Quoth the Raven(56)

Out in the thickness of the crowd, a roar went up, raucous and hysterical, and people began to stamp their feet. Chessey Flint stood up, climbed a couple of steps to give herself more height, and craned her neck.

“That’s the voice vote starting,” she said. “I think this time Freddie’s going to end up winning it. I hope he does. This is the fourth time he’s tried in four years.”

She climbed back down to where Gregor was and began doing things to her costume, making it puff out the way it was supposed to. To Gregor, she looked better than she had—much better than when he’d first sat down. He found it a relief. At least she wasn’t crying anymore.

She sat down on the step beside him again and said, “It won’t be very long now. Then I’ll corral Jack for you and you can take him off to the tool shed. I hope you don’t mind getting your clothes in a mess.”





Four


1


ONE OF THE THINGS Gregor Demarkian had noticed in his last years at the Bureau—and he hadn’t noticed much; he was too caught up in Elizabeth’s dying—was how different the new men coming in from Quantico were from the men who had come in before them. It was the men in particular who had worried him. The new women were much more like the women the Bureau had always attracted than they wanted to admit, even if they did have new job titles and new responsibilities. Gregor sometimes thought it must be very difficult to force a woman not to grow up. When the Bureau had first decided to accept women as working agents, Gregor had gone to the library and taken out a pile of books on feminism. He had read his way through not only Friedan and Steinem and de Beauvoir, but Firestone and Dworkin and Carol Gilligan. Some of what he read was outrageous, some of it was tautological, much of it was brilliant—but on one point almost all of it was in agreement, and Gregor was not. In his experience, subculture notwithstanding, women were rarely “infantilized” in any significant way. He had met a few child-women among the rich of Palm Springs and Beverly Hills. Money and a certain kind of flaccid beauty, combined with an utter and determined isolation from real children, had made them into caricatures. The rest of the women he had known, from full-time housewives to Chanel-suited CEOs, had all been determinedly adult. They may or may not have been able to balance their checkbooks. Every last one of them had been able to understand the differences between authority and despotism, responsibility and obsessiveness, commitment and self-enslavement.

With the men it had been something else, and the something else had begun to make Gregor very uncomfortable, at least up to that point where the only thing on his mind had been whether the latest round of radiation treatments would put Elizabeth into remission or into her coffin. It was true that there had always been men in the world who couldn’t seem to grow up. The giggling martini-addict golfer and the rabbity suburban hubby with nothing on his mind but the length of the grass in his own front lawn were staple stereotypes of the kind of literature Gregor had been encouraged to consider “serious” in his days at the Harvard Graduate School. Still, there had been a hint of dysfunction about those men, a trace of self-knowledge, a guilt. It was as if they knew they had foiled themselves and everyone around them by becoming what they were. The new men Gregor had encountered in the halls of FBI headquarters had no self-knowledge and no guilt, and didn’t think they needed either. They blithered endlessly about self-fulfillment and career enhancement and personal growth as if they thought the terms had meaning. They were frozen in self-satisfaction. When one of the women around them complained about their childishness, they just smiled at her, as if they had a secret. They had looked into the future and seen the grave of manhood, marked by marble and covered with a bed of weeds. Resurrecting it would have meant nothing to them but a kind of self-abuse.

What had interested Gregor Demarkian about Jack Carroll, from the beginning, was his seeming immunity from all this. He was still a boy, but he was pulling against himself, struggling in all directions, trying to get out. Watching him come out of the crowd with Chessey Flint under his arm, Gregor thought he was having a little more success than he had been this morning in the quad. He had taken the hood off his head and tucked it into his belt. The faint, sparse streaks of red in his thick black hair were glowing copper in the light from the globe lamps. Behind him, boys were doing headstands and rebel yells and grabbing at girls and being slapped away. They might as well have been another species.

Gregor stood up—it was hard not to feel awkward, old, and fat in the face of Jack Carroll’s effortless physical ease and unforgiving muscle tone—and said, “There you are. I hope this won’t be an inconvenience.”