“Mind their own business,” he said, out loud, into the cold air, and Rob Benedetti, coming up the block to join him, blinked.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” Gregor said. “I was just thinking out loud. Do you like politics?”
“Like them? I don’t know. I suppose I do. I’m running for district attorney.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be appointed district attorney?”
“We don’t appoint district attorneys in Philadelphia,” Rob Benedetti said. “We elect them. Except in circumstances like mine, you know, where a DA has to leave and there’s a few months before the next election. Are you all right?”
Gregor was fine. “I just wish it were next year instead of this one,” he said, “when nobody is running for anything.”
“Somebody is always running for something in Philadelphia,” Rob Benedetti said. “We have elections for something pretty much every year.”
“Not elections I hear about,” Gregor said. “That would be enough.” There was a security guard waiting at the door of the building, sitting on a folding chair and reading the sports pages. He dropped the paper as Gregor and Rob Benedetti came up, recognized Rob immediately, and opened up.
“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve got a bomb threat. And there’s a huge fire down on Curzon Street.”
“You’ve got the building locked up because there’s a fire on Curzon Street?” Gregor asked. “That’s a mile away from here.”
“It’s making everybody jumpy,” the guard said. “It’s the homeless people, you know what I mean? Some of them started a fire in a waste bin out behind an abandoned building and the building caught fire, and now half the block has gone up. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the sirens, even if you weren’t exactly close. I heard the sirens when I was coming in this morning.”
“I heard sirens about an hour and a half ago,” Rob Benedetti said. “I didn’t think anything of it. There are always sirens in town.”
“There’s another thing,” Gregor said, as they moved off toward the elevators. “Homeless people. There’s a problem, it’s a real one. What to do about the homeless people. Some of them you can give homes to, but some of them you can’t. They won’t go to homes. They’re mentally ill, or they’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, and they just won’t go. But they’re around. They starve and they freeze to death. They get sick and spread their sicknesses. They upset pedestrians and tourists. You’d think there would be something that could be done for them, for them, not to them, and I’ve never yet heard a politician in this city even mention them. Not even once.”
“I have,” Rob Benedetti said. “Old Ellery Dreen used to go on about them all the time. Round ’em up and put ’em in workhouses or send them to jail. Whatever.”
“Ellery Dreen wasn’t a serious politician,” Gregor said, “and I didn’t say do something to them, I said do something for them. John isn’t talking about homeless people in his campaign. I know because I’ve read his stuff. The mayor isn’t talking about them. But they’re out there, and we’ve got the worst cold we’ve seen in thirty years, and they’re freezing to death, or causing fires, which could kill firefighters, and here we are. That’s what’s wrong with politics, you see. They yell at each other about family values and gay rights and whether you approve of teaching evolution in the public schools, but nobody talks about anything that’s actually happening that it would make sense for a government to do something about. And then everybody gets angry, and calls each other the spawn of Satan, and the whole process becomes nothing but a way for people who were already very angry to begin with to be angry in public.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever called anybody the spawn of Satan,” Rob Benedetti said, amused.
“Metaphorically,” Gregor said morosely. The elevator was here. The doors slid open. He and Rob Benedetti got on it and watched the doors close in their faces. Gregor wondered why people did that, so automatically—got on the elevator, turned to face the doors. He thought he was either going insane or in need of about forty continuous hours of sleep.
The elevator reached their floor, stopped with a bump, shuddered, and then sank a little. Gregor tried to put the image of them plunging several stories to the basement right out of his head. The doors opened. He didn’t dash for the solidity of the floor.
“You might consider,” Rob Benedetti said, “the possibility that they’re angry all the time. It isn’t just politics that makes them angry. They’re just angry.”