Read Not a Creature Was Stirring for Free Online

closet. Permanently.
    “It was when we were setting up the Behavioral Sciences Department,” he told Tibor. “That’s what I did most of my last eight years at the Bureau. I helped to coordinate investigations of serial killers. It was the serial killers Time was interested in, not me.”
    “I read the article,” Tibor repeated, chiding.
    “You should have read the one two years ago. That time, they called me an irresponsible son-of-a-bitch for walking out in the middle of a case just because my wife was dying.”
    “That case never got solved. Maybe that’s what they were worried about.”
    “I’m sure it was. And child murders are a particularly nasty kind of case not to get solved. But—”
    “Stop,” Tibor said. He got up and walked to the window, a narrow bar of glass that looked out on an air shaft.
    “I have read this Bennis Hannaford’s books,” he said after a while. “I like them very much. Whatever her father is, she is not the same. Do you see?”
    “No.”
    “He came here, and he sat in his wheelchair, and all the time I am thinking he has seven children, and maybe none of them are what he is. And he has a wife, who is very sick, and she spends her life doing good works. This I see in the paper all the time, too. He is—intent about his wife. And he comes here and talks to me, and he makes me an offer. A very strange offer. He takes out his briefcase and he opens it up, and inside he has money. One hundred thousand dollars in money. He counts it out for me, and then he asks me a favor, and he says if I do this favor the church can have this money.”
    “A hundred thousand dollars in cash?” This wasn’t ink. It was Krazy Glue.
    But Tibor was nodding. “Yes, Gregor. A hundred thousand dollars in cash. With money like this—there is a lot going on in Armenia now. The Turks. The Soviets, who are worse than the Turks. The problems caused by the earthquake. The people—”
    “Father,” Gregor said, “what did Robert Hannaford want you to do for that money?”
    Tibor smiled. “You’re thinking he wanted me to commit a murder?”
    “Or something worse.”
    Tibor’s smile got broader. It made Gregor realize he’d lost a lot of teeth.
    “Well, Gregor,” he said, “I will tell you. He didn’t want anything from me. He wanted something from you.”

TWO
1
    O N THE CORNER WHERE the Halakmanian grocery used to be, there was now a gift shop—a great big plate-glass—windowed, tinsel-trimmed shop full of colored glass Christmas ornaments and flower vases made of seashells. Gregor didn’t know if he liked it or not. If he’d still been living in Washington, the question wouldn’t have been worth asking. In a sophisticated city among sophisticated people, it was obligatory to deplore the “commerciality” of Christmas. Sweet little girl angels with feathery wings, bright tinfoil stars, tree lights that winked and blinked like the neon signs of roadside motels: Gregor could hear Mrs. Senator Thomaston now, going on and on about it in her hoarse society caw, as if putting blinking lights on Christmas trees was tantamount to letting a four year old attack the Sistine ceiling with bubble gum. Mrs. Senator Thomaston had been Marianna Winford before she married, and what she liked in Christmas ornaments were little mud-colored figurines made by peasant women in Honduras.
    What the children liked was flash and dazzle, the flash and dazzle of blinking lights especially. There was a crowd of them watching from the sidewalk, pressing their faces to the glass like street urchins in a Dickens novel. Even the ones in Ralph Lauren Polo had lost their studied jadedness. In fact, all of Cavanaugh Street had lost its studied jadedness. Back in May, when Gregor first moved into his apartment, the neighborhood had seemed not only newly rich but newly nervous. The triple deckers had been turned into private houses or renovated beyond recognition into what their new owners insisted on calling “flats.”