He got out of the shower, toweled off, and went back to the bedroom. He took a fresh pair of boxers from the top drawer and found a clean suit hanging in the closet. He threw on a plain white button-down shirt, which was the only kind of shirt he ever wore. Bennis always complained that he dresses as if he were still in the FBI.
He got on socks. He thought about dispensing with the shoes. He thought the Very Old Ladies were going to notice. They always noticed everything.
He opened the bedroom door and stuck his head out into the hall. He could hear murmuring noises coming from the kitchen. He hoped Bennis was holding her own.
He left the bedroom, walked down the hall and through the living room, and went into the kitchen. The kitchen was “eat in,” because there was no dining room. Sometimes he understood what Bennis meant when she said that the apartment was cramped.
The Very Old Ladies were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee out of large mugs that were only half full. Gregor guessed that this had been Bennis’s compromise with the fact that she didn’t own any of the tiny little cups Armenian coffee was supposed to be served in. According to Bennis, Armenian coffee was not a beverage. It was a drug addiction.
There was an empty chair at the table. Bennis was standing up, leaning back against the sink. She looked a little dazed.
Gregor sat down. “Good afternoon,” he said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for these three women to have climbed three sets of stairs plus the stoop to sit in his kitchen. He suddenly wondered if they had elevators in their houses, or if they’d kept in shape all these years making their way up and down staircases that were difficult for much younger people to manage.
Viola Vardanian, made a face. It was a very sour face. “We’ve come to find out what is going on,” she said. “We have tried to talk to the police officers, and they will not tell us.”
“What police officers did you try to talk to?” Gregor asked.
“We went to the precinct, Krekor,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “What did you think we would do. We went there, and we went to the hospital, and talked to Dr. Halevy. Nobody would tell us anything, because we are not next of kin.”
“I think that’s probably the law,” Gregor said.
“They did ask us a lot of questions,” Mrs. Melvarian said. Mrs. Melvarian was the small round one, the one that looked most like an Armenian peasant grandmother. “Dr. Halevy especially asked us. And she expected us to answer.”
“It’s been hard to get information,” Gregor said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything anywhere to tell us, well, to tell us things. Who her doctor was, for instance.”
“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Dr. Halevy asked us the same thing. You should find Sophie’s little book and use that. Although I don’t think I’ve ever known her to go to the doctors. She doesn’t like doctors.”
“Doctors can be necessary,” Gregor said. “What little book are you talking about?”
“Oh, her niece made it for her when she was in the fifth grade,” Mrs. Edelakian said. It was more like gushing. “When the niece was in the fifth grade, I mean. It’s beautiful, it really is. It’s got pictures on the cover of it, all these pictures of Sophie and her family. Sophie herself, and Viktor, and Dennis and Marco and their wives, and Clarice, too. Clarice made it in her art class.”
“Clarice is in fifth grade?” Gregor was confused.
Mrs. Vardanian snorted. “Of course she isn’t. She’s a middle-aged woman now, I would think. But Kara is right. She always used that one. She kept it in the little telephone table in the kitchen.”
“I looked in the telephone table,” Gregor said. “I looked in a big cedar chest in the living room. I looked in the night table next to her bed. I spent nearly three hours this morning going through every room in the house, I didn’t find any address book, with pictures on it or not. I didn’t find much of anything except very old lace and some copies of a magazine in Armenian.”
“The police say this other woman is Marco’s wife,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I don’t believe it.”
“We need to find out what doctor Sophie was seeing,” Gregor said. “He or she might be able to tell us something about why she’s still in a coma. If it is a coma. I get the medical terms confused, sometimes. We need to know why she’s unconscious.”
“Really?” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Maybe there isn’t any doctor. Sophie wasn’t sick. She was never sick. She didn’t even get colds. And she didn’t have the aches the way the rest of us do. She had a little arthritis, but that’s to be expected, Krekor. People didn’t always go running off to the doctor every time they have aches. There’s no point to it.”