Fighting Chance(15)

“Oh, I’m not part of the Federal Reserve proper,” Carpenter said. “I mean, we’re in the building, but that’s just because they were able to find space for us here. We’re really, I mean we’re actually—”

There were two sharp raps on the door. Gregor and Terry Carpenter looked up at the same time. Then the door popped open, and the formidable middle-aged woman stuck her head in.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said, “but Mr. Demarkian’s wife is on the phone, and she’s very insistent. She says it’s urgent.”





TWO

1

Afterwards, Gregor could never remember the order in which things had happened. He did remember wondering what the phone call was about, but mostly because Bennis was not, as she put it, “a crisis kind of person.”

If he’d been asked what he thought the crisis could possibly be, he would have said the very mortgage he was working on. Mikel Dekanian’s mortgage had been a crisis on Cavanaugh Street for weeks. There had even been images out of a silent movie serial: Mikel’s wife, Asha, had come to the Ararat with a head scarf over her head, trailing two young children and weeping uncontrollably because she’d had a letter that sounded as if she would be out on the street before nightfall. Mikel himself had stood on the steps of the church and ranted on and on in a frantic mix of Armenian and English about what he was going to do to the next idiot who called his wife and threatened her on the phone.

It was just one of those things it was impossible to get anybody to take sanely. And although Gregor didn’t blame them, they also made him tired.

The things he did not remember included just who had said what when, and just how long it had taken him to understand what Bennis was trying to tell him.

He wasn’t entirely sure he’d understood it even when he got to Penn Station, and then he was stuck in what felt like an endless round of phone calls and dropped phone calls and areas of no service and the whole insanity that made him hate cell phones.

At the same time, he felt guilty. He knew it was ridiculous, but part of him felt that nothing would have happened if he hadn’t shut his own cell phone off while he was talking to Terry Carpenter. He’d had perfectly good reasons. He didn’t want calls to interrupt the conversation. Interrupted conversations never quite worked out the way you were planning them to. But then the call had come in on the landline, and it had just seemed to be all his fault.

It had taken everything he had not to force the conversation out into the open right there in Terry Carpenter’s office.

“Father Tibor has been arrested,” Bennis said. Gregor could hear the heavy breathing, and everything in him went on high alert. Bennis kept her head almost always, but now she sounded as if there weren’t enough air in the universe to fill her lungs.

“Father Tibor’s been arrested,” Bennis said, “and I can’t—there was blood everywhere. Russ came in and Tibor was on the floor with the body and Russ tried to pull him out and then other people came and tried to pull him out or something, I’m not sure, but everybody had blood on them. Tibor was covered with it and Russ had it all over and other people and then the police came and I wasn’t there, but he’s not talking to me anyway, and—”

“What do you mean he’s not talking to you?”

“It’s on CNN already,” Bennis said. “If you could just get to a television, or bring it up on your phone, I showed you how to bring things up on your phone—”

“Bennis, for God’s sake. I’m in Mr. Carpenter’s office, I can’t talk and I can’t figure out—”

“I don’t want you to talk,” Bennis said. “I want you to get out of there right this minute and get home. Get home as fast as you can. Take an Amtrak Express if you have to. Hire a bloody limousine if you have to. Just get here.”

That was the point at which things got a little hazy. He half thought he’d made a lot of excuses before he slammed out the door and down the hallway and out onto the street to find a cab. Then he was sitting in a plastic molded chair in Penn Station, trying to get his phone to work.

He bought a ticket on an Acela Express. He got it out of a self-service kiosk after checking the board a dozen times, just to make sure the train was running on time. You could never tell with Amtrak.

It took him only five minutes to get CNN to load on his phone, but it felt like an hour, and he had to stop himself from smashing the thing on the ground to punish it for being so slow.

Then he was staring at CNN’s home page and reading the little blurb under the picture of a building. He thought the building might be the court where the incident had happened. He clicked on the link that said FULL STORY.