28 Hearts of Sand (2 page)

The man in the uniform was standing against the plate glass door, barring the way. She had the gun in her hands; the carpet under her feet was thin and beige and close to being worn down by too much traffic in too short a time. She pulled the trigger over and over again. It was easy. The trigger seemed to pull itself. The man in the uniform shot up off the floor and twisted in the air. He came down flat on his belly. She fired again and again, again and again, watching the blood spurting everywhere, watching the glass in the door shatter into pieces. This was what she had been waiting for. She knew it as soon as it happened. This was what she had really wanted when she started out looking for something they could do that would break the spell, that would break the monotony. This was what she had really wanted all along.

The man in the uniform was dead on the floor and his blood was pumping out of his side like someone had turned on a fountain inside his skull. She wanted to reach down and take some kind of souvenir, but there wasn’t time. There wasn’t time.

“I could have taken a finger,” she said out loud, to the dark and the silence of this house that nobody lived in anymore. “I told Marty that. I could have taken a finger.”

She didn’t know what she was saying. A finger wouldn’t have been good enough. Nothing would have been good enough. She would have had to take the whole head.

She got the gun into position. She wasn’t sure how. She was swaying. She wasn’t going to be able to stand much longer. Time didn’t mean anything. Then and now. She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger and heard the glass of the mirror smash just a second before a shower of shards rained down on her head.

She pulled the trigger a second time, and a third, and maybe a fourth. She didn’t know and she couldn’t tell and it would never matter to her again, because she was falling, falling into the glass and the blood and the coffee table, falling on the antique Persian rug that had cost three thousand dollars in 1873 and now had to be absolutely priceless.

Really,
she thought, as she felt herself rolling into blackness.
It was what I really wanted, all along.

PART ONE

I have never gotten used to the Western notion that women have souls.

—Nikos Kazantzakis

ONE

1

On the day that Bennis found the cat, it rained.

It rained in a way Gregor Demarkian hadn’t experienced for years—not only heavily but wildly, with thunder that rattled the stained glass windows on the main staircase landing and lightning that cracked across the sky like something out of the old Boris Karloff
Frankenstein
movie. It was only six o’clock in the morning, and it felt like the middle of the night.

It also felt, as Gregor thought of it, impossible. It wasn’t the weather that was the problem, but the house. What he agreed to all those months ago, when Bennis had wanted to buy the place, was that they would buy it and fix it up. Then, when it had been renovated, they would move in and put their own knocked-together apartments up for sale. The apartments were just up Cavanaugh Street, and Gregor felt nostalgic for them every waking moment of his life.

Part of the problem, he thought, as he stopped on the landing to listen to the rain, was that the house had not really
been
renovated. It was in the process of being renovated. All the upstairs halls had wood floors that felt oddly sandy when you walked on them. According to Bennis, this was because they had been “stripped,” which was something you did to them before you put shiny stuff on them and called them done. All the bathrooms but one had tiles missing from their walls and floors and fixtures that might or might not be fixed. The kitchen ceiling was mostly gone. The living room looked like the back office of a carpet and tile store, where all the samples were kept in a jumble in case anybody needed them right away.

He came down the rest of the stairs and into the front hall. There were little stacks of material swatches lined up against the moldings near the front door and a bigger stack of Bennis’s papier-mâché models for her last Zed and Zedalia book lying under the staircase newel. None of this debris was new, but for some reason it felt oddly more intrusive here than it had back at the apartment.

It was a very large house, owned for decades by an elderly woman who had had neither the resources nor the interest in keeping it up. Everything was wrong with the place. They had had to replace the furnace with something brand new. What was left of the old one wasn’t even salvagable. They had had to rip out all the old wiring and put in new. It was a miracle that old Sophie Mgrdchian hadn’t burned to death in her sleep. It was after they’d replaced the wiring that Bennis decided it was time to move in.

“I’ll be right there where I can stay on top of things,” she’d said.

Gregor thought that the reality was that they were right here where things could stay on top of them.

He went into the kitchen and opened the small, square “mini fridge” Bennis had bought to do for them until all the new appliances were delivered. The new appliances could not be delivered. The appliances could not be delivered until the kitchen was renovated. The kitchen would not be renovated until it was thoroughly gutted and then refloored. They also needed to find a new stamped tin ceiling and restore it over their heads.

Gregor sometimes had the feeling that a war zone would be less logistically problematic than this place.

He got out a small carton of cream and put it on the round table they used for everything. There were no kitchen counters left. He took a coffee bag out of a box on the table. He found his clean cup in the drainer next to the sink. The sink didn’t look entirely bad. It was porcelain, and very old. It had stains and nicks all across its surface. Still, it looked like a sink.

He got the plug-in kettle from the same round table where he’d found almost everything else. He popped the lid open and held it under the high, curved faucet that reminded him of his elementary school. He turned on the cold water tap and watched as the entire fixture started to shake. A second later, the cap at the top between the two knobs flew off, followed by a geyser of water that reached up almost as high as the twenty-foot ceiling.

Gregor turned the water off and stared at the faucet. The metal cap had fallen to a clanking halt in another part of the room.

“I forgot to tell you,” Bennis said from behind him. “We’re having some plumbing done. The guy was here yesterday. Anyway, you have to hold the cap when you turn on the water or it, you know, does that.”

“This was something we had done yesterday?”

“You were out doing whatever. Talking to the people at the Philadelphia FBI office? Something like that.”

“Something like that.”

“I should have told you,” she said again. “I thought this would be a perfect time to do it. You know what I mean. You’re going off tomorrow. You’ll be away a week, you almost always are. Or longer. I thought it would be a good time to get some of the serious work done.”

“What did you intend to do if I didn’t go off somewhere?” Gregor asked. “I don’t always go out of town to work. Are you going to be able to live in this place on your own if there isn’t any plumbing?”

“There will be plumbing,” Bennis said. “It just won’t be elegant plumbing. I know this seems like a lot of work, and a monumental inconvenience, but it really will be wonderful when it’s done. It’s hard to find places like this right in the middle of the city. There are only a couple of them right here on Cavanaugh Street. It’s just a matter of putting up with a little inconvenience now so that we have something better later. Deferred gratification. You’re always talking about deferred gratification.”

“It helps to know how long you’re deferring it for,” Gregor said. “The last I heard, this was going to take a couple of months. I think we may be past that by now.”

Bennis ignored this, and took the kettle out of his hand. She put it down on the table and looked around, squinting her eyes in the dim light cast by the floor lamp she’d picked up at IKEA to make do until real lights could be restored. Then she said, “Aha,” crossed to the other side of the room, and picked something up.

“Here it is,” she said, coming back with the cap. “It would be a really good idea not to lose this if we could possibly manage it.” She put the cap back into the center of the faucet fixture, held it down, and then started the water running. “Hand me the kettle,” she said.

Gregor handed her the kettle. Bennis stuck it under the flow of water, waited until it was as filled as it was allowed to get, and then handed the kettle back to Gregor. Then she turned off the faucet with her finally free hand.

“There,” she said. “It’s not all that difficult once you get used to it.”

“Ten years at hard labor isn’t all that difficult once you get used to it,” Gregor said. “But I wouldn’t want to try it.”

“Oh, Gregor. It isn’t going to take ten years. It isn’t going to take ten months, not the difficult parts of it, anyway. I know it looks like a mess, but it always does until it’s over. And besides. I thought you had work to do. I thought this was a big, important case you were working on. At least, that’s the way you made it sound when you got that call about it.”

“I don’t know that I’d say it was important, exactly,” Gregor said. “Not anymore. It’s an historical oddity, though. It’s important to the Bureau, because the original case was important. It wasn’t something I worked on when I was there.”

“Still, you’re interested in it,” Bennis said. “I don’t mean to be vague or flippant about it. It’s just that I have my mind on other things. It would be a good idea if you had your mind on other things, too. That way, we wouldn’t get in each other’s hair. Or something.”

Bennis had been putting coffee bags into cups and then water on top of them. She handed a cup to Gregor and went to the kitchen door. The thunder and lightning were still going on full blast. The day outside looked darker than it should have for this time of year.

Bennis opened the kitchen door and looked out. Wind blew rain into the house and into her face.

“What are you doing?” Gregor asked. “It’s a mess out there.”

Bennis was still standing with the door open. “I don’t know,” she said. “I heard something odd a minute ago. When I was in the bathroom.”

“Of course you heard something odd out there. It’s an absolute mess.”

Bennis closed the door. “It wasn’t that kind of something odd,” she said. “I don’t know what it was. It just sounded wrong.”

“That’s the kind of thing you say that I never know how to respond to,” Gregor said. “Are you coming to the Ararat? I told Tibor we’d meet him.”

“I’ll come in a bit. Donna’s supposed to be here any minute to help me with some things about the wallpaper. I really do hate wallpaper, but sometimes it seems to be the only answer. You can’t take apart plaster walls the way you do Sheetrock. I never thought I’d say it, but I’m beginning to feel kindly about Sheetrock.”

“I’m not a hundred percent certain I know what Sheetrock is,” Gregor said. “I’m going to go on over. Tibor and I will keep you a place.”

Bennis went back to the kitchen door, and opened it, and looked out. The wind was making a high-pitched whine.

Bennis closed the door again. “I really wish I knew what that noise was,” she said.

Gregor hadn’t heard anything to wonder about, so he finished off his coffee and headed back to the stairs to find a Windbreaker and an umbrella.

2

It was June. Gregor was sure it could not be really cold in late June, and that the rain could not be half sleet hitting his face like tiny needles—but that’s what it felt like, and the world was so dark, it almost seemed plausible. He kept his head down and his eyes on the sidewalk. He knew his way to the Ararat by instinct, even from this direction. He wished the day were less than terminally depressing, as if it mattered what the weather was.

Through the Ararat’s broad front plate glass window, Gregor could see Father Tibor Kasparian sitting in their usual booth, little stacks of papers spread out across the long, wide surface. The wind started picking up again. Gregor pulled the hood of his Windbreaker farther up over his head and went inside.

As soon as he stepped through the door, a dozen heads looked up from half as many tables, noted who had come in, and went back to whatever they had been doing. Linda Melajian rushed out from the swinging door at the back with a coffeepot in one hand.

“There you are,” she said. “Father Tibor keeps asking if I’ve seen you, which makes absolutely no sense, because with where he’s sitting, he’d see you before I did.”

She went to the booth and unearthed a cup and saucer from under Father Tibor’s papers. She filled the cup and looked around for the little metal basket of sugar packets. She didn’t find it, and went hurrying off to get another one from the kitchen.

Gregor sat down and pushed the papers around a bit. The little metal basket turned out to be on the stack between Tibor and the window. Tibor picked it up and put it back.

“I needed the space, Krekor,” he said, waving at the stacks of papers.

“What is all this?” Gregor asked.

“It’s the Problem,” Tibor said. “For a while there, I was beginning to think no papers really existed. I thought they’d made up the entire issue of the papers. It would make perfect sense, considering everything.”

Gregor picked up one of the papers and looked at it. Long ago—so long ago, he almost never remembered it anymore—he had trained to be an accountant. That was in the days when special agents of the FBI had had to be either accountants or lawyers, which said a lot about what old J. Edgar had thought his Bureau would be doing. It had been a long time, though. His skills were out of date. He had no idea if he had any skills left at all.

“Bennis isn’t here?” Tibor said.

“She’s back at the house, waiting for Donna to bring something,” Gregor said. “I’m not entirely sure what.”

“Does the house look like it might be finished soon?”

“The house looks like it might be finished in the twenty-second century. Last night, I found paint samples in bed. And there’s something about wallpaper, which Bennis hates, but she thinks we have to have.”