Quoth the Raven (7 page)

Gregor managed to find the keyhole under all the crepe paper, tried his key, and found it wouldn’t work: the door was already unlocked. He let himself into the vestibule in a rising state of exasperation. None of the doors on Cavanaugh Street were locked these days. Lida and Hannah and all the rest of those silly women were much too concerned that the small children who came to their doors wouldn’t be able to reach the doorknobs. They intended to keep their doors not only unlocked, but open, all Halloween night. What kind of a world did they think they were living in? Cavanaugh Street was a prosperous neighborhood, ten blocks of miraculous self-styled urban renewal—but it was surrounded by nastiness. Even if all they did was pass through the neighborhoods on their periphery while safely ensconced in the backseats of cabs, they ought to know that.

He got to the third floor, saw that his own door was standing open, and barged in.

“Bennis?” he said. “Bennis, come out here for a minute. I want to talk to you.”

“Bennis is in the bathroom,” Donna Moradanyan said, emerging from the kitchen in a cloud of fair wispy hair and flour. Donna Moradanyan looked less Armenian-American than anyone Gregor had ever met, but she was definitely Armenian-American. Not only both her parents, but all four of her grandparents, all eight of her great-grandparents, and all umpteen-thousand of her other ancestors were of Armenian extraction. Exactly how she had come out looking like a virginal Swedish exercise nut, Gregor didn’t know.

“We’re almost all packed,” she said now, taking the heavier of the two bags out of Gregor’s right arm, “so if you want to add something we haven’t counted on, I don’t know what we’ll do. And the kitchen’s a mess. Tommy got into the flour when I wasn’t looking, and it’s all over the place.”

So that was what the flour was about, Gregor thought. Tommy was Donna Moradanyan’s infant son, just now going on six months old and threatening to become seriously mobile.

“I don’t want to add anything to what you’re packing,” Gregor said. “I’m not crazy. I just want—”

“—to ream us out about the doors,” Bennis finished for him.

Gregor turned around to see her emerging from the living room, which led to a little hall at the back with the bedroom and bathroom off it. She had her great cloud of trademark Hannaford black hair pinned haphazardly to the top of her head, the tails of her flannel shirt hanging out, and nothing but knee socks on her feet. She looked impossibly beautiful and impossibly disorganized. She was, in reality, both.

“I have,” Gregor said, “a perfect right to ream you out about the doors. I know I seem to be talking to thin air on this subject, but whether it has dawned on either of you or not—and on Lida, and on Hannah, and on Sheila Kashinian and all the rest of them—this is not a Hollywood movie set in the thirties. This is Philadelphia in the nineties. Not three blocks from this apartment there’s a crack house that operates twenty-four hours a day and gets raided once a week. You leave the doors on this street standing open and unlocked all Halloween night, and somebody is going to get killed.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “I hope you’re wrong, because there’s nothing I can do about it. Every time I try to tell Lida what you tell me, she pats me on the head and says, ‘Yes, dear, and now, that boy who took you out last week, is he responsible?’ ”

Donna smiled. “Lida wants to fix Bennis up with Hannah Krekorian’s son Johnny. He just got divorced.”

“But it’s okay,” Bennis said, “because he got divorced from a non-Armenian girl who wasn’t even Greek Orthodox or anything, and any food with a spice in it gave her indigestion, and Hannah and Lida couldn’t stand her.”

“I have to get back to Tommy,” Donna said. “He’s probably breaking plates by now.”

Donna whirled and went back through the kitchen door, cooing out mother-sounds in advance. Bennis turned to Gregor and shrugged.

“Look,” she said, “I know how you feel about the doors. I don’t even think you’re wrong. But there really isn’t anything I can do about it. They treat me like a pet.”

“Do you mind that, Bennis?”

“No.” Bennis paced around his foyer, stopping to look at his badly framed pen-and-ink drawing of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, stopping again to look at the vase of wilted flowers on the small occasional table. It wasn’t much, but it beat the way the foyer had looked for the first six months after he bought this apartment—meaning empty.

She came to rest in the exact center of the foyer floor, looked at the ceiling, looked at her feet, and said,

“Gregor? Can I ask you something?”

“Ask away.”

“Well. Okay. Um. Look, it’s been, what, two months since my mother died?”

“About ten weeks.”

“You always did have a better sense of time than I have. Anyway, the house belongs to Yale University now, and they’re getting antsy. I’ve got to find a new place to live.”

“You know how I feel about that, Bennis. I thought you should have found a new place to live last New Year’s.”

“Yes. Well. I had obligations. Gregor, I don’t know if you’ve realized it, but the second-floor apartment in this building is for sale.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t say ‘ah.’ ” Bennis threw up her hands. “Look, I don’t want to impose on you, all right? I don’t want to push things where they shouldn’t go. It’s just that Donna and I have been talking, you know, and I spend half my time here anyway, and we were thinking it might be the perfect solution. The apartment isn’t even very expensive.”

“You’re the only person I know who could describe a quarter of a million dollars as ‘not very expensive.’ ”

“I make a lot of money. Gregor, would you mind? I absolutely promise not to cook for you any more than I already do—”

“That’s a threat.”

“—and if I’m seeing some man, I’ll go to his place—”

“I’d rather have you bring him here. You tend to date psychopaths.”

“—and if I’m working later than two o’clock in the morning, I’ll put a towel under the typewriter so you can’t hear it and I won’t wake up old George downstairs—”

“Worry about old George, not about me. I’d be relieved to hear you were back at work.”

“—and all that sort of thing,” Bennis finished up. “Would you mind, Gregor? Would it bother you?”

“No,” Gregor said. “But Bennis, this is a fine time to tell me.”

“A fine time? Why?”

“Because you closed on that apartment yesterday. I ran into Stephen Telemakian last night and he told me all about it.”

Bennis took her cigarettes slowly, carefully, deliberately out of her shirt pocket, extracted one from the pack, lit up, and blew a stream of smoke at the foyer ceiling.

“Never try to surprise a detective,” she told him solemnly. “All it does is get you kicked in the ass.”

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER,
they were standing out on the curb, loading picnic baskets into Donna Moradanyan’s van while Donna stood by with Tommy in her arms, looking wistful. The sun was still shining brightly and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the day had grown sharply colder. Bennis had tucked her shirt back into her jeans and put on a pair of L.L. Bean’s Maine Hunting Shoes.

“I wish you were coming with us,” she was saying to Donna. “I know it would have been problematic with Tommy along, but Father Tibor loves Tommy. We could have found a way to make do.”

“Lida has me signed up to tell fortunes at eight o’clock tomorrow night. It’s all right, Bennis. I’ve got all that work to do on my portfolio. Besides, if I’m not here, who will sign for your furniture?”

“Old George?”

“He’d send it all back and get his grandson Martin to buy you a set of new.”

“I need a set of new.” Bennis climbed into the van, counted to seven twice—checking out the picnic baskets, Gregor thought—and climbed out again. “Remember, if Mitzy Hansen from Doubleday calls, you want fifteen hundred for cover art and no less. Don’t worry about what’s-his-name from Random House. They always pay all right for artists.”

“Okay.”

“What about you, Gregor? You ready to go?”

Gregor was definitely ready to go. Cavanaugh Street was beginning to get to him. Howard Kashinian had given up handstands for a prancing little vaudeville act that was positively surreal. Little Susan Lekmejian, aged six, was hopping up and down on the bottom step in front of her parents’ town house, dressed as a potato plant. Any minute now, somebody was going to decide to tie himself to the top of a tall tree and swing through the air like Peter Pan.

Bennis slammed the side door of the van shut. Gregor climbed into the front passenger seat and hooked himself into his seat belt. Donna Moradanyan caught Bennis by the sleeve and said, “Don’t forget about the downshift. It sticks.”

“I won’t forget.”

“And don’t drive faster than fifty-five.”

Bennis didn’t answer that one. She climbed into the driver’s seat, fastened her seat belt out of deference to Gregor, and put the van in gear.

“You know,” she said, “there’s been something else I’ve been meaning to ask you, About Father Tibor.”

“What about Father Tibor?”

“Well, is he all right? Is something seriously wrong with him all of a sudden or something?”

“Of course not,” Gregor said, surprised. “Why would you think there would be?”

“It’s just all these changes, that’s all. We were supposed to go up there tomorrow morning, and then he calls you up in the middle of last night and wants us up there today—”

“It wasn’t the middle of the night, Bennis. It was about six thirty.”

“Whatever. It isn’t like him. When Tibor makes a plan, he usually sticks to it.”

The van was easing out into the sparse traffic on Cavanaugh Street, rolling south toward a red light, and Gregor thought: That’s true. It isn’t like Tibor. The problem was, it hadn’t been not like Tibor, either. It hadn’t been hysterical, or overwrought, or insistent. It had been—sort of small and sad.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that Tibor is a little homesick. You’ve read about the fuss they make out of Halloween in that place. I don’t think he knows how to deal with it.”

“Hannah Krekorian told me that some priest who was here when you were all children said that Halloween was a Protestant plot to turn good Armenian Christians into Devil worshipers.”

“I don’t think Tibor would go that far. I think he just feels out of place and out of step.”

“Out of place and out of step,” Bennis repeated. “Oh, well. That’s practically a definition of the man, isn’t it?”

Actually; Gregor didn’t think it was, but he didn’t have time to protest. As soon as the light turned green, Bennis shifted into first and slammed her foot on the gas.

F
ATHER TIBOR KASPARIAN WAS
waiting for them in the parking lot at the back of King’s Scaffold when they drove up, standing hatless, coatless, and sweaterless in the stiff chill wind that had been flowing ever since they first entered the Allegheny Mountains. Maybe it was the Appalachians. Gregor could never get the geography of this part of Pennsylvania straight. In his childhood he had perceived it as a wilderness, a natural fortress that protected hillbillies and leftovers from the old west. Thinking about the fact that Philadelphia, a civilized city, was propped up from the south by places like this had made him lose his sense of linear time. Many years later he had come back and discovered what he should have expected to discover: that this might be the northern tip of the hill country, that hillbillies there might be, but that most of the territory was occupied by what everyplace else was occupied by. Small, neat ranch houses built of clapboard and stone, small collections of false-fronted stores antiqued with specialty vinyl siding, brick and redstone post offices and town halls—it wasn’t suburbia exactly, because there wasn’t enough of anything in any one place, but the aesthetic was in harmony with Levittown and Shaker Heights. Every once in a while Gregor caught a glimpse of something modern in cedar and glass and knew just what it was. The back-to-the-landers had their outposts here, offering up their Ivy League educations on the altar of politically correct environmentalism.

Seeing Tibor, Gregor’s first reaction was fret and frustration. Dressed in nothing warmer than his day robes, the priest had to be freezing. Then Bennis jerked the van to a stop, pulled the Walkman headphones off her head—she had been listening to Joni Mitchell tapes all through the drive up, not talking to him—and cut the engine. Gregor found himself feeling suddenly grateful. He was grateful that the van had stopped. Bennis’s preferred speed in road vehicles was somewhere around ninety-five, and she hadn’t made much concession to the twisting mountainside roads they had had to travel to get here. He was grateful, too, for Tibor. Left on his own, he couldn’t have found a college anywhere in this landscape. There was certainly no sign of one.

Bennis had detached her seat belt and, instead of getting out of the van, gone into the back where the picnic baskets were. Gregor detached his own seat belt, opened his door, and climbed out onto the tarmac.

“Tibor?” he said.

Tibor had been staring at a small shack at the back of the parking lot, near the drive where they had come in. Now he nodded to it, as if he’d been talking to it, and turned his head away.

“Krekor,” he said. He looked at the van and frowned. “You did not drive yourself, all the way down here from Philadelphia?”

“Bennis is in the back with the food. And it’s funny, but I keep thinking of us as coming
up
here from Philadelphia.”

“You have been traveling south, Krekor.”

“I know. But we’ve also been traveling up.” Over at the van, the side door slid open and Bennis Hannaford jumped out, holding one of the picnic baskets in her arms and staggering under its weight.

“We’re never going to get all this stuff where we’ve got to go,” she said, “not unless that’s a lot closer than I think it is. Hello, Father. Is there a college less than a mile from here, or should I have brought my hiking shoes?”

“
Tcha
,” Tibor said. “Your hiking shoes would have been appropriate, because so many of the people here hike. And climb mountains. And jog. It is very remarkable, Bennis, this is such a place of peace, such a place of rest, and nobody ever stops moving.”