“No he couldn’t,” Bennis said. “I don’t know what happens to Rogan le Bourne. And stop worrying about your friend Tibor. I’ll come back and sign his books for him if he wants me to.”
“I think he only has the paperbacks,” Gregor said.
“I’ve got a supply of the others.” Bennis snapped shut the cover of the book she was writing in, abandoned it, and took another. “You are angry at me, aren’t you? I know I should have stuck around. And I know I shouldn’t be flip. Not about Emma. Emma—well, I don’t want to get into Emma.”
“She’s told me all about it,” old George said. “This is a terrible thing, Krekor.”
“This is a dangerous thing,” Bennis said. “That’s what worries me. And I did come here.”
“It was dangerous from the beginning,” Gregor said.
“No it wasn’t.” Bennis shook her head vigorously. “Not if what was going on was what I thought was going on. But now it can’t have been, and I just don’t know—” She threw up her hands.
Gregor sat back and looked her over, curious. She had been crying again, recently enough so that her eyes were as red and puffy here as they’d been back at Engine House this afternoon. He would never have called her flip. Even when she tried to be sarcastic, the sarcasm didn’t come off. He had a feeling that Bennis and Donna Moradanyan might have more in common than hunting boots. Bennis was prettier, of course, and more intelligent and more accomplished and more sophisticated and more of everything else. Unlike Donna, she had developed a rock-hard foundation of self-confidence that the mere opinions of other people could not shatter. What was similar was that air of innocence. In Donna, Gregor had thought it was sexual innocence, and been wrong. Now he put another definition to it. Bennis Hannaford and Donna Moradanyan were two young women who believed, at the core, that the world was a good and righteous place where virtue triumphed and evil failed, where people always wanted to do the right thing and only did wrong out of ignorance or confusion. And no matter how much evidence they got to the contrary, they would go on believing it.
Gregor watched as Bennis finished the last of the books and restacked the whole mess next to old George’s chair.
“There,” she said, “finished. When I have the next one, I’ll send you a copy.”
“No, no,” George said. “Send Father Tibor a copy. He can’t afford to buy them. I have Martin.”
“Martin is his grandson,” Gregor said.
“He told me. Electric carrot crinklers.” She stretched out her legs. “Do you still want that drink? I was thinking, under the circumstances, it might make more sense if I bought you a whole dinner.”
“Under what circumstances?”
“Well,” Bennis said, “for one thing, I’m hungry.”
“I’m hungry, too,” Gregor said. “I’ve been living on coffee all day.”
Bennis waved her Yerevan Special in the air. “I’m also a little drunk,” she said.
“True,” Gregor nodded.
“But the real reason, of course, is that this story is going to take a little time. It may take quite a lot of time.”
“What story?”
“Ah,” Bennis said. “Well. Mostly, it’s the story of how Emma tried to do it once before—or how we all thought she did.”
“Tried to do what?” old George asked.
“Tried to kill our father, of course.” Bennis looked into her Yerevan Special, took a deep breath, and swallowed half of what was left.
2
Gregor didn’t know if taking Bennis to Ararat was foolishness or incitement to riot. It was certainly an experience. As soon as they had been seated in one of the back booths, heads began popping out of the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. Old and young, the women of Ararat wanted to get a look at Gregor and his presumed “date.” The news—that Gregor was having dinner with a woman, and a much younger woman at that—would be all up and down the street in no time. Their only hope for an uninterrupted meal was the possibility that Lida was out because she’d gone to visit her grandchildren in Paoli. Even without Lida, they were going to have to suffer through better than average service.
Still, Gregor liked the comparisons he could make between this and the last time he had eaten in a restaurant. Then, he had taken a poor man to an expensive place. Now, he was sitting with a rich woman in a relatively cheap one. The two experiences were a lot alike. Like Tibor, Bennis Hannaford was fearless when it came to food. Having told him she’d never eaten Armenian before, she then proceeded to order everything she liked the sound of on the menu, including a main course that must have been a mystery to her. Ethnic restaurants in tourist centers explained their food in plain English, but Ararat wasn’t in a tourist center. It was in an Armenian neighborhood, and its usual patrons had been eating the dishes it served since childhood. Bennis ordered cheerfully and without hesitation even so, then handed the menu to their waitress and asked for a cup of black coffee.