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Not a Creature Was Stirring(10)

By:Jane Haddam


“What I know about Howard Kashinian is that he used to be the biggest juvenile delinquent on Cavanaugh Street. He got sent to the reformatory when he was twelve and his mother wore black for a year.”

Father Tibor’s face became a mask of infinite innocence. “There was a little contretemps with the Securities and Exchange Commission,” he said blandly, “but that was nearly two years ago, and the charges were dropped. Please come in.”

Father Tibor smiled. It was a smile with intelligence in it, and humor, and the acid of a tempered cynicism.

Well, Gregor thought, at least this is going to be interesting. And then, because he had been brought up to it and it’s never easy to get rid of what you have been taught in childhood, Gregor grabbed the handle of the door and motioned the priest to go in before him.





3


Father Tibor’s office was full of books—great floor-to-ceiling cases crammed until the wood cracked, great stacks scattered across the floor, small piles on chairs and tables and even an umbrella stand. Tibor had to clear a place for Gregor to sit. When he did, Gregor saw the books were in at least five languages, or maybe six. There were two books in Greek, but Gregor had the impression they weren’t in the same Greek. Was it really possible that this man read both ancient and modern Greek? It was an eerie thing, like being presented with the ghost of one of the desert Fathers.

Father Tibor sat behind his desk—he had to take a few books off that chair, too—and folded his hands. It was a classic priest’s pose, but Tibor couldn’t really look priestly. At his best, he looked like a scholar. At his worst, he reminded Gregor of the old men who had lined the halls outside the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the hottest days of the cold war.

“Well,” he said. He looked at the ceiling, and the floor, and his hands. “Well,” he said again.

“You wanted to ask me a favor,” Gregor prompted him. Tibor cleared his throat. “Well,” he said for the third time. “This is very hard for me to say. I told you this had nothing directly to do with the Church?”

“Yes, you did,” Gregor said. He didn’t say he didn’t believe it. In his experience, Armenian priests professed to believe that everything, even the shifting rules of sandlot baseball, had something to do with the Church.

“Well,” Tibor said yet again. “I don’t know if I should have put it that way. My English is still—I read well enough, but I don’t speak… precisely… all the time. I get… in my life, I’ve had to live in Russian and French and Hebrew and English and sometimes even Armenian. I get… confused.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I don’t wonder. I just lose my patience. Yes. Well. Maybe it would be easiest this way. Do you know a man named Robert Hannaford?”

Gregor hesitated. Hannaford. The name was familiar, but he couldn’t figure out why. He slid, automatically, into what he had been trained to do. Known criminals, suspected criminals, candidates for investigation: the list was appallingly long, but the name Hannaford was not on it. Hannaford wasn’t the name of anyone he’d known at the Bureau, either, or any of the victims of crimes still unsolved when he’d taken early retirement. God only knew, there was nobody named Hannaford connected to that last mess of a job he’d left unfinished to sit at Elizabeth’s deathbed.

Tibor swiveled in his chair, nearly fell out of it, and finally managed to retrieve two paperback books from the case behind his desk. He pushed them across the clutter to Gregor. This time, Gregor was really surprised. These weren’t theology, or history, or even literature with a capital L. They were sword and sorcery popular novels, complete with gold foil lettering and embossed unicorns. Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia, the closer one said. The other was called Zedalia in Winter. On that one, the author’s name was above the title, writ large: Bennis Hannaford.

“Bennis Hannaford,” Gregor said.

Tibor was bouncing up and down in his chair, making Gregor feel a little dizzy. “She’s one of the daughters,” he said. “The middle child, I think. Mr. Hannaford has seven children. This one is very successful, a best-seller all the time—”

“I’ve seen her books. They’re all over the newsstands.”

“They’re all over everywhere. And she has a brother, an older brother, and he runs the family business—”

“I remember,” Gregor said, jolting up a little in his chair. That was why he recognized the name—not from the Bureau, but from his life before the Bureau. “Hannaford of Engine House. They made their money in railroads. Rich people out on the Main Line.”