by Jane Haddam
His hair was wet, and all the rubbing he was doing with the towel wasn’t making it any drier. The heat was on full blast, as if it needed to be to guard against the ridiculous cold they’d been having week after week for a month now. He had left his clothes over the top of the hamper: boxer shorts, trousers, undershirt, good white shirt. His socks and shoes were in the bedroom. His ties were hanging from tie holders in the closet. There was a sweater laid out on the bed. He was working very hard not to put on a tie for a day when he was doing nothing but hanging around Cavanaugh Street.
“Didn’t you ever wonder about Ozzie Nelson?” Bennis had asked him once. “I mean, he never went out of the house, and there he was wearing a tie to sit in the living room reading the paper while the television was on.”
He put on the boxer shorts and the undershirt and the trousers and the shirt. He went into his bedroom and got the clean socks he’d left on his night table. The message light was blinking on his answering machine. Someone must have called while he was in the shower. It was Bennis’s idea to have the answering machine in the bedroom. Gregor thought it was completely nuts. What was the point of an answering machine if it didn’t let you sleep through calls in the middle of the night?
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe they shouldn’t have tried living together, even temporarily. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. It had even seemed necessary. Tibor was out of his apartment, since the place wasn’t structurally sound after the church was bombed. He could take Bennis’s apartment while Bennis stayed with Gregor, which she did most of the time anyway. But there was a real difference between staying the night almost every single night and actually moving in. There was a difference in the way you felt about the way things were done and the places things were put.
He pulled on his socks, then reached onto the bed for his sweater, a good three-ply cashmere one from Brooks Brothers, Bennis’s idea of a Christmas present. He sat down on the edge of the bed and pushed the play button to hear the message. If it was Tibor saying he wasn’t up to going to the Ararat for breakfast, Gregor thought he would smash something.
“Mr. Demarkian?”
Gregor frowned. The voice was, sort of, familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
“Mr. Demarkian, I know it’s only six thirty in the morning, but I remember from when we met before that it’s best to get you early. I hope I haven’t woken you up. I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Edmund George. Chickie. People call me Chickie. We met a couple of years ago when you were consulting with the Philadelphia Police about the, you know, the murders connected to the gay stuff. I’m sorry, it’s early in the morning and I haven’t had my shower yet. Anyway, that’s who I am.”
Gregor actually did remember him, and now he knew what it was that was odd about the voice. The Chickie he had met had been a “flaming queen,” as John Henry Newman Jackman had put it, but not the kind who came by it naturally. It was as if he needed to exaggerate an effeminacy he didn’t really have, as if it wasn’t enough to be “gay,” or even to be “out,” if you didn’t throw it in everyone’s face in a way that they couldn’t possibly ignore it. The voice on the answering machine was not effeminate in any way. If he hadn’t known something about Chickie already, he would not have automatically assumed that the man wasn’t straight, or anything else but another guy with a Philadelphia tinge to his accent, the Italian street kind of Philadelphia twinge. Gregor wondered what Chickie was doing now.
“Anyway,” Chickie was saying, “I don’t want to run out your machine and get cut off, or anything, but I’ve got a problem. Actually, the organization I volunteer with has a problem. And I was thinking, you’re probably the best person in the city to ask about it. So I was wondering if it would be okay if I came over and talked to you. I can come over right this minute, if you want me to. I’m just going to step in the shower and wake myself up, but after that I could be at your place in twenty minutes. I’m not all that far away. It’s the Justice Project I volunteer for, by the way, and it really is important. You can call me back and leave a message on my machine if you want to see me right now, or call later or whatever. At your convenience. I’m at 555–4720. Thanks.”
Gregor sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, thinking. The Justice Project. He’d heard a lot about the Justice Project recently, because of… that was it, the Drew Harrigan drug thing. Gregor hadn’t paid much attention to it. He didn’t like men like Drew Harrigan, no matter which side of the political divide they inhabited. Drew Harrigan, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Michael Moore: here was another way his generation was not like Bennis’s, and not like this Chickie’s, either. He had no idea when politics had become this angry, and this ugly, but he hated it instinctively. These days, he didn’t follow debates and he didn’t read editorials. He figured out which of the available candidates came closest to his preferred political identification of “a little common sense, please,” and voted for that.
He wondered why he was spending so much time thinking about “generations.” He wasn’t aware of feeling particularly geriatric. He wasn’t particularly geriatric. Maybe Bennis was making him as complicated as she was herself. Maybe he’d start finding it impossible to choose between the brown socks and the gray ones and have to resort to an investigation of the psychic foundations of his attitudes toward color. He wasn’t being fair. He wanted Bennis to come back and start acting like herself again, meaning like the self she’d been acting like before they had all gone to Massachusetts.
His bedroom windows were rattling in the wind. It was going to be another bad day in a string of bad days. He’d gotten to the point of thinking of twenty degrees as “warmer.” Whatever else was going on with him, he was undoubtedly bored. It wouldn’t hurt to take his mind off whatever it was it was on. It was significant that he didn’t know what it was on. He needed coffee. He needed Bennis at home, where he could have a screaming fight with her and get it all over with.
He picked up the phone and dialed 555–4720. The voice on the answering machine tape not only had no trace of effeminacy in it, it could have belonged to a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. That was a gift, Gregor thought. It had to be very useful to be able to turn your voice into that wide a range of effects.
The screaming beep went off. Gregor said, “Mr. George? Yes, I remember you. If you’re really in that much of a hurry, I’m going to be having breakfast at the Ararat restaurant on Cavanaugh Street from about seven thirty to eight thirty. Come on by and talk to me. I’ll see you there.”
He hung up and stared at the phone. Then he reached for his shoes on the floor and put them on. Bennis was always telling him he had to do something about his shoes, because they were too formal. He couldn’t imagine himself in a pair of running shoes, or whatever they called them these days. He used to call them sneakers.
One of the first things they taught new agents at Quantico was to pick their spots. Don’t fight every battle. Don’t answer every challenge. Don’t follow every lead. Maybe he needed to go back for retraining at Quantico. It was too bad they wouldn’t have him, and he wouldn’t last a day without kicking somebody’s ass.
2
It was cold. It was worse than cold. The temperature with the windchill was supposed to be something like minus twenty-five, and the windchill was no joke, because the wind was no joke. By the time Gregor was standing on the steps in front of Fr. Tibor Kasparian’s front door, his fingers felt cold enough to fall off, and he had them stuck into the pockets of his coat. His head was bare, so the skin on his face felt as if it had already fallen off. At least, it had no feeling in it. His ears were entirely numb. He rang the doorbell and heard a cascade of excited yips coming from the other side. This was new. It sounded like a dog. As far as Gregor knew, Tibor didn’t have a dog.
Tibor came to the door and opened up, and right there, running around his legs, there was indeed a dog. It was a very small dog—Gregor didn’t know anything about dogs, but he knew what a puppy was when he saw one�
�and it was completely, happily berserk, bouncing around on the vestibule carpet as if it had pogo sticks for legs, chasing first up Tibor’s legs and then up Gregor’s, wagging its tail so hard Gregor thought the thing was going to fly off. He came all the way into the apartment and closed the door behind him. The cold was getting in. The dog took off for the living room on a run, barked happily a little longer, and then came running back.
“When did you get a dog? Gregor asked. “You didn’t say anything about a dog.”
“It’s Grace who got the dog, Krekor,” Tibor said. “She’s a chocolate Labrador retriever named Godiva. Grace got the dog and then she had to go play in New York, so I’m keeping the dog for the week. She’s a very nice dog.”
“A chocolate Lab named Godiva.” “Yes, well, Krekor, what can I say? I didn’t name the dog. She really is a very nice dog, very intelligent and very affectionate. And small, so she isn’t hard to keep. I rigged up a kind of Kitty Litter box in the back air lock—”
“Kitty Litter for a dog?”
“Sand, Krekor, sand. You can’t ask a small animal like this to go out in the cold to do its business. I keep it in the air lock and it doesn’t bother me. Come into the living room. If you sit on the couch, she’ll sit on your lap.”
Gregor decided to sit on the chair, because although Godiva really was a very nice dog, he didn’t want dog hair all over his trousers. He even had an excuse for that, since Chickie was coming. He looked at the books on Tibor’s coffee table, which as usual was so covered that nobody could put a cup of coffee on it without threatening either Aristotle or Jackie Collins. Today there were a few new arrivals: a novel called Baudolino by Umberto Eco; another novel called Blindness by José Saramago; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Tibor must be having a fiction week.
“The thing is,” Tibor said, coming back to the living room from the kitchen, “I can’t take the dog into the Ararat. The Melajians don’t mind, but apparently the city of Philadelphia does, and you can’t take dogs into restaurants unless they’re Seeing Eye dogs. I’d try to pass Godiva off as a Seeing Eye dog, but she’s too small and she’s, uh—”
“—A little too active?”
“Something like that, yes, Krekor. It’s really too bad, because Linda Melajian is very fond of her. But I think she would end up running all over the place and overturning tables and things if she got out of hand.”
“You can leave her here, can’t you? She can stay in the apartment for an hour.”
“She can stay, yes, Krekor, but she’s a Labrador retriever. She’s a very affectionate dog. She needs company. That’s why Grace didn’t leave her in her apartment and have me just come by and walk her and feed her a few times a day. They get depressed if they don’t have company, this kind of dog. So she’s staying here with me, and we sit together to watch television, and then at night she comes in and sleeps on the bed.”
“Don’t Labs get to be really big dogs? I mean, how is Grace going to feel about that sleeping on the bed stuff when the dog is fully grown and weighs a hundred pounds?”
“By then she will have gone to obedience school, Krekor. It will be all right. Give me a minute. I’ve forgotten where I put my wallet.”
“Look in the medicine cabinet,” Gregor said. “That’s where you usually leave it.”
“You’re perhaps not as respectful as you could be, Krekor, where a priest is concerned.”
Gregor liked to think he was unfailingly polite to everyone, which might or might not be true.
3
There had been a small problem with the dog, who had wanted to come with them until she dashed into the courtyard and realized how cold it was. Then she’d dashed back inside and begun crying pitifully to get them to come back in with her. Gregor thought she probably thought they were insane to be going out in this weather, and she was probably right. Tibor had compensated by spending a few minutes kneeling on the ground at the door and speaking to her in a cooing voice Gregor thought was usually reserved for babies in distress. He couldn’t believe Tibor hadn’t frozen his kneecaps to the slate tiles in the process. Then they had gone out through the courtyard and around the side of the church to Cavanaugh Street itself, and Tibor had had to stop and look inside.
“They really did a very wonderful job,” Tibor said. “And we don’t have the iconostasis anymore, which was only there because we took this over from a Greek Orthodox congregation, and isn’t really the Armenian way. And we have held off Hannah Krekorian and Sheila Kashinian, and there is no stained glass in the windows with pictures of St. George slaying the dragon on them. Sheila has no sense of place or time, do you understand that? And Hannah just goes along with her. I know that it’s too much to ask that American schools should teach the history of the Armenian Church, but the Armenian Church should teach it. What did you all learn in religion lessons when you were growing up?”
“Not much,” Gregor said. “The priest taught them himself and he only spoke Armenian, and most of us barely did. Also, he smelled, and he was a nasty man.”
“I think Sheila Kashinian secretly wants to be a Roman Catholic. I don’t mean as a matter of what they believe. I don’t think she knows what they believe. I don’t think she knows what we believe, or why there’s a difference. I think she wants to be Roman Catholic so she can sit in a Gothic church with stained glass windows and imagine herself becoming a nun.”
“Only if there’s an order that gets its habits through Nieman Marcus,” Gregor said.
“We need to be nicer, Krekor. Howard gave us ten thousand dollars for the new church.”
“Bennis gave more, and she doesn’t even believe in God.”
“I know, Krekor, but Bennis has more. Howard gave the ten thousand dollars and between that and the money Bennis gave, and all the smaller things, we have a new church that looks like it belongs to the Middle Ages, when people really gave money to churches. Of course, we have the kneelers, which is not traditional, but I think it was the right decision. People aren’t what they were. You can’t get them to kneel on the floor anymore. Even the pews are an innovation, really. In the early days, people didn’t sit in church. They either stood or kneeled and the floors they kneeled on were made of stone.”
“I’m surprised anybody ever came to liturgy.”
“If they didn’t, they were fined. Yes, I know, Krekor, don’t say it. Things have changed and they’ve changed for the better. I wish the elections were all over. Since I came to this country, since I first received citizenship, I’ve been the most conscientious voter on the entire continent. But I’m tired of them already, this year.”
“The conventions haven’t even happened yet.”
“It doesn’t matter. It will all be anger and craziness. When I first came to America, people weren’t angry like this all the time, Krekor. People were passionate about politics and, yes, there were some, idiots in the New Left, what they were thinking I don’t know, but most people were not angry like this. It is not one side or the other now. It is both of them. And it doesn’t matter what the issue is. If you don’t like the tax cuts, you are a traitor who wants to sell out the country to Islamic fundamentalists. If you don’t like abortion, you are a fascist murderer who wants to enslave women as breeding machines with no right to a life of their own. It’s not that there isn’t any center anymore. It’s that there isn’t any sense. First the Republicans accuse President Clinton of paying for a hit man to murder his friend. Then the Democrats accuse the Republicans of allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen on purpose, if not causing them themselves. It doesn’t matter who gets elected in November, it will be the same thing all over again, and do you know why? It’s because it’s not about politics. It’s not about are we going to have a welfare state or a laissez-faire one. It’s not about should there be public schools or private schools that get vouchers. It’s not about politics. It’s about religion.”
“It is? Are the Democrats pushing religion?”
“Tcha,” Tibor said. “You’re too li
mited in your scholarship. There is real religion, which is about our relationship to God, which is important. But there is another kind of religion, and that is the religion that is about identity. It is about banding together in a group and defending ourselves against what we fear, when what we fear is each other. It is about not wanting to live in a world where we are in a minority, because it is uncomfortable to be a minority. That kind of religion talks about God sometimes, but it doesn’t have to. It can call itself Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Communist or Libertarian or Green. I like real religion, Krekor. It’s been of enormous importance and value in my life. This other stuff, I look at it and I fear for the survival of civilization.”
“That’s quite a lecture for five minutes to seven on a Monday morning.”
“Don’t be flippant, Krekor, it matters. I’m more American than most Americans. From the day of my naturalization, I’ve kept a flag in my house; now I keep it in my kitchen. I have little lapel pins with the flag on them. I have a red, white, and blue baseball cap. I embarrass the people who were born here with my enthusiasm. I think this is the greatest experiment in the history of the world, the story of the Tower of Babel falsified. But lately I am not so sure it is going to survive. Not in any form in which I recognize it.”
“I think it will survive,” Gregor said. “I think it’s just one of those times, like during the Civil War—”
“—This you think is a comforting analogy, Krekor?”
“I didn’t mean I think we’re going to have a civil war. I mean it’s one of those times that we go through where we reinvent ourselves. The Civil War was the worst of it, but there have been other times. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression, for instance.”
“Tcha. I like Roosevelt. I like both Roosevelts, though the first one was perhaps a little overenergetic.”