The Headmaster's Wife (11 page)

“Tibor could have died.”

“He didn't die. Nobody died. A lot of structural damage was done to the church, and now it's being rebuilt, that's all. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.”

“It was a landmark.”

“It was a landmark badly in need of updating. It was drafty. It needed a new heating system. It needed new flooring in the sacristy—”

“Well, for God's sake, Bennis, we could have done all that without blowing the damned tiling up.”

“Yes, I know we could have. My point is that the church was not a child, and it was not a pet, it was a building. And assad as it is to see a building destroyed when it's been a vital part of the neighborhood for decades—”

“More than a century.”

“More than a century. It's still just a building, Gregor, and it's being put back up. It's not being replaced by condominiums. You're not going to find a Wal-Mart staring at you from across the street.”

“I don't think Wal-Mart builds in cities.”

“I don't care where they build. You're making a huge leap of the imagination to give yourself a reason to feel guilty here. You're in some kind of clinical depression. You barely eat. You're driving Lida and Hannah crazy, and the Melajians think it's all my fault. We don't even talk anymore.”

“We're talking now.”

“No, we're not,” Bennis said. “I'm lecturing you. There's a difference. You need to go back to work. It's not about making money or being a gigolo. It's not about whether I want you around the apartment. It's about your sanity.”

The knot of people at the construction site had grown larger. It bothered Gregor to think that he hadn't noticed the new people come in. “The thing is,” he said, “none of it interests me anymore. A woman who was poisoning her husbands. Well, yes. Women do that. For the insurance money. Because their husbands cheat on them. You might make a case for self-interest in the theory of women as serial killers. Women serial killers rarely kill for sexual satisfaction, which men almost always do. But you know, Bennis, I've been doing this for thirty years now. Over and over again. What's the point of doing it some more?”

“It interests you,” Bennis said, “or at least it does when you get into it. And you help to get people off the street who are a danger to the innocent people on it.”

“And there will always be a couple of dozen more out there whom I don't get off the street. Nobody can get them
all
off the street. They're—part of us. That's what we don't ever accept, I think. We want them to be monsters and aliens, and they're just the kids next door and the women at the PTA meeting.”

“So what? So we take the police off the streets and don't even bother to try?”

“I didn't say that,” Gregor said. “I was just trying to explain why I'm not interested.”

“Bullshit,” Bennis said. “You are interested. I've seen you sitting up watching
American Justice
and
City Confidential.
It's not that you're not interested; it's that you don't want to get involved.”

Gregor pressed his face against the glass. Father Tibor had been joined by Grace Feinmann. That was two people from the building who were out and about without his having noticed their leaving, and Grace lived above them, so it wasn't that. She was carrying a thick sheaf of papers and waving them around in front of Tibor's face. The papers were probably sheet music, and later today she would probably begin the practicing that would fill the house with harpsichord music until whenever it was her next concert started.
Probably probably
Gregor thought. Everything was probably, or probably not.

“I'm going to the Ararat,” Bennis said. “I've got nothing against keeping you company under ordinary circumstances, but it ruins my day to spend breakfast with you in a funk. Get your coat and come with me.”

“I'll still be in a funk.”

“I'll have a lot of other people to take my mind off it.”

Grace and Tibor had left the construction site and were on their way up the street. They would be going to the Ararat, too. Directly across from Gregor's apartment, Lida Arkmanian came out the front door of her town house and squinted in the direction of the construction. When Gregor got particularly maudlin, he wondered what would have happened to him if he had married Lida right after they'd both graduated from high school, which is what everybody but his mother had expected him to do. His mother had expected him to take advantage of that scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania, and Lida had married Frank Arkmanian and settled down on Cavanaugh Street.

“You know,” he said, “maybe we ought to stop circling the question and just get married.”

There was absolute silence from the couch behind him.

“This is good,” he said. “I expected a lot of answers to that suggestion, Bennis, but I will admit I never anticipated silence.”

“Is it a suggestion?” Bennis asked. “I couldn't tell. It sounded like an … observation.”

“It was.”

“Ah. Maybe you ought to try again if you ever decide to turn it into a suggestion.”

“You're making this very hard for me, you know.”

Bennis got up off the couch. “Maybe I'd just feel a little better if you'd actually look at me when you said things like that. I'm going to the Ararat, Gregor. Come if you want to.”

There was more movement, more rustling, the sound of Bennis's feet slipping into clogs, the sound of clogs on the hardwood floor of the entry way, the sound of the apartment door opening and snicking quietly shut. Gregor stayed where he was until he saw Bennis come out the front door of their building and start up the street, a small, thin, irrepressibly elegant woman with a cloud of black hair that floated around her head like a storm. He tried to decide if he'd just proposed marriage to her or not. He really didn't know.

I don't want to get myself involved in anybody else's criminal conspiracies,
he thought, but the sentence sounded pompous to him even as it echoed inside his head, and it wasn't what he had meant anyway. If he could figure out what he did mean, he might be able to do something about Bennis, and about a great many other things.

Gregor had been thinking about his brother, Stefan, because Stefan had had a fiancée when he went into the army, a Cavanaugh Street girl with Armenian parents who went to Holy Trinity Church every Sunday and worked part-time at a little bakery that had once existed two doors down from Ohanian's Middle Eastern Food. There was something that had changed for the worse about Cavanaugh Street. Gregor had loved that bakery when he was a child. He could take a quarter into that place and come out with a big piece of
loukoumia,
or those round honey pastries with the pistachio nuts whose name he could never remember anymore. Lida would know what they were called. She would probably even make him some. Once, about three weeks after they'd had the news that Stefan had died, Gregor had come across the girl he'd been engaged to sitting on the stoop in front of the bakery with her apron held up over her face, weeping silently and steadily and without the sobbing convulsions he had come to assume were natural to women in tears. The sight of her had fascinated him. She was crying for Stefan. He was sure of that. She was only crying, though, and not going to pieces, and for some reason that made her grief much deeper and all the more real. He had wanted to cry for Stefan himself, but he hadn't been able to. He had lain in bed night after night, staring into the dark in the direction of the ceiling, thinking about nothing. Stefan had been, and now he was not. He was nothing. There was nothing in the other bed in the room, and there would never be something again. Death had seemed to him then to be literally absence—not the absence of life, but absence in its essence, the
definition
of absence. He had really been very, very small, less than five years old, and he hadn't had the words he needed to describe what he felt. It was as if a great, gaping hole had opened up under his feet. It wasn't the pit of hell, the way the priest sometimes said. There was no fire down there. There was no devil. It was just a hole, going down, never stopping, a hole with nothing in it. That was what the girl seemed to understand, sitting there without sobbing, that nobody else around him did. He'd wanted to go up to her and sit beside her. He didn't think he could comfort her. He didn't think there was any comfort left in the world. He hoped that she could calm him. He was not afraid. You couldn't be afraid of nothing. He was only paralyzed, and for days it had seemed to him that there was no point in breathing.

Right at this split second, he was still standing at the window of his living room in his third-floor apartment on Cavanaugh Street, the new Cavanaugh Street, where the buildings were town houses or condominiums and the women wore fur coats without fear of being set on by animal rights activists.
Where death is only a rumor,
he thought, but that wasn't exactly right. People died here. They just didn't die the way Stefan had, or the way so many of the people had in the cases he had worked on over these last thirty years. Sometimes, when he had a hard time getting to sleep, he could see their faces in the only way he had ever known most of them, dead faces, laid out on gravel drives or carpeted bedroom floors, eyes glazed, mouths slack, flesh gray. He couldn't put names to most of them. You forgot the names after a while unless something truly awful had happened to make you remember. He remembered the names of most of the child victims. He lost the ones of the women raped and murdered by the men who thought killing was a natural part of sex. God, how many of those there had been. That was life in the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, and now they didn't even use the unit anymore, or they'd reorganized it or something. He had never been a profiler. First he had been an investigator. Then he had been an administrator. If there was some explanation for why people did what they did, some reason that fit the greater purposes of the cosmos, why some men could only reach orgasm if the woman they were with was soon to be a corpse, Gregor didn't know what it was. He'd never understood murder on any level. Even the obvious murders—that woman of John Jackman's, who was killing her husbands for their insurance, racking up the cash, playing at killing the way high-stakes gamblers played at casinos—seemed to him overdone, overfelt, overemoted. Maybe the truth of it was that murders were committed by people who took themselves too seriously, by people who could not see into the future and understand that life would end for everybody, even for them, and that the things in it were not as important as that fact.

It's me who's taking myself too seriously,
he thought now,
although he really didn't entirely mean it. It was hard to look at yourself and know when you were being overwrought, especially when you were upset. Still, he was tired of standing the way he was standing. His back ached. The street below him was almost clear of people now. The sun was too high in the sky, although he could tell from what few people there were, and what people there had been, that, sun or no sun, it was very cold out there. He looked around and found his wallet and his cell phone on top of the television. He put them both in his pocket, although he often didn't carry the cell phone.
That
felt overwrought and ridiculous. There might be a point to it if you had children and worried about emergencies. There might be a point to it if you were the president of the United States and the fate of the world hung on your decisions—now
there
was a thought, the fate of the world hanging on the decisions of George W. Bush—or if you were the vice president and needed to know if the president had been assassinated. There was another thought. It didn't matter. He just thought it was silly, carrying a cell phone the way most people did, as if taking a call from their wives about what they wanted to have for dinner tonight was so important it couldn't wait until they were safely in an office or a phone booth and able to sit down when they talked.

He checked his other pocket for keys. He could always get into his place by asking old George Tekemanian, because old George had copies of all the keys, but old George wasn't always at home these days. Gregor got his long, black coat off the coat stand in the foyer and put it all the way on. He didn't bother looking for a hat. He didn't care how cold it was. He thought men looked ridiculous in hats. He'd thought that decades ago when all men were assumed to be required to wear those felt fedoras that served no other purpose than to make them look like Christmas trees topped by the angel of death.

He went down to the first floor and tapped on the door of old George's apartment just in case. There was no answer, meaning that old George had either gone down to the Ararat to schmooze or off with his grandson Martin and Martin'swife, Angela, probably to buy a machine that cut cube steaks into paper dolls you could dress up in parsley nurse's uniforms. He went out onto the street and looked around. There was nothing much to look at. The street was as it had been since he had moved back to it soon after his wife, Elizabeth, had died and he had retired from the FBI and the only life he had ever felt completely comfortable in. By then he wasn't comfortable with that life either. He had no idea if he was comfortable with this one.

He stopped at the construction site and spent a moment or two watching the crews hauling a large piece of stone to a well of concrete that seemed to have been constructed as a place for it. If he'd thought about it at the time, he would have said that he expected a new church to rise on the site of the old one in about six months to a year. It had been longer than six months, and the new church had barely been started. There had been a lot of debris to clear away, and too much left standing that could not be left standing if reconstruction was to take place. For months nothing had happened out here but blasting and tearing down and hauling away, as if the contractors were in league with the people who had bombed the place and they only wanted to finish the job.