“Money,” she told herself, and then, “note.”
Her computer was at the curved center of a built-in workspace in one corner of her bedroom. The edges of this workspace were twin piles of mess. Bennis rummaged around in the closer of these messes and came up with a piece of paper and a Bic medium-point pen.
Christopher, she wrote, I had to go out. Go up to the fourth floor and ask Donna Moradanyan for the key. Eat something. See you later. Bennis.
She grabbed a roll of transparent tape and her coat, started for the hall, then stopped. She checked the pockets of her jeans for money and decided she needed more. She went into the kitchen and raided her cookie jar for the three hundred dollars she kept there. For all she knew, Tibor wasn’t the only member of the demonstration who needed twenty-five dollars for the fine. She might as well be prepared.
She let herself into the hall, fastened the note to her door with tape, and went downstairs. There was light showing through the crack under the door of old George Tekemanian’s first-floor apartment. She thought about stopping, but didn’t. If she got talking to old George, she could lose an hour.
She let herself out on the stoop and looked up and down Cavanaugh Street for cabs. There were none at the moment—there was no traffic of any kind—but Bennis knew it wouldn’t be long before a taxi showed up. Cabs liked Cavanaugh Street.
Bennis sat on the bottom step to wait. Across the street, Lida Arkmanian’s town house was lit up like a lighthouse and festooned with hearts and ribbons—Donna Moradanyan’s first foray into decorating the street for Valentine’s Day. Two blocks up, light spilled out of the plate-glass windows of the Ararat Restaurant, darkened periodically by the shadows of waitresses and diners moving back and forth in front of the big main arc light. Bennis stretched her legs and considered lighting another cigarette, and then she saw the cab.
It was a cab with its occupied light glowing, but there was always a chance it was going to drop its fare on Cavanaugh Street, so Bennis stood up and went to the edge of the curb to wait for it. It did stop on Cavanaugh Street, up beyond the Ararat, in front of the narrow brownstone Howard Kashinian had renovated and turned into two duplex apartments. One of those two apartments he had kept for his own great-aunt Melina. The other he had sold to Hannah Krekorian after Hannah’s husband’s death. It was Hannah Krekorian whom Bennis saw get out of the cab now, her stout little middle-aged-to-getting-old figure moving briskly against the wind. The wind was very bad. February was always a cold time in Philadelphia. This February was starting out to be brutal. Hannah scurried quickly to the first step of her stoop, then turned around.
At the curb, the street-side passenger door to Hannah’s cab remained open. Bennis watched, fascinated, as first one trouser-clad leg and then another emerged from it. The legs were followed by a body and then a head, all unnaturally elongated, all sticklike and stretched. What a tall, thin man, Bennis thought. And it was true. He was immensely tall and emaciatedly thin. He looked like some sort of flexible rod with a coat attached to it. From this distance, Bennis couldn’t make out any of the detail of his face—the best she could do was note that the coat was an expensive one, obvious from the way it moved and the way it hung and the things it didn’t do in the cold—but there was something about him that seemed familiar, and the familiar thing was not pleasant. Bennis reached for her cigarettes, thought better of it, rubbed her hands together in the frigid breeze. The tall, thin man shut the curbside door and paid the driver. He walked over to Hannah Krekorian and took her arm. The two made their way up the steep cement staircase to the brownstone’s front door. Bennis stepped halfway off the curb and began to signal for the cab.
He does look familiar, she told herself. Why does he look familiar? He wasn’t anyone who lived on Cavanaugh Street. He wasn’t anyone she’d known growing up on the Main Line either, although that would have made more sense. Most of the people on Cavanaugh Street were either Armenian immigrants or the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Armenian immigrants. Some of them were tall, but after a certain age all of them ran to fat. None of them had that fine-boned fragility that made a person, male or female, look more ghostlike than real. Even Gregor Demarkian, who was six foot four, was a big massive solid man, not an elegant one.
I have seen that man before, Bennis told herself. I really have.
Then the cab pulled up to the curb and she had to get into it. That was always the way things seemed to work out. She got curious about something and something else came along to prevent her from satisfying her curiosity. It was the way the universe was organized. There was something cosmic out there that was trying to get her. There was—