Somebody Else's Music(31)

He got his clothes off and got into the shower. He ran the water as hot as he could make it without squealing and stood under the stream for a good five minutes, only wondering, a little guiltily, at the end, if this house got its water supply from a well. Sometimes, showers helped him think. If he stood under them long enough, ideas came to him that would come to him no other way. Today, nothing like that happened. He only thought more about the dog. That had been an ugly scene out there. He would have thought it was ugly even if it had been a mob operation, where he could have excused it to some extent because the issues would have been serious: the division of several million dollars earned from the sale of a couple of kilos of heroin; the control of vice and gambling on the South Side. This looked like nothing but spite. Who did something like that to an animal out of spite, and who did it so openly, in the still light of a late afternoon, when there were people in the house? Water beat down on his head, making him aware of how thick his hair was. The whole incident stank. What was worse, it had too much in common with that story of what had happened to Elizabeth Toliver on the night Michael Houseman died, except that the intensity had been ratcheted up a notch. If he’d been a younger man, he’d have beat his head against the wall.

He got out of the shower and toweled off. He went back to his bedroom and put on clean clothes, all folded into his suitcase with the precision that only a true fanatic would employ. If Bennis had been with him the night before, she would have insisted that he unpack his suitcases and hang his clothes from the curtain rods over the windows, or she would have done it for him. The idea that he might be too tired would not have occurred to her. Bennis was a woman who had never been tired in her life. Gregor knotted his tie without checking it out in a mirror—there wasn’t one in the room; he didn’t feel up to digging out the one in the Mark Cross travel set Bennis had given him—and sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed to use the phone. Bennis would have made the bed. Gregor only noticed that the phone was a princess style, and pink.

He dialed his own number first. The phone rang and rang but was not picked up, not even by an answering machine. He must have forgotten to turn it on. He tried Bennis’s number next. Bennis was never in her own apartment anymore except when she made those papier-mâche’ models of Zed and Zedalia she used to help her plot her fantasy novels, and it was the wrong time of year for that. He hung up again and picked up again and dialed the number for Tibor’s apartment. There was always a chance that Tibor was home, because Tibor often forgot to go to appointments. Bennis or Lida or Donna Moradanyan had to run down and pull him out of his easy chair to do whatever it was he was supposed to do. If they didn’t get him in the mornings, he forgot to go to breakfast. Once, Donna had had to rouse him out and stuff him into his robes because he’d forgotten to go to the church and celebrate a wedding.

Tibor’s phone rang four times and was picked up, but not by Tibor. The answering machine whirred into life. Tibor’s voice said, “This is Father Kasparian at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. I am unable to come to the phone right now. If you leave your name, the time that you called, and a number where I can reach you, I will call you back as soon as possible.”

“Tibor?” Gregor said. Tibor never called anybody back. He forgot to check the answering machine, sometimes for weeks. Of course, sometimes he forgot to pick up the phone, too, so there was no way of knowing if he was in the apartment or not. “Tibor?” Gregor said again. “It’s Gregor. Pick up.”

Nobody picked up. The tape whirred some more.

“Okay, Tibor,” he said. “This is Gregor, calling from Hollman. I’ll try to call you back. Or Bennis. I hope you’re at the Ararat, remembering to eat.”

Gregor put the phone down. He took his comb off the night table and ran it through his hair, not using a mirror for that, either, which meant he had no idea how it had come out. He could look like those old newspaper drawings of Jack the Ripper on the prowl. Tibor not only forgot appointments, and his answering machine, he forgot everything, if he got into a book or involved in that Internet newsgroup he’d become addicted to. RAM.rec.arts.mystery. Gregor had no idea why he remembered it. He had no idea how a man like Tibor could forget to eat, either. You’d think that after decades of being half starved to death in Soviet prison camps, he’d be eating nonstop for the rest of his life.

Gregor put his comb and his wallet in his pocket and went out into the hall. The house was very quiet. He walked to the edge of the hall and found the living room. He went through the living room and found another hall. “Rambling,” that’s what they would have called this house in real estate ads at the time it was built. This next hall was very short. He went through it and found the dining room.