Fountain of Death(2)

The cityscape was becoming a jungle of tracks and wires and abstract shapes. The conductor came through from the back of the car, yelling, “New Haven. Last Stop. New Haven. Last Stop.” Like all conductors, he was nearly unintelligible. The boy with the greased hair stood up. The elderly woman with the shopping bag shook herself awake and checked for her pocketbook. Gregor Demarkian put his briefcase on his lap.

The briefcase had come from Mark Cross and cost a mint. Gregor only owned it because it had been given to him by Bennis Hannaford as a Christmas present. Bennis Hannaford was the woman who owned the apartment just below his in the converted brownstone house on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia where Gregor had retired to be among people he knew. The scarf Gregor was wearing draped over the back of his neck under the collar of his Burberry topcoat was a Christmas present, too, but not an expensive one. It had been given to him by Father Tibor Kasparian, his closest friend and the priest of Cavanaugh Street’s Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. It had probably been bought, like most of Tibor’s presents were, at a charity shop in central Philadelphia run by five churches and a synagogue for the benefit of a homeless center west of Society Hill. When Gregor was still with the Bureau, he had not had the kinds of friends who gave him Christmas presents. He had had colleagues and family and the people that Elizabeth knew. In this way, now was better than then, too. Gregor sometimes surprised himself with how strange all that seemed to him now, living in isolation, living for work. He must have been out of his mind.

The train was gliding to a stop under a tangled web of lights and structural beams. Gregor stood up and shook out his coat and headed for the open space in front of the sliding doors. Of course, he thought, there was one small problem with the self-analysis he had been doing this morning, one little kink in the reasoning that just wouldn’t go away and leave him alone. If he was so content on Cavanaugh Street and delighted not to be obsessed with work—why was it that it had taken only a single phone call to get him out of his living room and on a train to New Haven, Connecticut?

There was a big banner hanging over the platform next to which the train had stopped that said “HAPPY NEW YEAR AND WELCOME TO NEW HAVEN.” It looked tattered and old, as if it had been dragged out of a trunk somewhere after several years’ hard use and no trips to the dry cleaner. The train doors slid open; a blast of cold air rushed in. Gregor helped the elderly woman with the shopping bag across the little gap onto the platform.

“It gets wider and wider every time,” the elderly woman told him. “People just don’t think.”

Gregor was thinking that Bennis Hannaford would have thought of the same question he just had, and that before he went back to Philadelphia and had to face her he ought to think up a fairly good answer. Of course, if he waited long enough to get back to Philadelphia, she would be gone, out to Los Angeles for a month to talk to the people who were turning her series of fantasy novels into a video game.

One of the things Gregor had found out in his retirement but didn’t like to mention was that he loved video games. He especially loved really violent video games where the good guys did impossibly grotesque things to the bad guys, like tear out their hearts and turn their eyes into blood fountains.

“Law enforcement is frustrating,” that same old instructor at Quantico used to say.

Gregor Demarkian could only suppose that it must have been.





2


GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER met Tony Bandero, or even seen a picture of him, but coming up into the main body of New Haven Station, he had no trouble picking him out of the crowd. There was, surprisingly, a fairly large crowd. Gregor’s train had been so deserted, he had assumed that the New Haven Railroad had the same problem Amtrak did: not enough passengers to make it profitable. He had forgotten that the New Haven was a commuting line to and from New York City and that most of the people who lived down here, on what was called Connecticut’s Gold Coast, worked in New York. New Haven did not look like it was possessed of much gold. The station was large because it had been built in the days when stations were built large. It was clean because the railroad was putting serious effort into keeping it that way. Otherwise, it was just like all the other large old stations Gregor had had the occasion to be in over the last few years. The waiting room was overrun with homeless people. The legitimate passengers were all crowded around the gates to the platforms or in lines at the ticket counters. The waste-baskets were full of crumpled newspapers and torn candy wrappers. The advertisements that hung as posters on the wall were faded, even though Gregor knew that some of them had to be new. If you moved quickly and in the wrong direction, you caught sight of a junkie before he had a chance to scuttle away. Gregor wondered what the laws of vagrancy were in this state. In New York, they had all been declared unconstitutional. If a man who belonged in a mental institution but couldn’t get a place because there was no money to keep him there decided to take up residence on the stoop of your elegant East Side brownstone, you were stuck with him.