The phone was on a little night table that was bolted to the wall between the two beds. All the furniture in this motel room was bolted to the wall. Gregor wondered who on earth would try to steal a bed. Next to the phone there was a little cardboard notice, tented into an open-sided pyramid, that said:
Party All Night
in enormous red letters. The notice was advertising a sleepover New Year’s Eve party being held in the motel. Gregor had read the notice the night before and decided that it sounded like a good idea. People who were staying over at a motel after drinking all night were at least not threatening sober drivers on the road. Gregor had been to only one New Year’s Eve party in his life—unless you wanted to count the wine-and-old-movie sessions held every year in old George Tekemanian’s apartment, which Gregor didn’t—and he’d hated it. New Year’s Eve was a nonholiday nonevent. It was a lot of people coming together in a desperate search for an excuse to get drunk, and not finding one.
Gregor’s wallet was also on the table next to the phone. Gregor got his AT&T calling card out and began to punch numbers into the pad. He loved this new practice of making touch-pads standard on phones. His fingers had never fit comfortably into the old rotary dials. He got the bonging tone and the strange, lilting robot voice that inevitably startled him. “Thank you for calling… AT&T.” He quashed the urge he always had to tell the robot voice that he was not calling AT&T. He was calling Philadelphia. The phone was ringing on the other end of the line. It was pulsing over and over again, unanswered. Gregor had a sinking feeling that he hadn’t called early enough. Tibor was already down at the Ararat restaurant, having breakfast. It would be hours before Gregor would be able to get hold of him.
Out in Philadelphia, the phone was picked up. A low, distracted voice mumbled something Gregor suspected was Armenian, but that was too garbled for Gregor to be sure. With Tibor, it was hard to be sure. Tibor had been born and brought up in Soviet Armenia, so he spoke both Armenian and Russian with fluency. He also spoke Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and modern Greek. He read Latin, ancient Greek, old English, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Welsh, too. When Tibor answered the phone still half asleep, he could be saying anything in any language at all.
Gregor turned the notice about the motel’s New Year’s Eve party to the wall, so that he didn’t have to look at it. “Tibor? Did I wake you up?”
There was what sounded like a crashing pile of books on the Philadelphia end of the line—probable, since Tibor’s small apartment behind Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church was decorated almost entirely with enormous piles of books, ranging from Aristotle’s Poetics (in the original Greek) to Mickey Spillane’s The Body Lovers (in the most garish of its paperback covers). Gregor heard Tibor mutter under his breath and smiled slightly. It was a point of honor with Tibor that he did not swear, in any language, no matter what happened to him. Gregor always wondered what it was he said instead.
“Krekor,” Tibor said finally. “Just a minute, please. The cookbooks.”
Cookbooks? What cookbooks? Tibor couldn’t cook. Tibor couldn’t even make instant coffee.
“Take your time,” Gregor told him. “I thought for a moment there that I’d missed you. I thought you’d gone down to the Ararat for breakfast.”
“I’m not going to breakfast today, Krekor. I’m blessing a house. In Ardmore. It’s Sheila Kashinian’s cousin and Sheila asked me to come.”
Gregor stretched out on the bed again, trying to prop himself up on a pile of pillows. People did this on television all the time, and looked really comfortable. When Gregor did it in real life, he always slid down to the point where his neck and shoulders started to ache and he had to sit up again. This time, he slid down almost immediately. He curled himself up and got his feet off the side of the bed again.
“I thought I’d call you for some advice,” he said. “I thought I’d find out how things were going back there. I’m in a motel room.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes,” Gregor said seriously. “It reminds me of my early days with the Bureau. I didn’t like my early days with the Bureau very much. And I don’t think this should feel so natural. Being alone, I mean.”
“It gets claustrophobic around here,” Tibor said. “Everybody means well, but they press too close. It’s not a terrible thing to want to get out on your own every once in a while. Even Lida does it.”
“Is Lida going to California again?”