Festival of Deaths (14 page)

The man’s name was Ira Ballard, and he got back from Florida—at least to the extent of answering Gregor’s calls—on the day Gregor and Tibor were due to have tea with Sofie Oumoudian and her aunt. The call came in at nine fifteen in the morning, while Gregor was standing in front of his closet, contemplating ties. None of his ties were going to do, he could see that. They were all either too loud or too wide. Tibor had already warned him that Sofie and her aunt were “very pious” and “very conservative,” meaning they were really old-time Armenian, meaning God only knew what. At least Gregor knew his suits would do. Gregor had always been a terrible stick-in-the-mud about suits. Bennis had tried to talk him into buying anything from a houndstooth check to a jacket with wide lapels, but he had remained loyal to his 1950s organization man classics. The only concession he had made was in price. While he was still at the Bureau, he bought his suits at Sears. Now that he was retired, with decent if not spectacular money in the bank and nobody to worry about but himself, he let Bennis steer him to J. Press. J. Press was also good for plain white button-down shirts, of which he had a dozen. The ties were Gregor’s own fault. He simply couldn’t pick ties. He was hopeless.

Gregor and Tibor were due at the Oumoudian apartment at eleven o’clock. Gregor had started fussing through his closet at eight. When the call came in, he had all his ties laid out on the bedspread of his big double bed, and he was close to despair.

“I keep seeing your picture in the paper with this woman who looks like Elizabeth Taylor at twenty-five,” Ira Ballard said, when Gregor picked up the phone. “What gives?”

“She’s thirty-seven,” Gregor said, “and nothing gives. To put it the way she puts it, we hang out. Hello, Ira. I hope you had a good vacation.”

“I never have a good vacation. I hate the heat. Nancy loves the heat. Every year she points out that we do it my way fifty weeks out of fifty-two, the remainder ought to be hers. So I hate the heat but I go to Florida. Is this some kind of emergency?”

“I wouldn’t call it an emergency, exactly, why?”

“Five calls from you. One from Jack in Philadelphia. One from Fred Hacker in Omaha.”

“Synagogues,” Gregor said, “and anti-Semitic organizations. Nothing out of hand. Not yet.”

“Right,” Ira said. “Well, that’s the name of the game. Not yet.”

“It should be ‘not ever,’” Gregor said. “Just a minute. There’s something I have to do here.”

The something Gregor had to do was pick up the ties. He was sick of looking at them. He put the phone between his ear and his shoulder and scooped the ties into both hands. Then he dumped them on top of his dresser. Jumbled up there in a pile, they looked like knotted snakes. He retrieved the phone and said,

“Ira, give me another minute, I’m going to change phones. It’ll only take a second.”

“Go right ahead.”

Gregor put the receiver down on the bed. Then he went out to the kitchen, picked up the receiver there, and laid it down on the kitchen table. Then he went back to the bedroom and hung that receiver up. By the time he got back to the kitchen, he felt like a damn fool.

“You know what somebody should invent?” he asked Ira. “A gadget that would hang up a phone in the bedroom while you were talking in the kitchen. If you know what I mean.”

“What anti-Semitic organization?”

Gregor got his kettle off the stove and filled it with water. He put it back on the stove and turned on the heat.

“Let me get my notes here,” he told Ira. “You’ve got to understand, I’m giving you all this third hand. I haven’t talked to the rabbi whose synagogue was involved. Not yet, anyway.”

“Who have you talked to?”

“Another rabbi. Man name of David Goldman. He—”

“The David Goldman whose sister has that sex show?”

“You know him?” Gregor was surprised.

“I don’t know him personally,” Ira said, “but I know of him. He used to be all over the place down here before the Wall fell. He used to sponsor people who wanted to immigrate from the Soviet Union.”

“I think he still does,” Gregor said. “In a way, that’s who I came in contact with him. He sponsored the man who’s now my parish priest.”

“Funny. I thought he made a point of sponsoring Jews.”

“Maybe he just makes a point of sponsoring people who have been persecuted for their religion. Whatever. I’ve talked to Rabbi Goldman, but I haven’t talked to the rabbi whose synagogue was involved, so take what I’ve got with that in mind. Oh, and I checked into the police reports. They’re useless.”

“They often are.” Ira Ballard sighed. “Christ, Gregor, what are you going to do? The cops have fifteen murders a week to solve and some asshole to chase who gets his kicks driving by apartment buildings and spraying their windows with machine gun fire, they don’t have a lot of time left over for spray paint. In spite of the fact that a little preventive medicine—”

“Ira.”

“Never mind,” Ira said. “Shoot.”

The kettle was shooting steam and wailing in a high-pitched whistle that threatened to turn into a shriek. Gregor dumped a teaspoon of instant coffee in the bottom on a mug and poured water over it. The instant coffee was freeze-dried, and it foamed.

“The incident happened on the twenty-third of November at Temple Beth-El in Philadelphia proper, meaning not on the Main Line,” Gregor said. “I’m sorry. You probably didn’t need to be told that. Around here it’s sometimes necessary. Temple Beth-El is the cornerstone of an Hasidic neighborhood, there’s been trouble up there before—”

“With this same sort of thing?”

“Nothing so focused,” Gregor said. “Nothing religious, certainly. A few smashed windows. A few overturned trash cans. That kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing can be everything or nothing.”

“Yes. I know. On the twenty-third, though, the attack was focused. Sometime in the night, the entire street facade of Temple Beth-El was sprayed over in phosphorescent paint. With the usual kind of thing. A lot of obscenities. ‘Go back to Israel’ with ‘Israel’ misspelled. ‘Hitler was right.’ That kind of thing.”

“Any signature?”

“Definitely. ‘White Knights, Defenders of Race and Faith.’”

“Mmm,” Ira said.

“The police did try all the usual things,” Gregor told him. “Nobody in the neighborhood had seen anything. Nobody had heard anything, either—”

“That could be fear,” Ira put in quickly. “Sometimes, if the neighborhood is heavily populated by people who have immigrated from countries where there is a lot of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism, people are afraid to talk. They think the police are in collusion with the people who are tormenting them.”

“Well, fear or ignorance, it doesn’t matter now,” Gregor said. “Nobody was willing to admit seeing or hearing anything. The rabbi at Temple Beth-El was working late in his office that night. His office is on the first floor, directly across the street from the synagogue’s front door. He worked until midnight and then he went to bed. So whatever happened had to have happened after midnight.”

“If we were dealing with anything but an Hasidic neighborhood, I’d want to put it later than that,” Ira agreed. “Was there any precipitating incident that you know of?”

“What do you mean, a precipitating incident?”

“It could be anything at all,” Ira said. “It could be really remote. We had a bunch of these guys in Oakland, went on a spray-paint rampage after that Israeli guy won the Nobel in medicine last year.”

“Why?” Gregor was thoroughly confused.

Ira was exasperated. “How could I know why? Because they have IQs in the single figures, Gregor, that’s why. I’m not kidding. I’ve been in this job, what now, seven years, maybe, and you know what I’ve found out? The guys who pull this shit are dumb. Not mentally retarded, Gregor,
dumb
. Stupid. It’s incredible. We pulled this one guy in here, he’s set fire to a black Baptist church in Tupelo, Mississippi. That was maybe the tenth church he’d set fire to, in maybe the third state. So we haul him in here and we ask him what in damn hell he thinks he’s doing, and do you know what he tells us?”

“No.”

“He tells us he’s got to stop the black people from taking over the Christian churches before they feed poison to any more women and turn the women into feminists, which they won’t stop doing because—”

“Wait,” Gregor said.

“It doesn’t make
sense
,” Ira snorted. “These things never make sense. You listen for more than twenty minutes and your brain turns to mush.”

“Oh,” Gregor said.

“You ever read
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“It’s the original anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. You could get better intellectual coherence from
The National Enquirer
.”

“Oh,” Gregor said.

“Never mind.” Ira sighed again. “I could go on and on like this all day. These assholes would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous. What was the name of your guys again?”

“White Knights, Defenders of Faith and Race,” Gregor repeated. “Are you sure about the ‘guys.’ Aren’t there women involved in these things?”

“There are women in the Klan,” Ira said, “and on the fringes of most of the other organizations, yeah, but they don’t lead any of them. For one thing, most of these groups are chauvinist as hell. They get to the part where St. Paul says wives should be subject to their husbands, and they don’t bother to read the rest of the passage.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, women don’t go out and spray paint people’s synagogues,” Ira said. “They’ve got more sense. Just a minute now. Let’s see what we’ve got on the White Knights.”

Gregor’s coffee mug was empty. He put the kettle back on to boil and listened to the tapping of keys on a computer keyboard. The water boiled in no time at all. He’d drunk his first mug of coffee quickly. The water in the kettle was still hot. He dumped another teaspoon of instant coffee into his mug and watched while the hot water made it foam.

On the other side of the line, Ira had started to grunt. “Philadelphia,” he was saying. “Philadelphia, Philadelphia, I don’t have anything on them in Philadelphia.”

“You mean they’re not known to operate in this city?” Gregor asked.

“I mean we’ve never had any reports on them from the Philadelphia office. But you know that. You called the Philadelphia office.”

“That’s right.”

“This is a very minor league group, Gregor. Tiny. These people are nobody important.”

“They’re important enough to have spray-painted this synagogue,” Gregor pointed out.

“Spray paint doesn’t make them important,” Ira said. “Never mind. I know what you mean. Look, last April these people had a convention of sorts down in Kisco, Oklahoma. In a trailer park, no less. With beer. God, it’s incredible. Anyway, I’ve got a notation here, we’ve got a file report on this thing. We must have had an agent there. I could talk to him and see what he has to say. And I could look up the file report.”

“Would you?”

“Sure. We’re having a reasonably slack time around here. That’s why I could take a vacation. What are you going to do? Get the names and then stake them out?”

“Something like that.”

“Best way to go about it. Of course, you can’t if you’re official. Not unless you’ve got some way to cover your ass—”

“Claim you had an informant?” Gregor suggested.

“Oh, that’s good,” Ira said. “That’s very good. You always were good. I can get back to you in about two hours, how about that?”

“I’ll be out. Why don’t you try this evening? Or tomorrow morning, if it’s more convenient.”

“I’ll interrupt your dinner. It’s too bad the lady isn’t more than a friend, Gregor.”

“No it’s not.”

“You must be getting old.”

Gregor heard a click in his ear. Ira had hung up. He hung up himself and went back to his coffee. Why was it, he wondered, that everything in his life that started out simple ended up complicated?

Through the kitchen doorway, he could see the menorah Donna had left him, perched in the window, plugged in and glowing. Sometimes he got so tired of symbolic gestures, he could scream.

T
IBOR CAME TO PICK
him up for the walk to Sofie Oumoudian’s apartment at quarter to eleven, and by then Gregor had managed to give himself what was nearly a nervous breakdown about his tie. He had also started to resent the hell out of Tibor and his cautions. If Tibor hadn’t insisted, over and over again, on just how pious, devout, old-fashioned, European, and traditionally Armenian these two women were, Gregor would never have gotten so nervous. He had also begun to wonder just how accurate Tibor’s description really was. After all, Sofie Oumoudian had managed to attract Joey Ohanian, and Joey was hardly a pious, traditionally Armenian young man. In fact, he was something of a rip. Gregor thought Joey would put up with a certain amount of shyness and sexual standoffishness for the sake of romanticism, but there would be a limit. The limit would probably have something to do with the backseat of Joey’s brand-new, shiny black Chevrolet sports car, his parents’ gift to him on his sixteenth birthday, when they still thought he would finish out at Deerfield without giving them any problems.

Tibor arrived in impeccably correct dress, his cassock cleaned and pressed. That was one of the virtues of a religious uniform. It was appropriate everywhere. Tibor looked Gregor up and down once or twice and apparently didn’t find anything wrong with him. Either that, or he decided it wasn’t worth saying anything.

“I’ve brought pastries,” he said, holding up a white box that had obviously come from Ohanian’s. “It is customary to bring something. Do you know what you are going to say?”

“In a way,” Gregor said.

“The aunt’s name is Helena,” Tibor told him. “She is in the church often and long. She lights candles and leaves offerings. I think there is family back in Armenia.”

“You think?”

“She doesn’t talk to me much.”

One of the difficulties yet to be untangled in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union was the position of the churches and their clergy. The Russian Orthodox Church had been thoroughly infiltrated by the Communist government, and it was generally assumed that the hierarchies of the smaller eastern churches had been infiltrated as well. In occupied Armenia there had actually been two churches, the official one and the one operating underground. Tibor had been part of the church operating underground. Of course, Helena Oumoudian would assume that any priest operating out in the open the way Tibor was now would be suspect. She hadn’t been in the United States very long.