Gregor went back to the gap on the balcony and looked down. No one was hurt. No one was killed. No one was even messed up, as far as Gregor could see.
It just didn’t make any sense.
3
GREGOR WAS STILL STANDING at the open place in the balcony rail, thinking that nothing at all was making sense, when the police finally showed up—but by that time Gregor wasn’t alone, and Tony Bandero had lost the fight to keep order in the foyer. The police arrived with sirens wailing, as if there were an armed robbery in progress. Their noise mingled with all the other noise and became unintelligible.
“Get away from the wood,” Tony Bandero was bellowing. “Get away from the wood.”
There were now dozens of women in leotards in the foyer and on the balcony. They had come streaming out of doors and stairways all over the house, curious and tense, still worked up from whatever exercise they had been doing when the fuss started. The women who had come from the third and fourth floors had their hair plastered to their heads with sweat. Some of them were wearing clothing with Fountain of Youth advertising on it. Gregor saw one woman in a pale green leotard with the words “A NEW YOU FOR THE NEW YEAR” plastered across her chest in black. The letters made it impossible to tell with any accuracy whether she was thick or thin, in good shape or bad.
“Traci nearly got killed,” women kept saying.
Traci was standing where she had been standing all along, with her back to the wall. She wasn’t screaming anymore.
“Get away from the wood,” Tony Bandero kept saying. “Get away from the wood and stay away from it.”
Down in the foyer, the front door opened and two uniformed policemen stepped in. They were both young and jumpy. When they saw the crowds of women who awaited them, they both blanched. Gregor shook his head in exasperation and started down the stairs. That was all they were going to need now, two rookies put out of commission by sexual confusion. There were too many people around here who had been put out of commission by other kinds of confusion already.
Gregor gave Traci Cardinale one last look—she seemed on the verge of tears, but she wasn’t crying—and then went all the way down into the foyer. He pushed his way through a crowd of older women in dark tights and brightly colored headbands and went up to Tony Bandero.
“Is everybody here you expect to be here? Simon Roveter? Magda Hale?”
“I don’t know,” Tony told Gregor, Beginning to redden, “I haven’t had a chance to look. This is nuts.”
“We need you ladies to step away from the wood,” one of the young uniformed patrolmen was saying to five very young women in stretch bicycle shorts. “We need you to keep away from the wood.” The women weren’t listening to the patrolman any more than they had been listening to Tony Bandero.
Gregor stepped up to the wood himself and looked it over. There wasn’t much more of to see close up than there had been from the balcony. The nails looked longer and newer. The splinters of wood looked bigger and more treacherous. Gregor rubbed his face.
“The important thing here,” Tony Bandero said, coming up behind him, “is to find out whether this was deliberate or an accident.”
“No,” Gregor told him, still rubbing his face.
“No?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “it couldn’t have been an accident. That’s obvious. So the real question is not whether this was deliberate, but what kind of deliberate it was.”
“I don’t think I get your point here,” Tony Bandero said.
Gregor walked away from Tony. There was wood everywhere in the foyer, so he couldn’t walk all the way around it all. The nails gleamed. The shards flashed wickedly sharp points. The splinters looked like loose needles ready to prick and stab. Gregor wanted to kick something. It didn’t make any sense.
“The important thing here,” Gregor told Tony Bandero with an edge of anger in his voice, “is that nobody got killed, nobody got hurt, nobody got even scratched. And it just doesn’t begin to add up.”
THREE
1
WHEN GRETA BELLAMY FIRST heard that Gregor Demarkian was in the building, she was standing on the second-floor balcony just a few steps from the doors to the second floor proper in a cluster of other women, wondering what was going on. Ten minutes later, she was still wondering what was going on, but she had seen Gregor Demarkian in the flesh. He was less impressive than he had been in People magazine. That might have been because he was looking confused instead of wise. In People, he always looked a little like one of those ancient seers, a man with all the answers. It might also have been because he didn’t have Bennis Hannaford with him, or didn’t seem to. Greta was confused. She had thought, from what she had read, that Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford were always together, like Siamese twins. She looked around and around the foyer and through all the clusters of strange women that littered the stairway and the halls, but she didn’t see anyone who looked like the dark-haired woman in People magazine. It made Greta feel a little let down. She had been tense and miserable all day, thinking about Chick and Marsha in Atlantic City, thinking about how ugly she must look in her leotard and how stupid she must seem trying to do aerobic dance steps when she had no sense of rhythm. She felt thick and awkward, the way she had when she first started going out with Chick. When Chick had asked her out for the first time, it had felt like a miracle.