“Timetables of what?”
“Of who had seen who where. The last time anybody had seen Drew Harrigan. The last time anybody had seen Sherman Markey. Hats. You name it. By the time we all got through at the morgue it was the middle of the night and nobody wanted to talk to us, including Neil Savage, Harrigan’s attorney. And Judge Williamson isn’t talking to anybody.”
“There’s a judge who is a suspect?”
“There’s a judge who signed off on Harrigan’s rehab, and what all of us want to know is what kind of paper he got to ensure that Harrigan was actually going into rehab and staying there. We all want to know a lot of things, but like I said, it was late, and we couldn’t get anybody to talk to us, or they couldn’t get anybody to talk to them, and then the mayor called and had a fit about me. This was at, oh, I don’t know. Midnight. I hung around a little while longer and then came home. And I’m very tired, and very fed up, and I know I’m going to have to go out there today and listen to John and the mayor both blithering about the primary and the general election and the world going to hell in a handbasket, and all I want to do is take a couple of weeks in Bermuda. It’s warm this time of year in Bermuda, isn’t it?”
“Warmer than here,” Tibor said.
Godiva nuzzled deeper into Tibor’s lap, and Tibor petted her absently. Gregor thought that if Grace was away for long, she’d come back to find that dog so devoted to Tibor that she wouldn’t want to come back home.
Gregor finished his coffee and checked his watch. If he had to get up in the middle of the night to work on something he wasn’t even sure he was being hired to work on, everybody else should get up in the middle of the night to keep him company.
He wasn’t sure that was the best policy for a politician to follow, but he felt himself justified in being smug that he was not now, and would not ever be, a politician.
3
At seven o’clock, Gregor was out on Cavanaugh Street, waiting for the cab he’d very carefully called for from Tibor’s apartment. It shouldn’t be difficult to get a cab at this hour of the morning, but nothing ever worked the way it was supposed to, and he was taking no chances. Tibor came out to the street to wait beside him, since he had to go that way to get to the Ararat for breakfast anyway, and when the cab pulled up, they were discussing Bennis’s book tour. Or not discussing it, as the case might be. Gregor found it difficult to understand why so many people had so much trouble talking about Bennis as if she were an ordinary human being, instead of this fantasy that had dropped out of heaven onto their heads and might go back there at any moment, for any reason.
“I think it is a matter of professional obligation,” Tibor was saying as the cab was stopped at the light only two intersections away. “I think you are wrong to believe that it has anything to do with you. I think that if Bennis were angry with you, she would tell you. Bennis is like that.”
Gregor was about to say that he had no idea what Bennis was like, but the cab was suddenly there, pulling in so close to the cars parked at the curb that it threatened to scrape the paint from a green Volvo and a yellow Ford Escape. Gregor gave one small thought to who on Cavanaugh Street wanted to pay for the gas on an SUV when he was living in a city where the hills were few and the snow removal was good, and then got into the cab’s backseat.
“Never in her life has Bennis ever made any sense to me,” he told Tibor, through the still-open door, “and she doesn’t make much sense to me now. All I know is, she’s upset about something, she’s been upset for months, she won’t tell me what’s going on, and now she’s disappeared. And I don’t care if you call it a book tour or a professional obligation, it’s still a vanishing act. I’m too old for this, Tibor.”
“You’re never too old for love,” Tibor said.
The problem was, this situation had nothing to do with love, and Gregor knew Tibor knew it. He slammed the door shut and told the driver to go down to John Jackman’s office. Here was one early morning John wouldn’t be spending at his campaign headquarters. The cab pulled out and down Cavanaugh Street far more quickly than it had advanced from the stoplight to pick Gregor up, and they were suddenly in a built-up section of the city, full of office buildings and hole-in-the-wall restaurants with plate glass windows. The sky was already light, with that sharp edge to it that meant the air was extremely cold.
The first thing Gregor caught sight of that his mind fixed on was a dispenser full of copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer, its headline glued to the Drew Harrigan story but properly vague, as it would have to be given the time limitations of going to press while the investigation was still stumbling around in confusion. The next thing he saw was a homeless woman wearing a thick bulky coat, stockings that fell down her legs, and bedroom slippers. It was the image of a moment, connected to nothing, indicative of nothing, and before he had really absorbed it the light changed and the cab shot off and away, onto other streets. Gregor found himself thinking of something the nun had said last night, while they had both been sitting in the police precinct’s waiting room for the second time.