A Stillness in Bethlehem(26)
“I’m a very hungry man in a hotel room that hasn’t been cleaned yet. Let’s get our things together and go find some food.”
“Just a minute.”
Bennis dropped down in the chair across from Tibor’s and spread the paper out on her knees, reading with a concentration that dismayed Gregor. Gregor had met Bennis Hannaford in the middle of what he thought of as his first “extracurricular” murder case. They had been friends ever since—although not the kind of friends some people, like Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian, back on Cavanaugh Street, wanted them to be. The problem with Bennis was that she had developed far too strong a taste for just the kind of situation he had first found her in. She was as passionately interested in esoteric murder investigations as a dedicated Baker Street Irregular was in Sherlock Holmes’s blood type. Gregor could just imagine what was going on in her head, as she squinted at the newsprint with the intensity of the farsighted when presented with small type when they didn’t have their glasses. She was turning a pair of simple hunting accidents into Murder on the Orient Express.
Then Bennis dropped the paper and stretched and nodded. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Patricia Feld Verek.”
“What?” Gregor asked her.
Bennis motioned at the paper she had dropped. “Patricia Feld Verek. One of the victims. Of the hunting accidents.”
“Bennis,” Tibor said. “You aren’t making any sense.”
“In the paper they called her Tisha Verek,” Bennis explained patiently, “not Patricia and without the Feld. So I wasn’t sure. But I am sure she was married to Jan-Mark Verek, who’s a painter and from what I hear an all-around world-class bastard—”
“Bennis.” From Tibor.
“Wait a minute,” Gregor said. “Do you mean this what’s-her-name Verek was somebody you knew?”
“Not knew,” Bennis said. “Just knew of. And of course I knew of Jan-Mark Verek because he used to be this enormous noise in modern art, and you know how my sister Myra got about modern art. Anyway, Patricia Feld Verek was a writer. She did—true crime, that sort of thing. Mid-level sellers, I think, but better than average. Her editor on Cry of the Wolf was later my editor on Zedalian Mirror.”
“But you never actually met,” Gregor said.
“Well, of course not. I can’t have actually met every writer with a publisher in New York. There have to be millions of them.”
“There are forty-six thousand books published in the United States every year,” Tibor said innocently. “I have read this in a copy of Publishers Weekly.”
“I don’t care where you’ve read it,” Gregor said, “as long as Bennis has never actually met this woman. Which, she has just assured me, she hasn’t. So why don’t we all get out of here and go to brunch?”
Father Tibor Kasparian was looking more innocent than ever, but Gregor didn’t care. He knew what Bennis was up to—or what she could get up to if given half a chance. He knew what Tibor was up to, too, but he didn’t mind very much. Mischief, excitement, curiosity, a proprietary interest in Gregor Demarkian’s career—all these were good signs, intimations of the return of the old Tibor. Gregor was perfectly willing to put up with them if they would help Tibor recover on all the levels he needed to recover on. That did not mean Gregor had to put up with a Bennis gone wild.
Gregor’s coat had come up draped over a brace of suitcases. The brace of suitcases had been placed just inside the suite’s door. Gregor marched over to it, picked up his coat, and began to get dressed for the cold.
“Come on,” he told them. “There’s got to be some place in this town where I can get a corned beef sandwich.”
Two
1
AS A MATTER OF fact, there wasn’t any place for Gregor Demarkian to get a corned beef sandwich in Bethlehem, Vermont, or a hot pastrami sandwich, either. Gregor did not think of himself as a particularly “ethnic” man, in spite of the fact that his parents had been immigrants from Armenia. He didn’t think of himself as particularly “urban,” in spite of the fact that he had been born and brought up in the middle of Philadelphia. A medley of factors—college, graduate school, the army, the FBI—had conspired to make him what he thought of as “cosmopolitan,” meaning at home in most places in America. His work with the Bureau had taken him from lushly secured compounds in Beverly Hills to back-alley flophouses in Phoenix, Arizona. Surely by now he had a feel for the country and how it worked. Surely by now he understood its parameters. Ten minutes after he, Bennis and Tibor had stepped back out of the Green Mountain Inn and started down Main Street in search of something to eat, he was wondering if he had been transported to another planet. Five minutes after that, when they had come to a stop at one corner of the small park that had been roped off to serve as a stage for the Nativity play, he was sure he had been. It wasn’t the fact that the three restaurants they had looked at so far weren’t serving lunch yet. Gregor told himself he should have remembered that in smaller towns without delis or Greek coffee shops, nobody started serving lunch until at least eleven. It wasn’t the fact that one of those three restaurants was self-consciously “healthy,” either. “Healthy” had gotten to be such a fad, Gregor had almost gotten used to it. What really stopped him was the realization that not one single item on any of the three menus they had read so far seemed to have a spice in it. Health-food restaurants in Philadelphia usually offered a set of Mexican dishes that promised to be liberally laced with chopped jalapeno peppers. Jalapeno peppers were supposed to be good for your metabolism and contain a lot of vitamin C. This health-food restaurant stuck to “delicately flavored” vegetable ragouts and tofu stir-fried with mint. Gregor had often complained about the way the good ladies of Cavanaugh Street refused to send him off on any journey without a hamper or two full of food. He’d gotten his way and taken off foodless this time because of all the fuss with settling the refugees. Now he was sorry he had. He would have killed for a suitcase full of yoprak sarma and those big meatballs with bulgar crusts. He would have done more than kill for some of Lida Arkmanian’s marinated shish kabob.