Quoth the Raven (18 page)

The problem with the porch was with those buckets of lye Dr. Steele had left with her.

They were missing.

B
Y 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.”

A
CTUALLY, 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.