On the other hand, you didn’t have to tell him anything twice. Or once either. Without a word Marlene handed him the folder on the Alphabet City Jane Doe. He read it silently. Marlene turned to other work. After fifteen minutes, he put it back on the desk and said, “You think he might do it again.” Marlene felt a rush of gratitude and smiled at him. With no prompting at all, Harry had seen in the photographs and the autopsy report and the bare-bones investigation exactly what she had seen, and understood that of course this was why an anonymous death with some oddly sexual bits might be important.
She said, “Yeah. What do you think? Too stale?”
“I could try to find him.”
Marlene’s brows knotted. “What, the killer?”
He gave her a look, the one he gave her when she missed the subtext of one of his telegraphic messages.
“No, the guy who called it in. For starters,” said Bello, rising and picking up the fat file. “Can I keep this?”
Marlene nodded and Harry Bello disappeared, and she wasn’t entirely certain that the door had opened. Five minutes later, she cursed and banged her desk. She had forgotten about the agreement with Karp, about Harry and the Armenian thing.
Karp had sort of forgotten about the Harry part too, in that he was still personally on the case. At the moment he was emerging from an unmarked police car onto the gravel drive of a large Riverdale house. It was a lovely house, a two-story Italianate villa in rusticated brown sandstone with a red tile roof. The grounds were bright with flowering trees, and there was a flash of silver through the boughs from the Hudson. Karp rang the bell, and a maid in a white uniform showed him in.
He had called Sarkis Kerbussyan first thing that morning, and the man had agreed to meet with him immediately. Indeed, he seemed anxious to do so. The servant, a dour, elderly woman, led Karp silently through paneled halls that were floored with marble or dark wood where they were not covered with oriental carpeting. Karp was notably insensitive to works of art, but these carpets struck even him with their obvious quality, the depth and intricacy of their patterns, the brilliance of their colors. It was like walking on soft jewels.
The woman brought him at last to a large semicircular room, white paneled, its walls made of bookcases except on the curved side, where high French windows gave onto a formal garden, just turning bright green. The floor was covered with a ruby carpet bordered in vivid blue. On the carpet, in the approximate center of the room, was a light writing table of some pale wood, and behind the desk was an old man.
The woman left the room, closing the door silently behind her. This is like a movie, thought Karp, being of a class and generation that did not often enter houses of this style, and that instinctively used the fictions of Hollywood as a reference when encountering the remarkable in real life.
The old man rose stiffly to his feet as Karp approached, and smiled and offered his hand, introducing himself as Sarkis Kerbussyan. Karp said who he was and took the proffered chair.
“Nice place,” offered Karp, and immediately regretted it, feeling the hick. Kerbussyan nodded politely. “Yes, I like it very much. I bought it because it reminded me of my grandfather’s house at Smyrna, also on a hill above a river, also with a red tile roof and a garden in the back. I have been successful in growing figs here too, despite the climate. Perhaps, if you are interested, later I will show you the house and the garden.” He paused and smiled. “But first our business, yes?”
“Aram Tomasian,” said Karp.
“Yes. An unfortunate mistake. A tragedy for the boy and his family.”
“I take it you don’t think he did it.”
Kerbussyan made a dismissive gesture. “An impossibility! I have known the boy since he was born, and also his father and his mother from a very young age. In Beirut, in fact. They were brought there as orphans, and my uncle arranged for them to come to this country. So I know them all very well. They are all businessmen, peaceful people, like me. There is no possible chance that Aram was involved in such a thing.”
At that moment the servant reappeared with a tray containing a coffee service and a small plate of baklava. In the necessary pause while this refreshment was served out, Karp took the opportunity to study his host. Old, at least eighty, thought Karp, but not frail. Rather the opposite, with a full head of thick white hair swept back from a freckled, ivory forehead. He had a strong, fleshy nose over a thick, stiff-looking mustache, also white. He was dressed neatly, as for business, in a well-tailored gray suit, a white silk shirt, and a blue tie. He became conscious of Karp’s examination as he poured the coffee and met Karp’s gaze out of deep-set brown eyes.
The eyes held an expression Karp had seen before: veiled, layered, amused, ruthless, an expression common to powerful men of a certain stripe. Some of the dons had such a glance, and some lawyers around town, and Karp had also seen something like it in both an Israeli intelligence agent and a Nazi fugitive. Sarkis Kerbussyan was not a simple businessman, or a simple anything.
They drank, they nibbled. Small talk flowed. Kerbussyan, it turned out, had started as a rug merchant-a deprecating smile, denoting his concession that such a trade was almost a parody for an Armenian-and while expanding his businesses into real estate and investments, he had retained his love for carpets and antiquities. Karp learned that the rug beneath their feet was worth a good deal more than the house in which it sat.
“That’s a lot of money for a rug,” said Karp, willing to be impressed. “That’s pretty nearly enough to bail Tomasian out.”
An incomprehensible look, that could have been anger or pain, flashed across Kerbussyan’s eyes for an instant. He put a stiff smile on his mouth and said, “That is being attended to. Five million is a great deal of money to assemble at short notice. As for the rug and other antiquities of value, I am afraid that the courts are reluctant to accept them as bailable items. Not like cash and real estate, you understand.” He glanced away, seeming to take in the carpet and the room’s other furnishings for the first time, or as if he were looking at them for the last time.
“Yes, a great deal of money. It is an Ushak medallion carpet made in the region around Smyrna in the seventeenth century. There was one like it in my grandfather’s house. But there are only a few of this quality and size left in private hands in the world, and that is where value resides-quality, craftsmanship, beauty, yes, but uniqueness above all.
“Something else too. Objects, certain objects, have a kind of soul. Rugs, for example. In the old days, they say, the rug makers would buy little girls from poor peasant families and wall them up in rooms with a loom and wools of many colors, and the little girls would spend their entire lives working on a single rug. When you bought such a rug, you would, in effect, be buying a whole life, a soul.
“That people would do such a thing is an indication of our fallen state. After all, what is more unique than a human being? Yet we treat one another so badly; we murder for objects. There are objects in this very house that are dripping blood. If we were truly godlike, we would become connoisseurs of souls and not objets d’art, don’t you think?”
“We have a way to go,” said Karp. “Meanwhile, people kill for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with objects. Passions. Causes.”
“Yes, but it takes a particular sort of man to kill for a cause, don’t you think? To return to the reason for your visit, not a man like Aram Tomasian.”
“No? He sure had enough equipment for it. And he’s a member of an organization called the Armenian Secret Army, and he’d written threatening letters to the Turkish mission.”
Kerbussyan put down his coffee cup, pressed his palms together beneath his chin, and looked at Karp. “Mr. Karp, I do not see many people anymore, outside my community, that is. I was curious about why the chief of the Homicide Bureau wished to see me, and so after you called I made some telephone calls of my own. It appears that there was recently a difference of opinion between you and the gentleman who is handling Aram’s case.”