Mysterium

“I saw Billy Seagram’s body on a cart outside City Hall. His niece walked past the body on the way to school. She cried for three hours in the classroom. I saw that.” He leaned over to tie a ragged shoelace, and Demarch was fascinated in spite of himself by the casual gesture. “Is that why you brought me here? To put the fear of God into me?”

Demarch had never heard the expression. He blinked. “I don’t think that’s in my power, Mr. Graham. But it sounds like a prudent fear.”

∞

He was insolent, but was he dangerous?

Demarch pondered the question after Graham was dismissed. He pondered it that night as he climbed into bed with Evelyn.

She had been nervous about the interview. Demarch supposed she thought he was petty enough to hate Graham because Graham had been her lover. “Don’t get angry with him,” she said. Imagining that anger had anything to do with it.

Demarch said, “I only want to understand him.”

“He’s not dangerous.”

“You’re defending him. That’s a noble impulse, but it’s misplaced. I don’t want to kill him, Evelyn. My job is to keep the peace.”

“If he breaks the law? If he violates the curfew?”

“That’s what I mean to prevent.”

“You can’t frighten him.”

“Are you saying he’s stupid?”

She turned out the light. The temperature outside had dropped and there were fingers of frost on the windowpane. Dim radiance from a streetlight traced a filigree of shadow on the opposite wall.

“He’s not that kind of man,” Evelyn ventured. “He told me a story once…”

“About himself?”

“Yes. But he told it like a story about someone else. He said, suppose there was a man, and this man had a wife and a son. And suppose he was always careful about what he said or did, because he might lose his job or something bad might happen to his family, and he cared about his family more than anything. And then suppose the man was out of town, and there was a fire, and his house burned down with his wife and child in it.”

“He lost his wife and son in a fire?”

“Yes. But that’s not the point. He said it was the worst thing that could happen to this man—a complete loss of everything at the center of his life. And he survived it somehow, he went on living. And then, Dex said, the man noticed a strange thing. He noticed that there was nothing left to hurt him. What could be worse than this? Death? He would have welcomed death. Losing a job? Trivial. So he stopped hiding his opinions. He told the truth. He got in trouble, but there was no threat that meant anything to him. No more terrors. For instance, he used to hate riding in airplanes, he was a white-knuckle flier—but not anymore. If the plane fell out of the sky and he was killed… well, that was territory his wife and child had already visited. Maybe he’d find them there, waiting for him.” She shivered. “You understand? He was brave almost by accident. It got to be a habit.”

“Is this a true story? Is that how he seemed to you?”

“Some of the edges have worn off. This was all a long while ago. But yes, that’s how Dex seemed.”

Brave, Demarch thought, but probably not dangerous. A man with nothing to lose has nothing to defend.

∞

Later, on the verge of sleep, Evelyn said: “There are more soldiers around town. Another truck-full came past today.”

Demarch nodded, not far from sleep himself. He was thinking of Dorothea. He was thinking of Christof’s small face, his eyes bright as porcelain china.

“Symeon? Is something bad going to happen to the town? When you were talking on the phone—”

“Hush. It was nothing.”

“I don’t want anything bad to happen.”

“Nothing bad will happen to you,” the lieutenant said. “I promise. Now sleep.”

∞

In the morning there was half an inch of snow on the ground. Demarch’s boots crunched on the frozen paving stones as he walked to his car; wet snow tumbled from the branches of the trees as he drove to the heart of the town, where the dismantling of Two Rivers had already begun.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The last of autumn was an unsettled time in Two Rivers.

Mornings were often achingly cold; afternoon skies were cloudy or a stark, brittle blue. Woodsmoke drifted through the commons. Women in the food lines wore down jackets or bulky cloth coats; men shuffled forward with parka hoods drawn or caps pulled over their ears. No one lingered in the streets.

Things were changing, people whispered.

For instance: every day now, between the hours of seven and eight in the morning, two or three militia trucks would come into town popping blue smoke from rust-caked tailpipes. The trucks were drab green and always manned by six or eight soldiers. A truck would park outside a building—most often a store or warehouse—and the soldiers would stretch and climb shivering down from the tailgate and file inside. Inside, they would box items and tag them and stack them for loading into the truck.