Conspiracy Theory (30 page)

“For all you know, I've already told the police whatever it is you don't want me to tell them,” Ryall said. “I've already been questioned. I spent four hours at the police department the day after your brother was murdered. It was disgusting. But I told them everything I know.”

“Fine. Then it's possible that you don't know what I think you do. No harm done. But if you get some bright idea in your head, keep it to yourself. Don't tell the police. Don't tell Larry King. Just calm down and shut up. Because if you don't, I'm going to take these pictures and shred your life, from the bottom up.”

“You're such a bitch,” Ryall said. “You always were, even when I first started the column. You were probably a bitch in grade school.”

“I make a point of it.” Anne Ross Wyler stood up and took the snapshots off the coffee table. “You can have these, you know. I have the negatives. And I have copies. It doesn't matter.”

“I want them out of here as fast as you can make them go.”

“Fine. Here's one more thing. Stay away from Patsy Lennon from now on. And stay away from that street and all the rest of the girls on it. I'm out there almost every night. I'll be watching for you. If you have to fuck children, take a sex tour to Thailand.”

“What wonderful language. All of you have completely foul mouths, have you ever noticed that? Do they teach that kind of thing in dancing classes?”

Her tote bag was packed up and back over her shoulder. Her coat was in her hands. Ryall didn't remember her getting either. She was not a tall woman, but she was very trim. He didn't think she went on diets or worked out to keep herself that way. Why was he thinking about Anne Ross Wyler on a diet? He thought he was losing his mind.

“I don't understand how you can live the way you do,” she said, looking around the living room. Then she turned her back to him and walked off, out of the living room, into the foyer so tiny it wasn't much more than a breathing space shoved against the door. He didn't think she'd been talking about the living room, but he couldn't be sure.

What he could be sure of was that he was sick. If he didn't get up and get to the bathroom immediately, he would soil himself. All his muscles felt completely out of control. Everything was twitching. And the worst thing was, he had no idea what she was talking about. He really could have told the police already. He couldn't remember what he had told them. He'd talked and talked and talked. He'd said whatever had come into his head. The same was true with what he'd been doing on television. He'd just
talked
.

He thought of himself, just through the gates when all hell had broken loose, the shouts of the security guards, the running of men in dark clothes. It had been like watching a movie. If there had been some secret there that he was supposed to have witnessed, he couldn't begin to imagine what it was.

David Alden was getting extremely tired of the game. It wasn't that he wanted to stop playing it, exactly. No matter what Annie Ross said, he was not, at heart, an emotional dropout from hypercapitalism. He'd always liked his job when Tony was alive. He'd liked being the one who knew everything, all the projections, all the risks, all the secrets. He'd liked being the one who made the decisions. Tony was supposed to make them, but in nine cases out of ten Tony left it to him, and they were both satisfied. Being Tony Ross's second in command was like being the chief clerk to a justice of the Supreme Court. You were the one who had the expertise, who did the work, who made the change happen. You weren't the one who got the blame for it when things went wrong.
Well,
David thought,
not quite
. If things went wrong enough, you could end up with plenty of blame, but it would be private blame, meted out in secret, not the kind that appeared on the op-ed page of the
Wall Street Journal
.

Of course, when things went right, you didn't get quite as much of the credit as you deserved, but David was finding he minded that less than he thought he had. Nobody in the bank seemed to know what to make of him anymore. They couldn't get along without him. He was the only one who knew what Tony had known and who could explain it to them. They didn't want to have to get along with him at all. Two murders had made him seem more than a little jinxed, and he could tell that some of them were beginning to wonder if he had committed them, or if he had somehow brought them on. Maybe there was a jealous husband out there aiming for his back. Maybe the jealous husband had less-than-perfect aim. Maybe the nuts had found out who he was and were using him as a pilot fish. Maybe he was a pilot fish by choice.

Now he looked out at the early morning downtown New York traffic and felt almost infinitely tired. He hated staying overnight in Philadelphia in the middle of the work week. He hated the morning commute, even on the Amtrak express. He hated not being able to get to his own things in his own closet in the only place he'd ever called home without ambiguity, the apartment he kept on Riverside Drive that had exactly one bedroom, no room for guests, no room for family, no room for expansion. Mostly, he hated the feeling of disorientation it gave him, so that his timing was off for the rest of the day. Maybe that was his problem. Some part of him was back there with Charlotte dying in her own driveway and Marianne shrieking like a gored pig and the police sirens in the distance, all of it seeming so familiar that he thought he would never be able to think of Tony's place again without those sirens. He was, he decided, going slowly crazy. He looked up and down the street, which still seemed tense and cramped to him in the wake of September 11. He went into the building and across the high-ceilinged prewar lobby and into the ornate elevator. There were too many people in the halls, rushing in late to work, rushing around trying to get set up for the day. He rode the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor and got out again. He went down the hall to his own office and put his attaché case on his desk. He seemed to be the first one here besides the secretaries. He usually was. The secretaries were all hushed and agitated, and he didn't blame them.

He unbuttoned his coat, but didn't take it off. He walked over to the wall of windows and looked out on the financial district. He'd always liked this view. He still liked it, in spite of the fact that it had been … altered … somewhat in the destruction last year. He heard the door open behind him but didn't turn around to see who it was.

“I saw you come in,” Adele said. “You didn't have to come in. God, David, we'd all have understood if you'd wanted to take a day off.”

“I've still got Price Heaven up the wazoo,” he said. The view was altered, but not altered enough, that was the problem. He couldn't see enough. “Get a coat on and come for a walk with me. Just for ten minutes.”

“A walk? Where are we going? The office just opened—”

“There are other people to handle the phones. You don't do much of that anyway. Come take a walk with me. I want to go see it.”

“See what?”

“Ground Zero.”

“Good God, David, why?”

“I haven't seen it yet, did you know that? Everybody else has been over there to take a look, but I never have. On the day it happened, the first I knew that there was something going on was when the windows blew out. All these windows. They just popped, suddenly. I was sitting at my desk going over the risk cost figures for the loan to the government of Peru, and suddenly
snap snap snap
. It was the oddest thing.”

“I think you should have stayed home,” Adele said. “I don't think you've got your head on straight this morning. I know you didn't like her much, none of us did, but that doesn't mean you aren't affected by the way she died. You knew her a long time.”

“Do you know Tony's sister, Annie Ross?”

“Mrs. Wyler? I've met her a few times, why?”

“She thinks I'm turning on, tuning in, and about to drop out. She thinks I'm emotionally detached from banking.”

“Are you?”

“No. At least I don't think so. At least, it's not the banking. I know how this looks to people, you know. I hear all the jokes on Leno. Here we are, the heartless bank, making Price Heaven fire six thousand people right before Christmas. And I'll admit, the timing is not stellar. If it were up to me, the physical year would end on August thirty-first and then these layoffs wouldn't always coincide with the holidays, but Adele, the thing is, they'd still happen. They'd have to happen. And getting that damned fool CEO of theirs to take a cut in salary and bonuses wouldn't keep a single extra person on the job.”

“I thought the idea was to get that damned fool CEO of theirs to resign.”

“It is. We're going in on that today. But do you know what you get when you don't have people like me, people like Tony, people like the bank—when you don't have us coming in and forcing these things? Everything just jogs along getting worse until the business collapses completely. Or they get themselves a government bailout and then it jogs along even after it's dead, and the money that could have been used to put life into a new and viable enterprise isn't available, because we're putting it into keeping a gigantic dinosaur alive and for what? For sentiment? It's not even good sentiment. The collapse is going to come, no matter what. Staving it off just makes the mess bigger when it's over.”

Adele cleared her throat. “David? You're preaching to the choir here.”

“Yes,” David said, “I know. I know. Come take that walk with me. I want to move around a little before I start the day. And I want to see it. Just this once. Have you been?”

“We went—the whole bunch of us, all the exec assistants and most of the typists—we went the day after the observation platform was opened.”

“Why?”

“To see it,” Adele said.

“See?”

“Yes to see,” Adele said. “But we haven't been back. None of us, that I know of. I think we wanted to see it because we're all afraid of it. We're still afraid of it.”

“You're afraid the terrorists will come back?”

“No,” Adele said. “Not of that. I don't know how to put it. The terrorists don't bother me at all. They just seem like jerks.”

David turned his back to the window and sat on the sill. “You're right. They seem like that to me too. Any loser can destroy things. They do it all the time. They get knives and guns and mug old ladies on Broadway. They set fire to buildings.”

“It's—” Adele looked uneasy. “It's just, you know, you hear all these things, about how we should appreciate other cultures for what they are, that every culture is great in its own way. And after that I couldn't help feeling it wasn't true. Their culture isn't great. If it was, they wouldn't have done that, and their people wouldn't have cheered it. And I shouldn't say that in the bank. We have a lot of clients from Islamic countries. Stewart Markham down in development will call me an imperialist.”

“At least,” David said wryly. “Annie wants to blame it on religion—all religion, everywhere, leads to violence. Christianity had its religious wars and it burned its heretics and hanged its witches. The Hindus kill the Muslims in India and Pakistan. The Muslims make war on the World Trade Center. We should go to work to abolish religion.”

“How can you abolish religion?”

“I think it's all an excuse,” David said. “All of it. Religion. Politics. Love. Hate. Rage. It's all an excuse for the fact that some people love blood. They love destruction. They hate everything about themselves so much. They hate what they are. They hate their humanness. And mostly they hate other people's humanness. They hate the fact that other people are human just the way they are, but they do so much more, they accomplish so much more. That's what they have to get rid of. The fact that there's no difference between themselves and those people, the people who do things, who make things instead of tearing them down. I think every murder ever committed on the face of this planet has been committed out of guilt.”

“I'd like to say I know what you're talking about, but I don't,” Adele said. “Maybe you should take your coat off and sit down. I'll bring you some coffee.”

“Maybe you should get your coat on and come with me. I'm going to go look at it. When we come back, we can take a break from Price Heaven and look over the setup for the foundation Annie wants to endow for Adelphos House. We can write up the specs and send it down to Carver to hammer out the details. I want to go, Adele. I'd like you to come with me.”

“All right,” Adele said. “My coat's right out in the hall. Let me get it. Are you sure you shouldn't be home in bed with a tranquilizer?”

“I'm sure.”

“You're behaving the way some of us did right after it happened. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, they call it. Some of the younger men walked around for days looking like they'd just been shot, and not being able to remember where they put anything. Tranquilizers do help, you know. And nobody would think worse of you for taking a day off when two of your closest friends have been murdered within sight of you in less than a week.”

“I don't need a day off. Get your coat. Let's go.”

Adele hesitated. Then she shrugged slightly, turned on her heel, and went. She left the door open. David stared through it for a moment. The outer offices looked busy. They always were at this time of day. In an hour or two, the men on the Asia desk would pack up and go home. They worked reverse hours to be in touch with the Tokyo market. He didn't think he had been exaggerating. He really didn't. Every murder was committed out of guilt, the guilt of knowing that you were less than you ought to be. That was what had happened on September 11 and that was what had happened to Tony and Charlotte. It was counterproductive to attempt to make something huge and special and enormous out of a terrorist attack, as if to be a terrorist was to be something more than human, or less. To be a terrorist was to be exactly human. To be a murderer was to be exactly human. No matter what the excuses were, at the bottom, the motives were always the same.