27 Blood in the Water (8 page)

Gregor saw old George’s sock baller, a machine Martin had given him once for a Christmas or a birthday. Old George and Father Tibor used to hang around old George’s apartment sometimes and ball socks and let the machine fling them around the room. For some reason, the machine was never satisfied with just balling socks. It liked to play the catapult.

Gregor stepped back into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind him.

He didn’t want to see the rest of the apartment. He didn’t want to tell anybody about what he had just done. He had the odd feeling that everybody knew, anyway.

2

“Death is a part of life,” Tibor said, when Gregor picked him up at the apartment in back of the church.

Tibor was muffled up as if it were the middle of February. He had on a long black winter coat and a scarf and the kind of hat that made Gregor wonder if Tibor ever looked at himself in a mirror. He had gloves on his hands and his hands in his pockets. Gregor could never get over just how short he was.

“The man was a hundred years old,” Tibor said, as they rounded the corner into the alley and headed for Cavanaugh Street. “A hundred years old. The Bible says the days of a man are three score and ten. He was in overtime. And, sincerely Krekor, he knew it.”

“He wasn’t sick,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t ailing and in pain all that time. Not until the very end. The last week, maybe. He didn’t have dementia. His mind was as good as mine ever was. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It doesn’t make sense to you that people die of old age?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I guess it doesn’t. I mean, I understand that people’s bodies break down, and they get sick, and that sort of thing. I understand that some people have minds that break down. But it just doesn’t make any sense to me that somebody who is perfectly well, perfectly in charge of his faculties, should just die because—because of what, really? Because he’d been living too long?”

“That’s the idea,” Tibor said.

“Then I think there’s something wrong with the idea. It’s like cavities.”

“Excuse me, Krekor, but you’re getting away from me.”

“It’s like cavities,” Gregor said. “Think about it. Your teeth exist for what? To make it possible for you to eat. Right?”

“Right,” Tibor said. “Also, sometimes in some circumstances, if you know the wrong kinds of people, to help out in a fight.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “I may even know those kinds of people, but that’s beside the point here. Your teeth exist so that you can eat. But when you eat, just by eating, just by using your teeth for what they were made for—well, by doing that, you wreck your teeth with cavities, and they hurt and crumble and then fall out.”

“There is the toothbrush—”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “but why should you need a toothbrush? You’re not misusing your teeth when you eat. You’re using them for what they’re supposed to be for. You’re using them in just the way you’re supposed to use them. So why are there cavities at all? If teeth were something a company made, and they did that—they broke because you used them properly—well, there’d be lawsuits, wouldn’t there? There’d be congressional investigations. We’d do something about it.”

“You want the United States government to do something about death?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I don’t know what I want.”

They were out on the street itself now. People were coming out of the tall brownstone buildings and wending their way toward the lighted plate glass storefront of the Ararat. Gregor saw Lida Arkmanian in her three-quarter-length chinchilla coat, hurrying to catch up with Hannah Krekorian and Sheila Kashinian. Sheila had on a coat that was some kind of fur and was supposed to look expensive, but didn’t quite. Hannah was getting along with her usual wool, and if you’d asked her about it, she would have given you a long lesson on the stupidity of conspicuous consumption.

Except that she wouldn’t have called it that.

Gregor slowed down a little. Lida might be in a hurry to catch up with those two, but on most mornings, he was not.

“Look at them,” he said, pointing ahead to the women, now walking together. “We all grew up together on this street. I remember Lida in church when she was no more than four or five years old. I’d have to have been the same. She had a new dress for Easter, and her mother had bought her a hat to match. It was like a miracle had occurred right in the middle of the block. A matching hat. Who had the money for a matching hat?”

“Yes, well. While you were all growing up here, I was in Yekevan, and it would have been enough to have money for hats. Is that really what you’re worried about now, Krekor, people’s hats?”

“No,” Gregor said. “No. It’s hard to explain. We all did grow up here. It’s odd to think about it sometimes. And we didn’t have any money.”

“Most people don’t have money,” Tibor said.

“We all have money now,” Gregor said. “Even Hannah has more than she’d ever dreamed of all those years ago. She has a matching hat.”

“I don’t know why,” Tibor said, “but I don’t trust where this is going.”

“Old George Tekemanian lived on this street when we were growing up,” Gregor said. “You can’t say he grew up here, because he was born in Armenia. He was from my parents’ generation, not from mine. Can you imagine that? He was from my parents’ generation. He remembered immigrating. He remembered what it was like when this was all tenements and some of them didn’t have windows. He remembered doing all his business in Armenian and reading the Armenian language newspaper instead of
The Philadelphia Inquirer.
He remembered World War I. Can you imagine that?”

“I don’t have to imagine it,” Tibor said carefully. “There’s nothing to imagine. It’s just the reality of the real world. Of course he would remember all that. He had a good mind and it functioned well and he was a hundred years old.”

“And now he’s gone,” Gregor said, “and all that is gone with him, and it makes no sense at all. It’s wasteful, and arbitrary, and it makes no sense at all. You have to see that.”

“What I see,” Tibor said, “is that perhaps this time Bennis has a point. Perhaps you are depressed.”

They were right in front of the Ararat now. The lights gleamed out into the dark of the November morning. Behind the glass, Linda Melajian was running back and forth with a Pyrex pot of black coffee.

“I’m not depressed,” Gregor said. “I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed and offended, if you want to know the truth. It’s a waste of time and resources and everything else I can think of that somebody like old George Tekemanian would die of nothing but old age. And it is not the way a well-ordered universe would be constructed to run.”

Gregor grabbed the plate glass door, pulled it open, and went inside. The door sucked back toward Tibor, who stood unmoving on the sidewalk.

Gregor thought he should feel guilty about that, but he couldn’t do it.

He was, he thought, right in everything he was saying, and he’d been thinking about it for weeks.

Cavanaugh Street was not the same without old George down there on the first floor, and it never would be.

3

Twenty minutes later, Gregor was sitting with Tibor and Bennis in the big benched booth near the windows, and Linda Melajian was delivering a platter with his favorite breakfast. He had two scrambled eggs, two pieces of buttered toast, two round breakfast sausages, three rashers of bacon, and a huge pile of hash brown potatoes. Tibor was having almost exactly the same. Bennis was having black coffee and a half of grapefruit, and glaring.

“Look at it this way,” Gregor told her as he picked up his fork, “if I die on you in the middle of the night, it won’t be because of old age.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis said.

Linda Melajian swung around to see if anybody wanted more coffee, then took one look at Bennis’s face and decided that they did not. She swung away again, back through the crowded dining room with its little knots of people bending over coffee cups and talking without bothering to take breaths.

There were times when Gregor sat looking at Bennis and marveling that he had ever married her. It was unusual to get lucky twice with wives. It was even more unusual to have reached the age he was now and never have been divorced. Bennis made him feel lucky most mornings, but this was not one of them.

He could look around the Ararat right now and see old George sitting there, at one of the interior tables, having breakfast with Lida and Hannah and Sheila or with Donna Moradanyan Donahue and both of her children, or with, well, anybody. Everybody had breakfast with old George once in a while.

He could see both Linda Melajian and her mother bending over old George’s chair, scolding him about forgetting his gloves or his hat or eating the real butter instead of the nonsaturated-fat margarine.

These were the ordinary markers of an ordinary life. They were not vices, or risks, or natural disasters. They were not diseases or injuries. They were nothing but what everybody did everywhere with perfect safety, and there was something gravely wrong with the idea that someone would be punished for them after all.

I am being childish,
Gregor thought. This is not the way grown-up people respond to death and dying. There are supposed to be stages of grief, and then at the end you are supposed to be all calm and accepting and ready to go on with your life. He had figured out in no time that what he was thinking and feeling did not fit into them.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,” he said.

“What?” Father Tibor said.

“It’s a poem by a man named Dylan Thomas,” Gregor said. “Bennis probably had to read it at Vassar. He wrote it to his father when his father was dying. Do not go gentle into that good night. Death is the enemy.”

“He’s been like this for days,” Bennis said. “Sometimes I get it, but sometimes I just want to kill him.”

“Then there’s the other thing,” Gregor said. “The wages of sin are death.”

Tibor shook his head. “If you’re going to read the Bible, you should read the whole thing, not just bits and pieces of it that suit your mood. It doesn’t do anybody any good taken apart like that. We’ve started wars doing that. We’ve killed people.”

“I’m not going to kill anyone,” Gregor said. “I’m arguing against killing anyone, that’s the point. But the wages of sin are death goes to prove it.”

“To prove what, Krekor?”

“That death is meant as a punishment,” Gregor said. “It was in that book you gave me, too, that St. Augustine. The wages of sin are death. Death is a punishment. And George hadn’t done one damned thing to be punished for that I know of. And if he’d ever done anything, it was so far in the past it couldn’t possibly have mattered any more.”

“You have read the St. Augustine, Krekor? You have read all of it?”

“He sits on the couch and pages back and forth through it,” Bennis said. “Then he stops and reads some of it and mutters under his breath. I don’t know what you were thinking, Tibor. That thing is a thousand pages long.”

“With little tiny type,” Gregor said. “But I’m not mistaking his meaning, Tibor, and you know it. The whole thing, the whole way you explained it all at the funeral, makes no sense. We couldn’t run a criminal justice system this way. We couldn’t write a code of law—doesn’t it start with what’s supposed to be a code of law? Could you imagine a code of law that gave the same penalty to somebody who cussed out his grandmother and, I don’t know, pick somebody. Hitler. That wouldn’t be a code of law. It would be a travesty. And this is a travesty. And you know it.”

“He’s back on religion again,” Bennis said.

“Yes,” Tibor said. “I am sorry for this. I did not mean to cause this kind of a problem. I only meant to give George a proper funeral.”

“And you did give George a proper funeral,” Bennis said. “There was nothing wrong with anything you said. He’s just grabbing hold of it and taking it to the zoo.”

“I could have given the homily in Armenian,” Tibor said.

“Then Martin and Angela wouldn’t have understood it,” Bennis said.

“I understood it perfectly,” Gregor said, “and I’m not being an idiot here. That explanation made no sense. And if a God actually exists for whom that explanation does make sense, then He doesn’t make sense, and there’s no point in listening to Him. We don’t have to figure out if God exists or not, we only have to figure out if He’s sane, and apparently He’s not. And that really ought to be all we need to know about it.”

“Don’t you think there’s something really odd about the fact that this is the first time you’ve ever had trouble thinking that God makes sense?” Bennis asked. “I mean, Gregor, you were with the FBI for decades. You investigated serial murders. You’ve been investigating murders ever since. You see broken and ravaged bodies all over the landscape and you vaguely think you probably might not believe in God but it doesn’t bother you—and then old George dies peacefully and without pain at a hundred years old and you get like this? You don’t think there’s anything odd about that?”

Gregor looked at his plate. There was too much food on it. He hadn’t eaten like this in years. His back hurt.

“No,” he said finally. “I don’t think there’s anything strange about this. I understand why people die at the hands of serial killers. I understand why they kill each other. And it does make sense.”

He was about to go on with the thought—and it was a thought; he’d been working it out obsessively ever since old George’s funeral—when the front door to the Ararat opened and a man walked in Gregor was sure he had never seen. There would have been nothing strange about that at lunch or dinner, but breakfast at the Ararat tended to be the neighborhood and nobody else.

A dozen heads throughout the room swiveled around to stare. If it had been Gregor himself in that position, he would have backed right up and gotten out of there.

The strange man came inside instead and looked around. He was very small and very round and very bald, and he was about as nervous as he could be without giving himself a heart attack. Gregor found it hard to look at him. He was that twitchy.

The man looked around the room once, then twice, then again, and finally he turned his head enough to see the window booth. The twitchiness disappeared at once. The round bald head glowed. The oddly fishlike lips spread up and out in a grin. Then the little man hurried over, and stuck his hand out over the food at Gregor Demarkian.