Hardscrabble Road (38 page)

“Well, that’s not to his discredit,” Gregor said. “That’s very good of him.”

“Yes, Krekor, it was very good of him. He is a relatively wealthy man. His books sell well and the Nobel Prize brings about
a million dollars with it. But he is like many wealthy men in these enterprises. He gives, but he expects to get in return.”

“And what did he expect to get?”

“Our agreement not to attempt to block, or even to protest, legislation that would have made the pastors who practice faith
healing liable to criminal prosecution for practicing medicine without a license.”

Gregor sat back on his seat. It was, he thought, not all that ridiculous an idea. He could even see a couple of ways around
the constitutional problems somebody was bound to bring up, probably the ACLU.

“You’d argue it as a kind of fraud protection,” he said. “You’d say there is no evidence that faith healing works, ever—is
there?”

“No,” Tibor said. “It is my personal opinion that if God wanted to cure all our ills with prayer, He wouldn’t have given us
the minds to invent modern medicine. I am not saying that God does not sometimes heal us when we ask for healing in prayer.
Yes, He does that. I am saying I know of no properly corroborated case of a cure through faith healing. There are stories,
of course. People claim things. Some of the things they claim might even be true. But they can’t document them, and if they
can’t document them, then the proper response of rational people is to think it probably did not happen. But here, you see,
is the difficulty. Not all people, not even all rational people, have the proper response. They hear the stories, and they
find the stories more compelling than the hard evidence. And they go to faith healers anyway. Sometimes they give these people
a lot of money they cannot afford to give. Sometimes they do things that make their conditions medically worse. Diabetics
throw away their insulin, for instance, and some of the ones who do go into comas and some of the ones who go into comas die.”

“I’m surprised nobody has thought of this before, if it’s that bad,” Gregor said.

“People have thought of it before,” Tibor said, “and it’s worse than you realize. Jehovah’s Witnesses will not have blood
transfusions, even to save their lives. Christian Scientists do not consult conventional doctors or use conventional medicine.
They use Christian Science practitioners instead. Christian Science practitioners pray with the sick person, but do not use
medicines or medical technology. There have been cases involving the death of children—”

“—Good God.”

“Yes, Krekor, good God. There are states that have passed laws requiring parents to seek conventional medical care for children
in spite of their religious beliefs, and those hold up when they are passed, because the child itself is not making the decision
and the parent who does make the decision is not hurting only himself. And this is fine with me, Krekor. I have nothing at
all against such laws to protect children. But I do have something against such laws to stop the adults involved in these
religions from refusing medical care they deem to be sinful or inappropriate. Do I think they’re stupid to do this? Yes, dear
God, yes. I think they are stupid almost to the point of criminality. But I also think that it must be their choice, and their
decision, on their terms, and not mine.”

“And Jig Tyler, I take it, didn’t feel that way,” Gregor said.

“Dr. Tyler expressed the opinion that anybody who could look at the evidence and still think faith healing was a rational
choice was not, in fact, rational, and that we do not allow mentally incompetent people to run around making decisions they
are unable to make and hurting themselves in the process. If a person is mentally ill, we have hearings and commit him to
a mental institution. If people persist in irrational and harmful behavior, we make laws against the irrational and harmful
behavior. Like seat belt laws. He brought up the seat belt laws. That’s why I was thinking of them.”

“And that’s why you think he is capable of committing a cold-blooded murder?’

Tibor looked into his coffee cup. It was empty. “Krekor,” he said. “You have to understand something. Dr. Tyler is a serious
person.”

“You mean he doesn’t have much of a sense of humor?”

“No,” Tibor said. “I mean he has, what, gravitas is the word, and it isn’t English. I’m sorry. He is a great mind, probably
the greatest I have ever met. This is not a trick, or a joke. He can do things with his mind I can’t even understand, never
mind do myself. He is a committed person. Nobody wins two Nobels and a Fields Medal if he isn’t. His books are outlandish
and overwrought, but they are meticulously researched and meticulously documented. I can only guess how quickly and efficiently
his mind works, and on how many levels. When we first met, we talked about the formation of the New Testament, and he quoted
St. Ignatius to me, in demotic Greek. I went back and looked up the passage when I got home, and he had it exactly. From memory.
From a field he has no professional interest in. In the course of our time on the committee, he quoted from or alluded to
everybody from Niels Bohr to Charles Schultz. He’s read Dante in the medieval Italian and understood it. He’s seen every movie
Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made. He speaks six languages and reads ten. He can play both Beethoven and Jerry Lee Lewis on
the piano. It’s an encyclopedic mind, a comprehensive mind, and the most remarkably detailed memory I’ve ever encountered
in anyone, ever. It’s not a ‘photographic’ memory, it’s something better. It’s a regular memory, just at four hundred times
the effectiveness that most of us can manage. If I’d met him under other circumstances, I might have felt privileged to have
some time to talk to him. But.”

“I knew there was a but coming,” Gregor said.

“If there wasn’t a but, you’d have no need to talk to me. There is a but, Krekor, yes. And it is that I think that Dr. Tyler
does not think he is human, or does not think the rest of us are.”

“You mean, he thinks he’s God?”

“No, no, Krekor. He is not trite. I mean that he thinks there is a difference between us and him, a difference so vast it
is not a difference in degree but a difference in kind. He sees us the way we see very intelligent dogs. We can love our dogs,
but we don’t treat them the way we treat our grandmothers. Dogs do not have rights, because we don’t think they would know
what to do with them. We put them down, if we think we have to.”

“That’s trite, though, isn’t it?” Gregor said. “The great genius who looks down on lesser mortals. I’d think that is as trite
as it comes.”

“It may be trite, Krekor, but it’s also human nature. If you ask me, the most pernicious idea this world ever came up with,
next to the perfectibility of man, which has killed more people than smallpox, the next one is the idea of the genius. Leonardo
da Vinci did not think of himself as a genius. He got a lot more work done than most of the people who have thought of themselves
as geniuses, and he did it without writing himself out of the human race.”

Up at the front of the café, the door opened and a woman came in, looking up one row of tables and down another, as if she
was frantic to find somebody, but thought she wouldn’t. When she got to Gregor she stopped, nodded slightly, and came forward.

“Mr. Demarkian?” she said.

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

“My name is Laurie Kohl. I’m an assistant DA in Rob Benedetti’s office. He says he wonders if you would mind coming across
the street right away, right now, it’s urgent. There’s been a phone call.”

“A phone call about what?”

“I don’t know,” Laurie Kohl said, “but you’re not to go up to the office, you’re to wait for him in the lobby, he’s on his
way down. And there are officers coming. I don’t know what’s going on. Could you come, please?”

Wed–Thurs, February 11–12

High 11F, Low –2F

Sentences of death, where they are freely chosen, do not need to be written.

—G
EORGE
S
TEINER

But consider, Sisters, that the Devil hasn’t forgotten us. He also invents his own honors in monasteries and invents his own
laws.

—S
T
. T
ERESA OF
A
VILA

No matter how fast light travels it finds darkness has gotten there first, and is waiting for it.

—T
ERRY
P
RATCHETT

T
he first thing Gregor
Demarkian thought of when he had time to think, nearly an hour later, was that no matter how much he had been complaining
of the cold these last few days, he hadn’t spent much time outside in it. Now he had no choice.

“Outside and in the back,” Rob Benedetti had said, when Gregor met him in the lobby little more than half an hour before.

Tibor had been hanging back on the edges. Benedetti hadn’t noticed him. Then a whole line of patrol cars had pulled up, and
suddenly everybody was running.

Well, no, Gregor thought, not quite. He had felt as if everybody was running, but that had at least as much to do with his
age as with the way other people were behaving. Marbury and Giametti had come, and they led the charge out the front door
of the building, along the sidewalk, and through the narrow opening of an alley leading behind the buildings. Gregor’s stomach
lurched as soon as he saw where they were going, and he remembered, as clearly as he remembered his conversation with Tibor,
seeing the homeless man pushing a shopping cart through that space. He tried to remember what the homeless man had looked
like, but couldn’t get anything except the impression of someone tall and thin. He tried to remember what was in the cart,
but couldn’t get that, either, except that the thing was full. Everybody was right. You didn’t really look at homeless people.
You didn’t notice them in detail, the way you might a “normal” person, although, in Gregor’s experience, you didn’t notice
much about “normal” people either, unless they were somebody you knew or something had called your attention to them. Maybe
that was the difference. Maybe you didn’t notice much about homeless people especially when something called your attention
to them. You looked away, the way you would if a friend had just done something to embarrass himself in public.

The backs of the buildings were a maze of fire escapes and garbage cans, stray garbage and discarded needles. Did addicts
really huddle out in back of the District Attorney’s Office to shoot up? Apparently they did. Maybe they did that even behind
police stations. If you were out of sight, you were invisible. The shopping cart was parked right at the end of a long line
of metal garbage cans, the big ones the trucks came for three times a week. It might have been one more package destined for
removal. Gregor wished he had brought a hat. He wished he had remembered to put on his gloves before his fingers felt so cold
they could be broken off like icicles on the ends of his hands. He wished that when Marbury and Giametti got whatever it was
out of the cart’s big well, it wouldn’t turn out to be a tall, thin homeless man in dark clothes.

It wasn’t. Marbury reached in and disturbed the rags and papers to find the body. Then he checked for a pulse. When he didn’t
get one, he got Giametti’s help and the two of them began to pry the body loose and into the air.

“They have to do that,” Rob Benedetti said to Gregor, coming to stand very close to him as they both watched the extraction.
Benedetti didn’t have a hat, either, and he’d forgotten the gloves entirely. “Even if they don’t get a pulse. Even if they
know they’re dealing with a corpse. If there aren’t maggots coming out of the thing, they have to get it out and check it
out again, just in case. The last thing we want is to end up killing somebody by accident, or not getting them help in time
when we could have.”

“Listen,” Gregor said. “I think I saw this cart come in here.”

“What?”

“I was crossing the street to get to the coffee shop, and this man, this tall, thin man—no, let me back up. This tall, thin
person. I just assumed it was a man. Anyway, he pushed a shopping cart pretty much like this one into the alley that leads
back here. There couldn’t be two of them, could there?”

“I don’t know,” Benedetti said.

They both looked at Marbury and Giametti, now working with two other officers. The body came up from the well like an unruly
beach ball, and then suddenly it was stretched out between the men, one holding the arms, the other holding the legs, a third
officer propping up the torso at the middle of the back. They put the body down on the ground just as the ambulances came
up out on the street, their sirens screaming into the cold like needles. They got down on their hands and knees and began
to pump at the man, to check him out, to try the impossible. It was remarkable how automatic that was, trying the impossible.
Even combatants in war, coming up on the enemy wounded, often tried to save them rather than kill them off.

Gregor moved close to get a better look at the man. It was definitely not the one he had seen on the street. This man was
short, and chunky, even
though he was thin enough, probably from addictions and malnutrition. His clothes, though, were not as worn as you might expect
them to be. They were dirty, but not torn, and not frayed. The man’s face was a mass of beard, and that made Gregor stop to
think. He saw homeless men on the streets every day. Most of them had stubble, at most. Where did they shave? Or did alcohol
make a beard stop growing? It hadn’t on this man. His beard was filthy and full of bits of food and dirt, but it was most
definitely there. His hair was not. He was close to bald, and he didn’t have a hat.

Tibor came up to Gregor’s side and pulled on his sleeve. Gregor had had no idea he was still there.

“You should go home,” Gregor said. “This is a crime scene, at least presumptively. You can’t walk around in it without tainting
the forensics.”