Baptism in Blood(33)

“You’ve been worried about it,” Gregor said.

But Tibor was gone. Gregor could hear him in the kitchen, rummaging around in the books and the utensils. There was that breathless rush that meant that the gas on one of the gas burners had been lit. It hadn’t occurred to Gregor that Tibor would refuse to come with him to North Carolina. What was he supposed to do now?

Crash. Splatter. Whoosh. Tibor was making coffee. Ti­bor was making coffee so awful, no human being would be able to drink it, although Tibor would. Tibor could do this even with instant coffee. Gregor wasn’t sure how.

Gregor looked down at the computer screen. The puls­ing white in the lower left-hand corner of the screen said downloading. The machine was making absolutely no sound at all.

I’m perfectly fine, Gregor told himself. I haven’t felt this well for years.

He rubbed the back of his neck reflexively and stretched. He was tense, but he was sure it was just that he was so worried about Tibor. He was jumpy, but that was worry about Tibor, too.

If he had been having nightmares lately, full-scale and out of control—well, there was nobody in the world who knew about that but him, and nobody who was going to.





Two


1


IT WASN’T EASY TO get to Bellerton. There was an Amtrak train to Raleigh—making it unnecessary for Gregor to fly—but after that you were on your own. There were doz­ens of numbered highways on the map, two-lane blacktops, probably. They were useless if you didn’t drive, which Gregor didn’t. There were dozens of little towns, too. Some of them had names like Hendersonville and Cary and ap­peared on the map in bold black type. Others had names like Sallow Bridge and Lee Hollow. Were there really places with names like that? Gregor Demarkian was an ur­ban man. He was so urban, in fact, that he had spent almost none of his time in the Federal Bureau of Investigation working in the South. The South was traditional seasoning territory for new special agents, too—or it had been, in those days. There had been a lot of prejudice back in the days when Gregor had first joined the Bureau. You were supposed to be Anglo and Protestant, a “real American,” to qualify. There he had been, huge and hulking, with his odd name and his college degrees. He still had a strongly physical sense of what it had been like to sit in J. Edgar Hoover’s office on the afternoon of his final interview. He could still see the two special agents who had brought him into the Great Man’s presence. The agents were tall and slim in that maddening North European way. Even their bones were elongated and fine. Hoover was something else again. Gregor had known immediately that the man was a raving psychopath. The odd thing was that nobody else seemed to know it. The two special agents had kept their eyes trained on a point somewhere behind old J. Edgar’s head. Gregor had kept his hands folded in his lap, hoping nobody would see how badly his palms were sweating. At that moment, he had wanted to be a special agent more desperately than he had ever wanted anything in his life. He was scared to death that that crazy old man would take it away from him.

Gregor was sitting in first class on the Amtrak train—why, he didn’t know. Normally, he didn’t like to go to that extra expense, even though he could afford it. First class was almost deserted. There was an old woman with a pow­der blue cardigan over her shoulders playing solitaire on her tray table. There were two very young women, dressed up in leather that had been studded with metal things. Gregor had both seats in his row to himself. He had the empty seat on the aisle filled with books and papers. Every once in a while he would look at it, annoyed and vaguely upset, and realize he was expecting to see Tibor in it. He had been hatching the plan to take Tibor with him to North Carolina ever since David Sandler’s second letter arrived. Now he felt bottled up and frustrated. It wasn’t just that Tibor wasn’t here, when he ought to be. It was that Gregor himself needed somebody to talk to. He had all these maps and clippings that David had sent him, and these books on abnormal psychology and child abuse he had bought at the University of Pennsylvania bookstore. He had a book called The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother, by Shari L. Thurer, which he thought was going to tell him how mothers felt about their children, but didn’t, quite. He had no idea why he was going to such great lengths to do research for a case he was sure would end up being open-and-shut. He didn’t know why he kept looking out the train window and thinking how flat every­thing was. When his wife was still alive, he had let her drive them down to Florida every couple of years or so, for what was supposed to be a vacation. He had always been able to tell exactly when they had crossed the state line from Virginia into North Carolina. The land seemed to flat­ten out. The air seemed to change color. The houses on the side of the road definitely got poorer and more rickety and more forlorn. There hadn’t been many houses like that this time, Gregor had noticed, although there had been one or two. These days what appeared on the roadsides were small brick ranches with curving front windows. He supposed that was an improvement. Had things improved down here, since the days when he had prayed not to be assigned here because he didn’t want to have to deal with racial problems and running guns? Bible thumping and ATF agents. Back­yard stills and really murderous hate. Gregor didn’t have a wonderful vision of the American South. Still, he thought, this was said to be the up and coming place. People were moving down here in droves. Surely they wouldn’t do that if the South were as awful and backward a place as he had always assumed it to be. That was the problem with getting what you knew about something from television, especially television that was twenty years out of date. He could still see the dogs and the Federal marshals in Birmingham, George Wallace in his wheelchair, old Strom Thurmond switching parties so he wouldn’t have to be in the one that was hell-bent on helping the… Negroes.