He reached into the suitcase. The book was called Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by somebody named Walker Percy. This was more than a little confusing. Tibor did not ordinary give him self-help books, and did not ordinary read them except to complain about them. Gregor pulled out the three-by-five card. On one side there was the Web address, written out carefully by a woman who assumed that Gregor would be absolutely clueless when it came to the computer:
www.boxhillconfections.com
On the other side was the order, sort of. It seemed to be in code. Gregor looked it over for a minute and decided that Bennis was ordering wedding favors, and that the wedding favors would be chocolates, and that the company that made these chocolates was in Maine. Did Bennis really expect him to get all the way from Margaret’s Harbor to Maine, in a little side trip? Apparently, she did. At the bottom of that side of the three-by-f ve card was a little note, carefully written out in minuscule handwriting in red pen:
I need 750 of the chocolate yaprak sarma.
Janet will know what I mean.
Yaprak sarma was an Armenian dinner dish that consisted of meatballs encased in a bulgur crust. This was going to be chocolate encased in what?
Gregor got out of the chair, got the laptop out of the suitcase, and set it up on the desk. He took off his tie and his shoes and his socks. There was an Internet connection here someplace. He’d look for it after he had his shower. He wondered if Janet, whoever she was, would have a picture of chocolate yaprak sarma on the Web site of Box Hill Confections. He wondered if he would ever get used to the idea that he was going to have another wedding, and not another wedding of the kind he had sometimes imagined in the years since he and Bennis had met.
There, he’d admitted it to himself, the thing he’d been keeping in the back of his mind for months: over the course of all these years, even before he and Bennis became any kind of official couple, he had imagined them one day married. For some reason, though, he had seen them in a registry office someplace, or eloping to Las Vegas to get married in an Elvis chapel. He hadn’t envisioned a Bennis as completely wrapped up in the preparations for a formal wedding as Donna Moradanyan Donahue would be in decorating the street for Christmas. It had thrown him off balance. It had been a good part of the reason why he had not been interested in taking a case for months, and a good part of the reason why he had taken this one.
It all seemed to come together, but he couldn’t say how. He was tired. He had a headache. He needed a shower.
He would take the shower and then sleep for a while, and after that was over he would be ready to talk to Stewart Gordon and Clara Walsh again, and to finally figure out what it was he was supposed to be doing here.
2
Gregor took a long time in the shower, long enough so that his skin began to look pickled, and by the time he was done he thought he had the claims on his attention at least tentatively organized. The trick was to separate the case and Bennis, and then to let Bennis take care of Bennis. Bennis and Donna didn’t really want his input on the wedding, no matter how much they said they did. They wanted to stage a spectacle, and he knew from experience that they were very good at it. His one hope was that they would be limited by their audience. This was a wedding they expected to hold on Cavanaugh Street, with the residents of Cavanaugh Street in attendance. That meant it would have to take place in Father Tibor’s church, which held only about four hundred people at capacity, and which Father Tibor would not suffer to be turned into an Egyptian pyramid or a seventeenth-century pirate ship. Then there would be the reception. They were counting on good weather so that they could hold it outside. They’d applied to the city for the permits they needed to block off the street the way you would for a block party. This meant accepting certain limitations—they would have to admit anybody who came along and wanted to attend—but these were not the kinds of limitations that bothered them. Gregor had wondered, on and off, what would happen if one of the people he had been instrumental in putting behind bars got out on parole and decided to attend for reasons having less to do with congratulations than with revenge, but when he had broached this possibility to Bennis, she had brushed it off.
“The people you put behind bars stay there,” she said. “Some of them just die. I’m not going to worry about some serial killer from your past deciding to sneak into the reception and start killing off little old ladies. You might worry about me starting to kill off little old ladies, because I’ve had it with some of them. If what’s-her-name Vardanian says one more thing under her breath about cows and milk, I’m going to strangle her.”