“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, Gregor, that if the people who called themselves Christians behaved like Christians, there wouldn’t be any people sleeping in the street.” Tibor smiled shyly. “You should come to visit me, Gregor, in my apartment. I have given you an invitation. And you might like to meet my houseguests.”
Houseguests, Gregor thought. He felt struck dumb.
Could Tibor really be picking up strangers off the street and filling his apartment with them? Gregor opened his mouth to argue against this craziness—to argue against it in the same way and for the same reasons he would have argued against Tibor’s taking a pleasure hike on the West Bank—but when he looked down, Tibor had disappeared. Gregor saw no sign of him when he looked up, either. The man had dematerialized.
Gregor turned away from the church and headed down Cavanaugh Street toward his apartment. Christianity was all well and good, but a third of the homeless were supposed to be mentally ill, outpatients who should never have been let out. Another third were supposed to be addicts of one kind or another, alcoholics and junkies. Tibor was going to end up getting his throat cut. Or worse.
Gregor had never been the kind of person who saw blood in his dreams. If he had been, he would never have survived in Behavioral Sciences. Now he was having technicolor visions of carnage. Tibor dead. Tibor murdered. Tibor slaughtered, and all because the man was some kind of idiot saint—
He had his eyes on the ground and his mind on another world, so preoccupied he almost missed the entrance to his building. He would have missed it, except that the man who had been sitting there stood up as he approached, and came down to the sidewalk, and stopped him.
“Mr. Demarkian? Excuse me. I think maybe I ought to start with an apology.”
An apology.
Gregor blinked.
It took him nearly a full minute to realize he was looking at John Henry Newman Jackman.
2
John Henry Newman Jackman didn’t like Gregor Demarkian’s apartment. Because nobody ever liked it, Gregor decided not to apologize for it. He ushered Jackman through his foyer into his living room, sat him down on one of the two chairs, and headed for the kitchen to make coffee. He heard Jackman get up almost as soon as he was out of the room. Pacing.
They had gone through it all on the stoop, and again on the stairs, but Gregor knew they would go through it once again, in here. That was the way things were turning out to be between Jackman and himself. It was too bad. From what Gregor could make out, Jackman had done a remarkable job in the less than forty-eight hours since Robert Hannaford’s death. Jackman had certainly done a remarkable job on him, and he was both the least important and most difficult of the subjects Jackman had to deal with. If Jackman had been half as good with the rest of his case, he must have broken the Hannafords into molecules by now.
The truth of it was, you never got over having been the subordinate of a man you truly respected. Gregor had been that way with his first superior in the Bureau. Jackman was that way with him now—even though they’d only worked together that one time, and under conditions that kept them apart more often than threw them together. Gregor was worried. With the wrong kind of man—and he didn’t know Jackman well enough to know if he was wrong or not—a situation like this quickly became infantilizing, and finally generated resentment. The last thing Gregor wanted was John Henry Newman Jackman nursing a resentment. Jackman had brought the Hannafords back to him. After a dismal Christmas Day and an even more dismal afternoon spent trying to get drunk enough to feel happy, Gregor was rejuvenated.
Maybe I am going crazy, he thought. I’m beginning to have emotions I don’t even recognize until four or five hours later.
It hadn’t been four or five hours. It had been barely two.
Gregor put the coffee and everything else he could think of on a tray and carried it out to the living room.
Jackman, caught pacing, blushed. He sat down again, quickly. “I’m sorry,” he said, for what must have been the fiftieth time. “I didn’t mean to be a son of a bitch. I really didn’t.”
“You weren’t.”
“You were making me nervous,” Jackman said. “I mean, I walked into that room and there you were, looking over the scene, and I thought—what was I supposed to think?”
“I told you I was retired,” Gregor said.
“I know you did. But this is the federal government I thought I was dealing with here.”
“You thought I was lying?”
“Never mind,” Jackman said.
“I’m very retired.”
“Yeah,” Jackman said, “so they tell me. But I couldn’t be sure about that. And you said all those things, about the murder—”