“That was sensible,” Gregor said. “What did you find?”
“The woman is an idiot,” Tibor said. “Either that or she’s a liar. And the rest of the people who write for the paper are not much better. It is astonishing, Krekor, let me tell you, how ignorant a person can be and still be paid money for their opinions.”
“Something you could say about most of the newspaper reporters in this country. Why is she on Cavanaugh Street anyway?”
“She is here to report on Red America.”
“Excuse me?”
“Red State America,” Tibor amended. “I know. It is very confusing.”
“But Pennsylvania isn’t a Red State,” Gregor said. “Or at least, it wasn’t in the last election. She should be in Nebraska or Kansas or someplace like that.”
“She would have culture shock so severe, it would take hospitalization to cure her.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“And it is not a matter of little import,” Tibor said. “The things she writes in the paper are the things people will believe about America. People who have never been here, and who will probably never come. They will make decisions when they vote in their home countries; they will make decisions in their private lives on this misinformation. America is a place where everybody has to hold three jobs just to make the rent and eat. America is a place where if you do not have money you do not get medical care. America is a place where there is no unemployment insurance and no pensions for old people—”
“What?”
“Yes, I am serious, Krekor. And if it was just a matter of ignorance, I wouldn’t mind. She is here. We can show her the truth. But it is not a matter of ignorance. It is a matter of malice. And now there is this Plate Glass Killer and the homeless man they have arrested, and I am thinking she is working herself up to write about it. Wrongly. She is working herself up to make this into an example of what it is not.”
Tibor came away from the window, and sat down on the couch. Part of the foreignness were the clothes, Gregor thought, the cheap black suits always just a little too small and a little too tight, as if he had not been able to afford more material. There was something Bennis had tried to change that she hadn’t been able to make budge. Bennis bought Tibor clothes, and as soon as he put them on, they looked like all the other clothes he had ever had since the day he had first arrived in America from the old Soviet union .
“We should not have given her the apartment,” Tibor said. “That’s what I am thinking. But maybe I am wrong. If she had gone somewhere else, what would she have thought? The inner city. Somewhere like that. And then there is the fact that it is a favor to Bennis, who usually has much better taste in friends.”
“Bennis has no taste in friends,” Gregor said. “Bennis knows everybody on the planet and half of them are lunatics more unreliable than she is. Which brings us to our usual impasse. You don’t know where she is, really?”
“No, Krekor. I don’t know where she is. I would not lie to you. If I knew but I wasn’t allowed to tell, I would tell you that.”
“Not even a clue? What about Miss Lydgate. Would she know?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. She perhaps saw Bennis somewhere recently, that is possible.”
“But?”
“But I do not believe that Miss Lydgate is really a friend,” Tibor said. “She is mean, and when she is not that she is malicious, and Bennis does not have patience with either. I wonder if they have a mutual friend that Bennis perhaps does the favor for. If I knew where Bennis was, Krekor, I would call her myself. I would ask her about this woman and what she is doing here.”
Gregor stood up. “Well,” he said, “nobody on Cavanaugh Street has heard from Bennis in four months, not even Donna Moradanyan. Maybe she’s gone through a wormhole. Is that a word? I took Tommy to the movies last weekend. I was never so confused in my life. Let’s go have breakfast. If you don’t like what Miss Lydgate is doing, maybe you can corral her and tell her what you think.”
“Tcha, Krekor. She wouldn’t listen. Or she would write an article about how Americans refuse to face reality. This is a major theme of hers. Americans should be miserable because the country is horrible; but they’re not miserable, so they must be delusional. Over and over again. Then she mixes up federal and state law, she gets federalism wrong. When I was still studying for my citizenship test, I did better than this. And I have put out my flag.”
“I didn’t know you had a flag.”
“I had it in a box in the closet to put out for the Fourth of July because Donna has asked me to. I have put it out this morning, so that she would have had to pass it on her way out of the courtyard. She wanted to know if I kept a gun.”