Fighting Chance(56)

Even so, the cell was small, and it was very empty. He didn’t understand why jailers everywhere always did this. Cells could be small. That didn’t matter. But cells should not be empty. Even very stupid people could get bored with nothing to occupy them. And boredom always caused trouble.

He had gotten to the point where he was repeating nursery rhymes in his head when the guard came to tell him he had a visitor, and the visitor was not somebody he had expected. He had started by repeating Armenian nursery rhymes to himself. Then he had gone on to English. Then he had gone on to French. French was not a language he had ever been completely easy with, at least in its spoken form.

When the guard asked him if he wanted to go downstairs and talk to his visitor, Tibor had a moment of complete frozenness. Hannah Krekorian was down there. She had come to him all on her own, as if she had a plan. Hannah Krekorian never had plans, not real ones. She had vague intentions, and a lot of emotions, and a world’s supply of intellectual confusion. She was a nice woman. She was not a threat.

The nursery rhymes were driving him crazy. He made up his mind before he’d had a chance to think it through.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I will come.”

Coming was a mass of complications: handcuffs, leg irons, orders. Tibor let it happen. If you got upset about these things, they wore you out. He also didn’t entirely blame them. They would have seen that video just like everybody else. He hadn’t seen it, but he could imagine. He probably looked like a crazed animal with no restraint.

They brought him to a room with a line of booths against one wall. The booths had seats and little shelf desks and phones, and one of the sides was faced with thick glass. Tibor had seen this on TV. He didn’t know if the glass was so thick, it was impossible to hear through it, or if it required so much in the way of shouting that nobody wanted to do that. They wanted their privacy. They used the phones instead.

Hannah had been crying, and that was not a good thing. She had never been an attractive woman, even when she was younger. Crying made her face go red and her eyes puff up and her nose run. Tibor wanted to put a hand through the glass and pat her head to make her feel better.

Tibor was more relieved than he wanted to admit that he had no sudden urge to start talking. Instead, he sat down and picked up the phone on his side of the glass and waited for Hannah to pick up hers.

She did pick up her phone, but instead of holding it to her ear, she put her face into an already sodden handkerchief and started to cry.

Tibor made motions telling her to put her phone to her ear, because they really weren’t going to get anywhere if she didn’t do that.

Hannah did it, and the first thing she said was, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there this morning. I meant to be. Lida came to pick me up. But at the last minute, I couldn’t handle it.”

“There was nothing special about this morning,” Tibor said. “You were better to stay at home.”

“That’s not what I hear,” Hannah said. She’d gone from crying to indignant. “Lida has been talking about it ever since they came back. You did something stupid. Or you did something worse. You did something dangerous. Bennis called a Supreme Court justice to ask about it.”

This was probably garbled. Tibor wondered whom Bennis had actually called, to make Hannah think it was somebody on the Supreme Court.

“I was sorry I hadn’t been there,” Hannah said. “If I’d been there, I would have known. So I thought I would come down here. They were saying you wouldn’t talk to anybody, you wouldn’t even talk to Gregor, but I thought I’d come.”

“Well,” Tibor said. “I am talking to you. You can see there is nothing wrong with me.”

“There’s everything wrong with you,” Hannah said in a wail. “Just look at you. And look at this place. What are you doing in this place? And that video. Have you seen yourself in that video? It’s impossible.”

“No, no,” Tibor said. “I have heard about the video, yes, but I have not seen it. I do not have a cell phone here.”

“I’m not completely stupid,” Hannah said. “I know there must be something going on you’re not telling anybody. I know there must be some reason you’re not talking to Gregor, and it’s not because you killed some silly woman you didn’t even know. And I know that what you’re doing is wrong, Tibor, I know it. I was suspected of committing murder once. This is not what you are supposed to do.”

“No, no,” Tibor said. “I am not doing anything. I am only telling the truth.”

“Telling the truth to say you killed that woman?” Hannah said. “Telling it to a judge in court? I don’t believe it.”