Bennis came out, too. “Hey,” she said. “The Melajian boys were just here. We have breakfast.”
“The Ararat delivered breakfast?”
“Just this once for the special circumstances,” Bennis said. “I talked to Linda about it a couple of days ago. I thought it would be a bit much to take Javier to the Ararat first day out, so she put together a few things for us to have here.”
“Did she send eggs?”
“Scrambled only. She said sunny-side up doesn’t travel well. There’s sort of a lot of it.”
Javier and Pickles had disappeared into the kitchen. Gregor followed Bennis back there and saw Javier sitting at the table in front of a plate piled up with pancakes, waffles, hash browns, sausages, and toast. Next to him, Pickles was being presented with a small plate of pancakes with butter and syrup.
“Oh, no,” Bennis said. She grabbed the small plate and put it on the floor. Pickles followed it. “No dogs at the table,” Bennis told Javier. Then she leaned over and told Pickles the same thing.
“Of course, I don’t know what Tibor does,” she said, “and I’ve got a suspicion that pancakes aren’t what you really want to feed dogs, but we’ll work it out. He’s going to bring over some of her things later. Do you mind Pickles staying a few days?”
Gregor sat down at an empty place and started going through the plastic containers of—everything. “Of course not. She seems to be acting like a therapy dog. I hope Tibor doesn’t mind.”
“I don’t think he minds. I don’t know if he’s making much sense this morning, though. You’re making a lot more sense than I expected you to.”
“All I did was go down and check things out. I probably didn’t even need to. It isn’t like they got arrested. They were just witnesses. They talked to the uniforms. They talked to the detectives headquarters sent out, or maybe the precinct. I don’t even know. They gave their information and we all came home. It was just a weird incident.”
“You were the one who said it was an attempted murder.”
“I can’t think of what else it would be,” Gregor said. “But the woman was alive when she was taken away in the ambulance, I’m just glad Javier wasn’t there.”
“I’m just sorry Tommy was,” Bennis said. She looked toward Javier. Gregor noticed that the boy had started in on the fruit jams. There were five or six different kinds. He was using all of them.
Bennis had tea and a plate with a piece of melon on it. She sat down herself, saw Javier was struggling to reach the big tub of hash browns, and pulled it closer to him. Javier said gracias and went at it.
“Lida called. She and Hannah are coming over sometime today. They baked cookies. Father Tibor is sleeping in. I suppose Tommy is sleeping in, too.”
“Did you talk to Donna?”
“Sort of. And the weather is awful, so I was thinking we’d just stay in today. Javier and me, I meant. You can do what you want.”
“Is there somewhere you wanted to go?”
Bennis shrugged. “There are things that need to be done. Clothes, for instance. I have all his school uniforms, that was easy, but I don’t have that much in the way of stuff for him to wear otherwise. I didn’t want to go out and pick up a bunch of things I liked and just stick him with them. Even children have their own tastes. I don’t know what he wants in colors, or if he likes jeans or khakis, or any of that sort of thing. And he needs a backpack. I can get that off the Internet at L.L.Bean, but then there’s that color thing again, and there are different kinds. There are a lot of things to think about.”
Gregor looked over at Javier. Pickles was in his lap, and chomping down on something. Bennis got up, took the dog, and put it back down on the floor.
“No dogs at the table,” she said to Javier, very emphatically this time. Then she sat down again. “I’ve got my suspicions about the language thing,” she said. “I think it’s like the first time I was by myself in Paris.”
“He speaks Spanish,” Gregor pointed out.
“I know. But I was in Paris on my own for the first time, and I was getting kind of frantic, because I didn’t speak the language and I kept seeing myself starving to death in the street because I couldn’t figure out how to order any food and the French are really such jackasses about pretending they don’t know what you’re trying to say. And then I was in this bakery, patisserie, you know, and I was trying to buy some pastry, and it suddenly hit me. I wanted to buy pastry, and the girl behind the counter wanted to sell me pastry, and given those circumstances, we’d find a way.”
“You aren’t making any sense.”
“I think Javier’s ability to understand what I’m talking about sort of waxes and wanes with how motivated he is to get the message.”
“Ah.”
Somewhere out in the foyer, the landline rang. Bennis stood up.
“I’ll get it. And I was thinking just last week that we ought to get rid of the landline because we never use it anymore.”
“It’ll probably be a robocall. You can hang up.”
Bennis left the room. Gregor turned his attention to Javier. Pickles was back in his lap, but she wasn’t chomping on anything this time, so Gregor let it go.
Javier stroked the dog’s head.
“You don’t know it yet,” Gregor told him, “but you’re about to be surrounded by a bunch of Armenian ladies who were born to be grandmothers. They’re going to be all over you. You’re going to have cookies.”
“Oreo,” Javier said, almost solemnly.
Gregor laughed. “Those, too. But there are going to be cookies they make themselves. In big batches, bigger than you can get at any grocery store.”
“Chips Ahoy!” Javier said. “Fig Newtons!”
Gregor laughed again. “We’ve got Girl Scouts around here,” he said. “We’ll get you some of those, too.”
“Mallomars.”
Just then, Bennis came back, looking puzzled.
“It’s for you,” she said. “It’s John Jackman.”
2
Over the years Gregor Demarkian had known him, John Henry Newman Jackman had become the most famous politician in Pennsylvania. He had started as a detective of homicide in Bryn Mawr, a position that had made him joke that racial stereotypes didn’t work in Bryn Mawr, because the only black man in the suburb was on the side of law and order. He had moved from there to become head of homicide in Philadelphia, and then police commissioner in Philadelphia, and then mayor. Until Barack Obama came along, Gregor had been sure he had been looking to become America’s first black president. At the moment, he was having to settle for a seat in the United States Senate and more interviews on CNN than most people could handle without losing their minds.
There was a little chair next to the telephone table in the foyer. It was solid enough to sit in, but ornate in the way furniture was when Bennis didn’t expect anybody to use it. Gregor sat down and picked up the receiver.
“John? Are you calling from Washington? Why are you calling on the landline? Nobody calls on the landline. I don’t understand why we still have it.”