Hearts of Sand(3)

Gregor hadn’t heard anything to wonder about, so he finished off his coffee and headed back to the stairs to find a Windbreaker and an umbrella.

2

It was June. Gregor was sure it could not be really cold in late June, and that the rain could not be half sleet hitting his face like tiny needles—but that’s what it felt like, and the world was so dark, it almost seemed plausible. He kept his head down and his eyes on the sidewalk. He knew his way to the Ararat by instinct, even from this direction. He wished the day were less than terminally depressing, as if it mattered what the weather was.

Through the Ararat’s broad front plate glass window, Gregor could see Father Tibor Kasparian sitting in their usual booth, little stacks of papers spread out across the long, wide surface. The wind started picking up again. Gregor pulled the hood of his Windbreaker farther up over his head and went inside.

As soon as he stepped through the door, a dozen heads looked up from half as many tables, noted who had come in, and went back to whatever they had been doing. Linda Melajian rushed out from the swinging door at the back with a coffeepot in one hand.

“There you are,” she said. “Father Tibor keeps asking if I’ve seen you, which makes absolutely no sense, because with where he’s sitting, he’d see you before I did.”

She went to the booth and unearthed a cup and saucer from under Father Tibor’s papers. She filled the cup and looked around for the little metal basket of sugar packets. She didn’t find it, and went hurrying off to get another one from the kitchen.

Gregor sat down and pushed the papers around a bit. The little metal basket turned out to be on the stack between Tibor and the window. Tibor picked it up and put it back.

“I needed the space, Krekor,” he said, waving at the stacks of papers.

“What is all this?” Gregor asked.

“It’s the Problem,” Tibor said. “For a while there, I was beginning to think no papers really existed. I thought they’d made up the entire issue of the papers. It would make perfect sense, considering everything.”

Gregor picked up one of the papers and looked at it. Long ago—so long ago, he almost never remembered it anymore—he had trained to be an accountant. That was in the days when special agents of the FBI had had to be either accountants or lawyers, which said a lot about what old J. Edgar had thought his Bureau would be doing. It had been a long time, though. His skills were out of date. He had no idea if he had any skills left at all.

“Bennis isn’t here?” Tibor said.

“She’s back at the house, waiting for Donna to bring something,” Gregor said. “I’m not entirely sure what.”

“Does the house look like it might be finished soon?”

“The house looks like it might be finished in the twenty-second century. Last night, I found paint samples in bed. And there’s something about wallpaper, which Bennis hates, but she thinks we have to have.”

“You’ll be going away for a while,” Tibor said. “Maybe she’ll get a lot done and you’ll come back to perfection. What is it they say when they work out? No pain, no gain.”

“Today, I tried to turn on the faucet in the kitchen sink, and I blew off this little cap thing and water went spurting all over the ceilings. And you know those ceilings. They’re twenty feet high.”

“Yes,” Tibor said. “Well.”

Linda Melajian came back to the table. “Do you want a breakfast menu, or shall I just get you your usual cholesterol bomb? Bennis isn’t here, so I assume we’re going for the whole bacon, sausage, hash browns, three scrambled eggs extravaganza.”

“At least I come here,” Gregor said. “I could go to Denny’s or IHOP and get bacon ice cream sundaes, whatever those are.”

“There isn’t either of those close enough for you to get to unless you start driving, and I’m not expecting that anytime soon. I’ll be back in a bit.”

Linda took off, and Gregor watched her go. She was the youngest of the Melajian girls, but that didn’t mean she was very young anymore. And she ran the entire restaurant for breakfast.

Gregor looked back at the papers. “So?” he said.

Tibor nodded. “We’re up to six now. The Arkanian family out in Wynne. I remember when they came from Armenia. That was maybe five years ago.”

“Speak English?”

“Yes and no, Krekor, you know how it is. They spoke English well enough to get by. And we told them when we came that we would be there to help them if there were things they wanted to do. Things like buying a house. I don’t understand why these people don’t come to us and ask for help. Russ Donahue would have looked over the loan papers for them. I would have looked over the loan papers. I know nothing about the law, and I could see what was wrong with these.”