Skeleton Key(33)

Did I really think that was a suffocating life? Gregor asked himself, as he tried to get comfortable on the hard plastic seats. It seemed he had. It was to escape the suffocation that he left Philadelphia the first time, for the army—and then, when the army was over and he had come home, left it a second time for the Harvard Business School. Those were the days when all special agents of the FBI were required to have a degree in accounting and a degree in law, and he had been sure he would never be able to stomach the full course in a law school.

It was a suffocating life, but it had edges. Maybe that was the thing. The lives some people led these days seemed to have no edges at all, so that drifting into a heroin stupor looked no different to them than going to night school for their GED, or even making love. Equal opportunity indirection, Gregor thought, and then he thought that it made no sense. He had no idea what he was trying to get at.

Outside on the platform, a man who was probably homeless was bending over to pick three quarters up off the dirty floor. There were always coins on the platforms, because people lost them while they tried to get things out of their pockets and walk at the same time. The man was wearing clothes so ragged that the bottom of his pants looked like a fringe. His hair was matted to his skull.

Gregor twisted on the seat again, and prepared to sit up awake and miserable all the way to Bridgeport.





3


The first time Gregor Demarkian fell asleep, they were just outside Stamford. He would have gone right on past Bridgeport, and maybe all the way to New Haven, except that the young woman in the seat next to him woke him up.

“Didn’t you say you were getting off here?” she asked him. “This is Bridgeport. Didn’t you say you had to make a connection?”

She was really very, very young. Gregor thought she was a student She was reading Peter Kreeft’s gloss on St. Thomas Aquinas, A Summa of the Summa. Maybe she was just religious, or the kind of person who enjoyed philosophy as a hobby. She had very wide eyes and pretty glasses. Gregor said that he did, indeed, need to get off at Bridgeport, and thanked her for waking him up.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I fall asleep on this train all the time. But New Haven is the last stop, you see, so I don’t have to worry.”

The train station in Bridgeport was very clean and very small. Considering the kinds of things Gregor had heard about Bridgeport—that it was drug and gang central, that it was decaying into an unbroken slum, that it was so violent even its own police refused to live there—he was very favorably impressed. He got himself a copy of The New York Times from one of those vending machines and a cup of coffee from the little diner in a corner and checked the time for the train to Waterbury. He had just about fifteen minutes. He sat down in a molded plastic chair and wished that his coffee was stronger. There wouldn’t be anything about the death of Kayla Anson in the Times, of course. The body had probably been discovered after the paper had been printed. There would be something in the paper tomorrow, however, and probably in every other paper in the country. Gregor wondered if Bennis had considered the implications of that.

Gregor still had half a cup of coffee when his train was called. He went back out onto the platform to find that it was the wrong platform. He had to take the long tunnel to the other side of the tracks.

There were two other men and a woman heading for the same train. They all went racing through together, although they were all middle-aged. Going up those two flights of stairs at the end wasn’t easy for any of them. When they came out on the platform they found not a train, but a single train car, oddly built, so that it could go in either direction. Gregor went inside and found a seat next to a window in the back of the car, near one of the exit doors.

“They used to have runs up to Waterbury four or five times a day,” the woman who had come over with the rest of them said to him. “But I suppose this is better than nothing. Do you know that Governor Rowland wanted to eliminated this service entirely?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Then there wouldn’t be any public transportation out of the Northwest Hills at all. It’s the way they think of us out in Hartford, and down on the Gold Coast. As if we were all a lot of movie stars with our own limousines. Susan St. James. Meryl Streep. As if nobody else lived up in the Hills at all. Although you’d think Governor Rowland would know better.”

“Excuse me?”

“Governor Rowland is from Middlebury. That’s right on the border of Litchfield County. You’d think he’d know better.”

“Oh,” Gregor said.

The woman was that sort of not-quite-thin, not-quite-fat that women in their late forties and fifties often got if they had had a couple of children and no dedication to serious exercise. She was standing in the aisle near Gregor’s seat, as if she were waiting for the train to start before she let herself sit down. Gregor sipped his coffee and stared at her politely. He wanted to read his paper and think about Bennis, in jeans or otherwise.