The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [81]
All his life, he had been told he was Mardiros’s son. And all his life, good and bad, he had done his best to make that true. The girls, the outbursts, the devotion to business, the loyalty to family, it became his way of honoring the father. But what it meant to be Mardiros Iskenderian’s son had changed irrevocably that day. It was one thing to be the second coming of a patriarch beloved by family and community. It was another to know that all this legacy had been washed over by one act. Who was the father? Who was the son? How could Steve ever be expected to build a new Zankou in his father’s name, without ever owning up to what his father had done?
Usually he did not plan his visits to Forest Lawn. He went only when the impulse seized him, and that was rare. Truth be known, he wasn’t sure if he was strong enough. But that December day in 2007, as he barreled into Los Angeles, he decided he would do something different. Inside the cemetery gates, he visited the grave of his father, and then he headed to the opposite end to locate the graves of his grandmother and aunt. He hadn’t gone to their funerals. He had never said a proper good-bye. “I know it sounds stupid, but it wasn’t until I was standing there, staring into their headstones, that it hit me for the first time. That my father had killed them. I never really looked at it like that before. He took two lives. He was going to die anyway, so I don’t count his life. But he took two lives with him. And those lives belonged to my grandmother and my aunt. There was no turning away from it. This is what my father chose to do as his final deed.”
He wanted to believe that none of it was truly planned, that his father, racked by rage and cancer, was not of sound mind. He wanted to believe that in the living room of his aunt’s house, his father awoke to his crime and felt immense sadness. He could only hope that his father had asked for forgiveness as he sat down on the couch and raised the gun to his head. What he didn’t know was that the coroner had checked for traces of salt beneath his father’s eyes and found none. Mardiros Iskenderian had shed no tears.
The son left the cemetery that day with the same questions he had been lugging around for five years. They were questions, he now knew, that had no answers. How could a woman who cooked with such love disown her son on his deathbed? How could a man so intent on passing to his sons the good name of his life’s work hand them this name, this act?
He drove up the canyon to the mansion that sat on a ledge in the Verdugo Hills. He parked his car and walked up the driveway past the koi pond in the entrance and knocked on the door. His mother and three brothers were waiting for him. There was Ara, who struck an impressive bodybuilder’s pose, and Vartkes, the university student who was still trying to finish a condolence letter he had been writing to Dzovig’s sons for five years. And there was Dikran, the uneasy patriarch, who felt the need to speak for them all.
“Dad wanted us brothers to love each other and always support each other no matter what. We are different, each of us, but we are one. We love each other, and we will die for each other. As his sons, we can never let money or outsiders tear us apart. To do less would be to dishonor Dad’s memory.”
Steve sat down on the couch next to his mother, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Rita took a puff of her cigarette and smiled. Her prince. Her pasha. Then she opened the family scrapbook to a page from Beirut, the year 1975, and she began to narrate. “To this day, I never see anybody as beautiful as my husband was. I met him when I was 12. Roof to roof, we passed each other notes. It was forbidden, but we fell