Le Cirque Blanc was the closest thing Philadelphia had to a “celebrity” restaurant, and Gregor had not been surprised when Jimmy Card had asked to meet him there. It was not Philadelphia’s best restaurant, or the one most famous for its food, but like certain places in New York it had a couple of curtained-off back rooms that could be reached by a side entrance and a staff that understood what privacy did—and did not—mean. In New York, such a place would be full of people like Madonna and Harrison Ford, people so famous that they really had had enough of having their privacy invaded every time they went out for a drink or a little light dinner. In Philadelphia, Gregor got the impression that the place was full of members of the city government who didn’t want their dinner meetings to show up on the six o’clock news and Main Line society women who wanted to have flings that wouldn’t do them credit with their friends. Most of the time, both these groups of people tried to be as public as possible, on the theory that well-known people were more important than the less well-known kind. Some of the Main Line society women must have known this wasn’t true, since they were probably married to men so important that their entire lives revolved around staying strictly out of sight.
Le Cirque Blanc had an awning that reminded Gregor of the ones on Manhattan apartment buildings, and a doorman who reminded him of Manhattan apartment buildings, too. The doorman wore a uniform and a cap, like a chauffeur. What really bothered Gregor about “celebrities” was that they reminded him, so much, of the serial killers he had spent the last half of his career chasing. The Ted Bundys, the Jeffrey Dahmers, the John Wayne Gacys, all had that hard streak of vanity and that desperation, as if in some way they weren’t really alive unless other people said they were. When the Bureau had first been putting together the composite psychological profile that later became the basis for the entire Behavioral Sciences Unit, Gregor had wanted to put that in, but none of them could think of a way to phrase it so that somebody who had never encountered it could understand it. Gregor had always thought that the most obvious case of it had been—still was—Charles Manson, a man who lived entirely by the effect he had on other people, so much so that he hadn’t even had to do his own serial killing. It was an open question as to whether or not that quirk of personality, and the charisma that went with it, had survived all the years in prison. Gregor made it a point to watch Manson’s parole hearings when they were shown on Court TV, but it was hard to tell. He was cleaned up now, and subdued, but that could be for the benefit of the parole board, which wasn’t going to release him in any case. It was too bad that monsters didn’t stay monsters in real life, that growing old meant growing weak for even the most dedicated of them. For some reason, watching a Charles Manson turn into an old man made Gregor far more aware of his own mortality than the death of someone like Princess Diana did. Maybe that was because he had never been able to think of Princess Diana as really being real.
“Mr. Demarkian,” the man on the front desk said. He was dressed in a white tie and tails, in spite of the fact that it was barely noon. The restaurant lobby and the restaurant behind him were both dark, as if nobody could eat unless it was the middle of the night. The man himself was just slightly overweight, in that smug, self-satisfied way that some people equated with high social status, even though these days, everybody who really did have high social status was bone thin. Gregor decided he must have been hired for effect, like a stock actor hired to play a stock character, the point being that nothing mattered except keeping the ambiance unbroken, whatever the ambiance was supposed to be.
“If you follow me, I’ll take you back myself,” the man said.
Gregor nodded toward him, half afraid to speak. That would break the ambiance soon enough. Part of him wanted to jump up and down or shout or do something equally ridiculous, because this place was so false, so uncomfortable, so strained, that even the air felt oddly synthetic. He looked from left to right as they walked through the large main dining room, empty except for two elderly women in a booth along the west wall, drinking cocktails with paper umbrellas in them. You could buy those little paper umbrellas in party stores for $6.95 a hundred.
At the back of the main dining room, the man in the tails paused and felt along the wall. The door that opened there had been papered to look as if it wasn’t a door at all, and it didn’t, unless you knew what to look for. Then the outline was painfully obvious and—like so much about this place—completely unnecessary.