Not a Creature Was Stirring(61)

Gregor nodded. “I can probably find him, if you’ll give me some information I need to get started. But right now I’m very confused. Why do you want to find him? You sound as if you don’t even like him.”

“I like him well enough,” Donna said. “He’s a nice person, really. A little young, you know, and maybe a little weak, but nice. I don’t want to marry him, if that’s what you mean.”

“If you don’t want to marry him, what are you going to do with him when I find him?”

“Talk to him. Just to get a few things straight in my mind. And tell him about the baby, of course, because he’s the father and I’m going to have it and he ought to know. And. Well. Ask him to do something for me. Something important.”

“What?”

“Oh,” Donna said. “You know. It’s a brave new world.”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t—”

“The AIDS test,” Donna said. “I want him to have the AIDS test. I mean, I thought he was all right, when I first met him, but now, with all of this, how can I know? He’s so irresponsible. He could have been doing anything before I met him.”

“I suppose he could have,” Gregor said.

“I think it’s a lot of crap,” Donna said. “All that stuff about how everybody wants sex all the time and just pretends they don’t or stuffs it down in their unconscious or something. I think some people do and some people don’t. And I don’t see why it has to be bad if you’re one of the people who don’t.”

“Of course it’s not bad,” Gregor said.

“Everybody always tells you it is,” Donna said. “Especially boys. Men. Whoever. Do you want to see a picture of him? I’ve got a good one.”

Gregor held out his hand. “First the picture, then everything he ever told you about his family, his life, his schooling—everything.”

“He told me a lot about his life.” Donna sat down at the table again. She looked very earnest and very young and very, very angry. “The problem is, Mr. Demarkian, I think most of it might have been lies.”

“Lies?”

“Lying was something he did, wasn’t it? He’s the one who was talking about marriage for eight months. I never brought up the subject. And it’s not like you have to say those things just to get yourself laid these days.”

She reached into her jacket, came up with a wallet and threw the wallet on the table.

“There,” she said. “Everything there is to know about Peter Desarian and Donna Moradanyan, Couple.”





2


Out on Cavanaugh Street, the snow was coming down again, thick and hard—the start of another blizzard. After Donna Moradanyan had left his apartment, he’d spent some time making calls—checking information for Boston and five of its suburbs; talking to a friend of his in the Boston city government; talking to another friend of his who was still at the Bureau—and then he’d stretched out on the couch, feeling vaguely disturbed. Donna Moradanyan was such a nice, ordinary girl. He couldn’t believe she was also a crazy, although she’d sounded like one. He wished he watched more television, or read more popular fiction. Maybe the things she had described to him were perfectly normal now, as mundane as war movies and John Wayne westerns had been when he was younger. He had no way of knowing.

After a while, he got up and started to wander around the apartment. It was a useless exercise. The only popular fiction he owned was a copy of one of Bennis Hannaford’s books, and that wasn’t going to be much help to him. For one thing, the damned novel took place in fairy land, or wherever it was unicorns were commonplace. For another, he’d got the impression, from reading the first few chapters, that Bennis Hannaford had an unusual sensibility. She would never have been taken in by “psychology.” Assuming she knew it existed.

He sat back down on the couch, stretched out again, and folded his hands over his stomach. The last two calls he had made would bear fruit in a very few hours. People would get back to him, and the things they had to tell him would point him in the right direction. If the boy was an habitual liar—and so many people were; it never ceased to surprise him—he’d have to start again from the beginning, but he didn’t think he’d mind that. What he minded was Donna Moradanyan, so confused she didn’t know what she thought or felt any more—so much in love and not even knowing it.

Love, he decided, had been a lot easier in the old days, when he and Elizabeth had met. Then courting had been a dance, engraved in stone, and everyone had known the steps. He could remember sitting alone in the tiny one-room apartment he had rented when he was a graduate student at Harvard, counting out quarters and dimes and trying to come up with enough for half a dozen red roses. Roses were the universal language, practically a proposal of marriage—especially if you were poor and the girl you were seeing knew you couldn’t afford them. People might not have had so much sex in those days, but they’d had assurances.