“Tibor? I’m leaving.”
“Have a good lunch,” Tibor called back.
“Tibor?”
No answer.
Gregor went into the entry, got his coat from the closet and headed out the door.
When Tibor refused to talk to him at all, God only knew what kind of insanity was going on.
2
LATER, GREGOR DEMARKIAN WOULD tell Bennis Hannaford—his immediate downstairs neighbor; the woman half the magazines in America insisted on calling his “constant companion” and that half the people in America thought was his lover (Gregor had once told Tibor he’d as soon take the Tasmanian devil for a lover, it would be calmer)—that the hardest thing about his talk with Tibor that morning was not telling Tibor why he was having lunch with his “friend from the FBI.” Tibor Kasparian was probably the man Gregor had been closest to in his life. Gregor’s father and older brother had both died when Gregor was very young, and he had no distinct memories of either. Then there had been college and graduate school, the army and the Bureau. Men made close friends in places like that, but Gregor hadn’t. Gregor had made a close friend in his wife. She had been enough for him as long as she was alive. It was after she died that Gregor had come back to Cavanaugh Street and found himself at loose ends. It was in coming back to Cavanaugh Street that he had met Tibor. It all got very complicated. Gregor Demarkian had grown up on Cavanaugh Street in the days when it had been an Armenian-American ghetto, the kind of place all its residents wanted to escape for the greener grass of the Philadelphia Main Line. He had come back to a Cavanaugh Street transformed, but not quite. The buildings had been spruced up and gutted and remodeled and rearranged. The tenements had been changed into townhouses and floor-through condominiums with twelve-foot-high ceilings and marble fireplaces and Anderson windows in brownstone frames. The people on Cavanaugh Street, however, had not changed at all. Lida Arkmanian bought her clothes at Saks these days and covered them over with a chinchilla coat, but she still went at cooking as if she could bring about world peace with it and worried about everybody’s grandchildren. Hannah Krekorian took her vacations in the Bahamas these days, but she still talked a blue streak and lusted over love and romance the way a cat lusted after fresh fish. People were so much the same, Gregor sometimes found himself stopped dead in confusion, as if he had wandered into a costume party that refused to come to an end. Surely any minute now Lida would trade in that chinchilla coat for a cloth one from Sears, and Sheila Kashinian would confess that all those diamond rings were just paste. Surely any minute now Gregor’s own mother would come trundling up from Ohanian’s with a soft reed basket under her arm, carrying a plucked chicken and two cups of bulgur to make for tonight’s dinner. Of course, Gregor’s mother was dead now and Ohanian’s had become Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store. Gregor put flowers on his mother’s grave every Christmas Day and Ohanian’s sold prepackaged filo leaves to tourists from Radnor for twelve ninety-nine a pound. It should have been enough to cause a case of terminal disorientation in anyone, but it wasn’t, and that was the problem. Gregor Demarkian’s loyalties were here. For the rest of his life, they would be. What Gregor had had a hard time not telling Tibor that morning was what he was having lunch with his “friend from the FBI” for. Gregor kept putting the phrase—“friend from the FBI”—in quotes, because it belonged in quotes. Don Elkham was not strictly a friend of his, although Gregor described him that way, for want of another term to use for him. Gregor and Don had known each other since their first day of training at Quantico, and followed each other through the ranks at the Bureau ever since. The difference was, while Gregor had ended up chief and originator of the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Don had gotten stalled along the way. Of course, Gregor was retired now, with no standing at all. There was no reason for a man like Don Elkham to be jealous of a Gregor Demarkian who had demoted himself into nothing but an amateur. Even so, the jealousy was there. Gregor had felt it coming over the phone when Don had called.
What Don had called about was what he insisted on referring to as “a little criminal anomaly in New York.” What he meant was that one of the staff members on Rabbi David Goldman’s sister’s television show had been murdered in Manhattan last month and there was enough strangeness around the case to get all the law enforcement people a little nervous. Gregor had wondered out loud what that had to do with the FBI, but the explanation had turned out to be less than sinister. Don Elkham was a station agent in Philadelphia. His best buddy from the army was the police lieutenant handling the case in New York. Everybody knew about the connection between Lotte Goldman’s brother David and Father Tibor Kasparian, and between Father Tibor Kasparian and Gregor Demarkian.