Feast of Murder(18)

On the day the picture of the Pilgrimage Green came in the mail—and the FBI reentered Gregor’s life with a typically two-left-footed crash—all that was at least three years in the past. Gregor’s wife was dead. Gregor’s career with the Bureau had ended with his polite letter to the director two years before the old mandatory retirement age. His life in the District of Columbia—if he’d ever had a life in the District of Columbia, which was doubtful—was something he preferred not to remember. He lived on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia now, the very same Cavanaugh Street on which he’d been born. It had transmuted itself from an immigrant Armenian ghetto to an upscale urban enclave, but Gregor had owned his third-floor floor-through apartment across the street from Lida Arkmanian’s townhouse long enough to be used to that. There was no reason at all why he shouldn’t be completely adjusted to life as he expected it to be for many years to come. There was no reason why he should keep flashing back to life as he had gratefully left it in the past. There were and weren’t reasons, but none of them mattered, because here he was.

Where he was, precisely, was standing at his living room window, looking down on as much of Cavanaugh Street as he could see. It was ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, the sixteenth of November, less than a week before Thanksgiving. On the other side of the street, the facade of Lida’s modest stone palace was hung with brown and yellow cardboard cornucopias and sprightly turkeys made of quilted crepe paper fans. If he had been able to see his own building, Gregor knew, he would have found the same sort of thing. Down on the street, the store windows were plastered with Thanksgiving decorations, too. An hour ago, he had watched as the children of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School marched from their classroom building (at the north end) to the church basement, decked out as Pilgrims and Indians for their parts in the school play. It was business as usual for Cavanaugh Street. Give these people the slightest excuse for a holiday and they would run with it. Gregor was used to it. What he wasn’t used to was—the other thing.

At the moment, “the other thing” was represented by a crudely colored, and oddly tentative, paper flag, drawn on the inside of a carefully cut up grocery bag and hung from Lida’s third-floor guest-bedroom window. It was crudely colored because Lida had drawn it herself. Donna Moradanyan, Gregor’s upstairs neighbor and the street’s only real artist, had been out on the Main Line visiting her parents overnight. The flag was tentative because it had to be. The Republic of Armenia had declared its independence from the Soviet union   on September twenty-fourth. Since then, a positive rain of Armenian flags had descended on Cavanaugh Street. So had a positive rain of Armenians.

Gregor pressed his face to the glass, and looked down on the street again, and sighed. There was a little knot of them sitting on the steps of the church, young men in jeans so new and pressed the legs had creases, young women in brightly colored sweaters bought in the last week or so at K mart and Sears. If Gregor had had to guess what they were doing, he would have said reading the paper, although reading didn’t quite cover it. They puzzled it out, with the help of dictionaries and passersby. They were terribly proud of themselves when they were done, and asked questions about municipal elections and the state lottery. Every last one of them bought at least one lottery ticket a week, just in case.

“Why not?” Gregor asked himself now. “Old George Tekemanian buys half a dozen lottery tickets a week.”

Then he backed away from the window, rubbed his hands against his face, and told himself he had to get going. He had promised more people than he could count that he would do more things than he could count today, and he had to pack and be ready to leave tomorrow morning on top of it. Bennis had probably had her suitcases ready and waiting in her hall closet for a week.

At the thought of Bennis, Gregor Demarkian stopped, crossed his fingers, and listened. He was disappointed. No clatter of fitful typing came from the heating grate at his feet. No clang and clash of pots and pans rose up from the second-floor apartment’s kitchen. Bennis had to be taking the day off—and that meant, of course, that Bennis had to be resting. When he went downstairs, he’d find the standard sign on her door: ASLEEP UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

“I wish I was asleep until further notice,” Gregor said to no one in particular, but that sort of a thing wasn’t even a hope to him. Bennis Day Hannaford was one thing. Gregor was another. The people on Cavanaugh Street allowed him to get away with much less.

“Snobs,” Gregor said.