Stillness in Bethlehem by Jane Haddam

or something, can’t you see? Tibor is interested in what they’re going to do, and so am I.”
    Now that Bennis had pointed it out, Gregor could indeed see. The other two camels hadn’t absconded. They had been in another part of the small park in the charge of a short, muscular man in a bright red ski parka. He was leading them around in a wide circle, pulling them along on leashes that ended in three feet of wooden stick that he held onto. The camels did not look pleased.
    Gregor tapped Bennis on the shoulder again. “It’s not an animal rehearsal,” he said. “The man’s just making sure the camels get some exercise. You see those sticks? That’s so they can’t get close enough to bite him. Camels bite.”
    “I know camels bite,” Bennis said.
    “I have read about it in my pamphlet,” Tibor put in, waving the long booklet in the air. “This year they have fourteen different kinds of animals for the Nativity play and later for the living crêche. Camels. Cows. Sheep. Horses. Donkeys. Pigs. A black bear. A family of deer. A moose.”
    “A moose?”
    “They got it from a zoo in Oregon, Krekor. They also have three lion cubs and a tiger cub and a panther cub that they got from a firm that supplies animals for television commercials. It is going to be most symbolic.”
    “It is going to be an unholy mess,” Gregor said. “I wonder how they get them all here. This isn’t a major intersection. Do you figure they block off Main Street?”
    “If you read your brochure you’d know,” Bennis said. “Main Street is closed to all but pedestrian traffic from six o’clock every night until two o’clock the next morning. So are the two blocks closest to Main Street on something called Carrow. That’s so people can mill around and not get run over, and there isn’t any traffic noise to make it hard to hear the play.”
    Gregor shook his head. “That doesn’t answer my question. That just means Main Street is going to be full of people instead of cars. How are they going to get a moose and a black bear and a family of deer through all that?”
    “Maybe they get them here before, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Like these sheep and this cow they have here now.”
    “If they did that, you’d have other reasons besides traffic for not hearing the play. This isn’t that big a park.”
    “Well, they have to get here somehow,” Bennis said, “and they obviously do, because they’ve been having this play for the last two weeks, and nobody’s complained that I know of. I don’t understand you sometimes, Gregor. You get a perfectly interesting problem like a couple of shootings and you don’t think anything of it. And then you take off after some simple piece of nothing like this business of the animals as if it were the most fascinating puzzle since the Gordian knot.”
    “It’s because he’s lonely,” Tibor said. “You should consider this, Bennis. It is not good for a man of Krekor’s age to be without a wife.”
    “You’re my age,” Gregor said, “or just about. You don’t have a wife.”
    “I have the grace of God to see me through my difficulties, Krekor. You have only Lida Arkmanian’s cooking.”
    “I wish I had Lida Arkmanian’s cooking,” Gregor said.
    “I wish we had some kind of map,” Bennis said. “That’s the one thing the people who wrote this brochure didn’t think of. I suppose they thought in a town this small there was nothing to draw a map of. Never mind. I’m with Gregor. Tibor, we ought to get in out of the cold and at least get some coffee or something. What time is it?”
    “Ten to eleven,” Tibor said.
    “I don’t know what you think you’re trying to do,” somebody else said, “but I’m not going to let you do it. It’s been my part in this play for the last two weeks, and I haven’t done a single thing wrong with it.”
    Gregor turned around. In the beginning, he had thought the voice was coming from somewhere in the middle of the park. Then he’d