by Jane Haddam
He saw Alice coming up the walk before she knocked. He could have put the gun out of sight if he’d wanted to. He knew that no matter how easily he’d strong-armed the Windsor Academy administration over the matter of his smoking, he would not be able to strong-arm them on the matter of this gun. They would insist that he get rid of the gun or get himself out of faculty housing. He wanted to do neither.
Even so, he opened the door to Alice without putting the gun away. It was lying out in the open on the coffee table when she walked in. She took off her cape and stared at it, truly shocked. Philip thought it was the only time he had ever seen her shocked. Then he amended that. It was the only time he had ever seen her show a thoroughly genuine emotion. Alice was always on stage. She was like that remarkable hair of hers: overblown, overcolored, overwrought.
“Well,” she said, “you got paranoid very fast. I wouldn’t have expected that of you. What did you do, go into Boston last night and pass a man a hundred on a street corner?”
“No.” He sat down on his own couch and went back to loading the chamber. “I bought this gun in 1998.”
“And you’ve had it here ever since? In the dorm?”
“That I have.”
“The trustees will have a complete fit. They won’t let you keep it, you know. And I don’t understand why you have it in the first place. It’s not as if Windsor is a high-crime area.”
“No.” There was more crime in Windsor than she knew, but that was one of those things Philip had long since ceased trying to explain to the faculty of Windsor Academy. He finished loading the chambers and tried siting at his reflection in the wall mirror. Alice Makepeace shuddered.
“I’ll be happier when they make you get rid of it,” she said. “I don’t know why you want it here to begin with. Especially not now. God only knows what’s going to happen around here now that we’re in the middle of this mess. Don’tyou hate what it’s like around here? When the institution is threatened, I mean. Peter gets insane. You should see him.”
“I’d expect that Peter is afraid for his job.”
“Of course he is. And of course we’re going to have to leave. That’s inevitable. If it wasn’t when Michael decided to kill himself, it was as soon as that poisonous Mark DeAvecca starting flopping around Sheldon’s bathroom like a rag doll. That woman came to see Peter this morning, you know. Mark’s mother.”
“Liz Toliver. I’ve seen her on television.”
“Yes, well, so have I. That hardly matters, does it? Anyway, she’s breathing fire and when she breathes fire, The New York Times breathes fire along with her. The whole thing is such a mess, I don’t know where to start. That’s why I came. Maybe you can tell me where to start.”
“Where to start what?” Philip asked. “Explaining yourself? Getting Peter another job?”
“People come to you and tell you things. I know that. Everybody knows that. You’re everybody’s father confessor, except mine.”
“That’s quite all right, Alice. I wouldn’t want to be your father confessor.”
“I don’t have one,” Alice said, “I know better. But people talk to you, which means you know what they’re thinking.”
“They don’t talk to me as much as you think, Alice. And they don’t tell me their secrets. If that’s the kind of thing you want, hire a private detective and have them bugged.”
“I want to know what they’re saying. About Michael. About me.”
“Like I said, have them bugged.”
“It wouldn’t do any good to have them bugged now, would it? They’ve already done their talking. I don’t think you realize the seriousness of what’s been going on here.”
“Oh, I realize the seriousness, Alice,” Philip said, “I just don’t evaluate it the same way you do. Are people talking about the affair you had with Michael Feyre—”
“I didn’t have an ‘affair’ with Michael Feyre.”
“—then yes, they’re talking about that. They’ve been talking about it for months. Why should it matter to you that they’re talking about it now?”
“People don’t understand the problems a boy like Michael has finding himself,” Alice said. “They’re used to their own comfortable lives, and they just don’t realize how repressed somebody like Michael is. How oppressed. Oppressed by false consciousness, really, thinking that the system is just fine, really, it’s all their own fault if they constantly screw up. You have to give them back their self-respect if you’re going to teach them to see the world clearly, if you’re going to make them understand that they’re the victims here.”
“And you do that by fucking them in broom closets in the off-hours on weekends? Alice, try to make sense for once. You like to star in your own movie. You like to be the center of attention. You do it every year, and you’re only going to stop doing it when those lines on your face get deep enough so that the boys can’t help noticing.”
“I don’t have lines on my face.”
“Yes, Alice, you do, and in a year or two you’re going to face the choice all fair-skinned women do. You’re either going to have to go in for surgery or Retin-A, or you’re going to have to give it up. I’m betting on the surgery myself. You’ll never give it up, and Retin-A would mean no more long afternoon walks in the sun.”
“Michael,” Alice said, choosing her words carefully, “was a misguided but very intelligent boy. He could have become a great leader, a truly authentic leader—”
“Michael,” Philip said, “was a thug. He was a thug when he came to Windsor, and he was a thug when he hung himself. His mother could see him for what he was. He was a thug without pretensions, at least until you got to him. He was better off where he was.”
“He was better off as a thug?”
“Yes,” Philip said, “thugs rehabilitate themselves sometimes. I’ve seen it happen. Thugs with pretensions, though, they’re hooked worse than any junkie ever was.”
“If he was hooked, as you put it, why would he have killed himself?”
“I have no idea why he killed himself.”
“You really don’t understand,” Alice said. She was pacing. Philip thought she had been pacing for a long time, but he hadn’t noticed. His eyes were always going on and off the gun. It was fully loaded by now. She could pick it up and use it. He knew she wouldn’t.
She stopped at the wall mirror and checked herself out. She kept her back to him and said, “There’s a whole world out there that has nothing to do with the trivialities you concern yourself with. There’s a whole world that has nothing to do with equations and geometry proofs and logic templates or whatever it is you call them. There’s a world of people.”
“I’m aware there’s a world of people, Alice. I’m more aware of it than you are.”
“There’s a world of history, too,” Alice said. “History is marching on whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. History is not on the side of this place and the people in it—people like you.”
It was a measure of the extent of the radical change that had taken place since Mark DeAvecca collapsed in Hayes House that Philip was tempted, even if only for a moment, to deliver a lecture on “people like” himself, a lecture so detailed and explicit that even Alice Makepeace would have no way of misinterpreting it. He stopped himself just in time, but he couldn’t deny that he’d tapped a vein of recklessness in himself that he’d thought he’d exorcized forever a very long time ago. His cigarettes were on the table next to the gun, two kinds of coffin nails huddled together for warmth in the icy moralistic air of a progressive school. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with the plain blue plastic Bic lighter he kept next to the ashtray. He had Bic lighters all over the house. They were the only kind he used.
“You know,” he said, “there are people out there, people in this country, who take revolution seriously. They’re not playing a game, and they don’t deal in concepts like ’false consciousness.’ They just do what they do. They’re very dangerous. You wouldn’t like them much. You�
��d approve even less.”
“I want to know if anybody saw me talking to Mark last night in the cafeteria.”
“People like Timothy McVeigh,” Philip said.
Alice turned away from the mirror. She looked like she was forcing herself. “Leave it to you to call a fascist like that a revolutionary.”
“He was a revolutionary, Alice. He was a homegrown, working-class American revolutionary. If the proletariat of the United States ever rises up to overthrow the capitalist hegemony, that’s what they’re going to look like: Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph. Take your pick. And you do. Take your pick, I mean. You picked Michael Feyre because he had no interest in revolution at all.”
“I picked Michael Feyre because he was one of the most intelligent and tortured souls I’d ever met.”
“And the one last year? Alex Cowby. He was an intelligent and tortured soul, too. Until he became too obviously disappointing.”
“You can’t save everybody,” Alice said. “They’re so damaged by the time they get here, saving them isn’t always possible. They buy into the whole thing, into the big corporate lie. Into the idea that having things and making money are what they should be after.”
“Alice, for God’s sake. We’ve got a Socialist Club and a Communist Youth League. We’ve also got a nice little sprinkling of working-class kids on scholarship. Not one of them wants anything to do with—”
“Why are we going into this again?” Alice said. “What’s your point, Philip? Is there some reason that this is all you can ever talk about? I asked you a question. I asked if you’d heard anybody say they saw me in the cafeteria with Mark last night.”
He took a deep drag on his cigarette and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Why? Were you trying to seduce him, too?”
“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.
Chapter Five
1
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.