Fighting Chance(84)

“Yes.”

“At ten o’clock this morning.”

“Yes.”

“Petrak, I don’t know what you’re trying to pull here, but you can’t, you can’t lie to the police in a case like this. You could be prosecuted just for lying to them, never mind for everything else that’s going on. And it doesn’t make any sense for you to lie to me, either.”

“I am not lying to you,” Petrak said.

“Petrak, for God’s sake,” Gregor said. “At ten o’clock this morning, I was in Mark Granby’s office myself. I was there from quarter to ten till quarter after. And he made no phone calls. He didn’t leave the office even once. He didn’t call anybody. I was there.”

“He called me,” Petrak said. “I recognized his voice.”

“You recognized Mark Granby’s voice,” Gregor said.

“It was familiar as soon as it started to speak,” Petrak said. “He whispered, but it was familiar. And he told me who he was.”

“You said the name was in the address book,” Gregor said. “That’s how you found him in the first place. Did the name come up in the caller ID when you answered the phone?”

“No,” Petrak said. “It was just a number. I didn’t think about it.”

“Petrak, for God’s sake,” Gregor said. “The only way Mark Granby could have called you at ten o’clock this morning is if he’s figured out a way to be two places at once, and—”

“And that’s impossible,” Petrak finished for him.

Gregor was thinking that it wasn’t necessarily impossible at all.





FOUR

1

Father Tibor Kasparian had been waiting for Krekor Demarkian all day. He had been waiting from the moment old Mrs. Vespasian slammed the communicator phone down into its receiver, stood up, and stomped off with her two aged minions behind her. The minions had not said anything, but they never said anything, except to Mrs. Vespasian herself, and then almost always in Armenian. Mrs. Vespasian was, indeed, very, very old. It didn’t matter. She was in remarkable shape, and she knew her own mind and followed it.

Tibor assumed the Very Old Ladies had gone straight to the nearest phone they knew how to use and called Krekor and told him all about the video. That would be bad enough, but Tibor suspected that Gregor had known all along that the video was faked. The real problem would be what else Krekor would have figured out. In most things, Tibor would have trusted Krekor with his life, but this was not most things. In this case, Krekor would be unreliable.

When the guard came to tell him he had visitors, he did think about refusing to see them. The guard said his visitor was “your lawyer, Mr. Edelson, and some people.” As soon as Tibor heard that “your lawyer,” he knew there was no point in arguing. They called George Edelson “your lawyer” only when Edelson and the mayor, and Krekor himself, were pulling something.

Tibor thought of half a dozen legal protests to being forced to see visitors he didn’t want to see, but he knew they wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if he threatened to file a lawsuit for the violation of his civil rights. They wanted to talk to him now. They were going to talk to him now.

Or talk at him.

Tibor submitted to the handcuffs and the leg irons and all the rest of it. The trussing up had ceased to depress him, and now only made him feel foolish. He allowed the guard to follow him down the hall. She kept just behind him, with a hand on his elbow, until the very end, when she went just ahead and guided him down a hallway he hadn’t expected. Unexpected or not, Tibor knew what the hallway was. They weren’t taking him to the booths with the phones and the bulletproof glass. They were taking him to the big conference room where he had met George Edelson for the first, and he’d hoped the last, time.

When they got to the door of the conference room, the guard opened it and stood back to let him go inside. Tibor saw George Edelson standing near the window with his hands behind his back. The guard ushered Tibor in and then took the handcuffs off. By then, Tibor was trying his best not to look at the other end of the conference table.

Krekor Demarkian was sitting at the other end of the conference table, breathing fire.

If Tibor didn’t know it was impossible, he would have said that Krekor Demarkian was actually breathing fire.

Tibor sat down, as far away from Krekor as he could get.

Krekor stood up.

“I’d invite you to stretch your legs,” Krekor said acidly, “but you can’t do that, because you’re in leg irons.”

George Edelson cleared his throat. “I think shouting is not necessarily the way we want to proceed with this.”