Deadly Beloved(30)

Tibor lived in an apartment attached to the back of Holy Trinity Church, reached by walking through a cobblestoned courtyard carefully overhung with vines. The apartment had been designed for a priest and his family. Armenian priests, like those in most of the Eastern churches, were usually married, unless they had been tapped by their hierarchies as possible material for promotion to bishop. Bishops were not allowed to marry—a rule that was left over from the days when the Armenian Church had been part of the Catholic Church. There were a lot of those, Gregor supposed, although the Armenian Church didn’t like to admit to them except when everybody was talking about ecumenism for the newspapers, at which times it was understood that Christians who looked united also looked good. Tibor had had a wife, named Anna, back in the Soviet union  , but she had been executed years before he escaped to Israel and came to the United States. Even Gregor, who was Tibor’s closest friend on Cavanaugh Street, had no idea what Anna had been executed for. Tibor now had this huge apartment, given to the priest of Holy Trinity no matter who he was, owned and maintained by the church, and no people to put in it. Sometimes he took in homeless families and refugees, but mostly he just rattled around by himself. And bought books, Gregor thought, as he leaned hard against the front doorbell. Tibor always bought books.

The sky was gray with clouds but very light. The courtyard in front of Tibor’s door was slick with dew, making it treacherous to walk on. Gregor heard shuffling on the other side of the door and stood back. The door opened and Tibor peered out, fully dressed but mentally on another planet.

“Oh,” he said. “Krekor. Is it late? I was reading.”

Tibor stepped back, and Gregor went into the apartment, almost colliding with a tall stack of paperbacks that had been shoved against the walls just inside the front door. It was a very tall stack of paperbacks—as high as Gregor’s waist, and he was a tall man. Gregor leaned over and checked them out. The three on the top were Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, and the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism threatened to destroy the whole pile because, unlike the rest of the books in the stack it was the size of a hardcover book. Gregor saw little pieces of paper sticking out of it, covered with marks from a bright red felt-tip pen. Nobody on earth could read Father Tibor Kasparian’s handwriting. Tibor saw where Gregor was looking, and shrugged.

“I have one or two philosophical disagreements with the Catholic Church,” he said. “Also, unlike this Pope, I think I like inclusive language, except maybe that I am not ready to call God my mother. Come into the kitchen, Krekor. I was just making coffee.”

Tibor’s coffee was even worse than Gregor’s, but he followed the other man through the wide living room anyway. Tibor looked older than Gregor and moved as if he were nearly ancient, but he was actually almost ten years younger. His living room was even more crowded with books than his foyer was. There were books stacked against the walls, books on chairs, books on tables, books in piles on the floor. Gregor saw Mickey Spillane and Judith Krantz, Aristotle in the original Greek and the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, novels by Hemingway and histories by Toynbee and something called The Semiotic of Toilet Tissue by nobody he’d ever heard of. The books made up for the fact that there was not a decoration of any kind in the apartment. Tibor had crosses that he hung on his walls here and there, mostly given to him by other people, but he seemed never to have heard of the idea of putting up pictures to make your rooms look brighter.

The kitchen was just as full of books as the living room and the foyer. Gregor took a stack of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky off a chair and sat down. Then he moved a stack of Stephen Donaldson fantasy novels to give himself a little room at the table. Tibor came over and put a cup of coffee down in front of him. Gregor wondered for the millionth time how Tibor managed to get instant coffee to come out like that.

“So,” Tibor said, clearing a chair off for himself too. “What is this about? Do you want to go to the Ararat?”

“I did,” Gregor said, “but I’ve been talking to old George. Does all this business with the wedding sound a little—excessive—to you?”

“No.”

“Well,” Gregor said dryly, “that answers my question.”

Tibor waved his hands dismissively. “You don’t understand about weddings,” he said. “I’m a priest. I’ve officiated at hundreds of weddings. It’s always like this.”

“We’ve had weddings on Cavanaugh Street before. They never made me afraid to have my breakfast in the Ararat.”