“Probably not.”
“We’ll have to continue this tomorrow evening. I trust you can find your way to your room? Everyone else is asleep.”
I had a feeling that was a very subtle, guilt-inducing dig. “Um, yeah.”
“Good morning, Kitty.” She swept past me, down the corridor and away.
Morning. Sleep. Yeah. What a night.
I was bleary-eyed when I met Ben in front of the Dirksen Senate Office Building at noon.
“What the hell happened to you?” he said by way of greeting.
I peered at him through slitted, sleep-encrusted eyelids and smiled self-indulgently.
“I went out last night.”
He shook his head and took a sip of coffee out of a paper cup. “I don’t want to know.”
I blinked, trying to focus and feeling like I was only now waking up. I knew this was Ben standing in front of me. The figure certainly looked like Ben, and sounded like Ben. But his suit was pressed. His shirt was buttoned. He wore a tie, and his hair lay neatly combed back from his face.
I should have known it would take the U.S. Senate to polish him up.
“What are you staring at?” he said. I could only grin sheepishly.
We went inside and managed to find the room the hearing was being held in with only a couple of wrong turns. We sat in the back of the room, which was nicer than I was expecting: blue carpet, wood-paneled walls, the desks and tables in the front made of an expensive-looking wood. The place had a formal, legal air. The chairs for the audience were padded, which was nice.
The space for observers wasn’t huge, but it was filled. A lot of the people looked like reporters. They held tape recorders or notepads. A couple of TV cameras stood off to the side.
No one noticed us. I considered it one of the perks of radio that I could be well known and completely unrecognizable at the same time. The reporters focused all their attention on the front of the room: the row of senators, eight of them, each with an identifying nameplate, and Dr. Paul Flemming, sitting at a long table facing them.
Ben leaned over. “You met him. What’s he like?”
“I don’t know. He’s kind of cagey. Nervous. Territorial.”
“He looks kind of mousy.”
“Yeah, that too.”
C-SPAN live wasn’t any more exciting than C-SPAN on TV. I paid attention anyway, waiting for McCarthy to burst out of some unassuming senator’s skin and ravage the hearings with Cold War paranoia. No such luck. The proceedings were downright sedate, very Robert’s Rules of Order.
Senator Duke opened the hearings after laying down the rules of how long each senator could speak and when. As Chair, he got to decide such matters.
“Because of the highly irregular nature of the subject which we have convened to discuss, and the secrecy under which the research on this subject has been conducted, the committee has opted to reserve the first two sessions for questioning the gentleman who supervised the research. Dr. Paul Flemming, welcome. You have a statement for us?”
Each witness could enter a prepared statement into the record. They tended to be dry and academic. I expected Flemming’s to be doubly so.
“Five years ago, I received a grant of funds from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research into a number of previously neglected diseases. These are diseases which have for centuries been shrouded in superstition and misunderstanding—”
And so on. He might as well have been talking about cancer or eczema.
The senators’ questions, when they finally started, were benign: what is the Center, where is it located, who authorized funding, from which department was funding derived, what are the goals of the Center. Flemming’s answers were equally benign, repetitions of his opening statement, phrases like the ones he’d given me: the Center strives to further the boundaries of knowledge in theoretical biological research. He never even used the words vampire or lycanthrope. I squirmed, wondering when someone was going to mention the elephant in the room.
Senator Duke granted my wish.
“Dr. Flemming, I want to hear about your vampires.”
Dead silence answered him. Not a pen scratched in the entire room. I leaned forward, waiting to hear what he’d say.