The Headmaster's Wife (33 page)

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Then why?”

“Because I want to know,” Alice said, “that's all. Because I want to know. There've been rumors all day about the caffeine, about caffeine pills or tablets or whatever you call them. Maybe he took them last night while I was there, and I just didn't notice. Maybe something. I don't know. I want to know.”

“All right.” The cigarette was nearly out. Philip put it down in the ashtray and got another. He rarely chainsmoked; it made his lungs hurt. Now he found he wanted his lungs to hurt, if only because the sensation would have a reality to it that he could not make come clear in this room. He had always found Alice ephemeral in some odd way. He'd never been able to accept her as solid. She seemed to him to be a mass of affect and confusion: that electric red hair, that way of carrying her body that showed she had always known that men admired it—and women too, that mass of drivel that poured out of her mouth every time she talked. Freud had once asked: “What do women want?” Philip was willing to bet that if he'd ever met Alice, he would have been completely stumped.

“You're not going to tell me what I want to know,” she said, coming to sit down on the edge of the chair across from him.

“I don't know the answer to the question you've asked. Nobody has said anything to me about it. That's the best I can do.”

“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.

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.

Gregor had been made head of the new Behavioral Sciences Unit because the new director was at sea, because the Bureau had just moved to a new building, and because he'd had so much publicity that appointing him looked like a good piece of PR. It had been a grace to all concerned that he had also been competent. That's why not being able to engage in office politics was not a virtue. If competent people didn't engage in office politics, incompetent ones would, or worse, competent ones with ulterior motives, with agendas both personal and ideological, with their eye on the prize. Gregor only wished that most people who lusted after power did so because they wanted fame, money, and luxury. People who wanted fame and money could be bought off. Even people who wanted power for power's sake could be bought off, at least up to a point. The real killers were the ones who wanted to change the world. Gregor Demarkian was not a conservative and couldn't be. He was a child of an immigrant tenement neighborhood, and his own mother had kept a picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an icon frame right next to her icon of the Black Madonna. He did share one idea with the conservatives though, and he thought it was a sensible one. He did not think it was ever possible to make human beings perfect, to rid them forever of greed andlust and avarice and pride. He distrusted the hell out of people who thought they could.

He was able to do the Machiavellian thing in this case because he was truly convinced that somebody had tried to murder Mark DeAvecca and because he had cleared the whole thing with Brian Sheehy beforehand. There was nothing like getting the cooperation of the person you wanted to manipulate to make manipulation feel like high morality. He had no idea if Brian took him seriously or was merely indulging him, but the result was the same in either case, and the result was all that Gregor cared about. Brian, in the meantime, cared mostly about embarrassing the school. Gregor would be happy to oblige him.

The call from the hospital came less than half an hour after he'd left Dee Feyre at the inn's front door. She had a room there, too—there wasn't anywhere else to get a room in Windsor unless you went out to the Interstate, to Concord or Lexington—but she wanted to get “some things done,” as she put it, and Gregor hadn't wanted to ask her what. He'd gone back up to his room to think, and to think about calling Bennis, when the phone rang and he was put through to a pleasant female voice speaking against a background of conversation and random noise. He wondered where she was calling from. It wasn't an office. Was it that distractingly loud at a nurses' station?

“Mr. Demarkian?” she said. “This is Carol Alberani at Windsor Hospital. I'm the head nurse on Two West. Dr. Copeland asked me to call you.”

“Thank you,” Gregor said, wondering if he'd been completely off the wall. Her voice did sound pleasant and unconcerned. Would it be unconcerned if what he'd suspected was true?

“Dr. Copeland said to tell you that what you suggested turned out to be true and to thank you for suggesting it. He wouldn't have thought of it on his own. He'd like to talk to you in person, along with Mark's parents, later on this afternoon. Say about two o'clock? He said he knows this is short notice, but under the circumstances—”

“No, no,” Gregor said. “It's fine. I'm grateful he can see me that quickly.”

“From what I know of Dr. Copeland's schedule, that's the end of his rounds for the day. He'd like you to meet him on the floor at the nurses' station at two, if you could.”

“I'll be there.”

“I'll tell him. Thank you very much, Mr. Demarkian.”

“Don't mention it.”

She hung up in his ear. Gregor stared at the receiver for a moment and then put it down. It was already well after noon, and it wasn't all that easy to get out to the hospital. He'd have to arrange for a cab ahead of time. He put in a call to the front desk and asked them to do that for him. He hung up and stared at his hands. He needed Bennis, that was the truth. He always needed Bennis, but he needed her especially in cases like this one, when something about the case itself, or the place it happened in, or the people involved in it, started tripping all his wires. He couldn't seem to make his mind stop drifting into his own past, his childhood, his career, his memories. Maybe “drift” was the wrong word. Drifting implied randomness. There was nothing random about the way his mind was working. He knew, by now, just what it was about Windsor that drove him so completely up the wall—that hermetically sealed, pristinely smug self-righteous bubble that adopted “liberalism,” not because of liberal convictions, but because of the sense that only stupid, vulgar, ignorant people were anything else. It was not the liberalism his mother had embraced when she became an American, and it was not the liberalism of somebody like Bennis, whose support for government health insurance and rejection of the death penalty had nothing to do with morality and everything to do with what she thought of as practical necessity. Hell, he thought, it wasn't even the liberalism of initiatives and programs. He suddenly realized what it was all these people reminded him of. They were the liberals of conservative caricature, born into the flesh and made real on a stage of their own choosing. This was a place where care would be taken to choose only those foods that could beimported from workers' collectives in the third world by the same people who had only contempt for the everyday, middle-class kids who made up the population at the local public high school.

It was, Gregor thought, a symptom of something, of the same something that had resulted in the destruction of Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Christian Church, of something that was neither liberal nor conservative except superficially. No wonder so many people were turned off to politics these days. It wasn't politics anymore. It wasn't about how best to fill the potholes or how best to make sure that everybody could see a doctor if he needed to or how best to build a system of defense that would neither leave the country vulnerable to attack nor bankrupt it This was politics as total lifestyle choice, a kind of armor people put on to proclaim their superiority to every other person, and Tom DeLay did it just as surely as Barbara Boxer did. This wasn't even politics about candidates. He had no idea who the people of Windsor, Massachusetts, had voted for in the last election, and he didn't think it mattered. This was the politicization of everything. It was no longer possible to decide you liked beer instead of wine without that choice becoming a declaration of just which side you were on.