Conspiracy Theory (36 page)

“No,” Jackman said.

“Neither did I.” Gregor slammed the door of the limousine shut and went around the back of it to the sidewalk. He climbed the steps to the front door to the building that held his apartment and went inside. There was a light coming from under old George Tekemanian's apartment door, and laughter coming into the hall from the other side of it, but Gregor didn't turn in that direction. He checked his mail—three bills; a frantic letter about how President Bush was destroying the nation from some Democratic Party fund-raising committee; a frantic letter about how liberals were destroying the nation from some Republican Party fund-raising committee; a Levenger catalogue—and went upstairs. For just a little while, he didn't want to talk to Bennis, or Tibor, or Donna, or anybody else on Cavanaugh Street. He wanted to make more notes for himself, and then he wanted to make some phone calls. He'd need to talk to the director again, because that was the fastest way to FBI information that he knew of. He'd need to talk to Margiotti and Tackner again too, because there were some details he needed to work out about what exactly had happened on the night Tony Ross had died. Most important, though, he needed to sit down with as many editions of
The Harridan Report
he could find, and read them.

Gregor Demarkian was not a conspiracist. He did not believe that everything that happened in the world—or much of anything—was being controlled and directed by any central force. He did not work himself into a sweat over the possibility of a coming One World Government. In fact, he vaguely liked the idea, at least in principle. Tibor was right. Who
wouldn't
prefer to see the Arabs and Israelis suing each other in an international court rather than doing what they did now? When it came to things like MKUltra Mind Control, and the CIA running a project that was systematically brainwashing half the population of North America, he wanted to laugh hysterically. The CIA were the same people who had managed to fail to assassinate Fidel Castro in the middle of a civil war. Secret rituals held in the basement dungeons of rich New Yorkers where thousands of babies a year were sacrificed in orgies of satanic ritual abuse. Catholic Mormon Freemasons who were the real power behind the spread of communism. A secret government made up of Rockefellers and Roo-sevelts who made all the decisions that only seemed to be made by people like the president and the United States Congress. The content of these ideas was ludicrous, but the content was not the point. It was the atmosphere they created that was the point. Tibor seemed to think that that atmosphere had somehow sprung into being with the disasters of September 11. In reality, it had been around a long time, making its way around the American South and Midwest in waves throughout the twentieth century. It had existed before then too, in Europe.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
was a conspiracist holy text, entirely fabricated but fervently believed by that wing of the movement that saw the Jews as the cause of all the world's problems.
The Turner Diaries
was a conspiracist holy text too, but only in the United States, among people who had given up anti-Semitism in favor of the imminent arrival of the apocalypse. If you tried to undo the strands and make it all make sense, you'd go crazy.

Gregor let himself in to his apartment. Bennis wasn't home, which was just as well, since he didn't want to talk to anybody but the people he needed to call. Upstairs, Grace Feinman was pounding away on one of her harpsichords. Gregor thought he remembered someone saying that she now had three up there, plus the virginals. He put his coat on the hook of the coat stand and went into the living room to sit down on the couch. He pulled the phone to him and started dialing.

Later on, when he was finished with these, he would have to find a way to talk to Kathi Mittendorf again.

It wasn't until it was over that Gregor Demarkian admitted to himself that it was a relief to talk on a regular, rather than a cell, phone. Not only couldn't you be intercepted out of thin air—he had visions of vans roving throughout the city, randomly snatching messages in mid-flight in the hopes of being the person who picked up the next phone call from Monica Lewinsky—but you didn't have to worry about the sound quality fading out on you or disappearing altogether. Gregor did not remember either of those things ever happening to him. Bennis was too much of a stickler for getting exactly what she wanted and too willing to pay lots of money to get it to be saddled with inefficient cell phone service. Still, that sort of thing was always happening to Howard Kashinian, and Gregor was sure that if something could happen to Howard, it could happen to him.

He looked down at the notebook he'd been jotting things down in for the past hour of phone calls and hoped he'd be able to decipher it when the time came. He had very neat handwriting, but he'd not only written lists and words but drawn arrows and made symbols, all in an attempt to straighten out the complexities of just who could or could not have fired a rifle at Tony Ross on the night of the party. The short explanation was that anybody who had already been on the grounds at the time and who had already had access to a gun there could have committed the murder. That was less helpful than it seemed, because although the secret service had screened the area early on the day, they hadn't been able to keep it absolutely secure because of the right-of-way granted to the riding club. Besides, the secret service simply didn't apply the same level of scrutiny to the arrangements for the first lady as they did for the president himself, unless there was some indication that the first lady was in direct and immediate danger. They had provided near-paranoid security for Hillary Clinton, because the media had been full of furious denunciations of her almost from the day her husband began running for office.
This
first lady was far less controversial. She was also far less interesting, but Gregor had to admit that interesting people were more likely to be vilified than uninteresting ones. The simple fact was that the secret service had not been all that concerned about a party given by Charlotte Deacon Ross. It was unlikely to be dangerous. The first lady didn't have legions of enemies hoping to get rid of her at the first opportunity. Charity balls were a regular feature of a first lady's life, and if they had to do a full security sweep on every one of them, they'd have to double their numbers and never do anything else.

The problem, Gregor decided, was not how the murderer got on to the estate. He—or she, he amended, for the sake of the voice of John Jackman in his head—could have managed that any of a number of ways, including simply walking in through the front gate. The problem was how the murderer got out again after the murder, which was by no means an easy thing. The first lady had not arrived and never did arrive. The secret service had turned the car around and taken her right back to Washington. The security already in place on the estate had locked into place only seconds after the shots were fired. It wasn't as good, or as tight, as the secret service would have been, but it would have made just strolling out the front gate a near impossibility. It would have meant strolling out the bridal path a near impossibility too, because there had been a man stationed at that entrance. That left only a very few options for escape, and he understood why Michael Harridan hadn't liked any of them.

He folded the notebook up and put it back in his pocket. It was after six. He wondered where Bennis was. He grabbed his coat from the coatrack in the hall and headed out down the stairs. He could still hear laughter coming up from old George Tekemanian's apartment, but Grace was no longer playing her harpsichord. Maybe she'd gone to rehearsal, or to play a concert. He went down one flight and knocked on Bennis's door. He would always think of that apartment as Bennis's apartment, even though she never went there anymore except to work. They really ought to knock the two apartments together and make a duplex, even if it did mean confirming in public what everybody on Cavanaugh Street already knew.

There was a shuffling sound on the other side of the door and then it was pulled inward. Tibor stood in the doorway in a pair of black trousers, a white shirt, a tie, and an expensive, thick cotton sweater that looked both very new and very orange. Gregor raised his eyebrows. Tibor shrugged.

“Bennis sent for it for me from Land's End,” he said carefully. “She thinks I do not have enough clothes. She thinks the clothes I have are too depressing. Come in, Krekor. I have been trying to pay attention to blueprints.”

Gregor went in. The apartment looked the way it always looked. Tibor was not doing much in the way of redecorating it for his stay. The papier-mâché models of Zed and Zedalia had been taken off the end tables in the living room. The coffee table had been cleaned of trays and now held only a single cup of coffee and a small plate of butter cookies. They looked like very good butter cookies. Gregor had to restrain himself from taking one.

“I thought I'd come along and get you to go to the Ararat for dinner with me,” he said. “Bennis is missing in action, I have no idea where. And you've barely been to the Ararat since the explosion. Maybe I think you're depressed.”

“I have only been to the Ararat once or twice,” Tibor said. “I find it difficult to walk by the church. I try to look on the positive side, as Bennis tells me to. We'll have a new church. I'll have a new apartment. And this church will be built just for us. It will not be something we take over from somebody else. Still. I have made arrangements today for preserving the icons.”

“Are they the kind of icons that should be preserved? I have no idea where Orthodox churches get their icons. I supposed I always half-thought that there were factories someplace.”

“I don't think so, Krekor, no. And especially not a hundred years ago, when Holy Trinity was first built. They would have had to send for them to Greece, to be painted by artists who specialized only in icons. There are still such artists now, but perhaps there are factories too. I was thinking that the people who first built this church worked very hard to have the icons here, and we should not destroy them, or put them in storage where nobody can see them. Isn't it too early for the Ararat?”

“A little.” Gregor took a seat on one of the big black leather chairs. “I thought I'd ask you about something first, if you're up for it.”

“About something that has to do with the investigation? Because if so, Krekor, I will not be of a great help. I went to Adelphos House. I stopped at that man's newsstand and bought something. I walked down the street to the Ararat to get coffee and the building exploded behind me. If I had had any kind of real information, I would have told you about it long ago. I know what to worry about. Did I see any unusual person around the church at any time in the month or so before the bombing? No, I did not. Did I see any unusual person around the church on the day of the bombing? No, I did not. Did I see any unusual person—”

“That's all right,” Gregor said. “I'm not worried about your seeing unusual people. It's a theory I wanted to ask you about. Or maybe you could get on the Internet and ask the people at RAM.”

“You want to know which mystery novels to read when you take your vacation?”

“I didn't think RAM ever discussed mystery novels,” Gregor said. “Last time I checked into there, you were all discussing the War on Terrorism and responses to September eleventh.”

“Everybody was discussing that then. Grace's harpsichord newsgroup was discussing that then. Now we are discussing formula in crime fiction. It's very interesting.”

“I'm sure,” Gregor said. “I want to discuss One World Government.”

“Oh,” Tibor said. “Please no, Krekor. It gives me a headache. The people who are always harping on it give me an even bigger headache.”

“There are people who harp on it on RAM?

“One or two.”

“Anybody named Kathi Mittendorf? Or Susan—wait, I'm going to have to look up the last name—”

“Don't bother,” Tibor said. “There were no women. Only men.”

“How about Michael Harridan?”

“
Pfft,
” Tibor said. “What do you take me for? If I had seen that name on RAM pushing conspiracy theories, I would have told you about it. But no. These were just two, maybe one and a half—they would get on and talk about satanic ritual abuse, and how the FBI was covering up this abuse of children. And for a while I tried to check that out, Krekor, because of course you never know. It is not a good thing to trust government agencies. But it turned out to be craziness. The FBI keeps numbers on all the missing children. There are only a hundred or so a year who are not accounted for. The files are all open and public knowledge. And when you say that to these people, the ones who have the conspiracy theories, they say that the infants who are killed in sacrifices are not recorded anywhere because they have been born especially for this and their births have not been registered. It is a truly crazy thing, Krekor.”

“I agree with you,” Gregor said. “But I want to understand it. There seem to be a lot of people out there who believe it.”

Tibor shrugged. “Believe what? There is more than one version of it. There is the Islamic version of it. There is the fundamentalist Christian version of it. There is the secular version of it.”

“Are the versions substantially different?”

“Not so different as you'd think,” Tibor said. “And with the fundamentalist Christians and the secular conspiracists, there's a great deal of overlap. They read each other's material. They believe each other's ‘evidence,' except it isn't really evidence. Krekor, these things—”

“Start from the beginning,” Gregor said, giving up and snagging one of the butter cookies. Whoever made them must have used pounds of the stuff. “There's a conspiracy to bring the United States under the aegis of a One World Government—”