What had reminded Gregor of Alabama—and all the rest of it—in David Sandler’s house was the smell just under the smell of the ocean, the flat damp badness of vegetation gone to rot. In Alabama, that smell had been everywhere. In spite of the fact that he had spent only two weeks at that camp, Gregor had carried the smell with him ever since, and it was still part of what he thought of when he heard the words “the South.” One thing about being an overeducated ethnic had been very good, even at the time. None of the officers in that Alabama camp had been able to stand him, and none of them wanted to deal with him, and so at the first possible moment, faster than he would have dreamed was possible in the U.S. Army, he had been shipped off to a training facility in Massachusetts, and put on the list for the Officer Training Corps, and that was that. Gregor had all he had ever wanted to have of being a grunt in one of the army’s classic proving grounds in the Bible Belt. Just why the army always seemed to want to build their forts on swampland and great plains, Gregor never did learn to understand.
The clock on the night table next to the bed said 5:45. Gregor untangled himself from his light coverlet and got to his feet. Then he went to the door and looked into the big central main room of the house. Everything was quiet. David Sandler’s sleeping loft was quiet. Gregor went into the living room and looked around. The sunlight coming in through the windows was very strong. It didn’t seem to matter down here that it was late in the month of October. Gregor looked at the paintings on the walls that he hadn’t paid much attention to yesterday, and the books in the bookcases, too. The paintings were all prints from the Renaissance. People expected militant atheists to be modern, but David had always had more than a little of the classical scholar in him. The books were all books for work—books on the history of religion; tracts on various denominations and sects; the really classic literature of atheism, like Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Gregor made a face. Reading ought to be for pleasure as much as for work, he thought. His apartment back in Philadelphia had almost nothing in it but crime manuals or forensic textbooks, and the entire set of Bantam’s paperback editions of the Nero Wolfe novels. Gregor took another look at David Sandler’s door—David was unlikely to wake up soon; he had stayed up late the night before; David was a night person—and went back to the guest room. He shut the door and shucked off his pajamas, navy blue with red piping, a gift last Christmas from old George Tekemanian. Really hip men didn’t wear pajamas, according to Bennis. Really hip men wore nothing to bed at all. Gregor reminded himself that he neither was, nor aspired to be, a really hip man, and went in to the guest bath to take a shower.
When he came out of the shower, it was only 6:06 and the house was still quiet. He went to his suitcase, found a pair of good but reasonably relaxed gray flannel slacks and a shirt still in its packaging from the cleaners. He found new underwear and three ties, all shredded, that he decided not to wear. It was going to be too hot to wear a sweater, so he took out a sports jacket instead. Then he laid it all out on the bed and tried to decide if the pieces matched each other. Bennis and Lida and his late wife Elizabeth all seemed to be able to tell just by looking, but Gregor had no idea what they were looking at. Between the time Elizabeth had died and the time he had moved up from Washington to live on Cavanaugh Street, he had played it safe by wearing suits that had been matched by the store he bought them at. Now that he didn’t feel comfortable doing that anymore, he found himself spending too many mornings agonizing about whether he was going to look put together. That, he knew, was Bennis Hannaford’s fault. Before Bennis Hannaford, he had never cared whether he looked put together or not, although that might have been because Elizabeth had been there to make it unnecessary for him to care.
Gregor was doing it again. He put on his clothes as quickly as possible. Then he put on his shoes and went back out into the living room. It was still quiet—why wouldn’t it be?—and he went out the big sliding glass doors on David’s deck to look at the ocean. It seemed impossible that the ocean had gone crazy less than three weeks ago and laid waste to most of the coastline of this state. Right now it looked majestic but calm, like a grand old lioness well past the days when she was able to hunt.
Gregor walked all the way around the deck to the side of the house, where the deck faced the beach instead of the ocean. From there, he could see not only the beach road but the start of town beyond it. Yesterday, that town had been nothing but a blur of crowded images, mostly of television equipment and junior reporters wielding microphones. Now it looked as quiet as David’s house was. And why wouldn’t it be? The media people were probably as night-oriented as David. The official organs of the town and state wouldn’t open until nine. The rest of Bellerton would be, though. If there was one thing Gregor knew about small towns, it was that they woke up early and got down to business with the dawn.