It was customary in this neighborhood that anybody who gave a party asked the whole street. Gregor shrugged off his overcoat and slid it down the wall-side bench of the window table where he had his breakfast almost every morning. The coat bounced against the glass with the softest of ricochets. Gregor went back to the front desk and took one of the copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer that were kept for sale next to the cash register. Linda would put it on his bill.
“A party next Friday night,” he said, going back to his booth. “With such short notice, will anybody come?”
Linda laughed. “This is Cavanaugh Street in February. They’ll come in costume if they’re asked to. Hannah wants fifteen pounds of loukoumia, can you believe it? Mickey’s going to have to cart the stuff over there in a wagon. In several wagons.”
Loukoumia was the Greek and Armenian name for what the rest of the world called Turkish delight—but in Armenian neighborhoods, and Greek ones, nothing was ever called Turkish anything, unless somebody was trying to start a fight. Gregor opened the paper, saw the headline (DEFICIT GROWING WORSE), and decided to read the comics instead. He hated parties. He especially hated the kind of parties where the hostess felt it necessary to have fifteen pounds of loukoumia.
“Let me see,” Linda said. “A ham and cheese omelet, three eggs. A side of hash browns, a side of breakfast sausage, two orders of rye toast with butter, and a pot of coffee. Did I leave anything out?”
“Could I have it ham and cheese and mushroom?”
“Sure. I didn’t think you ate mushrooms. No cholesterol.”
“Now, Linda.”
“Never mind,” Linda said. “Where’s old George this morning? Where’s Father Tibor? Usually you people descend on me in a gang.”
Gregor shrugged. “Tibor had a late night with that protest of his. Old George has a cold and isn’t supposed to go out. I’m supposed to bring him back some muffins.”
“He isn’t really sick, is he?” Linda asked quickly. “If he’s really sick, I’ll go over there myself with some hav abour. I know he likes erishtah abour better, but chicken soup is better than lamb soup when you’re sick, and old George is getting up there—”
“Old George isn’t getting up there,” Gregor said. “Old George is already there.”
“Right. Don’t worry about the muffins. I’ll put a box together and go myself.”
Doonesbury had a sequence about the deficit. Gregor sighed and closed the paper. “While you’re there,” he said, “bring some of that hav abour to Donna Moradanyan. I don’t know what’s wrong with her lately. She just isn’t behaving like herself.”
Linda Melajian looked startled. “You don’t know what’s wrong with Donna Moradanyan? Really? I’d have thought it was obvious to everybody.”
“You would?”
“Well, of course,” Linda Melajian said. “I mean, after all—”
Gregor never got to hear what Linda meant, or what was after all. The plate glass door blew open so forcefully, it rattled all the other plate glass windows facing the street. A gust of wind hit the stack of folded napkins on the table where Linda had been working and scattered them across the floor. Salt and pepper shakers jumped, and copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer rippled in the breeze. Bennis Hannaford stood in the door, wearing jeans, a turtleneck, a flannel shirt, a pair of L. L. Bean Maine hunting boots, and a bright red scarf. Gregor thought she had to be freezing, out in the cold like that without a coat. Bennis didn’t seem to be noticing the temperature.
She had a stack of computer printouts under her arm. She grabbed them in her right hand, held them in the air, and announced: “Gregor, I’ve got the most outrageously awful thing to tell you.”
2
Gregor Demarkian had reason to know that Bennis Hannaford was not a flake. In spite of the way she liked to act in public—which was as a cross between a Barbara Stanwyck madcap debutante from a thirties movie and Agatha Christie’s Mrs. Ariadne Oliver—she was in her way a brilliant businesswoman and certainly a successful writer. What she wrote was sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels, but Gregor was not the kind of person to whom genre fiction simply didn’t count. Especially genre fiction that sold that many copies and made that much money. Of course, Gregor had never actually read anything Bennis had written. He’d tried on several occasions, but he was always brought up short by the unicorns. Bennis always had unicorns in her novels. She always had witches and dragons and sorcerers too. It made Gregor dizzy. Tibor and old George Tekemanian had read the whole series, though, and they said the work Bennis did was wonderful.