The Headmaster's Wife (10 page)

He got up to the second-floor landing and stopped. He could barely breathe. His mother had had better wind when she was still smoking two packs a day. He came around the landing and started up again. There were so many things he had learned not to do here or not to mention. They didn't like it when he read books on his own that weren't required for study. They were always reminding him that his grades were mediocre and that he wasn't getting his work done. He needed to be concentrating on his assignments and not wasting his time with trashy, pop-cult novels. He supposed there was some point in that. His grades were mediocre. He must not be studying hard enough. What was worse, he really wasn't reading much of anything except those trashy, pop-cult novels. They were, these days, all he could get himself to understand. It would be interesting to know when that had happened, too.

Halfway up to the third floor, he stopped again. He was winded again. He could barely see straight. He took three or four deep breaths. His throat hurt like hell. It often did, these days. His head hurt, too, in that dull throbbing he had come to associate with “not having any air.” He counted to twenty. He flexed his fingers. The joints in them hurt. He started back up the stairs again. Why was it that his life reminded him so often of the old, original version of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
where all the people who were taken over by pods were so unnaturally, unchangeably calm? He was not calm. He was nervous and stressed all the time. He twitched when he least expected it. He still felt like a pod person.

He reached the third-floor landing. His room was on the far end, but the hallway was dark and he could see that no light was coming from under the door. Michael was either out or asleep. He was most likely out. Michael had a varied and active social life. Mark wondered what it was like to have an affair with a woman like Alice Makepeace, the kind of affair that everybody would know about so that even the teachers looked at you and wondered. It had to be better than having the teachers looking at you and wondering if you were an idiot or a drug addict. Mark was sure of that, in spite of the fact that he didn't much like Alice Makepeace. She was beautiful. He wasn't so out of it that he couldn't recognize that. He didn't trust her. There was something—
wrong
—about the way she was, something off, that made all his defenses go up automatically.

He opened the door to the room he shared with Michael Feyre, and the first thing he noticed was that the window was open. The room was ice cold and there was a wind coming in, blasting in his face, making the hair on his arms go stiff. Michael had to be out. He wouldn't have lasted ten minutes in the cold in this place. Mark snaked his hand around on the wall next to the door until he found the light switch. Always before, when he'd gotten a new room, it had taken him only a week or so to know instinctively where the light switches were on the walls. In this place, he had to learn over and over again, time after time.

He turned on the light. He looked into the cold room for a great long minute without reacting at all. Everything was a mess. The drawers had been pulled out of both the desks and both the dressers. There were books and papers and clothes everywhere. The laundry bags had been ripped apart. There was dirty underwear on the floor. Someone had smashed the big round alarm clock he and Michael called the Alarm Clock of Satan. Its hard, crystal face guard was shattered. Its hour hand had disappeared.

They're going to have a fit about the mess in here,
Mark thought, and then, only then, did he acknowledge what he had seen first, the most obvious thing in the room, the elephant in the middle of the floor.

Michael Feyre's body was hanging from a rope thrown over one of the snaking pipes belonging to the sprinkler system. His neck was bent at an odd angle. His muscles were twitching. His eyes were bulging out. There was a bruise on his neck that looked as black as if somebody had tried to color in his skin with permanent marker.

They ‘re supposed to put a hood over your head when they hang you,
Mark thought, and then, only then, could he make himself turn and run into the hall to get help.

It had been years since Gregor Demarkian spent much time thinking about his older brother, Stefan, and then it had only been a glancing thought occasioned by the fact that he was back on Cavanaugh Street and Cavanaugh Street was not what he'd expected. Now, standing at the window of his apartment and looking down at the construction crews beginning to arrive for their day at Holy Trinity Church—or what was left of it—it occurred to him that this was very odd. There had been a time, when he was very small and Stefan had just gone into the army, that he had thought about him every hour of every day, with an intensity of fear and hope that had blocked out every other emotion. Looking back on it, he found he couldn't reason away the conviction that he had known, from the moment Stefan had put on his uniform and walked out the door, that he would never see his brother again. The whole idea of war had been a matter of confusion, and at that point he had never known anyone who had died except the very old people on the street who had never seemed alive to begin with. It wasn't an understanding of life and death that had convinced him, any more than it was an understanding of war that had made him feel, at the time and forever afterward, that he didn't approve of it. Stefan had seemed so tall standing at the door, holding his hatunder his arm while their mother draped herself over his chest and wept into the khaki buttons on his government-issue shirt. It was odd to think that he knew, now, that Stefan hadn't been tall at all. He'd barely been five ten, and Gregor himself was now well over six feet.

Maybe, Gregor thought, it would have been easier to remember accurately if Cavanaugh Street had been the same as it was then. Everything was too clean, and too well taken care of. The fire escapes had all been moved around to the back. The brownstones had been scrubbed free of dirt and pollution and age. The stoops had been transformed into entryways, complete with low, white stone pillars and polished slate inlays on the surfaces of the steps. He remembered playing on this street when he was nine or ten years oldlong after Stefan was dead-and hitting a ball into a clothesline stretched from a window on one side of the street to a window on the other. Mrs. Bagdinian had stuck her head out and cursed him in Armenian, and he and all the other boys had run away.

Down the hall at the back of the apartment, the bathroom door opened and closed. Bennis said, “Gregor?” but kept on moving, into the bedroom, where she already had her things laid out on the bed. The bedroom door did not close. That was something else that had changed. Gregor's late wife always closed the door when she dressed, even after they'd been married for twenty years, and Gregor was willing to bet that his own mother had done exactly the same. That apartment had been a cramped series of small boxes on the fourth floor of a tenement, where half the apartments had to share a bathroom in the hall. He had felt rich beyond measure because his own family's apartment had had a bathroom to itself, and he had not been kind to the children he had seen tramping back and forth to the little cubicle at the back of the floor. Then he had gone to school and for the first time met people who did not live in places like Cavanaugh Street, and from that day to this he had never felt rich again.

Bennis came into the living room. Gregor did not turn around. The construction crews were unpacking their equipment. Some people had stopped to watch them begin work. One of those people was Fr. Tibor Kasparian.

“Tibor's up and around already,” he said. “It's incredible that we never hear him leave in the mornings. He's like a ghost.”

“He's on the floor below us. Are you watching the construction? Can you see it from here?”

“Not really. I can see the trucks. They just came in. We must be late.”

“It's eight. Granted, we've been going to breakfast at seven for a while now, but there's no real need for it if you're not on a case, and you've turned down four cases in the last three weeks. More, in the last eight months. Do you ever intend to get around to telling me what all that's about? Have you decided to stop working?”

“Would it bother you if I had? Would it be too much as if I'd turned into a gigolo?”

“Christ,” Bennis said. “Sometimes you are truly and sincerely one of the most annoying men I've ever met. Nobody even uses words like ‘gigolo' anymore.”

“No, I suppose they don't.”

“And we live in your apartment, not mine. And you won't let me share expenses. And the last I heard, your investments were doing just fine, which beats mine, since you're apparently clairvoyant and know exactly when to pull out of the stock market—”

“The trick with the stock market is to never get into it.”

“Whatever. What brought this up, Gregor? ‘Gigolo' is a nasty word, especially in this context, especially since it's not even close to true. Or maybe that's my background. It's the principal paranoia of every rich girl's parents that somebody will marry her for her money.”

“I don't know what brought it up,” Gregor said. “I was looking at the street and thinking about my brother. Did I ever tell you I had a brother?”

“Yes. Older. Died in the army.”

“Right. He's buried where my mother is, in the same cemetery where my wife is buried. I haven't been there inages, and the last time I went I only went for Elizabeth. There ought to be something on the street to remember them by. I don't know what. I keep thinking of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, but that isn't what I mean at all, really. I don't know. Maybe we could carve something into the sidewalks. ‘At this spot stood a five-story walk-up tenement where the apartments were all too small and where Sofia Valdanian Demarkian heard that one of her sons was dead and the other had been admitted to Harvard Business School.'”

“On the same day?”

“No, of course not. Nearly two decades apart. Doesn't it ever bother you? Or are all the places you grew up in still intact so that you can go back and see them exactly the way they were?”

“My childhood home has been inherited by a nonprofit foundation, and I wouldn't want to go back and see it in any case, especially if it were still intact, as you put it. Gregor, why aren't you working? I know I used to complain about how much time you spent on it, and I know I used to worry that you'd end up getting shot, but this isn't good for you. It really isn't. And it's not as if nothing interesting has come up. John Jackman—”

“Has he been talking to you behind my back?”

“It's hardly been behind your back. He's a friend of mine. He had that case in December of the woman who was poisoning her husbands, you remember; she'd already gotten away with three of them, and he was afraid she was going to get away with another—”

“She didn't.”

“No, she didn't, Gregor, but she'd have been in jail a lot sooner if you'd helped, and you know it. And he asked for your help. I've never known you to turn down John when he asked. I think he was insulted.”

“Then I'll have to apologize to him.”

“This is impossible,” Bennis said.

He heard her fussing with something behind him, but he didn't turn around to look at her. He was still looking downon the construction trucks and the people on the street. They were people he knew, by and large, but for some reason they didn't look familiar, any more than the street did. He wanted to think it was just the time of day. Back before the church had been destroyed, he and Bennis had gone to breakfast every day at seven, instead of eight, and maybe the people on that schedule had been different than the people on this one—but he really knew it was not. They looked wrong, though, all of them. They looked very wrong.

Behind him Bennis had come around the back of the couch and sat down. He could hear her feet going up on the coffee table, even though he knew she wasn't wearing shoes. She never wore shoes in the house. In the summer she didn't even wear socks.

“Listen,” she said, “I know you feel responsible for that mess out there. I know you do. But nobody else does. Tibor doesn't. Lida doesn't. Hannah and Sheila and Howard don't. Nobody does, really. And it doesn't make sense for you to think that. And you know it.”

“It's not that simple.”

“It is that simple, Gregor. He'd have done what he did even if you'd never have existed—”

“He wouldn't have done what he did to this church.”

“He'd have done it to some other church. Or to police headquarters.
She'd
have done what she did, too. She was unbalanced as hell. You have to know that.”