Baptism in Blood (11 page)

“Maybe she likes it there.”

“And you’re the next thing to useless these days. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Mmm,” Bennis said.

“And old George is much too old to take on this kind of responsibility. He doesn’t get around well enough.” Gregor drummed his fingers against the table. “I don’t really know what I ought to do here. It’s not that I think the Ginger Marsh case will interest Tibor. It barely interests me. If David Sandler hadn’t written me directly, I don’t think I would have paid any attention to it at all.”

“Satanism and witchcraft and child sacrifice?” Bennis looked up, her attention caught at last, frankly sur­prised. “You must be kidding. It got everybody else’s attention. I’ll bet the trial is going to be enormous.”

“The trial is going to be a nonissue. Give it a couple of more months. They’ll look into all their leads. They’ll do the conscientious investigative probe. Then they’ll arrest Ginger Marsh and she’ll plead guilty.”

“You really believe that.”

“The only difference between Ginger Marsh and Su­san Smith is that Ginger Marsh has a more elaborate sense of the theatrical. Pentagrams and candles and a bloody knife beat a phantom carjacker any day. But they’re just as bogus. And they’re just as cheap. That woman murdered her own child.”

“I don’t think I can remember you being this cynical before.”

“It’s not cynicism. It’s experience. I was in the Fed­eral Bureau of Investigation for twenty years. I know these people.”

“Which people?”

“The Ginger Marshes of this world. The Susan Smiths. The Terry McVeighs. There really isn’t much dif­ference, you know. It’s all the same—attitude, I guess you’d call it. The same arrogance. And if you don’t mind my saying so, Bennis, I think that in my old age, I’m get­ting tired of it.”

“You’re not old, Gregor. For God’s sake.”

“I’ll be sixty-one on my next birthday. Any day now, they’ll stop talking about how I’m in early retirement. And like I said, I’m getting tired of it. More tired than you know.”

“Then why do it? You’re not obliged to go down there. The case will go on without you.”

“I know it will.”

“So?”

Gregor shrugged. “David Sandler is a friend of mine. He hasn’t had much experience. He thinks there’s some­thing mysterious in what’s happening down there. If I do what he’s asking me to do, it might ease his mind.”

“Right,” Bennis said.

“And then there’s Tibor, too. Maybe getting him away from here will help. Maybe if he has something else to do with his time besides sit around and brood about domestic terrorism and the disintegration of the American soul, he’d snap out of it and be Tibor again.”

“He’s got an entire church to run,” Bennis pointed out. “And he’s running it. He’s got a school to run, too. I know he’s been depressed, Gregor, but he really hasn’t withdrawn from the world. He’s been right in there the way he always has been.”

“No.” Gregor shook his head. “Not the way he al­ways has been.”

“I think you’re kidding yourself,” Bennis said. “I think this has less to do with Tibor than it has to do with yourself. I think you’re using Tibor as some kind of cover.”

“As a cover for what?”

The plate glass front door of the Ararat swung open. Bennis and Gregor looked up. Old George Tekemanian was limping in on unsteady legs, followed by a bustlingly im­portant Hannah Krekorian and an over-made-up Sheila Kashinian. Hannah was gray-haired and plump and dowdy and downtrodden looking, in spite of the fact that she had to have at least a couple of million dollars. Sheila was wearing a three-quarter-length mink coat dyed into candy pink and lime green stripes, God only knew why. God only knew why Sheila Kashinian did anything. Old George looked embarrassed to be with her.

“That’s an interesting outfit,” Bennis Hannaford said, sipping at her coffee at last. “I wonder where she managed to find it.”

“Maybe she had it made custom.”

“Sheila doesn’t do custom. It takes too long. If we ask old George over here, do you think we’ll get Sheila, too?”

“We’ll probably get Sheila no matter what you do.”

“True.”

Bennis swung her legs out of the booth and stood up. She was a small woman, no more than five four and no heavier than a hundred and five pounds, but sitting down she had a more commanding presence. Gregor watched her stride across the restaurant and stop where old George was standing just inside the front door. Hannah and Sheila crowded in, wanting to hear—whatever.

Out on Cavanaugh Street, the sunlight looked brittle, like cheap glass. Gregor could see the front of Lida Arkmanian’s big five-story town house, its front door sporting a wreath of pink and blue ribbons in spite of the fact that Lida was away and likely to stay away for a while. Mara Kalikian had just had a baby, and Bennis and Donna Moradanyan were having a party for it after its christening next Sunday.
Her,
Gregor thought. A party for her. The baby was a girl. Maybe Bennis was right to say that this whole thing about going to North Carolina was really about himself, and not about Tibor. Sometimes these days, he seemed, to himself, almost as distracted and out of focus as Bennis.

Once, years ago, in the month when his wife Elizabeth had started the last serious agony of her dying, Gregor had stood at the edge of a ditch on the side of a road in rural Massachusetts, looking down at the bodies of five small boys. The picture was more clearly in his mind now than anything he could make himself look at: the arms and legs twisted and entwined; the reinforced toes on the shoes of the Massachusetts state policeman who had driven him out from Boston. While it was happening, it had all seemed very far away. Elizabeth was dying. That was what had been at the front of his mind. Elizabeth was dying and there was nothing they could do about it anymore, no way left to save her, no way left to lie to himself that it would finally turn out all right. He had been, at that moment, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Department of Behavioral Sciences. His job was to hunt and find and capture serial killers. A serial killer had killed those boys—and would probably kill more, given time, given freedom, given opportunity.

Up at the front door, Bennis had finished talking to Hannah and Sheila and old George. She was leading them across the room, toward the window booth and Gregor. Gregor rubbed the side of his face with the flat of his hand and took a deep breath. He had never caught the man who had murdered those boys. Nobody had. Gregor didn’t know if he was still out there killing someplace, or if he had died, or if he had been jailed for something else, or if he had gone dormant, as some of them sometimes did. Donna Moradanyan’s son Tommy was now about the age those boys had been. Watching Tommy flying down the sidewalk on Cavanaugh Street, it struck Gregor every once in a while that he might be in danger.

Of course, Gregor thought now, scooting over on the bench to give old George room to get in, everybody was in danger, all the time. That was the lesson of Oklahoma City. It was the lesson learned daily on every city street in America. There was no real safety and there never would be—not even on Cavanaugh Street.

Old George piled onto the bench and Hannah came after him, shoving Gregor all the way to the window, so that his arm was pressed against the glass. Sheila got in on the other side of the booth next to Bennis, shrugging her mink coat off her shoulders and letting it spread out around her. Bennis kept looking at the coat, as if she wanted to touch it, but was afraid to.

“Guess what I heard,” Sheila announced, waving frantically for Linda Melajian. “Helen Tevorakian’s niece Marissa is going out with a Muslim, and now they both want to convert to Buddhism and get married in a temple in Salt Lake City.”

Gregor thought Salt Lake City was where the Mormons were—but he let that go. Religion made his head ache, and Sheila Kashinian made it ache even worse. He wanted to go over and find out how Tibor was, but it was too early. It wouldn’t have been, in the old days, but lately Tibor stayed up all night watching CNN. Gregor had a ter­rible feeling Tibor stayed up all night talking to himself, too, but he couldn’t prove it.

I should have made the world safe when I had a chance,
Gregor thought, and then flushed bright red. Had he ever thought anything quite so stupid before in all his life? He didn’t think he had.

Linda Melajian held her Pyrex pot of coffee over his cup and raised her eyebrows, but Gregor shook his head.

The way this day was going, the last thing he needed was more caffeine.

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, Gregor was standing in the small courtyard behind Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. He could see a light shining through the vines from Tibor’s front window. That, he knew, would be the light in the foyer. Tibor must have gone to bed without doing his usual spot check of the house. Maybe Tibor hadn’t gone to bed at all. Gregor could just imagine how it had been: the dark­ened living room full of books; the television flickering; the icons propped up on the bookshelves and the fireplace mantel, looking down on it all in that blind wall-eyed way all icons seemed to have.

Gregor shook his head. The sun was hot and hard, even though it was still low on the horizon. He could hear faint sounds of traffic in the distance. He was still right in the middle of the city of Philadelphia, even though it didn’t look like it here. He walked up to Tibor’s front door and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. When there was no answer a second time, he got his keys out of his pocket and searched through them for the big clunky old-fashioned one that fit Tibor’s door. He kept telling Tibor how important it was to get some kind of modern secu­rity put in. At the very least, in the middle of the city like this, Tibor ought to have a deadbolt and a chain. On matters of security, however, nobody on Cavanaugh Street listened to Gregor Demarkian. He was only the man who was sup­posed to be the expert.

He shouldn’t have worried about Tibor sitting alone in the dark. It wasn’t only the foyer light that was on. Through the archway, Gregor could see all four lamps in the living room, all lit. He could see the television, too. That wasn’t lit. He moved carefully through the apartment, holding himself in so that he wouldn’t brush against anything. He was a big man, six four and carrying more than twenty extra pounds. The halls in Tibor’s apartment were narrow and their walls were lined to the ceilings with paperback books. Aristotle’s
On Nature,
in the original Greek. Mickey Spillane’s
The Body Lovers.
The new
Catechism of the Catholic Church,
in the Vatican edition, in Latin. Judith Krantz’s
Scruples.
Here and there, Gregor found a light­weight book club edition of something or other, mostly steamy sex novels of the throwaway variety. Bennis had given Tibor a membership in the Literary Guild for his birthday.

The living room was empty. The seats of the chairs were all full of books, as usual. The books had dust on them, which they never used to do, before Oklahoma City. Gregor went to the television set and ran his hand along the top of it. That was thick with dust, too. Tibor was supposed to have a housekeeper who came in every couple of weeks or so—the church paid for one—but either she didn’t come or she’d given up trying to make the apartment livable. Tibor being Tibor, he probably sat her down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, got her to talk about all the problems she had ever had in her life, and never let her get any work done at all.

Gregor opened the door to the kitchen and looked in. The lights were all on in there, too, both the overhead and the small ones built in under the cabinets to make it easier to work at the counters. The kitchen table was covered with books, except in one small corner, which had a plate and fork on it, both clean. The sink was clean of dirty dishes, too. There was a straw basket full of apples on the counter next to the stove. The apples looked new and shiny. The basket looked full, as if it had been delivered as a gift and not touched since. Gregor took a deep breath and counted to ten.

“Tibor?” Gregor said finally.

There was a grunt from the direction of the pantry. Gregor had to make himself take a deep breath again. He didn’t know what was wrong with him these days. He was always imagining disasters—and he had never been like that, never, not even in the worst of Elizabeth’s dying. Now he was imagining Tibor flat on the pantry floor, out cold, the victim of a stroke or a heart attack. Gregor was a much better candidate for either than Tibor would ever be. Still, Gregor could see it. The dark pantry. The shelves of canned corn and sacks of flour. The smell of carrots and potatoes, still not washed clean of the dirt they grew in.

“Tibor?” Gregor said again.

“I am coming,” Tibor said again, in a perfectly clear and normal voice.

Gregor felt himself blushing for the tenth time that morning. He went over to the pantry and looked in. There was an overhead light, and it was on. There was also a clip-on extension lamp on the table Tibor had set up to work on, the only table in the house that was not so thoroughly cov­ered with books as to be unusable for any other purpose. What this one had on it was a brand-new IBM PC with a four-color display screen and a host of attachments Gregor couldn’t begin to comprehend. Tibor was tapping away and humming a little under his breath. He had a Sony Walkman plugged into one ear. The other earplug was dangling, and through it Gregor could hear the thin sounds of Gregorian chant. He looked at the display screen again. He didn’t know much about computers—in fact, he didn’t know anything; he had been very, very happy to retire from his job before everybody at the Bureau had been required to know how to run one—but he knew expensive when he saw it, and this was very, very expensive.

“Where did this come from?” he asked Tibor.

Tibor took the headphone off his head and laid it down next to the keyboard. “Bennis got it for me. It’s much easier to use than the one in the church office, Krekor. I have no problems with this one at all.”

“That’s good. What are you doing with it?”

Tibor pointed at the screen. “There are things called bulletin boards, Krekor. And discussions. People from all over the world share information. Even people from places like China, where they aren’t supposed to. It’s a wonderful thing.”