by Jane Haddam
“Demonstration?”
“It was a protest of some kind he was involved in. I’m not really sure of the details. Anyway, she must have gone to get him, and not expected to be long, and then things happened to hold her up. Somehow, with Father Tibor, things always happen to hold you up.”
“I’ve heard.” Christopher grinned. “I get regular reports about Father Tibor and old George Tekemanian and Gregor Demarkian and Donna Moradanyan. Which one are you?”
“I’m none of those,” Lida said. “My name is Lida Arkmanian.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of you,” Christopher said. He stepped back a little and tilted his head to one side. Lida flushed and turned away. He made her—he made her so conscious of the way she looked. A small woman, still relatively thin—although not as thin as she had been—and relatively shapely, in spite of the fact that she’d had five children and—oh, who was she kidding? How old was this man? Forty? Less than forty? Her stomach stuck out. That was why she wore dresses with full skirts with elastic waistbands. After five children, anybody’s stomach would stick out, unless you had one of those operations, the way movie stars did and—what was the matter with her?
“You don’t look at all the way Bennis described you,” Christopher Hannaford was saying. “She makes everyone on Cavanaugh Street sound so foreign.”
“Some of us are foreign,” Lida said. “Father Tibor came from the Soviet Union. When there was a Soviet Union.”
“Getting to be a crazy world, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Lida said. “I read somewhere last week that the Swedish government is going to privatize their post office. Sweden. It’s hard to believe it.”
“We’re probably going to nationalize our parking garages,” Christopher said. “It’s just an itch for change, that’s all. It goes through the world every once in a while. It’s been going through me for the last six months.”
“Has it?” Lida said. “I think I’ve been experiencing something similar. Restlessness. Restlessness but no real need to do anything in particular. Are you the one who’s the poet?”
“I’m a deejay out in California. I write poetry sometimes.”
“You publish your poetry in The New Yorker and in Poetry magazine. Bennis shows them to me sometimes.”
“I’m flattered. I never thought Bennis took my poetry seriously. It doesn’t pay enough to keep me in coffee beans.”
“I wish I could do something like write poetry,” Lida said. “All I seem to be able to do is cook.”
Christopher kicked a toe at Bennis’s closed door. “I suppose I’ll just have to camp out here on the landing and wait. She can’t be all night, can she? And I’ve got a book to read. In fact, I think I’ve got six. I hit one of those huge Barnes and Noble stores right before I got on the plane.”
“Ah,” Lida said, looking toward Bennis’s darkened doorway herself.
It was very odd. She didn’t feel restless anymore. She didn’t feel self-conscious. She was really very relaxed. That strange feeling of being on trial and sure to be found wanting had disappeared. Maybe it was just that Christopher Hannaford didn’t seem to be looking at her anymore. Not looking at her to any purpose, at any rate. Maybe it was just that she finally knew what it was she was supposed to do.
“You can’t stay here,” she told him. “It could be hours before Bennis gets back. Father Tibor is definitely not reliable when it comes to time. And you must be hungry.”
“I’m always hungry,” Christopher said. “Why? Is there a restaurant—”
“There’s a very good restaurant just a couple of blocks away,” Lida said, “and you can go there if you like, of course, but that wasn’t what I meant. I meant you should come across the street with me. That’s where I live, across the street. That big window on the second floor of the building immediately opposite this one is my living room.”
“You can’t see it from here,” Chris said.
“No,” Lida agreed, “but you can see it from the living room windows of all four of the apartments in this building, and what’s more important, you can see all their living room windows from mine.”
“Meaning when Bennis gets in, I’ll be able to see her window light up.”
“Exactly. Of course, we will leave a note on the door before we go, just in case you would rather watch television or read one of your books instead of watch for lights in Bennis’s window.”
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble. I know it’s late, or getting that way—”
“You won’t be any trouble at all. I will be glad to have the company. I have that big town house, and there isn’t anybody to live in it but me. It gets very lonely sometimes.”
“Bennis said something in one of her letters about your giving room to some refugees.”
“Oh, yes,” Lida said, “I gave rooms to refugees. I gave rooms to quite a few refugees. But refugees are just like anybody else. They like to have places of their own. Mine found very nice apartments. We keep in touch. Do you like Armenian food?”
“I don’t know,” Chris said. “I’ve never had any.”
“Well, we’ll try it anyway,” Lida said, and then, suddenly, she was embarrassed again, she didn’t know why. She stuck her hands into the slash pockets of her chinchilla coat and searched around frantically for a pen and a piece of paper. Why she expected to find them, she didn’t know. She never kept anything in the pockets of that coat except a little loose change. She was still in awe of the fact that she owned it.
Chris had come up with his own pen and paper, rooted out of the duffel bag he had brought instead of a suitcase. If Lida hadn’t known he was rich, she’d have taken him for one of those rootless men who always seemed to be thumbing rides just above the exit ramps when she took the superhighway. Still, she was more sophisticated than that. She knew that people who came from old money often dressed like tramps, as a kind of statement. She knew that from Bennis.
Chris finished his note, looked at it thoughtfully, and then nodded to himself. He took his Swiss army knife out of his pocket and opened it to one of the smallest blades.
“This will hold it up,” he said, “and she’ll know it’s really me. I’ve got the ultimate model, you know. It’s even got a knife and fork and spoon.”
“Big enough to eat with?” Lida asked doubtfully.
“Big enough to eat with if you’re Thumbelina,” Chris said.
“Let’s go across the street,” Lida said. “I’ll give you a knife and fork and spoon big enough to eat with if you’re the Green Giant. Or whoever it was that Jack met. I’m not very good at fairy tales.”
“Neither am I.”
Lida felt perfectly at peace. She was silly to chide herself about the amount of cooking she did. She had been cooking since she was a girl. It was an excellent mode of communication with people she only barely knew. It was a completely safe zone of human endeavor. Once she’d started talking about cooking, she hadn’t been afraid of Christopher Hannaford in the least.
Feed them, Lida Arkmanian told herself. If you feed them, the feeding will blot out everything else.
It always had before.
9
VERY MUCH LATER, AT ten twenty-two, when the windchill was down to minus forty degrees and the sidewalks felt like ice, Bennis Hannaford finally got home with Father Tibor Kasparian in tow. She had a couple of other people in tow too. Father Ryan. Father Carmichael. Father Papageorgiou. Reverend Kress. Cold or no cold, Bennis had the window she was sitting next to all the way open. She was puffing frantically on a Benson & Hedges menthol and seriously considering taking to dope.
“We can’t possibly sit in at the mayor’s residence,” Father Carmichael was saying, “because he’s got pit bulls.”
The cab pulled up in front of Holy Trinity Church. Bennis shoved her hands in her pockets, came up with a wad of money, and peeled off a few bills for the cabdriver. The driver took them and asked,
“Are they always like this? Aren’t they supposed to be holy people?�
�
“I don’t know what they’re supposed to be,” Bennis said. “You can keep the change.”
“Very nice.”
“I’m getting out,” Bennis said to the collective clergy. “This is where we’re all going. You guys should get out too.”
The collective clergy didn’t seem to have heard her. Bennis landed on the sidewalk and walked back along the side of Holy Trinity into the little courtyard onto which Father Tibor’s apartment fronted. She had her hands in her hair and her mind on something else. She was thinking she really ought to get out of there and go back home to see if Christopher had arrived.
“Idiots,” she said to the air.
Nothing happened. No priests or ministers rounded the corner from the church. No sounds of vigorous arguing split the night air. They were probably still back there, taking up space in the cab.
Bennis went back out along the side of the church and around to the front again. It was too cold to sit still and she was too exasperated to want to. She found the Fathers and Reverend Kress standing in the little plaza in front of the church steps, stomping their feet in the cold but otherwise oblivious of it. They were discussing tactics for mounting an assault on Independence Hall.
“It would be a purely symbolic gesture,” Father Ryan was saying, “but it would be wonderful symbolism.”
“Gentlemen,” Bennis said.
And then she stopped.
Holy Trinity Church was much closer to the building where Hannah Krekorian lived than Bennis’s own apartment building. It was close enough so that Bennis could now get a good look at the tall man in the coat who seemed to be taking up Hannah Krekorian’s night. They were coming back from somewhere again, which meant they must have been out together in the meantime, but Bennis didn’t bother about that. She got up as close to the edge of the church’s property as she could, so that she had a clear look at the man’s face.
That was when she got a very rude shock.
“Good God,” she said. “Where did Hannah pick him up?”
Father Tibor tapped her on the shoulder. “Bennis? Will you come to the apartment for some coffee? We need to pay you back for all you have done.”
Bennis was still staring at the man. He had taken Hannah’s key now, the way well-brought-up men used to do when she was younger, and he was opening the building’s front door. He hadn’t changed at all since the last time Bennis had seen him. He didn’t have a touch of loss or grief in his face.
“Bennis?” Father Tibor asked again.
“Yes,” Bennis said. “I’m coming. Just a minute. I’ll be right there.”
Paul Hazzard, Bennis thought.
Paul Hazzard with Hannah Krekorian.
Just wait until Gregor Demarkian hears about this.
Part One
Hearts and Flowers…
One
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD BEEN living on Cavanaugh Street for something over two years, and in that time he had developed a routine for what he thought of as his “normal” days. “Normal” days were days when he was not involved in any extracurricular murder case, or traveling, or being hauled off from one place to another to “consult” with people Father Tibor Kasparian thought needed his advice. “Normal” days were normal in spite of the fact that there were fewer of them than of the other kind. It was odd how that worked. Gregor had sworn at enough alarm clocks in his time to believe that he ought to have loosened up and done away with schedules completely, now that he was retired. Instead, he might as well have been back in Virginia, coming in every morning to the Department of Behavioral Sciences. That was what Gregor Demarkian had done his last ten years with the FBI. First he had organized and then he had run the Department of Behavioral Sciences, which had the job of conducting federal searches for interstate serial killers. During the decade he spent in the FBI before that, he had done all sorts of things, none of which he would now describe as “normal.” It was enough to make him wonder about people—and even about himself. His schedule was as rigid now as it had been when he’d held a mandatory staff meeting every Monday through Friday at eight A.M.
These days, what Gregor held every Monday through Saturday at seven A.M. was breakfast at the Ararat Restaurant. He would have held it there on Sunday too, but the Ararat wasn’t open then. The Melajians, who owned it, went to church on Sunday mornings. Some of the people Gregor usually met for breakfast went to church on Sunday mornings too. Father Tibor Kasparian had to, or there would be no liturgy for the rest of Cavanaugh Street to attend. Old George Tekemanian hadn’t missed a Sunday since the day he was married. He had been twenty-three then and was well over eighty now. Even Bennis Hannaford went most weeks, in spite of the fact that she’d been brought up Protestant Episcopal and not in the Armenian church. Only Gregor stayed away consistently. He wasn’t sure why. He had nothing against religion. He had nothing against hearing Tibor preach and listening to the choir sing the kyrie eleison. He even believed in God on and off, depending on how his life was running. When it went badly, he tended to think there was an almighty out there, determined to get him. No, no. It was none of the usual things. It was just that church somehow didn’t seem—right—to him.
The seats are hard, Gregor told himself now. They hurt to sit in for even a little while, and the liturgy goes on for hours and hours, and before it’s half over you want a club chair and a great big mug of old George Tekemanian’s hot buttered rum.
It was ten minutes to seven on the morning of Saturday, February 2, and Gregor was in no danger of being asked to go to church. He had just come out the door and down the stoop steps of the brownstone where he had his apartment—and where old George Tekemanian, Bennis Hannaford, and Donna Moradanyan had theirs. He began walking up the street toward the Ararat. He stopped every once in a while to check out the decorations Donna Moradanyan had put up for Valentine’s Day. If he hadn’t known that Donna went to church regularly, he might have suggested she go. As it was, he thought he ought to suggest something. Donna was definitely off her feed. These decorations—the big silver-and-red heart on their front door; the red and white metallic streamers wrapped around every lamppost; the crepe paper cupid with his crepe paper bow and arrow on the façade of Lida Arkmanian’s place between the first and second floors—these decorations were nice, but they lacked Donna’s usual obsessiveness. It was as if she just hadn’t been able to work up any enthusiasm for hearts and flowers this year. Always before, Donna had loved Valentine’s Day.
Gregor got to the Ararat, tugged at its plate glass front door, and found it locked. Linda Melajian looked up from where she was folding napkins at a table in the center of the room and nodded. Linda Melajian was what the old people on Cavanaugh Street called a success story. She had gone away to an Ivy League college in New England and gotten a wonderful education—but then she’d come back again. Now she helped run the family business and taught English to new immigrants two nights a week in the basement of Holy Trinity Church.
“Sorry,” she said as she turned her keys in the lock and got the door open. “I’m running late this morning. Don’t ever tell my mother you caught me still folding napkins at seven o’clock. Or nearly seven o’clock. What time is it? Hannah Krekorian woke me up at quarter to six, if you can believe it, all hot to place an emergency catering order for a party she wants to give next Friday night. I’d keep an eye out for her today if you don’t want to go. I think she’s going to ask the whole street.”
It was customary in this neighborhood that anybody who gave a party asked the whole street. Gregor shrugged off his overcoat and slid it down the wall-side bench of the window table where he had his breakfast almost every morning. The coat bounced against the glass with the softest of ricochets. Gregor went back to the front desk and took one of the copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer that were kept for sale next to the cash register. Linda would put it on his bill.
“A party next Friday night,” he said, going back to his booth. “With such short notice, will any
body come?”
Linda laughed. “This is Cavanaugh Street in February. They’ll come in costume if they’re asked to. Hannah wants fifteen pounds of loukoumia, can you believe it? Mickey’s going to have to cart the stuff over there in a wagon. In several wagons.”
Loukoumia was the Greek and Armenian name for what the rest of the world called Turkish delight—but in Armenian neighborhoods, and Greek ones, nothing was ever called Turkish anything, unless somebody was trying to start a fight. Gregor opened the paper, saw the headline (DEFICIT GROWING WORSE), and decided to read the comics instead. He hated parties. He especially hated the kind of parties where the hostess felt it necessary to have fifteen pounds of loukoumia.
“Let me see,” Linda said. “A ham and cheese omelet, three eggs. A side of hash browns, a side of breakfast sausage, two orders of rye toast with butter, and a pot of coffee. Did I leave anything out?”
“Could I have it ham and cheese and mushroom?”
“Sure. I didn’t think you ate mushrooms. No cholesterol.”
“Now, Linda.”
“Never mind,” Linda said. “Where’s old George this morning? Where’s Father Tibor? Usually you people descend on me in a gang.”
Gregor shrugged. “Tibor had a late night with that protest of his. Old George has a cold and isn’t supposed to go out. I’m supposed to bring him back some muffins.”
“He isn’t really sick, is he?” Linda asked quickly. “If he’s really sick, I’ll go over there myself with some hav abour. I know he likes erishtah abour better, but chicken soup is better than lamb soup when you’re sick, and old George is getting up there—”
“Old George isn’t getting up there,” Gregor said. “Old George is already there.”
“Right. Don’t worry about the muffins. I’ll put a box together and go myself.”
Doonesbury had a sequence about the deficit. Gregor sighed and closed the paper. “While you’re there,” he said, “bring some of that hav abour to Donna Moradanyan. I don’t know what’s wrong with her lately. She just isn’t behaving like herself.”
