Bleeding Hearts (18 page)

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gregor said, “my scope seems to be far less limited now that I’m on my own than it ever was when I was with the Bureau.”

“Does it? I think I’d find myself at loose ends.”

“There’s always something to keep my interest up. I like history, for instance. I never had enough time for historical research when I was directing a government department.”

“History,” Paul Hazzard repeated. “Do you like any particular period of history? Are you one of those people who knows the blood type of every soldier who fought at Antietam or do you plot the course of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow?”

“I’m interested in the history of crime, of course.”

“Of course. Unsolved mysteries, I suppose.”

“All the really unsolved mysteries,” Gregor said, “aren’t perceived as mysteries. They’re the case of old Mrs. Smith who died so suddenly, wasn’t it odd, but heart attacks happen that way. Except that it wasn’t a heart attack and it was worse than odd, but nobody knows it, although one or two people may suspect. Either that, or the crime is unsolved because it’s a simple case of random brutality. Street thug sees old lady with purse on street, goes up to old lady, sticks her with his flic knife, grabs her purse, disappears. As long as he takes only cash and gets rid of the purse at the first opportunity, it’s the perfect crime.”

“But his fingerprints will be on the purse,” Paul Hazzard said.

“Yes, they will, but it won’t matter. The chances are one in a million that the match will ever be made if he’s picked up for something else. Our computer matching systems just aren’t that good.”

“I see.” Paul Hazzard looked away. The room was too full of people. And there was too much noise. “That’s rather disheartening to hear. I’ve spent much of the last four years thinking that a little mystery of my own would be solved any day now, cracked wide open finally by some cop somewhere picking up some junkie thief and running his prints. You did know I was once—involved—in the investigation of a murder?”

“Yes, Mr. Hazzard. I knew that.”

“It was my wife who was killed,” Paul Hazzard said. “My second wife. Jacqueline. They thought I’d done it, of course. They put me on trial for it, but I was acquitted. I suppose you knew all that too.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you suppose all these people know it?” Paul Hazzard gestured around the room.

Gregor thought of Bennis with her computer printout. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you, Mr. Hazzard. It all happened a long time ago, and the state had a fair shot at you in a fair trial. Even if you did kill your wife, I doubt if anything could be done about it now.”

“There could be new evidence.”

“It would have to be very, very, very good new evidence. There are constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy. The courts take them quite seriously. So do the police.”

“I didn’t kill my wife.” Paul Hazzard had stopped looking around the room. He was doing his best to stare straight into Gregor’s eyes. “I know it’s asinine to make such a point of it after all this time, but it’s true and the truth of it matters to me. I did not kill my wife.”

Gregor said nothing.

“When I found her lying in the living room that night, I thought I was going crazy,” Paul Hazzard said. “Except, of course, I wouldn’t have put it that way then. Do you believe the universe is split in two?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Paul Hazzard seemed to straighten, although he hadn’t been slouching that Gregor could tell. “I’d better get back to Hannah. I’m supposed to be helping out. I’m glad to have met you, Mr. Demarkian.”

“I’m glad to have met you too.”

“I’ll bet you are.”

Jab. Thrust. Sharp edge. Stab. Gregor was startled. The comment was such a change from Paul Hazzard’s customary oversincerity. It almost made him human.

Paul Hazzard stepped into the crowd around Hannah near the door. Gregor looked around for Bennis and found her nearly at his elbow. She must have been eavesdropping on the whole thing.

“I don’t like him,” she said promptly. “Do you? He comes off to me like somebody who’s after something.”

“He probably is,” Gregor said mildly.

“I don’t see how you can let him take advantage of Hannah,” Bennis said. “Really, Gregor. Sometimes I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

As far as Gregor was concerned, most of the time Bennis didn’t know what he was thinking. Gregor took this as a blessing.

“I’m hungry,” he said as forcefully as he could. Then he took off as quickly as he could in the direction of the buffet table.

Since Bennis never ate anything at these parties until she had had at least one glass of wine, she didn’t follow him.

Twenty minutes later, sated with
dolmas
and
dabgadz kufta
and Sarah Melajian’s best
khorovadz biberr
and he didn’t know what else, Gregor Demarkian sat in a chair along the wall next to Father Tibor Kasparian, drinking a large glass of
raki
and watching the movement in the room. Bob Cheswicki, Gregor noted, was where he had been all evening—just close enough to Paul Hazzard to know what was going on. Bennis had Tommy Moradanyan asleep in her lap while she sat on the couch next to Mary Ohanian. Their heads were bent so close together, Gregor decided they had to be talking about sex. Hannah Krekorian and Paul Hazzard were more difficult to figure. Paul seemed to be drifting aimlessly through crowds of people he did not know. Hannah seemed to be hovering around him anxiously, as if, if she took her attention away from him for even a moment, he would disappear.

“I did not say that I had met Mr. Hazzard before tonight,” Father Tibor was chiding Gregor gently. He had a glass of
raki
too. His arrest seemed to have perked him up. “I said I knew more than you would think about the work he does. It is because of Sonia Veladian, Krekor, whose mother married that man with the mustache and later it turned out that the man was, well, you know, with Sonia when she was eleven. The mother threw the man out of the house when she found out. But still, the damage was done.”

“And the mother took Sonia to see Paul Hazzard?” The problem with Father Tiber’s stories was that they not only started in medias res, they started in media confusion.

“No, no,” Father Tibor said. “Sonia was grown-up when she went to see Paul Hazzard, only not actually to see Paul Hazzard but to a—what do you call it—a support group. Yes. For grown-ups to whom things of this kind have happened as children. Sonia Veladian is older than Bennis, Krekor. She was older than Donna Moradanyan is now when she joined this support group.”

“And did it help her?”

“Well, that is a curious thing, Krekor. It did and it didn’t.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Tibor shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t. Not here and not now, at this party. I want to drink
raki
and relax a little. But come to my apartment tomorrow, Krekor, and I will tell you everything I know, and maybe we can find a way to get in touch with Sonia. Although I doubt it. The last I heard, she was in Somalia.”

“Somalia?”

“She is with the U.N. It is a very complicated story, Krekor, but it has a good ending, I think. But I also think I do not like this man Hazzard. In principle.”

“Oh, well,” Gregor said. “A lot of people around here don’t seem to like him on principle.”

“There is not much to like.” Tibor stood up. His glass was empty of
raki
and nearly empty of ice. He went three steps over to the table and poured himself some more. Across the room, Bennis stood up, put Tommy down on the place on the couch she had vacated, and walked over to Gregor.

“Hello,” she said. “All in all, a very dull party. You’d think a major neighborhood scandal would manage to work up more tension than this. And Paul Hazzard. Didn’t they say Eichmann was banal?”

“Hannah Arendt did,” Gregor told her. “I don’t think Paul Hazzard is banal. I think he’s just minding his manners in a perilous situation.”

Bennis laughed. “The old ladies got hold of him and positively grilled him. He kept doing all that appropriate closure behavior stuff to try to get out of it—you know, saying things like ‘It’s been very interesting talking to you, but I have to break off this conversation now’—and it was doing him no good at all. They were rolling right over him.”

“They would,” Gregor said.

Tibor came over with his full glass of
raki.
“You have been losing beads all evening,” he said to Bennis. “Look at the door now. Someone has arrived whom I do not know.”

They all turned to look at the door, where a pretty woman in her forties was standing, holding an invitation card and looking oddly sexy in a plain silk shirtwaist dress.

“Maybe it’s one of Paul Hazzard’s daughters,” Bennis said. “He’s got two. Maybe Hannah invited the whole family.”

It was not one of Paul Hazzard’s daughters. As Gregor and Bennis and Father Tibor watched, the woman walked a few steps into the apartment, held out her invitation card to Hannah Krekorian, and said: “You must be my hostess. I’m very glad to meet you. My name is Candida DeWitt.”

L
ATER, GREGOR WOULD THINK
how odd it was that Candida DeWitt had known exactly whom to introduce herself to, exactly where to go after she had come in the door. It bespoke careful planning of the kind that can sometimes make poor people rich, if they stick to it. It bespoke cleverness too. Gregor thought Candida DeWitt was very clever in the way the English used that word. She was smart and insightful about men and women and how they would behave in tense situations. She was good at putting herself first.

When the doorbell rang, Paul Hazzard had been holding forth to a little circle of women that included one of the old ladies (Mrs. Vartenian, looking fierce) and all six of the Devorkian girls. The Devorkian girls looked as awestruck as if they’d wandered into Madonna’s dressing room. Hannah was hovering around at the edges. She seemed to have a compulsion to touch him, just a little, so gently it might never be detected. A light whispering rub of sleeve on sleeve. The side of a hand along the hem of a jacket. Paul Hazzard didn’t notice. His face was lit up, as if a powerful light had gone on inside him. He was in his element. He had an audience.

“What you have to understand,” he was telling the women clustered around him, “is that there are no hierarchies of pain. That’s the worst of the sickness of the society around us. That’s how that society keeps us in line. Here we are, so damaged we can barely function, and what do we hear? We hear that we shouldn’t be, because somewhere in the next street or next town or next county or wherever, somebody has it worse than we do. And if we insist on naming our pain and owning our anger, we get hit with the big guns. Hiroshima. Dachau. How can we possibly say we’ve been damaged when people have been through things like that and lived perfectly good lives?”

“But that’s true, isn’t it?” Linda Melajian said. “My great-grandmother came from Armenia, and you should have heard the stories she used to tell about what happened to her. She had a baby and a husband, and they were both killed when the Turks came through during the massacres. She had pictures of them she used to keep in her room. But then she came here and married my great-grandfather and had other children, and she was fine.”

“She was in denial,” Paul Hazzard said promptly.

“I came from Armenia,” Mrs. Vartenian said ominously. “In 1916.”

“What you have to understand,” Paul Hazzard said, “is that the human being is a delicate instrument. A very delicate instrument. Especially in childhood. Something like Hiroshima, or the concentration camps, or these massacres you’re talking about—major traumas like these can affect the lives of the people who suffer from them forever. I’m not denying the power of experiences of that kind. What I’m trying to explain is that experiences that are much less dramatic may in reality be much more damaging. After all, the Nazis were the enemy. Nobody expected them to be anything else. Not even the children. A child is much more deeply and permanently hurt when someone close to him abuses him—when he’s the victim of parental neglect, for instance.”

“I’ve heard of things like that,” Traci Devorkian said. “Junkies, usually. They get high as kites and don’t clean the house or feed their kids for weeks at a time and the cops come in and the kids’ beds are wet with pee and I don’t know what and then it gets in the papers and the pictures are really gross.”

“Pee?” Kelli Devorkian said. “Why would the kids pee in bed?”

“They don’t have any control of their bladders,” Debbi Devorkian said. “They haven’t been brought up right.”

“If our parents didn’t pay attention to us for a couple of weeks, I wouldn’t pee in bed,” Kelli Devorkian declared. “I’d go out with Bobby Astinian and neck till my brains fell out.”

“Shut
up,”
Staci Devorkian said. “Mother is right over
there.
You’ll get us all
grounded.
”

“I was thinking of something a little more subtle than gross neglect,” Paul Hazzard went on. “I was thinking of the kind of mother who always makes her children wait a minute before she gets them the milk they ask for, or always has one more thing to do—one more thing that takes only a minute—before she can look at the pictures they’ve painted or hear the story they want to tell.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Linda Melajian said. “That sort of thing happens all the time. That’s just life.”

“Not really,” Paul Hazzard contradicted her. “It’s a kind of control. It’s one of the ways parents ensure that their children stay within the preferred family pattern—within the preferred family sickness, if you will. Middle-class children today are really at much higher risk for permanent psychological damage than children were in earlier eras, or even than poor children are today. There’s no excuse, you see.”

“No.” Linda Melajian shook her head. “I don’t see.”

“A child in a farm family in the eighteenth century with a critical and withholding mother could tell herself that her mother’s behavior didn’t mean her mother didn’t love her. It was only that there was so much work to do and so little food and worries always about money. A poor child of today can tell herself the same kinds of things. But a middle-class child… Paul Hazzard shrugged. “There’s no way to escape reality for the middle-class child. The middle-class child
knows
her mother doesn’t love her.”