Gregor went back down the street to his own building. This time, he did not crane his neck and twist his body around to see if he could see what was left of Holy Trinity Church. He went up the front steps and into the vestibule. He made note of the fact that the door to old George Tekemanian’s ground-floor apartment had no light coming out through the peephole and remained firmly shut. Sometimes, when old George was at home, he left the door open a crack so that he could catch anybody coming in from outside. Old George was not worried about burglars. He was worried about company. Gregor paused to listen, but Grace was no longer playing the harpsichord way upstairs. He wondered if she had a performance this evening. Bennis and Donna had taken him once—and Russ too—to one of Grace’s groups performances. It had been held in an enormous pseudo-Gothic room in a university downtown, and Gregor had found himself both enjoying the music and being annoyed by the setting. He hated “college Gothic,” the way he hated Tudor houses on the Main Line. Neither the Goths nor the Tudors had ever had anything to do with America. They certainly hadn’t left buildings there. Why, Gregor wondered, did people so often choose to be fake when it was actually easier to be authentic?
He went up the stairs to the second floor, to the apartment he still thought of as Bennis’s. He raised his hand to knock, but before he could the door opened in front of him and Grace Feinman was standing before him, looking flushed.
“Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “We’ve all been wondering where you’d gone. It’s just Father Tibor here now. And me.”
“Where did Bennis go?” Gregor stepped into the apartment’s foyer and looked around. It was exactly like his foyer, one floor above, and exactly like Grace’s, one floor above that. This building had been converted into three identical floor-through condominiums with a fourth, a little smaller, on the ground floor. It was not the kind of place Gregor normally thought of as “condominiums.” “Condominiums” sounded like modern, concrete things with too many hard primary colors and shiny surfaces pretending to be modern art.
“She went to park the car,” Grace said, closing the door behind Gregor as he walked in. “She left it parked somewhere or the other again, and she had to put it back in the garage. If I had a car that expensive, I’d probably bronze it and not drive it at all. Except that I’d never buy a car that expensive. If I got that much money in place, I’d buy another harpsichord, or have one made, or maybe I’d buy an antique. It would be wonderful to have one of the really important harpsichords, like the pieces we use when we make disks.”
Gregor had gone into the living room, which was covered with Bennis’s pa-pier-mâché models of Zed and Zedalia. Everything in the room was Zed and Zedalia. Bennis owned the original art from all her covers. She also owned the signing posters from all of her book tours. All these were framed, and on the walls. Tibor was sitting in an enormous black leather chair next to the big window that looked out into the street, and directly across to Lida Arkmanian’s second-floor living room. The coffee table was piled high with food.
Gregor walked around the back of the couch and sat down, close enough so that Tibor wouldn’t have to raise his voice too far to be heard. Tibor did not look well. He didn’t look ill, exactly. Gregor knew there was nothing physically wrong with him. The brick that had hit Tibor on the night of the explosion had only grazed his shoulder. It had created a nasty bruise, but no lasting or serious damage, like a concussion. Tibor had been passed out cold when the police reached the scene, but the doctors thought that was shock. It wasn’t an injury to the head. There hadn’t been a trace of hematoma anywhere on his scalp.
“So,” Gregor said, patting Tibor on the knee. “You look terrible. Were the women too much for you?”
Tibor shrugged. “The women were the women. They brought food.”
Gregor and Tibor both looked at the huge mess spread across the coffee table.
“They brought more than this,” Tibor said. “It is in the kitchen, in the refrigerator and on the counters. They even brought Pringles and Cheez Waffies.”
“What on earth are Cheez Waffies?”
“They’re the round ones with the two waffle-looking wafers making a sandwich with the fake cheese,” Grace said helpfully.
“It doesn’t matter what they are,” Tibor said. “You wouldn’t like them. I’m just tired. I can’t get over being tired. The doctor said this is probably psychological.”
“It probably is,” Gregor said.