The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [70]
“My grandmother and aunt. Are they dead, too?”
The cop stared into his eyes and nodded. “Yes, they’re dead, too.”
The police had questions, and he tried his best to answer them. On the drive home, he had to forgive himself for allowing his mind, at such a moment, to consider the family business. Who would take it over now that his father and grandmother, the heart and soul of Zankou Chicken, were gone? His mother, Rita, by design, had never worked a single day at Zankou. His older brother, Dikran, was a born-again evangelist whose fire took him to street corners, and a younger brother, Ara, was addled by drugs. No one was more lost than Steve himself. Just three years earlier, he had been charged with shooting at a prostitute and her pimp and had faced a life sentence. The case ended in a mistrial. He did have two cousins, Aunt Dzovig’s sons, who were capable enough. But how could they be expected to work beside the sons of the man who had murdered their mother and grandmother?
“My God, Dad,” he said, climbing the hillside to give his mother the news. “What have you done?”
IN THE WEEKS and months and years to follow, five years to be exact, the Armenians of Glendale, Hollywood, Montebello, and Van Nuys, and their kin up and over the mountains in Fresno, told and retold the story. “Let’s sit crooked and talk straight,” the old Armenian ladies clucked. There was no bigger shame, no bigger ahmote, than an Armenian son taking the life of his own mother. And who could explain such a shame from a man like Mardiros Iskenderian? He was the same son who had honored his mother on Mother’s Day with lavish ceremonies at the church, celebrations in which Margrit Iskenderian, short and plump, salt-and-pepper hair cut in a bob, was invariably crowned queen. Wherever they went as a family, he made his wife take a seat in the back so his mother could sit beside him. For 25 years, she had lived with Mardiros and Rita and their children, her bedroom the master bedroom, where a single photo, that of her and her son back in 1950s Lebanon, graced her dresser. Each day at 6 p.m., when Margrit returned home from her long shift cooking at Zankou, Rita was there to greet her at the door. So why, after all those years of devotion, did Margrit Iskenderian leave the house of her son and move in with her daughter Dzovig?
The old ladies gave answers, some less cruel than others: The cancer that filled Mardiros’s body had gone to his brain. He was thinking like a crazy man. No, it wasn’t cancer, it was the scars of growing up in Lebanon with a father who was the drunkard of Bourj Hamoud. No, haven’t you heard the talk about the Pepsi company offering the family $30 million for the Zankou chain and trademark? Greed split the family house in two.
Others insisted there was no sense to be made of it because life made no sense, death made no sense. Yes, we Armenians were the first people to accept Christianity as a nation, way back in 301 A.D., before the Romans, before the Greeks. But to answer this question of why Mardiros Iskenderian killed his mother and his sister and then himself, Armenians had to reach back to their pagan past, to a way of seeing older than the Bible itself: Pakht, they called it. Fate. Jagadakeer, it was muttered. Your destiny is etched into your forehead at birth. What is written no one can change.
Thus, from Turkey to Beirut to Hollywood to Glendale, from the genocide to the garlic paste to the mansion to the murders, it was all foretold.
RITA WAS AN ARMENIAN CATHOLIC SCHOOLGIRL growing up in the suburbs of Beirut in the late 1960s when she first set eyes on Mardiros Iskenderian, the bad boy gunning his banana yellow 442 Oldsmobile up and down the lane. When he blew the engine, he turned up the next week with a brand-new 442 Olds, this one burgundy. The pampered son of Zankou Chicken hardly noticed Rita Hovakimian, who was