Festival of Deaths(39)

He turned in the direction of Fifth Avenue and started walking, quickly and angrily, and the inside of his head took up a litany.

He was going to have to replace it all.

Replace it all.

And it was going to cost a hell of a lot of money that he just didn’t have.





FOUR


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN ALWAYS TOOK Father Tibor Kasparian seriously. He did what Father Tibor asked him, and he investigated what Father Tibor thought was worth investigating—with the exception of a possible permanent union   between Gregor and Bennis Hannaford, which Gregor thought of as Tibor’s single symptom of mental illness. Since the graffiti on the walls of Rabbi David Goldman’s colleague’s synagogue had nothing to do with Bennis Hannaford—she’d dated a Reform rabbi once and gone to her best-friend-from-college’s oldest son’s bar mitzvah, but beyond that she’d never had anything to do with synagogues—he started looking into it as soon as he got a free minute. It turned out to be more complicated than he had expected. Gregor called a friend of his at the Philadelphia office of the Bureau, who referred him to a mutual acquaintance in Omaha, who turned him around and sent him to a man all three of them had known at Quantico who was not in Washington, D.C. The man in Washington, D.C., was on vacation. Gregor left four or five messages and then gave it up. The man would be back from Florida when the man got back from Florida. There was nothing Gregor could do before then.

The man’s name was Ira Ballard, and he got back from Florida—at least to the extent of answering Gregor’s calls—on the day Gregor and Tibor were due to have tea with Sofie Oumoudian and her aunt. The call came in at nine fifteen in the morning, while Gregor was standing in front of his closet, contemplating ties. None of his ties were going to do, he could see that. They were all either too loud or too wide. Tibor had already warned him that Sofie and her aunt were “very pious” and “very conservative,” meaning they were really old-time Armenian, meaning God only knew what. At least Gregor knew his suits would do. Gregor had always been a terrible stick-in-the-mud about suits. Bennis had tried to talk him into buying anything from a houndstooth check to a jacket with wide lapels, but he had remained loyal to his 1950s organization man classics. The only concession he had made was in price. While he was still at the Bureau, he bought his suits at Sears. Now that he was retired, with decent if not spectacular money in the bank and nobody to worry about but himself, he let Bennis steer him to J. Press. J. Press was also good for plain white button-down shirts, of which he had a dozen. The ties were Gregor’s own fault. He simply couldn’t pick ties. He was hopeless.

Gregor and Tibor were due at the Oumoudian apartment at eleven o’clock. Gregor had started fussing through his closet at eight. When the call came in, he had all his ties laid out on the bedspread of his big double bed, and he was close to despair.

“I keep seeing your picture in the paper with this woman who looks like Elizabeth Taylor at twenty-five,” Ira Ballard said, when Gregor picked up the phone. “What gives?”

“She’s thirty-seven,” Gregor said, “and nothing gives. To put it the way she puts it, we hang out. Hello, Ira. I hope you had a good vacation.”

“I never have a good vacation. I hate the heat. Nancy loves the heat. Every year she points out that we do it my way fifty weeks out of fifty-two, the remainder ought to be hers. So I hate the heat but I go to Florida. Is this some kind of emergency?”

“I wouldn’t call it an emergency, exactly, why?”

“Five calls from you. One from Jack in Philadelphia. One from Fred Hacker in Omaha.”

“Synagogues,” Gregor said, “and anti-Semitic organizations. Nothing out of hand. Not yet.”

“Right,” Ira said. “Well, that’s the name of the game. Not yet.”

“It should be ‘not ever,’” Gregor said. “Just a minute. There’s something I have to do here.”

The something Gregor had to do was pick up the ties. He was sick of looking at them. He put the phone between his ear and his shoulder and scooped the ties into both hands. Then he dumped them on top of his dresser. Jumbled up there in a pile, they looked like knotted snakes. He retrieved the phone and said,

“Ira, give me another minute, I’m going to change phones. It’ll only take a second.”

“Go right ahead.”

Gregor put the receiver down on the bed. Then he went out to the kitchen, picked up the receiver there, and laid it down on the kitchen table. Then he went back to the bedroom and hung that receiver up. By the time he got back to the kitchen, he felt like a damn fool.