Fountain of Death

Part 1


    “New Year’s resolutions are what secular society has instead of the confessional, and they don’t work half as well.”

    —ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST,

    U.S. Catholic





ONE


1


FOR MANY YEARS, GREGOR Demarkian had thought of New Year’s Eve as the celebration of the letdown that happened after Christmas. First there was the real holiday: tinseled trees, gold foil wrap and satin ribbons, carolers in the streets. Then there was the long slide into discontent and exasperation, with too many leftovers in the refrigerator and too much slush ice on the roads. Then there was the pop, the point when nobody could stand it anymore and nobody thought they ought to have to. It was that pop that caused so many fatalities on the roads and in otherwise stable marriages. Gregor had seen it through all his long twenty years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau didn’t investigate local crimes, but it did rub up against them, especially in Washington and Virginia. It also had agents, who were just as susceptible to New Year’s Eve explosions as anyone else. Maybe there was something about cheap champagne that was different from all other forms of ingestible alcohol. Men who had never before shouted at a football game gave their wives black eyes. Women who had never fantasized so much as a love scene from a Barbara Cartland romance left home with itinerant carpenters. Hundreds of loose and drifting people, without family, without friends, without ties of any kind, poured into the streets—and they were people with nothing to lose.

“Give me a guy with a job and a house and a mortgage,” Gregor’s favorite instructor out at Quantico was always saying. “Give him to me every time. That’s a guy I can count on.”

Outside the grimed window of the train, the small Connecticut towns were going by with syncopated regularity, each more or less like the one before it. There had been a couple of small cities on the way, but those had seemed oddly unreal, too clean, too firmly placed in a rural backdrop. Gregor tried to remember if Connecticut had ever been a serious manufacturing state but got only a vision of whaling ships and wooden nutmeg. The small towns all still had their Christmas decorations up. Tinsel and colored glass lights were wound in whorls from one streetlamp pole to another, across nearly empty streets. Big, fat cardboard Santa Clauses sat in store windows. Frantic elves and drunken reindeer were scattered across town parks. Every once in a while, Gregor saw a sign announcing a New Year’s sale or a New Year’s special or a “Get Ready for the New Year Extravaganza,” but the signs lacked fire and conviction. Nobody in the shore towns of Connecticut was any more enthusiastic about ringing out the old and ringing in the new than Gregor Demarkian was.

Nobody on this train was in any hurry to get where he was going, either. Gregor was sitting up in his seat, at the back of the car, with his hands on his brand new black leather briefcase, but the other two passengers he could see were both asleep. One of them, a young white man in baggy clothes and blunt-cut hair that had been greased to stick straight up from his skull, had his feet up on the seat across from him. The other, an elderly woman with an oversize pocketbook, was sitting upright with her arms folded around a shopping bag. Gregor found himself wondering if either one of them would have qualified as someone who “could be counted on” by his old instructor at Quantico. He wondered if he himself would have qualified. All that time was so long ago and far away. A world where women were refused appointments as special agents of the FBI as a matter of policy. A world where there were no black people or African-Americans but only Negroes—or something worse—and the Negroes were all serving drinks and carting baggage and going home on a different bus. A world where men like Gregor Demarkian didn’t retire after twenty years’ service, but got promoted into administration and were expected to stay put. Well, Gregor thought, I spent my time in administration, ten years in the formation and running of the Behavioral Sciences Department—and I didn’t like it much.

The train began to slow down, surrounded by the debris of a cityscape again, tracks branching out in all directions and low brick buildings crammed too close together. Half the low brick buildings were empty. Half the empty buildings had their front windows smashed. Maybe the reason Gregor Demarkian didn’t like New Year’s Eve was that it was as much a nostalgia orgy as anything else it was supposed to be. Look back in befuddlement. Look forward in a haze of 150-proof courage. Gregor Demarkian did as much complaining as anybody else about what had happened to the world. The vandalism. The crime. The dirt. The violence. He knew better than most people how true it all was. He still didn’t want to go back. His old instructor at Quantico might not have considered him a sterling character any longer. He didn’t have a job. His wife was dead. He owned his floor-through condominium apartment free and clear. If push came to shove, he just might decide that he had nothing to lose he wasn’t willing to lose. The statistics were terrible and they were probably getting worse. He really didn’t care. He liked this world better than he had liked that one, in spite of how quiet that one had been. He liked himself better than he had liked the man who had gone to work one morning in his socks but without his shoes, because he had been too preoccupied with a case to notice what he wore. The only thing he wanted to bring back from that time was his wife, Elizabeth, and he only wanted her if he could have her without the cancer that had killed her. He wouldn’t put Elizabeth, or anyone else he knew, through pain like that again.