Quoth the Raven(17)

Mary rang the last of the mess up on the cash register and said, “It comes to a hundred and two ninety-five. If you don’t have that much, you could come back with it after Halloween. Daddy and Mother wouldn’t mind.”

“I have it,” Gregor said. “I stopped at the bank machine on my way up. I knew it was going to be expensive.”

“Do you think Father Tibor eats this kind of food because he was deprived in the Soviet union  ? I mean, it’s not very healthy.”

“I don’t think Father Tibor is worried about being healthy.”

“I don’t, either. It’s strange, isn’t it, Mr. Demarkian. It’s like a whole different way of looking at the world. It’s like Father Tibor thinks getting old is something you can’t do anything about, and dying is going to happen to you no matter what.”

“You don’t think dying is going to happen to you no matter what?”

Mary Ohanian looked confused. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think you ought to think about it that way. I don’t think that’s healthy.”

Gregor had a sudden urge to tell her there was nothing healthier in the world than thinking about “it” that way, that there was no other way on earth to make a life for yourself that made any sense—but he didn’t. She was very young, and he knew where the urge was coming from. He was still riding the wave of his ambivalence, and nothing—not even the ludicrousness of Father Tibor Kasparian’s taste in food—was going to talk him into a more salutary frame of mind. He got his right arm around the heavy bag, the one full of Armenian food, and his left around the light one.

“If you see Mrs. Arkmanian,” he said, “tell her we’re leaving at ten o’clock. If she comes in after ten, tell her we’ll be up at Independence by eleven thirty.”

“Do you want to leave a number she can reach you at?”

“She has Father Tibor’s number. Have a good Halloween, Mary.”

“Oh, I will,” Mary said. “I’m going to dress up as Cinderella, in my sister Evelyn’s prom dress from two years ago. I love that dress. It makes me feel pretty enough to have Michael Keaton fall in love with me.”

It makes me feel pretty enough to have Michael Keaton fall in love with me.

Right.

There was a fine curtain of gossamer spiderwebs across the top of the store’s door. Gregor ducked his head going under it, holding the bags close to his chest, and went out onto Cavanaugh Street, to the carnival that was just a vaguely ethnic version of a state fair. Down on the corner of Cavanaugh and Muswell, Howard Kashinian was doing a handstand, wobbly, threatening to fall over. Two blocks north of that, the Ararat restaurant had replaced its customary sidewalk display—a phalanx of Armenian national flags—with a huge jack-o’-lantern leaf bag stuffed solid. Even his own building was decorated for the season, although in such an incongruous way that the sight of his own front door had begun to make Gregor a little dizzy. Donna Moradanyan, his upstairs neighbor, had covered that door with orange-and-black crepe paper—tied into bows.

The bag full of junk food began to slip. Gregor jostled around until he got it positioned solidly into the curve of his arm again. Then he turned south and made himself walk briskly and purposively in the direction of home.





2


THE PROBLEM, HE DECIDED later, as he climbed the marble steps to that crazily covered door, was in his history. It was nice to pretend that Halloween was nothing but a holiday for children, that nothing went on under the cover of it but the benign fantasies of little boys who wanted to grow up to be superheroes. It was even nice when grown-up people, who ought to know better, worked overtime to make sure their children got a cozy, unthreatening picture of the dead of night. It was not so nice when the grown-up people began to believe their own propaganda. Gregor Demarkian had not only spent twenty years of his life in the FBI. He had spent ten of those twenty years—the whole second half of his career, from the day the states of Washington and Oregon had requested federal help in catching a killer called “Ted” to the day his wife Elizabeth, ill with cancer, had entered her final crisis—chasing serial murderers. He knew far too much about the things people did to each other and more than far too much about Halloween. Halloween was, as a colleague of his had once said, the night of the werewolf. For 364 days out of every year, things went along more or less as they could be expected to go along. Even the Green River Killers, the Ted Bundys, the Sons of Sam, had their routines. On the 365th day, all hell broke loose. The rabbity serial killer you had been tracing for six months suddenly took his knife and cut fifteen people in half an hour. The teenage boy who had always seemed only to want to look like James Dean suddenly decided to ram himself and six of his friends off the edge of lovers’ lane. The nicest little old lady in the neighborhood suddenly made up her mind to put cyanide into the caramel apples she passed out to the children who came to her door. Suddenly was definitely the best word for Halloween. Unexpectedly was the second-best one.