Not a Creature Was Stirring(14)

“Me and Lida and Howard Kashinian,” Gregor said. He was laughing so hard he was choking. “Lida and I weren’t supposed to play with Howard Kashinian, but we needed him. He knew where to find the donkey. And he was the one with the criminal mind.”

“But Krekor—”

“Well, old Karpakian deserved it,” Gregor said. “The day before we’d had this church school class, preparation for something, I don’t remember what. And Lida’s sister Mary had a cold. She was sick as a dog and her mother had given her something for it that kept putting her to sleep. So she fell asleep at her desk and Karpakian came thundering down on her with a ruler and practically broke her fingers. And Lida said—”

“Krekor, old Karpakian may have deserved it, but I didn’t deserve to spend my Sunday afternoon getting a donkey off the second floor of a church. Never mind out of that little room.”

“He certainly knew what the little room was for,” Gregor said. “That’s the first thing he did when we got him in there.”

George sighed. “Drink your drink, Krekor. And try to remember I’m an old man. I don’t want to die without knowing how it was done.”

Gregor took a long pull on his rum punch. “Oh, well,” he said. “Tibor. I suppose I expected an illiterate peasant. I got a scholar. It’s unusual.”

George hesitated, as if he wanted to take up the matter of the donkey again. Then he said, “Tibor is unusual. When they sent him we got a report from the bishops. You know how that is?”

“I didn’t know they let old wrecks like you on the parish council,” Gregor said.

“The parish council is all old wrecks like me,” George said. “The young men want to give the church gold-plated icon stands. There was a wife, you know.”

“I wondered about that. I thought we liked them married.”

“We do. Tibor’s wife was just as crazy as he is, from what we hear. Crazy in a good way. She died in prison in the Soviet union  .”

“That’s interesting. What was she in prison for?”

“We don’t know. I think this man may be a saint, Krekor. A real one, not the plasterboard kind they like to tell us about in church.”

“I find it hard to believe you don’t know all about him,” Gregor said. “Everybody always knows everything about everybody around here. They used to say Lida’s mother knew who was going to have a baby before they even conceived.”

“Father Tibor,” George said, “talks a lot. But not about himself.”

“What does he talk about?”

“Many things. What did he talk about with you?”

Gregor shot the old man the look he used to give subordinates who’d asked questions they’d no right to the answers to—and then stopped himself. Under the circumstances, that was a particularly stupid reflex. He wanted to talk to George, and not only because he was lonely—although he’d come down to this apartment for that reason alone often enough. George was old and basically uneducated, but he would have made a better agent than most of the men Gregor had trained. Come to think of it, Father Tibor would have, too. They were both perfect straight men, the kind who knew when and how to get creative.

Gregor held his now-empty cup in the air, got an affirmative nod from George, and passed it over. He hated to admit it, but since he’d started thinking about Robert Hannaford, he’d been feeling better. It was like eating a really big dinner after being on a diet for months. He felt alert, awake, energized. He felt—

George handed him a cup full of rum punch. “So,” he said, “are you going to tell me or aren’t you going to tell me?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you,” Gregor said. “I just don’t know if it will mean much.”

“It wasn’t just a lecture on how you should go out and do more?”

“No.” Gregor cast around for a way to get into it, and came up with the same one Tibor had. Of course. “Do you know a man named Robert Hannaford?” he asked.

“The robber baron?” George brightened.

“The great-grandson of the robber baron,” Gregor said. “The one who’s alive now.”

George frowned. “Robert Hannaford can’t have a great-grandson,” he said. “He’s only—forty something. I read it in the paper.”

“Forty something?”

“In The Inquirer,” George said.

“This Robert Hannaford who was in The Inquirer,” Gregor said, “was he in a wheelchair?”

“Oh, no. He’d just won—a tennis championship, I think. It was in the paper, Krekor. I read it.”