Fighting Chance(86)

“Tcha,” Tibor said.

It was an all-purpose word. It meant whatever you wanted it to mean. Tibor’s brain felt like soup.

Krekor pulled out a chair right next to Tibor’s and sat down again. “We’re making arrangements right now. John Jackman has his people on it, and we’ve got people at the governor’s office, so don’t bother trying to pull anything more. George here has become your attorney of record. He’s filed a writ of habeus corpus. We’ve pulled three judges out of their lunches and their golf games. In about another forty-five minutes, you’re going to be out on bail, and when you are, you’re coming with George and me and we’re going to see Petrak Maldovanian and his lawyer, and then it’s really going to hit the fan. Because I’m not going to stop until you come to your senses.”

“Tcha,” Tibor said again. He was desperately buying time. He needed time.

“When this is over,” Krekor said, “and it’s going to be over—and it’s going to be over my way, and not yours—when this is over, you are never going to hear the end of it again. Ever. For the rest of your life, I will remind you of this. I’ll remind you over and over and over again. And if I die before you do, I’ll come back as a ghost and remind you of it some more. Of all the stupid, asinine, dangerous things anybody could ever do, this has got to be the prize.”

“Tcha,” Tibor said yet again, as if he couldn’t force any other sound out of his throat. And maybe he couldn’t.

Before he walked into this room, he’d been absolutely sure of what he was doing and why. He’d been resolved to carry it through.

And now, all of a sudden, he wasn’t sure.

2

The news reports began just after noon, and from the first, Janice Loftus found them confusing. At first she thought Petrak Maldovanian had been arrested, but that turned out to be untrue. What was true was that there had been a murder, and that Petrak had been found at the murder, near the body, doing something. There were a lot of deep, dark hints, the way there always were when nobody actually knew what was happening.

At least two of the local news Web sites contained long articles that were careful to point out that Petrak had been found in the corridors around the chambers where Martha Handling was murdered, and even that he had had blood on him. That was completely typical. Of course Petrak Maldovanian had had blood on him. Everybody had blood on them by the time it was over. People kept coming into the room and wandering around in it, walking over to the body, walking back out into the corridor again. She herself had done it. Martha Handling was lying there so still and so awful looking and she hadn’t been able to help herself.

That was something she hadn’t known until that day. Blood smelled like copper. The whole room smelled like copper. And blood squished. When you stepped on it, it didn’t feel like other things did under your feet. It squished and it slid, and all you wanted was to be away from it.

Janice made her mind blank it out as best she could. That was not the important point now. The important point was that they were going to arrest Petrak eventually. You could tell that much in the news reports. They might have let him go for now, but it wouldn’t be long, and then they would not only arrest him for this murder but for the murder of Martha Handling, too. But that wasn’t right. She had been there at the murder of Martha Handling. She’d walked into the room only moments after it must have occurred. She’d not seen anything, and nothing of what she’d seen had been Petrak Maldovanian.

It was anti-immigrant sentiment—that’s what it was. Janice saw it all the time. She saw it at school, where half her fellow teachers spent their time deriding all the “morons” who couldn’t get their verb tenses right or didn’t know anything about what had happened at Appomattox Court House. Of course, it wasn’t only immigrants who didn’t know those things, but nobody was going to come out and call Americans “morons” in a collegiate setting. They especially weren’t going to call them morons if they were people of color. If there was one sure way to make your career end, that was it.

Unfortunately, the fear and the abhorence of the Other weren’t restricted to the campuses of community colleges. They were everywhere. They were in the news media that put out these stories. In the nice minds of all the nice people who owned little shops in the city, worked for corporations, or drove cars to shop or anything else. The bigotry was even in the minds of the people who worked for organizations like Pennsylvania Justice.

“It’s not accidental,” Janice had tried to tell Kasey Holbrook as soon as she heard the news about Petrak. That was the first time Janice had called. “I know you don’t like to talk about conspiracies, Kasey, but sometimes there are conspiracies. There’s a conspiracy here. It’s the friends of that priest—it’s Gregor Demarkian and those people. They’ll do anything to get him off.”