Of course, most people, making the analogy, would have said that the murderer was a cancer, but Gregor couldn’t see it. Most murderers were either so hapless and so stupid it was embarrassing to listen to them, or so mentally ill they didn’t know what was going on in front of their noses. The idea of Jeffrey Dahmer in jail made Gregor’s head ache. The man had talked to furniture. Ted Kaczynski had talked to trees. Literally. Had the country gone completely insane?
Maybe what it really was was the death of hope. There had been a time when most Americans truly believed that the criminal could be rehabilitated. They wanted punishment. They wanted revenge. They also expected regeneration. Now they only wanted closure. The murderer had ceased to be a human being in any substantive way. He was simply evil, through and through, without so much as a pocket of untainted air, like a solid chocolate Easter bunny. Was he really comparing murderers to chocolate Easter bunnies? It was cold out here. The wind was stiff and constant. He should have taken a cab. Instead, he had decided to walk, to give himself time to think, and now he was thinking things like this.
The problem, really, was that Bennis’s sister Anne Marie was one of the rare exceptions. She was not an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic hearing voices and cutting throats in the back alleys of a small American city. She was not a terminally stupid drifter with even less education than brains and no discernible self-control. She was a deliberate killer, the kind who thought and planned, the kind who knew what she was doing and thought she had been right in doing it. It had been eight years since Gregor laid eyes on her, but he was sure she hadn’t changed her mind about that. He could still see her sitting at the defense table during the first appeal, her hands folded in front of her, her face set in stone and as much like a gargoyle’s as anything on the facade of the Rheims cathedral. She believed she had been right to do what she did. She believed she had only been caught because of accidents and coincidences. She believed, most of all, in herself, and she would go on believing in herself, right down to the moment when she was strapped onto the gurney with an IV feed in her arm. If Gregor had believed that personality was genetic, he would have been afraid for himself, and for Bennis—but then, maybe Bennis had received a different set of genes, from her mother instead of from her father, and that was all that was needed to take care of that difficulty.
It was worse than cold out here. It was freezing. There were thin, slick films of ice on the rounded edges of the sidewalks. Gregor checked his watch and saw that it was almost eleven. He was sure that had to be enough time for Henry to have done what he’d asked him to do. If it wasn’t, maybe he could wait in Henry’s living room while the details were ironed out. He was only a couple of blocks away. He had been circling this neighborhood for half an hour, trying to give Henry enough time. Under the circumstances, he didn’t want to seem as if he were pushing. Still. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, then took them out again to raise the collar of his coat higher on his neck. He was always telling Tibor and old George Tekemanian to wear their hats, and he had no idea what had happened to his. He turned right at the next corner and then right again. He started left along Baldwin Place with his hands back in his pockets. All the houses on this street were made of dead brown stone and jammed right up next to each other. They looked like hundreds of other houses across the city of Philadelphia, and they were probably equally expensive. After decades of losing out to the expensive suburbs of the Philadelphia Main Line, the city was becoming fashionable again—at least with singles and couples without children. The living-room windows had heavy curtains hanging at the sides of them. All the curtains were drawn back, their owners preferring to sacrifice privacy for a chance at sunlight. Gregor suddenly realized why it was the neighborhood depressed him. Nobody had decorated anything here. The houses were blank and unadorned, almost regimented, so that they looked as if they had put on uniforms. He made a mental note not to complain so much about the way Donna Moradanyan Donahue decked out the fronts of the houses on Cavanaugh Street. At least it gave the street a bit of color.
He got to Henry Lord’s house and looked up at the black front door. The door was shiny as well as black, meaning it must have been painted recently. Gregor had no idea why this should matter. He seemed to be nervous about seeing Henry, although he had known the man for so long now that he might have known him forever. Thirty years, Gregor thought, as he pressed the doorbell and got a detailed mental picture of Henry at the University of Pennsylvania in his sophomore year. Gregor had been a senior. They hadn’t liked each other much.