Conspiracy Theory (16 page)

“The most favored angel of God who took up arms against heaven and was defeated by St. Michael and sent to Hell,” Bennis said. “I remember from my course in Milton.”

“Satan is willful ignorance,” Tibor said. “Satan is superstition. Satan is what we all do when we take the easy way out and look for magic and potions and plots to explain life to us, and now we all seem to do it. The president of the United States does it. They think it's religion, Bennis, but it is not. It wasn't when we burned witches in the Middle Ages and it isn't now. It's a kind of brain disease.”

“You think the explosion in the church had something to do with burning witches?” Bennis looked at sea.

Tibor waved it away. “Maybe I will give a homily on Satan the next time I celebrate the liturgy. Except that I don't know if I could make sense. I wish people were better than they are.”

“So does everybody.”

“I wish people were more like people,” Tibor said.

Bennis got up. “I'm going to run upstairs and get Gregor. He wanted to know when you got back. And don't tell me I can't wake him up.”

“I do not believe in witches,” Tibor said. “And I do not believe in UFO abductions. Or conspiracies. Or miraculous healings at prayer meetings held in auditoriums where the healer is on a stage. Or that God put fossils in the earth to deceive people of little faith into believing that evolution had occurred. But I do believe in God. And I do believe in evil.”

“If I hurry, I can get Gregor down here before the crowds arrive,” Bennis said. “Lida and Sheila and Hannah made you something for a coming-home present. They want to present it to you personally.”

“You think I've become as insane as I think they are,” Tibor said.

“No,” Bennis said. “I think you're still incredibly upset. Give me a moment. I'll find Gregor.”

She crossed the room and went behind him, into the foyer. He heard the apartment's door open and then close again. Donna came back in from the kitchen with a big mug of black coffee that she put down in front of him on the coffee table.

“There,” she said. “That should help. I made the Turk—ah, the Armenian kind, although how you can drink that much caffeine without going into cardiac arrest, I just don't know.”

Tibor looked into the mug. The coffee was as thick as mud, the way it was supposed to be. He did sound as crazy as the people he was talking about, who probably didn't sound crazy at all to most people most of the time. They did their shopping. They went to work. They paid their mortgages and mowed their lawns. They just thought that it was really true that people rode around on broomsticks and shape-shifted themselves into ravenous wolves and stole children through the pages of fantasy books.

He put his hands inside his jacket and felt the thickness of paper in his inside breast pocket. It had survived the blast, and the hospital stay, and been there for him to find when he got dressed to wait for Bennis early this afternoon. He'd half-forgotten about it.

“Tell me,” he asked Donna. “Do you believe there is a guardian angel always watching over you and everything you do?”

“I've never thought about it,” Donna said. “Am I supposed to believe it?”

“Never mind,” Tibor said.

He picked up the coffee mug in both hands and took a drink so long it made his throat feel scalded and raw.

For David Alden, it was the worst week he could remember, ever, in his entire life, and all he really wanted was to get out of the New York office and back to Philadelphia. In another time, on another planet—back before Tony was murdered; back when all he had to worry about was getting the data on the Price Heaven mess in place on time—he would have taken off for the rest of the week and only resurfaced when he wanted to, or thought he could no longer get away with it. Now there was no time, and that was true even though he was not Tony's heir apparent. He knew Charlotte thought he was, or at least thought he intended to end up at the head of the bank, but the idea was laughable. He was far too young, and he'd had far too little experience. If he did everything right, he might curry enough favor with whoever the new man would be to stay on here. He might not. It was less than pleasingly sentimental, but he'd updated his résumé and FedExed it to a headhunter less than two days after Tony was pronounced dead at the scene at the Around the World Harvest Ball. Ever since, he'd had one ear trained for the sound of other banks looking for talent. He did not sit at Tony's desk when he worked. It would have made sense if he had, in terms of efficiency, but it gave him the creeps. He did not make calls from Tony's phone, either, although he answered the ones that came in. He had taken up residence in the office's corner sitting area: a couch, two chairs, and a coffee table bordered on two sides by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on Wall Street and lower Manhattan. When the World Trade Center had collapsed in 2001, they had been forced out of these offices for nearly two weeks while inspectors made sure there was no structural damage to the building and window installers replaced the windows on every floor of the side that faced the disaster. Then the cleaning women had had to come in, to sweep the broken glass and the other debris from the floors. Tony's Persian carpet, flown in from Iraq in the days before Saddam Hussein was supposed to be Evil Incarnate, had been destroyed. David Alden did not understand politics in the way politics was played by people like Hussein and the Trade Center bombers. War seemed, to him, so obviously counterproductive. It destroyed economies, and in destroying economies it destroyed markets. David understood markets, and had since he was in high school—although he resisted using the words
high school,
because in his case, they were so clearly affected. Groton was not a “high school” the way anybody who had gone to a public high school would understand it, but David didn't like
prep school
, either. That sounded worse than affected. That sounded deliberately off-putting, as if he were not only an elitist—which he was—but a snob. America could be a very schizophrenic place to live, if you were the kind of person he was. He had tried to get that across to a British girlfriend he'd had for a while, but it had gone right past her. To Rosamund, being someone who went to famous schools and had been required to dress for dinner in a jacket and tie since you were eight years old was just a fact of life, and if other people resented it it was because they lacked both character and proportion.

The Price Heaven documentation was spread out in front of him in variegated stacks of paper, freshly printed out this morning so that he could get a physical sense of what was happening here. Actually, there was no doubt what was happening here. Price Heaven was in free-fall. Even the drastic measures David had outlined to Tony might not suffice to correct it. If they didn't, Price Heaven would file for bankruptcy—real bankruptcy, David thought, not just Chapter 11—and then the shit would truly hit the fan, because the bank was exposed on this one big-time. David had done the calculations a dozen times. There was no way around it. In all, the bank had loaned Price Heaven something close to a billion dollars outright, and provided spot financing and stock-price support in a myriad number of small ways. The small ways were adding up.

The door to the office opened. David looked up from where he was sit-ting—on the floor, with his legs spread out in front of him and his jacket tossed onto the couch behind him—and saw Paul Delafield coming in. Paul Delafield was executive vice president in charge of development, a fancy way of saying the man who found new projects for the bank to invest in, the man who had brought Price Heaven to the bank. Paul Delafield looked pale, as he had been looking pale for weeks. If he was mourning Tony's loss, there was no evidence of it on his face.

Paul came over to the little sitting area and dropped down on one of the chairs. “Well?” he said. “Should we all batten down the hatches?”

“At least.” David thought about getting up, but didn't see the point. There were people he had to fear in the bank, but Paul Delafield wasn't one of them. “The good news is that it's not Enron. There's no evidence of accounting fraud.”

“And the bad news?”

“We're going to be lucky as hell of they don't implode completely. And I mean completely. Chapter eleven bankruptcy. Public liquidation.”

“Shit.”

“I agree.” David bent over the papers again, but he couldn't keep it up. He didn't have his heart in it. He already knew what was here, and now that he'd spent a few hours making the reality physical—turning it into stacks of physical paper so that he could visualize it—he had a knowledge of the internal workings of Price Heaven far more complete than its own directors ever had had. Which was a good part of the problem. Price Heaven might not be in the mess it was in if its directors knew what they were doing. It completely amazed him that so many people rose to the heights of American business with IQs in the single digits, and not because they were hereditary legacies, either. The chairman of the board of Price Heaven was Jerry Poldawicz, who grew up in Levittown and did his undergraduate degree at SUNY New Paltz. The CEO was Tom O'Hay, whose father had been a bricklayer and mother a nurse. There were probably a dozen Price Heaven employees running cash registers in Price Heaven outlets who could have done a better job of managing a company than either of those two.

“So,” Paul said. “Where do we go from here?”

“Don't ask me,” David said. “I just make recommendations. I have no power at all about what recommendations the board will decide to follow.”

“What recommendations do you intend to make?”

David sighed. “All the layoffs we discussed last week, before Tony—before Tony. Then we need to close at least a third of the stores. They've got stores in the oddest places, small outlets that have been doing next to no business for years. It's bizarre. Once they opened a store, nothing could get them to close it. And I do mean nothing. So they've got little hole-in-the-wall places in small towns off the highway that nobody can get to because nobody knows they're there, but nobody would want to get to even if they knew, because there's nothing at the end of the ride but a kind of mom-and-pop novelty place with not much to buy. Some of them were opened in the 1940s. They should have been closed or moved to malls years ago. It's insane.”

Paul Delafield looked away, out those big windows that looked over lower Manhattan. He didn't seem to be seeing anything. David had always found it interesting to see who was and who was not emotionally affected by the World Trade Center collapse. Some people—Paul Delafield—seemed to live in an emotional vacuum.

“She's not going to like it,” Paul said.

“Who isn't?”

“Charlotte.”

“She'll just have to live with it, then,” David said. “There's really no way around this. We should have done something a long time ago. We're sicken-ingly exposed, and we don't have the excuse we have with governments, where we can say we loaned Argentina all this money to make sure nobody starved or their economy could keep running. This is Price Heaven. It's an old but mostly derelict company that under other circumstances would have been run underground by Wal-Mart long ago.”

Paul turned around in his chair, put his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward. “She's been on the phone to me all morning, Charlotte has. She thinks it looks bad, laying off all those thousands of people right before Christmas.”

“Everybody stages layoffs right before Christmas. That's the end of the fiscal year. It's that or your paper looks awful when the accounting gets done.”

“She says she thinks it's that kind of thing that got Tony killed. She got something in the mail, some piece of literature, she called it. Something that said that Tony was ripping off the proletariat, or something like that.”

“Somehow, I can't imagine Charlotte reading Communist propaganda.”

“Still.” Paul Delafield was stubborn. “She's going to be able to sit on the board, you know that. She's going to have control of a tremendous amount of stock, both her own and whatever Tony's left her—”

“Tony may have left the estate to his daughters. Or to the oldest one. It isn't as if Charlotte is in any need of money.”

“Even with just her own stock, she could make a lot of trouble. Wouldn't the daughter side with her? Or is it one of those Greek tragedy things?”

“I don't think I'd go that far,” David said, “but I don't think the daughter and the mother see eye-to-eye on much. Marianne, that's what her name is. Sorry. My mind goes blank sometimes.”

“Charlotte says it looks bad when companies lay off thousands of workers right before Christmas, like they're all interested in being Scrooge. She thinks we should wait until after the first of the year.”

“Price Heaven can't wait. If it tries, it will collapse completely.”

“There's the Christmas buying season. We're right in the middle of that. That could help them instead of hurt them.”

“Christmas is in five weeks. The only things that make that kind of money in five weeks are fantasy movies. Too bad Price Heaven didn't produce
Fellowship of the Ring.
”

“It does look bad,” Paul said. “I can see her point. And don't think the public doesn't know the banks are behind those things when they happen. Then all the stories come out. Tony Ross made thirty-two million dollars in salary and bonuses last year, and what he got the bonus for was making sure Price Heaven laid off a bunch of minimum-wage salesladies who aren't going to be able to go on making the payments on their daughters' medical treatments. And then it will come out that Price Heaven hired practically everybody part-time, so most of their workers didn't get health insurance, not even crappy HMOs, and at the same time the Price Heaven executives and us here at the bank all have top-of-the-line fee-for-service plans that pay for everything from extracting ingrown toenails to having yourself cloned.”