Winter Moon

Sighed. He closed the doors and locked them.

Jack felt useless. He could see that Luther was uncomfortable too.

Sometimes a cop couldn't do much more for a victim than nod in sympathy

and shake his head in sorry amazement at the depths into which the city

was sinking. That was one of the worst things about the job.

Mr. Arkadian went around the corner to the front of the station

again.

He wasn't walking as fast as before.

His shoulders were slumped, and for the first time he looked more

dejected than angry, as if he had decided, perhaps on a subconscious

level, to give up the fight.

Jack hoped that wasn't the case. In his daily life, Hassam was

struggling to realize a dream of a better future, a better world. He

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

second word right above their eyes. Shithead. Etch it into their skin

with acid just like they did to your glass. Make em walk around like

that for a couple of years and see how their attitude improves before

maybe we give them some plastic surgery."

"You think you can find who did it?" Arkadian asked, though he surely

knew the answer.

Luther shook his head, and Jack said, "Not a chance. We'll file a

report, of course, but there's no manpower to work on small crime like

this. Best thing you can do is install roll-down metal shutters the

same day you replace the windows, so they're covered at night."

"Otherwise, you'll be putting in new glass every week," Luther said,

"and pretty soon your insurance company will drop you."

"They already dropped my vandalism coverage after one claim," Hassam

Arkadian said. "About the only thing they'll cover me for now is

earthquake, flood, and fire. Not even fire if it happens in a riot."

They stood in silence, staring at the window, brooding about their

powerlessness.

A cool March wind sprang up. In the nearby planter, the queen palms

rustled, and soft creaking noises arose from where the stems of the big

fronds joined the trunks.

"Well," Jack said at last, "it could be worse, Mr. Arkadian. I mean,

at least you're in a pretty good part of the city here on the West

Side."

"Yeah, and doesn't it break your heart," Arkadian said, "this is a good

neighborhood."

Jack didn't even want to think about that.