“Do they?” Gregor said.
“I went to a store today,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “In the very poorest part of town. It was run by a black man—not a South Asian, an African, a really black man. And here he was, in the middle of a neighborhood of his own people, and what was he doing? Selling cigarettes. Selling the worst kinds of junk. Potato crisps. Twinkies. I bought a packet of Twinkies. It made me sick.”
“Did you eat two of them?”
Phillipa Lydgate ignored him. “I went to that place because it was owned by a man who was suspected in those murders you have. I’ve never seen such a country for violence. Of course, he was only suspected because of his race. Americans can’t seem to get over their racism. They can’t even seem to confront it. Do you know what this man told me? His store, the physical store, the property itself, is owned by an absentee landlord of a Mayflower family, and as far as I can tell, they treat him no better than those Mayflower families have ever treated their slaves.”
“I don’t think any slaves came over on the Mayflower, ” Gregor said.
“It was all about slavery, the founding of this country,” Phillipa said dismissively. “And this landlord this man had got, this woman apparently—although you’d think women would have more sensitivity to social inequality—this woman came down to the store and screamed at him the one time he was even a week late on the rent. A week. Can you imagine that?”
“It does sound a bit excessive,” Gregor said.
“I pressed him, but he refused to see the incident for what it was, completely unacceptable and a gross violation of his human rights. He’s grateful to her, if you can believe it, because she agreed to rent him the property even though he’d been in prison. Think about it. What’s a man supposed to do when he gets out of prison if people can refuse to rent to him because of it? The people of this country think nothing of rehabilitation. They’re only interested in vengeance. That’s why you still have the death penalty. Every civilized country has abolished it.”
Gregor was opposed to the death penalty, but he couldn’t help himself. “Japan isn’t civilized?” he asked.
Phillipa Lydgate acted as if she hadn’t heard him. “And then there are the guns,” she said. “The guns are everywhere. There are shops selling them right in the middle of the city. I don’t know how any intelligent person can live in this country. I don’t know if any intelligent person does. Lord only knows, if I was an American, I’d have emigrated to someplace civilized long ago.”
“THIS IS Cavanaugh Street,” Gregor said, and it was, which was a good thing because the cab driver’s neck kept getting redder by the minute.
The car pulled up at the curb, and Phillipa hopped out without bothering to look back. Gregor pulled out his wallet and paid up.
TWO
1
Dennis Ledeski was not behaving like a sane man. He knew that. He knew that he should never have disappeared from his office to begin with, and if he had he shouldn’t have taken so much with him. He didn’t trust Alexander Mark, that was the thing. Alexander Mark was “gay,” and gay was the absolute opposite of what he was. Gay was a grown man who wouldn’t step up to the plate and shoulder his responsibilities. It wasn’t true that the Greeks had honored homosexuality. They tolerated a few flings between warriors in wartime, but that was only sensible. You took a bunch of men and put them out on the march away from home for months at a time, and it wasn’t surprising that they took to screwing anything that moved, including trees, which didn’t move. The Greeks despised homosexuality, that was the truth. What they favored were mentor relationships between older men and younger boys. The idea was that sex would bring the two together, and the bond that would be created would make it possible for the boy to learn, not only from his mentor’s teaching, but his mentor’s soul.
Of course, the younger boys in those relationships had been fifteen, not six, but Dennis couldn’t see where that made the difference. The principle was the same. Once, spending the afternoon in an Internet cafe in a little town outside Orlando, Dennis had looked up NAMBLA’s Web site, and he had seen at an instant that they understood what he himself did. It was the relationship that was important. Sex was the trivial thing. It was the relationship that he craved so much that he sometimes came awake at night in pain, the images streaming through his head as if somebody had held an image hose to one ear and turned the water on full. That made no sense. He never made any sense when he thought about this.