Quoth the Raven(91)

He put his hand on the priest’s shoulder and said, “Tibor? Are you all right?”

“I am fine, Krekor,” Tibor said. “I am thinking. You are very sure you have this set up exactly right?”

“I think so, Tibor, yes. I have it set up the only way I think it will work.”

“It seems like a very large chance, Krekor. You are counting on—”

“On guilt,” Gregor said simply.

“Yes. On guilt. But Krekor, I am not sure, in this case, if guilt applies. What you have shown me is something that takes much work, much concentration, much coldness to effect. It is not like hacking away at someone with an ax in a fit of rage. It is not—normal.”

“No, of course it is not normal.”

“Do you read G. K. Chesterton? He said once somewhere that in order for a man to break the fifth commandment he must first break the first. That the murderer’s problem is not with ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but with ‘I am the Lord Thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me.’ ”

“I’ll have to read Chesterton.”

“It seems like a paltry reason, Krekor. A little thing. For all this blood and pain and trouble.”

“I know.”

He did, too. For the past hour, he and Tibor had been walking, from one end of campus to the other, from one place that needed to be checked out to the other, nailing it down, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything or assumed something he shouldn’t have assumed. Markham’s men were out doing the important work, gathering the information and making the discoveries that would later have to be presented in court. That was necessary. The rules of evidence were so convoluted by now it didn’t do to tamper with them. What Gregor had wanted, and what he and Tibor had set off to get, was confirmation of the fine points. They had gotten them, but at a price. Gregor’s feet hurt. He was sure Tibor’s feet hurt, too. They would have taken Donna Moradanyan’s van, but neither of them was really able to drive. Tibor didn’t have a license. Gregor had one, but he was, as Donna and Bennis and everyone else who knew him always put it, “a positive menace on the road.”

They had reached the steps of Constitution House and Gregor stopped, letting a Siamese-twinned version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee pass between them before he spoke.

“The mistake you’re making,” he told Tibor, “is the same one I made up until a couple of hours ago. People invest their lives in all sorts of things that may seem silly to you or me, but mostly what they invest them in is their own image of themselves. We construct identities like houses and then we live in them. If someone comes along and threatens to burn the house down, we react.”

“We do not all react with lye, Krekor.”

“I’m not saying we do. Most of us never face the crisis in the first place. Identities are private, and the population at large usually tries to be polite. Sometimes there’s a situation where the crisis can’t be avoided, but then I think most people would do what most people have done in situations like that. Simply self-destruct.”

“Suicide?”

“Sometimes. Also nervous breakdown, psychotic break, chronic clinical depression. In this case what we had was a kind of double whammy. What Donegal Steele was doing not only threatened to burn our murderer’s house down, it threatened to destroy our murderer’s vision of the world as well. Think about Cavanaugh Street.”

“I have been thinking about it all this afternoon, Krekor. I would very much like to get back.”

“So would I. But before Bennis and I left there yesterday, Lida and Hannah and all their kind were doing a very stupid thing. They were leaving their doors unlocked. We haven’t had a frantic phone call, so I suppose it’s been all right, at least so far—but it might not be. You know what the world is like. You know what kind of a chance that is to take. They won’t even consider it. They have invested an enormous amount of emotional energy in their belief that Cavanaugh Street is different from the rest of the world. That is—no, that they have found a vaccination to make their small corner of the world immune from all the diseases of humanity.”

“And that is what our murderer is doing?”

“Oh, everybody does it,” Gregor said. “I remember a case once that came up when I was on jury duty in Washington, DC. I never had to serve on a jury. I just had to show up one day and explain I was with the FBI. While I was waiting around in the hall with everyone else that day, I heard a number of men talking about a case that had come up for trial. A young man had stabbed another young man twenty-five times with a penknife, because, according to the defendant, the victim had made a pass at him. The defendant was just in from some small town in Idaho. I remember wondering at the time why the prosecuting attorney had bothered to bring the damn thing to court. Things like that happen every day and they’re perfectly understandable. I’m sure that defendant was telling the strict truth. He belonged in a mental institution, but he wasn’t lying. But the point I’m trying to make, Tibor, is that the men who had been called and rejected for that jury were all vociferous in their insistence that the defendant was lying, that he had to be lying. A little while after that I ran into the first man I had ever met who refused to believe that rape—the rape of women I’m talking about now—actually existed. It hit me then that he and the men who had been rejected from that jury were doing the same thing. They were all reconstructing the universe in the only way they could to make it comfortable for themselves. They were eliminating that part of reality that would have made it difficult or impossible for them to be the kind of people they had to believe they were.”