Festival of Deaths (42 page)

“Never mind,” Bennis said. “What about the street vendors?”

“The street vendors will be fine, Bennis, but it will not be because of us. Reverend Casey from African Methodist got up and gave a speech about how it was racism; when the immigrants needed to be street vendors they could do it without any interference and now when it is African Americans who need to do it there are registration requirements and licensing fees. All of which is probably true, but the important part is that Reverend Casey got to say it on Channel Five—”

“—ah—”

“—and now everybody is talking about compromise. Will you come and get me, Bennis? I have to pay a twenty-five-dollar fine and I left my wallet at home. If you’re busy, I could call Donna Moradanyan—”

“Donna’s Tommy’s got the flu. I’ll come get you. What precinct are you at?”

“I’m not at a precinct. I’m at the superior court. I will go back now and listen to the arraignment of the prostitutes. They are very young, Bennis.”

“I know.”

“This is a remarkable country, Bennis. People who were born and brought up here do not understand. How long do you think you will be?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe.”

“All right. I will go back and listen to the prostitutes. There is one, Bennis, I do not think she is sixteen.”

Bennis was sure there were several prostitutes at Tibor’s court who were not yet sixteen, and maybe one or two who were not yet fourteen, but she didn’t have a chance to tell Tibor so. The speakerphone’s speaker stopped crackling and went to a hum. Bennis leaned over her coffee and shut the sound off. Her cigarette was burned to the filter. She got out another one and lit up again. Her head ached faintly. It always did that when she worked too long at the computer. She took a long, deep drag on her cigarette, promised herself to quit smoking again for Valentine’s Day, and stood.

“Money,” she told herself, and then, “note.”

Her computer was at the curved center of a built-in workspace in one corner of her bedroom. The edges of this workspace were twin piles of mess. Bennis rummaged around in the closer of these messes and came up with a piece of paper and a Bic medium-point pen.

Christopher,
she wrote,
I had to go out. Go up to the fourth floor and ask Donna Moradanyan for the key. Eat something. See you later. Bennis.

She grabbed a roll of transparent tape and her coat, started for the hall, then stopped. She checked the pockets of her jeans for money and decided she needed more. She went into the kitchen and raided her cookie jar for the three hundred dollars she kept there. For all she knew, Tibor wasn’t the only member of the demonstration who needed twenty-five dollars for the fine. She might as well be prepared.

She let herself into the hall, fastened the note to her door with tape, and went downstairs. There was light showing through the crack under the door of old George Tekemanian’s first-floor apartment. She thought about stopping, but didn’t. If she got talking to old George, she could lose an hour.

She let herself out on the stoop and looked up and down Cavanaugh Street for cabs. There were none at the moment—there was no traffic of any kind—but Bennis knew it wouldn’t be long before a taxi showed up. Cabs liked Cavanaugh Street.

Bennis sat on the bottom step to wait. Across the street, Lida Arkmanian’s town house was lit up like a lighthouse and festooned with hearts and ribbons—Donna Moradanyan’s first foray into decorating the street for Valentine’s Day. Two blocks up, light spilled out of the plate-glass windows of the Ararat Restaurant, darkened periodically by the shadows of waitresses and diners moving back and forth in front of the big main arc light. Bennis stretched her legs and considered lighting another cigarette, and then she saw the cab.

It was a cab with its occupied light glowing, but there was always a chance it was going to drop its fare on Cavanaugh Street, so Bennis stood up and went to the edge of the curb to wait for it. It did stop on Cavanaugh Street, up beyond the Ararat, in front of the narrow brownstone Howard Kashinian had renovated and turned into two duplex apartments. One of those two apartments he had kept for his own great-aunt Melina. The other he had sold to Hannah Krekorian after Hannah’s husband’s death. It was Hannah Krekorian whom Bennis saw get out of the cab now, her stout little middle-aged-to-getting-old figure moving briskly against the wind. The wind was very bad. February was always a cold time in Philadelphia. This February was starting out to be brutal. Hannah scurried quickly to the first step of her stoop, then turned around.

At the curb, the street-side passenger door to Hannah’s cab remained open. Bennis watched, fascinated, as first one trouser-clad leg and then another emerged from it. The legs were followed by a body and then a head, all unnaturally elongated, all sticklike and stretched. What a tall, thin man, Bennis thought. And it was true. He was immensely tall and emaciatedly thin. He looked like some sort of flexible rod with a coat attached to it. From this distance, Bennis couldn’t make out any of the detail of his face—the best she could do was note that the coat was an expensive one, obvious from the way it moved and the way it hung and the things it didn’t do in the cold—but there was something about him that seemed familiar, and the familiar thing was not pleasant. Bennis reached for her cigarettes, thought better of it, rubbed her hands together in the frigid breeze. The tall, thin man shut the curbside door and paid the driver. He walked over to Hannah Krekorian and took her arm. The two made their way up the steep cement staircase to the brownstone’s front door. Bennis stepped halfway off the curb and began to signal for the cab.

He does look familiar, she told herself. Why does he look familiar? He wasn’t anyone who lived on Cavanaugh Street. He wasn’t anyone she’d known growing up on the Main Line either, although that would have made more sense. Most of the people on Cavanaugh Street were either Armenian immigrants or the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Armenian immigrants. Some of them were tall, but after a certain age all of them ran to fat. None of them had that fine-boned fragility that made a person, male or female, look more ghostlike than real. Even Gregor Demarkian, who was six foot four, was a big massive solid man, not an elegant one.

I have seen that man before, Bennis told herself. I really have.

Then the cab pulled up to the curb and she had to get into it. That was always the way things seemed to work out. She got curious about something and something else came along to prevent her from satisfying her curiosity. It was the way the universe was organized. There was something cosmic out there that was trying to get her. There was—

—there was a distinct possibility that she was getting her period.

She leaned over the front seat and told the driver, “Superior court.”

The driver gave her a strange look, but took gamely off.

Bennis sat back and sighed. She told herself she could go over to Hannah’s tomorrow and just
ask
who it was. That was what would make the most sense.

Then she closed her eyes and let the cab take her across town, lulling her even in the Friday-night traffic, making her drift off to sleep in spite of the weekend lights. When they pulled up in front of the superior court building, she was nearly snoring.

“Hey, lady,” the cabdriver said.

Bennis came to and reached for her wallet.

Back on Cavanaugh Street, a gust of wind coming up the stairs as Gregor Demarkian opened the front door to let himself in, tugged at the tape Bennis had used to fasten her note to her brother Christopher to her door, ripped the note away, and sent the note and the tape both spiraling down the dark center of the stairwell.

H
ANNAH KREKORIAN HAD NEVER
been a pretty woman. In fact, she had never been pretty at all, even as a child. That might not have mattered if she had had flair, like Sheila, who was really plain but knew how to make herself up. It might not have mattered if she’d had brains or talent or humor or anything else that could provide an aura of fascination. Instead, Hannah had been a stocky, plain child with a good heart who had become a stocky, plain woman with a good heart. There were advantages in that. Her husband had married her for what he called her “generosity.” Her friends stuck by her for what they called her “helpfulness.” She had been elected to the parish council four times because of her universal reputation as a “good Christian woman.” The problem was, Hannah Krekorian did not want to be a good Christian woman. She wanted to be what Lida Arkmanian had been, when they were all growing up together on Cavanaugh Street. She wanted to be the most beautiful girl in the class, the natural prom queen, the undisputed choice to represent the spirit of spring at the annual citywide Armenian Festival. Most of all, Hannah wanted to be the kind of woman men just couldn’t help being attracted to.

It was so cold on this night, the tips of Hannah’s fingers were turning blue. The joints of her fingers felt too stiff to handle the key to her own front door. The bones in her face seemed made of stone. She was being silly and she knew it. She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was fifty-eight years old, and so was Lida. Sheila Kashinian wasn’t much younger. All of them had grandchildren. None of them was going to be chosen to represent spring this year or any year in the future. What good was it going to do her, wishing her life had been different when she was seventeen?

The key turned in the front-door lock. Hannah pushed against the door and couldn’t make it budge.

“Here,” Paul Hazzard said, coming up behind her. “Let me do that. It’s so cold out here, I can barely breathe.”

Actually, it was Hannah who could barely breathe. She’d been having trouble with breathing ever since Paul Hazzard had come up to talk to her, back at the coffee break during her meeting for the Friends of the Matterson Settlement House. The Matterson Settlement House was one of Hannah’s “charities.” She kept on with it—as she kept on with the Friends of the Philadelphia Public Library and the Friends of the Calliman Museum of Art and the Friends of the Boswell Theater of Modern Dance and all the rest of it—because the meetings gave her someplace to go and the other members of the organization gave her somebody to talk to. Hannah had people she could talk to on Cavanaugh Street, of course. She did a lot of real and well-appreciated work for the church and the Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School. She was surrounded by people she had known forever. It just wasn’t enough.

Wasn’t enough for what? she wondered now, watching Paul get the door open and stand back to let her pass. She’d been so restless lately, so dissatisfied, and she didn’t know why. She stepped into the foyer of her brownstone and turned on the foyer light. The doorway to Melina Kashinian’s apartment was dark. Melina Kashinian was eighty-nine and probably already in bed. That’s what’s really wrong with this place, Hannah thought. Everybody goes to bed too early. And they all go to bed alone.

What?

Paul Hazzard had shut the door behind himself and was now waiting expectantly. Hannah could feel herself blushing hot and hard, as ashamed of herself as if she’d just dropped her drawers in public. It was no good at all to tell herself that Paul Hazzard couldn’t read her mind. Where had a thought like that come from?

“There’s an elevator over here,” she told Paul Hazzard, “just for me. My apartment starts on the third floor.”

“It’s a floor-through?”

“It’s a floor-through duplex. I don’t think there are any buildings on Cavanaugh Street with more than one apartment on a floor. Not anymore. It was different in the old days.”

The elevator door opened. Paul Hazzard put his hand against the rubber safety edge and let Hannah go in first.

“In the old days, this was a tenement neighborhood,” he said, nodding. “I’m impressed with what’s been done to it. Most of the tenement neighborhoods have become slums.”

“Most of the tenement neighborhoods
were
slums,” Hannah said. “I always tell my grandchildren that that’s what I grew up in. A slum. My grandchildren live in suburbs, of course. My children wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

“What about you? Why do you live here?”

“Why not?” Hannah shrugged. “I’ve lived here all my life. And my children did well. All our children did well, and the grandchildren who are grown did well, too, and we’ve had a little private urban renewal. It’s very comfortable here.”

“I wish it were comfortable where I live,” Paul Hazzard said. “I’ve still got the town house my I-don’t-know-how-many-greats grandfather built before the Revolutionary War, but the neighborhood’s not what it was. To put it mildly. The neighborhood’s downright dangerous.”

“Oh, yes,” Hannah agreed. “So much of the city is dangerous these days.”

She had been holding her finger on the “open door” button. Now she released it and the door slid closed. Her head felt stuffed with cotton and very floaty. It was as if she had had a good strong cocktail to drink. Hannah never had anything to drink except a glass of wine at Christmas. Her mother hadn’t approved of drinking, and her father had done too much of it.

The elevator cab slid upward, silent. Paul Hazzard studied the pattern of the wallpaper on the cab’s sides.

“Here we are,” he said as the cab bounced to a stop. “Why are all the foyers in this building dark? It isn’t safe.”

“Cavanaugh Street is always safe,” Hannah told him. “I don’t think there’s ever been a crime here, not really, except one Halloween we had an attempted robbery.”

“Only attempted?”

“Somebody coshed the thief with a—I don’t remember what it was. But it was all right, you know. Nobody got hurt and they caught the thief and we didn’t even have to go to court because there was a plea-bargain.”

“Wonderful,” Paul Hazzard said.

Hannah found her apartment key, wondering why her fingers were still stiff. She did not wonder why she still couldn’t breathe. Paul Hazzard was the handsomest man who had ever said two words to her in her life, never mind asked her to dinner, which he had done. He was the tallest and thinnest and most Wasp-looking man she had ever met.

Hannah got her apartment door open and stepped into her own front hall. Paul Hazzard came in after her and Hannah found herself wincing. It all looked so—so stodgy. So solid and middle-aged and graceless. The big square club chairs in the living room. The hand-tatted antimacassars. The doilies her grandmother had made, badly, from spools of undyed thread. What had she been thinking of?