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A Stillness in Bethlehem(24)

By:Jane Haddam


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.