“We’ll go in the back way,” Michael told Gregor. “That way nobody can stop me on the run and ask me fifteen questions.”
“What if they need you for something serious?”
“I’ve got my beeper.”
Gregor followed Michael to the west building door. Michael knocked and introduced himself to someone looking through the peephole. The cab waited until the door opened and let them inside. The woman on the other side of the west building door was the nun Gregor knew as Sister Kenna. She asked a lot of fluttery questions about where they’d been and how they felt and what they were doing on the side of the bridge, and then she was called off by a voice down the first-floor hall. Michael took Gregor to the stairwell and started to climb.
“Going this way is a little difficult in some ways,” he said. “You’ve got to go up to five and then across the bridge and then down to three again, but it’s the only way to have even a modicum of privacy. And it’s only a modicum, believe me.”
Gregor believed that Sister Kenna was probably on the phone right now, telling Sister Augustine that Dr. Michael Pride had done the very odd thing of bringing Gregor Demarkian into the center by the wrong door.
Gregor followed Michael up and up and up and then over a bridge with glass sides that made him dizzy and more than a little anxious. Twenty years in the FBI had had an effect on his assumptions of the world. He kept wondering what would happen to them if there was a sniper down there, or in one of the buildings across the street. Whose idea had it been to build a glass bridge like this in such a dangerous part of town?
Michael Pride didn’t think anything of the bridge at all. He let Gregor into the east building and looked around.
“We have day care here from six in the morning to seven at night. Day care for infants and toddlers, I mean. Sixty kids under the age of five. Lots of volunteers. It’s easy to find volunteers for projects like day care.”
“What happens when the kids are five?”
“They go over to the west building to another program we have there. Actually, half the kids in this program are doing a version of Head Start. It’s not Head Start itself—the center doesn’t take any public money, not even Medicaid—but it’s the same idea. Works pretty well, from what I’ve seen.”
“Good.”
“Two more flights. Right this way.”
Gregor followed Michael again, glad to see that these last two flights were well lit and reasonably wide. He was trying to pretend he was not out of breath. Some of the floors they had passed on the way up in the other building had been essentially shut down for people to sleep. There had barely been any light at all. Michael had perked right up when they had gotten to this building. His tiredness seemed to have been almost a result of the atmosphere downtown. He went down the last two flights of stairs humming softly under his breath. Gregor recognized the song. It was “Under the Sea.” For no reason at all, it suddenly occurred to Gregor that one of the two composers of that song had died of AIDS.
“Maybe Eamon will be in his office,” Michael said, as they rounded the last bend in the staircase before reaching the third floor. “You should talk to him about Charlie. Eamon had more to do with Charlie than anybody else in this place but me.”
Gregor didn’t think Eamon Donleavy was feeling especially cooperative. He decided not to bring it up. He went barreling down the stairs after Michael, not looking where he was going. He almost ran right into Michael Pride’s back.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, pulling up short.
Michael was standing motionless in the middle of the third-floor hall, staring at a closed office door.
“My office,” Michael said. “The door’s closed.”
“So what?”
“My door’s never closed. The only time I ever saw it closed was when Charlie—oh, for Christ’s sake. This is asinine.”
Michael Pride strode ahead, grabbed the knob of his office door and yanked the door open. He was so sure that he would find nothing there but an empty office—and Gregor was so sure with him—that it took them both a long minute to assimilate what they did see.
What they saw was a woman in a short black dress, rolling around on the worn carpet on Michael Pride’s office floor, bucking and spasming as if she were being electrocuted.
Rosalie van Straadt.
PART TWO
The Cardinal Archbishop of New York
Is Beginning
to Lose His Patience
ONE
1
THEY TRIED TO BRING her back. They tried so hard, Gregor thought they were going to do it. He was a veteran of dozens of murder cases and an expert on poisons. He should have known better than to believe for a moment that someone in Rosalie van Straadt’s condition could recover from strychnine toxicity. But he got caught up in Michael Pride’s conviction. Michael Pride radiated conviction. Gregor had had hands-on experience in medical emergencies. He had once provided enough first aid to a woman who had swallowed lye so that she didn’t die from it—although, lye being lye, she hadn’t ended up in very good shape, either. First aid, however, was the key. Always before, when Gregor had been called on to do something about a man or woman who needed a doctor, no doctor had been available. Now the doctor was available, but Gregor’s help was needed anyway. There were never enough professionals on staff at the Sojourner Truth Health Center. The first thing Michael Pride did when he got over his shock at seeing Rosalie spasming and shuddering in his office was to go for his upstairs cabinet. The second thing he did was to start issuing Gregor orders. Gregor wanted to issue a few orders of his own. Don’t touch the upstairs cabinet, he thought. The strychnine probably came from there. Don’t touch the papers on your desk. The murderer might have gotten careless and left something important lying around. Watch where you step on the carpet. There could be fibers, sand, pieces of lint, anything. It was ridiculous. Gregor kept his mouth shut and followed orders.