The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “No,” Ruben said, and he took the key from his partner’s hand. “I’ll go. What I need is hard to find. Go rest. Read the paper. Enjoy the parade.”

  For a short while, Varoujan feigned protest. Then, satisfied with his effort, he dragged the hems of his pants to the chaise longue, retrieved his paper, and went with it to the balcony.

  Ruben knew the parade would go on until noon, and then the metro would be clogged all day with people crossing the city and loitering until the fireworks began at dusk. The choice—join the mobs in the torrid streets or else stay in the hotel room while Varoujan sauntered off suspiciously—was unpleasant but clear. Soon he was on the elevator, descending to the lobby, and in a flash of heat, he found himself among the people.

  Over the chaos of laughter and whistling from the parade came the ringing of a distant bell—om, om, om—and it swelled as Ruben realized he was following it. Otherwise, it was almost impossible to tell in which direction he was going. The city swarmed with people, and every hat in the crowd lurched sideways like a thirsty tongue. It was mid-July, and the heat was just beginning to wear out its welcome. Ruben—who refused even to go out for a pack of cigarettes wearing anything less dignified than a suit—folded his jacket over his arm. A block later, he rolled up his shirtsleeves. The sheer number of people in the streets—he couldn’t see over their heads—made him feel smaller than he’d felt in many years, and his smallness worked with the continuous ringing of the bell—om, om, om—to drive him off the boulevard and into a narrow, inconspicuous alleyway. There, alone, he caught his breath and regained his sense of size. He was sweating through his shirt and underwear, which clung to him like fearful children. He removed his shoes and peeled off his socks, which he rolled into tight balls that fit into the pockets of his folded jacket. Then he stepped barefoot back into his tasseled loafers. He’d get blisters, maybe, but the walk couldn’t be much longer now. In fact, merging again into the crowd, he could make out, just off the sidewalk and manned by an Algerian wearing a thinning beard, an outdoor bodega selling his ointment.

  In Paris, Ruben took pleasure in smoking special cigarettes he could find only there, Gauloises, and he put one in his mouth as he waited in the tangled cluster of buyers that passed for a line. He found a bottle of the stuff he’d come for and smoked two Gauloises before he made it to the Algerian with his makeshift register. As he paid, the bells struck again—om, om, om—and he saw, sandwiched between apartments along the Champs-Élysées, the engraved stone pediment and sea-foam spire of his church.

  Not his, really, but theirs. The Armenian Apostolic Cathedral of Paris—how many times had he almost, but not quite, gone inside? All those years ago, during his very first visit to Paris, he’d been invited to take a tour of the church. Mina had called ahead and arranged the whole thing. And although Ruben had agreed to go with her—had looked forward to it, in fact, holding secret beliefs that the church might transform them in some matrimonial and godly way—he failed to meet her in the lobby as they’d planned. Instead, he’d gone off with the men who’d invited him to follow them, and here he was, almost a decade later, still following them.

  He stood in front of a black ornamental gate, waist-high, that opened onto a pathway made of stone. Ahead, between two mighty columns, an old oak door stood invitingly ajar. Ruben uncapped his fresh bottle of apple cider vinegar. He drank a swig and then let himself in.

  With a heavy blow, the door closed behind him and shut out the raucous world. Here was a quiet place in a muted light, where even the few tourists escaping the parade seemed like penitents. Despite the shade, the heat felt thicker here, wetter, churning with the smell of driftwood. The scattered visitors craned their necks to marvel at the names of bishops engraved in the walls and at the chandeliers strung from the frescoed ceiling. The centerpiece descended on a wire from the tip of the cupola and cast alms of wheaten light over the narrow, extravagant rugs laid out along the aisle. There were no pews, only wooden chairs arranged in rows. Ruben took a seat in the back and started removing his shoes again. Disrespectful, probably, to be sockless in a place like this.

  An old priest in a black hood and a purple cloak lingered at the altar, seemingly unaware of the visitors. He lit a tall candle planted in a trough of sand. Almost exclusively in pairs, the tourists came and went, until Ruben, socks and shoes back on, was alone with the candle-lighting priest. The bell had stopped ringing, and it was quiet—not dead quiet, but the other kind, the living quiet of green things at the surface of the sea. The living quiet of blood to the ears, of memories swarming and piling and competing to be remembered. How long had it been since he’d slept more than a few hours through? The priest lit a candle with a candle. Ruben crossed himself.

  He’d come to Paris several days earlier from Athens, near where he’d lived for the past three years, after finding Avo. In 1980, they’d left the United States together and arrived in Greece to a small midnight audience. There were four men awaiting them in two idling cars outside the terminal, and they made up Hagop Hagopian’s innermost circle: Surik, an arms negotiator; Hamik, the group’s primary launderer; Zatik, an explosives engineer; and Martik, the man in charge of the place Avo was later taken to. Collectively, they were known throughout ASALA as the chorse eekner, the “Four Eeks”—Surik, Hamik, Zatik, and Martik. A rumor had spread that while every other ASALA loyalist around the world had been forced to slum it out in efficiencies and abandoned warehouses on the invisible dregs of cities, the Four Eeks had each been allotted a two-bedroom loft in the most luxurious high-rise in Palaio Faliro, a prosperous seaside suburb of Athens.

  The rumor turned out to be only half true; for the sake of precaution, the Four Eeks in fact lived in separate buildings, only three of which could be called, with sunset-facing windows overlooking the indigo sheen of Phalerum Bay, luxurious. The inhabitants of these three apartments—Surik, Hamik, and Zatik—lived with their wives and small children, and even in the glowering din of the arrivals terminal at the airport, they seemed exuberantly tanned and happy. They didn’t balk at the errand they were sent on that night, a kind of chauffeuring they hadn’t been assigned since their early days with Hagopian in Aleppo. Instead, they seemed to take their participation as a sign of two things: Hagopian’s dwindling trust in others to manage even the smallest business affairs, and the grave significance of the approaching pair.

  As for the fourth Eek, Martik lived alone, separately, in the country. That night he waited in the driver’s seat of one of the cars. He was the only one not to introduce himself to the two men he and the others had come for: the protégé, as Hagopian once called Ruben, and the traitor.

  On the surface, only an idiot could mistake the two. The Four Eeks had been forewarned that the one who’d betrayed them in Los Angeles was enormous, and only one of the pair fit the bill, folding into the car like a dinner roll into a hungry mouth. Still, there was something upside down about the way the two men comported themselves: the big deserter wore a mundane upward bend in his thick eyebrow, as if he were being taken to a regular appointment. As he walked to the car, the thick fingers at the ends of his casually breezing arms seemed as relaxed as hanging ducks. Even as he slouched and scrunched in the passenger seat of Martik’s car, a little glimmer reflected in his eyes in the window. According to Zatik, who kept his gun at the traitor’s big bald head from the backseat, he was gawking like a tourist at the passing sights of town at midnight, the vacant canopied shops and the radiant churches, the balustrades of towering homes and the stone-still boats in the windless dock. He was the traitor, and yet there was in him a kind of innocence.

  “We figured maybe we’d misunderstood Hagopian’s message,” Zatik told Ruben later. “You were the one who looked guilty!”

  “Definitely,” Surik said. “Ruben here was so little and nervous, shivering and wide-eyed like a raccoon caught in the garbage.”

  “Rolling his shoulders,” Hamik said, “throwing glances around like darts.”

  Apparently
, once he was in the car, Ruben had turned his attention between Surik and Hamik so violently that his glasses fell off twice.

  “You should be thanking every god that man ever invented,” Hamik said, and laughed. “I don’t know how we got it right, but you should thank us, too. That you weren’t in the car with Martik. Can you imagine if we fucked that up? If we’d taken the traitor here to Palaio Faliro, eating baklava and drinking ouzo, telling stories, and meanwhile we’d sent our little protégé, Ruben, to that other place? Martik’s place?”

  When both passengers had been loaded, the two cars sped away—together at first. And for some distance, the red taillights of one car were visible to the other. South, south from the airport. And then, at a traffic signal, one car kept true. The other turned left.

  “Thank whatever god you can find to thank,” Hamik said again, “that you were in the right car.”

  The truth was, Ruben really did feel thankful. Thankful to God, yes, but also to Hagopian for trusting him again, for allowing him back into the fold, and not least of all to Surik, Hamik, and Zatik, who welcomed him into their homes like family.

  Ruben swallowed another gulp from the bottle. At this rate, he’d have to stop by the bodega again on the way back to the hotel. Without it, the problems he’d been experiencing lately—burning ears, sweating palms, eyelids twitching, a tightening in his throat he could summon just by fearing it—would return. Cocaine and liquor—which had seemed to help the Eeks concentrate on their work—only made his problems worse, so he’d sworn off every chemical except cigarettes and this, a bottle of cooking juice he’d read about, secretly and ashamedly, in a dark corner of a library.

  Now a light broke through the church. The door had come open, and—accompanied by the far-off sound of conversations in motion—a boy of maybe fifteen rushed in. He charged so quickly up the aisle that, almost tripping over the rug, he arrived at the altar just as the door came again to a close.

  The boy was wearing a pageboy cap, which he kept adjusting as he spoke to the priest. The priest, who had begun a hymn, stopped singing to hear him. He whispered something to the boy, who disappeared behind the mural to a separate, invisible room. When he returned, the boy was wearing a red and white robe, and he’d lost the cap. Though not, Ruben noticed, the lines in his hair where the hat had rested.

  The boy—less rushed now, but with the residue of panic in the halting way he approached Ruben—mentioned in French that the public hours for the church had come to an end.

  “Give me five minutes,” Ruben said in Armenian.

  The boy looked over his own shoulder; the priest had disappeared into the invisible room. “You’ll have to leave now, I’m sorry to say.”

  “You’ve already delayed him, haven’t you? He had to light the candles himself like a choirboy.”

  The boy said, “The metro today, with the parade. I tried to explain.”

  “Do you have any family up there?” Ruben asked, pointing to the mural above the altar. Engraved there was a long list of names, Armenian clergymen lost between 1914 and 1918. The mural of God and Mary and the baby Christ encircled the names, as if committing them to memory.

  “Only distant relatives,” the boy said. “I hate to say it, but you really do have to leave now.”

  “Your robe is folded under in the front,” Ruben said.

  The boy fixed it. “You’re welcome back tomorrow morning. At seven.”

  “Is heaven so strict? Tell the priest to kick me out himself.”

  The boy, exasperated, ran off and disappeared again behind the mural. A moment later, the priest emerged alone, almost as if the boy had transformed into him. The priest stepped slowly along the rugs down the aisle. When he arrived at the final row of chairs, he spoke in Armenian. “Tell me you at least made a donation at the front.”

  Ruben looked up at the chandeliers and around the church. Gold everywhere. Behind a glass case near the altar, a Bible encrusted with diamonds he could see sparkling from here.

  “Looks like the church is doing fine without my pocket change,” Ruben said.

  “Whatever it takes to bring more people to the house of God.”

  Once, Ruben had tried to convince Avo to believe in God. They’d been very young. Avo had been reading his poems, and Ruben had told him to try reading the Bible for a change. The argument took off from there. Look at all the beautiful art made in the name of faith, Ruben had said. The architecture and the frescoes, the music and the sculptures, the book of poems in Avo’s hands—he could thank God for all of it. Only through beauty could those artists communicate with God. But Avo had refused to believe that beauty was a means to an end. Beauty was the goal, he’d argued. Art was the end, and God was the first work of art.

  “Tell me,” Ruben said, “what do you say to people who claim that God is fiction?”

  The priest sighed. “I tell them: Visiting hours are over, please leave a donation on the way out.”

  Ruben uncapped his apple cider vinegar and took a drink.

  “Now you’re breaking two rules,” said the priest.

  “You want some?”

  The priest bent to see what it was and declined. Then he lifted his cloak a bit and sat in the chair beside Ruben. A lot of effort in that cloak.

  “Am I keeping you from the Bastille Day parade?” Ruben said.

  “So you’re not French,” the priest said. “I didn’t think so, but now I know. We don’t call it Bastille Day. Only tourists do. We don’t celebrate the blood-soaked storming of the Bastille. Foreigners—especially Soviets and Americans, those bickering siblings—they think we do, but we don’t.”

  “So what’s the parade for?”

  The priest told him that what was really being celebrated was the Fête de la Fédération, the fourteenth of July of the year following the prison storming. “This was in the year 1790, when political factions came together in unity, when the king became a constitutional monarch. A day without bloodshed, a day of reconciliation. Of course, peace wouldn’t come until the end of the revolution, many years later—oh, I don’t have to tell you. The French have a very famous history.”

  “Unlike us.”

  The priest sighed. “Unlike us.”

  It occurred to Ruben that he could have been a priest. He could have spent his days reprimanding his squire for failing to light candles before the end of open hours. He could have wrapped himself in his faith, could have turned his faith into a cloak to shroud the world beneath, could have blanketed the world in his belief, could have put his seriousness in service of the justice he believed was eternal, rather than the justice he hoped to bring about.

  “I’d like to make a confession,” he said.

  The priest shook his arm until the sleeve of his purple cloak revealed an expensive watch. He said, “How big a confession are we talking?”

  How big a confession would it take to explain what he’d done to the man from Moscow and dozens of others; that he had sent his cousin’s cousin—his brother, really—to hell, just to regain the trust of a man whose true name he would never know; that he’d told his brother’s love that she’d been pitied and fooled, ensuring that his brother died without her love in return, without her respect, without her even longing to say goodbye; that he couldn’t sleep at night because of the heat in his ears, the ratcheting in his throat; that he couldn’t stop imagining the untold agony he’d sent his brother to die in; that he couldn’t stop remembering what the library book in Athens had told him about the sour taste on his lips, that another use for apple cider vinegar was to trap fruit flies at home. You were supposed to leave a few tablespoons of it in a wide-rimmed jar, stretch a sheet of plastic wrap over the top, and stab holes in the film using a fork. Flies could get in but not out. The same air holes that kept the flies alive had trapped them in the first place, and that’s what his pain felt like, less a fire below than a film overhead. Was that too big a confession? That he suspected all of life to be like those holes in that film, all snare and grace
at once?

  “Too big,” Ruben said, and stood to leave.

  “To answer your earlier question,” the priest said, “I tell unbelievers that I find it amusing. I simply find it amusing when a character calls his author fiction.”

  Outside, the parade was coming to an end, and the crowd blew apart like the heat in every direction. Ruben stopped by the bodega for a second bottle of his apple cider vinegar, but the Algerian’s shop had closed in the time he’d been in church. As he started his journey back to the hotel, Ruben calculated the rations he could afford himself for the next day and a half, when he could return to Greece and buy more.

  He wanted to believe what the priest had said, but he had a terrible sense that some men authored themselves.

  After he’d found Avo outside a corner drugstore in Greensboro, North Carolina, and after he’d sent him to Martik’s place to be erased, Ruben had spent three years establishing a routine in Greece with Surik, Hamik, and Zatik, a routine that had constituted something like a family life. At dawn every morning, a buzzer would announce their arrival, and Ruben would take the elevator down to join them on the street. They’d walk the dewy seaside paths to a small second-story restaurant called La Med. According to the list hammered like theses to the front door, the restaurant didn’t open to the public for several hours, but the owner, a Greek-Armenian named Hayk, had already readied a table set for four. Ruben’s first morning joining them, Hayk looked at him and nudged Surik in the shoulder. “Martik has been replaced?” And Surik said, “No, no. This is Ruben. He’s only recently joined us. Martik will rejoin us soon, and then we’ll be five.” Relieved, Hayk went back to the unstaffed kitchen and brought, one by one, enormous bowls of steaming khash, the boiled bits of cows unused in other recipes.

  After breakfast, they left La Med for Surik’s loft, or Ruben’s apartment, or wherever the kids and wives were strategically absent. From there, Ruben and the others spent long days smoking cigarettes, placing phone calls, laundering money at a jewelry shop on the boardwalk, driving to Athens and back to meet foreign buyers in bookshops, outdoor markets, cinemas, record stores—any place where they weren’t waited on, where the meeting could end as abruptly and casually as a blown candle. They might return to the flat in Palaio Faliro, eat lunch—Ruben, still full from the khash, the exception—smoke cigarettes, smoke weed (Ruben again the exception), play records, extoll the Greeks for their culture and history, the only rivals to Armenian exceptionalism, praise their luck to be based in a country whose hatred for Turks allowed them to work more or less out in the open, smoke more cigarettes, drink ouzo, drink thin and yellow beer, eat dinner—Ruben the exception, no appetite, still, after that morning’s hoof—and listen to Zatik explain the workings of a bomb he was designing, a bomb worthy of all his talents, a bomb he called “The Truth,” a bomb he’d been designing for years, a story he told multiple times a week, no one with the heart to stop him. Or else they’d watch Hamik scribble math on a spiral-bound notebook the size of an encyclopedia, tallying up the day’s sales, purchases, and trades negotiated by Surik, who ran his finger along his gums so slowly and purposefully as he listened to the others that Ruben kept expecting him to stop on a tooth as in a game of musical chairs and yank it clean out. They’d go back and forth from the living room to the balcony, enjoying the breeze and the view, until they’d grow restless and return inside. They called Ruben their little stoic—he didn’t eat, he didn’t drink anything but his vinegar, he didn’t laugh, he didn’t ask questions. No one could imagine him having sex.