Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  All of a sudden, Tibor didn’t look fatigued at all. He had a newspaper folded open on his lap. He was jumping up and down in his country print-covered blue wing chair. His face was shiny bright. If Tibor’s eyes hadn’t been sparkling, Gregor would have thought he’d developed a fever.

  Gregor moved up closer to Bennis and said into her ear, “Let’s both of us go over there and find out what’s going on.”

  “I think we’d better,” Bennis agreed.

  “I wonder what the newspaper is. Do you suppose he’s got hold of The Boston Globe?”

  “Not if he’s looking that happy.”

  Gregor decided not to pay attention to Bennis’s aspersions on the city of Boston—Bennis used to live there, and the experience did not seem to have left a good impression—and led the advance across the room to Tibor instead. By then, Tibor had gone from shining and sparkling to chuckling. He seemed entirely unaware of their approach. Then, at the last minute, when Gregor was just about to loom up at his side, Tibor looked up at both of them and smiled the widest smile they’d had out of him in two months.

  “Krekor,” he said enthusiastically. “Bennis. This is wonderful. You must see what I have here.”

  “We want to see what you have there,” Bennis said.

  “Yes, yes.” Tibor began to unfold his paper, got tangled in it and then forced himself to be patient. Finally he got the paper into the shape he wanted it in and held it up. “It was lying right here on the coffee table, and I picked it up with no idea at all. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Bennis Hannaford might have thought it was wonderful. Gregor Demarkian definitely did not. The paper was the Bethlehem News and Mail, and the double-page inside spread Tibor had opened it to was headlined:

  THE DETECTIVE IN ACTION

  HOW THE ARMENIAN-AMERICAN HERCULE POIROT

  SOLVED THE CASE OF THE ARTFUL ARBITRAGUER

  (Part Two of a Three-Part Series)

  Gregor Demarkian had been called “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot” before. He had been called that by the Philadelphia Inquirer, People magazine and The CBS Evening News. He had even done something recently that might provide an excuse for this article, meaning investigate a murder on the Atlantic ocean that had rich people and expensive eccentricities in it. The problem was, it hadn’t been recently enough, and he hated articles like this one. He had expected to suffer through five days of bad playwriting and sentimental Christmas pageantry for the sake of his friend, Father Tibor Kasparian. He had not expected to have to suffer through the local newspaper’s latest idea for increasing their circulation.

  It didn’t help any that Tibor had leaped to his feet and was bouncing up and down saying, “The paper only comes out once a week every Tuesday. This is last Tuesday’s paper, Bennis, and if this paper had come out every day like an ordinary paper, then I would have missed it. Wouldn’t that have been a shame?”

  2

  Bennis Hannaford was a woman with resources and connections, and one of the ways she used both was to ensure that she never had any inconveniences with travel or accommodations. The Bethlehem Nativity Celebration had been a harder assignment than most. It wasn’t the kind of thing the kind of people Bennis knew usually had a hand in. Neurotic rich girls who had once come out on the Main Line moved to Vermont all the time, but they tended to move to the more New Age, socially aware parts of it. Camels and angels and Magi and the Christ Child in a manger were not what they were used to or wanted to be used to. Then, too, all this had come up at the last minute. Tibor had collapsed three days after Thanksgiving. The doctor’s lecture on getting Tibor away from Cavanaugh Street and responsibilities and the persistent temptations to do just one more thing had come two days after that. Bennis hadn’t had much time to arrange things. Gregor had wondered if she was going to be able to arrange things at all. The Bethlehem Nativity Celebration might not be his first choice for a winter vacation, but that it was the first choice of a great many people was something he knew well. He’d fully expected every hotel room in town to be booked solid.

  Bennis, however, always had more resources than Gregor gave her credit for. In this case, she had a fellow writer of fantasy novels. That was what Bennis Hannaford did for a living. She wrote sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels full of unicorns and damsels in distress and knights in shining armor and evil trolls—and very successful ones, too. She had a wide range of acquaintances in the field and an intelligence network on the activities of other writers that rivaled the CIA’s files on known terrorist organizations. Through this network she had come up with a man named Robert Forsman. Robert Forsman was a very minor writer, as far as commercial successes went. He produced a slim book a year that showed up on the shelves at B. Dalton for a week and then disappeared. He would have gone along in much the same way as dozens of other writers who knew better than to quit their day jobs except for one small thing, and that was that in 1981, a Very Famous Movie Producer had decided he wanted to make a picture out of Robert Forsman’s latest novel. Hollywood deals are notoriously disadvantageous to book writers. The ordinary scenario is for the book to be bought for the Hollywood equivalent of twenty-five cents and made into a blockbuster that turns everybody but the creator of the original story into a zillionaire. It worked out differently in Robert Forsman’s case, because the Very Famous Movie Producer was stark raving nuts. He was stark raving nuts with a lot of money behind him because he had made the top-grossing movie in each of the previous six years.

  As far as Gregor could figure out, what Robert Forsman had to do with the fact that Bennis had been able to book them three of the top-floor rooms in the nicest inn in Bethlehem, Vermont, only two weeks in advance of the third week of the Nativity Celebration was that Robert Forsman owned the nicest inn in Bethlehem, Vermont. That was what he had done with the ridiculous amount of money the Very Famous Movie Producer had paid him. Forsman had intended to move in and run the place himself. He had even tried it for a while. It hadn’t worked out. He was much too much of a creature of city lights and dark plots to live among the calling moose for long.

  “And it’s just as well,” Bennis had told Gregor, “because he’s really the most odious little shit. Don’t tell Tibor I used the word ‘shit.’ But you know what I mean. Odious.”

  “Right,” Gregor had said. It had occurred to him that Tibor had probably heard Bennis use the word “shit” a hundred times, and he hadn’t complained yet.

  Now Gregor looked around and decided that, odious little shit or not, the man owned a nice hotel. The building was obviously very old, maybe even Revolutionary War old, but it had been more than kept up. Gregor didn’t have much patience for antique houses and picturesque inns. They too often meant antique plumbing and picturesque ceiling heights. It always astounded him how short people had been in 1776. This inn had been refitted for twentieth-century people. The hall was made of good hard oak that had been polished into a glowing mirror. The carpet runner down the center of it was green and thick. The ceiling had been raised high enough for even someone as tall as Gregor to find it comfortable. The tall thick doors to the rooms had been decorated with sprigs of evergreen and bright red bows. Bennis had the room on the right side of the hall. Gregor and Tibor were supposed to share a three-room suite that opened on the left. Gregor waited until the bumbling high-school boy who was serving as the bellhop stowed all the wrong bags in all the wrong places, tipped him a dollar, and then looked through into the common room of the suite himself. It was a beautiful room, complete with high ceiling and broad bowed window looking out on what seemed to be a small Palestinian village. These were even better rooms than Bennis had promised. That small Palestinian village had to be the site of the Nativity play itself. It only made sense. If they’d had one of those high-tech listening devices, they’d be able to watch and listen to the whole thing right from here.

  Gregor went all the way in, walked to the window and looked out. The Palestinian village looked empty, and so did the rest of the town. Gregor notic
ed a hardware store, a pharmacy, a real estate agent and a doctor. There was no grocery, and Gregor supposed the people here drove out to a shopping mall to buy their food. He turned slightly and found a two-story wooden building with the words “Bethlehem News and Mail” carved into a wooden sign that had been placed on the facade between the two floors. The sign was painted blue and the letters were painted gold. The blue and gold were almost the only extraneous colors Gregor could see. Bethlehem, Vermont, took Christmas seriously. The park where the Palestinian village was had been left more or less bare, home only to what would be needed in the production, but the rest of the town had been conscientiously decorated. Storefronts sported wreaths and bells. Houses had turned their porch rails into candy canes. The public library had a carved-wood crêche on its front lawn. Gregor thought Donna Moradanyan would be pleased. Donna Moradanyan was his upstairs neighbor on Cavanaugh Street and Bennis Hannaford’s closest friend in Philadelphia. Donna Moradanyan believed in decorating everything to within an inch of its life, just on principle.

  There was a knock on the door and Bennis came in, her down vest open over her sweater and her hair in even more of a mess than usual. Bennis always wore her hair loose on her first visit to a place, until it got so tangled she couldn’t deal with it anymore. Then she pinned it up and started a battle with falling hair barrettes.

  “Where’s Tibor?” she asked Gregor as she came inside. “I thought for sure he’d be running back and forth in front of the window taking in the panorama of the Nativity play. You don’t know what Robert had to go through to get us this suite. You don’t know what I had to pay for it, either.”

  “I don’t think I want to know what you had to pay for it,” Gregor said. “And I don’t know where Tibor is. I saw him come in here—”

  “I went to use the private room, Krekor, please. You will embarrass me.”

  “Oh,” Gregor said.

  Tibor emerged from one of the north-side doors—the one that led to the bathroom, Gregor assumed—still carrying his paper with him. He gave Bennis a shy smile and went to sit down in one of the heavy club chairs by the window.

  “I have gone past the article on Krekor and read the rest of the paper,” he said, “and do you know what? I think Krekor is famous in this place. He had a part in an entirely different article.”

  “You mean there were two articles on Gregor?” Bennis asked.

  Tibor shook his head. “It was an article on hunting accidents. Two weeks ago—it is Monday the second, it says here—there were two hunting accidents and two people died. I would have thought this was an occupational hazard in a place where there is hunting, but apparently not. According to the paper, the deaths have the town very, very upset. And the town is more upset because no one knows who’s responsible.”

  “Don’t they really?” Bennis took the paper from Tibor and turned it over in her hands. “How strange.”

  “There’s nothing strange about it,” Gregor said sharply. “It’s just the ordnance equivalent of hit-and-run.”

  “Well, Gregor, I know what it is. I just think it’s odd. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a case where a hunter gunned someone down and then didn’t tell anybody about it. Never mind gunning down two people.”

  “I don’t think it was the same hunter,” Tibor said. “Look in the paper there, Bennis. It was two different women in two different places. Miles apart.”

  “Was it?” Bennis unfolded the paper and searched until she found the front page story. “It doesn’t say anything about the bullets. They must have found them. They always do. Maybe the hunter was someone from out of the area.”

  “They say there they could use Krekor to solve the crime,” Tibor said. “I find it very flattering, Bennis. I find it fascinating. This is our Krekor, and they could use him to solve the crime.”

  “You make me sound like I’m two years old,” Gregor said. “And they couldn’t use me to solve the crime, because I’d be no good at this kind of thing. It’s a kind of hit-and-run, just like I said. They need firearms experts and tech men, the kind of people who can take footprint impressions and identify the treads of tires. That’s how you solve something like this. Not with a poisons expert with a sideline in motivational psychology.”

  “Is that what you are?” Bennis asked him.

  “I’m a very hungry man in a hotel room that hasn’t been cleaned yet. Let’s get our things together and go find some food.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Bennis dropped down in the chair across from Tibor’s and spread the paper out on her knees, reading with a concentration that dismayed Gregor. Gregor had met Bennis Hannaford in the middle of what he thought of as his first “extracurricular” murder case. They had been friends ever since—although not the kind of friends some people, like Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian, back on Cavanaugh Street, wanted them to be. The problem with Bennis was that she had developed far too strong a taste for just the kind of situation he had first found her in. She was as passionately interested in esoteric murder investigations as a dedicated Baker Street Irregular was in Sherlock Holmes’s blood type. Gregor could just imagine what was going on in her head, as she squinted at the newsprint with the intensity of the farsighted when presented with small type when they didn’t have their glasses. She was turning a pair of simple hunting accidents into Murder on the Orient Express.

  Then Bennis dropped the paper and stretched and nodded. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Patricia Feld Verek.”

  “What?” Gregor asked her.

  Bennis motioned at the paper she had dropped. “Patricia Feld Verek. One of the victims. Of the hunting accidents.”

  “Bennis,” Tibor said. “You aren’t making any sense.”

  “In the paper they called her Tisha Verek,” Bennis explained patiently, “not Patricia and without the Feld. So I wasn’t sure. But I am sure she was married to Jan-Mark Verek, who’s a painter and from what I hear an all-around world-class bastard—”

  “Bennis.” From Tibor.

  “Wait a minute,” Gregor said. “Do you mean this what’s-her-name Verek was somebody you knew?”

  “Not knew,” Bennis said. “Just knew of. And of course I knew of Jan-Mark Verek because he used to be this enormous noise in modern art, and you know how my sister Myra got about modern art. Anyway, Patricia Feld Verek was a writer. She did—true crime, that sort of thing. Mid-level sellers, I think, but better than average. Her editor on Cry of the Wolf was later my editor on Zedalian Mirror.”

  “But you never actually met,” Gregor said.

  “Well, of course not. I can’t have actually met every writer with a publisher in New York. There have to be millions of them.”

  “There are forty-six thousand books published in the United States every year,” Tibor said innocently. “I have read this in a copy of Publishers Weekly.”

  “I don’t care where you’ve read it,” Gregor said, “as long as Bennis has never actually met this woman. Which, she has just assured me, she hasn’t. So why don’t we all get out of here and go to brunch?”

  Father Tibor Kasparian was looking more innocent than ever, but Gregor didn’t care. He knew what Bennis was up to—or what she could get up to if given half a chance. He knew what Tibor was up to, too, but he didn’t mind very much. Mischief, excitement, curiosity, a proprietary interest in Gregor Demarkian’s career—all these were good signs, intimations of the return of the old Tibor. Gregor was perfectly willing to put up with them if they would help Tibor recover on all the levels he needed to recover on. That did not mean Gregor had to put up with a Bennis gone wild.

  Gregor’s coat had come up draped over a brace of suitcases. The brace of suitcases had been placed just inside the suite’s door. Gregor marched over to it, picked up his coat, and began to get dressed for the cold.

  “Come on,” he told them. “There’s got to be some place in this town where I can get a corned beef sandwich.”

  Two

  1

  AS A
MATTER OF fact, there wasn’t any place for Gregor Demarkian to get a corned beef sandwich in Bethlehem, Vermont, or a hot pastrami sandwich, either. Gregor did not think of himself as a particularly “ethnic” man, in spite of the fact that his parents had been immigrants from Armenia. He didn’t think of himself as particularly “urban,” in spite of the fact that he had been born and brought up in the middle of Philadelphia. A medley of factors—college, graduate school, the army, the FBI—had conspired to make him what he thought of as “cosmopolitan,” meaning at home in most places in America. His work with the Bureau had taken him from lushly secured compounds in Beverly Hills to back-alley flophouses in Phoenix, Arizona. Surely by now he had a feel for the country and how it worked. Surely by now he understood its parameters. Ten minutes after he, Bennis and Tibor had stepped back out of the Green Mountain Inn and started down Main Street in search of something to eat, he was wondering if he had been transported to another planet. Five minutes after that, when they had come to a stop at one corner of the small park that had been roped off to serve as a stage for the Nativity play, he was sure he had been. It wasn’t the fact that the three restaurants they had looked at so far weren’t serving lunch yet. Gregor told himself he should have remembered that in smaller towns without delis or Greek coffee shops, nobody started serving lunch until at least eleven. It wasn’t the fact that one of those three restaurants was self-consciously “healthy,” either. “Healthy” had gotten to be such a fad, Gregor had almost gotten used to it. What really stopped him was the realization that not one single item on any of the three menus they had read so far seemed to have a spice in it. Health-food restaurants in Philadelphia usually offered a set of Mexican dishes that promised to be liberally laced with chopped jalapeno peppers. Jalapeno peppers were supposed to be good for your metabolism and contain a lot of vitamin C. This health-food restaurant stuck to “delicately flavored” vegetable ragouts and tofu stir-fried with mint. Gregor had often complained about the way the good ladies of Cavanaugh Street refused to send him off on any journey without a hamper or two full of food. He’d gotten his way and taken off foodless this time because of all the fuss with settling the refugees. Now he was sorry he had. He would have killed for a suitcase full of yoprak sarma and those big meatballs with bulgar crusts. He would have done more than kill for some of Lida Arkmanian’s marinated shish kabob.