Not a Creature Was Stirring

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor saw what Tibor meant. This was a grandchild. Donna’s mother wouldn’t want to lose it, no matter how she had acquired it. As for abortion—well. People thought the Roman Catholic Church was fanatically opposed to abortion. People thought that because they knew nothing about the Eastern Churches, which gave new meaning to the word “fanaticism” any time they decided to get serious.

  Which, fortunately, was almost never.

  Gregor stretched his legs and poured himself still more wine. “In the first place,” he said, “you’ve got to understand that finding this boy is going to be easy, unless Donna picked him up in a singles bar. I take it she didn’t.”

  “She met him at a dance at the Assumption Church. The one that calls itself American Orthodox.”

  “All right. So he’s connected. People know him. Donna probably has his right name. She knows where his parents live?”

  “In Boston,” Tibor nodded.

  “Well, that could mean Boston or any one of a dozen suburbs. Still, it won’t be hard. Did she know him long?”

  “Eight months.”

  “Not a drifter, then. And not a one-night stand—”

  “Gregor,” Tibor winced.

  “You have to consider these things, Tibor. But not a one-night stand, meaning not a man who went on the prowl one night and maybe lied about half a dozen things to get what he wanted. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t lie about something, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, we have what appears to be a perfectly ordinary boy. Did you ever meet him?”

  “Once. Donna brought him to a—a pot luck supper? It was Sheila Kashinian’s idea. To raise money for the Sunday school.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He wasn’t like anything,” Tibor said. “He was in a pair of blue jeans and a sweater, like they always are. And he was very polite.”

  “No alarm bells going off in your head?”

  “Oh, no,” Tibor said. “I remember thinking it was nice she had found such a nice boy.”

  “What about the older women? Any alarm bells going off there?”

  Tibor bit back a smile. “Lida met him, and I thought she was going to have the engagement announced then and there. Even though there was no engagement.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said. “Now. Do you know what he was doing in Philadelphia? Did he have a job?”

  “He was taking a course in archaeology at the university. He was very interested in Greek ruins.”

  “When was the course supposed to be over?”

  Tibor thought about it. “It was over,” he said finally. “At the end of the summer, I think. You will have to ask Donna about this, Gregor. From what I heard, I had the impression he had stayed in Philadelphia to be with Donna, after his course was over. But I’m not certain.”

  “All right, I’ll ask Donna,” Gregor said. “Assuming she wants to talk to me.”

  “She wants to talk to you.”

  “The point is, nothing about this sounds as if there was anything strange about the boy. Fine. But that brings me back to the problem I had with this in the first place.”

  “Problem? But Gregor, I don’t understand. I thought you just said there wasn’t going to be any problem.”

  “There may not be any problem finding the boy,” Gregor said. “There may be a problem about whether or not we want him found.”

  “But Donna—”

  “Even if Donna wants me to find him, it may be a better idea if I didn’t do it. Shotgun weddings aren’t such a good idea, Tibor. I don’t care if they’re all the rage back in the old country. In this country, they far too often end up with a wife who gets her bones broken once a week.”

  “Gregor.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of such a thing,” Gregor said. “And don’t tell me you don’t think it could happen to Donna.”

  “In America,” Tibor hesitated.

  “People are the same in America as they are everyplace else.”

  Tibor looked away. His face was flushed. The restaurant suddenly seemed much too warm. Gregor wondered what was going through his mind. Maybe he’d spent so much of his life dealing with big evils, the little ones had escaped his notice. Persecution, torture, genocide—in the middle of all that, a little wife beating or an everyday rape might not seem very important, if they registered at all. But the little evils were important. Gregor was sure of that. Out of them, everything else flowed. In them, the very essence of being human was fully and irrevocably destroyed. Genocide was impersonal. Child abuse made the worst sort of paranoid delusion look like a badly managed Halloween party.

  Tibor was fussing with his cigarette lighter and his cigarettes, like a boy who had never used either. Finally, he pushed them away and folded his hands on top of the tablecloth. He looked like he was about to deliver a lecture, maybe on those verses in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians where wives are admonished to be dutiful to their husbands.

  Instead he said, “Gregor, does this mean you won’t look for the boy at all?”

  Gregor felt immensely relieved, although he couldn’t have said why. “Of course not,” he told Tibor. “I’ll be happy to look for him. Given one or two conditions.”

  “Yes?”

  “In the first place, I want to talk to Donna Moradanyan alone. I want her to tell me she wants the boy found.”

  “Yes,” Tibor said. “Yes, yes. That is very sensible.”

  “In the second place, when I do find him, the only person who’s going to know I’ve found him will be Donna. I’ll give her a name, an address, a phone number. Whatever she needs. She can do what she wants with them. Including not tell the rest of you that she has them.”

  Tibor’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead, as slowly and evenly as if they’d been raised by hydraulic drift. “Not even Donna’s mother?” he said.

  “Especially not Donna’s mother.”

  “You’re a very intelligent man, Gregor.”

  Gregor didn’t know how intelligent he was, but he thought he’d at least been rational, in this case. He picked up the bottle of wine, found that it was empty, and waved for the wine steward. First the Hannaford murder, then Elizabeth’s grave, then Donna Moradanyan’s little problem. The world seemed to be full of depressing situations.

  The wine steward was doing his best to indicate, without actually saying anything, that chardonnay was not the sort of thing one should use to get definitively drunk on in the daytime. Gregor ignored him. He’d never had a strong taste for alcohol, but there were times it was absolutely necessary for medicinal purposes. This was one of them.

  The wine steward came back with a fresh bottle, went through his little dance, and departed. Gregor filled both the wineglasses and got Tibor started on the happiest topic he could think of.

  Meaning the traffic in Jerusalem.

  FIVE

  1

  IN THE EASTERN CHURCHES and in Orthodox countries, Christmas is not as heavily celebrated a holiday as Epiphany. Children get their presents on Epiphany. Adults get their liquor on Epiphany. Priests get to say one of the most beautiful eucharistic liturgies ever written on Epiphany. Gregor had never lived in an Orthodox country—and wouldn’t have wanted to—but he had grown up in an Armenian household. He was geared to Epiphany. Downtown Philadelphia, with its stores full of after-Christmas sales and its streets full of shoppers and pickpockets, disoriented him.

  Either that, or his headache was even worse than he thought it was. This was why he hadn’t become an alcoholic after Elizabeth’s death. Not willpower, not strength of character, not common sense, not any of the things he prided himself on—-just the simple fact that liquor always gave him a wicked headache, and soon. Some people could drink and feel high and happy for hours. For Gregor, the hangover always started in the middle of the third glass of wine.

  On the sidewalk in front of Independence Hall, Gregor hailed a cab and put Tibor and himself into it. Tibor was happy. The wine seemed to have gone right through
him, making him cheerful but not drunk, and he was stuffed full of something called a hot fudge crepe. He was also entranced by the American Christmas spirit, Philadelphia style. To Tibor, after-Christmas sales, overstuffed Christmas stockings, straining credit card limits and mountains of discarded silver foil paper were not vulgar. They were miracles.

  “It’s a good thing I’m not a Puritan,” Tibor said. “I have never understood the Puritans. I understand them intellectually, of course. But I don’t understand them.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “they always sounded to me like a very unpleasant group of people.”

  “Illogical,” Tibor said. He had lit a cigarette, rolled down his window, and stuck his head into traffic. Now he pulled back again. “What these Puritans did, Gregor, their theology, it was not Christian. Fate and money, that was all. And no enjoyment of the money.”

  “I thought money was the root of all evil.”

  “Gregor, Gregor. It is the love of money that is the root of all evil, and love in that passage means—means—obsession? Yes, obsession. Lust, like with people who are insane with sex and think of nothing else. It doesn’t mean being happy you can buy a microwave oven.”

  “Do you have a microwave oven?”

  “I have two. Anna Halamanian gave them to me. She thinks I never eat.”

  The cab turned onto Cavanaugh Street at the north end, onto that block that was only nominally part of the neighborhood, where the Armenian-American families were interspersed with student artists and student writers and student actors. From here, they could see the painted dome of Holy Trinity Church, glittering gold even in the half-hearted sun. The cab began to slow down.

  “Do you think he’ll miss the church?” Tibor said. “All the cabdrivers, they always miss the church.”

  “They do?” Holy Trinity wasn’t an especially large church, but it was large enough. And it didn’t look like anything else in the neighborhood.

  “You tell them church and they think of spires,” Tibor said. “They get to Cavanaugh Street and there are no spires and they go right past.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m very disappointed in you,” Tibor said. “Money is the root of all evil. That is trite, Gregor. That is the kind of thing American college students say when they think they can show how intelligent they are by letting you know how much contempt they have for their fathers.”

  The cab had pulled to a stop in front of the church, a perfect landing. Gregor got out his wallet, paid the fare, and gave the driver an extra-large tip, because of Tibor’s cigarette. Gregor had no way of knowing if the driver minded, or if it was legal to smoke in cabs in Philadelphia. He did know that no one ever challenged Tibor’s right to smoke. With priests and foreigners, people never did.

  Out on the sidewalk, Tibor was pulling up the collar of his coat against a new onslaught of snow. Gregor, who felt as if he’d been snowed insensible over the last few days, didn’t bother with his own.

  “Maybe the college students have a point,” he told Tibor, searching through his pockets for the gloves he never remembered to bring with him. “We were in Liberty Square. You must have noticed people sleeping in the street.”

  “Of course I saw them.”

  “But what did you think of them?”

  Tibor shook his head. “Gregor, Gregor. Christ said, ‘Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.’ Not, ‘Be sure to vote for the congressman who promises to build the most low-income housing.’”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, Gregor, that if the people who called themselves Christians behaved like Christians, there wouldn’t be any people sleeping in the street.” Tibor smiled shyly. “You should come to visit me, Gregor, in my apartment. I have given you an invitation. And you might like to meet my houseguests.”

  Houseguests, Gregor thought. He felt struck dumb.

  Could Tibor really be picking up strangers off the street and filling his apartment with them? Gregor opened his mouth to argue against this craziness—to argue against it in the same way and for the same reasons he would have argued against Tibor’s taking a pleasure hike on the West Bank—but when he looked down, Tibor had disappeared. Gregor saw no sign of him when he looked up, either. The man had dematerialized.

  Gregor turned away from the church and headed down Cavanaugh Street toward his apartment. Christianity was all well and good, but a third of the homeless were supposed to be mentally ill, outpatients who should never have been let out. Another third were supposed to be addicts of one kind or another, alcoholics and junkies. Tibor was going to end up getting his throat cut. Or worse.

  Gregor had never been the kind of person who saw blood in his dreams. If he had been, he would never have survived in Behavioral Sciences. Now he was having technicolor visions of carnage. Tibor dead. Tibor murdered. Tibor slaughtered, and all because the man was some kind of idiot saint—

  He had his eyes on the ground and his mind on another world, so preoccupied he almost missed the entrance to his building. He would have missed it, except that the man who had been sitting there stood up as he approached, and came down to the sidewalk, and stopped him.

  “Mr. Demarkian? Excuse me. I think maybe I ought to start with an apology.”

  An apology.

  Gregor blinked.

  It took him nearly a full minute to realize he was looking at John Henry Newman Jackman.

  2

  John Henry Newman Jackman didn’t like Gregor Demarkian’s apartment. Because nobody ever liked it, Gregor decided not to apologize for it. He ushered Jackman through his foyer into his living room, sat him down on one of the two chairs, and headed for the kitchen to make coffee. He heard Jackman get up almost as soon as he was out of the room. Pacing.

  They had gone through it all on the stoop, and again on the stairs, but Gregor knew they would go through it once again, in here. That was the way things were turning out to be between Jackman and himself. It was too bad. From what Gregor could make out, Jackman had done a remarkable job in the less than forty-eight hours since Robert Hannaford’s death. Jackman had certainly done a remarkable job on him, and he was both the least important and most difficult of the subjects Jackman had to deal with. If Jackman had been half as good with the rest of his case, he must have broken the Hannafords into molecules by now.

  The truth of it was, you never got over having been the subordinate of a man you truly respected. Gregor had been that way with his first superior in the Bureau. Jackman was that way with him now—even though they’d only worked together that one time, and under conditions that kept them apart more often than threw them together. Gregor was worried. With the wrong kind of man—and he didn’t know Jackman well enough to know if he was wrong or not—a situation like this quickly became infantilizing, and finally generated resentment. The last thing Gregor wanted was John Henry Newman Jackman nursing a resentment. Jackman had brought the Hannafords back to him. After a dismal Christmas Day and an even more dismal afternoon spent trying to get drunk enough to feel happy, Gregor was rejuvenated.

  Maybe I am going crazy, he thought. I’m beginning to have emotions I don’t even recognize until four or five hours later.

  It hadn’t been four or five hours. It had been barely two.

  Gregor put the coffee and everything else he could think of on a tray and carried it out to the living room.

  Jackman, caught pacing, blushed. He sat down again, quickly. “I’m sorry,” he said, for what must have been the fiftieth time. “I didn’t mean to be a son of a bitch. I really didn’t.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “You were making me nervous,” Jackman said. “I mean, I walked into that room and there you were, looking over the scene, and I thought—what was I supposed to think?”

  “I told you I was retired,” Gregor said.

  “I know you did. But this is the federal government I thought I was dealing with here.”

  “You thought I was lying?”

  “Never mind
,” Jackman said.

  “I’m very retired.”

  “Yeah,” Jackman said, “so they tell me. But I couldn’t be sure about that. And you said all those things, about the murder—”

  “I kept trying not to. I didn’t want to interfere. No,” Gregor amended, “that’s not true. I wanted very badly to interfere. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”

  “It got to you, did it?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It got to me, too. I stood around in that house thinking I could have taken my vacation this week. Last week. Whatever. I could have taken my vacation and been in the Bahamas when this call came, and instead there I was, stuck with it.”

  “Stuck?”

  Jackman laughed. “Look at me. I should have stayed in Philadelphia. I went out there because they offered me a lot of money. I have a good rep and I’m the right color—and don’t think it doesn’t matter. Everybody on earth is trying to make their quotas. Don’t ask me what I think of it, because I don’t know. I do have a good rep.”

  “I’d think you would,” Gregor said. “You were only a rookie when I met you. You did exceptionally well.”

  “For a rookie? For a black man?”

  “For a cop.”

  “Fine.” Jackman sighed. “So here I am,” he said, “or there I am, in Bryn Mawr, investigating one of the founding families of the Philadelphia Main Line. Did you know that’s what they were?”

  “I’d have suspected it. I knew they were railroad money.”

  “Railroad money. Oil money. Banking money. Do you know how much Hannaford was worth? Four hundred million dollars.”

  “Four hundred?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You are in a lot of trouble,” Gregor said.

  Jackman stood up. Gregor was beginning to think it was just as well he hadn’t noticed the coffee. Jackman’s restlessness was almost a mania. And it seemed to be getting worse by the second.

  “Look,” Jackman said, “Myra Hannaford told me you were some kind of private detective, but I checked into that. You aren’t, are you?”