Gregor Demarkian had intended to be home when Tibor came back from the hospital. In fact, he’d been planning Tibor’s arrival for at least two days, going over and over in his mind what he wanted to say and what he didn’t, how to impart news of the investigation without saying the most pessimistic thing— which was that, since the police had the Tony Ross murder to worry about, they weren’t going to spend too much time on one little bombing that would surely turn out to be the work of a small-time brain-dead fanatic who committed hate crimes for the fun of it. Gregor wasn’t much in favor of singling out “hate crimes” from other crimes, or giving them harsher sentences, but he knew one when he saw it. Still, the simple thing was, the Philadelphia police had bigger things to worry about, even if Tony Ross had been murdered in Bryn Mawr instead of in the city. The feds were descending in droves, and so were the reporters. To paraphrase Bette Davis, it was going to be a bumpy ride. He was getting out of his tie and finding a sweater in the mound of sweaters the top of his bureau had become—Bennis, the most organized person in the world when it came to her work, went at the job of putting clothes away in drawers like a dyslexic Tasmanian devil on amphetamines—when the doorbell rang. He thought it was Bennis, home early, and for some reason he was able to get down the hall, across the living room and into the foyer without realizing that if Bennis was home this early, she’d been traveling at the speed of light, or faster. He had a sweater in his hand, but his shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest. He reached out to straighten the framed square picture of flowers he kept above his mail table next to the front door. Then he opened up, and found himself confronted by the most nondescript middle-aged woman he had ever seen in his life. She was shortish, no taller than Ben-nis. She was thickish, not exactly fat, but not slim, that odd solid that some women got at menopause. Her hair was grey and cut short. She was wearing no makeup. Her clothes looked like they’d been picked up at Price Heaven, but Gregor was willing to reserve judgment on that. These days, it could be very tricky to judge clothes. She held out her hand and said, “Mr. Demarkian? I’m Anne Ross Wyler. I’m Tony Ross’s sister.”
Actually, now that he knew, the resemblance was easy to see. She had the same high forehead and narrow, Grecian nose. To go along with them, she had enormous almond-shaped blue eyes. Gregor thought she had been pretty once, when she was young. She would be pretty still, if she took care of herself, which she obviously didn’t bother with. He stepped back to let her in. She walked into the foyer, shed her coat, and handed it to him. That’s when he saw the big round pin on her knit tunic, placed up near the left shoulder: Freedom FROM Religion.
She saw him looking at the pin. “Does it offend you? If it does, I’ll take it off. I don’t usually, but I’ve come to ask a favor. And I’m actually not quite so militant as all that.”
“No, no,” Gregor said. “That’s fine. I’m used to people who need to make statements, so to speak. I didn’t see you at the party the night Mr. Ross died, did I? I know we weren’t being introduced to each other at the end, and there was quite a crush, but somehow I think I would have noticed you.”
“Because of the clothes? I have very decent evening clothes in the back of my closet somewhere. I was debutante of the year the year I came out, according to some magazine or other, I don’t remember which. I probably still wouldn’t be wearing makeup, though.” She looked around the foyer. “Do you mind if I come all the way in? I’ve got a little problem and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Does the problem relate to your brother’s murder?”
“It might.”
“Then you ought to go to the police with it,” Gregor said. “There are two excellent officers on the case, Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner. I could get you their phone number.”
“I’d like to talk this out first, if you don’t mind. My instinct, under the circumstances, is to keep my mouth shut. Not because I give a rat’s ass about the gentleman involved, you understand, but because I’m afraid it might jeopardize my work, and my work—”
“Your work is what?” Gregor asked. “What do you do?”
Anne Ross Wyler looked surprised. “I’m sorry. I thought everybody knew. You must read even fewer newspapers than I do. I run a safe house for child prostitutes. Adelphos House.”
Gregor straightened up abruptly.
“You have heard of it,” Anne said. “We really do get a lot of publicity, on slow news days. It is almost impossible to find anybody who hasn’t at least run across our name.”
It wasn’t that, Gregor thought. Of course he’d heard of it before. He just hadn’t made the connection. From the first moment he’d heard of the explosion at Holy Trinity Church, hours after it happened, because when the church blew up he was busy witnessing the murder of Tony Ross, he’d been trying to find a connection, and now, out of the blue, here it was.
“I’ve heard of it around here,” he said. “One of the church groups was going to do volunteer work there. I’m not sure of the details.”
“And Father Kasparian came to see us on the night Tony was murdered, yes,” Anne said. “We’re always desperately in need of volunteers. We’ve got children living in the house. We’ve got a whole contact and ID thing going. We have to contact the families, even though many of them are abusive. Then we have to protect the girls when the families want them back.”
“Girls?”
“Most child prostitutes are girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen, yes. They learn to make themselves up in a way that the johns can make the excuse that they certainly looked eighteen. Although the johns know, of course. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I tend to lecture. Most people think of child prostitutes as eight-year-olds, and there is some of that, but not as much as the media might make you believe. Do you think we could go somewhere and sit down? I’m afraid I’ve had an exhausting few days.”
Gregor waved her toward the living room. She went in and looked around, without seeming to take much in. This was a woman who did not waste time on appearances. “Sit where you like,” Gregor said. “Would you like some coffee?”
He had those coffee bags that worked like tea bags. Bennis had bought them for him so that he could offer coffee to people while she was out, and not be in danger of killing somebody.
“I’d prefer tea, if you have any,” Anne said.
Gregor went into the kitchen and got the Red Rose. Then he put the kettle on to boil and took out two cups with saucers. If Bennis were here, she’d put the whole mess on a tray and bring it in like a maid.
Anne Ross Wyler appeared at the kitchen door. “Why don’t we just sit in here? You won’t mind, will you? I spend all my time at Adelphos House in the kitchen.”
“I won’t mind,” Gregor said. He was actually relieved.
Anne sat down at the kitchen table and looked around. “Very nice. We have a mutual friend, don’t we? Bennis Hannaford.”
“You know Bennis?” The kettle was already whistling. Gregor poured water into cups.
“She knew Tony better than she ever knew me,” Anne said. “I was better acquainted with her sister Anne Marie. That was a mess, wasn’t it? I do manage to read the papers some days. Maybe my problem is that I always read them on the wrong ones.”
Gregor put the cup with the tea in it in front of her place at the table. He put the cup with the coffee in it in front of a chair on the other side. He put down cream and sugar and spoons. He didn’t think Bennis could have asked any more of him, although Lida could have, and would have, if she hadn’t taken over the enter tea ceremony herself.
“Well,” he said. “Why did you come here instead of going to the police? And you do realize I’ll send you to the police, eventually. If you’ve got some information, you have to talk to them, whether you like it or not.”
“Oh, I know. And I do have some information, although possibly not the kind of information they’ve been looking for. One of the things I do, at Adelphos House, is take pictures of the johns.”
“The johns actually come to Adelphos House?’
Anne shook her head. She was going to let the tea steep until the water was black. “No, of course not. Some of the pimps do, to try to get the girls back, but not the johns. I go downtown, to the streets where the girls walk, and take pictures there. Of men at the doors of cars. Of men getting into cars. Sometimes even of men getting blow jobs in cars. I’ve got a telescopic lens, and I’ve got some equipment that’s supposed to make it possible to take pictures in the dark without a flash—which doesn’t work too well, for some reason, maybe because I don’t really understand how to use it. I can’t use a flash because it tips them off, and then they chase me.”
“I’ll bet,” Gregor said. “Have you been doing this for long?”
“Three years.”
“Then I’d say it was a damned miracle you haven’t been killed.”
“I don’t believe in miracles,” Anne said. She took the tea bag out of her cup, tasted the tea, and nodded. “Red Rose. Excellent. Where was I? Oh, yes. I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t believe in faith healing. I don’t believe in God. But most of all, I don’t believe in politicians who’ll talk for two hours about their deep commitment to religious faith and never say one concrete thing about what they’re going to do if they’re elected. I’ve made it my mission to get one politician in this city to come right out and say, ‘we’re going to start arresting the johns and prosecuting them.’ If he says that, I’ll sit still and listen to how his life turned around when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior.”
“Had a bad year with Philadelphia politics, did you?”
“With Philadelphia politics and the national kind, both. Don’t even get me started on the national prayer service after nine-eleven. Or faith-based social services, unless you’re talking about Catholic Charities. And yes, I know what the Catholics got caught doing less than five years ago. But then, I could go on and on about the fashion magazines and the movies too. Do you know what we’ve done, Mr. Demarkian? We’ve redefined beauty in women to mean a body type only found in human females at the start of adolescence. Grown women don’t have tiny waists and narrow hips, not usually. Eleven-year-olds do.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“I’m ranting.” Anne stood up. “Give me a second here.”
Gregor watched her as she went back into the living room. She fussed with her coat, which she’d left on the couch, and came back carrying a small manila envelope.
“Here,” she said, throwing the envelope down on the table. “Take a look at these. I took them the night Tony was killed.”
Gregor opened the envelope and drew out a thick stack of color photographs. They might as well have been black and white. He saw a car. He saw a girl who looked the way actresses did when they tried to look like children. He saw bits and pieces of a man’s body. A leg. An arm. Once or twice, he got the side of a face, but the pictures were blurry. He couldn’t make out the man’s features.
“The girl’s name is Patsy Lennon,” Anne said. “We first found her on the street about two years ago. She had just turned eleven. We’ve handed her off to child services half-a-dozen times. She hates foster care and runs away, or they try to reunite her with her family, which is a disaster. Her mother is a drug addict who turns tricks for dope, and she’s always got a pimp who wants Patsy peddling her ass. Patsy runs away and finds a pimp of her own.”
“The pictures of the man aren’t helpful,” Gregor said.
Anne laughed. “No, they’re not. I told you I was a lousy photographer. But I saw him with my own eyes. I saw him get into that car with Patsy Lennon. I saw him get a blow job from Patsy Lennon—”
“And you didn’t try to stop it?”
“I couldn’t have stopped it. I know. Back when I started, I wasted a lot of time trying to stop blow jobs. I got beat up a couple of times. But I saw him do it. And then he put Patsy back on the street and took off, and I followed him. I had the Adelphos House car and I followed him all the way out to my brother Tony’s house. Not that that was difficult, by the way. He wasn’t exactly tearing up the road.”
“Who is he?”
“His name is Ryall Wyndham. Or he says it is.”
“And you don’t believe him?”
Anne shrugged. “There are dozens of people like Ryall Wyndham all across the country, all across the world, maybe. They worship Jackie O. They desperately want to be part of Society, as if Society still existed in the way it did in the thirties. Oh, I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist at all. There are still in people and out people, and there is still ‘social standing,’ if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in. They’re interested, so they change their names and find some way to connect to the people they think are important—people like Charlotte, to be frank about it.”
“But why question the name?”
“Because Ryall is a family name. It’s a New York family name, not a Philadelphia one, but still. We all know each other. If he was really a Ryall, I would have heard of him.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “He paid a prostitute and then he drove out to your brother’s party and you followed him there. Which means he must have had an invitation to your brother’s party. Or am I being dense? Was he going to gate-crash?”
“No,” Anne said. “He definitely had an invitation. Charlotte wouldn’t leave him out. He’s a social columnist. He writes a column once a week, invoking the spirit of The Philadelphia Story.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” Anne said. “He went through the gates and I didn’t. I could have. The guard was Tony’s regular one, with some reinforcements in the background. He would have known who I was. I just, I don’t know. I didn’t want to be part of the fuss. When Ryall went through, the place was pretty close to deserted except for the guards, but then I sat there for a while and all sorts of people started showing up. There were a lot of cars on their way in. It was a huge ball. Charlotte was fund-raising for the UN. And then something odd happened. The guards closed the gates, even though there were cars there. Later on, I thought that that must have been when Tony was shot. At the time, I thought it might just be the first lady. I’ve been through security lockdowns like that, in my former life. I didn’t see any point to being part of it, so I took off. I came back to Adelphos House, and Father Kasparian had just left.”
“This Ryall Wyndham. Was he driving himself, or was he being driven?”
“Oh, he was driving himself. I don’t think anybody would let his driver take him to a prostitute. Or maybe they would. To me, it’s like asking to get convicted. You’re giving the prosecution an eyewitness.”
“I see what you mean,” Gregor said. He hadn’t touched his coffee. By now, it was probably cold. “Do you think this is connected? Ryall Wyndham’s encounter with a prostitute and your brother’s murder?”
“I have no idea. At first, I wondered if Wyndham was what Hemingway called a pilot fish, one of those people who scope out the territory so that the rich people won’t have to take too many risks. That maybe one of the people in that group was looking for fresh meat, so to speak. And maybe that’s it.”
“Do you think it was your brother Tony?”
“Good Lord, no. It’s not sisterly affection, Mr. Demarkian, it’s just that I knew Tony. He channeled his sex drive into his work. He was one of those people. Charlotte used to complain about it, but always in code. God, all those people talk in code.”
“You’re one of those people.”
“True,” Anne said. “But I made my escape. Anyway, I just wanted to tell somebody this, and I’ll tell the police if you want me to. I really don’t understand the relevance it has. I’m only sorry I didn’t get better pictures. The police won’t arrest the johns, and as long as they don’t, the prostitution will continue. Sometimes, if you get evidence against somebody prominent enough, you can get it into the media and then the police have to pay attention, at least for a little while. My Holy Grail is a crackdown on the johns only. I’m not going to find it.”
She gathered the pictures up in a stack again. Gregor looked at the face of Patsy Lennon, who was supposed to be thirteen years old. She didn’t look thirteen years old. She looked forty-two. Anne put the pictures back in the manila envelope.
“They get old fast,” she said. “Patsy will have to move on to rougher trade in another year. I’m not kidding myself that I’m somehow going to save her. Most of them don’t get saved.”
“Then why do you do what you do?”
“Because it called to me,” Anne said. “And don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t. I just woke up one morning next to my husband, who was a perfectly nice investment banker who’d become completely convinced that poor people were delinquent adolescents who had nobody to blame for their misery but themselves, and my entire life suddenly seemed completely ridiculous. Then about two days later, I found myself paying twenty-thousand dollars for an evening gown to wear to the April in Paris Ball in New York, and the whole thing was so asinine, I couldn’t keep a straight face. I had to have them messenger the damned dress to me, because I couldn’t stand to touch it. So I hacked around for a little while and landed back in Philadelphia and started Adelphos House. You can do a lot of things with trust funds.”
“Obviously.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “Write down the names of those detectives and I’ll call them.”
Gregor Demarkian waited until he saw Anne Ross Wyler emerging from his own front door onto Cavanaugh Street before he admitted to himself that he was just too jumpy to sit still, and then he spent two straight minutes trying to talk himself out of doing what he had been thinking of doing for the past four days. Crime scenes had to be kept clean, he knew that. The question was whether or not Holy Trinity Church was a crime scene. The church board had been given permission to go in and look around. Plans were already underway for rebuilding, if you could call tearing the place down and putting up something entirely new on the same spot “rebuilding.” Whatever. At least it would be a church and not a new apartment building or a water-treatment plant or whatever it was they committed urban renewal in the name of nowadays. Ca-vanaugh Street didn’t need to be renewed. It didn’t even need to be cleaned. At least once a week, the older women and the women who had just come from Armenia went out and hosed down the sidewalks. It wasn’t the famous scrubbing the Swiss were supposed to do, but it did insure that debris didn’t collect in the gutters and that the sidewalks were clear of the sort of stains dogs left in spite of the pooper-scooper law. He was, he thought, avoiding the issue, as he almost always avoided the issue these days. He found it much easier to deal with the death of Tony Ross than he did the destruction of Holy Trinity Church. The death of Tony Ross was both sensible and explicable. At the end of the day, they would find one of the usual suspects: a disgruntled employee; a jilted lover; his wife. Maybe his wife had hired a hitman. From what Gregor had seen of Charlotte Deacon Ross, he wouldn’t put it past her.
He got his coat out of the foyer and went downstairs. Tibor still wasn’t back from the hospital, and nobody was in Bennis’s old apartment on the second floor. Grace was still playing upstairs. This time, it was music he couldn’t identify at all, although since she played with a chamber group that specialized in Baroque, he expected it was some of that. He got down to the first floor and saw that there was a note on old George Tekemanian’s door asking the old man to call Sheila Kashinian as soon as he got in. That was new since Bennis had dropped him off. Gregor wondered what Sheila Kashinian wanted, besides a new fur coat every fall and a vacation in the Bahamas every winter. It was remarkable how predictable people got as they got older. He wondered if it had happened to him as well.
Out on the street, he didn’t feel depressed, or pessimistic, or frightened. If you face your fears instead of run from them, they’ll be easier to bear, his mother used to say, when he was growing up on this very street, in the days when the buildings were all divided up into tiny apartments and most people’s parents spoke English badly and never at home. He turned up the street toward the church and the Ararat. He still went to the Ararat for breakfast every morning. That meant he’d been passing the church at least twice a day since the explosion happened. He’d been passing it on the other side of the street, deliberately, in a way he never would have only a month ago. It was too bad he hadn’t been on the bomb investigation squad at the Bureau. He’d had the standard training in explosives, but that had been in his training year, and after that he’d never had any cause to use the information. Use it or lose it. Bennis said that about something other than information.
He got to the church and crossed the street so that he could stand on the sidewalk directly in front of it. The yellow barrier tapes were still up, warning him of danger and the illegality of trespassing. He stepped over the one nearest to him and walked up the shallow steps to what used to be Holy Trinity’s front door. That was gone, and so was the wall that had divided the vestibule from the sacristy. He could look right down the center aisle to the altar. The pews were covered with junk. The roof was only half standing. Near the front to his right, it had caved in entirely. Toward the middle on the left side, there was a large hole like a ragged skylight. Rain had come through it and spread water stains across the pews.
He was thinking that it would not be ridiculously dangerous if he walked up to the altar and assessed the damage for himself, when he realized he was being watched. There was somebody behind him, staring at him. In the worst-case scenario, it would be a reporter—but there wasn’t really any danger of that. As long as the Tony Ross case was front-page news, very few reporters would bother with coming down here. In the best-case scenario, it was somebody from the street, maybe one of the Very Old Women, waiting to lecture him on taking foolish chances. He turned around to see who was stalking him and stopped, confused. The person standing on the sidewalk in the place he had just left was nobody he had expected at all.
The man who was standing behind him was very tall, and very broad, and very tired—tired in the way only immigrants are tired, with that bone-weary defeatedness that comes from struggling every day to do the very simplest things. Gregor was sure he’d seen him before, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember where. He was sure he wasn’t one of the new Armenian refugees Tibor and the women of Holy Trinity found room for every week. The man saw Gregor watching him and shifted slightly on his feet. He was wearing a heavy jacket that was worn at the hems and the elbows but still serviceable, the kind of thing that had been expensive once because of its utility, not its elegance. Gregor cocked his head.
“Yes?” he said. “I wasn’t going to disturb anything, if you were worrying about that. I was just looking around. I suppose I shouldn’t have been.”
“You are Mr. Gregor Demarkian?” the man asked.
“That’s right.” The accent was indecipherable, Gregor thought—not Armenian, surely. Possibly Russian. Possibly from one of the old Soviet Republics. “Can I help you?”
“I am Krystof Andrechev,” the man said.
Gregor thought—yes, right, Russian.
“I have now the store there.” The man jerked his head down the road.
Gregor brightened. Now he knew where he’d seen him before. “The newsstand? The one Michael Bagdanian used to own?” Gregor never went in there. He had his paper delivered, and he didn’t read magazines unless Bennis subscribed to them or he got stuck in an airport.
Krystof Andrechev shifted again. “Yes. I have bought this store from Mr. Bagdanian. I have—you will come with me, please? I have now in my store something, something—” Gregor didn’t know if he was straining for words or for courage, but whatever it was, he didn’t find it. “I have now in my store a very large problem, a difficulty. You will come with me, please, and see this thing?”
“Sure.” Gregor came back down the front steps and stepped back over the yellow barrier onto the sidewalk. “Are you all right? You look—”
“I am upset,” Krystof said. “I am also angry. I do not know what to do about this, and I am being afraid it will make me—make me—” He threw his hands into the air, frustrated. They were walking down the street toward the newsstand. Gregor could see some of the women looking out their windows at what was going on—after all, Krystof was their mystery man at the moment. They all said he never talked, and wondered who he was, and where he came from. Now that they’d seen Gregor with him, he’d never get any peace.
“I am hearing that in this country you trust the police, but I am not sure this is sensible. I am not sure. You understand?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I do understand. If you want my opinion, you should usually trust the police, but you should always make sure you’ve got your ass covered.”
“Ha.” Krystof smiled, and stopped moving. They were at the front of the store. It was shuttered as if he had closed it for the night. It was also locked. “Covering my ass, yes. This is what I was looking to do. I was not sure how it could be done. I go for a walk. I see you standing there. You are an investigator, no?”
“No,” Gregor said firmly. “I work as a consultant for police departments on homicide—murder—cases, when I’m asked.”
“Fine. You know the police. They know you. Everybody here—” Krystof looked around Cavanaugh Street. “Everybody here thinks you are a good man. So with you I cover my ass. I do not know who this woman was. I never see her before. Come inside.”
Krystof finished unlocking the door and swung it back on its hinges to let Gregor in. When they were both in, Krystof shut the door and locked it again.
“I do not want somebody coming in,” he said. “It would be dangerous. See there on the counter next to the cash register.”
Gregor went to the counter. Even in the gloom, it took no time at all for him to see what Krystof Andrechev was worried about, and to think that, if it had been him, he would have been worried too. The gun in front of him was enormous, black and polished and deadly-looking—a .357 Magnum, possibly, or one of the knockoffs that had flooded the black market a few years ago.
“Good God,” he said. “What are you doing with that thing? Do you have a permit for it? Having something like that in a neighborhood like this can be—”
“No, no. You do not understand. This is not my gun. I own no gun. This she left here, this woman who came today. I have not touched it. Not once. Not even with a handkerchief.”
“What woman?”
Krystof shrugged. “An old woman. Nothing much. Past the time of being pretty but not, what do you say, not hunched over. Not near dead.”
“Middle-aged,” Gregor said.
“She comes in maybe two hours ago. There is nobody in the store. She comes up to me and asks me if I know what is going on in this neighborhood. Of course I know what is going on in this neighborhood. The women are bringing food to each other all the time, up and down the street, day after day. It is very strange not everybody here is very fat.”
“That’s a point,” Gregor said.
“I do not answer her,” Krystof said, “except I make a noise, you know. I do not say words. I do not like to talk much because my English is not good and my, what do you call it, my voice—”
“Accent.”
“Accent, yes. It gives me away. I did not know, when I came here, that everybody would be from Armenia.”
“They’re not. Most of them were born in the United States. What do you have against the Armenians?”
“I have nothing against anybody. But I am from Russia, and Russia and Armenia have not always been, what is it? Allies.”
“True enough. I doubt if anybody here will care.” This was not exactly accurate. The Very Old Ladies might care, but they might not, since their enmity was still fixed on the Turks.
“So,” Krystof said. “She comes, and I say nothing, and she talks. She talks for a long time. About how here on this street they worship the Devil. They worshiped the Devil in this church up here where the explosion was. I know this is not true. This is only an Orthodox church. I think she is very stupid and very ignorant, and I wish her out of my store, but I say nothing. Even hello and good-bye I mostly do not say to the people who come here.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I’d heard about that.”
“It is no wish to be unfriendly. I am only ashamed of the way I talk. So I do not talk, and this lady hands me these things.” Krystof went around behind the counter, rummaged underneath it, and came up with a stack of papers and magazines.
Gregor recognized the paper on the very top. It was another copy of The Harridan Report. Gregor wondered which one it was. Krystof handed the stack across to him, and he took it. Right under The Harridan Report—an edition he hadn’t yet seen, he was sure—was America Fights Back. Gregor would have thought it was one of those hyperpatriotic throwaways that had been everywhere after the September 11 attacks, except that under the title there was smaller lettering: Against the New World Order.
“You know what these things are?” Krystof said.
“I’ve seen similar things, yes,” Gregor said.
“I have looked them over,” Krystof said. “After she left and I locked up the store, I sat down to think for a while and then I looked them over. I read a little. They are insane.”
“Yes,” Gregor agreed. “They are insane.”
“We have something like this in Russia after the government falls. Everything is a plot. Everything is the KGB. But nothing like this—reptiles. Thinking people are reptiles.”
“What?”
“So she puts them on the counter, and then next to them she puts this gun. There is nobody else in the store, you understand? There is never anybody in the store at this time of day, and now she is there and she puts the gun on the counter and the first thing I think is she is trying to rob me, but I am not afraid. She is a small woman. I do not think I will have trouble getting rid of her.”
“And?”
“And she says I should not be afraid, the gun is for me. To protect myself. Against these people here on this street, who worship the Devil, or think they worship the Devil, because she knows that I know it is really something else. They are really agents—spies—for something else. It’s not a word I have heard before.”
“The Illuminati?” Gregor suggested.
Krystof’s face cleared. “Yes, that is it. You know this? It is not a word that makes sense to me. This is an organization of terrorism you have here a problem with?”
“No,” Gregor said firmly. “This is a paranoid delusion some people obsess about. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“If you could maybe talk a little slower,” Krystof said.
“Yes, I am sorry. She just came in here and laid down the gun? Just like that?”
“I am afraid the police will not be believing me,” Krystof said, “but that is what she did, yes. She is talking the whole time, about this word I don’t remember again, about the New World Order. I know that. We have that in Russia. About how this here on this street is full of spies or saboteurs or, I don’t know. She talks and talks.”
“And she leaves the gun.”
“Right there,” Krystof said. “I did not touch it. Not even one time. Not even with my little finger. I just leave it there and then I lock up and try to think what to do. Then I go out for a walk to go on thinking because of the air, and I see you in the church, and I think you will know. I have read about you in the People magazine.”
Gregor did not want to discuss People magazine. He looked at the gun again, wishing he was better at identifying firearms. That was another sort of information he hadn’t had much use for after training, and had no use for at all since his retirement, even when he worked as a consultant. That was why police departments had crime labs.
“I think,” Krystof said, “that if I do not do the right thing, I have much trouble. There are many who believe that all Russians are gangsters. Yes? We are not the Mafia, but people think so. So I think I have to do something smart, and then I see you. I go out after I locked up, but I do not see this woman anymore. She is not a woman from the street here that I know. She is never before coming into the store.”
Gregor looked down at the stack of material in his hands. There was a publication from something called Conspiracy Digest entitled “The Bush Crime Family.” There was material from something called A-albionic, whatever that was supposed to mean. The A-albionic material looked as if it had been printed out from a Web site. “Origins of the Modern Conspiracy to Rule The World,” it said and “Mystery of Masonry’s Origins Solved?”
“Freemasons,” Krystof said wisely. “We have too, in Russia, people who are afraid of the Freemasons. Here, I meet many Freemasons. They are nice men. They ask me to join their lodge, because I am now a member of the community. This is not for the United States, do you understand? This is nonsense for backward people.”
“We’d better call the police,” Gregor said. “If you’ve got a phone, I can—”
Krystof reached under the counter and came up with a phone. Gregor put the magazines and publications down and took the phone instead.
“It is only to prove,” Krystof said, “backwardness and ignorance are everywhere. Stupidity is everywhere. There is no escape. But I do not touch the gun. I am not an idiot.”
Four hours later, Gregor was finally free of the newsstand and Krystof An-drechev. If it hadn’t been for the help of John Jackman, it would have taken much longer, and been accompanied by the kind of public circus that brings crowds out of their apartments at every hour of the day or night, little knots of people gathered across the street or down the block from the immediate action, huddled against each other because they forgot to bring their coats, intense. With John’s help, he got an unmarked car and two detectives who were probably assigned to the case. It startled him to realize that he hadn’t paid enough attention to know who was handling the explosion at Holy Trinity Church. He had John Jackman to ask for information. John got him better information that he would ever get out of the officers in charge, unless he had been hired on as a consultant, which he would not be in this matter. He wasn’t really a suspect in the murder of Tony Ross, in spite of the fact that he’d been at the party. Tony had been killed by a bullet from someplace down the drive and into the night. He’d been behind in the big ballroom with a crystal bowl of paté in his hands. He could be a suspect in the explosion of Holy Trinity Church. He lived here. He knew these people. For all the police knew, he could be carrying grudges, harboring resentments, going crazy.
By the time the detectives were ready to go, it was dark. The streetlights were on all up and down Cavanaugh Street. When Gregor walked out onto the sidewalk, he could see the glow that meant the Ararat was all lit up and streaming light out its plate-glass window. In a little while, the lights would be dimmed and candles would be set out for dinner. The Ararat liked to exude “ambience” in the evenings. He looked back at Krystof calmly locking up and the detectives getting back into their unmarked car, the gun nowhere in sight. One of them was checking something in his notebook. The other was staring out into space, making eye contact with nobody. Gregor remembered that from the Bureau. It was what you did when you were gathering evidence or arresting someone while being watched by a hostile crowd.
Gregor had been free to go half an hour before. He had only hung around to make sure Krystof was all right. Gregor was not somebody who assumed that the police in every city were automatically corrupt or automatically racist, but he had been around long enough to know that some of them were both. These two had turned out to be only efficient. They had insisted that Krystof Andrechev give them his fingerprints. They had not insisted that Gregor give them his, but only because Gregor’s were already on file with the department. At least they hadn’t panicked, or arrested anybody. Gregor had a hard time understanding who they would have arrested or for what, but when cops got spooked, it could have been anybody for anything.
Gregor went back down the street to his own building. This time, he did not crane his neck and twist his body around to see if he could see what was left of Holy Trinity Church. He went up the front steps and into the vestibule. He made note of the fact that the door to old George Tekemanian’s ground-floor apartment had no light coming out through the peephole and remained firmly shut. Sometimes, when old George was at home, he left the door open a crack so that he could catch anybody coming in from outside. Old George was not worried about burglars. He was worried about company. Gregor paused to listen, but Grace was no longer playing the harpsichord way upstairs. He wondered if she had a performance this evening. Bennis and Donna had taken him once—and Russ too—to one of Grace’s groups performances. It had been held in an enormous pseudo-Gothic room in a university downtown, and Gregor had found himself both enjoying the music and being annoyed by the setting. He hated “college Gothic,” the way he hated Tudor houses on the Main Line. Neither the Goths nor the Tudors had ever had anything to do with America. They certainly hadn’t left buildings there. Why, Gregor wondered, did people so often choose to be fake when it was actually easier to be authentic?
He went up the stairs to the second floor, to the apartment he still thought of as Bennis’s. He raised his hand to knock, but before he could the door opened in front of him and Grace Feinman was standing before him, looking flushed.
“Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “We’ve all been wondering where you’d gone. It’s just Father Tibor here now. And me.”
“Where did Bennis go?” Gregor stepped into the apartment’s foyer and looked around. It was exactly like his foyer, one floor above, and exactly like Grace’s, one floor above that. This building had been converted into three identical floor-through condominiums with a fourth, a little smaller, on the ground floor. It was not the kind of place Gregor normally thought of as “condominiums.” “Condominiums” sounded like modern, concrete things with too many hard primary colors and shiny surfaces pretending to be modern art.
“She went to park the car,” Grace said, closing the door behind Gregor as he walked in. “She left it parked somewhere or the other again, and she had to put it back in the garage. If I had a car that expensive, I’d probably bronze it and not drive it at all. Except that I’d never buy a car that expensive. If I got that much money in place, I’d buy another harpsichord, or have one made, or maybe I’d buy an antique. It would be wonderful to have one of the really important harpsichords, like the pieces we use when we make disks.”
Gregor had gone into the living room, which was covered with Bennis’s pa-pier-mâché models of Zed and Zedalia. Everything in the room was Zed and Zedalia. Bennis owned the original art from all her covers. She also owned the signing posters from all of her book tours. All these were framed, and on the walls. Tibor was sitting in an enormous black leather chair next to the big window that looked out into the street, and directly across to Lida Arkmanian’s second-floor living room. The coffee table was piled high with food.
Gregor walked around the back of the couch and sat down, close enough so that Tibor wouldn’t have to raise his voice too far to be heard. Tibor did not look well. He didn’t look ill, exactly. Gregor knew there was nothing physically wrong with him. The brick that had hit Tibor on the night of the explosion had only grazed his shoulder. It had created a nasty bruise, but no lasting or serious damage, like a concussion. Tibor had been passed out cold when the police reached the scene, but the doctors thought that was shock. It wasn’t an injury to the head. There hadn’t been a trace of hematoma anywhere on his scalp.
“So,” Gregor said, patting Tibor on the knee. “You look terrible. Were the women too much for you?”
Tibor shrugged. “The women were the women. They brought food.”
Gregor and Tibor both looked at the huge mess spread across the coffee table.
“They brought more than this,” Tibor said. “It is in the kitchen, in the refrigerator and on the counters. They even brought Pringles and Cheez Waffies.”
“What on earth are Cheez Waffies?”
“They’re the round ones with the two waffle-looking wafers making a sandwich with the fake cheese,” Grace said helpfully.
“It doesn’t matter what they are,” Tibor said. “You wouldn’t like them. I’m just tired. I can’t get over being tired. The doctor said this is probably psychological.”
“It probably is,” Gregor said.
“Yes. Well, Krekor, psychologically I am tired. And we have the Sunday coming up. We need to celebrate the liturgy. I do not like the idea of this neighborhood going to another church on Sundays. It might give the bishop the idea that we don’t need a church here.”
“If you don’t want them to go, they won’t go,” Gregor said.
Tibor nodded. He did not ask Gregor why Gregor had not been at the apartment to meet him. He did not make an effort to see what was going on in Lida’s living room, or on the street. He just sat, and the longer he sat, the more alarmed Gregor became.
“You know,” he said. “It doesn’t make much sense to brood on it. The world is full of nuts. It really is. There’s not much any of us can do about it. Oh, I know, every time there’s a disaster people start insisting on precautions. Look at what happened after September eleventh. Half the country was willing to shred the Bill of Rights to be safe from terrorists. You can’t make them understand that nothing will ever make us safe from terrorists. Or from nuts of any kind. Even the Israelis aren’t completely safe from terrorists, and they take the best and most sensible precautions on the planet—”
“No,” Tibor said. “There’s something else.”
Gregor took a deep breath. “What?”
Tibor glanced at Grace. She had her back to them, fussing with something on the occasional table that sat against the narrow piece of wall between the foyer and the living room’s entry to the kitchen. Maybe there was food there.
“Grace,” Gregor said. “Do me a favor, will you?” He reached into the pocket of his pants and got his keys. “Run up to my place and get my copy of Anderson’s Guide to Forensic Pathology. It’s lying on the desk in my room, under some other things. To the left of the computer. Look around and you’ll find it.”
“Oh, all right,” Grace said. She took the keys. “Are you sure I’ll need the keys? I never lock up anymore except when I’m leaving the building.”
“I’ve got the door on automatic lock,” Gregor said.
“Why do we need this book about pathology?” Tibor asked, as Grace rushed through the foyer and out onto the landing. They both heard the door snick shut behind her. “I do not much like forensics in any form, Krekor. It makes me ill.”
“It gets her out of the apartment for a good five minutes, which is what it’s going to take to unearth that thing,” Gregor said. “So tell me what’s wrong.”
Tibor reached into his suit jacket and came out with an envelope. It was an ordinary white envelope, “business”-sized as they used to call it when Gregor was in school. Tibor put it down on the coffee table between them, balancing it against a big bowl of tiny meatballs with toothpicks in them.
“There was this that came the day the explosion happened,” he said. “It is not the first one. I threw the other ones out.”
Gregor picked up the envelope and took the letter from it. It was a very short letter, typed on a computer, a little smeared by a printer that seemed to be malfunctioning.
Priest of Satan, the letter said. Don’t think we don’t know what you are. Don’t think we don’t know what you’re doing. We’ve seen the bodies of the infants you killed. We know you cremate them in the basement of that hellhole you call a church. We know that you fuck children there night after night, stick your filthy prick up their anuses until they scream. We’ve heard their screams. We won’t let them go unre-venged.
Gregor stopped reading. “What the hell?” he said.
Tibor shrugged. “They came for three weeks. At first a few days apart. Then almost every day.”
“And you didn’t tell anybody?”
Tibor slammed his palms on the arms of his chair. “I do not want to sound like a fool,” he said. “It’s not the first time. We have had such letters before, Krekor, they come on and off, people don’t understand what we are. They don’t know about the Orthodox churches. They know only about Protestants and Catholics. So they get confused.”
Gregor looked down at the letter again. Don’t think you’re going to get away with it forever. We’re watching you. We know how to put an end to the evil you’ve brought to this city and this country. We know how to put a stop to you, and we aren’ttoo timid—or too cowed by the law that you’ve got in your own Satanic pocket—to take the measures we need to take to stop you. We are coming.”
“This,” Gregor said, “is a threat. It’s an immediate threat of imminent physical violence.”
“Yes, Krekor, I know. I should have done something about it. I should have showed it to you. I didn’t want to.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because I didn’t want you to go to the police.” Tibor shook his head. “Krekor, please. It did not occur to me that anybody would actually commit any real violence. You see this sort of thing on the Internet all the time. Mostly, it does not get physical—”
“Except that this wasn’t on the Internet. This was sent directly to you.”
“Yes, I know. But still. And then I worried about the obvious. That people would believe what these things said.”
“Believe that you were sacrificing infants to Satan?”
“No, Krekor. Believe that there was some truth in the other things. That there was sex going on at Holy Trinity. That is not so far-fetched an accusation, is it? Think of what happened with the archdiocese in Philadelphia, and then in Boston too, hundreds of children, dozens of priests, all involved in—in—”
“Those were the Catholics,” Gregor said firmly.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tibor said. “It doesn’t matter that you and I know that nothing like that has ever gone on at Holy Trinity. It doesn’t matter that the whole neighborhood knows. The mud would fly and the mud would stick, out there, in the city, no matter what we did to clean it up. And then I thought that maybe that was the point. That whoever sent this expected me to go right to the police, and then when I did the contents of the letters would be aired in the press, and the reputation of the church would be destroyed. So I threw them away.”
“Okay,” Gregor said.
“Now I am thinking that maybe I brought this on us myself,” Tibor said. “That if I had done what I was expected to do and gone to the police, the church would still be standing. That they only blew up the church because the other thing, the thing with the letters, was not working. It was very wrong of me, Krekor. It was a matter of self-regard, and self-protection, and that is not what a priest with a congregation should do.”
“Okay,” Gregor said again, trying to think. “But you kept that one. Why did you keep that one? Why didn’t you throw it away?”
“I—it was different. More abusive. And by then they were coming every day, and I thought I should now maybe show them to you. That one frightened me. It used, what do you call it? Not curse words. Anglo-Saxonism, you know. Bad words like that, where the others hadn’t. And there was the direct threat. And I couldn’t make myself throw it away, so I put it in this pocket and I went out to Adelphos House and when I got back to Cavanaugh Street it was still there. And then the church blew up.”
Gregor got up. His head hurt. Tibor was not entirely wrong about what would happen to the church’s reputation, or his own, when the contents of this letter got out—and they would get out. “You can’t throw that one away,” he said carefully. “Not now. It’s evidence in a crime, or it might be. Maybe I can take it straight to John Jackman and see if he can keep the contents private, at least for the time being—”
“Oh, Krekor.”
“The time being may matter a great deal. If it turns out this whole thing was orchestrated by one of the nut groups, the press will concentrate on the nut group. And I should think it’s inevitable that that’s what happened. The next most likely thing is that this was the act of a single deranged individual. All we have to do is to show that he’s made similar threats to other people before. The public isn’t completely cynical, Tibor.”
“Not cynical, no,” Tibor said, “but jaded. And you can’t blame them. Those things did happen, in the Catholic archdiocese, and in other churches as well. Sometimes I think that is the only religious news I read anymore, the sex molestation cases. Except for the politics, you understand, where some pastor somewhere is burning books. It’s as if the whole world has gone insane, and not just since September eleventh. People no longer have common sense.”
Gregor thought that people never had had much in the way of common sense. In his experience, common sense was less common than genius, because even geniuses didn’t usually have it. He folded up the letter, put it back in its envelope, and put the envelope into his own jacket pocket.
“I’ll call John about this right away,” he said, thinking that John Jackman was going to start regretting the fact that he’d given Gregor his private cell phone number. “We’ll do this the very best way we can. But for goodness sake, if you get any more, don’t throw them away.”
Tibor smiled slightly. Gregor stood up, thinking it made as much sense to call from the phone here as to go upstairs. Bennis wouldn’t be charging Tibor for the phone bill. Gregor got around the edge of the couch and headed for the bedroom. Bennis also had a phone in her kitchen, as he did himself, but for some reason that felt far too public for a call like this. Tibor had gone back to looking out the window, but not looking, the way he’d been staring at everything since Gregor had first seen him in the hospital after the explosion.
“It’s not just that people no longer have common sense,” Tibor said. “It’s that so many of them want to see evil with a capital E. It’s not enough anymore that there are people in the world who do bad things. It must be some big plot, some ultimate war against the forces of darkness. But I never thought the forces of darkness were like that. I always thought that Armageddon, when it came, would happen in a civil servant’s office, and most people wouldn’t even notice.”
“Well,” Gregor said, unsure where to go from there.
The door to Bennis’s apartment slammed open and Grace came running in. “Mr. Demarkian,” she said, breathless. “There’s a man on the phone and he says he has to talk to you right away, because Charlotte Deacon Ross is dead.”