Bleeding Hearts(28)

Setting up for an Armenian funeral was a complicated thing. The Armenian funeral liturgy was a complicated thing. Gregor wondered if Tibor would read it in Armenian, to limit the amount the family could understand. The priest who had read the funeral liturgy for Gregor’s wife, Elizabeth, had insisted on reading it in English. Gregor had been ready to kill him and worse well before they actually got to the grave. That was what the problem was with all this “celebrating your ethnic heritage” stuff. Everybody ran around singing the praises of ethnicity, talking about how rich and wonderful it made their lives to be part of an ancient culture. They forgot that that culture had content. In the case of the Armenian funeral liturgy, that content was sin. There he was, standing at the edge of a heaped mound of white roses that covered what was left of his wife, listening to a priest who had known neither of them pray for her release from her iniquities. Iniquities, for God’s sake. Elizabeth. It hadn’t made Gregor feel the least bit better when friends came up to him afterward and said that the Greek service was really much worse. He may have been raised in an ethnic neighborhood by a mother who never shed her immigrant’s accent, but he was thoroughly an American in all the most important ways. He thought there was something faintly unpatriotic, and possibly even treasonous, about sin.

Gregor went on past the church—Tibor would be in there soon, making sure he had everything he needed; there was no point to Gregor’s calling in at the rectory for the rest of the day—and to the steep stoop of his own brownstone. He looked at the single large heart fastened there and shook his head. He wished he understood women. He wished he understood rabbits. He had been praised a million times for the insight he had into the minds of murderers. He thought he did pretty well at figuring out who would do a murder and why and how and what kind. He did better than pretty well when the murderer was a John Wayne Gacy or a Son of Sam. What he didn’t understand were ordinary people living ordinary lives. They couldn’t all be like Bennis. They couldn’t all be erratic and pigheaded. Some of them had to make sense.

He went up the steps to the front door, let himself into the foyer—the front door was unlocked; the front door was always unlocked; it didn’t matter what he did or what he said—and stopped outside old George Tekemanian’s apartment. George’s lights were on. A low murmur of voices was drifting into the foyer, punctuated spasmodically by sudden bursts of laughter. Gregor knocked and said, “George? It’s Gregor Demarkian.”

There was a sound of footsteps moving rapidly over hardwood—definitely not old George’s footsteps; George was sure on his feet even at eighty-odd, but he hadn’t been that fast in twenty years—and Donna Moradanyan stuck her head into the hall.

“Oh, Gregor,” she said. “Come on in. We’re just playing with George’s new toy.”

“My grandson Martin gave it to me,” George said from deep inside his apartment. “It is to compensate me for the diet his wife has put me on because I am sick. Come in, Krekor. This is a wonderful thing.”

“It is a wonderful thing.” Donna stepped back to let Gregor past. She was a young woman in her twenties, tall and blond and strapping-healthy. Donna reminded Gregor of the young women he had known in the Midwest when he was first working for the FBI, young women who played tennis and touch football and swam laps and still didn’t have a place to put all their energy. Gregor knew both of Donna’s parents. They were younger than he was by fifteen years, but they had grown up on Cavanaugh Street. Donna’s mother was a small, round woman in the classic Armenian mold. As a young woman she had been dark and beautiful. As a middle-aged mother she had run to the kind of weight called “pleasingly plump.” Donna’s father was very tall, like Gregor himself, but he was dark and Middle-Eastern enough to play the ethnic friend in a new wave James Bond movie. Where Donna had gotten the blond hair and blue eyes was anybody’s guess.

Gregor went into George’s foyer, dumped the stack of computer paper on the foyer table, and shrugged off his coat. The table was a John Esterman reproduction. It must have set George’s grandson Martin back a good three thousand dollars. Gregor tried not to think about how much money Martin spent on George’s apartment. What Martin had wanted to do was move George out to the Main Line, where Martin lived with his wife and George’s two greatgrandchildren in a six-thousand-square-foot house with “grounds.” Martin had done extremely well in the bond market. But George wasn’t interested in moving. In fact, George was adamant about not moving. Martin had done the next best thing, to his own mind, and brought the Main Line to George. He’d bought this building, turned it into floor-through condominiums, gutted this ground floor apartment for George, and reconstructed the place to be what he called “pleasant.” He’d bought George a lot of expensive furniture. He’d arranged for a cleaning woman to come in twice a week. George had balked at the idea of someone coming in every day to cook, so Martin had given that up. Instead, he’d started to give his grandfather presents, gadgets, grown-up toys. Gregor thought Martin sat down in front of the Sharper Image catalogue once a month and picked the most ridiculous and most ridiculously expensive thing.