Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  They had come to a stop at this corner because Tibor wanted to look at the set-up for the Nativity play. There was a lot to look at, too. A middle-sized octagonal gazebo had been artfully camouflaged with driftwood and reeds to look like a stable. The manger inside it was rough and gray and seemed to be a thousand years old. The ground around it was bare of snow, in spite of the fact that the rest of the town was buried under at least six inches of white. Gregor decided that that was because this ground had to be cleaned up regularly when the animals did what animals will do no matter how strenuously you try to talk them out of it. Gregor could see some of those animals on the other side of the park, penned up in a circle behind a makeshift picket fence. Three sheep, a cow and a camel—according to the brochure they had gotten from the travel agency, there were supposed to be three camels, but Gregor didn’t want to ask where the other two were. This camel was munching on something, as were the cow and all three of the sheep. Since the ground was barren, Gregor assumed someone had put food in there with the beasts to keep them quiet. Maybe that was what had happened to the camels. Maybe they had decided the food wasn’t good enough and gone off in search of more interesting stuff. There were two small stands of tall evergreen bushes in the park, one at Gregor’s end and one at the other side, but camels might not have wanted them. Camels were Middle Eastern beasts.

  The rope fence came up to the middle of Gregor’s thighs. It came close to both Tibor’s and Bennis’s waists, and they were both leaning forward over it, balancing on the balls of their feet but looking as if they were letting the rope support them. Their posture made Gregor uncomfortable, and so did the wind. In spite of the incessant whine of complaints he had heard since they first drove across the state line this morning, the weather in Bethlehem did not seem to him “warm.” It felt downright cold and getting colder. The wind was frigid. The sidewalk under his feet felt frozen solid. The thin leather soles of his shoes provided so little protection, his toes felt iced into a block. Gregor leaned forward and tapped Bennis on the shoulder.

  “Let’s go and eat something,” he told her. “At least let’s go somewhere inside. I’m getting frostbite.”

  “You’re wearing silly shoes,” Bennis said. “Just a minute, Gregor. They’re having some kind of animal rehearsal or something, can’t you see? Tibor is interested in what they’re going to do, and so am I.”

  Now that Bennis had pointed it out, Gregor could indeed see. The other two camels hadn’t absconded. They had been in another part of the small park in the charge of a short, muscular man in a bright red ski parka. He was leading them around in a wide circle, pulling them along on leashes that ended in three feet of wooden stick that he held onto. The camels did not look pleased.

  Gregor tapped Bennis on the shoulder again. “It’s not an animal rehearsal,” he said. “The man’s just making sure the camels get some exercise. You see those sticks? That’s so they can’t get close enough to bite him. Camels bite.”

  “I know camels bite,” Bennis said.

  “I have read about it in my pamphlet,” Tibor put in, waving the long booklet in the air. “This year they have fourteen different kinds of animals for the Nativity play and later for the living crêche. Camels. Cows. Sheep. Horses. Donkeys. Pigs. A black bear. A family of deer. A moose.”

  “A moose?”

  “They got it from a zoo in Oregon, Krekor. They also have three lion cubs and a tiger cub and a panther cub that they got from a firm that supplies animals for television commercials. It is going to be most symbolic.”

  “It is going to be an unholy mess,” Gregor said. “I wonder how they get them all here. This isn’t a major intersection. Do you figure they block off Main Street?”

  “If you read your brochure you’d know,” Bennis said. “Main Street is closed to all but pedestrian traffic from six o’clock every night until two o’clock the next morning. So are the two blocks closest to Main Street on something called Carrow. That’s so people can mill around and not get run over, and there isn’t any traffic noise to make it hard to hear the play.”

  Gregor shook his head. “That doesn’t answer my question. That just means Main Street is going to be full of people instead of cars. How are they going to get a moose and a black bear and a family of deer through all that?”

  “Maybe they get them here before, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Like these sheep and this cow they have here now.”

  “If they did that, you’d have other reasons besides traffic for not hearing the play. This isn’t that big a park.”

  “Well, they have to get here somehow,” Bennis said, “and they obviously do, because they’ve been having this play for the last two weeks, and nobody’s complained that I know of. I don’t understand you sometimes, Gregor. You get a perfectly interesting problem like a couple of shootings and you don’t think anything of it. And then you take off after some simple piece of nothing like this business of the animals as if it were the most fascinating puzzle since the Gordian knot.”

  “It’s because he’s lonely,” Tibor said. “You should consider this, Bennis. It is not good for a man of Krekor’s age to be without a wife.”

  “You’re my age,” Gregor said, “or just about. You don’t have a wife.”

  “I have the grace of God to see me through my difficulties, Krekor. You have only Lida Arkmanian’s cooking.”

  “I wish I had Lida Arkmanian’s cooking,” Gregor said.

  “I wish we had some kind of map,” Bennis said. “That’s the one thing the people who wrote this brochure didn’t think of. I suppose they thought in a town this small there was nothing to draw a map of. Never mind. I’m with Gregor. Tibor, we ought to get in out of the cold and at least get some coffee or something. What time is it?”

  “Ten to eleven,” Tibor said.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re trying to do,” somebody else said, “but I’m not going to let you do it. It’s been my part in this play for the last two weeks, and I haven’t done a single thing wrong with it.”

  Gregor turned around. In the beginning, he had thought the voice was coming from somewhere in the middle of the park. Then he’d realized that couldn’t be true. The park was what out-of-staters would have called a “common.” It was a flat, empty stretch of land with nothing but the gazebo in it and a few benches. The animals were there, and the small man who was walking them. Nobody else was. The voice they had heard was high-pitched, hysterical and definitely a woman’s. It had cut through the cold-thickened air as if it had edges made of razor blades.

  “There they are,” Bennis said. “Up by the Bethlehem News and Mail.”

  Bennis was right. They were up by the Bethlehem News and Mail—all the way up. You couldn’t really talk about “blocks” in Bethlehem, Vermont, although everybody, including the brochure on the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration, did. Main Street was sort of broken up into them, since it was paved and crossed by smaller streets here and there. The intersection pattern was random, though, and not neatly or precisely laid out. It was as if cows had wandered over this area many years ago, and the paths they made had been paved and christened roads. What Gregor meant when he thought of the offices of the Bethlehem News and Mail being “at least two-and-a-half blocks” away from where he was standing was two-and-a-half Philadelphia city blocks. A long way away, in fact. Far enough to make it surprising that they had heard this woman’s voice at all.

  There were three of them, two women and a man. Gregor knew immediately that the voice he had heard had come from the small blonde woman and not the other one. The other one was blonde, too, but a studied kind of blonde, as if she had her hair dyed strand by strand to produce the proper effect. In spite of that, she was not particularly attractive. There was something leaden about her face, something uninspired about the way she held her body. That could have been the distance from which he was looking at her, but Gregor didn’t think so. The smaller woman looked to him like a Botticelli angel, and the way she held herself was—he could
n’t pin that down. There seemed to be a dozen things going on in her at once, but there was fire and passion in all of them.

  The other woman was talking now. Gregor could see her lips move, but hear nothing of what she said. Beside her, the man was rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, his denim jacket open to the wind. Gregor had a hard time deciding whose side he was on, or which woman he was with. The smaller blonde one, he finally decided, because the other one looked too expensive. The other one looked as if she’d only be interested in men in suits.

  “I’m fine,” the smaller blonde woman said now, her voice still hysterical, still carrying, still sharp. “I’m just plain fine. I don’t need any help from you. I don’t need any help from anybody.”

  The man leaned over, said something, leaned back. The small blonde woman recoiled instinctively and then seemed to force herself to stand perfectly still. Then she turned her back on both of them and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

  “Look,” Tibor hissed in Gregor’s ear. “Right in the brochure. She’s the girl who is Mary.”

  “What?” Gregor said.

  Bennis had her brochure out, too. “Tibor’s right. The small blonde one who was getting hysterical is playing Mary. There are pictures of all the people playing the major roles right here in the back. It says she’s seventeen.”

  “That can’t be the same person,” Gregor said. “She has to be twenty.”

  Bennis looked amused. “I thought she was fifteen. Look. The other one is the one who’s playing Elizabeth. She’s seventeen, too. Quite a difference, isn’t there?”

  “I wonder what the fight was about,” Gregor said.

  Bennis shrugged. “I’d say Elizabeth thinks she’d be a better Mary than Mary. The Elizabeths of this world always do. I met a million and a half of them in boarding school. Mary looks like she’s all right. I don’t think she’s going to give in. With any luck, the people who run the Celebration are too intelligent to let her. There’s a place in this brochure called The Magick Endive, spelled with a ‘ck.’ Let’s go there.”

  “I like The Magick Endive, too,” Tibor said. “And it’s eleven-oh-two. I don’t think it’s right, Mary and Elizabeth fighting over their parts in a religious play.”

  “Of course it isn’t right,” Bennis said.

  “I don’t like that man,” Gregor told them.

  They all turned around in unison, to look again at the little group in front of the Bethlehem News and Mail. There was nothing to see. The little group had gone.

  That’s what happens when you start making mountains out of molehills, Gregor told himself. You make yourself feel silly.

  2

  Surprisingly, The Magick Endive didn’t turn out to be such a bad idea at all. Gregor had been convinced because of the name that the place would be a holding pen for the vegetarian and the leftover hippie. He expected to find salads made of nettles and tofu and honey-sweetened sassafras tea. He found all those things—although not the nettles, not really; nobody could eat nettles—but he also found a good deal more, and the good deal more made him very cheerful. “We use the Moosewood cookbooks,” the menu said. Gregor had never heard of the Moosewood cookbooks, but after reading a few of the descriptions under the listed dishes, he decided those books must be absolutely peachy. Meat there was not. Cheese there was, as well as sour cream, real butter and enough different kinds of pasta to make an Italian feel he’d gone to heaven. There were some items on the menu that would actually have been healthy for him to eat—low-fat, low-cholesterol, high-complex carbohydrate—but Gregor didn’t pay any attention to them. As far as he was concerned, the entire healthy-foods movement had been invented to make comfortable middle-aged men like himself feel bad.

  He picked out a bean-and-pasta casserole with a sauce made of sour cream and dill, ignored Bennis’s pointed “beans and pasta this early in the day?” and then applied his mind to his surroundings. That scene on Main Street was nagging at him. There was no reason it should. It was none of his business. He just couldn’t get it out of his mind. The man especially had made him uncomfortable, and he just wished he knew—

  Their waitress was a small girl in jeans and a pony-tail. After she’d taken their order, she’d gone through a swinging door at the back, been invisible for a few seconds, and then come out again. She was now sitting at a table carefully placed behind two potted evergreen trees. There was another girl with her, much the same physical type, as if this restaurant chose its help with an eye to physical stature. Gregor wondered how old they were, and whether he ought to be using the word “girl” to describe them. They looked impossibly young to him, but they also looked hip.

  Bennis was sitting next to Tibor on the other side of the table, bending over an open brochure and plotting the day.

  “I don’t think we ought to go souvenir shopping first thing,” she was telling him. “We ought to look around a little first and see how we feel. What about the tableaux for this afternoon? They’ve got ‘Celebrating the Winter Solstice Around the World’ in the basement of the Episcopal Church.”

  “I don’t understand this ‘Celebrating the Winter Solstice,’ Bennis. I am not celebrating the winter solstice. I am celebrating the birth of Our Lord.”

  “Right. Well. How about Christmas carols? The Baptist children’s choir is singing Christmas carols on the steps of the Baptist Church right here on Main Street starting at one-forty-five. That would even give us time to go back to the hotel and change.”

  Gregor wanted to go back to the hotel and sleep, but he figured he could fight that out with the two of them later. Now he stood up, stretched a little and said, “I’ll be right back. You two have a good time.”

  “Us two can use your input,” Bennis said pointedly. “It might be nice if we knew what you wanted to do.”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Fine,” Bennis said. “I think the Druids used to celebrate the winter solstice by getting dead drunk and dancing naked around a bonfire. Maybe we’ll do that.”

  “We will do no such thing,” Tibor said. “Bennis, you must not say such things. Not unless you mean them.”

  “You mean you wouldn’t mind if I meant them?”

  “Krekor—”

  “I’ll be right back,” Gregor said again.

  Bennis started to say something else, but Gregor slipped past her. With anybody else, he would have been worried that she would sit staring after him, thereby discovering that he was not on his way to the place he had implied he was on his way to. With Bennis, he didn’t worry at all. He knew she would throw herself right back into the job of planning every minute of Tibor’s day as soon as he was out of voice range.

  Gregor rounded the artificial island created by the potted evergreens and came to a stop in front of the small table where his waitress was still sitting with her friend. They both looked up at him at the same time and paused politely in their talking. Gregor hesitated. When he’d been an agent for the Bureau, he’d had a set of credentials that provided him with a reason to question total strangers. Since his retirement, his involvement in various criminal cases had usually been accompanied by authorization of one kind or another from the local authorities. Now he not only didn’t have credentials or authorizations, he didn’t even have a crime. He had no idea why he wanted to ask the questions he wanted to ask. He simply felt a compelling need to ask them.

  His waitress—Faith, if he remembered correctly—started to rise from her seat.

  “Could I get you something?” she asked him. “Was there something you forgot to order?”

  “No, no,” Gregor said. “Sit down. I’m just—ah—yes. So. I’m just being nosy.”

  “Of course you are,” the other waitress said. “I told you, Faith. He looks just like his picture in the paper.”

  “It was a week ago when I saw his picture in the paper. I didn’t really look at it. Crime isn’t my thing.”

  “It isn’t my thing either, but I looked
at the picture.” The other waitress gave Gregor a big smile. “You are Gregor Demarkian, aren’t you? The one in the paper?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, I am.”

  “Are you investigating a crime?” Faith asked. “That seems like such an odd thing to say about this place. Investigating a crime. There isn’t any crime here.”