Hardscrabble Road (42 page)

“Gregor Demarkian is a very decent human being,” Chickie said. “He’s not radical, and he’s not particularly ‘progressive,’
but he’s a decent human being and he’s a fair one. You’re making unwarranted assumptions about how he will behave—”

“It’s not just him,” Kate pointed out. “It’s the police and the district attorney, too. They’re part of this. You act as if
nothing and nobody existed but ourselves and Gregor Demarkian.”

“Two people are dead, Kate. Including that poor idiot from Liberty-Heart Communications, who seemed to me like a pretty decent
human being, too. This is not a game anymore. This is not a chance to stick it in the eye of Drew Harrigan.”

“He was the first one who was dead,” Kate said.

“Call Demarkian, and tell him what you did.”

Kate swiveled the chair around so that her back was to Chickie and stared at the posters on the wall. They were somebody else’s
posters, or else some secretary’s idea of what would be suitable for guest lawyers who wouldn’t be around very long. “It’s
still about Drew Harrigan, you know,” she said. “It’s still about who he is, and what he can get away with, and what men like
Sherman Markey can’t. It’s still not impossible that we’ll lose this fight and Markey will end up on the run or in jail.”

“He’s already on the run.”

“I know. I’m just saying that you have to be more careful than you’re being. You can’t just charge into the breach and blunder
around and expect it all to work out like an episode of Law and Order.”

“Call Demarkian or I will.”

“All right,” Kate said, making up her mind. She swiveled the chair around again so that she was facing forward. She was struck,
as she was sometimes, by just how young Chickie George really was. She wondered how much of his attitude had to do with the
fact that he had a very good friend who was becoming a nun. She put her elbows down on the desk and her face in her hands.
“All right,” she said again. “First thing in the morning, I’ll call him. You get me his number, and I’ll call him. But you
have to understand. I don’t really think this is the right thing to do.”

“Why not call him now?”

“Because it’s late,” Kate said. “It’s very late. If he’s home, he’s going to want to rest, or he’s going to be already resting.
If he’s not home, he’s not in a place where I can talk to him in peace. I’ll call him first thing in the morning. Get me the
number. You were the one who said he wakes up early every day to have breakfast at some restaurant.”

“At the Ararat on Cavanaugh Street at seven,” Chickie George said. He hesitated. “All right. I suppose. I’m not happy about
the delay, but I suppose. But no later than that. If he still doesn’t know by tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to tell him.”

“How will you know if he knows?”

“I’ll ask him.” Chickie leaned forward and took the notepad that sat beside the telephone—another guest-lawyer note, Kate
thought, another message from the land of the secretaries. Chickie took the pen out of the inside said.
pocket of his jacket and wrote the number on the pad. “There it is,” he said. “You don’t even need an area code.”

Kate picked up the notepad and put it squarely in the middle of the felt blotter. “First thing tomorrow morning,” she said.
“I get in here at seven anyway.”

Chickie stood up. “It’s the one thing I don’t like about public interest law,” he said. “Too many of the people who do it
seem to assume that the world is full of enemies, and offense is the only defense they can play.”

“The world is full of enemies,” Kate said. “The fact that human nature won’t allow the revolution to succeed won’t change
that.”

“I’ve got to go downstairs and do some work on the single-room occupancy thing,” Chickie said. “The people who are on the
other side of that aren’t enemies. They’re just trying to do what they’re trying to do.”

“Trying to throw the poor into the street and let them starve?”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Chickie said. “Never mind. I’m going to go work. First thing tomorrow morning,
or I do it myself.”

Kate waited patiently as Chickie left the office and went down the hall.

He was very young and very angry, and it wasn’t certain that he’d learn to understand all the things she had learned to understand
in the long years since she’d left Philadelphia and stopped being a society wife.

She waited until she was sure he must have gone down the stairs, that he couldn’t possibly be about to pop back in again to
give her one more part of this lecture. Then she pulled the piece of paper with Gregor Demarkian’s phone number on it off
the notepad and tore it into very tiny pieces.

She didn’t know what she would say to Chickie tomorrow afternoon, but she would think of something. She had no intention of
giving up what little advantage she had in this case just because Chickie George thought Gregor Demarkian was “a good guy.”

I
t had been a long day,
and not a good one, and Gregor Demarkian wanted to walk. It was what he usually did to clear his mind. He hated being in
truly rural areas for very long, because there were no sidewalks, and walking any length in any direction was difficult. He
hated bad weather, for that very reason, although he’d gone long distances in heavy rain and moderate snow. He left Rob Benedetti’s
office after it was already dark and realized, in less than a block and a half, that this was never going to work. He didn’t
mind wind, but he minded it when it pushed hard cold at him like needles. All his joints had begun to ache. His neck felt
stiff enough to snap off his body like a plastic pearl on one of those little add-a-pearl necklaces the girls used to have
when he was a child. He knew he was in trouble when he started thinking about himself when he was a child. Other people were
sentimental about their childhoods. He was not. Growing up poor was either a lifelong ticket to neurosis or a prelude to something
else, and he had the something else.

He stepped into a tiny hole-in-the-wall magazine store just to get out of the cold and think. There was a television on the
wall showing the news, and the story that was up was the one about Frank Sheehy. Gregor could still hear the noise in Rob
Benedetti’s office when the confirmation had come through, but he didn’t want to think about that, either. There was something
all wrong about this case. He just couldn’t put a finger on what it was. Everything was sideways. Nothing fit what it should.
He wished he knew something more about Drew Harrigan, but when he asked people he got nothing more than clichés and nothing
less than venom. To know him—or to know of him—was to hate him. That was clear. What wasn’t clear was the personality behind
the bombast. It was as if the man had been invented, from scratch, out of old bits and pieces of political speeches.

They were saying something on the news about Frank Sheehy and his
life: his years at Princeton, his struggle to found LibertyHeart Communications. Gregor reached into the pocket of his coat
and came up with a crumpled copy of Ellen Harrigan’s list. There was something else that bothered him, and that should have
bothered Rob Benedetti and the police much more. They seemed to take it as a ruse on the part of Ellen Harrigan to draw suspicion
away from herself, and Gregor thought that was certainly possible. He didn’t think it began to explain either why she’d made
the list to begin with or why these particular people were on it.

It was a silly idea, but it at least involved moving around, so he decided to go ahead with it. He went back out onto the
street and looked up and down for the cab. Rush hour appeared to be over. He had no idea what time it was. At any rate, the
traffic wasn’t back-to-back here. He saw a cab in the distance and raised his hand for it. It sped up until it got to him
and then pulled over to the curb.

It was one of those things. It was as if God were trying to tell him something. He got in and gave the driver the address
he’d noted beside one of the names. Then he explained he was talking about one of the buildings at Penn. He’d been an undergraduate
at Penn, years ago, but he’d never become really familiar with its campus, because he’d commuted from home instead of living
in a dorm. It was a different time and a different place. The Ivy League was really Ivy. Poor boys on scholarships didn’t
get around very much with the rich boys who ran everything from the Chess Club to the campus newspaper.

They were closer than Gregor had realized. He probably could have walked—but then, you could walk almost anywhere in Philadelphia,
if you were willing to take long enough to do it. He paid the driver and got out. The campus looked deserted, or close to
it. The security lights were on everywhere. Did they lock the doors at night in these places? They would have if he’d been
running things.

The door to this one, the closest thing he could find to a “front” door, was not locked. He walked in and looked around. The
address gave an office number on the second floor, and now that he thought of it, that was interesting. Why give Alison Standish’s
office address instead of her home address? He got the list out again and looked down it to find Jig Tyler. It gave his office
address, too. Either Ellen Harrigan hadn’t known the home addresses of the two professors at Penn, or she hadn’t wanted to
look them up.

He went up to the second floor, feeling more idiotic by the minute. The building was nearly empty. He did see one or two people
at their desks, pecking away at computers, but it was obvious that most of the people who worked here had gone home long ago.
He had no reason to think that Alison Standish hadn’t gone home, too. He would have, if he was her. He
walked down past the offices. Most of their doors were closed. Some of those doors had posters hanging on them: the New York
City Ballet; the imminent release of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Che. He stopped for a moment in front
of the Che. It astonished him that anybody still took Che seriously.

Alison Standish’s office was far at the end of the hall, and he saw before he reached it that it was open. Light was flowing
out of it into the dark corridor. He went up to the door and looked in. A blond woman in her forties was standing on a ladder
with her back to him, trying to get a book off a high shelf.

Gregor hesitated. He didn’t want to startle her, and he didn’t want her to fall. He cleared his throat and knocked lightly
on the door. She turned around.

“You’re very tall,” she said.

“Ah,” Gregor said. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Could you come up here and get this book for me? I should have known not to let them put books up on that shelf. I’m going
to kill myself here.”

She got down off the ladder. Gregor came into the office and got on. The top shelf was all the way up to the ceiling, and
even for somebody as tall as he was, it wasn’t comfortable to try to get a book from it.

“What you need is a taller ladder,” he said.

“It’s the thick navy blue one right about where your head is. It’s called Ecclesiastica Romana.”

Gregor got it. It weighed a ton. He came down the ladder and handed it over. “What is that, anyway?”

“It’s a book on the evils of the Roman Church, written by a monk in twelfth-century Provence. I have to bless Latin, really,
because if he’d written it in Provençal, I wouldn’t be able to understand a word. Not that we really understand the Latin,
even ecclesiastical Latin, after all this time. The context is gone, and we can never get it back again. It makes you wonder
what people are thinking when they say that they understand the Bible.”

“My guess is that they’re thinking that the Bible, being divinely inspired, is also divinely delivered, so that God prevents
us from making mistakes we would make with ordinary texts.”

“You sound like you’re quoting somebody.”

“I am,” Gregor said. “I’m quoting Father Tibor Kasparian, who is the pastor of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church and
a good friend of mine.”

“The Tibor Kasparian who wrote ‘The Aesthetic Roots of the Nestorian Controversy’?”

“I don’t know. The Nestorian controversy sounds right. He talks about Nestorians quite a lot. I just don’t understand him.
My name is Gregor Demarkian, by the way.”

“I know,” Alison Standish said. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. I recognized you from your photographs. And that would
be the same Tibor Kasparian, by the way. I met him at a conference on The Problem of Art in a Time of Heresy. He’s an interesting
man.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “He is.”

“I take it you’ve come about that list, and about that man who died. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know Drew Harrigan, either.
I’ve got no idea why all this is happening to me.”

Gregor got down off the ladder and looked around. It was like being in Tibor’s apartment, in among the Serious Books. He saw
English, French, German, Latin, Greek, and a few he didn’t recognize.

“Rob Benedetti’s people looked it up,” he said. Then he paused. “Rob is the district attorney. After the list came out, they
looked it up. They said that Drew Harrigan had talked about you ‘repeatedly’ on his show, and called for you to be investigated
for bias, and that the university had responded by opening an investigation.”

“I know.”

“That’s a fair indication of why all this is happening to you.”

“Except that Harrigan’s original accusation is part of what’s happening to me,” Alison said, “and I don’t understand why.
I teach medieval literature and intellectual history. I’m not in the Women’s Studies program. The people in the Women’s Studies
program don’t even like me. I’m too blindly wedded to the repressive hermeneutic of dominant heterosexism. Or something. I
never get the jargon straight. My last book was about the influence of Scholastic theology on English common law.”

“From what I understood, Harrigan claimed that he was in contact with a student of yours who claimed that you deliberately
gave lower grades to students with conservative political convictions.”

“I know. The problem is, I wouldn’t know which of my students had conservative political convictions to save my life. Modern
politics doesn’t tend to come up in a course concentrating on marital imagery in medieval devotional poetry.”