Fighting Chance(11)

Janice opened the door and looked inside. It was an ordinary office. There was a desk with a little L to the side, where the computer sat. There were some bookshelves. There were some chairs. It could have belonged to anybody, doing anything.

Janice closed the door and stood very still. This corridor was not uninhabited. She could feel it. She could hear it.

She could hear breathing.

She went down the hall a little farther, stopping at each door and listening. Mostly what she heard was nothing. The names on the doors meant nothing.

The name on the door in the middle of the line was finally one she recognized: JUDGE HANDLING, just like that. No first name. The other women in the corridor must be some kind of assistants. At any rate, they wouldn’t be judges.

Janice stopped in front of Martha Handling’s door and listened some more. There was definitely breathing. It sounded labored and quick, unhealthy. Maybe Martha was in there having a heart attack. Maybe Martha was in there drinking.

The breathing came on and on, heavy and shallow and rapid all at once. Janice rapped against the door as loudly as she could.

For a moment, the breathing stopped.

Only seconds later, it started up again.

Maybe Martha was having a heart attack.

Janice gripped the doorknob and twisted. The door swung open soundlessly, the hinges so well oiled, the door felt as if it had no weight.

The two people in the room were both on the floor, and in the first few seconds, Janice recognized neither of them.

Then the blood on the floor and the wall and the desk came into focus and the bloody gash in the side of the head came next.

Janice would have screamed, but she was wondering if the white stuff all over the edge of the wound was brains.

7

Father Tibor Kasparian had not screamed, and was not screaming. He was sitting where he had been for the last four minutes, one hand holding Judge Handling’s heavy custom gavel, the other lying in the blood that covered both his knees.

The room smelled of blood. Father Tibor knew the smell of blood. It had a hard metallic edge.

It laughed at you.

He wondered who the woman was who had come through the door. He wondered why she wasn’t screaming.

Then he told himself that there was only one thing he really had to remember, and that was that he had the right to remain silent.





PART ONE





ONE

1

Somewhere back in the mists of time, Gregor Demarkian had trained to be an accountant. First he had taken a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. That had sounded very practical to his parents, who were immigrants from Armenia and heavily invested in making sure their children had careers that could carry them in America. Gregor never had the heart to tell them that academic economics was not the same thing as a business degree. To this day, he wasn’t sure what it was most of his professors had been getting at. Whether they were socialist or capitalist, mercantilist or Marxist, they all seemed to be living in cloud-cuckoo-land, where “rational actors” and “historical forces” bumped about the landscape doing things no actual existing human being would ever do, “inevitably” coming to conclusions that contradicted everybody else’s inevitability.

After college, Gregor went on to the Harvard Business School, where he’d been given an MBA that should have been spectacularly practical. He’d been enabled to go by the Armenian American Professional Fund, which was set up by an earlier generation of immigrants than that of his parents, dedicated to turning Armenian Americans into doctors and lawyers and that kind of thing.

“We can’t go on and on with the rugs,” the secretary of the fund explained to him when he’d gone by to pick up an application. “It’s embarrassing. It’s a stereotype. Nobody wants to be a stereotype.”

Gregor had been a contrarian even then, and something in the back of his mind observed that not only did everybody rely on stereotypes to get by in everyday life, but that it could sometimes be to your own advantage to be taken as one. Fortunately, he’d had too much sense actually to say that. He’d just taken the papers home, filled them out, and sent them in. Two months later, his tuition at Harvard was covered.

His father thought he’d been in school long enough already, but his mother was very pleased. “They take you very seriously,” she’d said. “You want to be taken seriously.”

Gregor supposed he did want to be taken seriously, but at the moment, it was mostly a side issue. He’d done well at Wharton, and while he was doing very well, he had assumed that he would spend his life after graduating working for some enormous corporation, or for one of the Big Eight accounting firms. He’d had his sights set on Arthur Andersen when the man from the FBI showed up at a recruitment day.