He was thin enough to slip between a gap in the gate, and he moved from the ground floor to the top, knocking on every door along the way. There were four apartments on each of the four levels, and the first-floor doors went unanswered. The next several were answered by Spanish speakers, and several others also went unanswered. It wasn’t until the fourteenth door—a middle apartment on the top floor—that Ruben introduced himself to another Armenian.
“Barev,” he said to the woman who answered. She was his mother’s age, and her hands were wet. She was cooking. He could smell the kufte. “I’m looking for my friend who lives here,” he said, and she told him to come inside.
As he described Avo, the woman brought him a cup of tea and a plate of bread and cheese. She recognized Avo but said she hadn’t seen him in about a month. Sometimes he would talk to her grandchildren, she said, but otherwise, she didn’t know much about him, other than that he was fresh from the old country. Did Ruben want anything besides the tea? The food was almost ready. Beer? Whiskey?
“Thank you,” he said, “but my search continues.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll ask my granddaughter if she knows anything. Your friend would talk to her outside when she was visiting. Are you sure you’re not hungry?” she added. “Here, let me pack something for you.”
In the end, he took a wrapped plate of dolma, kufte, and lavash back with him in the cab. The driver made a show of sniffing but didn’t complain. He just said, “Spill in my car, I’ll spill you.”
Several days passed before the phone in his hotel room rang. He’d given the number to the woman at the apartment and had told her to contact him when the granddaughter visited next.
“You’re friends with Avo,” the granddaughter said. She was eight years old.
“You remember him? About a hundred feet high.”
“He wasn’t that big.”
“Oh, he must have shrunk in America.”
“He was still pretty big.”
“Oh, good. Do you know where he is now?”
“No,” said the girl. “Do you? He was nice.”
“While he was here, did our dear friend Avo mention where he might go next, what he wanted to do next?”
“No,” she said, and her grandmother’s voice in the background said, “That’s enough, let me talk to him now.”
Shit, Ruben thought. There was nothing to learn here. He’d hang up and think of where else he could search. “Okay,” he said, wrapping the phone’s cord so tight against his forearm that his hand turned white. “Tstesutyun, goodbye.”
The girl said, “You speak Armenian and English, too? Did you learn from Valantin, too?”
Ruben said, “Valantin?”
“She teaches English. The grandparents won’t try, but everyone else here learned from her. My mom did. Avo, too. She speaks the way you just did, once in Armenian, once in English. It takes her so long to talk.”
Her grandmother took the phone. “God be with you,” she said before hanging up.
Leaving the hotel, Ruben asked the man at the front desk if he could put him in touch with an English tutor. And the man knew just the woman.
“I set him up with a job,” Valantin said. They were at a little coffee table in the back of a jewelry store, and nobody but her sons had passed through in thirty minutes, but she kept looking around as if the feds might burst in. “I’ve gone over there to ask for any information at all, but the owner said he’s lost so many undocumented workers, from Central America and Mexico and the Soviet Union, that he’s grown accustomed to replacing them without asking any questions. Questions lead to a serious risk for his business, he said, and although I understand, I’m worried. I’m so worried that Avo’s been detained, taken somewhere, disappeared. His English was improving well, but he wouldn’t be able to understand or speak on legal issues. I’m very, very worried.”
“Where did he work?”
She bent forward and whispered. “A bar. Called The Gutshot. It’s classier than it sounds.”
Ruben waved his hand. “No judgment here. I’m just concerned about finding my cousin,” he said, and Valantin put a hand on the lightly padded shoulder of his suit.
“I’ve been feeling so guilty,” she said. “It’s my fault he was working illegally. It’s my fault he’s disappeared.”
“He knew the risks,” Ruben said. “And when I find him, he’ll tell you the exact same.”
“Shnorhagalem, Ruben-jan. Ruben, thank you.”
At four o’clock in the afternoon, the door to The Gutshot was locked, and the alleyway was empty. His taxi driver had told him the bar wouldn’t open for another hour, but Ruben pulled on the chrome handle anyway, and knocked at the door with the fat of his fist. When it opened, a man—young but with silver hair—said, “Please stop that.”
“I’m here to talk about Avo Gregoryan.”
The man was holding a white rag. He said, “Don’t know him.”
“I’m not the police. I’m a friend of his.”
“Still don’t know him,” the man said, ready to close the door.
Ruben, in a flourish he’d practiced in the mirrors of Europe, opened his jacket to show his gun.
Longtin had just become a father. Not long after the birth, he’d come into the baby’s room to find his wife folded impossibly inside the cradle with her tiny daughter snug in her arms, singing a melody she told him later she’d invented right on the spot. The girls in his life—that’s what Longtin was thinking about when he stepped aside to let Ruben in, when he described the bleached-blond manager who’d taken Avo on the road, and the sport he’d taken him to do. Who knew where they were now, what company or part of the country they’d landed in? Not Longtin, whose life was no longer his alone to risk, and not Ruben, who thanked him and left, blinding the bar with daylight as he opened the door to the world.
Later, in the hotel room, the phone rang. Ruben muted the television. Hagopian asked how his search was going. “I’m close,” Ruben said, “I’m close.”
In fact, he wasn’t. He hadn’t even learned the difference between the kind of wrestling Avo had done as a child and the wrestling he was doing now, the distance between the sport and the spectacle. And when he finally did, thanks to a bemused trainer in a San Diego dojo, Ruben still hadn’t discovered just how protective the professional wrestling industry was about its inner workings. Taking him for a reporter or a cop, no one would speak to him. It took Ruben over a year to find someone willing to talk, and even he—a vulgar carnival barker based in the negligible state of Kentucky—had no immediate answer to Ruben’s question.
“I’ll see if I can get ahold of his manager,” the Kentuckian said, and another long wait began.
Ruben had been living out of his hotel room in Los Angeles for nine months when he was beckoned back to Paris. He was taken to a jazz club and shown to a small table near the stage where Hagop Hagopian sat, watching two saxophonists duel. When Ruben joined him at the table, Hagopian didn’t acknowledge him. The band played chorus after chorus for the soloists to explore. Ruben stopped checking to see if Hagopian had noticed him and turned his attention to the musicians. A waitress bent her ear. Vodka neat, he said. He looked to Hagopian, who dashed his cigarette and ordered another cognac. According to the glasses on the table, it would be his fifth.
The band began a ballad. Brushes on the snare. Bass notes, whole measures apart. A breathy tenor over a dampened piano. Dim and smoky, the music seemed to infect the club, and the longer the band played, the dimmer went the room.
Ruben felt a touch on his elbow hanging from the edge of the table. He thought the waitress had returned. But it was a card-stock coaster, slid to him along the table, bearing scribbles in Armenian handwriting. Ruben kept his face toward the band but lowered his eyes to the note: Your cousin’s cousin is not alone. Organized coup from inside. You still with me?
The band quieted for the bassist to take a solo over the pianist’s comping. Brushes hissed and snapped, and the sounds
of the audience came alive: ice rattling in glasses, matches striking, the hushed tones of secrets passing lips.
For the first time all night, Ruben’s boss looked at him. Something had changed in Hagop Hagopian. He seemed decades older than the charismatic idealist Ruben had met in the same city five years earlier. The lines between his eyebrows had been troweled deep, and his nose had grown so sharp that the blue shadow it cast on one side of his face made a perfect triangle. And he hadn’t said a word. Drunk and quiet was an unsettling combination that reminded Ruben of his father in the moment before he’d burned their books.
To Hagopian’s scribbled question, Ruben nodded. He tried to convey his seriousness. He would be loyal until the end.
Hagopian reached for the coaster and added another line in pen. He passed it along. Prove?
The bassist was walking now, and the sax was trilling a high note in a long, unfurling, single breath. The musicians were drenched in sweat and seemed to come up occasionally for air.
In the end, Hagop Hagopian applauded, and so did Ruben. In order to prove his loyalty, in order to buy more time to search for Avo, he’d have to run an errand.
From the jazz club, Ruben had followed Hagopian to a hotel room with vaulted ceilings and a view of Sacré-Cœur lit up at night like paradise above the city. There they met the man from Moscow, a longtime ASALA member who looked up briefly from the money he was counting to greet them. All the furniture in that room was antique and upholstered in velvet. A dinner cart with dirty dishes and silverware was parked near the foot of the bed.
“You ate already?” Hagopian said.
“A while ago,” said the man from Moscow, who was married to a woman he hadn’t seen in three months. They spoke over the phone every chance he got. The calls to Moscow were expensive, and he spent most of those conversations listening to his wife complain about his job.
Their sons, five and seven, didn’t need reparations, she said. They needed their father. Okay, he said. He would drop the boss off at the airport soon and be done with Paris forever. Or at least he would have a break. Of course he knew he shouldn’t have told his wife about his role in ASALA, but he never could keep a secret from her. She’d once been engaged to his closest friend, and even that hadn’t stopped him from telling her the truth. On recent calls, he’d started interrupting her complaints. “It’s almost over, babe. Finish this assignment, and then a change of management coming soon, I promise.” He’d promised her it wouldn’t be another six months before the boss was replaced with Monte Melkonian, who was less—what was the word he used? Demanding.
Hagop Hagopian used the telephone cord to strangle him. He had long fingers, the man from Moscow. He was using them to pull away the helix at his throat. Before returning to Los Angeles, Ruben found a serrated blade on the dish cart and took care of them.
14
Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1980
A white bus with a pale blue roof came to a hiss beside the fountain in the square. The door opened, and a line of children filed out. The old Russian church with its golden dome welcomed them as if to the great hereafter, but instead of a saint at the gate, they were welcomed by their teacher.
“This way,” Mina said, and the children followed her the short distance to the train station. Mina walked backward, facing the students, counting them. Twelve. Like Jacob’s sons, she thought. Like the apostles. Like the number of days she’d gone without speaking to her parents.
Now she and her students were off to Tbilisi, a six-hour train ride through the northern forests. Rumor had it that Byzantine and medieval ruins lay at the bottom of those rolling thickets, but Mina had never seen them for herself. She hardly strained to look out the window. There was too much undiscovered history at the surface of the world, she thought, to go digging for it in the woods.
Not thirty minutes into the journey, the train screamed to a stop. An attendant came though the cabins, explaining that a mudslide up ahead had blocked the tracks. The delay would last overnight, possibly two days. Apologies, he said, but the train was heading back.
The twelve students groaned. They would miss their exhibition, and their parents would not be pleased. Somehow Mina would take the blame, as if she could control the rains of Lori province. As if anyone, especially her, had control over a single droplet of her own destiny. The train began to move back in the direction it had taken her away from, and she had nothing to do but watch the world in the windows reverse.
From one of the adjoining cars came a man her age, bearded and open-collared, who took a seat facing her. He didn’t seem from around here, but he said hello in Armenian, and she nodded. He had that open look in his eyes, the same look she’d noticed in the man in Paris. Handsome with ideas—that was what she’d called it in her journal. This man was handsome with ideas, too, and she knew he’d start a conversation before he’d even fallen into his seat.
“You don’t look like a woman who’s given birth to this many kids,” he said.
“I’m their teacher.”
“Yes,” he said, “that was a joke.”
Mina covered her chin. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. My delivery, probably. Where were you taking them?”
“We were supposed to go to an exhibition in Tbilisi.”
“In what sport?”
“Backgammon,” she said.
“Ah. I always preferred chess. You have to use every string bean in your brain.” His accent was strange. She couldn’t place it.
“Maybe,” she said. “But backgammon is more like life. Luck and skill together.”
The man smiled. “What’s your name?”
She told him.
“Monte Melkonian,” the man said, and reached across to shake her hand.
“I can’t place your accent,” she said.
“I’m traveling around, picking up new accents every day. I’m from the United States originally. California.”
“I’ve never been,” Mina said. She considered stopping there but didn’t. “I know someone who lives in the United States, though.”
He laughed. “I was going to ask for a name, as if I’d know your friend. It’s an enormous country. My state of California alone has eight times as many people as all of Armenia.”
She watched his eyes. He caught her watching.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not coming on to you. I’m in love—her name is Seda. I haven’t told her yet, but I think she knows. I’ve just been traveling so much—I was just in Tehran for the fall of the shah.”
“I hope you’re not planning a revolution on this train.”
“Ha, not here. I was an archaeology student—I’m just traveling, taking notes for a book.”
Mina looked out the window. The hills were as green as she’d ever seen them. She almost said something embarrassing about the future, about how she hoped the ’80s would be the first good decade for Armenians in generations, but she stopped herself and kept looking at the trees.
“I really wasn’t trying to come on to you,” Monte said. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
“It’s okay,” Mina said. “Even if you were, I would’ve told you I’m married. Well, I’ve just been engaged.”
“Oh yeah? To the man of your dreams?”
“No,” she said. Maybe because she’d never see this stranger again, she thought, she felt safe telling him the truth. Or maybe it was the space they were in, the shared and enclosed and moving train. “My parents have arranged a husband for me in Kirovakan.”
“That’s very old-fashioned,” Monte said. “Is he . . . Do you at least like him?”
“I don’t know him very well. He’s older. His first wife died. He’s just moved from Leninakan.”
“Well, he should be funny. I heard they’re supposed to be funny in that city, right?”
“Some of them are funny. Some of them are just as naïve and sentimental as we are in Kirovakan.”
Monte bent forward and planted his elbows on
his knees. He was so close to her he could whisper. “What if you don’t go back?”
“Excuse me?”
“What if you just stay on this train after letting the children off at Kirovakan. Come with me to Yerevan, travel with me. You would like Seda, I think. She’s easier to like than I am. She’s a genius.”
Mina felt the rare awareness of a certainty: she would replay this moment in her mind forever, following each tine in the fork.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Okay,” Monte said, and fell back in his seat. “In that case, don’t despair—I’m sure you’ll find a happy life in that arrangement somewhere. We’re Armenians, after all. We’ve survived worse occupiers than a funny old spouse.”
At that, he gave his attention to a book, which she hadn’t noticed him holding all this time.
Disappointed, she returned to counting the kids. Twelve—half the number of her years.
Back in Kirovakan, she wondered: what would she do with them?
The first few months after Avo had disappeared, one of two disturbing possibilities confronted her: either Avo had abandoned her in the middle of the night, avoidant and cowardly, stripping her of any respect she might’ve built for him in the past; or else something terrible had happened to drive him away. Under the second category, she wondered half sanely if she herself had done the harm, a question that could never—even after she learned the truth, many years later—be totally solved. In her more self-affirming theories, the only way Avo could’ve left her so suddenly was under the threat to her own safety, in which case her love had been exploited as leverage. In one way or another, she felt burglarized of her respect and her love, and because what had been stolen from her was in both cases abstract, she had no place or ritual specific enough to help her recover.
For that reason, she spent those first months alone trying to find something more concrete that had been lost, Tigran’s old collection of dice. In the past, she’d watched as Tigran’s widow scoured the house without any luck, but now Mina took the search upon herself. She asked the old men playing backgammon outside the café and in the city square, old chums of her coach who had no leads but wished her all the luck she was already famous for. She went to the census bureau’s office to see if they had any information on possessions of Tigran’s that might’ve been collected by the Party, but the middle-aged man behind the desk—squat and hairy, with a dinky pin clipped pseudo-professionally to his lapel—stumbled over his unhelpful words as if he’d never seen a woman with a question before. Then she even voyaged up the muddy path to the village in the hills where Ruben’s parents lived, to ask his mother if she’d seen the dice.
The Gimmicks Page 17