Blood in the Water(24)

“I’m not going to kill anyone,” Gregor said. “I’m arguing against killing anyone, that’s the point. But the wages of sin are death goes to prove it.”

“To prove what, Krekor?”

“That death is meant as a punishment,” Gregor said. “It was in that book you gave me, too, that St. Augustine. The wages of sin are death. Death is a punishment. And George hadn’t done one damned thing to be punished for that I know of. And if he’d ever done anything, it was so far in the past it couldn’t possibly have mattered any more.”

“You have read the St. Augustine, Krekor? You have read all of it?”

“He sits on the couch and pages back and forth through it,” Bennis said. “Then he stops and reads some of it and mutters under his breath. I don’t know what you were thinking, Tibor. That thing is a thousand pages long.”

“With little tiny type,” Gregor said. “But I’m not mistaking his meaning, Tibor, and you know it. The whole thing, the whole way you explained it all at the funeral, makes no sense. We couldn’t run a criminal justice system this way. We couldn’t write a code of law—doesn’t it start with what’s supposed to be a code of law? Could you imagine a code of law that gave the same penalty to somebody who cussed out his grandmother and, I don’t know, pick somebody. Hitler. That wouldn’t be a code of law. It would be a travesty. And this is a travesty. And you know it.”

“He’s back on religion again,” Bennis said.

“Yes,” Tibor said. “I am sorry for this. I did not mean to cause this kind of a problem. I only meant to give George a proper funeral.”

“And you did give George a proper funeral,” Bennis said. “There was nothing wrong with anything you said. He’s just grabbing hold of it and taking it to the zoo.”

“I could have given the homily in Armenian,” Tibor said.

“Then Martin and Angela wouldn’t have understood it,” Bennis said.

“I understood it perfectly,” Gregor said, “and I’m not being an idiot here. That explanation made no sense. And if a God actually exists for whom that explanation does make sense, then He doesn’t make sense, and there’s no point in listening to Him. We don’t have to figure out if God exists or not, we only have to figure out if He’s sane, and apparently He’s not. And that really ought to be all we need to know about it.”

“Don’t you think there’s something really odd about the fact that this is the first time you’ve ever had trouble thinking that God makes sense?” Bennis asked. “I mean, Gregor, you were with the FBI for decades. You investigated serial murders. You’ve been investigating murders ever since. You see broken and ravaged bodies all over the landscape and you vaguely think you probably might not believe in God but it doesn’t bother you—and then old George dies peacefully and without pain at a hundred years old and you get like this? You don’t think there’s anything odd about that?”

Gregor looked at his plate. There was too much food on it. He hadn’t eaten like this in years. His back hurt.

“No,” he said finally. “I don’t think there’s anything strange about this. I understand why people die at the hands of serial killers. I understand why they kill each other. And it does make sense.”

He was about to go on with the thought—and it was a thought; he’d been working it out obsessively ever since old George’s funeral—when the front door to the Ararat opened and a man walked in Gregor was sure he had never seen. There would have been nothing strange about that at lunch or dinner, but breakfast at the Ararat tended to be the neighborhood and nobody else.

A dozen heads throughout the room swiveled around to stare. If it had been Gregor himself in that position, he would have backed right up and gotten out of there.

The strange man came inside instead and looked around. He was very small and very round and very bald, and he was about as nervous as he could be without giving himself a heart attack. Gregor found it hard to look at him. He was that twitchy.

The man looked around the room once, then twice, then again, and finally he turned his head enough to see the window booth. The twitchiness disappeared at once. The round bald head glowed. The oddly fishlike lips spread up and out in a grin. Then the little man hurried over, and stuck his hand out over the food at Gregor Demarkian.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian! I’ve been looking for you!”





TWO

1

Gregor Demarkian had been a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for over twenty years, and he would have been one still if his first wife hadn’t gotten cancer and died. It had been a long time since he’d stood at the edge of the bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital and watched Elizabeth go, but he still thought about that day more often than he liked to admit, and he still thought about what his life would have been if that had never happened.