Winter Moon

jangling keys in the air in front of each open door, and he reminded Jack of nothing so much as a voodoo priest casting a spell-in this case, to ward off the riffraff who would despoil his rest rooms. His face was as mottled and turbulent as the stormy sky.
        "Let me tell you something. Hassam Arkadian works sixty and seventy hours a week, Hassam Arkadian employs eight people full time, and Hassam Arkadian pays half of what he earns in taxes, but Hassam Arkadian is not going to spend his life cleaning up vomit because a bunch of stupid bureaucrats have more compassion for some lazy-drunken-psychojunkie bums than they have for people who are trying their damnedest to lead decent lives."
        He finished his speech in a rush, breathless. Stopped jangling the keys.
        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