“Yes,” Carpenter said. “But you must realize that as affecting as these personal stories are—”
“It’s not just that their house is in foreclosure. It’s that their house is in foreclosure due to the legal action of a bank that, as far as I can figure out, never had a mortgage on the house. Never. You can do things about a foreclosure if you know how to go about it right. But I can’t do anything about a foreclosure when the bank that’s foreclosing doesn’t actually hold the mortgage on the house. And I really can’t do anything about it when everybody admits that the bank doesn’t seem to have the right to foreclose, but nobody will stop them from foreclosing. This ought not even to be an issue. We should have been able to go into court, show the judge that the bank did not have the lien, and walked out with the foreclosure stopped.”
“Yes,” Carpenter said miserably. “I know.”
“Instead,” Gregor said, “the court is acting as if Mikel Dekanian is pulling some kind of scam, and as if I’m aiding and abetting it. And the priest from our local church. And my wife. And before you say yes again, let me point out that this isn’t the only case like this we’ve had. There have, in fact, been four of these cases over the last three years in our own parish alone, and we lost one of them.”
“I’m feeling a little stuck on yes,” Terry Carpenter said.
“And does yes mean there’s nothing you can do about it?”
“Not exactly,” Terry Carpenter said. “Give me a minute and let me show you what I’ve managed to put together.”
2
What Terry Carpenter had managed to put together was an even bigger mess than what Gregor Demarkian had managed to put together for himself, and it was far more surreal.
“I just have to do a little setup here,” he promised while Gregor sat in his uncomfortable visitor’s chair and watched the razzle-dazzle roll out in the hands of two assistants who looked far more nervous than they ought to be.
Gregor was willing to bet that these were not Terry Carpenter’s own personal assistants, and the ferociously competent woman who had brought him to Carpenter’s door wasn’t either. The ferociously competent woman would belong to a higher-up who wanted to make sure Carpenter made a good impression. Carpenter wasn’t making a good impression.
He was barely making a bad impression.
Computers rolled into the office, mostly laptops with very big screens. These were lined up on the edge of Carpenter’s desk facing Gregor. The screens of the laptops all had very colorful graphs on them—bar graphs and pie graphs, overlapping circle graphs that reminded Gregor of elementary school forays into set theory. The whole thing gave off a distinct odor of panic.
“There,” Carpenter said. “There we are. I think that if we refer to these graphs, I might be able to explain what’s going on with your Mr., uh, Mr.—”
“Mikel Dekanian,” Gregor said.
“Yes,” Carpenter said.
Gregor gave the computer screens a sweep. “You know,” he said, “I don’t really need to understand what’s going on here. What I need is to find out what I have to do to fix it. I have a young man who’s done that thing we’re always talking about, and played by all the rules. He’s never been late on a mortgage paper in his life. He hasn’t dealt with any of the big banks exactly because he’s heard too much about the way they operate. And in spite of all that, he’s got letters threatening to send officers to his door. And—”
“It really would help if you understood it,” Terry Carpenter said. “It will only take a minute.”
“We’d let it go and laugh it off if it wasn’t for the case we had last year,” Gregor said. “I mean, for God’s sake, if something like this had come up twenty years ago, it would have been resolved in a week and the bank would have been falling all over Mikel, trying to pay him enough not to sue—”
“But that’s just it!” Terry Carpenter said frantically. “That’s just it! Twenty years ago, the lien would have been filed on paper in your local property tax jurisdiction, somebody would have taken a paper copy of the lien down to the wherever it is, wherever you file deeds and liens on the deeds—it would be the town hall in most places, but with a city the size of Philadelphia, I’m just not sure, so you see—”
“Are you trying to say that Mikel’s deed isn’t on file with the real estate office? Because I can tell you’re wrong. It’s there. I’ve seen it. What’s more, what isn’t there is any lien whatsoever besides the mortgage from the American Amity Savings Bank. I know. I went down there and looked myself.”