Hardscrabble Road (11 page)

She went to the portress’s desk and picked up the phone to get Reverend Mother out of bed.

You came to Carmel to look for answers, and all you ever got was the silence and the darkness and the long line of men and
women who had come before you, who had wanted to look into the face of God without falling down dead. Some of them thought
they had seen what they were looking for, and some of them were sure they had not, but in the end it all came down to the
man in the red hat whose face was nothing but a blur and a shadow, and the man standing in front of you whom you couldn’t
make real no matter how hard you tried.

Reverend Mother was not going to be happy to be woken at midnight, and the ambulance men were going to be even less happy
to come by to pick up the body of somebody who was not only already dead, but of no damn use to anybody at all.

Monday, February 10

High 3F, Low –14F

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

—J
ORGE
L
UIS
B
ORGES

The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie about the
greatest things.

—U
MBERTO
E
CO

T
here were times when
Gregor Demarkian forgot where he was, not in space—it was impossible to forget you were on Cavanaugh Street when you were
on it—but in time, so that he turned over in bed and expected to see Elizabeth sleeping next to him, or opened the top drawer
of his dresser to look for the laminated ID card he’d carried his last five years in the FBI. He would have felt better about
it if it had only happened to him when he was asleep, or just waking. He knew enough about dreams to have lost all tendency
to feel guilty about the content of them. He had been thinking about Elizabeth a lot lately, and about the FBI, although he
had to admit that he was more than happy to be retired, given the way things were going at the moment. He had come to the
Bureau when it was still run by J. Edgar Hoover, a psychopath with sexual problems and a driving obsession to redefine normality
for the rest of the universe. He had quietly celebrated on the evening of Hoover’s funeral, because he’d known that only death
would exorcise that man from the Bureau’s soul. Then he’d had his own life to worry about, and his own problems, and now he
was here, no longer concerned with serial killers or office politics. He could not imagine what he would have done if he had
been one of the people responsible for ignoring the evidence that could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. He could not imagine
a Bureau culture where so few people had been fired in the event. He had no idea what he was doing thinking about 9/11 now,
so long after the fact, but for some reason it had been on his mind for weeks.

The truth is
, he thought,
I’ve got too much time to myself
. It was true. There had been nothing in the way of a consulting
job coming through the door for some time now. Since he made a point of never going out to solicit them, that meant there
had been nothing in the way of crime to think about for some time now, either. Watching true crime on Court TV and A&E didn’t
quite make it. Then there was the problem of the apartments, plural.
The new church was finished, or as finished as any church ever got, what with committees to worry about carpets and pews and
better glass for the windows, and Tibor had moved back into an apartment of his own, with a new little courtyard and a new
set of hyacinth bushes, behind it. Bennis was on tour, the first one she’d agreed to in five years. On an intellectual level,
Gregor knew that this was a professional necessity. Authors didn’t go out on tours just for the hell of it, since they were
apparently very confused and confusing things. Wires got crossed, bookstores didn’t get their copies of the books on time,
hotels had the wrong reservations, airplane tickets turned out to be for the wrong days to the wrong places. On an emotional
level, he was—he didn’t know what. It would have helped if he had understood what was going on in his relationship with Bennis
these days, but Bennis was not like Elizabeth. If Elizabeth was mad at you, she shouted at you until you surrendered. If she
was happy with you, she did little things around the house for you and made your favorite foods for dinner several times during
the week. Beyond that Elizabeth did not get too complicated, at least when it came to their marriage. There was mad and happy
and sexy on at least a few nights a month. That was it, until the cancer got her, and things got very complicated indeed.
But dying was complicated, Gregor thought. You couldn’t blame a woman for becoming complex and hard to unravel when she was
dying.

Bennis was complicated as a matter of principle. She was complicated about her morning coffee. She was complicated about her
shoes, none of which she liked, except for the clogs, which didn’t go with anything. Most of all, she was complicated about
their relationship to each other, which had none of the clean obviousness of what Gregor was used to in something “settled.”
Maybe it was just that Bennis did not consider them settled, while Gregor did. Gregor had tried to fix that by asking her
to marry him, but she’d gotten complicated about that, too, and now she was off in the Midwest somewhere, signing copies of
a book called Summer of Zedalia, Winter of Zed. Gregor had tried to read one of her books while she was away, but he couldn’t
do it. They were filled with fairies and trolls and elves and unicorns, and in spite of the fact that they were very well
written—even he could tell they were very well written—he couldn’t get into them. They were of different generations. Maybe
that was where all the complications came from. At any rate, his generation wanted realism, not fantasy. His generation didn’t
believe in ghosts or angels or the supernatural. His generation wanted the solidity that came from the laws of nature rather
than the laws of Nature’s God. He wanted to chalk it up to the fact that his generation had fought a war, but Bennis’s generation
had fought one too. They’d just gone about it oddly.

His hair was wet, and all the rubbing he was doing with the towel wasn’t making it any drier. The heat was on full blast,
as if it needed to be to guard against the ridiculous cold they’d been having week after week for a month now. He had left
his clothes over the top of the hamper: boxer shorts, trousers, undershirt, good white shirt. His socks and shoes were in
the bedroom. His ties were hanging from tie holders in the closet. There was a sweater laid out on the bed. He was working
very hard not to put on a tie for a day when he was doing nothing but hanging around Cavanaugh Street.

“Didn’t you ever wonder about Ozzie Nelson?” Bennis had asked him once. “I mean, he never went out of the house, and there
he was wearing a tie to sit in the living room reading the paper while the television was on.”

He put on the boxer shorts and the undershirt and the trousers and the shirt. He went into his bedroom and got the clean socks
he’d left on his night table. The message light was blinking on his answering machine. Someone must have called while he was
in the shower. It was Bennis’s idea to have the answering machine in the bedroom. Gregor thought it was completely nuts. What
was the point of an answering machine if it didn’t let you sleep through calls in the middle of the night?

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe they shouldn’t have tried living together, even temporarily. It had seemed like a good idea
at the time. It had even seemed necessary. Tibor was out of his apartment, since the place wasn’t structurally sound after
the church was bombed. He could take Bennis’s apartment while Bennis stayed with Gregor, which she did most of the time anyway.
But there was a real difference between staying the night almost every single night and actually moving in. There was a difference
in the way you felt about the way things were done and the places things were put.

He pulled on his socks, then reached onto the bed for his sweater, a good three-ply cashmere one from Brooks Brothers, Bennis’s
idea of a Christmas present. He sat down on the edge of the bed and pushed the play button to hear the message. If it was
Tibor saying he wasn’t up to going to the Ararat for breakfast, Gregor thought he would smash something.

“Mr. Demarkian?”

Gregor frowned. The voice was, sort of, familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

“Mr. Demarkian, I know it’s only six thirty in the morning, but I remember from when we met before that it’s best to get you
early. I hope I haven’t woken you up. I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Edmund George. Chickie. People call me Chickie.
We met a couple of years ago when you were consulting with the Philadelphia Police about the, you know, the murders connected
to the gay stuff. I’m sorry, it’s early in the morning and I haven’t had my shower yet. Anyway, that’s who I am.”

Gregor actually did remember him, and now he knew what it was that was odd about the voice. The Chickie he had met had been
a “flaming queen,” as John Henry Newman Jackman had put it, but not the kind who came by it naturally. It was as if he needed
to exaggerate an effeminacy he didn’t really have, as if it wasn’t enough to be “gay,” or even to be “out,” if you didn’t
throw it in everyone’s face in a way that they couldn’t possibly ignore it. The voice on the answering machine was not effeminate
in any way. If he hadn’t known something about Chickie already, he would not have automatically assumed that the man wasn’t
straight, or anything else but another guy with a Philadelphia tinge to his accent, the Italian street kind of Philadelphia
twinge. Gregor wondered what Chickie was doing now.

“Anyway,” Chickie was saying, “I don’t want to run out your machine and get cut off, or anything, but I’ve got a problem.
Actually, the organization I volunteer with has a problem. And I was thinking, you’re probably the best person in the city
to ask about it. So I was wondering if it would be okay if I came over and talked to you. I can come over right this minute,
if you want me to. I’m just going to step in the shower and wake myself up, but after that I could be at your place in twenty
minutes. I’m not all that far away. It’s the Justice Project I volunteer for, by the way, and it really is important. You
can call me back and leave a message on my machine if you want to see me right now, or call later or whatever. At your convenience.
I’m at 555–4720. Thanks.”

Gregor sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, thinking. The Justice Project. He’d heard a lot about the Justice Project
recently, because of… that was it, the Drew Harrigan drug thing. Gregor hadn’t paid much attention to it. He didn’t like men
like Drew Harrigan, no matter which side of the political divide they inhabited. Drew Harrigan, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken,
Michael Moore: here was another way his generation was not like Bennis’s, and not like this Chickie’s, either. He had no idea
when politics had become this angry, and this ugly, but he hated it instinctively. These days, he didn’t follow debates and
he didn’t read editorials. He figured out which of the available candidates came closest to his preferred political identification
of “a little common sense, please,” and voted for that.

He wondered why he was spending so much time thinking about “generations.” He wasn’t aware of feeling particularly geriatric.
He wasn’t particularly geriatric. Maybe Bennis was making him as complicated as she was herself. Maybe he’d start finding
it impossible to choose between the brown socks and the gray ones and have to resort to an investigation of the psychic foundations
of his attitudes toward color. He wasn’t being fair. He wanted Bennis to come back and start acting like herself again, meaning
like the self she’d been acting like before they had all gone to Massachusetts.

His bedroom windows were rattling in the wind. It was going to be another bad day in a string of bad days. He’d gotten to
the point of thinking of twenty degrees as “warmer.” Whatever else was going on with him, he was undoubtedly bored. It wouldn’t
hurt to take his mind off whatever it was it was on. It was significant that he didn’t know what it was on. He needed coffee.
He needed Bennis at home, where he could have a screaming fight with her and get it all over with.

He picked up the phone and dialed 555–4720. The voice on the answering machine tape not only had no trace of effeminacy in
it, it could have belonged to a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. That was a gift, Gregor thought. It had
to be very useful to be able to turn your voice into that wide a range of effects.

The screaming beep went off. Gregor said, “Mr. George? Yes, I remember you. If you’re really in that much of a hurry, I’m
going to be having breakfast at the Ararat restaurant on Cavanaugh Street from about seven thirty to eight thirty. Come on
by and talk to me. I’ll see you there.”

He hung up and stared at the phone. Then he reached for his shoes on the floor and put them on. Bennis was always telling
him he had to do something about his shoes, because they were too formal. He couldn’t imagine himself in a pair of running
shoes, or whatever they called them these days. He used to call them sneakers.

One of the first things they taught new agents at Quantico was to pick their spots. Don’t fight every battle. Don’t answer
every challenge. Don’t follow every lead. Maybe he needed to go back for retraining at Quantico. It was too bad they wouldn’t
have him, and he wouldn’t last a day without kicking somebody’s ass.

I
t was cold. It
was worse than cold. The temperature with the windchill was supposed to be something like minus twenty-five, and the windchill
was no joke, because the wind was no joke. By the time Gregor was standing on the steps in front of Fr. Tibor Kasparian’s
front door, his fingers felt cold enough to fall off, and he had them stuck into the pockets of his coat. His head was bare,
so the skin on his face felt as if it had already fallen off. At least, it had no feeling in it. His ears were entirely numb.
He rang the doorbell and heard a cascade of excited yips coming from the other side. This was new. It sounded like a dog.
As far as Gregor knew, Tibor didn’t have a dog.