Festival of Deaths (15 page)

To get to the Oumoudians’ apartment, Gregor and Tibor had to leave Cavanaugh Street and walk two blocks north, into territory into which Gregor had never before ventured. Tibor, whose motto was “if Christian behaved like Christians, we wouldn’t need a welfare state,” had a wider acquaintance with the blocks that surrounded their Armenian-American enclave. When the first immigrants had come in the wake of Armenian independence, Tibor and Lida and all the others had done their best to find places on Cavanaugh Street itself, just as they had founded the Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School to teach children who knew no English and had to learn in a hurry. After a while, though, there got to be too many immigrants. Cavanaugh Street was a small place. That was when Lida and Hannah and Sheila and Bennis had started buying up real estate on the fringes, hoping to export what Cavanaugh Street was to any other part of Philadelphia they touched.

That they hadn’t quite succeeded was obvious as soon as Gregor and Tibor got more than half a block north. There were some signs of Cavanaugh Street on these blocks—Donna Moradanyan had been out, scattering bright foil paper and Christmas ribbons and glowing menorahs in her wake—but the brownstones looked mean and dispirited and the streets were full of litter. Children sat on stoops in the cold, dressed in thin sweaters, without coats, their feet shoved into unraveling sneakers and innocent of socks.

The Oumoudians’ apartment was in a looming building with grime on most of the windows that faced front and a coating of something like sand on the steps that led to the tall front door. Once upon a time, this brownstone had been a single-family house. Now it was cut up into apartments for people who had no time or energy or money to maintain it. Gregor and Tibor went into the vestibule and rang the buzzer under “Oumoudian.” The vestibule made Gregor even more depressed than the street had. There was a bright silver bow on the Oumoudians’ mailbox—Donna Moradanyan again?—but no other decoration of any kind. The floor was dirty and the walls were cracked.

“This is a mess,” Gregor said under his breath. “Maybe we should ring again. I don’t think they heard us.”

“They heard us,” Tibor told him. “Someone will be down in a minute. It is a mess.”

“Maybe we can come over here next week and clean this vestibule up,” Gregor said. “What could it take? A couple of hours and twenty dollars worth of ammonia?”

“You don’t think we should agitate for the landlord to clean it up himself?”

“I think we should do that, too. I think we should get him for neglect. Are there laws like that?”

“I don’t know,” Tibor said.

“There ought to be.” Gregor pointed at the bright silver bow. “I’m surprised Donna didn’t tell us. She must have been here.”

There was a sound of footsteps coming down stairs on the other side of the door. Gregor and Tibor looked through the fire glass at a young girl in an unfashionably long dress coming toward them. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a pair of braids, and that was unfashionable, too, as was the fact that her face was clean of makeup. Unfashionable or not, Gregor had no trouble discerning what had first attracted Joey Ohanian to Sofie Oumoudian. The girl was lovely.

She came to the door, opened it up, and stood back to let them enter.

“We are very honored to have a visit from two such distinguished men,” she said in an Armenian Gregor could just about understand. “We are afraid we will not be able to offer you the hospitality which you deserve.”

“We need no hospitality,” Tibor replied, in an Armenian just as formal, “except the grace of your company and the company of your aunt.”

“My aunt and I have no grace,” Sofie said, “but if it is the will of God we will please you.” Then she looked from one to the other of them, broke into a wide smile and said in English, “There. We have gotten that over with. Now Aunt Helena can not fault me for being rude. Hello, Father Tibor. How do you do, Mr. Demarkian. Joey Ohanian has told me very much about you.”

“Joey Ohanian had told us a lot about you,” Gregor said.

Sofie blushed. “He is nice, Joey Ohanian. He gives me much help. And I need help. You can tell, my English is not good. You will come upstairs?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Gregor said.

“We will be honored,” Tibor said. “Krekor, please, mind your manners.”

“I never had any.”

“Aunt Helena won’t notice. She’s been running around for a week, like a—I can’t remember—like a—now I have it—yes—like a chicken with its head cut off. Because the priest and the famous man are coming to the apartment together. She even got the tea glasses out.”

“Tea glasses,” Gregor marveled. “I haven’t seen tea glasses since I was a boy.”

“She has beautiful holders for them,” Sofie said, “what do you call them, like the holders they have here for ice-cream soda glasses, but not exactly. I remember. A zarf. My English is very bad. Joey told me about the zarf. In Armenian there is another name for them and in Russian there is another name for them yet. It’s quite confusing. My grandmother’s are made from sterling silver, brought all the way from London before World War One.”

“How did your grandmother manage to keep them?” Tibor asked. “What with the Turks—”

Sofie Oumoudian laughed. It was a beautiful laugh. It sounded like music. Gregor thought that if Joey Ohanian wasn’t in love for good, he was a damn fool.

“There is a story in my family that when the Turks came, my grandmother was so anxious to save the tea glasses, she had my grandmother bury her in the root cellar along with them and after it was over it took the village three days to get her out. My aunt Helena says that any time anything terrible happens to Armenia, it falls square on the heads of the Oumoudians. That’s why we came to America. Aunt Helena said God was telling us to move.”

The second-floor landing was as dirty and neglected as the foyer, but it was a little brighter, because the door to the Oumoudians’ apartment sported a wreath the size of a child’s inflatable swimming doughnut. This Gregor was certain was the work of Donna Moradanyan, because he had seen her making it—and five or six others like it—on her kitchen table less than a month before. Donna had made two kinds. One had cherubs and bells and silver Christmas trees. The other had menorahs and Stars of David. Bennis had taken one of the kind with menorahs on it. The Oumoudians had received a more conventional Christmas one. Gregor had no idea what somebody like Rabbi Goldman would think of a Hanukkah wreath.

“Before we go in,” Sofie said, “do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Of course not,” Gregor told her.

“It’s about this visit of yours. Which is because of Joey. It is also because of—of my wallet being stolen?”

“More than once,” Gregor reminded her. “At knife point.”

“Yes,” Sofie said. “I know. Well. And I know I should have told Aunt Helena the truth, you see, but I did not. She thinks I had my pocket picked. She is an old woman, do you understand?”

“I take it you don’t want us to tell her the truth,” Gregor said.

“You can tell her the truth,” Sofie said, “but I would appreciate it if you would tell her in such a way that she will not want me to stop going to school. I very much want to go on going to school. In Armenia, when I was growing up, we had the European system, and at eleven we took our examinations and those of us who did not pass them were not put in the classes to go on to university. But here, I have talked to a counselor at the school, and she says that there is no problem. If I want to go to a university, I can take new tests, and if I pass them there are places where I can get the money. And so—”

“Sofie?” a voice said from the other side of the door. “Why are you so long in the hall?”

Sofie blew a stream of air into the bangs that hung over her forehead. “Of course, I would like a lot of things,” she said. “I would like a skirt as short as the ones the other girls wear. I would like to go to the movies with Joey without a chaperon. Maybe none of these things are possible.”

“I think we can at least manage to keep you in school,” Gregor said.

“Although perhaps not
that
school,” Tibor amended.

“Sofie?” Helena called from the other side of the door again.

Sofie put her hand on the knob. “She has put on all her lace and taken out her cane,” she warned them. “You’d better be prepared.”

T
HE DREIDEL WAS STUCK
in the thin plastic bag the cleaners had put over Lotte’s favorite rose tweed jacket. DeAnna Kroll took it out and looked at it.
Nūn, gīmel, hē, shīn. Nes gadol hayah sham.
“A great miracle occurred there.” It was amazing what you picked up just hanging around people. DeAnna could remember years in her life—in her
adult
life—when she hadn’t known a lot of words in English, never mind being able to reel off a sentence in Hebrew, never mind being able to recognize four letters in a different alphabet. There had been years in her adult life when she hadn’t even known there were other alphabets. There had never been a time when she hadn’t known about room service, though. Before she’d been able to afford it, she’d dreamed about it.

“Go to your own room,” she told Maximillian Dey, who was still standing in the middle of hers. “I want to get some rest. Once we start working, we won’t stop again until Hanukkah.”

The room in question was the one DeAnna always took in the Sheraton Society Hill, which was her favorite hotel in Philadelphia, mostly because the room service was unbelievable. The room was full of stuff—Lotte’s clothes, so she didn’t have to bring them all the way out to David’s; props for the show; her own luggage—but the bed was clear and the phone was in plain sight and she had a copy of
Vanity Fair
in her totebag. If she could only get Max out of here, she could be in heaven. She just didn’t feel right about throwing him out on his ear. After all, he’d helped her get all this stuff up here. His job was to move the show, not the executive producer.

He was standing in the middle of the carpet, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, scowling fiercely. With Max, fierce never looked too fierce. There was something about his face that was much too young.

“It is a terrible thing,” he was saying, as he had been saying, over and over again, since they left New York. “One minute I am on the subway, the next minute I am on the sidewalk, and there it is. There it is not. It is gone.”

“Right,” DeAnna said.

“It is as I have tried to tell you,” Max said. “It is a terrible thing. It is an outrage.”

“I know.”

“Everything I have is gone. Everything.”

“I know.”

“My money. One hundred and two dollars.”

“Do you need money, Max? We could get you some money.”

“Thank you. I do not need money. My green card, it is also gone.”

“You told me.”

“And my pictures of my sisters and my mother that I carry all the time. That they sent me from Portugal.”

“It’s a shame.”

“What will I do now if I want their pictures with me? Write to Portugal to get others?”

“That’s an idea.”

“What will I say to them, my mother and my sister? That my wallet is stolen? They will think this city is full of thieves.”

“It’s not this city, Max. We’re in a different city now. And they’re both full of thieves.”

“I could tell them I have lost the pictures, but then they will think I am careless. They will think I no longer respect them. I will get a letter from their parish priest.”

“Because you lost a couple of pictures?”

“There it is not like here,” Max said. “There we believe in honoring our mothers. Especially our mothers. The wallet was made of real leather. I bought it in Manhattan. It cost me twenty-six dollars I should not have spent.”

“Of course it did.”

“It is the only grace that I am too poor a man to have a credit card. I have finally found the virtue in poverty all the nuns talked about.”

“Is there a virtue in starvation, Max? Because I’m really hungry here. I’m really hungry.”

“In my wallet there was also my library card and my membership card for the Museum of Natural History. It is a scandal, I tell you that. It is an outrage.”

It is an outrage, DeAnna thought, sitting down on the bed and picking up the dreidel. Sometimes she wondered what it was like, living in a place where even poor people were innocent. Sometimes she wondered if she would have done the things she had done here if she had been there.
Here
meaning the United States.
Here
meaning a place where poor people were definitely not innocent, not even as children, because they lived in a sea of dope and prostitution and firearms and crime. Then she reminded herself that there were probably no black people in Maximillian’s village in Portugal, and from what she’d heard about Africa she wouldn’t be happy there, either. Then she told herself she was tired, which was true. When she was tired she always wandered off into the metaphysical, getting melodramatic about her inability to solve the age-old questions of the universe. Good and evil. Wealth and poverty. Black and white. When she wasn’t tired she concentrated on four orders of shrimp cocktail and a bottle of Montrachat.

Maximillian was still standing in the middle of the room. For some reason, when he looked sad he also looked very thin. In spite of all the swearing he did in Portuguese, he was still a boy, and frail.

“Listen,” DeAnna said. “Have you got a room in this hotel?”

“Not in this hotel. Across the street. With Prescott Holloway and the man who drives the truck.”

“Fine,” DeAnna said. “Why don’t you go over there and lie down for a while? Why don’t you order dinner in your room and charge it to the show—”

“I can’t charge it to the show, as you put it—”

“I’ll call over and give them a credit card number to bill it to. Go ahead. Go relax. Tomorrow morning, everything’s going to start to go crazy. You’re going to be throwing furniture around for Shelley. We’re going to have that Demarkian man in—”

“The detective,” Max said shrewdly. “Everyone is saying you have brought him here to make a secret investigation into the death of Maria Gonzalez. He will catch her murderer and we will not have to talk to that foul man from the police department again.”