“Several times,” Bennis said. “Almost every night when we watch the news.”
“It’s not that I think it’s impossible to rehabilitate a criminal. Every once in a while you get one who should be rehabilitated—”
“Tibor’s students.”
“Some of them. However. Lots of them can’t be rehabilitated because they don’t particularly want to be. So there’s that. I don’t understand why it is that reformers can’t see that. And they really can’t. They think you’re a monster when you suggest that some people will only leave the rest of us alone when they’re locked up.”
“Well,” Bennis said, coming to sit down on his side of the bed. She was nearly dressed, now. She had on jeans and a long sleeved T-shirt under a short-sleeved one. She was not wearing socks or shoes. “It’s depressing, if you think about it,” she said. “It’s depressing to think that there will always be evil and violence in the world. People would like to think, even I would like to think, that there are ways to get rid of it forever.”
“There are no ways to get rid of it forever,” Gregor said. “That’s Tibor’s department. God gets rid of it on the last day, if I remember the Sunday school lessons of my childhood.”
“You don’t believe in God,” Bennis said.
“I don’t think I do,” Gregor said, “but that’s beside the point. Reality is what it is. We will never get rid of all the evil and violence in the world. There will always be murder. There will always be cruelty. There will always be robbery. We can make those things happen less often by catching the people who do them and putting them in jail and keeping them in jail. And making sure there isn’t an upside—that jail isn’t something . . . Did I tell you that when I was first in the FBI, I had a job in this one small town in Wisconsin—kidnapping detail, something. And I met this guy who deliberately committed a rape—deliberately, mind you—every spring he was out of jail. And do you know why? Because he wanted to be in jail. For the winter. It was the only way he could be sure of being out of the cold for the winter. It was the craziest thing I ever saw. With the three-strikes laws these days, they’d put him away for good now.”
“Maybe that was what he wanted,” Bennis said. “Maybe he was one of those people who only feel entirely comfortable when they’re locked up. Didn’t you tell me about that once?”
“Yes, I did. Where was I?”
“You were depressing me.” Bennis got up and started walking around the bedroom. “You were telling me that there would always be evil and violence in the world.”
“Ah. I know. Yes. There will always be evil and violence in the world, but we’re not really all that worried about that. We know what that is. We expect it. But we also expect everybody else, the people who aren’t these sorts of low-life thugs, we expect those people to behave themselves. We don’t police them the way we police the others. Hell, we can’t. There are too many people in any society to police them all effectively, unless you’re North Korea, and that’s no society any of us want to live in. So we let the rest of the population go about its business, sort of on the honor system.”
“You really think of all this in your sleep, do you?” Bennis said. “Didn’t I buy new socks? From L. L. Bean? I keep thinking I remember putting them away, but I’m not sure.”
“They’re in the top center drawer of the highboy,” Gregor said. “They’re in little plastic wrappings. It’s when the ordinary people, the people we expect to be on their good behavior, it’s when they start doing things they shouldn’t that we have to worry. Because if we can’t count on the ordinary people, the good people, to do good even if they’re not being watched . . . well, that way lies chaos. That way lies a society that can’t be governed at all. Can you see that?”
Bennis had found her socks and sat down on his side of the bed again to put them on. Bennis was forty-eight, but she still dressed like a college girl, and she oddly still looked like one. The enormous cloud of black hair was as thick as it had been when Gregor first met her. He expected it was dyed, but he didn’t ask. Her body was as slim as it had been, too, though, and that he couldn’t help wondering about. The woman ate like a horse, and she ate all the things his Armenian mother and aunts had eaten and gotten fat on. The really odd thing was the sides of her eyes. Bennis had no crow’s feet. Gregor knew she had never had plastic surgery. It would have been a kind of miracle, except that he wouldn’t have cared about crow’s feet.