Glass Houses (48 page)

The immediate cause of her upset this morning was Donna Moradanyan Donahue, who was sitting, as pregnant as a whale, at the table in her kitchen, sticking little American flags into cupcakes. The less immediate cause was Tyrell Moss, whom she had interviewed the day before in his store in some godforsaken ghetto she wouldn't know how to get back to if her life depended on it.

“I understand the rest of you,” she said, pacing back and forth as Donna went on planting flags. The cupcakes were for a party at Donna's son's school. How many people could be in that child's class? There seemed to be hundreds of cupcakes. “The rest of you are comfortable, so of course you're smug and superior and unthinking. You can't really help it. It's the legacy of your class.”

“What class is that?” Donna asked pleasantly.

Phillipa wondered for a moment if there had been sarcasm behind that question, but she dismissed it. Americans didn't understand sarcasm, never mind indulge in it. Or at least, they didn't indulge in the subtle kind. Americans had no subtlety. If Donna Moradanyan had wanted to be sarcastic, she'd have laid it on with a trowel.

Phillipa decided to be patient. “The middle class,” she explained. “The middle class is always smug and superior and complaisant. They don't really care about anything except whether or not they get what they want and whether or not they're comfortable.”

“I see,” Donna said. “It's like after Hurricane Katrina hit last year. Lida
Kasmanian only took in two families to stay at her house until their places were rebuilt because she didn't want to get crowded. And Hannah Krekorian only took in this one elderly couple because she only had one spare bedroom. And she didn't want to sleep on the couch.”

“What are you talking about?” Phillipa demanded.

“I'm talking about Hurricane Katrina,” Donna said.

“I know all about Hurricane Katrina,” Phillipa said. “It was disgraceful. You should all have been ashamed. All those people living in such wretched poverty, and then your own government just leaves them to sit there and die. The shootings, the rapes of children, and no government in sight—”

“Except that that wasn't true,” Donna said. “It turned out later that the reports were false. There were no rapes of children. And nobody ever shot at a relief helicopter.”

“Of course they did,” Phillipa said. “It's because the victims were black. America is the most racist country on earth. Everybody knows that. It's the fault of capitalism, really, and your own isolationism. You don't know anything about the world. You don't take an interest in anything besides yourselves.”

“Oh, that's true,” Donna said. “That's very true. I mean, every time we send packages to Yekevan, I find myself having to check the Web to find out who all the politicians are. And I can never pronounce Angela Merkel's name right.”

“You don't realize what was going on there,” Phillipa said. “You don't realize what goes on in your own city. The neighborhood I was in was just awful. No, it was more than awful. It was frightening. There were vacant lots. The buildings were decaying. There were no playgrounds. What do you think it must be like for a child to grow up there?”

Donna put what looked like the last flag into what looked like the last cup-cake. Then she got up and took the tray of cupcakes to the kitchen counter. “If you're talking about the area around Curzon and Divine, I know exactly what it's like. Our church has a sister-church agreement with the Holy Spirit AME.”

“What's AME?”

“African Methodist-Episcopal,” Donna said. “It's a black denomination. I should say an historically black denomination. It's like a lot of other things these days. It gets mixed.”

“It's just like Americans,” Phillipa said, “to segregate their churches.”

“Actually, I think that was probably bigger in South Africa than it ever was here,” Donna said. “But the churches aren't segregated. Did you go into the church? Did you even see it?”

“I don't go into churches,” Phillipa said, “except for the architecture. America has no architecture.”

Donna got out a big box of cling wrap and began to stretch it over the cup-cakes. “The flags are on toothpicks, so I don't have to use those. That makes it
easier,” she said. “You should have gone into the church. Our youth group went down there one weekend and met their youth group and painted the place and built a choir platform. They have the choir up front, instead of in the back like we do. And then both groups got together and went down to Louisiana last fall to help rebuild a Christian school.”

“Well, God forbid you rebuilt one for atheists,” Phillipa said in exasperation. “You can't be an American if you aren't a good Christian ‘soldier.' And I use the word advisedly. You have to be a soldier.”

“Do you have any idea of what you're talking about?” Donna asked. “I mean, you go on and on and you make no sense whatsoever. You get everything wrong. You insult practically everybody you talk to, even people like poor Hannah who are only trying to be polite, and then you throw up your hands and say we're all impossible. I think we've been saints, if you want to know the truth. If I hadn't been brought up to be polite, I would have smacked you one by now.”

“Americans can't face looking at the truth about themselves,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “It's the most important thing I can do to make you look at your-selves as you really are.”

“Yeah,” Donna said. “Well, you might get on with that a bit better if you'd read a sixth-grade civics textbook. Government-provided old-age pensions have been with us since the Great Depression. They're called Social Security. Government-provided health care for the elderly and the poor have been with us since the sixties. They're called Medicare and Medicaid, respectively. We may not have completely solved the race problem, but we managed to go from segregation to anything but in a single generation. I'm not saying we don't have faults. I could list them by the hour. But, I mean, for heaven's sake, you make them up.”

“You have the death penalty,” Phillipa said. “No other civilized, First World nation has the death penalty.”

“Japan does.”

Phillipa started pacing again. “You should have met this man I met,” she said. “A black man, with a store, in this horrible neighborhood. I went to talk to him because he'd been arrested awhile ago as the Plate Glass Killer, but in the end they'd let him go. Something happened, I'm not sure what, and they couldn't keep him. I'd say he was damned lucky. You know what the police in this country are like. They want nothing better than to lock up every black man in the nation. Then they could sleep at night. Do you know that one out of every four black men in this country will spend time in prison?”

Donna sat down again. She had a big tray of cookies this time and a lot of little white plastic squeeze tubes. She put out a long piece of waxed paper and put a cookie in the middle of it. “There,” she said. “You've finally got one. That's something that's really wrong. Of course, we could solve it tomorrow by legalizing drugs; but Amsterdam legalized most drugs and I've seen it, and
maybe that isn't the answer. But the man you're talking about is Tyrell Moss, isn't it? He was in the paper. He was never arrested. He was only taken in for questioning.”

“It's a distinction without a difference,” Phillipa said, watching in fascination as Donna began to decorate the cookie with red, white, and blue icing. “Whatever are you doing?” she asked. “Does everything in this bloody country have to be red, white, and blue?”

“I'm decorating cookies,” Donna explained, “because the party is for the parents of the children in Tommy's class who are taking the citizenship oath this week. Usually, there's only one every couple of years or so, but Philadelphia has a big group of people who came from China all together a few years ago, so we've got a lot all at once. So we decided to have a party. And it's quite definitely a distinction with a difference. My husband, Russ, was a police officer before he went to law school. Being brought in for questioning doesn't usually involve handcuffs, for instance, or getting locked in a cell.”

“He's been persecuted, that man,” Phillipa said. “He was even in prison when he was younger. And now he's stuck in that wretched place—”

“Did you bother to read the story in
The Inquirer}”
Donna asked. “Did you even bother to look it up? Oh, you must have. You had all that stuff Bennis got for you on the computer. But you didn't really read it, or you'd know that the reason he went to prison was that he and a friend of his robbed a liquor store and put the clerk in the hospital for over eight months. And left the clerk with a damaged leg that will never work right again. And it wasn't the first time he'd done something like that.”

“If your prisons were about rehabilitation instead of revenge,” Phillipa said, “he wouldn't have been in and out of prisons like that. He wouldn't have gone back and committed more crimes as soon as he was released.”

“Oh, that's what happens in England, is it?” Donna said. “There's no recidivism?”

“Ever since Margaret Thatcher, there's been nothing but recidivism.”

“Margaret Thatcher has been out of office for over a decade,” Donna said. “Maybe it's two decades. Did you come over here for a reason? Because, you know, you always say the same things. It's not like I don't get your drift by now.”

“I couldn't find Bennis,” Phillipa said. “And I couldn't find your Mr. Demarkian. I didn't know who else to talk to.”

“About what?”

“About this gentleman, the one they're looking for,” Phillipa said. “Henry something.”

“You know how to find Henry Tyder?”

“No, of course I don't,” Phillipa said. “If I'd known that, they'd have talked to me, wouldn't they?”

“Who would have talked to you?”

“The police, of course. But no. It's not him. It's his sister. She gave me an interview.”

“Which sister?”

“Margaret Beaufort,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “You see, I went back down to that place where I'd been yesterday to talk to that man again, but the whole neighborhood was full of police. It was like martial law. And then—”

But Phillipa could see that Donna was no longer listening to her. She was on her feet and at the telephone.

H
enry Tyder was good
at disappearing into the street, but he was good enough to know that now was not the time to do it. As long as he had had something like time on his side, and the dark, there hadn't been much danger. It hadn't taken much to use the passkey to get into the back of that store on Eldridge Street, or to use it again to get into another one on South Drexel. The store on South Drexel had even been something of a find. Henry hadn't thought anybody was stupid enough to leave cash in the register overnight anymore. Even so, cash wasn't what he needed. Margaret could get him cash. What he needed was a place to be, out of the open.

He spent all night fussing about it, unable to make up his mind. He had two choices. One was an abandoned building, of which there were several hundred in the city, not a single one entirely unoccupied. And that was the trouble. An abandoned building with nobody at all in it, where no one ever went, where no one ever saw, would be the perfect place. It didn't even matter that there would be no heat and no electricity. It was nearly spring. The days were semiwarm and the nights could be handled with adequate covering, and Margaret could get him that, too, if he wanted her to. The problem with abandoned buildings were the people in them, both the ones who were taking shelter and the ones who were not. The ones who were taking shelter came in two species: sleepers and rockets. The sleepers were no problem. The rockets were on so much crack cocaine that their paranoia meters were working overtime. They lashed out and they got crazy, and sometimes they killed somebody other than themselves. There was a reason why the winos didn't go to abandoned buildings, and the rockets were it.

Henry wasn't worried by the rockets. You could outrun them if you weren't completely hammered, and Henry was not hammered at the moment, not even a little bit. He intended to get that way as soon as it was safe, but at the moment he could have outrun a cokehead without even breathing hard. What worried Henry were the guys who came into the abandoned buildings without intending to stay, the ones who prowled from building to building
looking for . . . Henry didn't really know what. He'd been an intelligent man, once, back in the days when he'd been in college. He'd still been an alcoholic, but his brain hadn't been nearly as rattled as it was now. There was something about these guys that was diseased,
spiritually
diseased, that made old Dorian Grey look like an amateur. It made sense that some people stole from the rich when they were poor, or even when they were just not very well funded and a little resentful that other people were. You could look at the rich—at families like his own, Henry thought—and see that they had more than enough to get what they needed to get through life. They could feed and clothe themselves. They could educate their children. You took the money they would have spent on a second television or a few shares of a mutual fund.

The guys who came prowling through the abandoned buildings took money from men, and sometimes women, who had nothing. Their clothes were in rags. They had no place to sleep. Many of them almost never ate because what money they could find went to their addictions. Some of them were mentally ill, and some were mentally retarded. Many of them had no money on them at all. The guys beat them up if they couldn't steal from them, or even if they could. They beat them bloody and left them, and then they went on to the next house to do it again. You had to wonder at the psychology of it. What was happening, exactly, when people went out and robbed and beat people poorer than they were?