was one of a dwindling number who still had enough guts to resist
entropy. Civilization's soldiers, warring on the side of hope, were
already too few to make a satisfactory army.
Adjusting their gun belts, Jack and Luther followed Arkadian past the
soft-drink dispensers.
The man in the Armani suit was standing at the second vending machine,
studying the selections. He was about Jack's age, tall, blond,
clean-shaven, with a golden-bronze complexion that could have been
gotten locally at that time of year only from a tanning bed. As they
walked by him, he pulled a handful of change from one pocket of his
baggy trousers and picked through the coins.
Out at the pumps, the attendant was washing the windshield of the
Lexus, though it had looked freshly washed when the car first pulled in
from the street.
Arkadian stopped at the plate-glass window that occupied half the front
wall of the station office. 'Street art,' he said softly, sadly, as
Jack and Luther joined him. 'Only a fool would call it anything but
vandalism. Barbarians are loose.'
Lately, some vandals had traded spray cans for stencils and acid
paste.
They etched their symbols and slogans on the glass of parked cars and
the windows of businesses that were unprotected by security shutters at
night.
Arkadian's front window was permanently marred by half a dozen
different personal marks made by members of the same gang, some of them
repeated two and three times. In four-inch-high letters, they had also
etched the words THE BLOODBATH IS COMING.
These antisocial acts often reminded Jack of an event in Nazi Germany
about which he'd once read: Before the war had even begun, psychopathic
thugs had roamed the streets during one long night, Kristallnacht,
defacing walls with hateful words, smashing windows of homes and stores
owned by Jews until the streets glittered as if paved with crystal.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the barbarians to which Arkadian
referred were the new fascists, from both ends of the political
spectrum this time, hating not just Jews but anyone with a stake in
social order and civility. Their vandalism was a slow-motion
Kristallnacht, conducted over years instead of hours.
'It's worse on the next window,' Arkadian said, leading them around the
corner to the north side of the station.
That wall of the office featured another large sheet of glass, on
which, in addition to gang symbols, etched block letters proclaimed
Armenian SHITHEAD.
Even the sight of the racial slur couldn't rekindle Hassam Arkadian's
anger.
He stared sad-eyed at the offensive words and said, 'I've always tried
to treat people well. I'm not perfect, not without sin. Who is? But
I've done my best to be a good man, fair, honest--and now this.'
'Won't make you feel any better,' Luther said, 'but if it was up to me,
the law would let us take the creeps who do this and stencil that
