Gregor finished his coffee, got out of his chair, and went back to the lobby. Then he finally went up to his room and let himself in. He found his bags already in place, his big suitcase laid out open on the bed. He went across the room and sat down in a big wing chair to look inside it.
Father Tibor Kasparian was in the habit of giving Gregor a lot of books, most of which Gregor had no idea what to do with. Sometimes there were popular novels, meant to help Gregor relax, which did nothing of the kind, because Gregor didn’t understand them. There was Harry Potter, for instance, which Tibor loved, and a little collection called A Series of Unfortunate Events. A Series of Unfortunate Events seemed to be a detective story that never came to a defi nitive end, which Gregor found annoying, and Harry Potter seemed to spend his time riding around on broomsticks and casting spells to turn people into hot fudge sundaes. Gregor just found that stupefying. Did even children want to read about magic anymore? Did anybody care that witches had never ridden around on broomsticks, that there were no magic spells, that the whole thing was just pretend? Apparently not, because in the two weeks after Father Tibor gave Gregor Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, some police department in rural Pennsylvania refused to provide security for the public library on the night they did a reading for children from the Harry Potter books. The police department didn’t want to encourage children to engage in devilworship and witchcraft.
Sometimes, Tibor gave Gregor histories of one place or time or the other, although Gregor could never figure out just what it was Tibor wanted him to learn. There were American histories, usually of the period of the Founding, as if Gregor wouldn’t have gotten enough of that in elementary school. There were histories of the Soviet union , including a very disturbing one from France, called The Black Book of Soviet Communism. Gregor didn’t think he needed that, either. He’d never been one of those idiots who went around talking about how the Soviet union was a workers’ paradise. There had even been one history of the House of Tudor, and what that was in aid of, Gregor would never know. He did think it was interesting that Tibor never gave him histories of Armenia. Gregor knew nothing about Armenian history, and didn’t want to. He was not one of those people who needed to create a fantasy nostalgia “background,” where his immigrant ancestors were Hardworking, Good, and Honest People with Hearts of Gold. Gregor had grown up with those immigrant ancestors. He’d gotten out as fast as he could.
Sometimes, Tibor gave Gregor books that seemed to have been chosen at random. That was what had happened this time, at the last minute, when Gregor’s suitcase was open on his bed and Tibor was in a hurry to drop off the book and get to a meeting.
“It’s the Philadelphia Improvement Society,” Tibor had said, dropping the thick oversized paperback down onto a carefully folded stack of ties. The ties were not carefully folded, because Gregor had folded them. Gregor had never folded a tie in his life. Bennis had folded them, and then Donna had come in, decided they were done all wrong—they would have to be as Bennis had grown up in a house with staff—and done it again. Gregor was wondering if he was going to wear a tie at all, or if Margaret’s Harbor was one of those places where everybody pretended to be casual in $150 polo shirts.
“They’re going to regret that name,” Tibor said, looking down at the book. “It’s a nineteenth-century name. It’s the kind of thing people named things before the days of tele vision.”
Father Tibor was an immigrant from Armenia, but even Armenia hadn’t been without tele vi sions in his lifetime. Gregor thanked him for the book, then stood back while Bennis and Donna came in and out, making sure he had things he hadn’t even known he’d owned.
“This is the Web address,” Bennis had said at the very end, handing him a three-by-five card to stuff into the book, so he wouldn’t lose it. “There’s also the snail mail address. See if you can’t actually go up there when the case is over. That would be best. You could pick up the order yourself. I’ve written the order on the back of the card. Call first.”
Now Gregor sat down in the big wing chair next to the bed and looked into the open suitcase at the book and the three-by-five card sticking out of it. The Oscartown Inn was a “nice” place, in the way that word was defined by women who had gone to Seven Sisters colleges. It was old, and well cared for, and impeccably clean. His bed was a four-poster and there was a fireplace on the opposite wall. The management would probably refuse to light it even if he asked them to—there had to be fire code considerations, even here—but it was the fact of the thing that counted. Gregor turned off the ringer on his cell phone. Then he turned off the ringer on the phone next to his bed. He wanted to sit in this room for an hour without talking to anybody about anything, and certainly without talking to Stewart Gordon or Clara Walsh about the Case.