Glass Houses (10 page)

“What?”

“Yes, I am serious, Krekor. And if it was just a matter of ignorance, I wouldn't mind. She is here. We can show her the truth. But it is not a matter of ignorance. It is a matter of malice. And now there is this Plate Glass Killer and the homeless man they have arrested, and I am thinking she is working herself up to write about it. Wrongly. She is working herself up to make this into an example of what it is not.”

Tibor came away from the window, and sat down on the couch. Part of the foreignness were the clothes, Gregor thought, the cheap black suits always just a little too small and a little too tight, as if he had not been able to afford more material. There was something Bennis had tried to change that she hadn't been able to make budge. Bennis bought Tibor clothes, and as soon as he put them on, they looked like all the other clothes he had ever had since the day he had first arrived in America from the old Soviet Union.

“We should not have given her the apartment,” Tibor said. “That's what I am thinking. But maybe I am wrong. If she had gone somewhere else, what would she have thought? The inner city. Somewhere like that. And then there is the fact that it is a favor to Bennis, who usually has much better taste in friends.”

“Bennis has no taste in friends,” Gregor said. “Bennis knows everybody
on the planet and half of them are lunatics more unreliable than she is. Which brings us to our usual impasse. You don't know where she is, really?”

“No, Krekor. I don't know where she is. I would not lie to you. If I knew but I wasn't allowed to tell, I would tell you that.”

“Not even a clue? What about Miss Lydgate. Would she know?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. She perhaps saw Bennis somewhere recently, that is possible.”

“But?”

“But I do not believe that Miss Lydgate is really a friend,” Tibor said. “She is mean, and when she is not that she is malicious, and Bennis does not have patience with either. I wonder if they have a mutual friend that Bennis perhaps does the favor for. If I knew where Bennis was, Krekor, I would call her myself. I would ask her about this woman and what she is doing here.”

Gregor stood up. “Well,” he said, “nobody on Cavanaugh Street has heard from Bennis in four months, not even Donna Moradanyan. Maybe she's gone through a wormhole. Is that a word? I took Tommy to the movies last weekend. I was never so confused in my life. Let's go have breakfast. If you don't like what Miss Lydgate is doing, maybe you can corral her and tell her what you think.”

“Tcha, Krekor. She wouldn't listen. Or she would write an article about how Americans refuse to face reality. This is a major theme of hers. Americans should be miserable because the country is horrible; but they're not miserable, so they must be delusional. Over and over again. Then she mixes up federal and state law, she gets federalism wrong. When I was still studying for my citizenship test, I did better than this. And I have put out my flag.”

“I didn't know you had a flag.”

“I had it in a box in the closet to put out for the Fourth of July because Donna has asked me to. I have put it out this morning, so that she would have had to pass it on her way out of the courtyard. She wanted to know if I kept a gun.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her no, Krekor, without thinking about it. But if I had thought about it, I should have told her that I keep an M-16 and a rocket launcher in my kitchen. An M-16 is a kind of rifle, yes?”

“Yes. A very good kind of rifle. Also very powerful. What would you do with an M-16 aside from scaring the poor woman to death?”

“It is perhaps not the worst of outcomes, Krekor.”

Gregor got up and got his sports jacket from the back of the couch. It was probably only just cool enough to wear a sports jacket, but he wore them all the time, even in the middle of July, and most of the time he wore a tie, too. It was no use trying to be somebody you were not. He couldn't have turned himself
into a “hip” person or a “cool” person just for Bennis. He had to admit he didn't even want to. Maybe that was the key. Maybe she could sense, from that, that his commitment to her was not everything she wanted it to be.

This was so insane, Gregor began to wonder if he had started listening to soap operas in his sleep. Maybe he sleepwalked and turned on the set and watched—what? It used to be that soap operas were on only during the day. Now there was the Soap Channel, and he was fairly sure they got it on their cable tier.

“Tcha,” Tibor said. “You're off somewhere again. Aren't you going to breakfast?”

“Right away,” Gregor said.

There was something heavy in the pocket of his sports jacket. He reached in with his hand and came out with the Palm Pilot Bennis had given him as a present the Christmas before last.

He'd had no idea he was carrying it around.

G
regor Demarkian was a
man who needed—even demanded—a certain amount of regularity in his life. In the years since he had come to live on Cavanaugh Street, breakfast at the Ararat had become one of the hallmarks of that regularity. It wasn't quite as satisfying as a full-bore professional schedule, when you knew where you had to be every minute of every hour and there was a secretary at the end of the hall keeping tabs on it, but it had the advantage of being considerably more personal. The Ararat had the virtue of being always the same in its general outline, although always different in its particulars.

Today the Ararat was in a bit of a fuss. Gregor and Tibor always arrived for breakfast as soon as the doors opened, and there were rarely as many as five or six other people there to open up with them. Now the entire street seemed to be out early. Even Donna Moradanyan was having breakfast out, although she never did that anymore now that she had Russ to feed at home. Gregor wondered where Russ was. Donna was sitting with her son, Tommy, and one of the older Ohanian girls and Grace Fineman, who lived in Donna's old apartment in Gregor's building. Gregor tried to remember which of the Ohanian girls this was. There were so many Ohanians, Gregor could never keep track of them.

In spite of the crowd, nobody had taken the large window booth with its low benches covered with cushions, the one old Vartan Melajian had tarted up to look like what he imagined a bazaar restaurant would look like in Yekevan. Of course, Vartan had never been in Yekevan. He was of Gregor's generation, which meant it was his parents who had come over on the boat, and they had both been dead before he decided to open the Ararat. Gregor had always
had the sneaking suspicion that what the booth actually looked like was the reception room in a brothel. It didn't matter. Nobody would have been rude enough to make fun of Vartan over his decorating schemes—except his children, and they didn't count—and the tourists absolutely adored the thing. People called up and made reservations just for the booth.

Gregor slid in on the bench on one side and waited for Tibor to slide in on the other. The window looked directly out onto Cavanaugh Street, and from the direction he was facing Gregor could see Ohanian's Middle Eastern Food Store already open for business, with big round apple baskets and displays of vegetables set up outside. It was good the Ohanians had all those children. If they'd had only one or two, there might have been a mutiny over the day-today responsibilities of opening up and getting the vegetables out this early.

Linda Melajian came over with two cups, two saucers, and the coffeepot. She put the saucers down, placed the cups in them, and started to pour. She had not brought over menus. She knew Gregor and Tibor wouldn't need them.

“What do you think?” she said. “Have you talked to her?”

“I'm not even awake yet,” Gregor said.

“You will be in a minute,” Linda said. “I saw her go up the street to Dimitri's place to buy the paper, and she hasn't come back down again. I keep telling Dimitri to come in for breakfast, but he still doesn't have anybody to help him in the store. To tell you the truth, I don't think he wants to spend the money to hire somebody. It's hard when you don't have family, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I think she's very distinguished—Miss Lydgate, I mean. Donna says to call her Miss Lydgate, not Ms. They don't use Ms. in England. Or something. You want eggs and sausage?”

“No,” Gregor said. When Bennis had first been away, he had taken a certain amount of satisfaction in eating all the things she used to yell at him for eating, but now the novelty had worn off, and eggs and bacon just made him feel tired and overful. “I'll have orange juice and a melon and cheese. Something good for the cheese. Gruyere?”

“If you want, but it'll cost you extra. The stuff is like twelve dollars a pound, even wholesale,” Linda said. “So what's the deal? Is Bennis about to descend on us again so we're trying to make sure we can't tell her you've been eating like a pig?”

Tibor cleared his throat. Twice.

Linda gave them both a withering look. “Well, she hasn't moved out, has she? Her furniture is still here, and her apartment isn't up for sale. If it was, we'd all know it. So she must be coming back.”

“She must be,” Gregor agreed, “but if it's anytime soon, I don't know about it. Why don't you get me that melon and cheese?”

“And for me hash browns and sausages,” Tibor said. “And for yourself, more discretion, please. You act like a teenager.”

“I'm not exactly geriatric,” Linda said. “Never mind. I really do think she looks distinguished, you know what I mean? It must be wonderful to have a job like that. Donna says we shouldn't all gang up on her, and we won't, really, but still. Oh, and one more thing. Grade's group is having a concert downtown at the end of the month, and Donna wants us all to go. I've never heard a harpsichord concert. I wonder what it will be like. Do you want water with everything else?”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

“I wonder what she thinks of Philadelphia,” Linda added. “I mean, what it looks like to her. I wonder if she likes it.”

“She hasn't been here a full twenty-four hours,” Gregor said, “and she got here late last night, at least from what I've heard. Give her a minute.”

“I bet she's formed impressions, though,” Linda said. “Everybody forms impressions right away. But if you're going to see the city, night is the time to do it. It looks all lit up and shiny. Did you say you wanted water?”

“Yes,” Tibor said. “Linda, please, pay attention.”

“I
am
paying attention. I'm just a little excited, that's all. I'll be back in a minute.”

Gregor watched her go all the way across the restaurant's main room, stopping at tables along the way to chatter. He shook his head. “If this is what you've all been like,” he said, “it's no wonder she's not here yet, if she's going to be here at all. You'd all fall on the woman.”

Tibor shook his head. “She will be here, Krekor. She is only snooping. I know this kind of woman.”

“They had a lot of international newspaper reporters in the Soviet gulag, did they?”

“They had a lot of everybody in the gulag,” Tibor said, “but in this case, I was talking of the sense of Miss Marple. You don't have to be an international newspaper reporter to be what this woman is. There is one in every village. Tcha. There is one in every family. I keep trying to tell people, but they won't listen.”

“They're just being friendly,” Gregor said. “As well as ridiculously nosy. Which is what they're like. They don't mean any harm.”

“She does. Wait and see, Krekor. She will begin to write her articles, and then everybody will see and be upset. But I have tried to warn them.”

“Well, maybe she won't even come to breakfast, no matter what you think. It's her first day. If it was my first day, I'd find all this a little overwhelming. Come to think of it, I did.”

Linda was back with plates and a tray. She put down two tiny glasses of water and then began to pass out the rest of it. Gregor's melon was huge and orange and cut in half. The actual item on the menu said only half a melon, but he'd come to an equitable agreement with the Melajians a long time ago.

“I've brought the paper,” Linda said, throwing a copy of
The Inquirer
down on the table. “They've caught the Plate Glass Killer, isn't that wonderful? Maybe my father will stop being such an idiot when all I want to do is go to the movies with a couple of friends. I mean, honestly, what sense did it make giving me a curfew anyway? He killed those women in the daytime as well as the nighttime. It's not like I am all right in the sunlight but in mortal peril after dark. I like the whole idea of mortal peril, don't you? It sounds like something out of a Sherlock Holmes's story. They all sound so much better educated in England, don't you think?”

Linda wasn't about to wait around to hear what they thought. She hurried off, the tray under one arm the way she must once have carried schoolbooks. Gregor watched her go and then looked down at the paper. The front page was entirely taken up by pictures of the man the police had arrested as the Plate Glass Killer, and the largest headline Gregor had seen on the
Inquirer
in years. He looked down at the subtitle: “Homeless Man Confesses to Plate Glass Killings.” He looked at the pictures of the man again and said, “Huh?”

“What is it, Krekor? You are not happy they have caught this Plate Glass Killer.”

“I'm just surprised at who they've caught as the Plate Glass Killer.” Gregor looked through the pictures one more time, then turned to the inside page and looked at some more.
The Inquirer
had gone all out, as if this were a political assassination. “Tyder Picked Up Once Before,” one of the subheads read. He ran his eyes over those paragraphs quickly: the accused man, Henry Tyder, had been suspected of being the Plate Glass Killer after the murder of Conchita Estevez, who had been a maid living in the house of his sisters. Gregor blinked. The syntax was awful. Somebody had put the article together at the last minute and without sufficient regard to things like grammar, punctuation, and spelling. He looked through the pictures of Henry Tyder again.