“People tell you everything.”
“I doubt it.”
“Peter was saying this morning that we should never have admitted Michael to Windsor. We knew what his problem was with drugs. He had an arrest record. But it isn’t Michael we shouldn’t have admitted; it’s Mark DeAvecca. He’s going to ruin everything.”
“I doubt that, too.”
Alice stood up, and Philip thought she was going to come over to him. She’d done that once, when he was first at Windsor, after one of those long-winded faculty partieswhere too many people had drunk too much cheap sherry and at least two of the men had had to be talked out of lecturing the assembled company on The Mission of Education in the Twenty-first Century. He had thought at the time that her move was calculated as well as practiced. She had done it before with other new male faculty members, maybe even with female ones; and she was doing it again, not out of desire or necessity, but almost as a kind of insurance. She had snaked one arm around his neck and the other between his legs. He could feel her long, strong fingers outlining the mound of his stiffening penis and probing carefully for his balls. He stared into her face with bemusement, not sure how she expected him to react. She had tried kissing him. He had allowed her tongue into his mouth without much interest. He had not closed his eyes. He didn’t know her, and he could see for himself that she was truly beautiful, but she left him absolutely cold.
Maybe she remembered that. She stepped a little away from him and reached for her cape. Philip always found that cape more than a little ridiculous.
“You know,” he said, “you ought to take me seriously. You can’t go on doing what you’re doing much longer. It doesn’t even work all that well anymore. It never worked on me. My guess is that it doesn’t work on Mark DeAvecca either. Which raises him in my estimation more than you know.”
“Nothing could raise him in my estimation,” Alice said. “He’s a disaster. And he’s going to blow this whole place up, not just me. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
“No,” Philip said, surprised to realize that it was true.
“I’ll leave you to it then,” Alice said. The cape floated in the air and settled around her shoulders. She could still do that trick. It was fun to watch. She looked down at the gun, still on the table. “Be careful nobody ends up shot. You’ll be a ready-made suspect with that thing hanging around.”
Then she turned on her heel and stalked out, the picture of a stage heroine in high dudgeon, the star of one more performance. Philip watched her go first out his door, then, afew moments later, out of Martinson and into the quad. She had the hood of the cape down around her shoulders in spite of the cold. Her red hair shone and shimmered and danced. Philip thought of all the American revolutionaries, the rich and poor ones who’d joined liberation armies; the lower-middle-class ones who’d joined militias; the real ones who “went sovereign,” as the saying goes, and cut themselves off from everybody and everything, cut themselves off even from electricity and running water; the true lunatics in their mountain cabins with their arsenals and their Bibles and their ears tuned to the sound of creeping footsteps in the brush around the edges of their yards. It was the arsenals that were the weak links in those chains, and Philip knew it. It was the arsenals that were the weak links in all the chains because in the end there was no way to consider yourself a revolutionary and not be willing to kill somebody. He wondered who Alice Makepeace was willing to kill, and how she’d go about doing it.
Then he got up and went to the chest of drawers in his bedroom. He pulled it out a little ways from the wall and found what had also been taped there, along with the gun and its ammunition. He pulled out the shoulder holster and fixed it on his left shoulder. He had to adjust it twice. It had been years since he’d worn it, and he was definitely growing both older and wider. He thought about putting the gun in the small of his back and rejected the idea. He’d seen too damn many idiots shoot themselves in their butts.
Alice Makepeace had disappeared from the quad. Philip had no idea where she’d gone. He got the gun settled in the holster and then went looking for a jacket to cover it. It was just a precaution, but it was a precaution he’d decided to take when he first came out East from Idaho, and he still thought it was a very good idea.
Chapter Five
1
Gregor Demarkian didn’t think he had ever been this calculating about any other case in his career. Even at the FBI, where, especially in his early days, when Hoover was still holding down the fort in the main office, Machiavellian intrigue was accepted as a matter of course, he had insisted on sticking to the straightforward and outfront. There was something fundamental to his nature that recoiled from the backroom underhandedness that characterized the informal power structure of most organizations. Sometimes he tried to convince himself that this fastidiousness was a virtue. Maybe he was more honest and less manipulative than other people. Most of the time he recognized it as a weakness. There was no virtue in being unable to accept the reality of human nature or being unable to deal with it either. He had been very lucky to be able to advance without pulling the kinds of strings most people would have had to to get anywhere above the level of field agent. It had been a stroke of luck, completely outside his control, that he had both landed and then solved one of the first of the notorious serial killer cases, and a further stroke of luck that he had been the object of a great deal of publicity because of it. He didn’t want to say that it was also a stroke of luck that Hoover had died only a few years before, but it was, and in ways that hadnothing to do with the course of his own career. Gregor Demarkian had not been one of Hoover’s loyal acolytes, and he was not the kind of man to idolize the director just because he’d lasted so long in office that he’d become a “legend.” The legend covered a lot of unpleasant business, and not just the obvious things like blackmailing Congress, persecuting anybody whose politics he didn’t like, and wearing women’s underwear. Gregor had spent his first decade in the Bureau knowing that Hoover did not consider him a “real” American, and that he wasn’t the only one Hoover had marked out for “foreignness” in a crew of men and women almost every one of whom had been born in the United States. Some people wanted to go back to the fifties. Gregor Demarkian wasn’t interested in any period of American history before May 2, 1972, when Hoover had died.