Murder Superior(23)

“In case you’re wondering about the plaster of paris,” Bennis said, “it’s a topographical map of Armenia. Or I hope it is. I’m constructing it off a globe so ancient it might as well still show the world as flat, but it was the only one Lida could come up with with the borders of Armenia clearly marked, so here I am. They need it for the school. Tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Gregor said.

The school was a parochial school—the first Gregor had ever heard of in an Armenian-American parish—set up to accommodate the children of the immigrants who had come to Cavanaugh Street in the wake of earthquakes and political revolutions. It had also acquired a little group of children of the native-born residents of Cavanaugh Street, whose parents purported to like the idea of their children “growing up to know their heritage.” Since most of these parents wouldn’t touch their heritage with a ten-foot pole—unless they could eat it—Gregor thought that the real draw was the simple localness of it. The school was housed in a four-story brownstone right next to Holy Trinity Church. The children who attended could walk there in the mornings, and quite a few of them could reach the school’s front doors without ever having to cross a street.

“Anyway,” Bennis said, “I’m practically done except for the painting, and I’m not really going to do the painting per se, if you see what I mean. I’m only going to figure out what color has to go where and then write a code in pencil on the model and then the kids will paint it themselves. Did you used to do things like this when you were in school, Gregor? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me that all this stuff is really work.”

“They’re only children,” Gregor said mildly. “And you know how I feel about education. Most of them won’t remember a thing of what they learn two months after they go out into the real world.”

“Well, don’t say that in front of Lida. She’ll think you’re encouraging the children to drop out.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Right.”

Bennis got up, got the coffee, and poured him out a cup. She was standing so close to him the plaster of paris in her hair was clearly visible as flakes. Then she moved away and Gregor was left wondering why he’d thought that about the flakes, or felt so compelled to notice just how close she’d been to him. Standing over by the stove, a good ten feet away, she was just Bennis as he always saw Bennis. She was a perpetual thorn in his side. She was the woman Father Tibor Kasparian called “Bennis the Menace.” She was only thirty-six or thirty-seven, while Gregor was twenty years older than that.

She poured herself a cup of coffee while she was still standing next to the stove, drank it down black—but with enough sugar in it to give diabetes to the Visigoths’ invading hordes; Gregor saw her spooning it out of the sugar sack—and put the cup in the sink.

“I’d better go wash my hair,” she said. “You know how long it takes to dry and I hate those goddamned little hair dryers. Is there supposed to be anything solemn about this occasion? Can I wear a red dress?”

“I think you should wear a hair shirt and carry a staff,” Gregor said. “That way the nuns will know you’re serious about atoning for your sins.”

“The nuns won’t know what sins I’ve got to atone for, and besides I don’t atone. What’s the point? There’s those I forget what you call them in the refrigerator, the meatballs with the bulgur crusts. Lida brought them. You can heat them up in the microwave.”

“I’ve already eaten. And we’re supposed to go up to St. Elizabeth’s and have lunch.”

“That never stopped you yet.”

Gregor was about to say he wasn’t the kind of glutton these women liked to make him out to be, twenty extra pounds or no twenty extra pounds, but Bennis was already gone, her bare feet slapping carelessly against the wooden floor of her foyer, on the way to the privacy of her shower. Gregor wondered suddenly if Bennis felt she needed privacy from him—and then he shoved that away, because it made him feel a little crazy. In fact, everything about his relationship with Bennis made him feel a little crazy lately. It was as if, after years of running along on a track on which they were both comfortable, an invisible hand had thrown a switch that got them both off course. He had even started to dream about her.

Gregor Demarkian was a man of that generation that came of age just after World War II. He believed in reason and logic, not intuition and dreams. He felt nothing but exasperation for people who were forever exploring their subconscious. He didn’t actually think he had a subconscious.