Fighting Chance(73)

When they came and told him he had visitors, he didn’t hesitate. He really had crossed a line. He needed to see people. He needed to talk to them. He didn’t think he would agree to talk to Gregor. Talking to Gregor would be far too dangerous. But he would talk to anybody else. He would even talk to Bennis and Donna, if they came.

It was not Bennis and Donna who came. The guard who brought the message garbled the names, but Tibor had no problem at all knowing what they were.

“I haven’t seen them yet myself,” the young woman guard said when she got him out and all trussed up to move. “But I’ll tell you, Chris downstairs couldn’t stop laughing.”

Tibor would have bet his life that Chris downstairs wasn’t laughing where the Very Old Ladies could hear him. Nobody laughed at the Very Old Ladies unless he was suicidal.

Tibor wondered absently what they were doing about the setup downstairs, which allowed only one person to sit down in the cubicle and talk through the phone.

He also wondered what time it was. It was after breakfast and the long rigamarole that was getting teeth brushed and generally cleaned up. After that, there had been A Lot of Time, but that could mean anything.

When he got to the booth where they wanted him to sit, Tibor saw that Mrs. Vespasian was in the seat in front of the glass panel, and her two minions were standing right behind her. All three of the women were exceedingly frail. All three of them had to be well into their nineties. Not one of them was headed for a nursing home anytime soon.

Mrs. Vespasian had her walking stick with her, the ebony one with the ivory handle that one of her great-grandchildren had bought for her on a trip to London. She looked grim, but she always looked grim. The other two only looked worried.

“This is ridiculous,” she said when she picked up the phone. “What do they expect me to do with a walking stick? If it’s not on the ground as my fifth leg, I cannot stand up.”

She could always use it to whack people when she was sitting down, Tibor thought. He didn’t say it.

“And this thing,” Mrs. Vespasian said, gesturing to the cubicle and the glass and the phone. “What is this thing? What do they expect three old women are going to do? What do they expect you are going to do? You never hurt anyone in your life.”

This wasn’t true. Tibor let it go. “I am very glad to see you,” he said. “It becomes very boring in here. And I do not hear news.”

“It wouldn’t be so boring if you got out of here,” Mrs. Vespasian said, “and I am sure you can get out of here if you tell me what is going on.” Suddenly she switched to Armenian. It had been seventy years since she last saw Armenia, but she had not forgotten the language. “This is a ridiculous thing you are doing. Nobody believes in it. Even you do not believe in it. I can see it in your face.”

“But I do believe in it,” Tibor said, also in Armenian. “That is the one thing I am sure of.”

“I am sure that Krekor Demarkian says you are a fool,” Mrs. Vespasian said, “and I think he knows fools. You are a priest. You should act with morality. If you have committed this murder, you should say so. If you have not committed this murder, you should say what really happened. I do not think you have committed this murder. Do you want to know why?”

“Yes,” Tibor said.

“If you think I am going to say that I know you and I know you would not commit a murder, this is false,” Mrs. Vespasian said. “I know what people are. I know what they will do if they are pushed into the wrong place. No, I do not know for certain that you would not commit a murder. But I know that that video film everyone is showing everybody else on their phones is a fake.”

Tibor suddenly felt as if he really couldn’t breathe. He felt as he did when he’d fallen off a slide as a child and had all the wind knocked out of him.

“Fake,” he said.

“I am hard of hearing, Father, and you know it,” Mrs. Vespasian said. “So I have a phone my great-granddaughter got for me, it has special powers to help my hearing. And I can turn it up until it is very loud. So I watched that silly video, and then I turned the sound all the way up and I listened. And do you know what I heard?”

“No,” Tibor said.

“Your hand would go up and then it would come down and there would be a thud, a hard thud, the hammer was coming down on a hard place. On wood. You can hear the sound of wood. If the hammer had been coming down on the body of that woman, the sound would not be hard or sharp. It would be … squish.”

Tibor winced. He had heard that squish, and he never wanted to hear it again. He never wanted to think about it. He could barely believe that old Mrs. Vespasian had thought about it.