Conspiracy Theory(25)

John Jackman was standing at the door to the Ararat up ahead, bent over old Marta Varnassian, who seemed to be lecturing him. Since old Marta Varnassian lectured everybody, usually on the perfidy of all Turks everywhere, this was not surprising, but Gregor found it both hopeful and incredible that Marta was talking to John at all. There was a time when Marta would no more have had a conversation with a black man, even about the Turks, than she would have made love to the president of Turkey on the church steps at high noon. Maybe it was John’s two-thousand-dollar suit. Maybe it was just that John had been around so much in the last few years, Marta now thought he was Armenian.

“There’s John,” Bennis said.

“Looks good, I think,” Gregor offered, neutrally. Once, back when he and Bennis had first met, he was fairly sure that Bennis had had an affair with John Jackman. It was something they never talked about, just like they never talked about any of the other men she had had affairs with, including the governor of a large western state and a member of the Rolling Stones. In their case, it was Bennis who had had wild oats to sow.

“John always looks good,” Bennis said. “It’s that goddamned bone structure. Doesn’t it bother you that you can see all the pews and they’re still there and nobody has bothered to move them to someplace safe.”

You couldn’t see the pews at all, from here. They had walked past the church and the building on its right side, which had had to be evacuated. The building on its left side had had to be evacuated too. At this point, there was no way to know if those buildings could be repaired or if they would have to be torn down. Gregor worried more about the fate of the people who had lived in them than he worried about the fate of Holy Trinity Church.

John Jackman shook Marta Varnassian’s hand, gravely. She patted him on the arm and made her way through the doors of the Ararat to whomever was waiting for her there. Marta would not eat breakfast in a restaurant on her own. That meant at least one of the other Very Old Ladies must have come with her. John straightened up and waved to them. He was staring, slightly, at Bennis, but she was not staring back.

“Hi,” he said, when they reached them. “Interesting woman, that was. Mrs. Varnassian. Did the Turks really invade Armenia this morning?”

“It was in 1915,” Gregor said.

“Oh.”

“Hi, John,” Bennis said.

“I caught Linda a second ago,” John said. “She’s saving us a table, but not the one at the window. Do you know what she’s talking about?”

“Yes,” said Gregor. The window table was the one where he usually sat with Tibor and old George Tekemanian and whoever else wanted to join them. Today, Tibor was in the hospital, and old George was out on the Main Line staying with his nephew Martin, whose wife Angela had decided that Cavanaugh Street was not a safe place for him to be.

They went into the Ararat. Linda waved them toward a table along the far wall, marked out from the rest by a big black-and-white reserved sign stuck into the metal sugar packet holder.

“That’s subtle,” John said.

Gregor sat down. “There’s not a hope in hell that it will be private. You know we’ll have people coming over here as soon as we get settled. They want to know.”

John sat down too. Bennis waved to Linda for the coffee and then curled into a chair like a sick cat. John looked her over quickly, and only once, and then looked away.

Linda Melajian arrived with the coffee and three cups. She put one down in front of John Jackman and said, “I hope you’re going to do something about whoever did this. I hope you don’t have your mind all messed up by debutantes on the Main Line.”

“John loves debutantes on the Main Line,” Bennis said.

“Behave yourself,” John said. He reached for the little metal pitcher of cream. Linda knew better than to bring nondairy creamer to his table. “We’re doing everything we can. It might be less than you’d like.”

“Somebody planted a bomb, for God’s sake. There must be some way to send him to jail. Or something worse.”

“We’ll do our best,” Jackman said.

She marched off without taking their order. Jackman watched her go. “Well,” he said, “I suppose that’s not all that odd. Everybody’s upset. Everybody deserves to be upset.”

“Part of it’s just that there’s no way to stop thinking about it,” Gregor said. “The church is out there with the whole front wall blown off, practically. Everybody has to pass it every day.”

“I wish you’d left the guard there longer,” Bennis said. “Whoever it was could come back. And even if he doesn’t, children could get into there and hurt themselves.”