Glass Houses(97)

It was after five when Betty and Martha were finished putting together his computer printouts. Gregor thanked them and got up to go. He hadn’t seen Rob Benedetti come downstairs. He hadn’t heard Jackman’s voice anywhere either. He supposed they were both still up in John’s office trying to micro-manage by phone something that really needed a competent detective on the ground. He got up and tucked the computer printout under his arm. It was the size of one of those first Gutenberg Bibles, or maybe bigger. He had no idea if the information in it would be organized in a way that would allow him to understand it when he had the chance to sit down and read it.

When he went out onto the street, it was raining again, and with the rain had come cold, not bitter cold, but that hard underlying chill that characterized so many of the evenings in March. He buttoned his coat and put his collar up, feeling a little silly as he did it. He had a weird conviction that anybody who saw him on the street would think he was pretending to be Humphrey Bogart. Maybe that was what was really getting him down. It was hard to build an identity for yourself once you started to think you had an identity to build. Sensible people didn’t question who they were because they knew that once they did they would never understand themselves again. He had been pretty good at not asking himself metaphysical questions even in college, where he had avoided the Philosophy Department like the plague and taken lots of courses in history and economics instead. He thought people who went off to “find themselves” were idiots. If they were over the age of eighteen, he thought they were terminal idiots. But it wasn’t that simple. The man who had been happily married to Elizabeth Boukarian Demarkian wasn’t the same man who could be involved with Bennis Day Hannaford. The man who had been happily encased in the rationalized cocoon of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wasn’t the same man who could be described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” Cases mattered to him. He did not want murderers walking the streets. He did not want them walking the streets even if he could be sure they would never commit another murder again. Bennis mattered to him, too; and no matter how angry he was, he couldn’t even begin to doubt the fact that he did not want her to disappear from his life. If he could just hold on to those two things, he might be able to think his way out of this funk and do something about John Jackman’s problem at the same time.

He saw a cab coming down the street and stepped off the curb to hail it. Just as he did so, a woman stepped off the curb just a few feet behind him. He looked at her briefly and nodded, determined to do the right thing and let her have the cab ahead of him. Then he realized he knew her, or at least knew who she was. He saw in her face that she recognized him, too.

“It’s,” he said, coming up to her as the cab pulled over, “it’s Miss Lydgate, isn’t it? I’m sorry. I’m not good with names. I’m—”

“You’re Gregor Demarkian,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “If you’re going back to Cavanaugh Street, we can go together. I was just headed home.”

“That would be fine.”

Gregor held the door while Phillipa Lydgate climbed into the back of the cab, then got in himself. She had already given the driver their destination, so he sat back and unbuttoned his coat.

“Have you been touring the city?” he asked. “That’s what you’re doing in America, isn’t that right? You’re writing articles about Philadelphia.”

“I’m writing about American identity,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “I’m trying to get some insight into the way Americans think. Real Americans. Red State Americans.”

“Pennsylvania is a Blue State,” Gregor said, thinking that he remembered having this conversation with her before. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d had a conversation about a conversation like this with somebody.

Phillipa Lydgate was rearranging things in her handbag. “I was going to go to Ohio, but I couldn’t find a contact there. Americans are so woefully igno-rant of other countries, it’s nearly impossible to explain to them that the rest of the world just doesn’t see them the way they see themselves. They don’t see the value in work like mine. I don’t think even Bennis Hannaford does, and she’s a very well-traveled woman.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “she is that.”

“It’s the myopia that comes from being the world’s only remaining super-power,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “It’s another form of arrogance. We all have to pay attention to what other people think about us. It’s part of the process of being human. Americans think they’re immune.”