Feast of Murder(22)
“I am not trying to save the entire Republic of Armenia on my own, Krekor. I am merely trying to commit an act of corporal charity. I am all right, really. Trust me.”
“I don’t.”
“I know.”
“Who do you figure that is up at our house?” old George Tekemanian said. “I had thought he was one of the men Bennis knows, but now that I look at him I don’t think so. He is too—pressed.”
“Pressed?”
Gregor and Tibor had been standing on the side of the box pyramid away from the brownstone where Gregor and old George had their apartments. Now they came around the corner and looked up the street at the young man old George had noticed there. He was a very young man, and also—as old George had said—much too pressed to be a friend of Bennis Hannaford’s. In fact, Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone so pressed in his life. The very young man was wearing a navy blue suit with the trousers pressed into knife-edged creases and the end of his regulation rep tie tucked into his vest. He had very blond hair cut too short and a collar that rode just a little too high on the back of his neck.
“No, no,” Tibor said when he saw him. “Not Bennis’s. Bennis does not know nice young men like that.”
“How do you know the young man is nice?” old George Tekemanian said. “Just because he’s wearing a suit?”
“It is better than a torn sweatshirt and a nose ring,” Tibor said, “which is the young man she introduces me to at the Armenian festival last year. The young man who sings somewhere with a band nobody has ever heard of.”
“Everybody’s heard of him,” old George said. “Even I’ve heard of him.”
“I don’t care who’s heard of him,” Gregor said. “I’ve got to go.”
The two other men turned to look at him, curious, but Gregor was already on his way. He had done his share of speculating about Bennis Hannaford’s love life—since she had moved onto Cavanaugh Street after Gregor had met her on the first of what he thought of as his “extracurricular excursions into murder,” he had speculated on that sort of thing a great deal—but old George and Tibor were right. There was no way this young man fit the general description of “one of Bennis’s friends.”
What he did fit the description of was Rookie Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Gregor had trained too many of the damned idiots in his time to mistake the breed for something normal on the street.
Two
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER been much of a Cold Warrior. While the Cold War was still going on, he’d had other things on his mind—kidnapping detail, when he’d first joined the Bureau, and then serial murderers, and then Elizabeth dying. He wasn’t political and he wasn’t much upset by change, as long as it was someone else’s change. He hadn’t minded beatniks and he hadn’t minded hippies and when college students took over administration buildings just to declare their solidarity with revolution in Nicaragua, he wondered why they expended the energy. Once the Cold War was over, he couldn’t make himself get any more involved. What struck him were always the confusions, not the confrontations. Father Tibor stayed up night after night, watching governments fall in Sofia and Prague. Gregor bought a paper and stared at the headline for hours, not sure what he was supposed to do with it: “COMMUNIST PARTY BANNED IN SOVIET union .” Lida and Donna and Bennis and Hannah hung on the television set, listening to Gorbachev and Yeltsin and gunfire in the background. Gregor sat deep in his club chair and listened to the head of the KGB get interviewed on 60 Minutes. Even the independence of Armenia hadn’t broken through to him, in spite of the fact that the whole neighborhood had been up and about for that one. There were a pair of speakers over the door to Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store. Little Donnie Ohanian managed to get them hooked into the television set in his parents’ apartment on the building’s second floor, and the speakers had blasted out regular doses of CNN all that long morning while they were waiting for the news to be confirmed. While that was going on, Gregor had been sitting in the Ararat restaurant, reading over and over again a tiny article on the back page of the front section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, about how the tiny Republic of Elekteria had replaced its capital city statue of Lenin with a picture of Ronald Reagan. The story turned out to be apocryphal—and the Republic of Elekteria to be nonexistent—but those things only made the story seem that much more important to Gregor. That was the way things had been since everything had started to go seriously nuts. Gregor had a feeling that that was the way things were going to go for a while now.