Cheating at Solitaire (8 page)

Annabeth stopped still. “Exactly,” she said. “That's amazing. Very few people know that poem. Even English majors of my generation—our generation, really, I'm fifty-five and I seem to remember—”

“Sixty-two.”

“Yes, well, even English majors of our generation weren't asked to read that, and nobody else ever does except in graduate school. Maybe it was different in England—”

“Scotland,” Stewart Gordon said. “I'm Scots. You've got to keep that straight, or men in kilts will storm your door and beat on it with large swords.”

“Right,” Annabeth said.

“But you didn't go to graduate school in English literature, did you? It must have been history.”

“Oh, it was. But then I taught as an adjunct for a while in a small place and they had me teaching everything. They put it in textbooks for undergraduates now. ‘Dover Beach,' I mean. And, you know, I know that the night of the poem isn't supposed to be a storm. The moon is out. But then there's all that at the end, and it just feels more like a night like tonight. I'm babbling.”

“No. You're doing what I'm doing. You're slowing down as we approach the goal.”

“He's going to be dead in there, isn't he?”

“Probably. There's no telling how long he's been in the cold. If we could have gotten some sense out of Arrow, we might have a rough idea when it was the accident happened, but as it is, as far as we know, it could have been hours. It could have been any time since about eleven this morning.”

“Why eleven this morning?”

“That's when they threw Arrow off the set and she took off with Mark. Both of them, by the way, already fairly out of it. Not to say she was as out of it as she pretended to be at your place.”

“Did you think she was faking? I thought she was faking. I just couldn't figure out why I thought that.”

“You thought it because she's a damned piss-poor actress,” Stewart Gordon said. “I thought about pushing it, but I didn't see the point. There's one thing all those girls are good at, and Arrow in particular, and that's turning mulish and shutting up. It made more sense to come out and see. Here we are. We're not going to be able to get to the door on the passenger's side. The trade is almost rolled over onto it and it's jammed against even more rocks. This place is unbelievable with rocks. It's worse than the shingle at Brighton.”

“We'll have to climb up to the driver's door,” Annabeth said.

“I'll do it. Later on, I'm going to put a shot of Scotch into your tea and tell you why Arrow Normand is the inevitable product of late-stage corporate capitalism. That was a good
book, the one about Abigail Adams, but your understanding of economics is up your ass.”

“Right,” Annabeth said.

Stewart Gordon had been pulling himself up to the truck's driver's-side door all the time he'd been lecturing her about Arrow, rocks, and capitalism. The windshield was frosted over, but they could see well enough through it to see that there was a man in there, and blood. Annabeth thought about the blood in Arrow Normand's hair, and then she thought of something else.

“You know,” she said. “This truck is practically on its side.”

“I can see that.”

“I know you can. It's just—she must have climbed out. Arrow Normand, I mean. She can't have been thrown from the truck, which is what I thought she said. She must have climbed out. Except, I don't know. That doesn't make any sense.”

“Huh,” Stewart Gordon said. “Stand back a little. If the door is frozen shut, it's going to take a good yank to get it free.”

Annabeth stood back. Stewart Gordon yanked. He yanked again. Annabeth came forward a little and touched his arm.

“Look,” she said. “The little post thingee, the thing that locks the door. It's down.”

Stewart Gordon stopped and looked.

“That doesn't make sense either, does it?” Annabeth asked him. “I mean, she couldn't have been thrown from the truck if the door was locked, and the door wouldn't lock itself. And I can't imagine that she thought to lock it while she was climbing out.”

“Just a minute,” Stewart Gordon said. He leaned over and went at the windshield with the side of his arm, brushing off the thin layer of frost in great leaping arcs. The wind was getting worse. Annabeth thought that it was coming straight through her coat and going out the other side.

Stewart Gordon grunted, and stepped back again, staying on top of the truck so that he looked like some kind of fearsome
statue in honor of something—Annabeth was very aware that she was making no sense. Stewart Gordon had his hands in his pockets and was looking straight down. Annabeth moved slowly and got herself onto the truck, scared to death that she would slide off into the snow and then need rescuing herself. She got up next to him without his making any sign that he was aware she was coming. She looked down and saw the streaks of red and something else everywhere.

“He hit his head,” she said. “But that doesn't mean anything, does it? Head wounds give a lot of blood, even minor ones. He could still be alive.”

“He's not alive,” Stewart Gordon said.

“How do you know? We ought to at least check.”

“We're not going to check anything. We're not going to touch anything. We're going to go get the police no matter how busy they are in the storm. We're going to get them now.”

“We should get an ambulance, just in case,” Annabeth insisted—and yet, even as she insisted, she knew that he was right and she was wrong. Here it was, she thought, here it was, those ignorant armies clashing by night. Except that it wasn't night. It was only late afternoon. If she looked hard enough she could still find the sun behind the dark clouds that choked the sky. That was why they could see the purple of the truck, where it was exposed.

She was about to ask him why so much of the purple of the truck had not been covered by falling snow when he stepped back again, turned to her, and said, “He didn't hit his head. Somebody put a gunshot through it.”

 

1

Gregor Demarkian had been born and brought up on Ca-vanaugh Street, and married there when he was in his twenties. He knew everything there was to know about how this place reacted to the expectation of a marriage, right down to the superstitious things the Very Old Ladies would do in the privacy of their living rooms when Father Tibor Kasparian wasn't around to scold them. He had no idea why he had thought things would be different, now, for him. Maybe it was that Cavanaugh Street was so very changed from the way it had been when he had grown up here. There had been a lot of rising tides raising boats in the course of that something-more-than-half-century, and what had started as a cramped blank space of tenements and peeling paint had ended, now, as one of the most upscale gentrified neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia. The building where Gregor had been born didn't even exist anymore. Howard Kashinian's development company had had it torn down, nearly a decade before Gregor moved back to the street, and replaced it with three four-story brick town houses, each offering a single long apartment on each of its four floors. The disintegrating brown-stone where Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian had been brought up did exist, but the fifteen other families that had lived there were gone, and Lida had bought the place, had it gutted, and turned it into a showplace that had been featured on the cover of
Metropolitan Home
. It was a different world, with different expectations. These days the wives expected to spend their winter vacations in the Bahamas and the children expected to
go to college when their time came—and a good college, too, not just whatever was on offer locally in the community college system. Sheila and Howard Kashinian's daughter Deanna had had a huge, expensive party for her sixteenth birthday that was featured on a televison show called
My Super Sweet Sixteen
. Elda and Michael Valadanian's son David had just been appointed, at thirty-two, the youngest federal court judge in the history of the Eleventh Circuit. Susan Kasmanian, Hannah Kasmanian's niece, had been accepted to study for a doctorate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was not the kind of place that insisted on wrapping up the bride and groom in flower garlands so that widows could spit on them for luck.

Maybe Gregor had simply assumed that all that kind of thing would be ignored because the woman he was marrying was not herself Armenian. In fact, Bennis Hannaford was nearly the polar opposite of Armenian, in spite of the fact that she was eerily small and dark, as if in revolt against generations of tall, pale, blond English ancestors. She was a Hannaford of the Main Line Hannafords. That great pile of a house was still sitting out there, in Bryn Mawr, waiting for her brothers to decide what to do with it. She had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies. She had graduated from Agnes Irwin and Vassar. She even sounded more like Katharine Hepburn than anybody else Gregor had ever heard. He couldn't imagine anybody thinking she could spit on Bennis for any reason at all, and he had a sneaking suspicion that before she allowed herself to be wrapped in flower garlands, Bennis would insist on being naked.

Still, here he was, on the second of January, months before there was going to be anything like an actual wedding, letting Donna Moradanyan Donahue wrap a tape measure around his head.

“Stop making such a fuss,” she said. “I'm the one who should be screaming bloody murder. I've just had a baby.”

“That's true,” Gregor said. “You should be home with Martha Grace. You should be fighting with your mother-in-law about what church she's going to be baptized into.”

“I'm letting Russ fight with his mother,” Donna said. “It's counterproductive when I do it. I just need to get the proportions right here. I mean, you don't want your head to be up on Lida's roof looking like Charles Manson or something, do you?”

“I don't want my head up on Lida's roof at all. And you can't claim this is some kind of Armenian tradition, because I know better.”

“It's my tradition,” Donna said. “Just wait till you see what I do for the wedding. I'm going to cover the entire street. Well, except for the church. Father Tibor—”

“You cannot wrap the church in shiny paper,” Tibor said. “It's not respectful.”

“I wouldn't think it would even be possible,” Gregor said.

“It won't matter,” Donna said. “The church will have lots of flowers. We're going to have banks of them going down the stairs straight to the sidewalk. We've got to work on your entrance, though. Usually there are limousines, and that does for ceremony, but with both of you coming from the same street, we'll have to think of something else. Maybe we can work up one of those processions with children, you know, that they have in the villages. I always think those look beautiful.”

“That is because you have never had to live in a village,” Father Tibor said.

“Here's more coffee,” Linda Melajian said, putting the pot down in the middle of the table. “Bennis called to say she's going to be held up at the lawyers this morning, and you're supposed to stop complaining.”

Linda Melajian stomped off, and Gregor watched her go. It was nearly noon now, and outside the big plate glass windows of the Ararat Restaurant, Cavanaugh Street looked clean and cold and mostly empty. Donna had finished her measure-ments and wrapped the tape measure around her hand, and she pushed against him a little to give her room to sit down. The remains of the lunches Gregor and Father Tibor had tried to eat were still sitting on the table. Father Tibor never ate much, but Gregor used to, until all this thing with the
wedding. Now he'd left a great big stack of grape leaves stuffed with lamb sitting on the plate, and Donna Moradan-yan started picking at them.

Sometimes—and, for some reason, much oftener now—Gregor Demarkian thought that Cavanaugh Street was someplace he had imagined for himself on the worst and darkest days of his life. It wasn't someplace real. He would wake up in an hour or two and find himself still in that awful apartment near the Beltway, the place he had gone to wait for Elizabeth to die. Then he would turn over in bed and look at the numbers on the clock he had always set for five, so that he could be at the hospital before she woke up, if she woke up. Day after day, week after week, for almost a year, with nothing else to think about, and nothing else in his life. It was when he had first realized that he was not good at making friends or keeping them. He was too closed in on himself, and for all the time between the day he had married Elizabeth and the day she had died, he had lived as if they were the only two people in the world. Work didn't count. Work was something he was good at, but when he walked away from it, it was as if it had never been.

Now he was here in the Ararat, and all the people around him were his friends. They worried about what he did and didn't eat, how his relationship with Bennis was going and why it was going that way, what his work was doing to him, whether he was doing too much of it, whether he was doing too little of it. It would have shocked the hell out of most of them to be told that he was a “closed-off ” kind of person, but he thought he was. He was just better at hiding it, or better at hiding the defense mechanisms that could signal its existence.

He felt a tug on his sleeve and looked around. Father Ti-bor was looking worried, which might or might not have meant anything in particular. Father Tibor was five years younger than Gregor and looked at least a decade older. He'd spent most of his youth and middle age in Soviet prisons of one kind or another.

“Krekor?”

“I'm okay. Kind of tired, that's all.”

“Are you upset about the ceremony?” Tibor asked. “I'm not sure what to do about it. On the one hand, you and Ben-nis are my closest friends, and I am certified by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to perform marriages. On the other hand—” He threw his hands in the air. “I am not an unsophisticated man, Krekor. I know that not everyone who comes to the altar truly believes, and the world is full of hypocrites. But.”