Hardscrabble Road(3)

He wondered why he was spending so much time thinking about “generations.” He wasn’t aware of feeling particularly geriatric. He wasn’t particularly geriatric. Maybe Bennis was making him as complicated as she was herself. Maybe he’d start finding it impossible to choose between the brown socks and the gray ones and have to resort to an investigation of the psychic foundations of his attitudes toward color. He wasn’t being fair. He wanted Bennis to come back and start acting like herself again, meaning like the self she’d been acting like before they had all gone to Massachusetts.

His bedroom windows were rattling in the wind. It was going to be another bad day in a string of bad days. He’d gotten to the point of thinking of twenty degrees as “warmer.” Whatever else was going on with him, he was undoubtedly bored. It wouldn’t hurt to take his mind off whatever it was it was on. It was significant that he didn’t know what it was on. He needed coffee. He needed Bennis at home, where he could have a screaming fight with her and get it all over with.

He picked up the phone and dialed 555–4720. The voice on the answering machine tape not only had no trace of effeminacy in it, it could have belonged to a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. That was a gift, Gregor thought. It had to be very useful to be able to turn your voice into that wide a range of effects.

The screaming beep went off. Gregor said, “Mr. George? Yes, I remember you. If you’re really in that much of a hurry, I’m going to be having breakfast at the Ararat restaurant on Cavanaugh Street from about seven thirty to eight thirty. Come on by and talk to me. I’ll see you there.”

He hung up and stared at the phone. Then he reached for his shoes on the floor and put them on. Bennis was always telling him he had to do something about his shoes, because they were too formal. He couldn’t imagine himself in a pair of running shoes, or whatever they called them these days. He used to call them sneakers.

One of the first things they taught new agents at Quantico was to pick their spots. Don’t fight every battle. Don’t answer every challenge. Don’t follow every lead. Maybe he needed to go back for retraining at Quantico. It was too bad they wouldn’t have him, and he wouldn’t last a day without kicking somebody’s ass.





2


It was cold. It was worse than cold. The temperature with the windchill was supposed to be something like minus twenty-five, and the windchill was no joke, because the wind was no joke. By the time Gregor was standing on the steps in front of Fr. Tibor Kasparian’s front door, his fingers felt cold enough to fall off, and he had them stuck into the pockets of his coat. His head was bare, so the skin on his face felt as if it had already fallen off. At least, it had no feeling in it. His ears were entirely numb. He rang the doorbell and heard a cascade of excited yips coming from the other side. This was new. It sounded like a dog. As far as Gregor knew, Tibor didn’t have a dog.

Tibor came to the door and opened up, and right there, running around his legs, there was indeed a dog. It was a very small dog—Gregor didn’t know anything about dogs, but he knew what a puppy was when he saw one—and it was completely, happily berserk, bouncing around on the vestibule carpet as if it had pogo sticks for legs, chasing first up Tibor’s legs and then up Gregor’s, wagging its tail so hard Gregor thought the thing was going to fly off. He came all the way into the apartment and closed the door behind him. The cold was getting in. The dog took off for the living room on a run, barked happily a little longer, and then came running back.

“When did you get a dog? Gregor asked. “You didn’t say anything about a dog.”

“It’s Grace who got the dog, Krekor,” Tibor said. “She’s a chocolate Labrador retriever named Godiva. Grace got the dog and then she had to go play in New York, so I’m keeping the dog for the week. She’s a very nice dog.”

“A chocolate Lab named Godiva.” “Yes, well, Krekor, what can I say? I didn’t name the dog. She really is a very nice dog, very intelligent and very affectionate. And small, so she isn’t hard to keep. I rigged up a kind of Kitty Litter box in the back air lock—”

“Kitty Litter for a dog?”

“Sand, Krekor, sand. You can’t ask a small animal like this to go out in the cold to do its business. I keep it in the air lock and it doesn’t bother me. Come into the living room. If you sit on the couch, she’ll sit on your lap.”

Gregor decided to sit on the chair, because although Godiva really was a very nice dog, he didn’t want dog hair all over his trousers. He even had an excuse for that, since Chickie was coming. He looked at the books on Tibor’s coffee table, which as usual was so covered that nobody could put a cup of coffee on it without threatening either Aristotle or Jackie Collins. Today there were a few new arrivals: a novel called Baudolino by Umberto Eco; another novel called Blindness by José Saramago; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Tibor must be having a fiction week.