AT QUARTER TO SIX, Father Tibor Kasparian gave up. Lenore had shown up at his window, finally, but she hadn’t stayed long. The raven had been edgy and inconsolable, pecking at his fingers when he tried to give her food. He had gotten her to eat a little pile of pine nuts covered with honey. After that, she hadn’t wanted anything. It made Tibor depressed.
A lot of things made Tibor depressed. Once Lenore was gone, his mind drifted back to Donegal Steele. That always made him feel tight, as if he’d been roped around the chest-and was now being squeezed. He kept getting a picture of the worst thing he had ever seen Steele do, the definitive act that had defined the Great Doctor’s character for him for all time. It had happened at the opening convocation at the beginning of the college year. The faculty had been assembled on stage facing the student body, standing while the school song was sung, and Donegal Steele had raised his arm, swung it sideways, put it down the front of the robe of a young woman in the Department of English, and squeezed. Just like that. In front of hundreds of people. Students. Faculty. God only knew who else. It had all happened so fast, and so decisively, nothing had come of it. When it was over, no one could think of what to do. And the look on Steele’s face—Tibor got itchy even thinking about it. The look on Steele’s face had had no triumph in it at all. It had been sly and self-satisfied, as if he did that kind of thing all the time, and in much more sensitive circumstances—and as if the fact that he always got away with it signed and sealed the truth of what he had always believed women were.
Meat.
Tibor sighed, and then looked up to see that the clock tower was showing six thirty. He started to stack his books into a pile, starting with the Castleford history of the anti-Federalist papers and ending with the magazine he carried everywhere these last few weeks, the one with the story of the Long Island murders and Gregor Demarkian’s picture in it. Seeing Gregor’s face always made him feel better. If he’d had his way, Gregor would have moved up here with him, and brought some of the others: Bennis Hannaford, Donna Moradanyan, Lida Arkmanian. The names from home rolled through Tibor’s mind and made him feel pleasantly melancholy. True sadness was either a curse or an opportunity. It could destroy you or make you into a saint. This kind of sadness was a luxury.
He had a green canvas book bag to carry his things in, just like the students did. He put his books inside it and started to put the magazine in there as well. Then he stopped and opened the magazine up again. “America’s Premier Private Sleuth Nabs Another One,” the subhead said. The picture underneath it made Gregor look half-furious and half-terrified. Tibor smiled a little, closed the magazine, and tucked it in the book bag.
Poor Gregor. He’d always hated publicity, and now he had it all the time. What was he going to do when they wanted to make a TV movie about his life? Tibor was sure someone would want to make a TV movie about Gregor Demarkian’s life. That was the sort of thing people did in America.
He went down the empty corridor to the front stairs, then down the front stairs to the wide foyer that led out onto the path to the quad. The bushes that crowded the sides of the great stone building were covered with crepe paper and bats. The paths were covered with students in costume. Tibor wondered what was going on back in Philadelphia, on Cavanaugh Street. He liked all this enthusiasm about Halloween, but it felt a little wrong to him, undernourished somehow, without children. He passed a boy dressed up as the Incredible Hulk and a girl dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood and smiled and nodded to them both. He couldn’t tell who they were under all the makeup, but he thought he might as well be pleasant.
At the place where the path curved to join the quad proper, Tibor could see the stretch of Minuteman Field again and the effigy against King’s Scaffold. The Scaffold was swarming with people and the pile of logs was higher than ever, but there were neither logs nor kindling in the effigy’s lap. Maybe the students had decided they didn’t want anything to block their view of good King George in flames.
Tibor turned into the quad and walked slowly toward Constitution House, through the crowds, through the gossamer spiderwebs, through the ambushes of plastic bats and sateen ghosts and rubber balloon jack-o’-lanterns. Someone in one of the quad dorms was playing music on a stereo system through his windows. Tibor recognized the piece as something called “Monster Mash,” which both Donna Moradanyan and Bennis Hannaford liked.
“Hey, Father,” a boy in a Count Dracula suit said, “you got your costume ready? You coming to the bonfire dressed as Lucifer with a tail?”
“I’m coming to the bonfire dressed as myself,” Tibor told him, wishing he knew who the boy was. “I’m too old and too tired to go running around pretending to be the Devil.”
“What about your friend, the great detective? Is he going to come in costume?”
“I don’t think so,” Tibor said, and blushed.
“I hope he talks about blood a lot in his lecture,” the boy said. “It would be absolutely rad.”
Tibor didn’t know what it meant to be “absolutely rad,” but he didn’t have a chance to ask. Everybody on the quad seemed to be dancing to the “Monster Mash” song. A girl in a space helmet and electric pink tights chugged up and nabbed his boy, and they both disappeared.
It was, Tibor thought, just as well. He still felt a little guilty about what he had pulled on Gregor, asking him up here at first just to the Halloween party, to keep him company, and then dumping this lecture on him. Tibor had no idea how Gregor felt about lectures, but he could guess.
The book bag was hurting his shoulder, so he readjusted it. Then he got started again on his way to his temporary home. When he got to the center of the quad he looked up reflexively and saw Lenore above his head, circling and circling, her caws drowned out by the pounding bass of the music around him. Lenore was nearly tame. She never went circling through the air like that, agitated and angry.
There was something else that was strange, and he didn’t like it either. He hadn’t seen the Great Doctor Donegal Steele all day. He thought he ought to consider it a blessing—Donegal Steele was probably the first man Tibor had honestly hated since he left the Soviet Union—but he couldn’t. There was something so fundamentally wrong about it, it made his flesh crawl.
Lenore and Donegal Steele.
Tibor turned down the path that led to the front door of Constitution House. It would be all right, he told himself, because Gregor was coming. In just two days, Gregor would be on campus and everything would be fine.
When Tibor had Gregor with him, everything always was.