He got himself off the bench and went to the road. He looked at his watch. It was nearly six. This would be rush hour traffic on the road. It felt like it. The rain started to come down harder. Had he had an umbrella when he started this day? He couldn’t remember.
The cab came, and pulled up to the curb, and stopped. Gregor got in and gave the driver his address. Cavanaugh Street was not an obscure part of the city. It was even featured in the newspapers every once in a while, with the Ararat getting restaurant reviews and the Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store being listed as a good place to get things like olive oil and grape leaves. These days, the street probably showed up on television as well, as the place where a woman had been found in a coma.
Gregor suddenly realized that he had no idea if there had been any publicity at all about what had happened in Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. It made him feel even odder than he already did. It wasn’t like him not to know that kind of thing.
The cab pulled up in front of the five-story brownstone where Gregor and Bennis had the second and third floors. Gregor paid the man and got out and looked around. The street was mostly deserted. The lights had come on in the church and in a couple of the storefronts, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t totally dark. In another hour, the Ararat would start filling up.
Gregor climbed the stairs to the front door and let himself in. Old George Tekemanian had the door to the ground-floor apartment open and was sitting in it, playing with a gadget that seemed to be shooting little arrows of light every once in a while, to no purpose Gregor could see. Old George was in a wheelchair these days, but he was as sharp as always, and his nephew Martin had paid to put in a ramp so that he could go in and out. Martin had paid for the motorized wheelchair, too. Martin’s wife Angela had stopped making noises about a nursing home.
Gregor went to where George was and looked at the gadget.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a light saber,” old George said. “Martin’s son Michael gave it to me for my birthday. It’s a miniature light saber, that’s what. I’ve got to remember to say miniature. I can fight the Empire with it.”
“Empire?”
“Tcha, Krekor. In Star Wars. How can you not know about Star Wars? We had a Star Wars party over at Father Tibor’s back around Christmas. He’s got all the DVDs.”
“So you’re sitting in the doorway fighting the Empire?”
“No, Krekor. I’m sitting in the doorway waiting for Lida and Hannah to come get me. We’ve having dinner together at the Ararat tonight, and I’m supposed to speak Armenian to the Very Old Ladies. I keep telling them that the Very Old Ladies aren’t as old as I am, but they never listen. Lida and Hannah, I mean. They never did listen. Not even as children.”
“No, they didn’t,” Gregor said.
“You ought to take an interest in things,” old George said. “You ought to get a hobby. It’s this running around thinking about criminals that makes you look the way you do.”
Gregor let that one go, and made his way upstairs. Now that the apartments were knocked together, he could have gone in on the second floor, but he didn’t want to. He went up to the third floor and let himself in there, into the foyer of what he thought of as his own apartment. This did not make any sense, and he knew it. They were married. There was a stairway between the two floors. It was their apartment.
On the other hand, the third floor had the areas they used—the kitchen they cooked in, the living room they watched television in. The second floor held mainly the spaces Bennis herself needed for privacy, like a room to write in.
Gregor took his jacket off as soon as he got through the door and hung it on the coatrack. It was an ordinary suit jacket, not some kind of outerwear, and it dripped. He looked at the little puddle of water forming underneath it and then left it there. Bennis could have a fit about what he was doing to the hardwood later.
He went into the living room and looked around. It had been tidied up. It had been tidied up entirely too well. Bennis didn’t tidy. There was the sound of water running in the kitchen. He went through the room and through the swinging door into there. Bennis was standing at the sink, filling a coffeepot.
“So,” she said, not turning around when he came in. “I’ve been watching television.”
Gregor sat down at the kitchen table. One of the great advantages of his marriage was the fact that, with Bennis in the apartment, he no longer had to make coffee for himself. Bennis wouldn’t let him make coffee for anybody.
“It was your idea I talk to the people from the reality show,” he pointed out. “You knew they were renting Engine House.”