Baptism in Blood (12 page)

“I’m sure it is. What are you sharing information about?”

“Sometimes I talk to people about religion. There is something called CR NET. It is for traditional believing Catholics who want to know more about the Church. I talk on that sometimes.”

“And?”

“There’s a thing called Dorothy L. It’s about mystery stories. Sometimes I talk to people on that, too.”

“And?”

Tibor looked down at the screen again. It was glowing, just like computer screens glowed in science fiction movies. Under the harsh light of the overhead, it looked too oddly, too intensely blue. Tibor looked enormously tired. He was a small man, wiry and much too thin. Years of living badly fed and badly treated had taken their toll on him. Gregor could see the lines in the sides of his face, deep and straight, and the white-skinned scars that wove their way through them. Tibor’s face always looked, to Gregor, as if it should hurt him. Tibor’s body always looked as if it had been wrung out like a piece of laundry by a giant’s hand, and never quite unwound again.

“Who else do you communicate with on that thing?” Gregor asked again.

Tibor’s shoulders gave a mighty shrug. “Yes, yes,” he said. “There are here other people who are interested in the bombing. That is the case. I know you don’t approve of it, Krekor.”

“I don’t think it’s good for you.”

“I don’t think it’s good for anybody, Krekor. How could a thing like this be good for anybody?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, I know. I know. It isn’t what you think, though, Krekor. It is not an unhealthy obsession.”

“There was a week back in May where you didn’t eat for three days straight. At least.”

“That was back in May. I will admit, Krekor, when it first happened, I was distraught. I had reason to be dis­traught.”

“You were nuts.”

“But that was a long time ago, Krekor. I’m not like that now. I’m just… interested.”

“Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Yes, Krekor. Of course I got to sleep.”

“In your own bed?”

“I fell asleep on the couch. I was reading something. I often fall asleep on the couch, Krekor. I was doing that long before there was a bomb in Oklahoma City.”

“What were you reading?”

Tibor’s arms fluttered in the air. “It was only a period­ical, Krekor. It was nothing important.”

“It was about the bombing. Or about the militias. Or something. You were at it again.”

Tibor tapped something into the keyboard, then stood up. A small white marker began to pulse in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

“I think you make too much of this,” he said. “You worry about me without need. I am concerned, yes, I am worried, but so are a lot of people. It isn’t anything strange. It’s you who are beginning to be strange.”

“Why?” Gregor asked. “Because I care about what happens to you?”

“I am going to make some coffee now, Krekor. You should sit down with me and have some. And I have some
yaprak sarma
in the refrigerator that we could heat up in the microwave. Hannah Krekorian brought it over last night. You should relax a little, Krekor. It is you who are beginning to be distraught.”

“I came to ask you to go someplace with me,” Gregor said. “To North Carolina. I’ve been asked on a case.”

“You’ve been asked on a case? And you want me to go with you?”

“That’s right. There’s a lot of religion in it. The case, I mean. I thought you could be a kind of expert witness.”

Tibor swayed back and forth on his legs. “You never want any of us to go with you on a case. You never con­sider it safe. Why do you want me to go with you now?”

“I thought it would take your mind off—all this,” Gregor said. “I thought the change of pace would be good for you.”

“Krekor, if I want a change of pace, I will go to the Bahamas with Lida. When are you supposed to leave for this case?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Tibor said. “Krekor, I am responsible for the church here. For the services on Sunday. For bap­tisms and funerals. For weddings and religious instruction. I can’t just pick up tomorrow and go off. I would have to make arrangements.”

“You’ve done it before. It’s not that hard to make arrangements.”

“On less than one day’s notice, it’s impossible. Krekor, Krekor, you are not making any sense. You have not made any sense for weeks. It is you I think who needs to see the doctor.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gregor said.

Tibor grunted. “I will go now and make something to eat. I will make you at least a cup of coffee. I am being serious when I say I think you should see a doctor, Krekor. I do not think you have been very well for weeks. I have been worried about it.”

“
You’ve
been worried about it,” Gregor said.

But Tibor was gone. Gregor could hear him in the kitchen, rummaging around in the books and the utensils. There was that breathless rush that meant that the gas on one of the gas burners had been lit. It hadn’t occurred to Gregor that Tibor would refuse to come with him to North Carolina. What was he supposed to do now?

Crash. Splatter. Whoosh. Tibor was making coffee. Ti­bor was making coffee so awful, no human being would be able to drink it, although Tibor would. Tibor could do this even with instant coffee. Gregor wasn’t sure how.

Gregor looked down at the computer screen. The puls­ing white in the lower left-hand corner of the screen said
downloading.
The machine was making absolutely no sound at all.

I’m perfectly fine, Gregor told himself. I haven’t felt this well for years.

He rubbed the back of his neck reflexively and stretched. He was tense, but he was sure it was just that he was so worried about Tibor. He was jumpy, but that was worry about Tibor, too.

If he had been having nightmares lately, full-scale and out of control—well, there was nobody in the world who knew about that but him, and nobody who was going to.

I
T WASN’T EASY TO
get to Bellerton. There was an Amtrak train to Raleigh—making it unnecessary for Gregor to fly—but after that you were on your own. There were doz­ens of numbered highways on the map, two-lane blacktops, probably. They were useless if you didn’t drive, which Gregor didn’t. There were dozens of little towns, too. Some of them had names like Hendersonville and Cary and ap­peared on the map in bold black type. Others had names like Sallow Bridge and Lee Hollow. Were there really places with names like that? Gregor Demarkian was an ur­ban man. He was so urban, in fact, that he had spent almost none of his time in the Federal Bureau of Investigation working in the South. The South was traditional seasoning territory for new special agents, too—or it had been, in those days. There had been a lot of prejudice back in the days when Gregor had first joined the Bureau. You were supposed to be Anglo and Protestant, a “real American,” to qualify. There he had been, huge and hulking, with his odd name and his college degrees. He still had a strongly physical sense of what it had been like to sit in J. Edgar Hoover’s office on the afternoon of his final interview. He could still see the two special agents who had brought him into the Great Man’s presence. The agents were tall and slim in that maddening North European way. Even their bones were elongated and fine. Hoover was something else again. Gregor had known immediately that the man was a raving psychopath. The odd thing was that nobody else seemed to know it. The two special agents had kept their eyes trained on a point somewhere behind old J. Edgar’s head. Gregor had kept his hands folded in his lap, hoping nobody would see how badly his palms were sweating. At that moment, he had wanted to be a special agent more desperately than he had ever wanted anything in his life. He was scared to death that that crazy old man would take it away from him.

Gregor was sitting in first class on the Amtrak train—why, he didn’t know. Normally, he didn’t like to go to that extra expense, even though he could afford it. First class was almost deserted. There was an old woman with a pow­der blue cardigan over her shoulders playing solitaire on her tray table. There were two very young women, dressed up in leather that had been studded with metal things. Gregor had both seats in his row to himself. He had the empty seat on the aisle filled with books and papers. Every once in a while he would look at it, annoyed and vaguely upset, and realize he was expecting to see Tibor in it. He had been hatching the plan to take Tibor with him to North Carolina ever since David Sandler’s second letter arrived. Now he felt bottled up and frustrated. It wasn’t just that Tibor wasn’t here, when he ought to be. It was that Gregor himself needed somebody to talk to. He had all these maps and clippings that David had sent him, and these books on abnormal psychology and child abuse he had bought at the University of Pennsylvania bookstore. He had a book called
The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother,
by Shari L. Thurer, which he thought was going to tell him how mothers felt about their children, but didn’t, quite. He had no idea why he was going to such great lengths to do research for a case he was sure would end up being open-and-shut. He didn’t know why he kept looking out the train window and thinking how flat every­thing was. When his wife was still alive, he had let her drive them down to Florida every couple of years or so, for what was supposed to be a vacation. He had always been able to tell exactly when they had crossed the state line from Virginia into North Carolina. The land seemed to flat­ten out. The air seemed to change color. The houses on the side of the road definitely got poorer and more rickety and more forlorn. There hadn’t been many houses like that this time, Gregor had noticed, although there had been one or two. These days what appeared on the roadsides were small brick ranches with curving front windows. He supposed that was an improvement. Had things improved down here, since the days when he had prayed not to be assigned here because he didn’t want to have to deal with racial problems and running guns? Bible thumping and ATF agents. Back­yard stills and really murderous hate. Gregor didn’t have a wonderful vision of the American South. Still, he thought, this was said to be the up and coming place. People were moving down here in droves. Surely they wouldn’t do that if the South were as awful and backward a place as he had always assumed it to be. That was the problem with getting what you knew about something from television, especially television that was twenty years out of date. He could still see the dogs and the Federal marshals in Birmingham, George Wallace in his wheelchair, old Strom Thurmond switching parties so he wouldn’t have to be in the one that was hell-bent on helping the… Negroes.

Gregor looked down at the mess he had made in the seat next to him. The map was spread out across most of it, green and blue and red, showing the route Interstate 95 took south from Richmond. Gregor stood up and brushed past it all into the aisle. He was so big, the aisle felt too narrow, although it wasn’t. The ceiling was definitely too low. There was a bar and snack stand one car back. Gregor headed for that, even though he wasn’t hungry. None of his thoughts would settle into a pattern. At the coupling be­tween cars, the doors felt too heavy for him. He was so used to being a big man with powerful muscles, he was surprised.

The problem with this little favor he had promised to do for David Sandler, Gregor realized, was that he hadn’t taken it seriously even yet. His picture of the South was so firmly fixed in his mind, he kept expecting the whole thing to turn out like a
Beverly Hillbillies
episode. Virginia Marsh would turn out to be itching to run off with her husband’s brother. The baby would turn out to have been the product of incest between Virginia and her own brother. The whole thing would blow up and land on
Sally Jessy Raphael,
which he would watch in stupefied amazement, unable to understand how anybody could be this dumb.

There was a drunk in the car, but Gregor ignored him. He was a drunk with a Yankee accent, which at least did nothing to excite Gregor’s prejudices. He asked for a diet Coke and paid nearly two dollars for it. He looked out the window behind the bartender’s head and saw rolling flatlands, as gentle as the waves on the surface of the water in a protected inland. Everything was green and bright and warm. True fall hadn’t come to North Carolina yet. The cars on the road all seemed to be very new and bought from Ford.

“Raleigh coming up,” the bartender said suddenly. It was as if one of the figures in a wax museum had started talking.

“Excuse me?” Gregor said.

“Raleigh coming up,” the bartender repeated. He had a soft southern drawl, like the ones Gregor had rarely heard outside the movies. “It’ll be less than five minutes. I’d go back to my seat if I had any luggage.”

“Oh,” Gregor said. “Yes. Thank you.”

“They’re going to cut this run, did you know that?” the bartender said. “The Republicans. Everybody votes Republican down here these days. My granddad would have died first. You a Republican?”

“I’m not an anything,” Gregor said, thinking that right now he would sooner admit to being an extraterres­trial.

The bartender was cleaning his counter with a rag. The drunk had gone to sleep.

“What I notice,” the bartender said, “these days, ev­erybody up North is a Democrat, and everybody down here is a Republican. Opposite of what it used to be. You see what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“It’s the fault of the liberals,” the bartender said sol­emnly. “The liberals ruined the Democratic party. It was much better when it was full of people like us.”

“I think I’d better go back to my seat,” Gregor said. “I think I’d better pack up my books and get ready to go.”

“Nobody down here would vote for Jesse Helms if there was a decent Democrat running,” the bartender said. “I don’t think there’s been a decent Democrat running since Harry Truman.”

The bartender didn’t look like he was much more than twenty-five years old. How much could he possibly know about Harry Truman?

“Yes,” Gregor said, backing up. “Well.”

He turned around and headed for the coupling of the cars, hurrying. There were windows open in the bar car. He could feel the warm outside air fighting against the frigidity of the air-conditioning. The drunk was snoring next to his beer. Gregor went through the coupling and back into first class. The woman who had been playing solitaire had packed up her cards. She was now half-curled in her seat, reading a book called
How to Have a Wonderful Sex Life at Any Age at All.