“Karla Parrish is in a coma. Come on, Bennis. Get up and I’ll take you to dinner. If you can go out with that thing on your arm.”
“I’ve got a kind of brace for it for walking. I think it’s a good thing for Karla Parrish that she was showing me that picture. I think she spent the whole night before that standing right behind the punch bowl at that table. She would have been blown to pieces. I’ll bet Mrs. Willis is trying to kill Julianne Corbett. I wonder why.”
“Maybe Mrs. Willis thinks Ms. Corbett doesn’t keep her campaign promises,” Gregor said. “Come on. Get up and get moving.”
“I don’t move too fast these days,” Bennis said. “I hate politics, don’t you?”
Actually, Gregor never thought much about politics beyond voting in presidential elections. What he was thinking about was what Bennis had just said about Julianne Corbett and Karla Parrish and Patricia MacLaren Willis, and it suddenly struck him that he hadn’t looked at the problem from quite that angle before.
FOUR
1.
GREGOR TOOK A TAXI down to John Jackman’s office the next morning. When he had first come back to Philadelphia from Washington, he had liked to take public transportation as often as possible, because it was a way to reacquaint himself with the city, because it was a way to tell himself that this was really home. Washington had never really been home, and couldn’t have been. Gregor had had something like the opposite of Potomac fever. All the buildings in the District of Columbia looked too big to him, and too cold, and too gray. Marble and limestone are not good materials to build your city out of when that city is going to be full of working internal combustion engines. Statues and monuments weren’t good things to fill your city up with if people wanted to live there. Gregor had never been sure if anybody actually wanted to live in the District. There was Georgetown and Foggy Bottom, of course, and a lot of poor people in tenements, but somehow at 6:45 every evening the entire city of Washington seemed to become uninhabited.
Big patches of the city of Philadelphia seemed to be uninhabited all the time these days, eaten up by soaring concrete highway ramps with no cars on them. Maybe it was just the time of day, after rush hour but before the shoppers came out in earnest. This was why Gregor didn’t travel on public transportation anymore. He kept getting caught in places like this. The air-conditioning in his cab was going full blast. He didn’t dare roll his window down, even though the morning wasn’t hot yet. He pressed his face against the glass and looked at thick concrete abutments and at the blank arc lights that hung over them. Obviously, there was some need to keep this stretch of road lit after dark. Then the cab went too quickly around a curve, throwing Gregor against the back of his seat. By the time he was sitting upright again, Gregor was in another landscape. This was the kind of landscape he could understand. The tenements were in bad shape, but they were full of people. The sidewalks were full of people too. Gregor assumed that a lot of the people he saw were Spanish, because a lot of the signs on the stores were Spanish. The cab pulled up to the curb in the middle of a block and he looked out to see a cluster of dumpy, middle-aged women at a newsstand, poring over a copy of Bride’s magazine.
“June,” Gregor said to no one in particular, getting his wallet out of his back pocket.
“What?” the cabdriver said. He was looking at the women looking at Bride’s magazine too. “You wonder what it is they’re reading there. They don’t speak English. I bet not a one of them speaks English.”
“Maybe they like looking at the pictures of brides in wedding gowns,” Gregor said.
“Why?” the cabdriver demanded. “They can’t any one of them be getting married in a white dress anytime soon. They must be forty.”
“Maybe it’s like fashion magazines. Women look at them even when they can’t wear the fashions.”
“Maybe. You’re that guy in the paper, aren’t you? The Lebanese-American Sherlock Holmes.”
“Armenian-American. I’m Armenian-American. Except that isn’t true either, because I was born right here in Philadelphia, so I guess I’m just American.”
“Whatever.”
Gregor decided he had enough change together and got out of the cab. He handed the money back through the window the driver had left open for him and watched a big Mack truck rumble toward the nearest stoplight, its side proclaiming it to be the property of Goldman’s Kosher Deli. Up the block a pack of children were playing something marked out with chalk on the sidewalk. A little way up from that, one of the stoops was full of slightly older children, all girls, smoking cigarettes and listening to music on a boom box. This was the city as Gregor remembered the city. He felt better than he had in days.