Once Charlie Shay was dead—once Gregor had seen him die, and gone through the motions necessary to secure the body and bring some kind of order to the resulting situation—Gregor had thought he would go back to the file for other reasons. Gregor had lived too long a life not to believe in coincidence. He knew that if a man intent on cheating on his wife runs into that wife in the lobby of the very hotel where he has established his rendezvous, the chances are that the wife has a meeting of her Sunday school teachers’ support group in that very place at that very time and isn’t following her husband at all. There was, however, a limit. Two men connected to the same enterprise, both poisoned with strychnine, both falling off things—or almost falling off them, in Charlie Shay’s case. That had to be too much for anybody. Gregor wanted to get down to the file and see if he could clear up a few of the points that had been bothering him when he’d talked to the very young man from the Bureau. He wanted to read through the whole thing with a felt-tipped highlighter in his hand. He wanted to really concentrate. He did not, however, want to do any of those things now. Now was very late on their first night on board, only hours after Charlie Shay had died. Gregor was tired and cold and wet. His body ached from the battering it had taken making sure Charlie’s body didn’t disappear into the sea. His head ached from the stuffy closeness of the cabins and the unending need to compensate for the rocking of the boat. His stomach was empty. Dinner had disappeared in the confusion. They had been just about to sit down to it when Charlie had gotten sick and gone up to the main deck. They had never sat down to it again after Charlie’s body was stowed below. Excitement had carried Gregor through all of that without allowing him to feel hungry, but excitement had come to an end. He was now hungry enough to eat wood.
He used the forked throne that hung over the sea that was all that was provided for a toilet and then made his way back to the cabin he shared with Bennis. He came in to find her sitting in the one chair, dressed for bed, her legs folded under her Turkish-fashion. Gregor had never seen Bennis dressed for bed before, although he’d been with her on one or two occasions when he should have. For some reason, at those times she’d gone to sleep in her jeans or drifted away from him to rest in private. Gregor didn’t know what he’d expected of her in the way of nightwear. He didn’t know if he’d ever thought about what to expect of her in the way of nightwear. He was still a little surprised by what he found. Bennis was dressed in what looked like a pair of men’s pajamas, except that they were made of silk and vertically striped in white and candy cane pink. Over them she had a wrap robe that was also vertically striped in white and candy cane pink. Gregor didn’t know why, but he got the idea that both these articles were very expensive. Bennis looked about fourteen in them, even with the grey in her hair.
Bennis looked up when Gregor came through the door. Gregor shut the door and latched it and went over to sit on the side of the bunk. It was not a comfortable position. The bunk’s side was really just a polished slat of wood, less than an inch thick. Sitting on it was like sitting on the pickets of a fence.
“So,” he said, “what have you got there? I take it it’s mine.”
“It’s the FBI report on Donald McAdam,” Bennis said. “You can’t chew me out about this, Gregor. You showed it to me yourself.”
“I’m not chewing you out. I was just thinking about it myself. Thinking I ought to read it, I mean. But not now. I’m tired.”
“I’ll bet you’re hungry.” Bennis waved her hand toward the narrow, stern-side end of the cabin, where an odd arrangement of slats served as a luggage holder, holding their suitcases against the motion of the sea. “Look in the zipper compartment under the top flap of my bag. You know, open it up and look right under what you’re holding. Donna packed us some food.”
“Donna?”
“On orders from Lida and Hannah Krekorian. They were busy doing something or other with the Society for the Support of an Independent Armenia.”
Gregor got up and went to the suitcase, opened it up, and found the “zipper compartment” just where Bennis said it would be. He unzipped it and looked inside. With that blissful disregard for practicality that characterized every resident of Cavanaugh Street on the subject of food, Donna had packed not only honey cakes and breads, which made sense, but stuffed grape leaves and eggplant salad, which needed refrigeration to stay fresh. Gregor took these out and added a whole small loaf of what looked like Lida’s best four grain and went back to the side of the bunk. It still hurt to sit down, but he accepted it better because it was in such a good cause. It was the only place he could go to eat.