The Headmaster's Wife(29)

Right at this split second, he was still standing at the window of his living room in his third-floor apartment on Cavanaugh Street, the new Cavanaugh Street, where the buildings were town houses or condominiums and the women wore fur coats without fear of being set on by animal rights activists. Where death is only a rumor, he thought, but that wasn’t exactly right. People died here. They just didn’t die the way Stefan had, or the way so many of the people had in the cases he had worked on over these last thirty years. Sometimes, when he had a hard time getting to sleep, he could see their faces in the only way he had ever known most of them, dead faces, laid out on gravel drives or carpeted bedroom floors, eyes glazed, mouths slack, flesh gray. He couldn’t put names to most of them. You forgot the names after a while unless something truly awful had happened to make you remember. He remembered the names of most of the child victims. He lost the ones of the women raped and murdered by the men who thought killing was a natural part of sex. God, how many of those there had been. That was life in the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, and now they didn’t even use the unit anymore, or they’d reorganized it or something. He had never been a profiler. First he had been an investigator. Then he had been an administrator. If there was some explanation for why people did what they did, some reason that fit the greater purposes of the cosmos, why some men could only reach orgasm if the woman they were with was soon to be a corpse, Gregor didn’t know what it was. He’d never understood murder on any level. Even the obvious murders—that woman of John Jackman’s, who was killing her husbands for their insurance, racking up the cash, playing at killing the way high-stakes gamblers played at casinos—seemed to him overdone, overfelt, overemoted. Maybe the truth of it was that murders were committed by people who took themselves too seriously, by people who could not see into the future and understand that life would end for everybody, even for them, and that the things in it were not as important as that fact.

It’s me who’s taking myself too seriously, he thought now,although he really didn’t entirely mean it. It was hard to look at yourself and know when you were being overwrought, especially when you were upset. Still, he was tired of standing the way he was standing. His back ached. The street below him was almost clear of people now. The sun was too high in the sky, although he could tell from what few people there were, and what people there had been, that, sun or no sun, it was very cold out there. He looked around and found his wallet and his cell phone on top of the television. He put them both in his pocket, although he often didn’t carry the cell phone. That felt overwrought and ridiculous. There might be a point to it if you had children and worried about emergencies. There might be a point to it if you were the president of the United States and the fate of the world hung on your decisions—now there was a thought, the fate of the world hanging on the decisions of George W. Bush—or if you were the vice president and needed to know if the president had been assassinated. There was another thought. It didn’t matter. He just thought it was silly, carrying a cell phone the way most people did, as if taking a call from their wives about what they wanted to have for dinner tonight was so important it couldn’t wait until they were safely in an office or a phone booth and able to sit down when they talked.

He checked his other pocket for keys. He could always get into his place by asking old George Tekemanian, because old George had copies of all the keys, but old George wasn’t always at home these days. Gregor got his long, black coat off the coat stand in the foyer and put it all the way on. He didn’t bother looking for a hat. He didn’t care how cold it was. He thought men looked ridiculous in hats. He’d thought that decades ago when all men were assumed to be required to wear those felt fedoras that served no other purpose than to make them look like Christmas trees topped by the angel of death.

He went down to the first floor and tapped on the door of old George’s apartment just in case. There was no answer, meaning that old George had either gone down to the Ararat to schmooze or off with his grandson Martin and Martin’swife, Angela, probably to buy a machine that cut cube steaks into paper dolls you could dress up in parsley nurse’s uniforms. He went out onto the street and looked around. There was nothing much to look at. The street was as it had been since he had moved back to it soon after his wife, Elizabeth, had died and he had retired from the FBI and the only life he had ever felt completely comfortable in. By then he wasn’t comfortable with that life either. He had no idea if he was comfortable with this one.