Hardscrabble Road(48)
From behind him, there was a small cascade of pattering, and the dark brown puppy poked her nose into the outside air. She didn’t like it, and retreated immediately in the direction of the living room. Gregor saw what had fallen. It was a stack of Tibor’s books, one of the paperback stacks he kept against the walls all over the house. This stack included Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, Karin Slaugher’s A Faint Cold Fear, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. At least there was nothing in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Assyrian. Father Tibor was the only person Gregor knew who had gone to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and not needed to read the subtitles to know what the actors were saying.
Tibor closed the door behind him and waved him toward the living room. “I still say you could have waited half an hour, Krekor. I would have been awake naturally in half an hour.”
“Sorry.”
“No, never mind. I would have been awake but not dressed and showered, so maybe it wouldn’t have mattered that much. I saw you on television yesterday evening. You should have stopped in when you got home. There will be a hundred people at the Ararat this morning wanting a full report.”
“They’ll have to wait. I’ve got to meet John for breakfast, and then I have to go downtown to get yelled at by the mayor.”
“Why does the mayor want to yell at you?”
“Because he thinks I’m ‘identified’ with John, and he thinks John is only calling me in on this one to look good to the electorate, and the whole thing is a stunt to get John to win the primary. I don’t know. Did I tell you I hate politics?”
“Several times.”
Tibor was out of the room to the back now, in the kitchen. Gregor took a seat in the living room and looked around. One of the changes they had made to this apartment when it had been rebuilt after the bombing was to install forced hot air heating and cooling systems, because that meant that Tibor could have central air-conditioning in the summer. It also meant that there were no more baseboards running along the walls to give heat, and Tibor could stack up books at all sides, everywhere. The living room now looked as if it were made of books. Every single one of the stacks looked as if it were about to fall down.
Tibor came back with two coffees. Gregor took his and sipped it very slowly. He knew from experience that Tibor’s coffee was either very bad, or Armenian, meaning strong enough to qualify as a controlled substance.
Tibor sat down on the couch and the dog jumped up to sit down with him. Gregor wondered if Grace allowed that, or if she would come home to find that her dog now believed it was a dog’s God-given right to ruin the furniture.
“So,” he said. “This man was famous, and now he is dead. If the mayor was smart, Krekor, he would call you in himself.”
“Would he? I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure out what to think of all this for hours, and I haven’t come up with anything. Oh. I brought you something.” He stood up and went looking through the pockets of his coat. “Here it is,” he said, coming up with the book. He tossed it over. “Drew Harrigan wrote a book. I want to know what you think.”
“You have read this book, Krekor?” “No, of course not,” Gregor said. “I’ve read bits and pieces of it, here and there. I only bought it yesterday, to see what all the fuss was about. I still don’t know. You read more than I do, and you keep up with all that stuff. I thought you might tell me what it means.”
“It means that Mr. Harrigan was a gentleman of the right wing,” Tibor said solemnly. “If you had brought me Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, I would have told you that it meant that Mr. Franken was a gentleman of the left wing, and also that he knows how to use pronouns correctly. It’s a political book, Krekor. What’s it supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “If I knew the answers to things like that, I wouldn’t be wishing I’d been in Los Angeles when this case came up. I think I should leave the country every time there’s an election year. I mean it. People don’t make any sense. They get angry at each other over things that don’t make any sense. Everybody yells nonstop for months and in the end, where are you? Back where you started, with another election coming in a couple of years.”
“Voting is an important obligation of citizenship,” Tibor said gravely.
“Paying taxes is a more important obligation of citizenship, and I do that,” Gregor said. “But I don’t like this stuff. I don’t like all the yelling. I don’t like the business of making the other guy look like a cross between Lucifer and Hitler. And I especially don’t like being told by the mayor of the city of Philadelphia that I’m a stealth contributor to John Jackman’s primary campaign. I don’t give money to candidates. I’m not that stupid.”