by Jane Haddam
“I’m just trying to look out for somebody I care about,” Bennis said sullenly.
“You’re just trying to meddle,” Gregor told her, “and I won’t have it. Now, order yourself some breakfast. Here comes Father Tibor with a gleam in his eye.”
Bennis poured herself more coffee and sank farther down onto the bench. “I think you’re being completely unreasonable,” she said. “You can’t let people go running off to cut their own throats. It’s not good for them.”
It was Gregor Demarkian’s opinion that most of the trouble in this world had been caused by people who thought they knew what was good for other people better than the other people themselves, but that was an argument he and Bennis had had several times, and he wasn’t going to get into it again.
Instead, he moved closer to the window along his bench and let Father Tibor Kasparian slide in beside him.
“It’s a wonderful morning,” Father Tibor said. “Father Ryan and Father Carmichael have come up with a plan for decisive political action, and it is not completely stupid.”
Two
1
THERE WAS A FUNERAL being set up at Holy Trinity Church when Gregor passed it, going home alone after a breakfast that had been too long and composed of too much food. He had Bennis Hannaford’s stack of computer papers under his arm. Bennis had errands to do in downtown Philadelphia and no particular interest in keeping the information, or the paper it was printed on. “After all,” she said through a haze of cigarette smoke, “I got it for you. I thought you’d be interested. Things have been… quiet around here lately.” It was certainly true that things had been quiet around here lately. The world of extracurricular murders seemed to be going through a recession. Gregor still wasn’t sure he wanted Bennis thrusting four-year-old unsolved cases under his nose and insisting he do something about them—and why? Just because Hannah Krekorian had had dinner with a man who had once been accused of the crime? Gregor knew what Bennis was hinting at, but he thought it was absurd. Hannah Krekorian was a stocky, stodgy middle-aged woman. She was almost old. She was no more interested in romance, or capable of inspiring it, than Gregor was interested in the Super Bowl chances of the Philadelphia Eagles. Or was it the Flyers? Bennis and Donna had season tickets to both the football and the hockey games, but Gregor could never remember which team played which.
Setting up for an Armenian funeral was a complicated thing. The Armenian funeral liturgy was a complicated thing. Gregor wondered if Tibor would read it in Armenian, to limit the amount the family could understand. The priest who had read the funeral liturgy for Gregor’s wife, Elizabeth, had insisted on reading it in English. Gregor had been ready to kill him and worse well before they actually got to the grave. That was what the problem was with all this “celebrating your ethnic heritage” stuff. Everybody ran around singing the praises of ethnicity, talking about how rich and wonderful it made their lives to be part of an ancient culture. They forgot that that culture had content. In the case of the Armenian funeral liturgy, that content was sin. There he was, standing at the edge of a heaped mound of white roses that covered what was left of his wife, listening to a priest who had known neither of them pray for her release from her iniquities. Iniquities, for God’s sake. Elizabeth. It hadn’t made Gregor feel the least bit better when friends came up to him afterward and said that the Greek service was really much worse. He may have been raised in an ethnic neighborhood by a mother who never shed her immigrant’s accent, but he was thoroughly an American in all the most important ways. He thought there was something faintly unpatriotic, and possibly even treasonous, about sin.
Gregor went on past the church—Tibor would be in there soon, making sure he had everything he needed; there was no point to Gregor’s calling in at the rectory for the rest of the day—and to the steep stoop of his own brownstone. He looked at the single large heart fastened there and shook his head. He wished he understood women. He wished he understood rabbits. He had been praised a million times for the insight he had into the minds of murderers. He thought he did pretty well at figuring out who would do a murder and why and how and what kind. He did better than pretty well when the murderer was a John Wayne Gacy or a Son of Sam. What he didn’t understand were ordinary people living ordinary lives. They couldn’t all be like Bennis. They couldn’t all be erratic and pigheaded. Some of them had to make sense.
He went up the steps to the front door, let himself into the foyer—the front door was unlocked; the front door was always unlocked; it didn’t matter what he did or what he said—and stopped outside old George Tekemanian’s apartment. George’s lights were on. A low murmur of voices was drifting into the foyer, punctuated spasmodically by sudden bursts of laughter. Gregor knocked and said, “George? It’s Gregor Demarkian.”
There was a sound of footsteps moving rapidly over hardwood—definitely not old George’s footsteps; George was sure on his feet even at eighty-odd, but he hadn’t been that fast in twenty years—and Donna Moradanyan stuck her head into the hall.
“Oh, Gregor,” she said. “Come on in. We’re just playing with George’s new toy.”
“My grandson Martin gave it to me,” George said from deep inside his apartment. “It is to compensate me for the diet his wife has put me on because I am sick. Come in, Krekor. This is a wonderful thing.”
“It is a wonderful thing.” Donna stepped back to let Gregor past. She was a young woman in her twenties, tall and blond and strapping-healthy. Donna reminded Gregor of the young women he had known in the Midwest when he was first working for the FBI, young women who played tennis and touch football and swam laps and still didn’t have a place to put all their energy. Gregor knew both of Donna’s parents. They were younger than he was by fifteen years, but they had grown up on Cavanaugh Street. Donna’s mother was a small, round woman in the classic Armenian mold. As a young woman she had been dark and beautiful. As a middle-aged mother she had run to the kind of weight called “pleasingly plump.” Donna’s father was very tall, like Gregor himself, but he was dark and Middle-Eastern enough to play the ethnic friend in a new wave James Bond movie. Where Donna had gotten the blond hair and blue eyes was anybody’s guess.
Gregor went into George’s foyer, dumped the stack of computer paper on the foyer table, and shrugged off his coat. The table was a John Esterman reproduction. It must have set George’s grandson Martin back a good three thousand dollars. Gregor tried not to think about how much money Martin spent on George’s apartment. What Martin had wanted to do was move George out to the Main Line, where Martin lived with his wife and George’s two greatgrandchildren in a six-thousand-square-foot house with “grounds.” Martin had done extremely well in the bond market. But George wasn’t interested in moving. In fact, George was adamant about not moving. Martin had done the next best thing, to his own mind, and brought the Main Line to George. He’d bought this building, turned it into floor-through condominiums, gutted this ground floor apartment for George, and reconstructed the place to be what he called “pleasant.” He’d bought George a lot of expensive furniture. He’d arranged for a cleaning woman to come in twice a week. George had balked at the idea of someone coming in every day to cook, so Martin had given that up. Instead, he’d started to give his grandfather presents, gadgets, grown-up toys. Gregor thought Martin sat down in front of the Sharper Image catalogue once a month and picked the most ridiculous and most ridiculously expensive thing.
Of course, what Martin had done for George was not all that unusual on Cavanaugh Street. In a way, it was the entire explanation for Cavanaugh Street. All these older women with their town houses and their Bermuda vacations and their fur coats—it wasn’t their money that was paying for it, or the money their husbands had left either. In Gregor’s generation, only one or two people, including Gregor himself, had managed to do better than low average in a financial sense. Lida and Hannah and all the rest of them had brought their children up on Cavanaugh Street when Cavanaugh Street was not much better than a slum. They h
ad watched their husbands die of early heart attacks from working three jobs to put the children through college. They had lived on rice and beans to make sure they could send money enough for meat to their precious Karens and Stephens and Lisas and Alexanders, away at law and medical school and in need of protein to keep up their strength. It was the Karens and Stephens and Lisas and Alexanders who had made good. And paid off. Cavanaugh Street was a tribute to American upward mobility and Armenian family sense.
Old George was sitting in the overstuffed chair next to his fireplace, surrounded by what seemed to be a pile of shiny socks. On the table next to his right arm was a pile of food that looked like nothing Angela Tekemanian had ever prescribed for a diet for anyone. Angela had been a nutritionist before she went to law school. She tended to favor the low fat and the aggressively green. Gregor supposed the food on the table had come from Linda Melajian and Ararat. Old George had a plate of boerag on his lap. The socks had been made into balls and then—what? What had happened to those socks? And how many pairs of socks did old George Tekemanian own?
“Come in,” George said again. “Come in, come in. You must see this thing. And you must eat some food.”
“Martin and Angela are due in at six o’clock,” Donna told him. “George doesn’t want to be caught with the loot. He says Angela is beginning to get very, very sticky.”
“Angela is always sticky,” George said. “But she means well. This last time, though, Krekor, she talked for thirty-five minutes about arteriosclerosis. I tried to tell her if I don’t have it now, I’m not going to get it, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Angela never really listens to anybody,” Donna said.
“Watch what I do to these socks, Krekor. It is a wonderful thing.”
George reached to the table and took a pair of socks from behind a tall box of patlijanov dolma. The socks were rolled into a ball and not shiny at all. He put his plate of boerag back on the table and replaced it with what looked like a small white plastic box. Then he held the socks in the air and grinned.
“Here,” he said. “Observe.”
Gregor tried to observe. The socks went into the box. The socks came out of the box. The socks were turned over and went half into the box. Gregor couldn’t follow it. Suddenly old George was sitting there with his hands still and the box closed, and the socks were shiny.
Gregor walked over, took the socks out of old George’s hands, and held them in the air. They seemed to be coated in clear plastic.
“What is this?” he asked. “What did you do to them?”
“They’re vacuum sealed,” Donna Moradanyan said.
“It was Angela’s idea this time,” old George said. “With this device, you can do many wonderful things. You can freeze vegetables absolutely fresh. You can keep chicken without its skin in the freezer for months, without having to worry about freezer burn. You can have healthy food all the time, and never have to worry about going off your diet.”
“We’ve been vacuum-sealing George’s sock collection all morning,” Donna said. “Next we’re going to start on his ties.”
Old George put the newly-shiny socks on the pile and the vacuum-sealer device back on the table. He grabbed a couple of dolma out of the large box and started to eat.
“We will keep the ties for when Tommy gets home,” old George said. “Also the loukoumia. Tommy has gone to play group at the church school, Krekor. He likes it very much.”
Tommy was Donna Moradanyan’s very small son—three years old now, Gregor thought, though he had to work at it to remember. Tommy had been born the first year Gregor had been back on Cavanaugh Street. That much he was sure of.
“Play group,” Gregor said. “That ought to be interesting. I can see Tommy now, marching up to old Mrs. Hogrogian and saying ‘I’m not particularly happy with these weather conditions we’re having today, are you?’ ”
“Tcha. That’s Father Tibor’s fault,” old George said. “Reading the child Aristotle before he was even out of diapers.”
“He read the Aristotle in Greek,” Donna said, looking out the window to Cavanaugh Street. “I don’t think Tommy understood a word of it. He just liked sitting on Father Tibor’s lap.”
“Aristotle he may have read in Greek, but the big art book he read in English and also the story about King Arthur and the knights.” Old George shook his head. “He is a very bright child. Tommy. You can’t blame him. Tibor used the words and Tommy learned the words and that was that.”
“I don’t think that’s something Tommy ought to be blamed for,” Gregor said seriously. “All you hear about these days is children who can’t read and teenagers who don’t know how to say anything but ‘like’ and ‘man’ and ‘huh’ and ‘duh.’ I think it’s a good thing Tommy is getting a good vocabulary.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t a good thing in the long run,” old George said.
“I think it’s a good thing even in the short run,” Gregor said.
Donna was still looking out old George’s front window. She didn’t seem to be listening to them.
“Donna?” Gregor asked.
Donna started. “Oh,” she said. “Yes. Excuse me. I must have been daydreaming.”
“You do a lot of daydreaming lately,” old George said, sounding sharp.
“I did a lot of daydreaming as a child too,” Donna told him. “Well. I’d better get upstairs. I’ve got work to do before I go to pick up Tommy. We’ll come in right after lunch if it’s all right with you, George.”
“You come in for lunch,” George said. “I have still got very much food.”
“Yes. Well. Maybe we will. I’ll see you two later, okay?”
Donna gave them both a little tight smile and retreated into George’s foyer. Gregor watched her extract her parka from under his coat and head for the door. She must have stopped in to see George after dropping Tommy at play group. Was she really desperately unhappy, or was Gregor imagining things? It was at times like this that he missed his wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth would have known how to read Donna Moradanyan. She had even known how to read J. Edgar Hoover. Gregor had relied on her for everything, and then she had died.
There was a crock of tutumov rechel next to George’s white plastic box. Gregor stuck a finger in it, came up with a little blob of jelly, and stuck it in his mouth. Linda Melajian’s tutumov rechel was always so sweet.
“All right,” Gregor said. “So something is wrong with Donna Moradanyan, and nobody wants to tell me what. That’s par for the course. Nobody tells me anything.”
“It is not a question of nobody wants to tell you, Krekor. It is a question of you have not asked.”
“I’m asking now,” Gregor pointed out.
Old George nodded. “I know that, Krekor. I am thinking of how to go about it so that you understand. You see, Tommy is going to play group now, every day for two hours in the morning.”
“So? Don’t tell me Donna is feeling old and wishing he’d always be a baby? She’s got more sense than that.”
“Donna is not wishing he would always be a baby, Krekor. It is Tommy we are concerned with here, not Donna. When Tommy goes to play group, he meets all kinds of children, more than he knew before.”
“So?” Gregor asked again.
“So,” old George said, “he is an intelligent child. He takes after, I think, his mother. He goes to play group and he notices that almost all the other children there, they have fathers. Most of them, they have fathers to come home to. Some of them, they have fathers who are divorced, they have to go somewhere to visit. But almost all of them, Krekor, have fathers.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “I take it this is upsetting him?”
“You could put it that way,” old George said.
“Well, what about Peter? I know he’s not very responsible, but he is the boy’s father and he doesn’t live that far away. Hadn’t he got a job in New York last time we heard?”
Peter Desarian was the young man who had gotten Donna Moradanyan pre
gnant and disappeared—except not quite, because Gregor had gone off to find him. To say that Peter Desarian was “irresponsible” was a little like saying that Adolf Hitler had had something against the Jews. Old George Tekemanian had gone very stiff at the mere mention of the young man’s name.
“If we have heard that Peter is having a job in New York,” he said, “it is on jungle drums, Krekor. Peter does not write.”
“Does Donna want him to?”
“No, Donna does not want him to. But this does not solve our problem now. There was an incident, you see. With Tommy.”
“What kind of incident?”
“It was back in November, when you were away at that conference. It happened one afternoon at Lida Arkmanian’s house.”
“What incident?” Gregor insisted.
“It happened because of nothing,” old George went on serenely. “It was a Saturday afternoon and we were all sitting around in Lida’s television room, watching the Walt Disney Pinocchio on a tape. We were eating too, Krekor, you know what Lida’s house is like, the television room is just off the kitchen to make it easier to get snacks—”
“George.”
“Yes. Krekor. You see, Tommy got hysterical.”
“What do you mean, hysterical?”
“Hysterical,” George repeated. “He burst into tears and leapt into Donna’s arms and started screaming and crying and ranting and raving—like a crazy person, Krekor, or like a tantrum, and then, when Donna and Lida tried to calm him down, when they rocked him and soothed him, he started asking over and over again, ‘Why doesn’t my daddy love me? What was the wrong thing I did to make it so my daddy doesn’t love me?’ ”
Gregor winced. Old George was an eerily good mimic. It was as if Tommy Moradanyan were there in the room.
