BY THE TIME THE bells in Declaration Tower rang six o’clock, Gregor Demarkian needed a rest—not a nap, not a mental and physical vacation, but the real rest of being outside the pressurized circle of social restraint. He was not tired. It had been years since he had been part of a real emergency, instead of being called in afterward to lend support and clean up. Even in the three murder investigations he had involved himself in since leaving the Bureau, he had served as a kind of consultant. It amazed him that his body still responded so well to the need to overcompensate for its preferred and natural lethargy. He was adrenalated. His mind was working too fast. Every muscle in his body was twitching and jiggling, as if they had been carbonated. He knew all the rules of official murder investigations, especially the iron one about how, after forty-eight hours, the odds against catching the killer grew more and more remote by the second. In his experience, it was a rule that did more harm than good. It made people rush and occupy themselves with busywork. It was the catalyst for dozens of unnecessary interviews and hundreds of extravagantly examined blind alleys. He did much better when he gave himself the time and distance to calm down, untangle his emotions, and face the problem like a rational man.
The problem, at the moment, was finding the time and distance. They were in Tibor’s apartment—he and Bennis and Tibor himself—and the topic on the agenda was dinner. Under the circumstances, it was not a topic Bennis and Tibor were approaching with a great deal of common sense. Bennis was agitated and distraught. She had seen at least one of her sisters die by violence. She didn’t take well to outbreaks of murderousness in her fellow man. Of course, Gregor admitted, nobody did, not even veteran agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With Bennis, though, the reaction was particularly acute, a kind of psychological nuclear implosion. It made Gregor wonder why Bennis was always so eager to become part of his problems—and so obsessed with filling up her spare time in the reading of murder mysteries.
For Tibor, the problem was different, more general, pervasive instead of specific. Most of the violence he had seen in his life—and there had been a lot of it—had been both officially sanctioned and rigorously theologized. He had told Gregor once that the most frightening hour of his life had come one afternoon when he was ten and sitting in his fifth-form Political class. His teacher, a pock-faced woman brought in from the outside the way priests were brought in from the outside to teach religion in some American Catholic schools, had delivered a lecture on “the fundamental lie of Christianity,” and that lie had been this: that Christianity demonized violence, illegitimated revolution, and celebrated the weakness of the weak. Change is a garden, she had told them, and that garden could only be properly watered by blood.
Now Tibor sat in his armchair, white and small, and watched Bennis pace back and forth across the living room. Gregor felt sorry for him. He looked so old and defeated, even though he was actually younger than Gregor himself. It had only taken one undeniable intrusion of the reality of the outside world to knock him back into a frame of mind he probably thought he had forgotten.
Bennis had come to rest in the middle of the room, with her foot on one of the picnic baskets the boys—Freddie and Max?—had delivered while they were out. She reached into the pocket of her shirt, took out her cigarettes, and lit up.
“The thing is,” she said, waving her wand of smoke in the air, “the one thing I am not going to do tonight is go back to that place to eat. Assuming it’s even open. If that David Markham person has any sense, he’ll have sealed it up.”
“If he has, he isn’t going to leave it sealed for long,” Gregor said. “He intends to eat breakfast there tomorrow.”
Bennis took a deep drag, tilted her head back, and blew smoke at the ceiling. “Marvelous,” she said. “I love macho. I just love it. However, being a girl, I do not have to display it, which is fortunate. I want to go out to dinner.”
“Bennis,” Tibor said tentatively, “there is so much food here. All these picnic baskets. There is so much food, I should distribute it to the poor. I will never eat it.”
“Well, Tibor, distribute it to the poor if you want, but don’t distribute it to me tonight. Honey cakes. Doritos nacho-flavored tortilla chips. For God’s sake.”
“I like Doritos nacho-flavored tortilla chips,” Tibor said. “You open the bag, you put it in your lap, you go on reading. Then in a little while you have finished the bag and you are full, and you have not been distracted.”
There was a column of ash an inch long on the end of Bennis’s cigarette. She tapped it into the saucer Tibor had left on top of the picnic basket for her to use as an ashtray and said, “Tibor, over there on the couch I have a pocket-book. In that pocketbook I have a wallet. In that wallet I have an American Express Gold Card on which I have charged not one single thing this month. I say we get the van, take the Gold Card, and go find the kind of place where a glorified lounge singer interprets Joni Mitchell music all night and you can drop three hundred dollars on a bottle of wine.”
“Bennis, please, you are at the edge of what is called Appalachia. There is no such place here.”
“Oh, yes, there is. Trust me. With this college sitting here and the tuition at eighteen thousand dollars a year—I saw it in the catalog I was looking through when we were waiting for you to get ready to go to lunch—trust me, there is. Just get me the phone book. I’ll find it.”
“Bennis, I do not have a phone book.”
“Yes, you do.”
And, Gregor thought, she was undoubtedly right. In this mess of books and periodicals, pens and pencils and notepaper scribbled over in six languages, there would be a phone book, and probably an entire Encyclopaedia Britannica as well. He had been standing near Tibor’s chair. Now he moved away and went to the window, to look out on the quad. It got dark so early in Pennsylvania, once the switch from daylight savings time had been made. The only light below him came from the globe lamps spaced out along the quad’s sidewalks and the “ghost wands” that so many of the students carried. The ghost wands glowed greenly phosphorescent in the puddles of darkness where the light from the lamps didn’t reach, seeming to move on their own.
“What’s going on down there?” he asked. “What is it exactly everybody thinks they’re doing?”
Bennis had found the phone book and was looking through it, sitting cross-legged on the floor and running her index finger across the large square restaurant ads that crammed the yellow pages. Tibor was sitting shriveled up in his chair, looking more defeated than ever. Gregor’s question seemed to give him heart, and he stood up to join his friend at the window.
“You should have read the material I sent you,” he said. “It is the thirtieth of October. They are having a Halloween advent.”
“Advent?”
“It is not meant as sacrilege, Krekor. It is just students having fun. They have a little later a kind of street fair without a street. Students who juggle. Students who mime. Students who do magic tricks. Then they will have a voice vote and give one of the performers a prize, for talent.”
“Well, that seems harmless enough.”
“Yes, Krekor, it is harmless enough. It only bothers me that they do it now, with Miss Veer in the hospital and possibly dying. I cannot make it feel right to me.”
“You ought to try,” Gregor told him. “You were the one who said she didn’t know much of anybody on campus but the people in your Program. There are hundreds of students down there. Most of them wouldn’t have been in the dining room this afternoon and most of them probably would never have met her.”
“Yes, Krekor, I know. But I will tell you who else will be down there. Jack Carroll and his friend Chessey Flint. And they were in the dining room and they have met her.”
“What makes you so sure they’ll be there?”
“They will have to be there, Krekor. Jack Carroll is the president of the students. Chessey Flint goes always where Jack Carroll goes.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
“Found it,” Bennis said. “Le Petit Chignon. My God, what a name. I don’t even think it’s grammatical. Anyway, ‘Fine Continental Cuisine,’ which is always a tip-off. ‘Jackets and ties required,’ which is also a tip-off. And listen to this, ‘live entertainment for discriminating tastes, Wednesday and Thursday nights.’ She’ll have a piano, a microphone turned up too loud, and an octave and a half in voice range. When she tries to do ‘Chelsea Morning,’ her voice will crack.”
“Wonderful,” Gregor said. “Don’t you ever like to go to nice restaurants? There probably are a few around here.”
“I was brought up on nice restaurants. I want kitsch.”
“Bennis,” Tibor said, “I do not have a tie, or a jacket, either. I have only my cassocks and what I wear under them.”
“They won’t object to clerical dress, Father. They never do. It’s Gregor I’m worried about. Do you have anything unspotted, unwrinkled, and unshredded you can wear around your neck?”
“I don’t have to. I’m not going.”
“Why not?” Bennis said.
“Because I’m not hungry, I’m not in the mood for your driving, and I need a little time to walk around, get some air, and think.”
“Do you really?” Bennis said.
“Krekor,” Tibor said, “I don’t think I want to—”
“Oh, yes, you do.” Bennis jumped up, looked around the room, found Tibor’s coat and grabbed it. Gregor had expected her to drop the whole dinner project as soon as she found he had something else he wanted to do. She was like that about his investigations. She hated the idea of being left out of any part of them, even though she knew being left out was inevitable at least some of the time. Tonight, apparently, she was no more in the mood for him than he was for Le Petit Chignon.
“We’ll call and make a reservation because they’ll expect it,” she said, “but they won’t be full and there won’t be any problem. Then I’ll go put on my dress and make up my face and put on my pearls. I don’t suppose you know how to drive a car?”
“No,” Tibor said.
“Well, I’ll just have to be the designated driver. Maybe they’ll sell me a bottle of wine to bring home. Places will sometimes if you offer them enough money and you don’t look like a drunk or a cop.”
“Try not to get arrested,” Gregor said. “Try to do that.”
“I always try to do that, Gregor. Go off walking or whatever it is you want to do. Assuming you know what you want to do. Which I doubt. I’m going to have a little fun.”
ACTUALLY, GREGOR THOUGHT, WALKING out of Constitution House into the quad, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. The snag came in getting to do it the way he wanted to do it. For that, he needed a guide. In this carnival of costumes and extremities, he wasn’t sure where he would find one. He paused at the bottom of the Constitution House steps and looked around. The real action was taking place far away from him, at the place where the sidewalks came together to make a circular frame of concrete for the statue of the Minuteman. At his edge of the quad, the crowd was sparse. He saw a girl dressed up as Carmen Miranda, with enough wax fruit on her head to provide a legion of baby van Goghs with the material for still-lifes. He saw three boys dressed up as bikers from Hell, huddled together, passing around a little grass. The grass made Gregor feel a little irritated, but not much more. He had made it a point to stay as far out of the Great Drug War as he could get, but he was not naive. Outside the grammar schools, practically everyone, especially college administrations, had given up the fight against grass.
Gregor moved away from the Constitution House steps and into the crowd, picking his way carefully through the increasingly thick clusters of students. He’d had a half-formed idea, upstairs, that it would be easy to find who he was looking for. He had forgotten about the abysmal lack of originality that always seemed to run rampant among the young. There were at least three bats, six Frankensteins, and fourteen mummies in his immediate field of vision. There were no fewer than fifty girls dressed up as identical pumpkins, as if they had each and every one of them given up their chance to play out their fantasies to play it safe in a sorority of timidity. He moved a little closer and caught sight of the boy performing in the center, his back to the Minuteman’s chest, a refreshing sight in a plain black eye mask, white tie, and tails. The boy was balancing five Day-Glo-painted polystyrene balls, large to small, top to bottom, on the end of a ghost wand balanced on the tip of his nose. Gregor didn’t know if it counted as juggling or not, but whatever it was it was very impressive. He moved a little farther forward to get a better look, and then began to feel silly. This was hardly getting him where he wanted to go.
Exactly what would get him where he wanted to go, he didn’t know, so he began to wander aimlessly through the crowd, looking into the blank masks that were presented for his inspection without much hope of recognizing any of the faces behind them. Somewhere near the center where the boy was performing, a tape player was pounding out what Gregor thought of as exercise-disco music. A boy to his left was using an ice pick to punch a hole in the bottom of his can of beer. As Gregor watched, he lifted the can high in the air, tilted his head back so that the bottom of the can was directly over his mouth, and pulled the flip-tab. A stream of beer shot down his throat and disappeared in thirty seconds.
Gregor began moving again. He had worked his way around in a half-circle to the best lighted place in the rectangle when he saw her, sitting alone on the bottom step of a short marble flight that led to the spotlit doors of a dormitory. The torso of her pumpkin costume seemed to have collapsed against her body. Whatever held it up and rounded it out on the girls in the middle of the quad was not operated for her. Her mask was pushed up over her head, flattening down her hair. Her gloves were off and lying in her lap. She looked so small and shriveled, Gregor almost didn’t recognize her.
Then she turned her head, directly into the light, and he saw it, through the tears and the chalky deadness of the white makeup plastered over her sickly pale skin: Chessey Flint.
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER had the kind of shoulder women liked to cry on. He had never gotten into the habit of offering tea and sympathy to women he didn’t know. And yet, walking over to Chessey Flint, he really had no particular intention but to offer sympathy. He was aware that she might know where Jack Carroll was, and that that was important to him. He was aware that she had been in the dining room this afternoon, and that that was important to him, too. He just didn’t have any urge to ask her about any of these things while she was sitting all huddled up like that, all small and weak and sad.
He maneuvered his way around a tall boy who seemed to be dressed up as the Straw Man from The Wizard of Oz, thought about sitting down beside Miss Flint without a word, and decided against it. He stopped directly in front of her instead, and cleared his throat.
“Miss Flint?” he said.
Chessey Flint looked up, blinked a little at the contrast between the harsh light around her and the shadowed place his face was in, and said, “Oh. Mr. Demarkian. It’s you.”
“Would you mind if I sat down for a moment? I came out looking for your friend, Mr. Carroll. I haven’t found him and I haven’t found anything else, either. I seem to be lost.”
“It’s easy to be lost out here,” Chessey Flint said. Then she brushed at the surface of the step beside her, as if she had to clear it off for him, even though it was empty. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “Of course you can sit down. I’m just a little—out of it tonight.”
“I don’t think I blame you.”
“You mean because of this afternoon? I don’t blame me either. I don’t see how Jack can—” She waved a hand feebly in the direction of the crowd and shook her head. “He’s out there in the middle of it all, doing what he always does, just as if it didn’t matter. I asked him how he could go through with it and all he said was it was his responsibility.”
“You don’t consider that an explanation?”
“No, Mr. Demarkian, I don’t. I suppose you’re going to go all male and self-righteous on me and tell me I ought to, but I don’t. I don’t have much respect for feminists, but at least I’ll give them this. All that groaning and bellowing men do about how they have to be responsible even if it means putting their emotions in the deep freeze is just so much stupidity.”
“Does your Mr. Carroll have a great deal of responsibility? Is he going to be tied up all night?”
“Jack? No, Mr. Demarkian, not all night. It’s, what? About six thirty?”
“About that.”
“They judge the talent contest at seven. Then Jack hands out the trophy. After that, he’s free and clear for the rest of the night. If he wants to be.”
“Well, then,” Gregor said, “I hope he wants to be. I want to go up to the parking lot, to that shack where the tools are to fix the cars. Father Tibor said Mr. Carroll knew something about it.”
“Oh, he does,” Chessey agreed. “He’s a licensed mechanic. Jack knows a lot about a lot of things.”
“Do you like that?”
Chessey Flint didn’t answer. She had lapsed into a private reverie, chin propped up on the palm of her hand, sharp point of her elbow digging into the top of her knee. Gregor didn’t feel right about interrupting her, so he lapsed into a private reverie of his own. He couldn’t see through the crowd to the Minuteman statue, but he knew that the boy in white tie and tails must have stopped performing. Up until a little while ago, he had been able to see the green glow of the boy’s ghost wand poking up above the heads of the people around him. Now the air above that space in the center was occupied by nothing but the light of the lamps shining into it. Instead of cheering and clapping their feet, the watching crowd was laughing.
Suddenly, Chessey Flint sat up straight, stretched out both her arms and legs in a ritual motion of unkinking, and said, “Mr. Demarkian? Can I ask you something?”
“Yes,” Gregor told her, “of course.”
“Jack said he thought you thought that—that the person who did that to Miss Veer wasn’t really looking to do it to Miss Veer. That it was just someone on the cafeteria staff who put that stuff in something it wouldn’t be noticed in, like a peanut butter sandwich, and then just left it out for anyone to take and get hurt by it. Is that what you think?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Gregor, thought about skirting the whole question. It wasn’t his investigation. He hadn’t even been asked to help yet. He had no idea what David Markham did or did not want generally known. To tell Chessey Flint only that such an explanation didn’t feel right, though, would offend her—and she would have a right to be offended. She was treating him like a human being and she had a right to be treated like one by him.
He wrapped his arms around his knees and gave it to her, the whole thing, from why the lye couldn’t have been in Miss Veer’s tea to the utter lack of anything else it could have been in anywhere in the premises after Miss Veer had fallen to the floor. Chessey listened to him in silence, her large eyes wide and trained determinedly on his face. When he was done, she stretched again and sat back.
“I see,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said Jack thought you thought it was one of the cafeteria workers. That wasn’t quite what he was getting at. I don’t think he knows what to think.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Chessey sighed. “I was sitting very close, you know. At one of the tables in the first line beyond the cash register, right on that side of the room. I was even looking straight at her when she started to fall. I just wasn’t paying any attention.”
“Had a lot on your mind?”
Chessey snorted. “I always seem to have a lot on my mind these days, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t think I like being a senior much. It’s confusing.”
“So is being fifty-five and retired. Life is confusing.”
“Maybe. But you know, Mr. Demarkian, I keep thinking about it. I was looking at it and I was not looking at it. I keep thinking I must have seen something. And all I can remember, really all I can remember, is thinking that Dr. Elkinson looks better with her hair back in a scarf.”
“Dr. Elkinson?”
“Dr. Elkinson was standing at the cash register with Miss Veer,” Chessey said. “They were just standing there talking, right inside the place where you have to pay, near the cans of Coke and Pepsi and that kind of thing. And then Dr. Crockett came up, and I got a little angry.”
“Why?”
“Sort of as a matter of principle. He’s been taking up a lot of Jack’s time lately, with the rock-climbing and the cabin on Hillman’s Rock and all that sort of thing. Did you know that Jack was a rock-climber?”
“From what I’ve heard,” Gregor said, “practically everyone around here is a rock-climber.”
Chessey nodded. “Practically everyone in the Program is, anyway. Dr. Crockett’s always been the adviser for the Climbing Club and he’s very popular. Even most of the faculty have gotten sucked into it at one time or another. Dr. Elkinson, Dr. Branch. I think it put Dr. Crockett’s nose a little out of joint when Dr. Steele came and it turned out he was a world-class climber too.”
“Dr. Steele.” Gregor rubbed his chin. “I keep hearing about this Dr. Steele, but I never actually see him. Isn’t he new on campus this term? Shouldn’t he be around?”
“Oh, he should be around all right, Mr. Demarkian, he just isn’t. Nobody’s seen him for a couple of days. It’s been a little weird, if you want to know the truth. Usually you can’t get rid of him. Anyway. About this afternoon. Dr. Crockett came up, and then Jack came up from the other end of the line. When I was first looking at them—at Dr. Elkinson and Dr. Crockett and Miss Veer—they were all talking together, but when Jack came up he and Dr. Crockett sort of split off by themselves. And I thought, well, if I don’t like it I ought to do something about it. I’m supposed to be all grown up. So I did.”
“Do something about it?” Gregor asked.
“That’s right. I went up, got Jack by the arm, and dragged him back to the table.”
“Then what happened?”
Chessey shrugged. “I don’t know. That was the point where I really stopped paying attention. To them, anyway. I had a lot to talk about with Jack. The next thing I knew, Miss Veer dropped her tray, the teacup smashed on the floor, and Dr. Elkinson started screaming.”
Out in the thickness of the crowd, a roar went up, raucous and hysterical, and people began to stamp their feet. Chessey Flint stood up, climbed a couple of steps to give herself more height, and craned her neck.
“That’s the voice vote starting,” she said. “I think this time Freddie’s going to end up winning it. I hope he does. This is the fourth time he’s tried in four years.”
She climbed back down to where Gregor was and began doing things to her costume, making it puff out the way it was supposed to. To Gregor, she looked better than she had—much better than when he’d first sat down. He found it a relief. At least she wasn’t crying anymore.
She sat down on the step beside him again and said, “It won’t be very long now. Then I’ll corral Jack for you and you can take him off to the tool shed. I hope you don’t mind getting your clothes in a mess.”