Not a Creature Was Stirring (4 page)

He spied a gap in the stream of people and felt a little better. At least he was going to be able to get out. He wedged himself between a tiny grandmother in archaic black and a boy in Ralph Lauren Polo and headed for the vestibule.

Going toward the door, he began to wonder what would happen if he did something “really radical,” as his favorite niece would say—if he started singing Bob Dylan songs in his deep baritone voice, or talking in Armenian.

Madness.

Actually, Gregor thought a little later, climbing the stairs to the second floor and Father Tibor’s office, what was really madness was his state of mind. For the two years of Elizabeth’s last crisis and the two more that followed her death, he had had absolutely no interest in the work that had taken up most of his life. That had begun to change. Maybe it was because he was settled, with a real apartment and a real address. Maybe it was just a matter of time, and he was getting bored. Whatever the reason, he was feeling distinctly itchy—and in his itchiness, he was beginning to do some very strange things.

Now he did something that wasn’t strange at all. He poked his head through the door of the big room where he had once attended Sunday school. It had been divided up by slick new baseboard partitions, each hung with a green chalkboard and decorated with construction paper cutouts of the dove of peace. Gregor backed into the hall again. The older he got, the more depressed the world made him. The big things didn’t bother him so much. Crime and drugs, war and brutality—he’d read enough history to know all that had happened before and would probably happen again to whatever civilization replaced this one. It was the little things that made him crazy. When he’d been at Sunday school here, the room had been decorated with icons and the words on the blackboard had been in Armenian. What was in there now could just as easily have been part of a Methodist Church in Pederucah, Tennessee.

Gregor heard a sound on the stairs and looked into the well. The little priest was there, hurrying, the tattered hem of his day robe catching on the stair runner every few feet. Gregor made a mental note. He’d known from the sound of the voice on the phone that Father Tibor was an immigrant. The day robes told him Father Tibor was an immigrant from a Communist country. It was only in places where the Church was suppressed that the clergy still felt the need for religious dress.

Gregor leaned over the railing. “Father Tibor?” he called down.

“Yes, yes,” Father Tibor said, still hurrying. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m very sorry. I was coming right up, but Mrs. Krekorian was there at the bottom of the stairs—”

“I know Hannah Krekorian,” Gregor said.

Father Tibor looked up quickly and smiled. “Everybody knows Mrs. Krekorian,” he said. Then he raced the rest of the way up and emerged, puffing and red faced, on the landing. “There. I should have told you to go into the office and sit down. The door is open. It sticks a little.”

“That’s all right,” Gregor said. It was, too. He was beginning to feel as if he spent his entire life sitting down. “I was looking at all the renovations. You’ve done a lot of work around here.”

“Work,” Father Tibor said, as if there was something particularly nasty about that word. He brushed past Gregor and walked to the far end of the hall, to an old-fashioned door that had been newly painted black. Then he twisted the knob and pushed, hard.

“Mr. Kashinian had the office remodeled,” he said. “It was a very fine remodeling. It’s my own fault I can never get this door open.”

“Howard Kashinian?” Gregor said.

“That’s right.” Father Tibor nodded. The nod was vigorous, almost frantic—but everything Father Tibor did was almost frantic. “I keep forgetting. You grew up here. You would know these people.”

“What I know about Howard Kashinian is that he used to be the biggest juvenile delinquent on Cavanaugh Street. He got sent to the reformatory when he was twelve and his mother wore black for a year.”

Father Tibor’s face became a mask of infinite innocence. “There was a little contretemps with the Securities and Exchange Commission,” he said blandly, “but that was nearly two years ago, and the charges were dropped. Please come in.”

Father Tibor smiled. It was a smile with intelligence in it, and humor, and the acid of a tempered cynicism.

Well, Gregor thought, at least this is going to be interesting. And then, because he had been brought up to it and it’s never easy to get rid of what you have been taught in childhood, Gregor grabbed the handle of the door and motioned the priest to go in before him.

Father Tibor’s office was full of books—great floor-to-ceiling cases crammed until the wood cracked, great stacks scattered across the floor, small piles on chairs and tables and even an umbrella stand. Tibor had to clear a place for Gregor to sit. When he did, Gregor saw the books were in at least five languages, or maybe six. There were two books in Greek, but Gregor had the impression they weren’t in the same Greek. Was it really possible that this man read both ancient and modern Greek? It was an eerie thing, like being presented with the ghost of one of the desert Fathers.

Father Tibor sat behind his desk—he had to take a few books off that chair, too—and folded his hands. It was a classic priest’s pose, but Tibor couldn’t really look priestly. At his best, he looked like a scholar. At his worst, he reminded Gregor of the old men who had lined the halls outside the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the hottest days of the cold war.

“Well,” he said. He looked at the ceiling, and the floor, and his hands. “Well,” he said again.

“You wanted to ask me a favor,” Gregor prompted him. Tibor cleared his throat. “Well,” he said for the third time. “This is very hard for me to say. I told you this had nothing directly to do with the Church?”

“Yes, you did,” Gregor said. He didn’t say he didn’t believe it. In his experience, Armenian priests professed to believe that everything, even the shifting rules of sandlot baseball, had something to do with the Church.

“Well,” Tibor said yet again. “I don’t know if I should have put it that way. My English is still—I read well enough, but I don’t speak… precisely… all the time. I get… in my life, I’ve had to live in Russian and French and Hebrew and English and sometimes even Armenian. I get… confused.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I don’t wonder. I just lose my patience. Yes. Well. Maybe it would be easiest this way. Do you know a man named Robert Hannaford?”

Gregor hesitated. Hannaford. The name was familiar, but he couldn’t figure out why. He slid, automatically, into what he had been trained to do. Known criminals, suspected criminals, candidates for investigation: the list was appallingly long, but the name Hannaford was not on it. Hannaford wasn’t the name of anyone he’d known at the Bureau, either, or any of the victims of crimes still unsolved when he’d taken early retirement. God only knew, there was nobody named Hannaford connected to that last mess of a job he’d left unfinished to sit at Elizabeth’s deathbed.

Tibor swiveled in his chair, nearly fell out of it, and finally managed to retrieve two paperback books from the case behind his desk. He pushed them across the clutter to Gregor. This time, Gregor was really surprised. These weren’t theology, or history, or even literature with a capital
L
. They were sword and sorcery popular novels, complete with gold foil lettering and embossed unicorns.
Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia
, the closer one said. The other was called
Zedalia in Winter
. On that one, the author’s name was above the title, writ large: Bennis Hannaford.

“Bennis Hannaford,” Gregor said.

Tibor was bouncing up and down in his chair, making Gregor feel a little dizzy. “She’s one of the daughters,” he said. “The middle child, I think. Mr. Hannaford has seven children. This one is very successful, a best-seller all the time—”

“I’ve seen her books. They’re all over the newsstands.”

“They’re all over everywhere. And she has a brother, an older brother, and he runs the family business—”

“I remember,” Gregor said, jolting up a little in his chair. That was why he recognized the name—not from the Bureau, but from his life before the Bureau. “Hannaford of Engine House. They made their money in railroads. Rich people out on the Main Line.”

“Very rich people,” Tibor said, and then, “Protestant, of course.”

Gregor bit back a smile. If he knew anything about rich people—and he did; that was one thing a twenty-year stint in the FBI had done for him—the Hannafords were Protestant the way he was Armenian. It was part of the definition.

“Of course,” he said.

Father Tibor sighed. “I don’t suppose it matters in America. Religious pluralism, they call it. I’m having a hard time getting used to it.”

Gregor studied the old man, curious. “Is that what all this is about? Robert Hannaford being Protestant? Your note said—”

“Wait,” Tibor said.

“I’m, sorry.” Gregor settled into his chair, as well as he could. He was so big, and the chair was so small, he felt a little like a beach ball trapped in a paper clip.

Across from him, Tibor took in an immense breath, let it out again, seemed to count to ten in his head, and stood up. “I have talked to Lida Arkmanian,” he said. “She says you are a very famous detective.”

“Famous?”

“That you once had your picture on the cover of
Time
magazine.”

“Yes, Father, I did, but that was—”

“She said you were very intelligent. I think in this matter you are going to have to be very intelligent.”

“Why? What matter? Father—”

Tibor sat down again. “I have had a communication from this man Robert Hannaford. He came here to this office one day last week. He was in a wheelchair. He had a driver with him and he had to be carried up the stairs. But that was just because of his legs. He was not a weak man. Even at his age, over seventy, he is not a weak man. He’s not going to die tomorrow. Or next week. He must work himself very hard. The upper half of his body is—” Tibor made a wide motion with his hands and arms. “You see?”

Gregor didn’t see anything. Talking with Father Tibor Kasparian was like swimming in ink. It didn’t make any sense, and the world was dark. But this was a direct question, and one he could answer, so he did.

“That’s not so strange in America,” he said. “Disabled people here seem to go one way or the other. Either they give up entirely, or they become obsessive about building up what body they have—”

Tibor brightened. “As a method of control? Yes, that’s what I thought it was. All through our talk, I got the impression Mr. Hannaford was a man who loved to be in control—of himself, of me, of everything. It was not pleasant.”

“No,” Gregor said. “It wouldn’t be.”

Tibor drummed impatiently against the desk. “I don’t think this is a good man,” he said. “I’m not saying that just because he reminded me—reminded me of other things. I’ve had a very long life, Mr. Demarkian. It was a bad life, but I think this man was worse. He—I don’t know how to say it—it was as if everything he did was a he. Even the expression on his face, that was a lie. And yet, you know, I think he was telling me the truth, when he talked. The exact truth as he knew it. I don’t think he said anything false.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. This was something he understood. He’d met a number of people who fit this description when he’d been at the Bureau, and most of them hadn’t been on the criminal lists. Politicians were the worst, but they weren’t the only ones. Lobbyists, businessmen, the head of a large consumer-advocate group: acculturated psychopaths. No intelligent psychopath had to murder a dozen little old ladies to get his kicks. He could wreak far more havoc by going into government work.

Gregor didn’t think Tibor needed any of this explained to him. If he hadn’t already figured it out, it had to be because he didn’t want to. Besides, there were more immediately interesting things going on here.

“What did Robert Hannaford want with an Armenian priest?” he asked.

Tibor flushed, bright red. Gregor felt the ink seeping back into his life.

“Father,” he started, cautious.

Tibor waved him to silence. “No, no. You must understand. You are famous—”

“I am not—”

“Yes, you are. I’ve read the articles. Mrs. Arkmanian kept every one. I realize you are very modest—”

“Father, I am not modest. I’ve never failed to take credit for something I’ve done right in my life. And that
Time
magazine article—”

“Yes?”

Gregor felt himself hunching up. He’d always been uncomfortable about that damn
Time
cover. No, worse than uncomfortable. He was not a natural extrovert. Left to himself, he even tended to be something of a recluse. The first time he’d seen that magazine on a newsstand, he’d wanted to go home and hide in a closet. Permanently.

“It was when we were setting up the Behavioral Sciences Department,” he told Tibor. “That’s what I did most of my last eight years at the Bureau. I helped to coordinate investigations of serial killers. It was the serial killers
Time
was interested in, not me.”

“I read the article,” Tibor repeated, chiding.

“You should have read the one two years ago. That time, they called me an irresponsible son-of-a-bitch for walking out in the middle of a case just because my wife was dying.”

“That case never got solved. Maybe that’s what they were worried about.”

“I’m sure it was. And child murders are a particularly nasty kind of case not to get solved. But—”

“Stop,” Tibor said. He got up and walked to the window, a narrow bar of glass that looked out on an air shaft.

“I have read this Bennis Hannaford’s books,” he said after a while. “I like them very much. Whatever her father is, she is not the same. Do you see?”

“No.”

“He came here, and he sat in his wheelchair, and all the time I am thinking he has seven children, and maybe none of them are what he is. And he has a wife, who is very sick, and she spends her life doing good works. This I see in the paper all the time, too. He is—intent about his wife. And he comes here and talks to me, and he makes me an offer. A very strange offer. He takes out his briefcase and he opens it up, and inside he has money. One hundred thousand dollars in money. He counts it out for me, and then he asks me a favor, and he says if I do this favor the church can have this money.”