In Gregor Demarkian’s opinion, they also had much too little taste. Coming up on Amtrak from Grand Central with nothing else to do—he could never read on trains; he got restless—he had been paying close attention to the landscape. At first, what he had seen had been what he had expected. Westchester and Duchess counties were rich suburbs of New York. Their towns were strung out along the track like so many exhibits in a museum of post-World War II architecture. Only the train stations themselves had any authenticity, and it was the authenticity of poverty. Obviously, New Rochelle and Rhinebeck and Hudson and Cleary didn’t believe the stations had any right to be kept up.
Farther North, the atmosphere changed, literally as well as metaphorically. For one thing, it got colder. New York and Philadelphia were both feeling the effects of the last assault of winter, but in both places there was a sense, just beneath the surface, of change coming for the better. North of the Duchess County line, that sense disappeared, and Gregor found himself staring at the dead black heart of the snow season. He came to the uneasy conclusion that the dead black heart never really disappeared. Around him, the hills rose higher and higher as the people seemed to sink lower and lower. The houses he could see from the window next to his seat were at best jerry-built tract boxes. At worst, they were little more than huts.
He was almost at the Colchester city limits when the landscape changed again, and this time the change was startling. Here, too, were tract houses, but tract houses on a grand scale: exuberantly ugly interpretations of French manor houses, Spanish haciendas, Swiss chalets, and Dutch gambrels, all of them too large and too brightly painted. Carriage house lights adorned their doors. Split-rail fences divided their lawns from the wide black asphalt roads that wound between them. The effect was hallucinatory. If the rabbit hole Alice had fallen into had been Truman Capote’s nightmare instead of Lewis Carroll’s, this is what it would have looked like. Gregor found himself tempted to forgive John O’Bannion his incoherencies. This would have made anyone with any sense as incoherent as hell.
Then the tracks curved and curved again, and Gregor was presented with the land of landscape he understood. A billboard painted in dull green and electric blue announced, MAVERICK INN—DOWNTOWN COLCHESTER AT ITS BEST. A white banner in its lower left-hand corner said, Closed for Renovations, February 17—June 1. Beyond were dozens of small buildings made of concrete block, frosted with snow and crowned with roof signs advertising warehouses, delivery services, plumbing supplies and office space for rent. There was always office space for rent in places like this. Gregor could never figure out who would want to rent it. God only knew, a doctor wouldn’t do too well if his patients had to come down to a district like this.
Gregor stood up, got his suitcase from the overhead rack, and looked down at the tie he had borrowed from George Telemakian. It was still intact, but unfortunately it was still pink. He shrugged a little and put on his coat, buttoning it all the way to his chin so the tie would be hidden. The train had shaken itself free of the planet of concrete block. Gregor leaned over to look out the window one more time. Colchester was a city of brick and stone, a city that had fallen into disrepair and recently been spruced up again. The signs were unmistakable. He caught another sign for the Maverick Inn with another white banner announcing renovations and shook his head a little. Whoever had thought up the wording on that one deserved to be shot. It was too confusing and too prominent—and it had probably had the effect of a bell on a leper.
Somewhere up front, the engineer hit the brakes. The wheels squealed. The train lurched. And Gregor Demarkian nearly fell on his ass.
Somehow, he couldn’t help seeing it as a very bad omen.
[2]
Colchester Station wasn’t bad as stations went. It had been built during the mania for high ceilings and marble floors and wrought-iron balconies, and it looked a little like the hall of justice in a tiny European principality. Unlike the station in Philadelphia, it was well equipped with newsstands and novelty stores. Once through the barrier that divided the main station from the platforms, Gregor was surrounded by pink plastic Easter eggs, fluffy yellow nylon chicks, evil-looking chocolate rabbits wrapped in red tinfoil, and fuzzy blue bunnies wearing pink polka dot bow ties. Every newsstand had its ceiling hung with baskets wrapped in amber cellophane. Every store had cardboard cutout posters of chicks breaking out of eggs cluttering up its windows. Even the inevitable Maverick Inn signboard with its inevitable white renovations banner had been decorated with green and yellow ribbons. Bright green cellophane grass was everywhere.