Festival of Deaths(23)

There, DeAnna thought, was a woman who needed psychiatric help.

DeAnna got to the corridor the storeroom was on, walked down to the end of it and opened the door. She put her hand inside to turn on the light switch and got nothing at all. Somehow it figured that the light would go out in the one place she had to get something from with less than a minute before taping. She couldn’t change the light bulb herself, not unless she knew where to find a stepladder, which she didn’t. Somewhere in the building there was a janitor who would fix it for her, but that would take half an hour, and she didn’t have half an hour. She went back up the corridor and stopped at the first secretary she found.

“Do you have a flashlight? The light’s burned out in the storeroom and I have to get something quick.”

The secretary was a young black woman named Marsha, who carried one of those tote bags that looked as if it was big enough to move furniture. She contemplated the idea of a flashlight for a moment. Then she nodded, plunged into her bag, and came up with two.

“This one is really tiny.” She held up something that looked like a pen but flashed on and off by some mechanism DeAnna couldn’t determine. “This one ought to be all right.”

The second flashlight was the standard-issue detective-story variety. Deanna took it and said, “Call maintenance. We’ll still need somebody to fix that light.”

“On the phone right away,” Marsha said.

DeAnna went back to the storeroom, wondering what else Marsha kept in that bag. Tuna fish sandwiches. Hand grenades. The Hope diamond.

The storeroom door had swung closed. DeAnna pushed it open again. Then she switched the flashlight on and went inside. It was incredible how dark a room was when it didn’t have any windows. Even the light from the corridor didn’t do much to help.

The silk flowers were in a box on a shelf on the left-hand side near the back. DeAnna had seen them herself less than a week ago, when she had come in here searching for Liquid Paper after everybody else had gone home. She trained the flashlight on the shelves and found boxes marked “ball point pens” and “felt tipped pens” and “paper clips.”

“Shit,” she said under her breath. Then she moved even deeper into the room, wondering how far back it went, there was no way to tell in all this gloom. She swung the light around to see if she could find the back wall and get her bearings, and then she stopped.

It was only a glimpse, really, a split second where everything had been suddenly, terribly, irretrievably wrong, but a glimpse was enough. Once she’d seen she couldn’t go back to the point where she hadn’t seen. She could do anything but swing the flashlight back, and stop, and contemplate.

She contemplated long and hard.

She thought about the show, and how it could be disrupted.

She thought about Lotte, and Lotte’s blood pressure, and Lotte’s peace of mind.

She thought about her old neighborhood and all the things that used to go on there, the things she used to accept as a matter of course.

She wondered if she was getting soft.

She was looking straight into the smashed face of Maria Gonzalez, and she wanted to curl right up and die.





PART ONE:


Sex and the Single Demarkian





ONE


1


IN THE YEARS SINCE Gregor Demarkian had come back to Cavanaugh Street—come back from Washington, D.C., and a job with the FBI; come back from professional life and nine-to-five identity; come back to sanity—he had gotten used to the fact that even minor holidays would be celebrated around him with an hysteria worthy of the fall of the Bastille. Major holidays, like Christmas and Easter, would be occasions for all-out war. For the second Christmas Gregor had spent on Cavanaugh Street, Donna Moradanyan, his upstairs neighbor, had wrapped every light pole and mailbox in a four-block area with red and green metallic paper. This was Cavanaugh Street and Gregor accepted it. But Cavanaugh Street was an Armenian-American neighborhood and therefore dedicated to the Armenian Christian church, and Gregor had accepted that, too. Long ago, Armenia had been the first country on earth to make Christianity a state religion. Lately, Armenia seemed poised to become the most fervent example of religious revival in the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. On Cavanaugh Street, the response was subtler but undeniable. Even old agnostics like Gregor showed up at church on Sunday, and a surprising number of young people—raised to be secular children in a secular age—weren’t agnostics at all. Father Tibor Kasparian kept them all moving in the direction he wanted them to go. He called that direction “pure Christianity.” “The first duty of a Christian in the working out of his salvation is to sanctify the world,” Tibor said, in the thick accent he had brought with him from so many countries Gregor couldn’t remember them all. Then he proceeded to sanctify the world by finding a religious meaning in Presidents’ Day. Gregor had gotten used to finding out that Tibor had discovered deep Christian significance in the Congressional Proclamation that had established Arbor Day. Gregor had even gotten used to the fact that as soon as Tibor had discovered such significance, he wanted to do something about it. What Gregor hadn’t gotten used to—what he hadn’t even considered the possibility of—was a Cavanaugh Street celebration of Hanukkah.