Not a Creature Was Stirring(22)

“Anne Marie, please.”

“Please what? Mother’s been dying for years, and now she’s going to be dead. What did you think was happening?”

“Anne Marie, for God’s sake.”

But Anne Marie was gone, disappearing through the west wing doors, the solid stack heels of her shoes making an odd thudding noise on the carpet, the tin angel on her chest clacking against the pearls of her necklace. Emma stood staring after her, wondering now if it was Anne Marie who was crazy. God only knew, you had to be crazy to take the death of your mother like that.

Emma thought about going after her, but she had a funny feeling it wouldn’t do any good.





4


Half an hour later, Emma got back to her room, climbed into bed, and put the book she’d picked up in the little library on her lap. The book had taken her forever to find, because she hadn’t been able to concentrate on looking for it. She kept thinking about Mother and Anne Marie and Bennis. Her dearest wish in the world was that she’d go back to the west wing and find a light under Bennis’s door. She desperately needed someone to talk to. Then she reminded herself that if there wasn’t a light under Bennis’s door, it would be all that much worse if she was stuck in her room without a book.

The book she found was called The Predators’ Ball, all about insider trading and corporate takeovers. It was reasonably new and shelved toward the front. If she hadn’t been so distracted, she would have found it right away. When she did find it, she decided to take it as a godsend. Financial scandal was her absolutely favorite thing, better even than chocolate. She’d once read Ray Dirks’s book on the Equity Funding scam twice in one month. Coming back onto the wing, she found Bennis’s room dark. She stood outside the door for a few moments anyway. Bennis had always said Emma should call any time Emma needed her. They were sisters and they would stick together. But Bennis seemed to know all about this thing. She had tried to explain it in the car while they were driving down from New York. If Emma woke her now, what would she say? That the truth had finally sunk in and it had upset her?

Emma went back to her room, got into bed, found her cigarettes, lit up. She couldn’t make herself care about Michael Milken. She couldn’t make herself care about Ivan Boesky. She couldn’t even make herself care about smoking. There were diseases out there that could get you, and the care you had taken with your health wouldn’t matter at all.

For Emma, there was something intrinsically wrong with that. It was as if she’d just found out, for certain, that most of the people in jail hadn’t done what they were convicted of doing.





FOUR


1


SOMETIMES, GREGOR DEMARKIAN THOUGHT, the net result of spending a significant part of one’s life as a policeman was a kind of mania. No matter what else came along to distract you, including common sense, you kept insisting the world was supposed to be a rational place.

He looked down at the phone, lying off the hook on his bed, and thought about making his call again. He decided against it. It was eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve morning, and he had already made that call twice since he got up. In fact, he’d made it over a dozen times in the last week. The first time had been very satisfactory. Robert Hannaford had picked up himself, and they’d had a short but suggestive discussion of what Gregor was supposed to do to get to Engine House—and what he was supposed to do after he got there.

“I have the money still in the briefcase,” Robert Hannaford had said. “You can count it when you get here. You can count it before you leave. Then you can take it with you.”

“And what do I do in the meantime?”

“Eat,” Robert Hannaford said.

Eat.

One of the things Gregor had been taught, and that he had in turn taught other people, was how to keep someone on the phone when they wanted to get off. He knew two dozen tricks for that purpose, and he had tried them all out on Robert Hannaford. None of them had worked. Like a politician or a surgeon, Hannaford knew how to cut off communication when he wanted it cut off. He knew even better how to say nothing when he wanted to say nothing. Gregor had been left, that first night, with the feeling that he had been snookered—and snookered by a man with a psychopath’s voice. He’d ended up so angry he hadn’t been able to sleep. He could still see himself, pacing from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom and back again, feeling more and more certain that what he really wanted to do was break Robert Hannaford’s neck.

It was his unaccustomed will to violence, and his feeling that he’d never sleep again if he didn’t get some answers, that had made him decide to make the first of the follow-up calls the next morning. Hannaford’s voice had had an unexpected effect on him. He was willing to grant Tibor all his nasty suspicions of the man’s character. If there was one thing Gregor understood, it was the psychopathic personality—not the brain-diseased delusionalism of the popular novel’s “homicidal maniac,” but the core of the men who had no emotions that were not in some way about themselves. And the women, too, Gregor thought. He’d never met a woman like that, but he’d read the files. What mattered here was that there had never been a normal man on earth with a voice like Hannaford’s, and there never would be.