“We’ll have her hospitalized,” Jimmy said. “That will get her out of the glare for as long as we have to live with it. The trick is to figure out how to get her and us out of here with a minimum of trouble. You drive a car, don’t you, Mr. Demarkian?”
Gregor hesitated. “Well,” he said, “I have a driver’s license.”
“You don’t drive a car?” Liz Toliver looked appalled.
“I can drive a car,” Mark said. “Just let me go and—”
“That’s just what we need,” Liz said. “Pictures in every paper in the country of Liz Toliver giving her fourteen-year-old son the keys to her car.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve driven,” Gregor said finally, “but I can surely drive a car far enough to get to a phone. There must be someplace reasonably near here—”
“Go out of the driveway and turn right,” Liz said. “It’s about half a mile. Some kind of gas station or body shop—”
“They’ll follow him,” Mark said.
“I wish they would,” Jimmy Card said. “I wish they all would. That would be the best possible solution. Unfortunately, they won’t follow him. Once they realize who he is, they won’t bother him at all.”
“Give me a couple of minutes,” Gregor said. “I need to throw myself in for a quick shower and get on some clean clothes.”
He turned around and went back the way he had come. Now that he knew what to pay attention to, he could hear clear evidence that they were being besieged. The low hissing noise he had noticed and dismissed as wind when he was still lying in bed was talking, frantic overwrought talking, dozens of people who hadn’t slept much recently all going on to each other in high gear. Gregor locked himself in the bathroom and dropped the rest of his dirty clothes on the floor as he took them off. The window here had already been nailed shut, and it wasn’t much of a window, just a small square high up in the wall. He turned on the water as hard and as hot as he could stand it and stepped under it. He applied soap and shampoo to himself the way bricklayers apply mortar to a wall. He was in and out before he felt as if he had been in at all. He wrapped the robe around himself and went down to his room. He flipped through the things in his suitcase until he found clean socks and underwear. Clothes fell on the floor. If Bennis had been here, she would have picked them up. He wasn’t going to take the time.
When he was mostly dressed—complete with tie, although not with suit jacket—he went to the window Mark had just nailed shut and looked through it, standing sideways against the wall again, so that nobody would realize he was there. From this angle, the problem was not so awful. What looked, from the living-room window, like an endless stretch of cars and people, actually ended only about fifteen feet up the road in one direction and maybe six feet up the road in the other. It was the sea of faces looking straight at you that caused the illusion. You looked at them instead of at the landscape. Gregor got on his shoes and took a fresh jacket from his suit bag. Then he went back out into the little hall and down it to the living room.
“Well?” Jimmy Card said.
“I’m ready,” Gregor told him.
“I’ve got everything written down,” Liz Toliver said, handing him a three-by-five card with the neatest, smallest printing on it that he had ever seen. “The most important thing right now is to get in touch with my mother’s doctors. We need an ambulance and maybe a hospital. Tell them what happened and what’s going on here. They’ll know what to do.”
“You really think an ambulance is the way to go?” Gregor asked. “That’s likely to increase the fuss rather than calm it—”
“An ambulance can be backed up almost to the door,” Jimmy Card said. “It’s the only way we’re going to get Liz’s mother or the nurse out of here without getting them mauled. If we can get the ambulance and my driver here at the same time, we might be able to create a diversion that will allow us to leave without—”
“I don’t think so,” Liz Toliver said. “Neither do you, really. We’ve got dark glasses. If we can get your driver here and a few police officers—did I tell you you should call the police, Mr. Demarkian?”
“I was intending to call the police,” Gregor said.
“Yes, of course you were, good,” Liz Toliver said. “I’m sorry. I don’t handle this kind of thing well yet. I’m not this kind of famous. Here, take my keys. You can take the Mercedes—”
“Do you really think it makes sense to trust me with a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar car?” Gregor asked gently. “I’m sure I can make it far enough up the road to get to a pay phone, but I haven’t been behind a wheel in eight years.”