“You can’t really think the two cases are connected,” John said. “That’s ludicrous.”
“I agree. It’s ludicrous,” Gregor said. “But if the two cases aren’t connected, then somebody is going to a lot of trouble to make us think they are. I’m beginning to feel like I’m reading an Agatha Christie novel and she’s doing that thing where she bangs people over the head with a two-by-four pointing out the solution and nobody ever pays attention. Except that I am paying attention. If you see what I mean.”
“No,” John said.
“It’s all right,” Tibor said. “He gets like this. He has enthusiasms. He reminds me of someone I knew when I was growing up, who always had a new invention that was going to change the world.”
“I don’t think it’s a matter of having enthusiasms when you just want things to make sense,” Gregor said.
2
When Gregor Demarkian had first come back to live on Cavanaugh Street— when he’d still expected to find it as he had left it, ethnic and economically marginal—he had been convinced that the last thing he was interested in was any more involvement in crime, criminals, law enforcement, or investigations. He knew many men who had left the Bureau and gotten private investigators’ licenses, or hung out their shingles as consultants, but they seemed to him to be almost entirely pathetic. If you wanted to stay in the game, then the sensible thing was to stay in the Bureau. If there was some reason why you didn’t want to stay in the Bureau, and he could think of several, then the sensible thing was to get a job with a real police department or some sort of state investigative agency. Hanging out a shingle was admitting to the worst sort of amateurism, the dream of being Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, the kind of thing only civilians imagined had anything to do with the real work of handling cases. It was also admitting to the fact that the game had swallowed you whole. You had no other life. You had no other interests. If you couldn’t file case reports and keep yourself awake thinking about the way in which that last piece of evidence might fit a pattern that didn’t otherwise want to accommodate it, then you were as good as dead.
For those reasons, and more, Gregor had been careful over the years only to work as a consultant. He questioned witnesses if the police brought him along when they were investigating themselves. He looked at the evidence other people had collected. He did not go out on his own and do the footwork required of any decent investigator. The game had not swallowed him whole, and he did have a life. He would not be distraught if no one ever asked for his help on a case again. He refused to allow himself to be sucked into the all-consuming totality of the work. If there was legwork to be done, somebody else could do it.
Sitting in his living room after breakfast with John Jackman and Father Ti-bor, he decided that all rules had exceptions, and this was going to be the exception to this rule. He was glad that Bennis was off doing something with Donna Moradanyan Donahue. That way, he didn’t have to explain himself until he was ready to. He got the cell phone and punched in a number he knew by heart, in spite of the fact that before a week ago, he hadn’t dialed it for ten years. He got past the director’s secretary with a heartening lack of resistance and laid out his problem, in detail. Then he hung up and waited until the call came telling him what he wanted to know. The call was not, of course, from the director himself, but it came because of him, and Gregor was very satisfied.
“You’re all set,” the man on the phone said. “I’ve told him you’re coming. I’ve read him the riot act. You should be fine. Christ, he hasn’t heard anything but the riot act all week.”
“If it was up to me, I’d fire him.”
“We’ll get around to that, don’t worry. First we’ve got a missing agent, right now presumed dead. Good luck. He’s a pain in the ass.”
“I know.”
Gregor got his coat, took the paper he’d written down the information on—hotel, hotel room number, hotel room direct line number, cell phone number, pager number—and went down to the street. He started walking up Cavanaugh Street toward a busier intersection, up beyond Krystof An-drechev’s store, but didn’t make it all the way there. The cab appeared out of nowhere, as if summoned by fairy godmothers. He thought he could use a fairy godmother. He got in, gave the address of the hotel, and sat back. Then he tried to clear his mind of everything having to do with the case, and most especially of everything having to do with Walker Canfield. The problem with thinking about Walker Canfield was that it made him do something very much like mental frothing at the mouth.