A Stillness in Bethlehem(71)

“No thanks.” Bennis found her lighter, stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit up. “Tibor was pushing chocolate cake and knishes on me all night. I’m not going to be able to eat for a week. You wouldn’t believe what he had when we got back here. Pizza.”

“Where did he get pizza?”

“I don’t know, but it was hot. Trust Tibor.”

“Maybe you ought to sit down this afternoon and let him see you eating a great big lunch. Maybe that will stop him from worrying about you.”

“Maybe it would,” Bennis said, “but it’s not going to happen this afternoon. I’m on my own. Tibor made the acquaintance of the local Catholic priest, and they’re going off together to look at facsimile Latin manuscripts or something the man brought back from Rome. I think they’re both slightly obsessional on St. Augustine.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said, and then made up his mind. No matter how much he disliked letting Bennis into the thick of real cases, he had a responsibility. It wasn’t that he thought Tibor was entirely right. Tibor had panics. He was having one now. On the other hand, it was also true that he never saw Bennis eating anymore, and that was disturbing. Bennis usually ate like a horse.

“Why don’t you come with me?” he asked her. “I’m only going to grab a sandwich on the run, but after that Franklin Morrison and I are going out to Stuart Ketchum’s farm. You might come in handy.”

“On a case?”

“For target practice.”

There was a knock on Bennis’s door—hardly necessary, since the door was open; the single and the suite at this end of the corridor constituted a little section of their own that could be closed off by a door in the hall, and Bennis had started to behave as if they were in fact living in a self-contained private suite—and Father Tibor Kasparian stuck his small neat head through. Gregor was intrigued to notice that he was in a much better mood than he had been in the night before, in spite of the fact that he couldn’t have gotten much sleep. He had a spring in his step and a large brown paper grocery bag in his arms. Bennis regarded the grocery bag warily, giving off an aura that looked to Gregor very much like despair.

“What have you got?” she demanded, through the smoke curling up from her cigarette and making a cloud above her hair.

“Cookies!” Tibor said triumphantly.

Gregor Demarkian decided it was time he got out of there.





2


When Gregor Demarkian had made up his mind that there wasn’t a single place to get decent food in Bethlehem, Vermont, he had reckoned without breakfast. Breakfast, after all, was the high point of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant cooking, the one thing even the English made better than anybody else. In France you got a sticky bun and overcaffeinated coffee. In Greece and Italy you got rolls so stale you could have used them for roofing tiles and a little weak tea. Only with the English and the descendants of the English could you be sure of being fed and satisfied at nine o’clock in the morning. Gregor had entered the Green Mountain Inn’s breakfast room with trepidation the morning before. He liked the suite he shared with Tibor well enough, but the Inn made him a little antsy. It was too studied, too discreet. The Christmas decorations erred on the side of chic. After The Magick Endive, he didn’t want to guess what the food would be like. Then he had entered the breakfast room itself and looked around and been instantly, pleasantly surprised. The tables were sturdy and functional without being self-consciously rustic. The tablecloths were good needlepoint covers with sprightly secular Christmas scenes across them. The chairs were solid looking. Gregor Demarkian was a big man, and not just because of the extra twenty or twenty-five pounds he carried. He was inches over six feet tall and thick-boned. He had broad, muscular shoulders and the powerful thighs that ought to have belonged to a former athlete. Gregor had never competed in athletics if he could help it, except in stickball and prisoner’s base when he was a boy. The unusual development of his shoulders and legs was entirely inherited. Gregor had had a much older brother once, who had died in France at the very end of the Second World War, and although Gregor remembered him only dimly, one thing that had stuck with him was his brother’s size and shape. God only knew what Gregor’s father had been like. He’d died when Gregor was so young, Gregor didn’t remember him at all.

This morning, Gregor stopped at the desk to buy a copy of the new Bethlehem News and Mail, unfolded it to find his face splashed across the front page under the headline, THE GREAT DETECTIVE COMES TO TOWN, and gave serious consideration to going right back to bed. Then he looked at the subhead—Reports On the Sighting of Gregor Demarkian in Bethlehem—and decided that what he should have done was strangle Peter Callisher in the park last night, when he’d had the chance. With Peter Callisher’s attitude and this new shooting, Gregor knew there was going to be no way to avoid being turned into a local wonder. He folded the paper up and put it under his arm. The young girl at the checkout desk was staring at him. When he looked straight at her she snapped her spine rigid and gave him a great big smile. He sighed and headed for the breakfast room. If this was the way things had started, it was going to be a very long day.