by Jane Haddam
“No.”
“He came here, and he sat in his wheelchair, and all the time I am thinking he has seven children, and maybe none of them are what he is. And he has a wife, who is very sick, and she spends her life doing good works. This I see in the paper all the time, too. He is—intent about his wife. And he comes here and talks to me, and he makes me an offer. A very strange offer. He takes out his briefcase and he opens it up, and inside he has money. One hundred thousand dollars in money. He counts it out for me, and then he asks me a favor, and he says if I do this favor the church can have this money.”
“A hundred thousand dollars in cash?” This wasn’t ink. It was Krazy Glue.
But Tibor was nodding. “Yes, Gregor. A hundred thousand dollars in cash. With money like this—there is a lot going on in Armenia now. The Turks. The Soviets, who are worse than the Turks. The problems caused by the earthquake. The people—”
“Father,” Gregor said, “what did Robert Hannaford want you to do for that money?”
Tibor smiled. “You’re thinking he wanted me to commit a murder?”
“Or something worse.”
Tibor’s smile got broader. It made Gregor realize he’d lost a lot of teeth.
“Well, Gregor,” he said, “I will tell you. He didn’t want anything from me. He wanted something from you.”
TWO
1
ON THE CORNER WHERE the Halakmanian grocery used to be, there was now a gift shop—a great big plate-glass—windowed, tinsel-trimmed shop full of colored glass Christmas ornaments and flower vases made of seashells. Gregor didn’t know if he liked it or not. If he’d still been living in Washington, the question wouldn’t have been worth asking. In a sophisticated city among sophisticated people, it was obligatory to deplore the “commerciality” of Christmas. Sweet little girl angels with feathery wings, bright tinfoil stars, tree lights that winked and blinked like the neon signs of roadside motels: Gregor could hear Mrs. Senator Thomaston now, going on and on about it in her hoarse society caw, as if putting blinking lights on Christmas trees was tantamount to letting a four year old attack the Sistine ceiling with bubble gum. Mrs. Senator Thomaston had been Marianna Winford before she married, and what she liked in Christmas ornaments were little mud-colored figurines made by peasant women in Honduras.
What the children liked was flash and dazzle, the flash and dazzle of blinking lights especially. There was a crowd of them watching from the sidewalk, pressing their faces to the glass like street urchins in a Dickens novel. Even the ones in Ralph Lauren Polo had lost their studied jadedness. In fact, all of Cavanaugh Street had lost its studied jadedness. Back in May, when Gregor first moved into his apartment, the neighborhood had seemed not only newly rich but newly nervous. The triple deckers had been turned into private houses or renovated beyond recognition into what their new owners insisted on calling “flats.” The cars in the cramped garages were made in Germany and various shades of maroon and grey. The women had switched their allegiances from Sears to Saks. Cavanaugh Street had been a theater of grinding poverty in the thirties, a prison of lower-middle-class anxiety in the fifties. This latest change should have been a happy one. Instead, the people Gregor met, even the ones he had known for years, lived behind defensiveness and cynicism, as jumpy and frightened as guests at a Washington cocktail party.
Maybe that was why he had made no effort to develop a social life. Maybe he had found no one here he wanted to socialize with. On the other hand, “socializing” had never been one of his strong suits. While he’d had Elizabeth, she’d been enough. Once she was gone, he’d found it hard to connect with other people.
He climbed the five stone steps to the door of the small house where he had his apartment and searched through his pockets for his key. It was after five and getting dark. He could feel a wet sting against his hands that was the first of this winter’s snow. He was beginning to regret his months of coldness. With the coming of the season, Cavanaugh Street had been transformed. He’d missed Christmas, he realized—not Christmas as it was celebrated in Washington and New York, but real Christmas with children and grandmothers and too much food, with colored lights strung in windows and ribboned wreaths hanging on doors. That, Cavanaugh Street had not lost.
He got the door open—he’d had so much trouble with it because it hadn’t been locked in the first place—and as he swung into the vestibule he heard George Tekamanian fumbling at the first-floor apartment door. Gregor shut the outer door against the wind and waited. George was quick for eighty-six, but he was still eighty-six. And just now, Gregor wanted to talk to someone. Badly.
The door scraped, screeched, popped. George stuck his tiny grey head into the vestibule, looking for all the world like a geriatric punk.
“Krekor,” he said, using the Armenian pronunciation, the way all the old people did. “I thought it was you. Come in, come in. I have the rum punch, yes?”
“Does your doctor let you drink rum punch?”
“If it was up to my doctor, I’d live on grass.” George swung the door wide and grinned. “Hot rum punch,” he promised. “Real butter. Cholesterol city.”
Gregor shook his shoes off on the vestibule carpet and followed George into the apartment—the Impossible Apartment, he thought of it, because the first time he’d seen it he’d thought he was hallucinating. George’s grandson Martin had made a killing in the stock market—six or seven killings, from the look of it—and since George had adamantly refused to leave Cavanaugh Street for the Main Line, Martin had decided to bring the Main Line to George. George’s apartment had been gutted and remodeled, its rooms made larger and airier, its soft plywood floors replaced with polished oak, its plain walls adorned with plaster moldings. In its present incarnation, it could have been a cover for Metropolitan Home, or a page from one of those catalogs for Yuppies Who Have Everything. Martin had bought George a “total entertainment center” in a walnut cabinet, complete with forty-inch TV and compact disc player. There was also an electric pencil sharpener, an electric waffle maker, an electric yogurt maker, a food processor that did nothing but roll meatballs and a set of sterling silver swizzle sticks in the shape of miniature golf clubs. There were also paintings, but both Gregor and George tried to ignore those. Martin had an unfortunate passion for postmodern art.
The rum punch was in a Baccarat crystal bowl surrounded by half a dozen matching cups—$8,000 worth of glass. The bowl and cups were sitting on a sterling silver serving tray—another $2,000. The tray rested on a butler’s table that looked like a museum quality-antique—with a price tag Gregor couldn’t begin to guess at.
He dropped into a needlepoint-embroidered wing chair. The fire was going, meaning Martin and his wife had been here not long before. The five-pound bag of sugar and the Hostess Twinkies were out, meaning they had been gone long enough for George to get comfortable. Sometimes Gregor wondered why he spent so much time in George’s apartment. It might be the pleasure of George’s company—which was considerable. It might also be envy.
George poured a cup of punch, dropped an immense dab of butter into it, and passed it over to Gregor.
“So,” he said, “you went over to see Father Tibor. How was he?”
Gregor knew better than to think George wanted a report on Tibor’s health. “He wasn’t what I expected,” he said. “I thought—”
“You’d find old Karpakian?”
Gregor smiled. Old Karpakian had been the priest at Holy Trinity while he was growing up—and the smelliest, most malicious old man Gregor had ever known. Armenians are respectful of their priests. Armenia was, after all, the first country to adopt Christianity as a state religion. Karpakian had been that anomaly of anomalies, a priest who was genuinely and universally hated.
Suddenly, Gregor had a flash, a memory that hadn’t surfaced in God only knew how many years. And it was just as funny now as its reality had been on V-E Day.
“Oh, God,” he said, starting to laugh. “George. Do you remember the donkey?”
“Of course I remember the donkey,” George said. “I—” He sat forward in his seat and tried to frown. “Krekor. The donkey. Was that you?”
“Me and Lida and Howard Kashinian,” Gregor said. He was laughing so hard he was choking. “Lida and I weren’t supposed to play with Howard Kashinian, but we needed him. He knew where to find the donkey. And he was the one with the criminal mind.”
“But Krekor—”
“Well, old Karpakian deserved it,” Gregor said. “The day before we’d had this church school class, preparation for something, I don’t remember what. And Lida’s sister Mary had a cold. She was sick as a dog and her mother had given her something for it that kept putting her to sleep. So she fell asleep at her desk and Karpakian came thundering down on her with a ruler and practically broke her fingers. And Lida said—”
“Krekor, old Karpakian may have deserved it, but I didn’t deserve to spend my Sunday afternoon getting a donkey off the second floor of a church. Never mind out of that little room.”
“He certainly knew what the little room was for,” Gregor said. “That’s the first thing he did when we got him in there.”
George sighed. “Drink your drink, Krekor. And try to remember I’m an old man. I don’t want to die without knowing how it was done.”
Gregor took a long pull on his rum punch. “Oh, well,” he said. “Tibor. I suppose I expected an illiterate peasant. I got a scholar. It’s unusual.”
George hesitated, as if he wanted to take up the matter of the donkey again. Then he said, “Tibor is unusual. When they sent him we got a report from the bishops. You know how that is?”
“I didn’t know they let old wrecks like you on the parish council,” Gregor said.
“The parish council is all old wrecks like me,” George said. “The young men want to give the church gold-plated icon stands. There was a wife, you know.”
“I wondered about that. I thought we liked them married.”
“We do. Tibor’s wife was just as crazy as he is, from what we hear. Crazy in a good way. She died in prison in the Soviet Union.”
“That’s interesting. What was she in prison for?”
“We don’t know. I think this man may be a saint, Krekor. A real one, not the plasterboard kind they like to tell us about in church.”
“I find it hard to believe you don’t know all about him,” Gregor said. “Everybody always knows everything about everybody around here. They used to say Lida’s mother knew who was going to have a baby before they even conceived.”
“Father Tibor,” George said, “talks a lot. But not about himself.”
“What does he talk about?”
“Many things. What did he talk about with you?”
Gregor shot the old man the look he used to give subordinates who’d asked questions they’d no right to the answers to—and then stopped himself. Under the circumstances, that was a particularly stupid reflex. He wanted to talk to George, and not only because he was lonely—although he’d come down to this apartment for that reason alone often enough. George was old and basically uneducated, but he would have made a better agent than most of the men Gregor had trained. Come to think of it, Father Tibor would have, too. They were both perfect straight men, the kind who knew when and how to get creative.
Gregor held his now-empty cup in the air, got an affirmative nod from George, and passed it over. He hated to admit it, but since he’d started thinking about Robert Hannaford, he’d been feeling better. It was like eating a really big dinner after being on a diet for months. He felt alert, awake, energized. He felt—
George handed him a cup full of rum punch. “So,” he said, “are you going to tell me or aren’t you going to tell me?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you,” Gregor said. “I just don’t know if it will mean much.”
“It wasn’t just a lecture on how you should go out and do more?”
“No.” Gregor cast around for a way to get into it, and came up with the same one Tibor had. Of course. “Do you know a man named Robert Hannaford?” he asked.
“The robber baron?” George brightened.
“The great-grandson of the robber baron,” Gregor said. “The one who’s alive now.”
George frowned. “Robert Hannaford can’t have a great-grandson,” he said. “He’s only—forty something. I read it in the paper.”
“Forty something?”
“In The Inquirer,” George said.
“This Robert Hannaford who was in The Inquirer,” Gregor said, “was he in a wheelchair?”
“Oh, no. He’d just won—a tennis championship, I think. It was in the paper, Krekor. I read it.”
Gregor thought it over. “That’s probably the son,” he said finally. “The son of the Robert Hannaford who came to see Father Tibor. Tibor said he, this Robert Hannaford, had seven children—”
“Then he’s not my Robert Hannaford,” George said. “They called this one an eligible bachelor. You know what that means. Not married and making whoopie with every girl he meets.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “But a robber baron?”
“A corporate raider,” George said helpfully.
“Ah,” Gregor said. “This is getting interesting. Seven children, one of them a—robber baron. One of them a famous novelist—”
“Bennis Hannaford,” George said, excited. “Father Tibor gave me her books. She’s very good, Krekor. Very exciting.”
“Does everybody around here read those things?” Gregor asked. It was remarkable what cultural climate could do. He had no interest whatsoever in fantasy fiction, or in fiction of any kind, but he was getting the urge to read Bennis Hannaford’s books. He took another sip from his cup. “Mr. Hannaford asked Father Tibor to get in touch with me. He wants me to go out to his house and have dinner there on Christmas Eve.”
“That was it? Just that you should have dinner there?”
“That was it for the request. He gave Father Tibor his card, and Father Tibor gave the card to me. I’m supposed to make a phone call. But Tibor said Hannaford insisted, and he stressed the ‘insisted,’ that there was nothing more to it but one dinner on the Main Line.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re famous,” George said, repeating the inaccuracy that was apparently believed by every resident of Cavanaugh Street. “Maybe he wants to impress his friends by bringing you out to dinner.”
“Maybe.”
George threw up his hands. “So what is it? It has to be something. What did he do, threaten Tibor with a gun?”
Gregor sat back, stretched out his legs, and told George all about the briefcase, the money, and the deal. His powers of narration seemed to have increased since he left the FBI. He’d never claimed quite that degree of attention from his listeners before.
By the time Gregor was finished, George was up on his feet and pacing—something, given arthritis and the general creakiness of old age, he never did. “But Gregor,” he said. “That’s crazy. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s even crazier than you think it is,” Gregor said.
“I don’t see how it could be. It’s crazy enough to start.”
Gregor held up his glass and let George take it from him. He wasn’t in need of another drink, but watching George pace that way, in such obvious pain, made him feel terrible.
“Listen,” he said. “If Robert Hannaford had been a self-made man, I might have looked at this thing and decided it was crazy but not impossible. But Robert Hannaford is not a self-made man. Do you see what I mean?”
“No,” George said.
“Self-made men sometimes think anything can be solved by money. Their whole lives have been motivated by money. A man I knew, a congressman, told me once it was true that anyone can get rich in America—as long as that was all he wanted to do. That’s the kind of commitment it takes, to be Carl Icahn, say. But the hereditary rich are different. They have money.”
“So?”
“So they learn early that t
here are a hundred better ways of getting what they want than shelling out cash. They have family connections—in Washington, in New York, in government and industry and the security services. If Hannaford wants me out at Engine House for Christmas Eve dinner, why not just call somebody who knows somebody at the Bureau? The Bureau knows where to find me. What’s more, anybody with any sense has to realize I owe those people.”
George nodded. “All right. So why?”
“My considered judgment?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Gossip,” Gregor said definitely. “Whatever’s going on with Robert Hannaford has to be sensitive enough so that he doesn’t want any gossip. Which means it’s probably actionable. You know what I’d do, if this had happened when I was still working?”
“Send Mr. J. Edgar Hoover after them?”
“J. Edgar,” Gregor said, “is blessedly dead. Blessedly for the rest of us, I mean. No, what I’d have done is go straight to the senator I thought I could trust most. And I do mean straight.”
George had settled himself in his chair again. The part of him moving now was his head. It was going back and forth like a door swinging on its hinge in a stiff wind. “Krekor, you’re talking as if this is about spies.”
“Spies is one of the things that might explain it. I can think of two others.”
“What?”
“That one of his children is involved in a plot to kill the president. Or that one of his children is involved in major fraud.”
This time it was George who took a long pull on his drink. He looked like he thought he needed it. “Krekor, in your voice I can hear it. You don’t believe any of those things. I don’t believe any of those things, either. They sound like science fiction. Miss Hannaford’s unicorns are for me more real.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “that sort of thing is real enough for me. I’ve spent most of my life living with it in one way or another. What bothers me is that I don’t think any of it is real in this case.”
“Why not?”
