Act of Darkness (5 page)

“It’s been a long day,” she said. “And now I have to go to a cocktail party.”

“I went to a cocktail party once,” Sister Mary James said. “Cardinal Jacoby gave it, back in 1962. There were forty nuns in the room, all in full habit, each of them clutching a single glass of sherry and scared to death it was going to get her drunk. Except Sister Mary Ambrose, of course. Sister Mary Ambrose could drink like a horse and never show it, even before Vatican Two.”

Janet laughed. “Well, Sister, tonight I’m going to stand around clutching one glass of Perrier water and trying to be polite to the reporter from the
Post,
who’s going to get drunk enough to ask me—well, never mind what he’s going to ask me. You can guess. I wish I could stay here instead.”

“Maybe you can, after the recess. We let people do that sometimes, come in and have a kind of pajama party with the children. Lights on late and pizza sent in, if you know what I mean.”

“It must get to be quite a zoo.”

“Of course it does. Children are always zoolike when they’re allowed to stay up late. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” Janet said.

“I just don’t want you fainting in the cab back to Foggy Bottom. You have to take care of your health.”

Janet took the comb out of her hair, picked up one of the long, needle-pointed antique Victorian hairpins she had left on the desk, and began to reconstruct her topknot. One of the pins stuck her finger as she was putting it in place, and made her bleed. I hate Dan Chester, she thought.

She sucked at the drop of blood on her finger and then rucked her comb back into her purse, snapped the purse shut, and stood up. She was going to be late for that cocktail party. Stephen would be livid, and Dan Chester would be impossible. She slung the purse over her shoulder and said, “I had to take Mary Alyse up to medical this afternoon because of a scrape. It’s way up on her left knee, under her uniform. I know I wasn’t supposed to, but she very much wanted a Tylenol and Sister Margarita wasn’t in—”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Fox. A Tylenol won’t hurt her.”

“I’m sure it won’t. She may want one later, though. I gave her the last one at three o’clock. Oh, and one other thing. The restricted medicine cabinet was unlocked again.”

“I’ll remember that,” Sister Mary James said. “Now go home and take care of yourself. Get some rest. Skip that cocktail party, if you have to.”

“I wish I could,” Janet said, and she meant it. She wished she could skip all the cocktail parties, all the dinners, all the dances, all the seminars that stretched in front of her like a term in Purgatory, that chess match in fancy dress that substituted for friendship in official Washington. Sometimes she wondered what would have happened to her if she had listened to her mother’s advice all those years ago and thrown over Stephen for the son of the then-chairman of the board of Columbia Pictures. Sometimes she wondered what would happen to her if she were dead.

Most of all, she wondered what would happen to her tonight, with Dan already in a lather about a future in the White House and Stephen already in a lather about Patchen Rawls.

F
OR STEPHEN FOX, COCKTAIL
parties were a torture, the ultimate dangerous situation in a world that seemed to him to be made of nothing else. Their dangers had been impressed on him a hundred times by his good friend Dan Chester and made real by experience. Dinner parties, seminars, even press conferences could be orchestrated. On the Senate floor, he was protected by Senate rules. In his office, he was protected by his staff. At home, he was protected by his servants. At more formal gatherings, he was protected by Dan Chester. At cocktail parties, the only protection he had was Janet—and Janet, this evening, wasn’t in the mood to protect him at all.

It was two minutes before eight o’clock, and the party was in full swing. The air-conditioning was cranked into high gear. The food table was surrounded by reporters who were behaving as if they hadn’t had a meal in a week. The long dark cherry-wood bar was crowded with lobbyists who seemed bent on getting absolutely blotto, but were probably drinking mineral water. The middle of the living room had been commandeered by Victoria Harte and the terrace by Patchen Rawls. Stephen knew he should have commandeered a corner for himself, with Janet at his side, but that had not been possible. Janet was putting her foot down.

He went up to the bar, wedged himself in between the lobbyists, and got a Scotch and water. One drink was all he was allowed at cocktail parties, and he usually saved it for late in the evening. This evening, he thought he should have taken it before the party started, for medicinal purposes. He was sweating.

He said hello to Clare Markey, who was sitting on one of the few barstools, and then headed across the room in the direction of Dan Chester and Kevin Debrett. They had tucked themselves between a pair of Jasper Johns abstracts that hung on the west wall and had been deep in conversation for over half an hour. Stephen thought it was time to break them up. At five minutes past eight, he was supposed to make an announcement, and he needed someone standing next to him while he did it. Because Janet appeared to be unwilling, Dan Chester was going to have to do.

Janet was standing next to her mother, looking like a plucked chicken next to Victoria’s honey blond sequined majesty, a contrast that always annoyed Stephen to distraction. Janet pretended he wasn’t there. Victoria stabbed him with one of those lethal stares that always made him feel like a bug. On her torso, the oversize heart-shaped ruby brooch made her look like she was being vivisected.

He retreated, quickly, and almost ran to Dan and Kevin at the place against the wall. His heart was pounding and the back of his shirt was soaked through under the protection of his Aquascutum blazer. He felt exactly the way he had the time he had been caught cheating in history class, and Professor Thomaston had made such a fuss about it.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, as soon as he was close enough to Dan and Kevin to whisper and not be overheard. “She wants my scalp tonight, she really does. What’s the matter with her?”

“Patchen Rawls,” Dan Chester said.

“She knows she doesn’t have anything to worry about with Patchen Rawls,” Stephen said. “My God, Dan. We’ve been through this a hundred times before.”

Kevin Debrett coughed into his drink and spattered his face with Scotch. “Never mind,” Dan said. “I’ll talk to Janet later. Are you all ready to make your little speech?”

Stephen nodded. He was never really ready to make a speech. He hated making speeches, except on television, where they didn’t last very long. He was always sure he was going to say something stupid, or quote something he’d heard once without attribution, or do any one of a hundred different things that got politicians in trouble when they forgot to keep their mouths shut. He couldn’t imagine having been a politician in the days of William Jennings Bryan or Theodore Roosevelt, when politicians never lost an opportunity to pontificate. It was bad enough to imagine himself sitting in the White House with a State of the Union Address to deliver.

“Janet,” he told Dan Chester, “isn’t going to be with me.”

“Of course she’s going to be with you,” Dan said.

“She won’t even talk to me.”

“Give me a minute.” Dan put his drink down on the occasional table under the Jasper Johns on the left, next to a vase of roses, and headed across the room to the cluster around Victoria Harte. Stephen watched him go with some apprehension, and felt that apprehension rise when Dan leaned over to whisper in Janet’s ear. But Janet didn’t slap him, which was what Stephen had expected her to do. She simply gave her drink to her mother and marched across the room to the coffee table where they were supposed to stand while he told the world about his great new project to put compassion back in government.

Kevin, who had been watching it all too, said, “He’s wonderful, isn’t he? Dan. He can do anything.”

“Yeah,” Stephen said. “He even knows the anything he’s supposed to do.”

“He’s coming back,” Kevin said. “He’s right, you know, Stephen. You ought to do something about Patchen Rawls. She’s getting—sticky. I know the signs.”

“So do I.”

“I’m sure you do. If you don’t intend to divorce Janet and marry her, you’d better get around to unsticking her. Remember what happened to Gary Hart.”

Stephen was sick of remembering what happened to Gary Hart. Fortunately, Dan was back.

“Get moving,” Dan said, beginning to drag him across the room.

Stephen began to feel nauseated, the way he always felt nauseated in front of a crowd, and the nausea was quickly being joined by the physical feeling he liked least of all: prickling. For some reason, whenever he was very nervous or very frightened, his skin began to tingle and then to pinch, as if he were undergoing some kind of involuntary, psychic acupuncture. After a while, it began to feel as if he were being stuck straight through all the layers of muscle and bone. He saw Patchen, in from the terrace, and shuddered a little. She looked even angrier than Janet. Worse, she was unpredictable. If Dan didn’t get to her and deflect her, she might make a scene. In a way, she was making a scene now, pushing through the crowd to him, elbowing in next to Victoria Harte, reaching out to touch his sleeve. He felt her hand stroking against the fabric of his blazer and then a crescendo of hot little needlelike pricks, like ectoplasmic hypodermics invading the soft skin at the side of his neck. He jumped, and Dan Chester grabbed at him.

“Calm down,” Dan hissed. “What happened to grace under pressure?”

“I never had any,” Stephen said.

“I know it.”

Dan pushed him, hard. The next thing he knew, he was standing next to Janet. His knees were bumping against the coffee table. His arm was around his wife’s rigid, unyielding waist. The pricking feeling had moved into overdrive. Dan walked out in front of him and said, “All right, everybody. The senator has an announcement to make.”

Immediately, the room was warily still, and watchful, just in case? Stephen wished he had not reached that state of terror where the sweating stopped and the chills took over.

He forced a smile on his face anyway and started in.

“Well,” he said. “As most of you know, this morning the Washington
Post
—”

This morning the Washington Post.
Yes, those were the words. They were there, out in the air, palpable, little drops of spit. And the words that came after them were there, too:
ran a story.
The problem was, the second set of words was not out in the air. They were inside his head. He kept trying to move his mouth and make them come out where people could hear them, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make it happen.

In fact, he thought, in growing panic, he couldn’t make anything happen. He couldn’t make his heart beat. He couldn’t make his chest heave to take in air. He couldn’t make his arms and legs move. He couldn’t turn his head. He couldn’t do anything. He had—stopped.

Stopped.

That was it.

He was fully, agonizingly conscious, but at the same time he seemed to be dead.

There wasn’t a single open patch of carpet anywhere in front of him, just a crowd of people all staring at him with increasing confusion, increasing contempt. He wished desperately to turn his head and see if Janet was worried about him, or just as amused as everyone else.

They think I’m drunk, he told himself. Either that, or they think I’m crazy.

Being neither drunk nor crazy, being not even dead, he fell forward in his limp paralysis and landed on the social reporter for that Moonie-owned bastion of conservatism, the Washington
Times.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN HAD ALWAYS
thought of himself as a rational and self-controlled man. It was an image of himself he had held for so long, and with such conviction, that he tended to get a little scatty at any hint of the possibility that he might have been kidding himself. “A little scatty” was definitely what he felt on this hot early morning of the first of July, riding across the whatever-bridge-it-was that went from Manhattan to Long Island in the company of Bennis Day Hannaford, encased like a prize butterfly behind the smoked glass of a baby blue Rolls-Royce limousine. It was not, however, the limousine that was bothering him. Gregor had ridden in limousines before, although Bennis’s idea of one—which she persisted in calling a “car”—was a little like Jackie Onassis’s idea of a house. Bennis had grown up rich and then gotten even richer by her own efforts. She habitually translated “renting a little pied-a-terre in New York for the weekend” as “renting the entire top floor of the Trump Tower, with maid service.” Back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia—where Bennis didn’t live, but did spend most of her time; and where Gregor did live—she had just presented Gregor’s upstairs neighbor Donna Moradanyan (six weeks late) with “a pair of blue earrings” as a reward for “having done such a magnificent job going through labor.” The blue earrings had turned out to be classic cut sapphires surrounded by tiny diamonds, so blatantly expensive the sight of them had made even the parish priest, Father Tibor Kasparian, pale. Old George Telemakian’s grandson Martin, reputed to be the most successful stock trader in the history of Philadelphia, had taken one look at the things and decided he needed a drink.

Philadelphia. That, Gregor knew, was the problem. Cavanaugh Street was in Philadelphia, and Bryn Mawr, where Bennis’s mother had her house, was not very far away. By every discoverable principle of self-preservation and common sense, Bennis ought to be back there, writing another knights-and-unicorns fantasy novel and helping Gregor’s childhood friend, Lida Arkmanian, turn Donnas baby boy into a paradigm of spoiled imperiousness. That she would much rather be here beside him was not the point. Bennis, as Gregor had told Tibor, had no caution. Gregor had asked for her help once, with the case during which he had met her, and she had promptly exceeded his instructions, put herself in the worst possible position, and nearly gotten herself killed. To bring her into a house of evil—and that, after numerous talks with the uncomfortable Mr. Dan Chester, was what Gregor was sure Great Expectations was—was sheer lunacy.