psychosomatic illness, or at least of mental breakdown. Only the pain, which either shouldn’t have been there at all or should have shocked the senator out of whatever trance state he’d been in, didn’t add up.

Gregor dumped the medical reports back in their folder and stood up. Somewhere out in the hall—or maybe somewhere out in the house; with all that open space, who could tell?—a clock he’d never noticed struck the hour. He was hungry, and he thought he’d heard something about lunch being laid out “near the pool.” He suppressed his inclination to wonder about a woman who would build a pool right next to a perfectly good sound and concentrated instead on a lunch “laid out.” It probably meant some kind of buffet everyone would have to attend if they wanted to avoid starvation, and that was good. He thought it was high time he saw how these people operated when they were all together.





[2]


By the time Gregor reached the pool patio—clomping across the sand between it and the deck in the brown wool suit and wing-tip shoes he had never bothered to change—lunch had indeed been laid out, and most of the principals were present. Only Victoria Harte was missing. Because everything about the elaborate buffet showed her hand—among other things, there was a cake decorated to look like the Great Seal of the United States, but heart-shaped instead of circular—missing might not have been the right word for it. Gregor clamored onto the polished slate of the patio itself and surveyed the offerings set out on the long table: an icesculpture American bald eagle melting quickly into the caviar it was supposed to protect; a whole tray of tiny individual quiches made to look like heads of George Washington; a huge cake of pate de fois gras food-colored to resemble Betsy Ross’s flag, with molded hard-boiled egg slices for stars; a huge basket of bread slices cut into Pilgrim’s hats. It was the parody of a party scene in a Judith Krantz novel—or maybe Victoria Harte’s latest slap in the face of Oyster Bay. For some reason, Gregor found he had a stronger sense of the real Oyster Bay out here on the pool patio than anywhere else at Great Expectations. The town seemed to ooze in on him from every side, spreading a mental deep freeze, hard-shelled and smooth as a pearl.

Gregor’s first instinct was to head directly for the man he knew from television as Stephen Whistler Fox, standing now at the head of the buffet table, flanked by his wife and the actress Patchen Rawls. But Stephen Whistler Fox looked pinned and helpless, and so jumpy he might have been carbonated. There were more interesting tableaux on the pool patio. Bennis was talking with Dan Chester and signaling frantically to Gregor for rescue. Gregor made no move in her direction. He knew Bennis, and he’d already talked to Dan Chester.