She tucked the card into her shirt pocket and got up. Anne Marie had taken to listening in on phone conversations, and Myra had no way of knowing if she’d listened in on that last one. She hoped she hadn’t. Things were in enough of a mess already.
It was going to be a hell of a Christmas.
PART ONE
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18–SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24
THE FIRST MURDER
ONE
1
WHEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS very young, his mother told him stories about Armenia. Her Armenia wasn’t the historical Armenia, because she’d never seen that. She had been born in Alexandria and come to the United States before she was twelve. It was Gregor’s grandmother who had been in Yerevan that November of 1915 when the Turks had come. Blood everywhere, horses everywhere, a million and a half dead in less than a year: the stories had come pouring out into the dark of Gregor’s room every night when his mother came to put him to bed. Even now, after more than forty years, he could smell the stink of dying. He thought his grandmother must have been a truly great storyteller. Either that, or his mother had had a genius for imagination. Whichever it was, he found himself—at the age of fifty-five, after a bachelor’s degree at Penn and a master’s at Harvard and a twenty-year stint in the FBI—firmly anchored in the agony of a country he had never seen.
Gregor had been four years old the first time he had heard about the New Armenia—four years old and sitting in this very church, in the second pew from the front on the right—and he remembered that even then he’d thought the idea made no sense. They wouldn’t march back to Asia Minor. They wouldn’t reclaim their land from whoever had it now. They would simply stay in America and build a Real Armenian Culture, distinct but not separate from the Armenian culture around them. How they were supposed to do this, no one knew—especially because the children were having none of it. Still, it inspired them. There would be a Great Cause and a Great Effort, complete with Virtuous Sacrifices. Whatever else was going to happen to them, they weren’t going to get rich.
And now, of course, they had.
Gregor put his hands up to his eyes and rubbed. The liturgy was nearly over, and the church was full of incense. As far as Gregor knew, the peculiar scent of that incense was used only in Armenian Christian churches. He had never encountered it anywhere else. Now he wondered if it was contributing to his feeling of incipient schizophrenia. The smell was right. The words of the service were just what they had been for more than 1,200 years. Even the little priest was right, standing in the center door of the iconostasis, dressed in blue and gold and carrying a great golden cross on a long shaft. It was everything else that was wrong.
He didn’t know what he’d expected. He’d left this small ethnic neighborhood in Philadelphia just after he graduated from Penn. In the thirty-four years since, he had been back exactly twice—once for his wedding, right after his two-year hitch in the army; once about five years after that, in 1962, to see his mother buried from Holy Trinity Church. The years between had been full of changes, for himself and everyone else. He had no right to be disoriented by a Holy Trinity that was not just what it had been when he left.
On the other hand, it was entirely possible that it wasn’t the fact that things had changed that was bothering him, but the way they had changed. When he had first decided to come back to this neighborhood—to come home—he’d half-expected to find nothing to come back to. He’d pressed on simply because he’d had nothing else to do. Elizabeth was dead, fading away finally after years of terror and futility, anger and pain. His job was gone. He’d taken a leave for the last year of Elizabeth’s illness, and when she’d died he’d had neither the energy nor the inclination to go back to work. Then he’d woken up one morning to find himself in a nearly empty apartment in a high-rise off the Beltway, with no idea what day it was or what he was going to do with the day now that he had it, and it began to occur to him that he had to get going again.
He’d been ready to find Cavanaugh Street changed into an Hispanic neighborhood. He’d been prepared to accept it as a battleground for teenage gangs, a strip for prostitutes, a drug bazaar, a burned-out hulk. He’d steeled himself against just about anything, except the sight of Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian in a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat.
The congregation had begun to go up to Communion , making two lines in the outside aisles. The little priest—that would be Father Tibor, the one who had called him—was standing in front of the iconostasis again, holding a large gold cup and a small gold spoon with a handle like an elongated letter opener. As Gregor watched, a boy of no more than three stepped up, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth.