Festival of Deaths (8 page)

“Okay,” Carmencita said again, and the men stirred in their chairs and did their best to sit up straight.

Up in the rafters, Itzaak whistled the first few bars of “As Time Goes By,” to let her know he was watching over her, and Carmencita relaxed.

Whatever Sarah Meyer was up to, it was creepy. Whatever had happened to Maria Gonzalez’s apartment, it was creepy, too. Carmencita could ride above it all, serene and confident in the benevolence of the future, because Itzaak protected her. That was the secret of their relationship. Itzaak protected her in a spiritual way, and as long as he was near her, she felt all right.

What she was going to do about that—what either of them were going to do about that—considering the problems they were going to have with religion and all the rest of it, she didn’t know. She just knew that she would much rather think about Itzaak Blechmann than about what might have happened to Maria, and that was that.

Her charges were beginning to look like lumps of Silly Putty softening in the sun. Carmencita clapped her hands again, and they came to attention.

D
OWN AT THE OTHER
end of the office suite, DeAnna Kroll was sitting in Lotte Goldman’s office, sitting on the desk and smoking the first cigarette she’d had in two and a half years, looking frazzled. Lotte was sitting in her own desk chair and putting on the persona she would have to maintain in front of the cameras. It never ceased to amaze DeAnna just how good Lotte was at this. Lotte could commit a bloody murder at noon and be ready to go on the air as if nothing had happened by 12:02.

“You’ve got less than a minute before you’re supposed to be on the set,” DeAnna told Lotte. “You’d better get moving.”

“I’ll get moving when I finish my cigarette. Are those policemen coming here?”

“Later this morning.”

“Whatever happened didn’t happen here.”

“We don’t know that anything happened at all,” DeAnna said. “Maria might have messed up the apartment on her own. She may have taken off for Acapulco. She might have been dealing drugs or robbing us blind or doing something else we don’t know about.”

“Maria was a very clean woman,” Lotte said. “And if the police are coming here, we have to wait for them. I’m already exhausted.”

“You can stretch out on the couch in my office. I’ll send Sarah Meyer over to one of those boutiques on Third Avenue to buy you a pretty little afghan.”

“Sarah Meyer will come back with a hair shirt.”

“Come on,” DeAnna said. “We’re all set up. We’ve got an audience waiting. We’re going to get a long day. Might as well at least start to get it over with.”

“That’s what I like about you,” Lotte said, getting up. “You’re such a comfort.” She hesitated next to the desk, stubbing her cigarette out in the crystal ashtray DeAnna had given her for Christmas last year. “Dee,” she said, “do you think something serious has happened to Maria?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Yes it does. I hate to say it, but I’m glad it didn’t happen here. Whatever it was. I’d feel responsible for it.”

“I just feel guilty I was so damned pissed at her earlier tonight,” DeAnna said. “Is all this a bunch of sentimental crap, or what?”

“It’s a bunch of sentimental crap,” Lotte said firmly. “Oh, dear. I’ve forgotten my flower. You know. The thing I wear to hide my microphone. I forgot to take it off after the taping yesterday and then I must have forgotten to put it back on when I left the apartment today—”

“Never mind. We’ve got tons of that stuff in the storeroom. I’ll get you something before we tape. Go on out to the set.”

“I will. Are you sure you can handle all this business with the police by yourself?”

“Until they get tired of talking to me.”

“Well, it if gets to be too much for you, send them to me.”

“Right,” DeAnna said, pushing Lotte toward the door.

Lotte Goldman was a dear woman, but she’d have about as much success at dealing with the NYPD as a worshiper of Kali would have had dealing with Savonarola. DeAnna pushed her out into the corridor and pointed her in the direction of the studio.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll go get you a flower.”

“Yes, Dee, I am going.”

DeAnna turned away and marched off in the other direction.

It was after six o’clock in the morning now and the office had started to bustle. The clerk typists wouldn’t be in until nine, but all the private secretaries had started to arrive, used to keeping their bosses’ hours. DeAnna passed women setting up coffee urns and putting out memo pads and yawning into makeup mirrors. She went by one young woman who was saying to another, “I can’t handle all this women’s lib shit. I’d rather be married.”

There, DeAnna thought, was a woman who needed psychiatric help.

DeAnna got to the corridor the storeroom was on, walked down to the end of it and opened the door. She put her hand inside to turn on the light switch and got nothing at all. Somehow it figured that the light would go out in the one place she had to get something from with less than a minute before taping. She couldn’t change the light bulb herself, not unless she knew where to find a stepladder, which she didn’t. Somewhere in the building there was a janitor who would fix it for her, but that would take half an hour, and she didn’t have half an hour. She went back up the corridor and stopped at the first secretary she found.

“Do you have a flashlight? The light’s burned out in the storeroom and I have to get something quick.”

The secretary was a young black woman named Marsha, who carried one of those tote bags that looked as if it was big enough to move furniture. She contemplated the idea of a flashlight for a moment. Then she nodded, plunged into her bag, and came up with two.

“This one is really tiny.” She held up something that looked like a pen but flashed on and off by some mechanism DeAnna couldn’t determine. “This one ought to be all right.”

The second flashlight was the standard-issue detective-story variety. Deanna took it and said, “Call maintenance. We’ll still need somebody to fix that light.”

“On the phone right away,” Marsha said.

DeAnna went back to the storeroom, wondering what else Marsha kept in that bag. Tuna fish sandwiches. Hand grenades. The Hope diamond.

The storeroom door had swung closed. DeAnna pushed it open again. Then she switched the flashlight on and went inside. It was incredible how dark a room was when it didn’t have any windows. Even the light from the corridor didn’t do much to help.

The silk flowers were in a box on a shelf on the left-hand side near the back. DeAnna had seen them herself less than a week ago, when she had come in here searching for Liquid Paper after everybody else had gone home. She trained the flashlight on the shelves and found boxes marked “ball point pens” and “felt tipped pens” and “paper clips.”

“Shit,” she said under her breath. Then she moved even deeper into the room, wondering how far back it went, there was no way to tell in all this gloom. She swung the light around to see if she could find the back wall and get her bearings, and then she stopped.

It was only a glimpse, really, a split second where everything had been suddenly, terribly, irretrievably wrong, but a glimpse was enough. Once she’d seen she couldn’t go back to the point where she hadn’t seen. She could do anything but swing the flashlight back, and stop, and contemplate.

She contemplated long and hard.

She thought about the show, and how it could be disrupted.

She thought about Lotte, and Lotte’s blood pressure, and Lotte’s peace of mind.

She thought about her old neighborhood and all the things that used to go on there, the things she used to accept as a matter of course.

She wondered if she was getting soft.

She was looking straight into the smashed face of Maria Gonzalez, and she wanted to curl right up and die.

I
N THE YEARS SINCE
Gregor Demarkian had come back to Cavanaugh Street—come back from Washington, D.C., and a job with the FBI; come back from professional life and nine-to-five identity; come back to sanity—he had gotten used to the fact that even minor holidays would be celebrated around him with an hysteria worthy of the fall of the Bastille. Major holidays, like Christmas and Easter, would be occasions for all-out war. For the second Christmas Gregor had spent on Cavanaugh Street, Donna Moradanyan, his upstairs neighbor, had wrapped every light pole and mailbox in a four-block area with red and green metallic paper. This was Cavanaugh Street and Gregor accepted it. But Cavanaugh Street was an Armenian-American neighborhood and therefore dedicated to the Armenian Christian church, and Gregor had accepted that, too. Long ago, Armenia had been the first country on earth to make Christianity a state religion. Lately, Armenia seemed poised to become the most fervent example of religious revival in the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. On Cavanaugh Street, the response was subtler but undeniable. Even old agnostics like Gregor showed up at church on Sunday, and a surprising number of young people—raised to be secular children in a secular age—weren’t agnostics at all. Father Tibor Kasparian kept them all moving in the direction he wanted them to go. He called that direction “pure Christianity.” “The first duty of a Christian in the working out of his salvation is to sanctify the world,” Tibor said, in the thick accent he had brought with him from so many countries Gregor couldn’t remember them all. Then he proceeded to sanctify the world by finding a religious meaning in Presidents’ Day. Gregor had gotten used to finding out that Tibor had discovered deep Christian significance in the Congressional Proclamation that had established Arbor Day. Gregor had even gotten used to the fact that as soon as Tibor had discovered such significance, he wanted to do something about it. What Gregor hadn’t gotten used to—what he hadn’t even considered the possibility of—was a Cavanaugh Street celebration of Hanukkah.

“Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday,” he had pointed out to Tibor that morning, picking his way through the books piled in columnar stacks on Tibor’s living room floor to get to the one halfway clear seat he could see. The seat was only halfway clear because it had both of Tibor’s present reading projects on it: Judith Krantz’s
Scruples Two
and
An Investigation into the Mathematical Nature of Time
by George Gamow. Gregor picked them both up and balanced them gently on the shortest stack of books on the end table. Those books were all in the Cyrillic alphabet. Armenia no longer used the Cyrillic alphabet. Gregor had seen a report on that on the evening news a few months ago. Armenia now had an American-born foreign minister, too. It was enough to give a man a headache. Gregor checked out the rest of the books on the end table—some Greek, some ancient Greek, some Latin, some French and
Passions of the Sea
by Lisetta Farnham—and then turned his attention to Tibor himself, who was trying to bring overfull cups of bad black coffee in from the kitchen. “Hanukkah,” he said again.

“Yes, yes,” Tibor told him. “I know, Krekor, I know. But it makes sense. And I am not a bigot.”

“I never said you were.”

“Well, Krekor, it would not have been outrageous if you had thought it. There is the Armenian record on anti-Semitism.”

Gregor was curious. “How is the Armenian record on anti-Semitism?” he asked.

“Appalling.”

Tibor had reached him with the coffee. Gregor reached out for a cup and managed to spill only a drop and only on the floor. This was good, because he was due in less than an hour at a lunch in downtown Philadelphia with a friend of his from the old days at the Bureau. He took a sip of the coffee and nearly choked. He put his cup down on the end table and waited for Tibor to seat himself. Tibor kept tripping over the hem of his cassock.

“So,” Tibor said, when he’d finally sat down. “I have told you, Krekor, Rabbi Goldman, David, he was my sponsor when I came to America?”

“You’ve told me, yes,” Gregor said. “As an inducement to going on his sister’s television show.”

“The television show. Yes. Well, Krekor, David asked me to ask you and so I asked. That is not what I wanted to talk to you about today. You know the television show will be here in just three days?”

“You’ve told me.”

“Yes, well, Krekor, it would be good if you could help us to clear this up before then. The graffiti, if you understand what I am saying.”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Don’t you ever watch the news, Krekor? It is a terrible trial talking to you sometimes. I bring up what everybody knows because it has been on television for a week, and it is as if you have been on Mars. The graffiti was on a synagogue in the—I don’t remember the street—here in Philadelphia where there is a neighborhood of Hasidim. The Hasidim are—”

“I know what the Hasidim are. Who.”

“How am I supposed to know what you know?” Tibor shrugged. “Never mind, Krekor. You can imagine what kind of graffiti it was, and now everybody is upset. And it is not that they should be blamed for it, Krekor, because the graffiti was very foul. But the worst of it is that the police have arrested nobody for this.”

“Do they know who did this?”

“Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

Tibor fumbled around in his pockets and came up with a crumpled sheet of paper. He got up, leaned over yet more stacks of books, and passed it to Gregor. “That is the name of the organization which claims responsibility. I had David write it down for me because I have a hard time remembering it. This is perhaps psychological.”

“Perhaps,” Gregor said drily.

“The important thing here is that the police know what the organization is but they don’t know who is in it. You see the problem? Have you ever heard of them, Krekor?”

What was written on the piece of paper was

WHITE KNIGHTS, DEFENDERS OF FACE AND FAITH

Gregor put the paper on the end table and sighed.

“I haven’t heard of them,” he said. “I don’t have to have heard of them. Groups like this crop up constantly. We had an entire section at the Bureau devoted to nothing but keeping track of them.”