He let himself into the foyer and saw that the door to old George Tekemanian’s apartment was closed and locked. He supposed George was out somewhere with Tibor or Lida and Hannah or somebody. If there had been something wrong, if old George had gone to the hospital or had an accident or any of that kind of thing, Donna would have known and told him.
Gregor started climbing the stairs. There were a lot of them. If he had owned this entire building, instead of one of the apartments in it—two, if you counted the one Bennis owned, since they were married now—he would have put in one of those little elevators.
He got to the second-floor landing feeling winded. He got to the third-floor landing feeling dead. He now had old George on his mind as well as everything else.
“You look like hell,” Bennis said. She was standing in the doorway of their apartment, holding the door open. “Have you had any sleep at all? Are you crazy?”
Gregor went through the door and into his own foyer. He took off his suit jacket and dropped it on the floor. He never dropped clothes on the floor. He heard Bennis come in behind him and pick it up. He kept on walking into the living room, made his way to the couch, and sat down. Or lay down. It was hard to tell which. He had half sprawled across it. He didn’t think he could move again.
Gregor heard Bennis close the door, and then her footsteps as she came into the room. She was standing right behind him. He could feel it.
“Do you want me to make you some coffee?” she asked him.
“No,” Gregor said. “Definitely no coffee. I’ve had enough coffee.”
“I could make you milk and honey,” Bennis said. “I’d like to say that was what my mother made me when I couldn’t get to sleep, but you knew my mother. It wasn’t the kind of thing she did. On the other hand, it is the kind of thing Lida does, and she told me all about it.”
“I just need to relax for a minute,” Gregor said.
Bennis came around the couch and sat down on one of the chairs. She was a beautiful woman. She had been a beautiful woman when he first met her, and she would be a beautiful woman if she lived to be a hundred and six. That was because there was no part of her beauty that was dependent on age. She was not beautiful the way that, say, somebody like Christie Brinkley was beautiful, with that perky blond evenness that indicated an age of twenty-five, and looked strange ever afterward. Bennis’s face was angular and strange. It looked like nothing else on earth. It also worked.
She leaned closer to him and said, “Is there something wrong? Is there something I should know about? I think I always worried that if we ever actually got around to doing it for real—”
“We got around to that part years ago,” Gregor said.
“I meant getting married.” Bennis made a raspberry. “I was always worried that it would freak you out. That we were all right being not-married married, but we wouldn’t be all right being actually married.”
“Not-married married,” Gregor said. His eyes were half closed now. “That’s a good way to put it.”
“So I thought I’d ask,” Bennis said, “whether the way you’re behaving has something to do with me. Because you’re behaving like a lunatic.”
Sleep was a foreign country, but Gregor was right there, at the border. He could see the little guard station and the little guard. He could see the gumdrop houses and cotton-candy mountains. This was the silliest line of thought he could remember himself having in all his life.
He forced his eyes open. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s time.”
“What?”
“I’m in the middle of two things, and they’re both sensitive to time,” Gregor said. “There’s only a short amount of time, and if we don’t get them right then something bad is going to happen. Well, it is definitely in the one case, and it could be in the other.”
“Which case?” Bennis asked.
Gregor made himself sit up just a little. “Sophie Mgrdchian,” he said. “She’s still lying in a hospital bed, but they’ve been through just about everything they can think of, and it’s been, what, two days? And they don’t have any reason why she should be in practically a coma. So they can’t hold this woman—”
“Karen Mgrdchian,” Bennis said. “That’s Sophie’s sister-in-law, isn’t it? Didn’t you tell me that?”
“She says she’s Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said, “but I’m pretty sure she isn’t. In fact, I know she isn’t. But I can’t prove she isn’t, and nobody can prove that anybody did anything to Sophie Mgrdchian to put her in the state she’s in, so there we are. The court handed this woman over for a psychiatric examination, but that’s limited to four days. By the end of the week, they’re going to have to let her out of there, and if they do, I’d be willing to bet she’d find a way to kill Sophie Mgrdchian in no time flat. Either that, or Sophie will die of whatever this is before she ever leaves the hospital.”