Precious Blood(14)

“‘How do you think this makes me feel?’”

Donna burst out laughing. “Exactly! Exactly! And then—”

In the bedroom, Gregor Demarkian stopped inspecting a functionally ruined red tie to close the bedroom door. Then he looked across at George Tekemanian royally ensconced in a newly delivered red wing chair, and said, “They’ve been at it like that for hours. Bennis got in from Bryn Mawr at six, got Donna down here at seven, then they started making whatever it is—”

“Gingerbread houses,” George said helpfully. “I talked to Lida Arkmanian. They are making many gingerbread houses to give to children in the hospital.”

“Wonderful,” Gregor said. “They’ve also been talking nonstop about orgasms. I know things about Peter Desarian I don’t know about myself. And I’m scared to death Lida is going to show up, and I’m going to find out even women of my generation talk about orgasms.”

“Krekor, Krekor. Even women of my generation talk about orgasms, and most of them are dead.” George considered it. He was more than eighty, and he looked it, but he didn’t mind it. “I think,” he said, after a while, “that the women I grew up with wouldn’t have called it orgasms.”

Gregor considered the tie again, decided he must have run it through the disposal and forgotten he’d done it. He threw it in the wastebasket. His wife had always marveled at the state to which he reduced his ties. Now that she was dead, he had to marvel on his own. How did he get a perfectly ordinary piece of stitched red silk to split into strips and tie into knots and fray from the inside? He reached into his underwear drawer, pulled out a blue silk tie in the same shape, and tossed that into the wastebasket, too.

It was eleven o’clock on the morning of March 27, and he was packing to go to Colchester, New York. Finally. Over the last six weeks, he had begun to feel that all he did was argue with himself about whether or not to take the train North. Even now, he wasn’t entirely sure why he’d decided to go. Granted, John Cardinal O’Bannion was a friend of Father Tibor Kasparian. Granted, Gregor owed Father Tibor a great deal. On the other hand, O’Bannion’s problem was not the sort of thing Gregor had been trained to solve. Nobody could solve it but O’Bannion himself. The Cardinal was just going to have to accept the necessary responsibility, dig in his heels, and get the dirty work done.

Still, Gregor thought, it was strange. No more than four months ago, living alone in this apartment and connected to nobody in this neighborhood, Gregor had thought he’d be more than happy to find a way off Cavanaugh Street, or out of Philadelphia. He’d come here, to this small Armenian-American enclave where he’d grown up, after Elizabeth had died, and mostly because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. His twenty-year stint in the FBI was over. He’d resigned when Elizabeth entered her last crisis, and he had no inclination to go back, even if they would let him. At fifty-five, he had hit the Bureau’s mandatory retirement age for agents. They made exceptions for administrators—which by then he’d become—but he was tired of it, anyway. Ten solid years of serial murderers was enough for anybody. A last case he had bungled remorselessly, bungled because he couldn’t think about it when he had to think so much about Elizabeth, was more than enough. It was time for something different. He just didn’t know what.

Now, one local murder case and one neighborhood Christmas season later, he would just as soon stay where he was. He had friends here. He was falling in love with Philadelphia, if not its weather. The changes that had come to Cavanaugh Street in his long absence, and that had first disturbed him, now amused him instead. So everybody’s children and grandchildren had grown up and gotten rich and tarted the place up until it looked like a billboard ad for Ralph Lauren Polo. So what? They were only trying to give the old people, who had worked so hard for so long for so little, a taste of what most of the rest of the country had always been working for.

He should, he thought, have turned O’Bannion down yet again. That was what he’d intended to do. It bothered him to think he might be going North for no other reason than that he was terminably bored.

He reached into his underwear drawer again, came up with a green tie in the same condition as the red and the blue, and threw that into the wastebasket, too. He would have to buy a tie in Colchester. He was always buying ties. Once he’d actually bought three of them in a single day.

But that was one of those days he had had to go to the White House. The White House was different. And he’d been younger.