stops around, he tells me a new rule says these are public facilities,
so you’ve got to let them open for the public, whether they buy
anything at your place or not.”
He jangled the keys again, harder, more angrily, then harder still.
Neither Jack nor Luther tried to comment above the strident ring and
raffle.
“Let them fine me. I’ll pay the fine. When these are unlocked, the
drunks and junkie bums who live in alleys and parks, they use my
bathrooms, urinate on the floor, vomit in the sinks. You wouldn’t
believe the mess they make, disgusting, things I’d be embarrassed to
talk about.”
Arkadian was actually blushing at the thought of what he could have
told them.
He waved the jangling keys in the air in front of each open door, and
he reminded Jack of nothing so much as a voodoo priest casting a
spell–in this case, to ward off the riffraff who would despoil his
rest rooms. His face was as mottled and turbulent as the stormy sky.
“Let me tell you something. Hassam Arkadian works sixty and seventy
hours a week, Hassam Arkadian employs eight people full time, and
Hassam Arkadian pays half of what he earns in taxes, but Hassam
Arkadian is not going to spend his life cleaning up vomit because a
bunch of stupid bureaucrats have more compassion for some
lazy-drunken-psychojunkie bums than they have for people who are trying
their damnedest to lead decent lives.”
He finished his speech in a rush, breathless. Stopped jangling the
keys.
Sighed. He closed the doors and locked them.
Jack felt useless. He could see that Luther was uncomfortable too.
Sometimes a cop couldn’t do much more for a victim than nod in sympathy
and shake his head in sorry amazement at the depths into which the city
was sinking. That was one of the worst things about the job.
Mr. Arkadian went around the corner to the front of the station
again.
He wasn’t walking as fast as before.
His shoulders were slumped, and for the first time he looked more
dejected than angry, as if he had decided, perhaps on a subconscious
level, to give up the fight.
Jack hoped that wasn’t the case. In his daily life, Hassam was
struggling to realize a dream of a better future, a better world. He
was one of a dwindling number who still had enough guts to resist
entropy. Civilization’s soldiers, warring on the side of hope, were
already too few to make a satisfactory army.
Adjusting their gun belts, Jack and Luther followed Arkadian past the
soft-drink dispensers.
The man in the Armani suit was standing at the second vending machine,
studying the selections. He was about Jack’s age, tall, blond,
clean-shaven, with a golden-bronze complexion that could have been
gotten locally at that time of year only from a tanning bed. As they
walked by him, he pulled a handful of change from one pocket of his
baggy trousers and picked through the coins.
Out at the pumps, the attendant was washing the windshield of the
Lexus, though it had looked freshly washed when the car first pulled in
from the street.
Arkadian stopped at the plate-glass window that occupied half the front
wall of the station office. “Street art,” he said softly, sadly, as
Jack and Luther joined him. “Only a fool would call it anything but
vandalism. Barbarians are loose.”
Lately, some vandals had traded spray cans for stencils and acid
paste.
They etched their symbols and slogans on the glass of parked cars and
the windows of businesses that were unprotected by security shutters at
night.
Arkadian’s front window was permanently marred by half a dozen
different personal marks made by members of the same gang, some of them
repeated two and three times. In four-inch-high letters, they had also
etched the words THE BLOODBATH IS COMING.
These antisocial acts often reminded Jack of an event in Nazi Germany
about which he’d once read: Before the war had even begun, psychopathic
thugs had roamed the streets during one long night, Kristallnacht,
defacing walls with hateful words, smashing windows of homes and stores
owned by Jews until the streets glittered as if paved with crystal.