And One to Die On(17)

Geraldine stepped out onto the boardwalk. The air was still cold and wet. The wooden floor under her feet was still slippery. The ocean still looked like choppy black glass. Yet, for some reason, the scene was brighter and gayer than it had been before Geraldine went in for her mug of coffee.





9


OUT ON THE ISLAND, Cavender Marsh was shambling along the deck at the back of the house, carrying a prelunch glass of wine in his right hand and looking into the sea. He had stopped for a moment with his back to the French windows that led into the library when he saw it—his face, caught in a suddenly still square of dark water, reflected in an accidental mirror. A moment later, it was gone. The wind came up and the water grew choppy and white-tipped again. More clouds rolled over the sun and turned the day to night.

Old, Cavender Marsh thought. I’m old, old, old. I’m twenty years younger than she is, but I’m still old.

He thought about himself, then, in France and before, about the movies he had made and the feeling he had gotten from seeing his pictures on the posters that hung in front of movie theaters. He had been famous in that decade. She had been nothing, passed over, out of date, and unfamiliar. Gone.

His wineglass was half full and he drank it off. He thought about those two last weeks in France and his face in all the papers, the reporters who had come looking for them only because he was who he had been. He wondered if the Duke of Windsor had ended up feeling like this.

Beneath him, the ocean swirled and roared and slapped against the black rocks that made up the island, slapped and slapped, as if it could drill holes in the granite and pour itself through to the other side.

Cavender Marsh crushed his wineglass into shards and threw the pieces into the sea.





PART 1


A Passion Like Obsidian





CHAPTER 1


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS NOT used to thinking of Bennis Hannaford as a competent person. He wasn’t even used to thinking of Bennis as an adult—and that was in spite of the fact that, if his calculations were correct, she should be turning forty sometime soon. Back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia, where they both lived, Bennis was often treated like a cross between a force of nature and a certified lunatic. “Bennis the Menace,” Father Tibor Kasparian called her, and everybody understood what he meant. Bennis came from a rich family out on the Main Line and had made a pile writing sword and sorcery fantasy novels: obviously, she had too much money. Bennis dated rock musicians with rings through their noses and respectable-looking politicians on the rise who turned out later to have connections with Saddam Hussein: obviously, Bennis had too little sense. “Too much,” Bennis’s best friend on the street, Donna Moradanyan, once said, “is practically Bennis’s real name.”

It was now seven o’clock in the morning on the Thursday they were supposed to go up to Maine, and Gregor was sitting in the dining room of the Boston Hilton, watching Bennis cross the carpet to join him for breakfast. Forty or not, Bennis looked good. There were streaks of gray in her great cloud of black hair—Bennis treated Lida Arkmanian’s suggestions that she “do something about herself,” like use lipstick or color her hair, the way a Hasidic rabbi would treat the suggestion that he ease his hunger with pork—and her hands looked longer and wirier and more muscular than they had when Gregor had first met her. Gregor was more impressed with the fact that she didn’t have a line on her face and that she had managed to stay so thin.

“I haven’t had any children, Gregor,” Bennis would point out to him, whenever he brought this up. “What do you think it is that puts serious weight on most women?”

Gregor had known plenty of women who had put on serious weight for no good reason he could tell. That came of having lived significant portions of his life in Armenian ethnic neighborhoods. He had known other women—while he was with the FBI in Washington—who were thin to the point of emaciation but who did nothing else with their time. If you asked these women how they were, they obsessed for fifteen minutes on the exact number of calories there had been in the celery-and-lemon sandwich they’d had at noon. Bennis didn’t do that, either. She was just this slight figure, five foot four and fine boned without being fragile, walking along in the costume he thought of as her uniform: Eddie Bauer blue jeans; L.L. Bean turtle-neck; J. Crew long red cotton sweater. If the major catalog companies ever went out of business, Bennis would have to go naked.

Halfway across the dining room, Bennis stopped to talk to a waiter. She smiled. She nodded. Her face lit up as if the conversation she was having was the most charming exchange she had ever engaged in in her life. The waiter, who had started out cool, thawed. Bennis talked to him a few more moments, nodded vigorously one more time, and then moved on.