True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  Ages ago, when Gregor was just out of the Army and engaged to Elizabeth, he had thought he knew what love was. Surely, when Elizabeth was sick, in those last awful years, he actually had known what it was. He would never have been able to stay with her, and to help her, if he had not loved her. Duty would not have been enough. Even so, this time around and with Bennis, he felt as if he didn’t know anything at all. She was such a complicated person. There were so many twists and turns and secrets to her body and her soul. He knew he would have been wrong to think that her life had been easy merely because it had mostly been rich—but he thought that that was what he must have thought, deep down, until very recently. Now he wanted to run the palm of his hand over her cheek, to feel the smoothness of it, to feel the heat. Sometimes it seemed to him as if his love for her reduced itself to these things: the visceral; the physical; the couldn’t-be-put-into-words. It surprised him, really. He had never been a primarily physical person, but his response to Bennis was intensely so, and so insistently present that he found himself coming to in stores and on street corners with the smell of her wrapped around him like a cloak.

  The throw blanket didn’t cover anywhere near as much of her as Gregor would have liked, but there was nothing he could do about it but stretch it smooth in the corners. He did that and then planted a kiss on her forehead. She neither moved nor spoke. He backed away into his front hall and got his coat. They’d been through a lot together over the last however many years, and they would get through this.

  Still, Gregor thought, I’d be happier if I wasn’t about to be the one responsible for the death of her oldest living sister.

  2

  It was later, sitting in the Ararat over coffee and eggs, that Gregor realized there was something he could do about what was going to happen. He couldn’t do anything about the execution itself, about the fact of it or its timing. He couldn’t even do anything about Dickie Van Damm, who was supposed to be the grieving widower of Bennis’s sister Myra—although he doubted if Dickie could hold a single emotion for the space of ten years, never mind a single thought. His mind flitted back and forth through the scenes at Engine House in the days after Bennis’s father had been killed, but he could never make it rest on Dickie Van Damm. Dickie himself was never at rest. He gestured and bopped. He hurried from one end of a room to the other. He talked, nonstop, while pulling at his tie hard enough to strangle himself. He had, Gregor realized with a shock, all the mannerisms that men of his own generation associated with homosexuality—except, of course, that he was not homosexual. The Truman Capote Syndrome, one of Gregor’s instructors at Quantico had called it. The memory made the past seem eons away instead of decades. Had they ever thought like that, as a matter of course, without even questioning it? Had there ever been a time when an “enlightened” view of homosexuality was that it wasn’t their fault, it was a kind of birth defect they were born with, and people who weren’t born with it should be less censuring than kind?

  Gregor was sitting in the big window booth, opposite Tibor and Russ Donahue, who was married to Donna Moradanyan. Next to him, Donna’s son Tommy was bent over a hot chocolate covered by a mountain of whipped cream. The cup was big enough to be a soup mug, except that it had a handle. Outside, on Cavanaugh Street, the pavements were slick with ice. There was a needle-fine rain falling, the kind that turned to ice in the air.

  “So,” Russ Donahue was saying, “what I told her was, she should apply to all the places around here, Temple and Penn and that kind of thing, even Bryn Mawr. It wouldn’t be that much of a commute. And so she did. And Penn took her right off, early admissions, first thing.”

  “So,” Tibor said. “She will go to Penn.”

  “Right,” Russ said. “And she was ecstatic, at first. But then, right after Christmas, it started to get odd. She’s all wound up. She’s, uh, decorating. If you know what I mean. You can see what she’s done to the front of our house.”

  Everybody could see what Donna Moradanyan Donahue had done to the front of the house she shared with Russ and Tommy. It was wrapped in red and white satin ribbons, and had a heart the size of a Volkswagen beetle on its roof.

  “She has also decorated the church,” Tibor said. “Not inside the church, where it would be a sacrilege, but the front where the sign is. We have now Cupids with arrows pointing to the time of the liturgy on Sunday.”

  “Now she’s going to go decorate your house,” Russ said, nodding at Gregor, “just the way she used to do. According to her. I think she’s talked to Bennis about it, but I can’t, because Donna’s the only one who can talk to Bennis these days. I’m all for Bennis’s quitting smoking, but you know, Gregor, she’s having a really hard time with it.”

  “She’s not having nearly as hard a time with it as I am,” Gregor said.

  “My mom is going to go to college,” Tommy said. “She’s already the second smartest person in the world, but now she’s going to get a paper that says so so she can show people when they want her to prove it.”

  “The second smartest?” Russ said. “Who’s the smartest, Father Tibor?”

  “You.”

  Gregor lifted his coffee cup and waved it at Linda Melajian, who was on the other side of the room trying to placate one of the Very Old Ladies. Gregor thought the Very Old Ladies had to be at least a hundred years old by now. They looked a hundred years old, and every time there was any news about Armenia they seemed to be able to remember events that took place in the seventeenth century. Even the assassination that had happened last fall had brought up memories of other assassinations, and of coups, and of Turks rampaging through the countryside. Gregor thought that what was really going on was a kind of emotional displacement. What they really remembered was the fear, and the sense of living in a landscape of chaos and uncertainity. There was something about the bad emotions of childhood that no adult could ever completely shake. Gregor was the same way about fires. His childhood had been full of fires, back in the days when Cavanaugh Street had been nothing but tenements cut up into meager cramped apartments, and when the people who lived here had had no money to speak of and no space to breathe. Even after all these years, Gregor could remember the light of the flames flickering in his window from a fire devouring one of the houses across the street. Three of them had gone up in a single year, when he was seven, and Gregor could still remember himself lying as still as possible in the narrow bed in the room he shared with his older brother, as if any movement of his might attract the fire’s attention, might make it leap across the street and begin to destroy his own. Then there would be the sound of sirens and screeching tires. The adults in the rooms around him, his parents, his Aunt Vida and his Uncle Michael, the Velaskians from across the hall, would gather in the Demarkian living room to look out on what was going on. They would talk rapidly, in panicked squeals, and in Armenian, so that the children might not understand. Maybe that was why Gregor had fought so hard against learning the language with any degree of competency. He’d always thought it was because he’d wanted to be a Real American, instead of the hyphenated kind. Across the street, the houses that had burned down all those years ago—and been left as rubble for decades—were now town houses owned by well-heeled women who spent their winters in fur coats. His parents’ old apartment was now one of the storerooms above the Ararat. Gregor, waved again. Linda Melajian caught his eye and nodded.

  “So,” Russ Donahue was saying, again, “that’s it. I mean, I thought that when I got married, you know, over time, I’d start to understand her. Not just love her or like her, but really understand her. And instead, she gets more incomprehensible every day.”

  “Wait till she gets pregnant,” Linda Melajian said, pouring coffee into Gregor’s mug from her Pyrex pot. She checked everybody else’s cup, and everybody else’s food, so that she was satisfied that nobody needed anything. Then she marched away.

  “I don’t think Donna wants to get pregnant just yet,” Russ said. “I mean, she does eventually, you know, but I thi
nk she wants to finish college first.”

  Gregor got a clean paper napkin out of the little stack of them Linda had placed in the middle of the table when they first sat down. The Ararat used cloth napkins for lunch and dinner, but for breakfast they used paper. It was a good thing, because Gregor was always trying to find something to write on. He took out his pen—Bennis’s pen; she stole his bathrobes, he stole her Bic medium-point pens—and began to draw a diagram that started with the governor’s office on top and meandered its way down to the state attorney general and the mayor of Philadelphia. He was just thinking that he had never gotten along with the mayor of Philadelphia—which was rather like saying that Jesse Jackson had never gotten along with Jesse Helms—when he became aware that everybody else at the table had suddenly gone quiet.

  “What is it?” he said, looking at his diagram as if it could really tell him something, instead of being the restless doodle it was.

  He looked up, and when he did he saw Sister Mary Scholastica standing by their table, wearing what looked like the Count Dracula’s cape over her long habit. Her veil was on slightly crooked, as if it had been knocked sideways in the wind. A few strands of hair were coming out of the white-tipped edge of the stiff crown. She was not alone. A small, much younger, much more tentative nun was standing just behind her. Gregor stood up.

  “Sister,” he said. “Sit down. I haven’t seen you in a year. Bennis isn’t here. She had a late night last night. I think she’s still—”

  “I haven’t come to see Bennis,” Scholastica said. “Oh, I’m sorry. I mean, I do want to see Bennis. I’ve been wanting to see her for weeks. But now. Now I came to see you. This is Sister Peter Rose.”

  “Sister,” Gregor said.

  Sister Peter Rose bobbed and blushed simultaneously.

  “Maybe Sister Peter Rose would like to sit down,” Scholastica said. “While you and I go somewhere to talk. It really is important. Couldn’t we just go and find an empty table—”

  They looked around There were half a dozen empty tables in the middle of the room. Sister Scholastica shrugged.

  By now, of course, everybody in the room was looking at them. People on Cavanaugh Street had run into Sister Scholastica before, since she and Bennis were friends, but it was still highly unusual for two nuns in only slightly modified habits to show up at the Ararat at quarter after seven in the morning. In fact, Gregor was willing to bet it was unheard of. Linda Melajian had already appeared with two clean coffee cups and the coffee. Sister Peter Rose slid into the place Gregor had just vacated.

  “We’ll go over there,” Gregor told Linda, pointing to a table five feet away. He led Sister Scholastica across the room. “I thought you said it was no longer a rule, that nuns had to travel in twos,” he said.

  “It’s not.” Scholastica sat down. “I just didn’t like the idea of wandering around in the dark on my own. I’m not used to cities, did you know that? Colchester was as close as I’d ever gotten to one before this, at least to live in, and it was hardly Philadelphia. I’ve got a problem.”

  “I had figured out that much.”

  Linda Melajian was there with the coffee and the cup. She had Gregor’s half-full cup with her as well. She put it down before Gregor could analyze how she was managing to juggle all these things at once.

  “Cream and sugar?” she asked Scholastica.

  “No, thank you,” Scholastica said. “I drink it black.”

  Linda Melajian wandered away.

  “Well,” Gregor said. “What is it? I can’t believe you’re in any kind of serious trouble. You’re one of the sanest people I’ve ever known.”

  “Oh, it’s not me exactly,” Scholastica said. “It’s—do you know I’m living in Philadelphia now? I’ve meant to call Bennis, but I’ve been too busy. I came in at the beginning of January to replace the principal at St. Anselm’s Parish School.”

  “St. Anselm’s? The place where there was that suicide a couple of weeks ago?”

  “It’s been nine days,” Scholastica said. “Exactly ten days. Today makes ten days. That’s the place, yes.”

  Gregor cocked his head. “Don’t tell me it turns out not to have been a suicide? I thought it was witnessed by all kinds of people—”

  “Oh, it was. By Peter Rose, for one. And Father Healy. As well as by a whole lot of homeless people who were sleeping in the church. Father Healy lets them sleep in the church. The Cardinal isn’t sure that he likes the idea. No. Marty Kelly committed suicide. It isn’t about Marty. It’s about Bernadette.”

  “Bernadette?”

  “His wife. He brought her dead body to the church. She was a diabetic, one of those ones where the disease seems impossible to control. Anyway, he was at work one day and she went into a diabetic coma at home and died. And he—I don’t know all the details, Gregor, it’s very complicated. But to make it short, he brought her body to the church. And he went into the sacristy, to the changing room where the priests robe for Mass, I think because he knew that nobody would be in there until right before seven. And he wrote a suicide note. And then he came out and put her body in front of the altar and, well, you know.”

  “All right.” Gregor’s coffee was still too hot for him to drink comfortably. Scholastica seemed to be drinking hers without noticing how hot it was. “So, there was his wife, Bernadette. Kelly?”

  “Right.”

  “And?”

  Scholastica put her hand up to the crown of her veil and tried to adjust it. With these new veils, there was always a little hair showing at the front, and a stiff half-moon at the crown that was almost like a linen tiara. Scholastica’s efforts to put the thing right only made the mess her hair was in even worse. She put her hands down on the table.

  “The medical examiner’s office is going to have a press conference today and announce the results of the autopsies. The Cardinal has managed to acquire an advance copy of the autopsy report.”

  “Ah. And?”

  “Bernadette Kelly didn’t die in a diabetic coma. She died of arsenic. A lot of arsenic. And what’s almost more important, it’s nearly certain that Marty couldn’t have given it to her.”

  Gregor slapped his hand against the table. “They can’t possibly know that. Not unless they can pin this man down with certainty at least for several hours, and even then—”

  “They can pin him down with certainty. Look, Gregor, it’s not just Bernadette, either. It’s—I really can’t go into all this now. You have no idea. I talked to Father Healy and Father Healy talked to the Cardinal. The Cardinal wants to know if you’d be willing to come down to his office as soon as you can get there.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. Gregor, please believe me. You have no idea how bad this is. That’s why I came instead of the Cardinal calling you. He doesn’t even want the chance of somebody finding out in advance that he’s consulted you. And under the circumstances, I don’t blame him. Will you come?”

  “Of course I’ll come,” Gregor said, and then his eye was caught by Tommy Moradanyan, standing on the book seat at Sister Peter Rose’s back in such a way that her veil cascaded over him, hiding him completely.

  It wasn’t really relevant at the moment, but Gregor disliked the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia almost as much as he disliked the mayor.

  TWO

  1

  Like many other people, Gregor Demarkian had long had a love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church. The love was an acknowledgment of cultural achievement. Michelangelo and Bach, Hildegarde von Bingen and Teresa of Avila—it was impossible not to notice that the institution that still called itself Holy Mother Church had been mother to men and women of great talent, integrity, and intelligence over the course of twenty centuries, and still was. Gregor had seen those critiques of religion put out by the various “skeptical” societies that had sprung up over the last twenty years, claiming that all religion was a delusion and all religious people were addle-headed idiots who only believed out of a craven and atavistic f
ear of hell, but then the people who wrote the critiques seemed to him to be more than a little addle-headed themselves. If you didn’t have an axe to grind, you had to accept it. Catholic art, Catholic music, Catholic literature, Catholic philosophy, Catholic architecture: you could go for years studying nothing else, and always be in the company of the best the human mind could produce. It even worked when you were in the presence of imitations, as he was now, walking through the high-ceilinged halls of the archdiocesan chancery. The pictures on the walls were reproductions, but they were good reproductions of good art. The almost-not-audible polyphonic chant was coming from a CD player and not from monks praying as they walked, but it was soothing to listen to. In the days of the old Cardinal Archbishop, Gregor would have been happy to be where he was. He had enjoyed the chancery then, even though he had never been in it except to discuss a problem, potential or actual. When his interviews were over, he would go downstairs and across the way to the cathedral and sit in a pew in the back for a while. In the late afternoon, this was usually safe. No Masses were being said. He hadn’t wanted to attend a religious service. He liked to watch the changes in himself, the way the place and the quietness of it rocked against the bleakness of his agnosticism. He had felt the same thing when Bennis had taken him to the Cathedral de Notre Dame in Paris, except that the experience had been even stronger. If there was any sense to the phrase “to wake the dead,” this was it. In Notre Dame, especially, Gregor had felt as if he were in the presence of centuries of souls, all still alive, all still alive, all just out of sight—and all, of course, as thoroughly convinced of the reality of God as he was of the impossibility of knowing anything about Him. Gregor sometimes wondered if this would have been different if he had been brought up a Catholic instead of in the Armenian Church. Much as he loved Father Tibor, the services at Holy Trinity, and even Holy Trinity itself, left him cold. He would never in his life be able to shake his childhood conviction that all things connected to it were foreign, and un-American, and second-rate. He supposed Catholics felt that way, too, about Catholicism, if that was what they were brought up with—but not all Catholics, obviously, since Sister Scholastica had both been born one and become a nun.