“Wait a couple of days and leave for Paris,” Gregor said.
Bennis made an extremely rude gesture and said, “Thanks a lot, Gregor. That’s just what was required in my hour of need.”
“What else am I supposed to say?”
“Miss Hannaford?”
This time the voice was accompanied by a sharp crack, so much like a gunshot that John Jackman jumped.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What was that?”
“That,” Bennis said, “was Miss Oumoudian’s cane. I’m expecting to find out she’s got a whip hidden in the folds of her dress somewhere and she’s only waiting for a chance to use it.”
“Now, now,” Gregor said. “It can’t be that bad.”
Bennis shoved her hands into the pocket of her jeans and glowered.
“Yes it can be that bad, Gregor, yes it can. Trust me.”
Then she marched past him and into her apartment, slamming the door behind her. Both Gregor and John Jackman winced at the violence of the sound.
“Well,” John Jackman said after a while. “This Miss Oumoudian isn’t one of the people I’ve met, is she?”
“You’d remember,” Gregor said. “She’s new. Not in the neighborhood but around the block. She and her niece immigrated from Armenia just after the collapse of the Soviet union .”
“Immigrated,” John Jackman said. “That’s nice. No wonder you know so much about green cards.”
“She goes out with one of the boys from the family that owns the Middle Eastern Food Store,” Gregor said. “No, of course she doesn’t. I’m tired, John. It’s her niece—”
“The one that’s going on the class trip,” John supplied helpfully.
“Exactly. The niece is Sofie. She was going to high school down the block here and having a little trouble.”
“A little?”
“A lot. Tibor and I have been helping to set up a scholarship fund to send her to Agnes Irwin. The problem is convincing old Miss Oumoudian that it wouldn’t be taking charity.”
“And did you?”
“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “She thinks the money is going to be paid out for services rendered.”
“What?”
Gregor was still staring at Bennis’s closed door. Now he turned away from it and headed up the stairs, shaking his head.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get some work done.”
“I think it’s really too bad Bennis has decided she hates me,” John said. “I don’t hate her in the least.”
That was a can of worms that Gregor Demarkian had no intention of opening. He climbed the stairs to the third-floor landing and let them both in to his own apartment.
2
IN THE BEGINNING, WHEN Gregor Demarkian had first moved to Cavanaugh Street after the death of his wife, the floor-through apartment whose streetside living room window faced Lida Arkmanian’s upstairs living room window on the other side was mostly bare. Moving in, Gregor had bought the minimum amount of furniture and no decorative elements at all. Coming home one night it had struck him that his apartment looked very much like the apartments of the serial killers he had spent so much of his time tracking down. At least, it looked like the apartments of the neat ones. There was a certain kind of serial killer who liked to imitate a pack rat. He collected the memorabilia of everything, from cereal-box tops to human body parts to string. This kind of serial killer was almost always psychotic. He saw visions and everybody he knew thought he was strange. The neat kind of serial killer was something else again. He was more normal than most of the people he knew, and better adjusted, and better organized—at least on the surface. He was a pathological liar but a meticulous one. His apartment was as antiseptic as the waiting room of a cancer ward. Gregor’s apartment had been antiseptic in that way, too. His foyer had been empty. His living room had contained one couch, one coffee table, and one chair. Women who had visited his kitchen had felt compelled to rearrange it, as if there were something you could do to a bar table and four plain chairs to make the arrangement look more human.
Gregor Demarkian had made this observation about his apartment three years ago. He had not rushed right out and done anything about it. What he had done instead was to open up another barren part of his life, and one that seemed much more in need of immediate attention: his lack of connection to other human beings. When he came back to Cavanaugh Street and moved into the apartment, he was friendless, in any substantive definition of the term “friend.” Eight months later, he had Tibor in his life and Bennis Hannaford and Donna Moradanyan and Lida Arkmanian and God only knew who else, and curiously enough, there was an entirely different feel to his apartment. It wasn’t that he had made any changes. Gregor was the kind of man who took six months to buy himself a new Jet-Dry bulb when the one in his dishwasher wore out. It was the rest of them who had changed his apartment. Donna Moradanyan had drawn pictures and had them framed and hung them in his foyer, along with everything else she hung in his apartment from time to time, the glowing menorah in his living room window not being the least of them. Bennis had bought him a living room full of house plants, which she watered for him. If she didn’t, they would die. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian had stocked his kitchen with equipment he never used (he didn’t know what it was all for) and pretty place mats and bright yellow kitchen curtains that at least made the place look less like the utility room at a group home.