Feast of Murder(20)

“Even so, Krekor,” he said, as he came back out into the hall and pulled his door shut behind him, “I think you are being foolish. I think Bennis is also being foolish. If the two of you feel so badly that you are taking too much of our hospitality, you should make a Thanksgiving dinner and invite us yourself.”

“You mean we should do it together?” Gregor asked.

Old George shot him a look. “Don’t joke, Krekor. We’re all very worried about you. We’re all very worried about Bennis, too. She’s old enough to be married. You’re too old not to be married again.”

“If we were married to each other, we’d provide Cavanaugh Street with its first known homicide. And I don’t know who would kill who first.”

“I think I will kill you both and put the neighborhood out of its misery,” old George said. “Besides, with all the refugees we could use the apartments. Next week I will have four people staying with me. How many people will you have staying with you?”

Actually, Gregor had no idea how many people he would have staying with him, because he had no intention of being there to meet them. He had given Lida a copy of his key so that she could use his living room as “a temporary hotel,” as she put it. He supposed she would fill his modest one-bedroom place with stranded Armenians of various shapes and sizes—and Bennis’s, too. He also supposed those stranded Armenians would be long gone before he returned. Lida and her cohorts at the newly formed Society for the Support of an Independent Armenia were supposed to have a regular real estate service going. They seemed to have better luck finding rental space than Donald Trump.

Old George stepped through the main front door to the stoop and waited. Gregor followed him, trying not to look back at old George’s apartment door. Gregor locked his apartment religiously, as all policemen, ex-policemen, and burglars do. Bennis locked hers because she had lived so much of her life in places where it paid to be cautious. The rest of Cavanaugh Street thought it was living in the nineteenth century. Doors were for going in and out of, not for locking up. When they locked up, they just lost their keys anyway. Besides, what could possibly happen to them in a neighborhood like this?

Gregor had tried many times to explain to them that their precious “neighborhood like this” was surrounded by neighborhoods like that, but it hadn’t done any good. Hannah Krekorian was still enamored of the theory that there are no bad boys, and Lida Arkmanian thought a crack house was one of those little metal chalets you bought from Hammacher Schlemmer to break the shells of nuts in. It was enough to make a grown man weep.

“Krekor,” old George called from the bottom of the stairs. “Come on now. I’m halfway there and it’s you who are daydreaming.”

Gregor wasn’t daydreaming. He never daydreamed. He fell asleep when he tried.

He climbed down the steep concrete stairs without holding to the railing, joined old George on the pavement, and turned his head toward Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church.





3


Two hours and ten minutes later, long arrived at his destination for the morning and long made miserable by the stiff mid-November chill, Gregor sat on top of a pile of brown packing boxes and wondered just what it was he had allowed himself to get talked into. Then he wondered which of the various things he had allowed himself to get talked into he meant. There was the trip with Bennis and the collected luminaries of the Baird family and Baird Financial on the Pilgrimage Green, of course—but for a number of reasons, if that trip hadn’t materialized on its own, he and Bennis would have had to invent it. Then there was the project of the moment, which consisted of reading the numbers off packing boxes while old George Tekemanian and Father Tibor Kasparian fussed around the base of the pyramid, clucking at each other in Armenian. Every once in a while, one or two of the new people would come up and offer to help. Tibor and old George always turned them down, as if it wouldn’t have been just as easy for both of them to take down numbers called out in Armenian—which was, after all, their native language—as in English. Every once in a while a child came by and asked what was going on. When that happened, Tibor stopped and tried to explain it all, starting with the Crucifixion, moving through the establishment of the Armenian state church, coming to a climax with the Turkish invasion, and rounding off on a note of triumph with the expulsion of the Soviets. The tale was riveting and the children were fascinated, as they were fascinated with anything this bent little man had to tell them. They had all heard stories about Tibor’s life in the Gulags and daring escape into freedom, and most of them didn’t care that the stories were not true. Over the past three years, Tibor had become the closest male friend Gregor had ever had, and Gregor normally approved of anything that made the man happy, as telling the history of Armenia this way certainly made Tibor happy. The problem for Gregor was that the speech took half an hour to make, and all during that time Gregor would be sitting on his box, rubbing his hands together in a vain attempt to keep them warm. Old George Tekemanian was really only here for show, and to give Tibor someone to mutter to in Armenian. The temperature was dropping steadily if not rapidly, making Gregor less comfortable by the minute.