Hardscrabble Road (37 page)

“I’m at the District Attorney’s Office and I’m not doing anything,” Gregor said. “It’s on Vine Street, do you know where that
is? If you’re going to take the bus, you can get here on the thirty-two, the thirty-three, and the seventeen. I think there
may be more.”

“If I’m coming there, I’m going to take a cab. You want me to come to the District Attorney’s Office?”

“No. There’s a little coffee shop on this block, right across the street from the front door here. I want you to go there
and wait for me. Or I’ll go there and wait for you. I want you to meet me there.”

“Why? This is not a criticism, Krekor, of course I will come. But is there a reason?”

“You’ve been listening to the news, you said. What did you think of Drew Harrigan’s widow?”

“Ah, the blond woman with the screechy voice. Her I did not listen to, Krekor, because she had such a screechy voice, it was
impossible to listen. Also, she is one of those people. She is profoundly stupid, so profoundly stupid that she lies when
it is not necessary, and if you listen to her you spend all your time trying to figure out where the truth is. There is no
point.”

“Yes, well. Listen, I’ll tell you all about it when you get here. Meet me at that coffee shop as soon as you can. Tell the
cabbie to take you to the DA’s Office and just walk across the street. I’ll be there. And yes, we could have this discussion
on the phone, but I need to get out of here before I go crazy. I’ll see you as soon as you can get here.”

“It will be about half an hour, Krekor. Traffic is like that.”

Tibor hung up. Gregor turned off his phone and folded it back into the even smaller shape it had to fit into his pocket. He
looked up. The receptionist did not seem to have noticed him making a call, or if she had, she didn’t seem to have heard what
he said. There was nobody else in the waiting room to hear. He felt a little silly. He wasn’t a prisoner. He wasn’t making
a break for it. It just felt as if he was. Even so, he waited, as patiently as he could, for fifteen minutes before he stood
up and went to the receptionist’s desk.

“I’m going to run across the street for some lunch,” he told her. “If Mr. Benedetti is looking for me, he can find me there.
I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The receptionist gave him a big smile and wrote it all down on a jumbosized Post-it note. Gregor turned his back to her,
walked down the hall, and pushed the button for the elevator. Nobody followed him. Rob Benedetti didn’t come careening into
view, demanding that he sit still and wait until they were off to do whatever it was they were supposed to do. Gregor almost
resented the ease with which he was able to get away. He’d only been sitting in that damned waiting room because Rob Benedetti
had said it was important.

The elevator hit the ground floor and let him out. He went through the plate glass doors to the street and only then remembered
what the day was like. The wind hit broadside, forcing up the hem of his coat until it billowed around him like a cape. He
saw a homeless man with his possessions in a shopping cart slip into the narrow alley between two buildings, so narrow he
thought the cart wouldn’t make it. Then he headed toward the coffee shop at a run. Philadelphia wasn’t supposed to be this
cold. The New England delegates to the Constitutional Convention had referred to it as a “Southern” city. He wondered where
homeless people found the carts they used to carry things around in. The most sensible answer was that they stole them from
supermarket parking lots, but there weren’t that many supermarkets in downtown Philadelphia, and supermarkets usually marked
their carts in one way or the other. He turned into the coffee shop and blessed whoever was to be blessed for the existence
of hot air heat.

T
ibor was five minutes
later than he said he would be, and by that time Gregor had managed to drink two cups of coffee and read an entire copy of
USA Today. He’d have bought the Inquirer, but he’d already seen it, or the New York Times, but there weren’t any left. His
only other choice had been the Wall Street Journal, and he wasn’t ready for that yet. Their editorials gave him headaches.
All this coffee was giving him a headache, too. From where he sat, he could see the street and the people going by on it,
bent against the wind, wrapped up in coats and hats and gloves. The Inquirer this morning had had a little advisory on the
front page, warning people that it wasn’t safe to go out without every inch of skin covered. Frostbite could happen faster
than you thought.

A cab pulled up outside, and the door opened, and a small man in a long black coat, black gloves, and three different-colored
scarves got out. Gregor watched as Tibor paid the cabbie and came across the sidewalk to the coffee shop. If he hadn’t known
Tibor for so many years, he would never have recognized him now. The scarves were red, yellow, and bright royal blue. The
bright royal blue one was pulled up over his mouth and nose, as if he were about to rob a bank.

Tibor came in, looked around, and spotted Gregor in one of the booths at the side. He came down next to the counter with its
chrome-accented swivel stools and threw his hat on the empty bench.

“Tcha, Krekor, it’s impossible. In weather like this there ought to be an emergency. Business should stop. The city should
close down. And then I see there are people on the street, living there in the cold. You did not wait lunch for me, Krekor?
I ate hours ago.”

Tibor unwound the scarves and put them on the seat, too. Then he took off his coat and hung it on the shiny rack that rose
up at the side of the booth. Then he sat down. The waitress was there in a flash. Gregor had the guilty feeling that she had
been hovering in the background for a while, watching him take up one of her booths without ordering much of anything. On
the other hand, there were plenty of empty booths. Nobody was being prevented from having lunch because he was there.

“Krekor?”

“Nothing,” Gregor said. “I’m having an odd day. I keep going into fugues. Could I have a Philly steak big meat with extra
cheese and some french fries? And, uh, water, I guess, and more coffee.”

“I will have only coffee, please,” Tibor said.

The waitress gave them both murderous looks, and stomped off. Gregor shook his head. “I forgot about the cold. I should never
have asked you to come out. I was just being held prisoner, or something. Rob Benedetti wants me around even if he has nothing
for me to do, and I was tired of waiting until he wanted to move.”

“I was getting tired of Hannah and Lida talking to me about wallpaper for the children’s center,” Tibor said. “They are good
women, Krekor, but they make everything into a production. Buy wallpaper in cheerful colors and make sure you can wash it
when children draw on it with crayons, what else do they need to know? But they have to discuss things. So there I was.”

“And now here you are. I’m glad you came. I thought you might provide a little insight where I need it. Did you hear any of
the news about the screeching woman at all? She came to the police and gave them a list of all the people she thought had
motive, means, and opportunity to kill her husband.”

“How does she know they had opportunity?”

“Good question. I expect that she’s just guessing. But the thing is, there’s the list, and she’s going on television to announce
it, and now we’re stuck taking the list seriously. But it’s an odd list. And there are a number of very odd people on it.”

“Like who?”

Gregor took a folded-up copy of the list from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it over. “Look at the fourth from
the top.”

Tibor counted down four, and blinked. Then he counted down four again, although why that mattered, Gregor didn’t know. Tibor
put the list flat down on the table and sat back.

“Well,” he said.

“Exactly,” Gregor said.

“Dr. Richard Alden Tyler,” Tibor said.

“I think people call him Jig.”

Tibor brushed this away. “Tcha, Krekor, what can I say? With some people it might only be a nickname, but with him it is an
affectation. Like that man in England, who gave up his title so he could sit in the House of Commons and pretend to be a member
of the working classes.”

“Tony Benn.”

“That’s right. Lord Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Or Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Lord Stansgate. Or something. I am sorry, Krekor, but
my memory is fuzzy. In both cases, it is an affectation. In Dr. Tyler’s case it is more than an affectation. It is a joke.”

“You don’t think Jig Tyler really believes the things he says politically?”

“I think that Dr. Tyler believes that the world is full of people so stupid they can be hypnotized by an advertising jingle,”
Tibor said. “He says he is a socialist, but that is not the case. He is not a socialist. He is a Platonist.”

“That’s a political party?”

“It’s a political attitude,” Tibor said. “The world should be ruled by philosopher-kings, because they are so much wiser than
the rest of us, and they will make good decisions for us because we cannot make good decisions for ourselves. This is the
real political divide in the world, Krekor. It’s not between conservatives and liberals or between left and right or between
Republican and Democrat or between capitalist and socialist. The real political divide in the world is between the people
who think that if you make a decision they think is stupid, you must be too stupid to make decisions, and the people who think
that every man has a right to make his own decisions about his own life. The second kind of people understand that we are
not free to make decisions unless we are free to make bad ones. It’s like seat belts.”

The waitress was back with Gregor’s sandwich and fries and a coffee cup for Tibor. The sandwich was the size of a small Tiger
shark and just as thick.
When they said big meat in this place, they meant it. They both sat back while the waitress returned to the counter for the
coffeepot. Then Tibor began putting sugar and milk into his coffee. He used a lot of both. Gregor thought he was going to
end up with a coffee milk shake, and more milk than coffee.

“Seat belts,” Gregor said helpfully.

“Yes,” Tibor said. “Seat belts. It is a very stupid thing to ride in a car without seat belts. There is nothing to be said
for deciding not to do it that would hold weight with any rational person. This is a fact, yes? But it is also a fact that
some people do not like to wear seat belts, and won’t wear them. So…is it a good thing to pass laws to require you to wear
them, or not?”

“We did pass a law to require us to wear them.”

“Yes, yes, Krekor, we did. But why? Because those of us who have come to the conclusion that not to wear seat belts is stupid
have no respect for the people who came to the opposite conclusion. We don’t need to treat them like adults who have a right
to make their own decisions. We instead treat them like children who have to be forced for their own good. That’s the key,
Krekor. Laws should never be passed to save people from themselves. When you begin to do that, you threaten to bring democracy
to an end.”

“You want to repeal the seat belt laws,” Gregor said, not sure he was understanding this.

“The seat belt laws are trivial, Krekor, the principle is not. Democracy rests on the principle that ordinary men and women
are fully competent to know their own best interests and make their own decisions about their own affairs. When we pass laws
against things people do that hurt only themselves, we say that democracy has failed. It didn’t work. Ordinary men and women
do not know what’s good for them, so we have to have smarter, more rational people force them to live in a sensible way. Seat
belt laws. The drug war. Laws against pornography in print and on the screen. Laws against giving birth control to unmarried
people. These proposals to tax people who are too fat or who won’t exercise or who insist on eating food like that,” Tibor
looked dubiously at Gregor’s sandwich, “rather than green salads with low-fat dressing. And Dr. Richard Alden Tyler, who would
legislate those things and a great deal more.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “we’re back to Jig Tyler. But I think you’ve been surfing the Libertarian Party Web site again.”

“No, Krekor, I don’t surf the Libertarian Party Web site. I do go to the Reason Foundation, which is run by serious people.
The Libertarian Party went off the deep end of ideology long ago. So did Dr. Tyler, only in the opposite direction.”

Gregor considered his sandwich, which, apparently, somebody wanted
to tax to keep him from eating. Or something. He took an enormous bite off the end of it and thought that Philly steaks were
the one thing he had really missed in all those years living in Washington. He missed them every time he went out of town,
too, because when people made them other places, they didn’t make them absolutely right.

“So,” he said. “I thought, since you were the only person I knew who had ever met him, you could tell me whether it made sense
to have Jig Tyler’s name on this list. If you thought he was capable of murder.”

“Most people are capable of murder, Krekor, under the right circumstances.”

“The kicker in that one is the ‘under the right circumstances.’ Most people will kill in self-defense, instinctively. A minority
of people will kill under the influence of alcohol or drugs just because they lose all inhibitions. I’m not talking about
situations like that. I’m talking about cold-blooded murder. Fill the pills with arsenic. Hand them over. Is he capable of
a murder like that?”

Tibor considered it. “Yes,” he said. “Under the right circumstances.”

Gregor threw up his hands.

Tibor shook his head. “No, Krekor, listen. Not that kind of under the right circumstances. When I met Dr. Tyler, we were on
a committee to set up a help service for new immigrants. It was a year and a half ago. The purpose of the committee was to
put in place a group of trained professionals who could help new immigrants with their problems with the immigration authorities,
with finding a place to learn English, with applying for naturalization, with finding employment, with dealing with regulations
if they want to start a business. The committee was put together by Reverend Kim at the Korean Baptist Church. His church
was helping many more people than it used to, because there have been many more refugees from North Korea in the last few
years. He looked around and saw a need, because many of the immigrants who come here do not come to existing communities and
must handle things on their own. He put out a call for help and money; he got lots of help and only a little money. Dr. Tyler
put in forty-five thousand dollars.”