She had the door to her office closed. The secretaries were out there, dealing with things. She thought they could deal with them a little while longer. She thought about Florence again, and about Athens, about walking up the steep hill to the Parthenon and down again, and stopping at a little place on Nikis Street to have galatoboureko and coffee.
She pulled her phone to her and picked up the receiver. She wondered how long phones like this would last. Everybody had cell phones now. It was close to one o’clock. Margaret would be in her office. Margaret was always in her office. Catherine punched the numbers in, and Margaret picked up on her cell phone.
“Are you alone?” Catherine asked.
“I am,” Margaret said. “I’ve been watching you on the news this morning.”
“It’s over now,” Catherine said. “I have a headache, but I was wondering . . .”
“About what?”
“About money,” Catherine said. “Remember, a couple of years ago, we talked about it? There would come a time that we couldn’t handle it anymore. That we couldn’t go on fighting a war we knew we were never going to win?”
“And you’ve come to that point,” Margaret said. “Because of the protestors?”
“It’s not the protestors,” Catherine said. “It’s everything, really. It’s the lawsuit, and the school board, and the fact that nothing ever gets done unless I do it. It’s having to live day after day with people who are just so damned proud of their ignorance they glow. I don’t know. I take it you don’t feel the same way.”
“I feel the same way,” Margaret said. “I’m just not quite as close to the end of my rope as you are.”
“Well, I’m at the end and beyond it,” Catherine said. “And I’ve been sitting here ever since they let me back into my office, thinking that if I have to do this for one more year, I’m going to have a breakdown. I can’t fix people, Margaret. I accepted that long ago. I can’t fix people, and I don’t want to live with the people I can’t fix.”
“So?”
“So I was thinking it was about time for me to bail,” Catherine said, “and I was just wondering, that being the case, whether we have the money for me to do it. I know I should be better about these things, Margaret, but you were always better about these things than I was.”
“I, at least, look at our bank statements every month. You want to know how much we have in the retirement accounts?”
“That was the idea,” Catherine said. “Yes.”
“At the end of last month, it amounted to five point eight million dollars.”
“That’s more than I thought,” Catherine said.
“It’s less than it could have been, if you hadn’t insisted on sticking to government bonds,” Margaret said.
“I wanted to be safe,” Catherine said. “It was so complicated. Getting the money and getting it put away, I mean. And I didn’t think we’d ever have that chance again.”
“I think we can retire, if we want to,” Margaret said. “We can’t stay in five-star hotels and eat out of the Michelin Guide, but we can definitely retire.”
“That’s good,” Catherine said.
And suddenly, she felt much more relaxed.
She could take anything now, because she could see the light at the end of the tunnel. She could see the end of her misery.
She could taste escape.
SEVEN
1
Gregor Demarkian did not go to see Alice McGuffie in jail. For one thing, it was too far a drive at a time when he had a lot to do much closer to home. For another, he knew almost everything she had to tell him without asking, and he didn’t like the idea of asking her. There are some people in this world who are always in a state of crisis, no matter what is happening to them. A mildly offhand remark in the supermarket is interpreted as a gross insult, or a racial slur, or the first step in sexual harassment. A driver who won’t get out of the way so that the people behind him can pass is an example of incipient road rage, or deliberately attempting to prevent our heroine from getting to work, because he’s always been jealous, even back in the third grade. It went on and on, with no good ever coming of it, and often a lot of harm. Its practitioners were male as well as female, every possible color, every possible nationality. Gregor sometimes thought that some nationalities—the Armenian, for instance—practically turned it into an art form. It didn’t matter, because what it came down to was that it was tiring, and he avoided that kind of person, and the events they generated, when he could. Fortunately, there really was nothing Alice McGuffie could tell him that he didn’t already know. He listened to her brother when he called and agreed to take a look at the photograph Alice wanted him to see, and that was that.