Wanting Sheila Dead(15)

There was light streaming in the window now, good light for six o’clock in the morning. That was how he knew spring was coming. He looked down the long line of his body. He was lying flat on his back in bed, which was how he slept. It annoyed the hell out of his new wife that he slept that way, instead of tossing and turning the way she did.

“It isn’t natural,” she’d told him, on several occasions. “It’s not like you’re sleeping at all. It’s like you turn into a statue when you close your eyes, and then Pygmalion’s kiss has to wake you up.”

“The kiss is the princess and the frog,” he’d reminded her. “I don’t think Pygmalion kissed anybody.”

“Galatea. And you don’t know. I can tell.”

Bennis was not laying next to him in bed now. She was in the shower. Gregor could hear the water running. He looked back down that long line of his body and reached for the book he’d left lying in bed when he fell asleep last night. He usually had the sense to put a bookmark in it and put it on the nightstand. He picked it up. It was At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie. He’d been given it by his closest friend in Philadelphia—by his closest friend in the world, maybe—and he was shocked to find that he enjoyed it very much. It was not realistic, but it was not trying to be. The police were not played for fools. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all.

“It’s a metaphor,” he said.

“What?” Bennis had just come out of the shower. She was wearing his bathrobe. She was always wearing his bathrobe rather than her own. If he let her have it and got himself a new one, she would abandon the old one and go for the new one. Gregor had no idea why this should be. He did know that her skin held a tan very well. She was still almost as brown as she had been in Jamaica. That was where they had just been on their honeymoon.

“It’s a metaphor,” Gregor said. He did not say that he found her remarkably and oddly beautiful, because he’s said that before. Marriage was supposed to change the conversation at least a little bit. “The Agatha Christie book Tibor gave me. It’s a metaphor.”

“A metaphor for what?”

“You were the English major,” Gregor said. “A metaphor for the reality of crime and evil. No, that isn’t it. A metaphor for the good of social order.”

“The good of social order? Are you sure Tibor hasn’t been lending you the nonfiction?”

“Social order is a good,” Gregor said. “It’s what makes everything else possible. If you’re running around all day worrying about getting murdered, or if you can’t open your store in the morning without worrying about getting robbed, then you don’t get very much done. You expend all your energy on self-protection. If you want art and music and railroads, even, then you have to have social order. And it can’t just come from the police.”

Bennis had let the robe slip to the floor, which was . . . interesting. She had her back to him, but still. He hadn’t moved off his back. Now he did, rolling over to his side as she started to get dressed. He wanted a better look. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe marriage didn’t change the conversation, not the little unspoken one that ran through people’s heads.

“Real murders,” he said finally, “aren’t like the murders in this book—except, actually, sometimes they are. I’ll get to that later.”

“You’ve been thinking of this in your sleep?” Bennis asked.

“Partially,” Gregor admitted. “I think of lots of things in my sleep. I sometimes have really rude dreams about you in my sleep.”

“You weren’t sleeping.”

“Murders,” Gregor said. “Your ordinary run of murder in the real world is not like the murder in this book. Your ordinary run of murder in the real world is monumentally stupid. It’s the product of a combination of drugs, alcohol, and IQs that would look good as golf scores. Or it’s the casual brutality of organized crime, which, Mario Puzo and Marlon Brando notwithstanding, doesn’t do much better on the IQ scale.”

“You’d have to say James Gandolfini now,” Bennis said. “Or Tony Soprano. Tibor says his students don’t know who Marlon Brando was.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. “The thing is, we’ve already made provision for that kind of crime. It’s built into the structure of society. I don’t care what kind of policing you have, there’s going to be that kind of crime. I don’t care how perfect you make your society, either. You can raise and lower the incidence of that kind of thing, the street mugging, the home invasion, usually by arresting people and putting them away for a long time. Did I tell you that I hold to the retribution and punishment side of what we should do about criminals debate?”