“It is criminal,” Tibor said.
“Be right back,” Linda said.
Gregor watched her go and then looked back at the papers. “You’d think there would be something you could do about outright fraud,” he said. “I know half a dozen first-rate Federal fraud investigators from at least four agencies who would love to bring down a big operation like NationReady.”
“NationReady has been bought by CountriBank.”
“They’d love to bring down that, too. You don’t know what these guys are like. Woman, in one case. They live to bring down big operations, especially if the operations are supposed to be respectable banks. They really hate banks.”
“They can hate banks all they want, Krekor, but that will not get these people back into their houses. And we are now stuck trying to make sure no more of them are forced out. It is not so simple as it sounds like it ought to be.”
“Maybe I’ll go talk to one of those people for you,” Gregor said.
“I would much appreciate it,” Tibor said. “I don’t think you will do much good, you understand, but I would appreciate it.”
“Of course it would do some good,” Gregor said positively, picking up his fork and attacking his sausage.
He always went for the sausage first, because it was the first thing Bennis wanted to take away from him when she saw he wasn’t breakfasting on fruit.
3
An hour later, with no sign of Bennis or Donna at the Ararat, Gregor walked back home to pick up his briefcase. The storm had died down. The wind was no longer violent. There was no more thunder. There was no lightning in the sky. The drizzle was still coming down, though, and it still felt cold.
Gregor went in through the front door of the house, because that was the place where the house looked most “done.” It was a beautiful entry, really, with a glass-inlaid door and a brass knob and knocker. As far as he could tell, Bennis didn’t intend to do anything at all about the building’s facade.
He let himself into the foyer, stepped over a stack of tiles, and took his Windbreaker off. There was an old-fashioned coat stand right there in the corner. Bennis had picked it up at an antique store somewhere or the other. He put his Windbreaker over that and headed for the back of the house.
“Bennis?” he said. “Are you all right? You never made it to the Ararat.”
He went past little mounds of bathroom fixtures, puddles of carpet samples, stacks of “home plan ideas” magazines that he was sure Bennis had never read. He let himself into the kitchen and heard a sudden, inhuman shriek.
Bennis was sitting on one of the chairs, holding a small, impossibly frantic animal in her lap. It looked like nothing Gregor had ever seen before. It was skeletal and matted. It was twisting around like it had no bones at all.
Bennis stood up and thrust it under a pile of blankets on the table. When Gregor looked again, he could see that the pile had actually been shaped into a little blanket cave. Shrieks came from the center of it, and the whole pile seemed to shake.
“What was that?” Gregor asked.
Bennis sat down again. “It’s a cat,” she said. “It’s a very small cat, and it’s half dead. Donna and I found it under the back porch with what was probably its mother and two litter mates. They were all dead.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “So you brought it in here. I didn’t think you liked cats.”
“I don’t mind them,” Bennis said. “And we couldn’t just leave it out there to die. We called the vet, and we’ve given it something to eat, but Donna went to get a cat carrier so that we can get it some medical attention. The vet says it sounds like it might be feral.”
“Which means?”
“Cats that have gone back to the wild, who have never lived with people. But if the mother cat had the litter under our front porch, the kittens might not have seen people but the mother cat might have, so—”
“All right, I can see that.”
“It is all right, Gregor, I promise you. I don’t intend to stick you with a cat. We’re just going to take it to the vet’s and then when it’s all right medically, we’ll feed it for a while and find somebody to adopt it. Maybe Tibor can adopt it. He likes cats. And the apartment is big enough.”
“You’ll have to ask Tibor about that,” Gregor said. “And the cat seems to be reemerging.”
Bennis got up to look. The cat was coming out on very wobbly legs. She picked it up and held it close to her chest, stroking its head. It curled up against her, and its shaking seemed to get less violent.
“Well,” Gregor said.