Hardscrabble Road(83)

“It may be trite, Krekor, but it’s also human nature. If you ask me, the most pernicious idea this world ever came up with, next to the perfectibility of man, which has killed more people than smallpox, the next one is the idea of the genius. Leonardo da Vinci did not think of himself as a genius. He got a lot more work done than most of the people who have thought of themselves as geniuses, and he did it without writing himself out of the human race.”

Up at the front of the café, the door opened and a woman came in, looking up one row of tables and down another, as if she was frantic to find somebody, but thought she wouldn’t. When she got to Gregor she stopped, nodded slightly, and came forward.

“Mr. Demarkian?” she said.

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

“My name is Laurie Kohl. I’m an assistant DA in Rob Benedetti’s office. He says he wonders if you would mind coming across the street right away, right now, it’s urgent. There’s been a phone call.”

“A phone call about what?”

“I don’t know,” Laurie Kohl said, “but you’re not to go up to the office, you’re to wait for him in the lobby, he’s on his way down. And there are officers coming. I don’t know what’s going on. Could you come, please?”





PART THREE


Wed–Thurs, February 11–12

High 11F, Low –2F

Sentences of death, where they are freely chosen, do not need to be written.

—GEORGE STEINER

But consider, Sisters, that the Devil hasn’t forgotten us. He also invents his own honors in monasteries and invents his own laws.

—ST. TERESA OF AVILA

No matter how fast light travels it finds darkness has gotten there first, and is waiting for it.

—TERRY PRATCHETT





ONE



1


The first thing Gregor Demarkian thought of when he had time to think, nearly an hour later, was that no matter how much he had been complaining of the cold these last few days, he hadn’t spent much time outside in it. Now he had no choice.

“Outside and in the back,” Rob Benedetti had said, when Gregor met him in the lobby little more than half an hour before.

Tibor had been hanging back on the edges. Benedetti hadn’t noticed him. Then a whole line of patrol cars had pulled up, and suddenly everybody was running.

Well, no, Gregor thought, not quite. He had felt as if everybody was running, but that had at least as much to do with his age as with the way other people were behaving. Marbury and Giametti had come, and they led the charge out the front door of the building, along the sidewalk, and through the narrow opening of an alley leading behind the buildings. Gregor’s stomach lurched as soon as he saw where they were going, and he remembered, as clearly as he remembered his conversation with Tibor, seeing the homeless man pushing a shopping cart through that space. He tried to remember what the homeless man had looked like, but couldn’t get anything except the impression of someone tall and thin. He tried to remember what was in the cart, but couldn’t get that, either, except that the thing was full. Everybody was right. You didn’t really look at homeless people. You didn’t notice them in detail, the way you might a “normal” person, although, in Gregor’s experience, you didn’t notice much about “normal” people either, unless they were somebody you knew or something had called your attention to them. Maybe that was the difference. Maybe you didn’t notice much about homeless people especially when something called your attention to them. You looked away, the way you would if a friend had just done something to embarrass himself in public.

The backs of the buildings were a maze of fire escapes and garbage cans, stray garbage and discarded needles. Did addicts really huddle out in back of the District Attorney’s Office to shoot up? Apparently they did. Maybe they did that even behind police stations. If you were out of sight, you were invisible. The shopping cart was parked right at the end of a long line of metal garbage cans, the big ones the trucks came for three times a week. It might have been one more package destined for removal. Gregor wished he had brought a hat. He wished he had remembered to put on his gloves before his fingers felt so cold they could be broken off like icicles on the ends of his hands. He wished that when Marbury and Giametti got whatever it was out of the cart’s big well, it wouldn’t turn out to be a tall, thin homeless man in dark clothes.

It wasn’t. Marbury reached in and disturbed the rags and papers to find the body. Then he checked for a pulse. When he didn’t get one, he got Giametti’s help and the two of them began to pry the body loose and into the air.