Quoth the Raven(93)

“Bastard,” Lenore said throatily. “Bastard, bastard, bastard. You’re a bastard.”

Bennis put the pen she was holding down on page eight. “It’s too bad you can’t take a bird into court. Lenore and I have been having a very interesting conversation.”

“Leonard,” Gregor corrected automatically. “Have you seen Markham? We thought he’d be done by now.”

“He’s in the bedroom making phone calls. I’d be done by now if it wasn’t for that damned blackout. I spent ten minutes getting the windows covered up. Oh, by the way. The Merry Pranksters called.”

“The Merry Pranksters,” Gregor said acidly, “were a drug-soaked band of overgrown adolescents who thought Ken Kesey was God.”

Bennis was unperturbed. “Call them what you want. They checked in. Your contact person was someone named Freddie Murchison. That mean anything to you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. To me he sounded like a complete flake. At any rate, everything is copacetic. The doors to the hall have been taken care of,” Bennis was counting out the points on her thumb, “everybody you want to see will be there, the solderer will be on the shelf under the top of the lecturn and you’ll have somebody standing by to help you operate it—”

“I can operate a solderer, Bennis.”

“You’ll burn yourself to a crisp,” Bennis said, “you can’t operate your own toaster. Hi, Father Tibor. How are you?”

“I am fine, Bennis. How are you? You are not done.”

Bennis blew a raspberry. “I don’t think it really matters,” she said. “He’s just going to get up there and say whatever comes into his head anyway. Nobody’s going to be able to tell he doesn’t know a comma from a banana split.”

She bent back over her work, scooting sideways just a little on the floor to give Tibor room to sit beside and behind her on the love seat. Tibor had bent over the speech—which, of course, wasn’t a speech at all, but the notes Gregor had made while outlining the situation for Markham in detail this afternoon after he’d realized the importance of the solder. The speech he had intended to give when he first came up here was lying untouched and unread at the bottom of his suitcase. Collation techniques. Requirements for the collection of evidence at the scene of a crime. Guidelines for the federal coordination of state and local police forces. Gregor was sure that all that was much more scholarly, much more in tune with the “spirit of intellectual inquiry” the college brochures were always talking about, than what he was actually going to do. He was also sure that it would have been a good deal less fun.

For the spectators.

Gregor gave Bennis and Tibor a last look—sometimes he thought that what the people on Cavanaugh Street provided him with was an Armenian-American version of a Norman Rockwell world; and that included Bennis, even if she wasn’t Armenian-American and even if he knew perfectly well that her life up until the time she had first come to the neighborhood was nothing Rockwell would have recognized—and then went down the short hall to Tibor’s bedroom. Markham was indeed in there, sitting on the edge of the neatly made bed, the phone plastered to his right ear and a look of mutiny on his face. When he saw Gregor come in, he pumped his eyebrows frantically and motioned with his left hand to the chair.

“I don’t care about your procedure,” he said into the phone. “I don’t care about the goddamned official lines of goddamned authority in the goddamned state of Pennsylvania, either. All I care about is that you get me five men in storm troopers’ outfits and Smokey the Bear hats and you get them for me in the next half hour….How the Hell am I supposed to know what’s going to happen? Do I sound like the Oracle at Delphi to you?…No, no, no. Just get them here. And get me a tech van. And make sure the paramedics have something to counteract lye just in case….No, I do not have a homicidal maniac…. No—oh, to Hell with it. Just get here and get here on time.”

Markham wrenched the phone away from his ear, held it in the air over the cradle, and slammed it home. Gregor thought the crash must have been loud enough to have been heard all the way to King’s Scaffold.

“Staties,” Markham said in mock solemnity. “I hate Staties. Have I ever told you I hate Staties?”

“All municipal police officers hate Staties,” Gregor said. “With reason, in my experience.”

“Yeah, well, in my experience, the goddamned local commander of our goddamned local troop is a neofascist with all the guts of a Puritan spinster. That’s sexist. You can tell anybody you want I said. On this campus, they’re disappointed when I’m not sexist. Do you want this information we’ve dug up?”