Stillness in Bethlehem Read online

  Gemma wanted to protest that they did nothing of the sort—Gemma wasn’t the sort of person who let other people run over her—but Kelley had gotten out of her chair and wandered off to the room’s single window, and there was something about the way she was standing at it that made Gemma pause. Head cocked, hands in the back pockets of her jeans, one foot rubbing the calf of the other leg—what could she possibly be looking at? Gemma came up behind her and stared over her shoulder at what seemed to be undifferentiated white. There was nothing to look at out there, not even a bird. Then the scene shifted into sharp focus, and she understood. The rectory property bordered the Verek property on one side. Because the rectory was on a much higher hill than the Verek property was, and because of the way Jan-Mark had had his trees cleared, they could look right down into the Vereks’ drive.

  Gemma backed away a little, put her own hands in her own pockets, and said, “Oh.”

  “Oh?” Kelley asked her.

  “Well,” Gemma said, uncomfortable. “It’s not nice, is it? Spying on people, I mean.”

  “Well, you can’t see anything important,” Kelley reasoned, “just people getting in and out of cars and driving away or coming home. I was looking out here earlier, while you were on the phone. I was thinking what a perfect spot it would be.”

  “Perfect spot for what?”

  “For a sniper,” Kelley said lightly. “There have to be dozens of people in town this morning who would love to see Tisha dead before she got a chance to go to Montpelier. This would be a perfect place to kill her from. You could just stand right here at the window and aim something really accurate, one of those fancy rifles Stu Ketchum is always carrying around. You’d be so far away, the hick cops around here would never be able to figure out where you’d done it from. Or who you were, either.”

  “The hick cops around here would probably have the sense to call in the state police,” Gemma said sharply. “What’s all this talk about guns? You know how I feel about violence.”

  “I know how you feel about everything, practically. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Feel? You’ve made a profession of it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No,” Kelley said wearily. “You probably don’t.”

  Gemma watched her walk back to her chair and drop down in it, looking tired. “This isn’t like you,” she said to the back of Kelley’s head, when Kelley had turned around again and begun to pretend to be working on her essay. “I don’t know what’s got into you this morning. You were just the way you usually are at breakfast.”

  “I’m just the way I usually am now. You aren’t used to paying attention. I wish you’d go take the phones off the hook or something and leave me alone. I really do have a lot of work to do.”

  “I don’t believe that’s true,” Gemma said tightly. “I think you’re playing games with my mind. I think you’re trying to punish me.”

  “For what?”

  “How should I know? In spite of the way you’re behaving, I can’t believe it’s over Tisha Verek and her silly lawsuit.”

  “Of course you can’t.”

  “Tisha Verek isn’t important. She’s just—God’s chosen instrument, that’s all. She’s just a vessel.”

  “You should know,” Kelley said. “You’re the one who’s sleeping with her husband.”

  And with that, Kelley Grey picked up her much-battered Sony Walkman, jammed the earphones in her ears, shoved the switch to “on” and closed her eyes. She had the music up so loud, Gemma could hear faint strains of “Silent Night.” Gemma stared at the back of Kelley’s head and then at the window and then at the back of Kelley’s head again. She wanted to break some furniture or smash the Walkman into fragments. She did neither.

  She sat right back down in Kelley’s metal folding chair and gave due consideration to just how many people had known for just how long that she was having an affair with Jan-Mark Verek.

  8

  Exactly twenty-one minutes later, at nine forty-one, Jan-Mark Verek himself rose from the tangled torture of his bed, walked around his bookcase headboard, and went to stand at the rail that looked out over the living room of his house. His mouth was full of cotton and his head was full of cotton candy. He had aches in places he was sure aches ought to be fatal and that sour taste in his mouth that meant he had drunk just enough to be hung over without ever having had the pleasure of being first-class drunk. He was wearing a pair of Jockey shorts and nothing else. If he had been entirely sober the night before, he wouldn’t have been wearing the Jockey shorts. The balcony looked out not only on the living room but on a wall of windows. Through those windows he could see his driveway with its detached garage and circular sweep of gravel. It was definitely the case that he was sick of that circular sweep of gravel, as he was sick of his house and his trees and the deer that came down out of the hills when the mornings were especially cold. He’d started talking to anybody who would listen about how much he appreciated forest fires. Down in the driveway, a rust-red Cadillac Seville was pulling in, maneuvering gingerly along the curve, trying not to scratch itself on the rocks and trees that jutted out of everywhere in a random hash the landscape designer had assured them was “ecologically aesthetic.” Jan-Mark identified the car as the one belonging to Camber Hartnell just seconds before he saw Tish come out on the gravel, dressed in her most constipated New York lunch clothes and actually holding a handbag. Tish never carried handbags unless she was meeting with an editor from The New York Times. She came hurrying across the gravel, seemed to trip, and stopped to bend over and fuss with her shoes. She was just standing up straight again when it happened.

  At first, Jan-Mark wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. It was all so fast and so neat. It was all so simple. First there was that odd popping sound, nothing too loud, nothing ominous. Then Tish seemed to rise a little in the air. Then she jerked backward at the neck and spun around. Then she fell. Jan-Mark stood at the balcony railing with his mouth open, staring. Tish was lying on the ground, seeping the smallest threads of blood onto the stones. The blood had to be coming from holes, but they were holes too small for Jan-Mark to see.

  They were not holes too small for Camber Hartnell to see. He slammed his Cadillac into gear, revved his engine so abruptly it made the car squeal and took off in a spray of flying gravel.

  9

  Fifteen minutes later and six miles farther down the road, in a hollow on the side of the road that had once been the edge of a farm owned by a family that had ceased to exist, old Dinah Ketchum lay in a nest of twigs and snow, listening to her murderer get into a car parked on the shoulder not ten feet away. Her murderer was the murderer of Tisha Verek, too, and Dinah Ketchum knew that. She knew everything there was to know about everything that had happened in the last half hour, and the only thing that really bothered her was knowing she would never get a chance to tell anyone about it.

  Old Dinah Ketchum was eighty-two years old, old enough, and as she closed her eyes, she told herself she should have known better. She should have seen. She should have understood. She should have wondered what the gun was doing there in the back of that car instead of up on Stuart’s rack at home where it belonged. Dinah Ketchum had never liked Stuart’s guns, and she didn’t like them now. The blood that was oozing out of her shoulder into the ground was so hot it was making the snow melt.

  Go to sleep, she told herself. Go to sleep.

  The only thing that matters now is to go to sleep.

  Part One

  Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

  The silent stars go by

  One

  1

  IT WAS CALLED J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets, and what Gregor Demarkian told people who asked him what he was doing with it was: Bennis Hannaford gave it to me for an early Christmas present. This, of course, was true. J. Edgar Hoover was a book, and Bennis Hannaford had indeed given it to Gregor Demarkian for an early Christmas present. She had even wrapped it up in shiny
silver paper. Back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia, where they both lived, Gregor thought Bennis had thought there might actually be sense in the idea. Gregor had spent twenty years of his life in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the last ten of them either establishing or heading the Department of Behavioral Sciences. He had chased serial killers from Florida to Oregon to Massachusetts and back around again. He had sat kidnapping stake-outs from Palm Beach to Palm Springs. He had known three presidents and more senators, congressmen and departmental functionaries than he cared to remember. He’d been spoken of as a possible candidate for Director of the Bureau itself, although that sort of talk had mercifully died an early death. To Bennis Hannaford, one thing and one thing only would have been important, and that was that Gregor had known J. Edgar Hoover himself.

  It was now ten o’clock on the morning of Sunday, December fifteenth, and Gregor was standing in the lobby of the Green Mountain Inn in Bethlehem, Vermont, letting Bennis and Father Tibor Kasparian deal with their bags and the sour-looking woman at the polished mahogany check-in desk. It was the sort of job he usually took on himself, because he was better suited for it. For all her authority of manner—for all her damn plain arrogance—Bennis was not only a woman but a small one. She measured just about five-foot-four and weighed in at less than a hundred pounds. Sometimes, no matter how hard she tried, she got overlooked. Bennis called it “the experience of drowning in tall people.” Father Tibor Kasparian had a different set of problems. He was also small—Lida Arkmanian back on Cavanaugh Street said there were two kinds of Armenian men, big and broad and small and wiry; Tibor was the latter—but his difficulties getting service at crowded counters came less from his size than his manner. Tibor was parish priest at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church in Philadelphia, and to many people who didn’t know him, he seemed as ineffectual as a parish priest could get. He was hunched and tentative. He was quiet and self-effacing. Countermen and bureaucrats took him at face value, and they really shouldn’t have. In spite of what he looked like, meaning just plain old, Tibor was actually four years younger than Gregor Demarkian. His grizzledness had been earned the hard way. First, he had preached Christianity underground in Soviet Armenia. Then he had preached it quite publicly in one gulag or another. Then he had found his way to Israel, and Paris, and finally America, and it had almost been too much. Holy Trinity was supposed to be Tibor’s reward for all the suffering he had done for the Faith, and it was. Tibor liked being pastor and he liked America the way Garfield the Cat likes lasagna. He liked Cavanaugh Street, too, which was an upper-middle-class Armenian-American enclave in a city that sometimes seemed to be falling apart in every other way. The truth was, he really wasn’t fitted to survive in the rough and tumble of an openly aggressive society. He had spent too much of his life making himself invisible. He had spent too much of his time thinking about the true meaning of Christian humility, which he had decided must be absolute. There were people who called Father Tibor Kasparian a saint—and Gregor agreed with them—but what he also was was a mouse, and mice stood in lines forever while the cats got served before them.

  Gregor Demarkian was the other kind of Armenian, big (almost six-foot-four) and broad (carrying twenty extra pounds that drove his doctor crazy) and forceful when he wanted to be. He was a modern American man in a camel’s-hair topcoat and good cashmere-lined gloves, but he carried the seed of a wild and savage manhood, a masculinity of the steppes. At least, Bennis Hannaford said he did. When she did, Gregor always wondered if she could possibly be on drugs.

  Up at the check-in desk, Bennis seemed to have finally gotten someone’s attention and held it less than a minute. The words were indistinguishable, but Gregor caught the rhythm and the timbre. There was nothing in the world like Bennis Hannaford’s voice. It was Main Line to Farmington to Smith. It was as maddeningly, gratingly elitist as the one Katharine Hepburn had sold to her adoring and oblivious public all through Gregor’s childhood. It should have driven Gregor’s democratic soul totally insane—but it didn’t. It was just Bennis’s voice, and Gregor was so used to it, it had begun to sound comforting.

  It cut off in the middle of what seemed to be a lecture, and Gregor looked up. Bennis had moved away from the sour-looking woman and gone back to Tibor, who had taken a seat next to a chicly decorated Christmas tree near the fireplace. All the Christmas trees at the Green Mountain Inn were decorated chicly. The one next to Tibor held gold balls and gold satin bows and nothing else. The one near Gregor’s elbow had received the same treatment in blue. Gregor preferred the Cavanaugh Street kind of Christmas-tree decorations himself. Lots of tinsel. Lots of blinking colored lights. Lots of candy canes. Lots of kitsch. That was what children liked. To Gregor’s mind, there was something inherently wrong with a Christmas tree that had been decorated to satisfy adults.

  Bennis finished talking to Tibor, straightened up and came across the lobby to Gregor. Gregor stuck his finger in his book and watched her. For the trip to Vermont, Bennis had added something extra to her everyday uniform of jeans, turtleneck, flannel shirt and down vest. This was an oversized thick-weave cotton sweater in a color she insisted on calling “pumpkin.” It reminded Gregor of really good pumpkin pie. It made Bennis look like a street waif with the face of a Botticelli angel.

  She came to a stop at Gregor’s side, shoved a hand into the great black cloud of her hair and looked down at Gregor’s book. It was dog-eared into twice its original thickness and stuffed full of small scraps of paper. Through the space created by Gregor’s finger, Gregor knew she could see a fresh infusion of written-in-the-margins comments. Gregor had had this book for less than a week, and it was a total mess.

  “For God’s sake,” Bennis said. “If I’d known the trouble that was going to cause, I’d never have bought it for you.”

  “I’m glad you bought it for me,” Gregor told her. “This sort of thing is dangerous. It’s crazy. You can’t let something like this—”

  “It’s a book, Gregor. It’s not an atom bomb.”

  “I know it’s a book. It could have been a medieval book. It’s a demonology. It’s very dangerous to overestimate the capacities of psychopaths, Bennis; it produces mass paranoia.”

  “Right,” Bennis said.

  “If J. Edgar Hoover had the kind of power this man wants us to believe he had, then J. Edgar Hoover would have taken over the country and declared himself king. I knew J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “Right,” Bennis said again.

  “Don’t patronize me,” Gregor told her. “I put up with that fool for ten years and I know what he was like. Tell me what’s going on with the room. Tell me what’s going on with Tibor. Tell me what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

  Bennis looked down at the book again, doubtful, but then she turned and looked back at Tibor in his chair. He looked settled and happy enough to Gregor, but Gregor was beginning to wonder if he knew enough about Tibor to make a judgment like that. They weren’t in Vermont because Gregor wanted to be there. They weren’t there because Bennis wanted to be there, either. They were there because after months of dealing with wandering Armenian refugees from the newly formed Armenian republic and points across the collapsing Soviet Union, Tibor had collapsed himself. What worried Gregor was that he hadn’t guessed that anything like that might be close to happening, and that he had been the only person who hadn’t guessed. He could still hear the sound of Lida Arkmanian’s voice coming over the phone to him at two o’clock in the morning, telling him that she’d called the doctor in and the doctor kept saying that everything was going to be fine, but that Tibor looked dead.

  “Do you think he’s happy?” Gregor asked, feeling suddenly worried all over again. “Do you think he looks relaxed? This is what he wanted, right?”

  “I think he looks happy as a clam,” Bennis said. “And this is definitely what he wanted. Five days of a Nativity play in Bethlehem, Vermont. You know what he told me? He told me he’d read about this thing in a newspaper in Bethlehem, Israel, when
he was waiting around for his visas to come through so he could come to the United States. Do you suppose that’s true?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I’ve never been in Israel. Have you?”

  “I’ve been in the Tel Aviv airport. And in Kabul once.”

  “I don’t think that counts.”

  “I don’t think that counts, either,” Bennis said. “I suppose we ought to go upstairs,” she said. “I had hell’s own time with that woman at the desk. She kept saying we were here early and we couldn’t go up until noon, but I finally dragged it out of her that there wasn’t anyone actually in those rooms, she just didn’t have the cleaning done. I promised her we’d stash our bags and wash up and then go out for breakfast. Or brunch. Or something. I don’t know if he looks relaxed, Gregor. Do you think he does?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “God, we’re awful. We should have brought Lida or Donna or Hannah or somebody just to make sure we had a grown-up. What are we going to do if he collapses again?”

  “He’s not going to collapse again,” Gregor said stoutly. “You know what Dr. Evanian told Lida. It’s all that running around that did it to him, and not eating so he’d have food to feed his refugees.”

  “I’m still furious about the food for the refugees,” Bennis said. “I mean, I’m rich, Gregor. Tibor didn’t have to starve himself to feed a lot of refugees.”

  “I think you got that across to him in the long run, Bennis.”

  “I should have been able to get it across to him in the short run. Oh, never mind. I’m just as worried as you are, and I don’t know what to do about it, either. He looks so pale.”

  “He looks so excited,” Gregor said.

  Bennis shot him an exasperated look, then turned thoughtful and spun around, so that she was not only looking at Tibor but facing him directly. Gregor caught her expression at the exact moment when she began to realize it was true. When Tibor had first sat down, he had been shaky and ashen, much as he had been for the past two weeks. Mostly, he had seemed infinitely sad. It was a change in demeanor that had scared Gregor Demarkian to death, because Gregor Demarkian had seen it before, in legions of old people who had given up and decided it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to die. It wasn’t a decision that automatically accompanied old age. The man who owned the ground-floor apartment in Gregor’s four-story, four-apartment brownstone back on Cavanaugh Street was well into his eighties, and if there was one thing old George Tekemanian hadn’t done, it was give up. What frightened Gregor was that he’d never known anyone to look like that and stay alive for more than a few months. What frightened him more was that he didn’t understand why Tibor should look like that in the first place. Fatigue, the doctor kept telling him. The doctor was a nice Armenian boy from over in Ardmore and the son of a friend of Sheila Kashinian’s. He seemed competent enough, but Gregor didn’t trust him. Gregor hadn’t trusted doctors since his wife Elizabeth had died of cancer in terrible pain. Gregor had always been convinced that the pain could have been avoided, since the treatments that caused it were worthless anyway. As for Tibor, Gregor just didn’t know. Fatigue. Tibor certainly seemed fatigued. He seemed terminally fatigued.