And no need to wait for opportunity, no need to be clever, because she had no intention of trying to escape. Not this time. She was tired, so tired, of playing the role of Ministering Angel while something in her writhed over questions she couldn’t answer, and the men she’d killed tormented her nights with their pleading. Now there would be an end to that, and the Almighty had mercifully granted her the privilege of a worthy end!
When he had fallen asleep, worn out with drink and with talk, she took a syringe from the nurse’s case that she kept always with her at night in case of an emergency, and she gave Thomas a single dose of a drug that was swift and sure. He made no sound, and he did not wake; in ten minutes he was quite dead, and past all hope of heroic measures. She moved him to the floor, long enough to close the couch that served them for a bed, and then she bent and maneuvered him onto it again — she had not spent all these years lifting and turning patients for nothing. She was strong enough, even for a man of his bulk, gone limp in death. She dressed him as he’d been dressed for the banquet, loosening the necktie, making it look as if he’d just stretched out there to take a nap. He often slept in his office, and no one would be surprised that he’d done so after the celebration.
And then! Ah, the wicked nurse, her sexual advances spurned by the upright moral Head of Household even in his slightly tipsy state, fell upon him and repaid his years of kindness with murder most foul! Out of nothing more than her wounded pride… She could easily imagine the newslines and the threedy features… CRIME OF PASSION! VINDICTIVE NURSE CRAZED WITH LUST AND MADDENED BY REJECTION, SLAYS TOP DOG LINGOE! It would be a seven days wonder. Maybe eight days. Maybe, since it was Thomas Blair Chornyak, much longer. It should buy the women many months, even if some other of the men had begun to notice what was happening, because the transfer of power for such an empire as the Lines constituted could not be a simple matter.
She had never been so calm, or so content. She was sorry that she would have to leave Nazareth Chornyak… dear Nazareth. But if Nazareth had known of this, she would have been grateful to have Michaela do for her what she could not do herself. It was a fitting gift to leave for her.
Michaela took her nurse’s case and went to her own room and her own bed; she fell asleep at once and slept without a single dream to disturb her rest. And she didn’t bother to undress. When they came for her in the morning, as they would the moment they saw the empty syringe beside the corpse, she would already be dressed to welcome them.
Chapter Twenty-four
It was a time when there was no splendor… do you understand? It was a time when the seamless fabric of reality had been subjected to an artificial process: dividing it up into dull little parts, each one drearier than the one before. And uniformly dreary, getting drearier and drearier by a man-made rule. As if you drew lines in the air, you perceive, and then devoted your life to behaving as if those air-territories bounded by your lines were real. It was a reality from which all joy, all glory, all radiance, had been systematically excluded. And it was from that reality, from that linguistic construct, that the women of Chornyak Barren House were attempting to extrapolate. It couldn’t be done, of course. You cannot weave truth on a loom of lies.
Aquina kept saying that we had to decide what to DO… well, imagine a person standing on a block of ice, planning and planning and planning. Planning ways to get about on the ice, ways to decorate it, ways to divide it up, ways to cope with all the possible knowns and givens of a block of ice. That would be a busy person, provident and industrious and independent and admirable, isn’t that so? Except that when the ice melts, none of that is any use at all.
We women had set a flame upon the ice, and it was inevitable that the ice would melt. In such a time, having never known anything but life upon the ice, you cannot do; in such a time, you can only be.
I would have explained, if I had known how; it wasn’t that I was trying to keep anything secret. It hurt me that I didn’t know how to explain. I would wake up in the morning and think, perhaps this will be the day when the words that would explain are given to me; but it never happened. I grew to be very very old, and it never did happen.
The meeting was an unusual one, in every way. Every place at the table was filled, and it had been necessary to bring in extra chairs to seat the overflow that couldn’t be fit at the table proper. Not only were the full complement of men from Chornyak Household there, but a delegation of three senior men and two junior from each of the other twelve Lines, attending in person. Ordinarily this outside representation would have been handled by computer conference to avoid the inconvenience and overcrowding… And looking at it now, seeing everyone jammed in elbow to elbow at the table, those in the chairs lining the walls already uncomfortable before the meeting even began, James Nathan wondered if he had made a mistake when he chose this alternative.
At his elbow, David Chornyak was wondering the same thing, and he and James Nathan stared at each other in quick consternation, and then looked quickly away. It was too late now, whether it had been an error or not; they were all here, and the best thing to do was get on with the business of the day as swiftly as possible.
“Go on, Jim,” said David under his breath. “Let’s get this over with.”
James Nathan nodded, and pressed the small stud beneath the table. He disliked the sound of the thing… his grandfather Paul John’s choice of a falling minor third would not have been his choice. But the tones did stop the muttering and get everyone turned to face him, which was their function.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” James Nathan began, “and my thanks to all of you for coming here in person. I know you’re not particularly comfortable, and I regret that. I’m afraid we’ve never had any need for conference facilities here at Chornyak Household.”
Nigel Shawnessey, whose Household in Switzerland did have conference facilities, cleared his throat elaborately and gave the ceiling a significant glance. He considered this a ridiculous imposition, carried out only as a vehicle for a display of dominance. And wholly unnecessary. Nobody had ever challenged Chornyak House for the position of Head of the Lines, and so long as the Chornyaks continued to produce men of the traditional caliber nobody ever would.
James Nathan had not missed the bit of body-parl, and he knew what it meant, but he didn’t agree. Filling the shoes of Thomas Blair Chornyak had not been easy; stepping into them at forty-six had come perilously close to being beyond his abilities. Nobody had ever anticipated such a thing, with his father in robust health and only just turned seventy… the Chornyak men filled their posts well into their eighties ordinarily, and sometimes longer than that.
There had been nothing ordinary about having a Head murdered by a madwoman. And the effort of assuming Thomas Blair’s role, so suddenly and without any of the usual mechanisms of transition, had brought painfully home to James Nathan the need to keep a tight rein on the Lines. Which was, even as he thought it, so awkward and unfelicitous a phrase that it made him smile. A tight rein on the Lines, indeed… thank God he hadn’t said that aloud! And he had been adamant about this meeting — under no circumstances would he have called it at Shawnessey Household, and found himself obliged to run the meeting while Nigel Shawnessey played host, with all the intricate burdens that would have laid upon the Chornyak men as guests. Thomas would have done it that way, and never given it a thought, but he was not Thomas, and he knew it. Oh no… he might be young, and he might have tumbled into the Headship a bit abruptly, but he was not stupid.