Festival of Deaths(24)

“Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday,” he had pointed out to Tibor that morning, picking his way through the books piled in columnar stacks on Tibor’s living room floor to get to the one halfway clear seat he could see. The seat was only halfway clear because it had both of Tibor’s present reading projects on it: Judith Krantz’s Scruples Two and An Investigation into the Mathematical Nature of Time by George Gamow. Gregor picked them both up and balanced them gently on the shortest stack of books on the end table. Those books were all in the Cyrillic alphabet. Armenia no longer used the Cyrillic alphabet. Gregor had seen a report on that on the evening news a few months ago. Armenia now had an American-born foreign minister, too. It was enough to give a man a headache. Gregor checked out the rest of the books on the end table—some Greek, some ancient Greek, some Latin, some French and Passions of the Sea by Lisetta Farnham—and then turned his attention to Tibor himself, who was trying to bring overfull cups of bad black coffee in from the kitchen. “Hanukkah,” he said again.

“Yes, yes,” Tibor told him. “I know, Krekor, I know. But it makes sense. And I am not a bigot.”

“I never said you were.”

“Well, Krekor, it would not have been outrageous if you had thought it. There is the Armenian record on anti-Semitism.”

Gregor was curious. “How is the Armenian record on anti-Semitism?” he asked.

“Appalling.”

Tibor had reached him with the coffee. Gregor reached out for a cup and managed to spill only a drop and only on the floor. This was good, because he was due in less than an hour at a lunch in downtown Philadelphia with a friend of his from the old days at the Bureau. He took a sip of the coffee and nearly choked. He put his cup down on the end table and waited for Tibor to seat himself. Tibor kept tripping over the hem of his cassock.

“So,” Tibor said, when he’d finally sat down. “I have told you, Krekor, Rabbi Goldman, David, he was my sponsor when I came to America?”

“You’ve told me, yes,” Gregor said. “As an inducement to going on his sister’s television show.”

“The television show. Yes. Well, Krekor, David asked me to ask you and so I asked. That is not what I wanted to talk to you about today. You know the television show will be here in just three days?”

“You’ve told me.”

“Yes, well, Krekor, it would be good if you could help us to clear this up before then. The graffiti, if you understand what I am saying.”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Don’t you ever watch the news, Krekor? It is a terrible trial talking to you sometimes. I bring up what everybody knows because it has been on television for a week, and it is as if you have been on Mars. The graffiti was on a synagogue in the—I don’t remember the street—here in Philadelphia where there is a neighborhood of Hasidim. The Hasidim are—”

“I know what the Hasidim are. Who.”

“How am I supposed to know what you know?” Tibor shrugged. “Never mind, Krekor. You can imagine what kind of graffiti it was, and now everybody is upset. And it is not that they should be blamed for it, Krekor, because the graffiti was very foul. But the worst of it is that the police have arrested nobody for this.”

“Do they know who did this?”

“Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

Tibor fumbled around in his pockets and came up with a crumpled sheet of paper. He got up, leaned over yet more stacks of books, and passed it to Gregor. “That is the name of the organization which claims responsibility. I had David write it down for me because I have a hard time remembering it. This is perhaps psychological.”

“Perhaps,” Gregor said drily.

“The important thing here is that the police know what the organization is but they don’t know who is in it. You see the problem? Have you ever heard of them, Krekor?”

What was written on the piece of paper was

    WHITE KNIGHTS, DEFENDERS OF FACE AND FAITH



Gregor put the paper on the end table and sighed.

“I haven’t heard of them,” he said. “I don’t have to have heard of them. Groups like this crop up constantly. We had an entire section at the Bureau devoted to nothing but keeping track of them.”

“There is perhaps such a section at the Bureau now?”

“No perhaps about it. Of course there is.”

“Well then,” Tibor said. “Krekor. You go today to have lunch with an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is a friend of yours. He may have friends of his own in this special section. He may be able to… help us out.”