Conspiracy Theory (41 page)

They had been proceeding into the town house all this time, down a long narrow hall next to a steep flight of steps, to the kitchen at the back. Gregor stepped into the kitchen and saw that the large table at its center was full of papers. Some of them were copies of
The Harridan Report.
Gregor was impressed that Henry had been able to get so many on such short notice. Some of them were printed pages of what looked like something Henry had done himself on the computer.

“Sit down, sit down,” Henry said. “I'll make coffee. Let me make a little room here. You asked me when it started, and what it's been doing, and I think I can give you a timetable.”

“Good,” Gregor said. He found a chair and sat down. There was no debris on the chairs. Jackman found a chair and sat down too.

Henry did something to the large coffeemaker. Then he came to the table and sat down himself. “Now,” he said. “The first you see of Michael Harridan was two and a half years ago, almost exactly. That's when the Web site went up, and two weeks later, I found the first notice I could find of
The Harridan Report
going out in the mail. In case you want to know, there's no mention of Harridan before that in any of the other groups. Which is very unusual. In fact, it's nearly unheard of. Most of these guys belong to one or the other of the established groups before they set out on their own. It's a classic case of progressive delusion, for some of them—”

“Only some?” Jackman said. “What about the rest?”

Henry Barden smiled faintly. “For a small segment of the population, it's simple fraud. There's a fair amount of money to be made at this stuff. Oh, you won't get as rich as Bill Gates, or rich at all in any serious sense, but you can do fairly well in an upper-middle-class sort of way if you're good at spinning the theories and good at organization and willing to work hard. I do want to emphasize, though, that the out-and-out frauds are few and far between. For one thing, it's very difficult to commit to the time and energy you need to run an organization like this if you don't really believe in what you're doing. For another thing, it's fairly difficult for most people to spin the theories in a convincing way if they don't believe them. There are, of course, other people.”

“What about Michael Harridan?” Gregor asked. “Would you say he's one of the other people?”

“Oh, definitely,” Henry Barden said. Something was happening with the coffee. Cameron went to get it. “And it's not only that he hadn't had any presence in any of the other organizations before starting his own. For one thing, his stuff is much too precisely targeted—”

“Excuse me,” Jackman said. “I've seen that stuff. It isn't targeted.”

“I mean relative to the stuff these organizations put out. You see, the usual procedure is to produce a comprehensive overview of your version of the meaning of world events. Go look at the sites sometime. Quite a few of them start their explanations with the dawn of civilization. Most of them go back at least until nineteenth-century Bavaria, with the founding of the Illumi-nati. Did you know that? There really was an Illuminati, a group of Bavarian business and professional men who founded an offshoot of the Freemasons that lasted maybe two-dozen years. They were political radicals in the context of their time. They disappeared, but their name has proved nearly irresistible to the anti-Masonic conspiracists, and especially to the Catholic Church, which has been using them in anti-Mason propaganda for more than a century now. Although, of course, the anti-Masonic propaganda these days is much more sophisticated. You'd be surprised at how unsophisticated some of the stuff is from the late nineteenth century. Conspiracy nuts in high places. And, of course, in this country, conspiracy theories in response to rising numbers of Catholic immigrants and rising hysteria among anti-Catholic natives.”

“But Michael Harridan doesn't go back that far,” Gregor said.

“No.” Henry Barden returned to the subject. Cameron began passing out cups of coffee. “He makes no attempt to produce a comprehensive explanation at all. He publishes
The Harridan Report
. He non-gives a few lectures—”

“What?” Jackman said.

“—and he maintains the Web site, that's it. He hasn't written a single book. He doesn't have a single publication for sale. Most of these guys have several of each. Most of them sell all kinds of things. Audiotapes, videotapes, pamphlets, books, you name it. It's like I told you. These are businesses. Their owners may be intellectually and emotionally committed, but at the end of the day they get paid for what they do and they have to get paid to keep on doing it. Michael Harridan doesn't seem to have to get paid for what he does and he isn't even trying to.”

“What did you mean about giving non-lectures or whatever it was you said?” Jackman asked.

“Well,” Henry said. “It's very interesting. Not only are these businesses. They're part of a circuit, a subculture with its own rules and members and events. Most of these guys give lectures to the same people in the same places. There are groups all over the country that sponsor speakers. Michael Harridan isn't on the circuit, although I'd bet he's been asked.”

“Why?” Gregor said.

“Because there's a little notice up on his Web site explaining why he can't accept speaking engagements in ‘outside' venues,” Henry said, “which means, I'm sure, venues where he isn't in control. With any other group of people, this might have been suspicious, but we're dealing here with people who make paranoia a profession. At any rate, he doesn't accept those, but for a while he did do talks and speeches, sort of. I say sort of, because he never actually appeared at any of them. People would come in, sit down, and listen to an au-diotape. That lasted for”—Henry checked his papers—“seven months. At the end of that seven-month period, what we find is that the talks are being set up by one Kathi Mittendorf, and all requests for lectures are being routed through her.”

“So, do you mean to say that Kathi Mittendorf is Michael Harridan?” Jack-man asked.

“No,” Henry Barden said. “I think that what happened was that Michael Harridan managed to recruit Kathi Mittendorf, to get her to do things for him so that he didn't have to be physically present himself. Probably, when he first started, he would be in the audience himself when he non-gave his lectures. He'd set up and sit back and pretend to be one of the audience. Or maybe he'd stand up and say he was somebody else. But I'm also guessing that this wasn't very safe for him. My best guess here is that he had reason to be concerned that somebody could recognize him, if not at the time he started then later. He didn't want somebody seeing him as himself in the newspapers or on television and leaping up to say, ‘I know that man! That's Michael Harridan!' ”

“So he recruited Kathi Mittendorf and she did his scut work for him,” Gregor said. “Then what?”

“Well, then he put out his newsletter,” Henry said. “And that's a very interesting artifact too. Most of these things take on everybody and everything. The World Bank. The United Nations. George W. Bush. And there's some mention of that stuff in
The Harridan Report
, but not enough of it. Everything I could find, everything on the Web site, everything you gave me, ninety percent of it was targeted at Anthony Ross and his bank. Specifically,
his
bank. Not Morgan. Not Citigroup. Not Chase. Not banks in general.”

“What was the other ten percent targeted at?” Gregor asked.

Henry shrugged. “Everything and nothing. The usual mix, except that you were quite right. For at least a month before the murders, there are small but persistent mentions linking the Russian Orthodox Church and the other Orthodox Churches in the Soviet Union to the KGB and the ‘worldwide conspiracy for One World Government.' Etc. Armenia and the Armenian Church are mentioned directly several times.”

“Wonderful,” Gregor said.

“Why the Armenian Church?” Jackman said, bewildered. “What did the Armenian Church have to do with Tony Ross? What does any of this have to do with Charlotte Ross?”

“There's just one thing,” Henry Barden said. “If you're right in your theories, and I'm right in mine, then he's got to get rid of Kathi Mittendorf and he's got to do it as quickly as possible. And he can't do it himself. Not now. Not under the circumstances. So—”

“So what?” Jackman said.

“So we have to get to Kathi Mittendorf,” Gregor said. “But I told you that already.”

Ryall Wyndham knew, as well as he knew anything—better than he knew how to enter a ballroom when he was sure to be the poorest person there, or how to ride a horse, or how to shoot a rifle in a way that would make sure to not have people laughing at him—that the one thing he could not do in the situation in which he was in was to let people see him sweat. Unfortunately, ever since Annie Ross had showed up at his apartment door, he had been doing nothing but sweating, and sweating was the thing that made him most like the Italian-peasant ancestors who lurked back there in his family tree. Hell, they did more than lurk. They dominated. You could forget the genealogical chart that hung on the wall next to his desk in the corner of the living room, the one the photographers so liked to catch when they produced pictures of him for the publicity shots that would appear in the papers on the day he was due to appear on
Dateline
or
Larry King Live
. Ryall was beginning to think he should not have allowed those photographers to see him in his apartment at all. By now, they all had to be as suspicious as hell. He would be if somebody claimed to come from one of the most important families in Philadelphia but lived in a dump like this, and a messy dump at that, without so much as a glance from a cleaning lady. The one thing he wanted, the one thing that really mattered to him, was that he not have to go back to being nothing but Philadelphia's “most important” society gossip columnist. That was like being Akron's “most important” cultural reporter. Forget Katharine Hepburn. Forget the Main Line. Society was worse than dead. It had metamorphosed into an octopus of excess, and what it cared about these days was not the venerableness of family lines or the purity of generational commitment to High Culture. What it cared about was money. Thirty years ago, he would have said this was impossible. Money was a New York thing. Now he knew that, when the really rich people in the country paid any attention at all to the Main Line, they did so in the way they paid attention to old movies. They found it quaint, and somewhat endearing. It was only those people— like Tony Ross—who meant something in the great world outside, who were powerful in the institutions that were centered in New York and Berlin and London, who “counted” outside the very rarefied small circle of Old Philadelphia Families who still talked only to each other. Ryall used to think they only talked to each other because they were too careful of their associations ever to let outsiders in. He now knew they talked only to each other because nobody of any importance was interested in talking to
them
.

It was a bad idea to start thinking of Tony Ross, or especially, Charlotte Deacon Ross. It made his face flush and his blood pound in his ears, as if he were the hero of a paperback thriller being chased through the city by the personification of Civic Malignity. He still hated them, though. He hated both of them. He hated Tony for thinking that he was nothing but a clown, a buffoon who need not be listened to courteously, never mind taken seriously. Not that Tony had ever been anything but courteous. Tony would have been courteous to Satan if he'd encountered him on a street corner. Tony was courteous to homeless women asking for spare change. Ryall thought it would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of that man's condescension. That was what they were all like— condescending. They talked to him as if they were talking to a child.

Still, they were better than the people like Charlotte. At least Tony had an excuse. He really was Important, in objective terms, in the real world. What had Charlotte been, but an aging postdebutante and Main Line matron, the sort of woman there were dozens of at every reunion of Agnes Irwin and the Madeira School. It was amazing the way these women took on their husbands' auras as if they deserved them.
My husband runs a very important international investment bank, therefore I deserve more respect and deference than the president of the United States.
Unlike Tony, Charlotte was not always courteous. Ryall would have thought her also less condescending, except that she wasn't. She was very out-front and straightforward about her condescension, and her contempt. There had been times when he had wanted to take her neck between his hands and snap it off—except, of course, that he couldn't have done it. He was not strong. He was no danger to anybody without a weapon in his hand, whether it was a pen or a gun. But that didn't work either. He couldn't write what he wanted about them. If he did, they would do to him what people very much like them had done to Truman Capote. They'd cut him off, and then where would he be? He wondered if it had been like this for the great social chroniclers of the past, the “powerful” columnists who had played right-hand man to people like Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt. He was willing to bet that it had been exactly the same. They would have been careful when they were required to be careful. They would have flattered and attended and lied to keep their place. Ryall didn't understand why people like Charlotte and Annie were so surprised at the kind of things they stumbled on in
The Harridan Report
. He was sure half the country secretly thought the kinds of things that were written there. They might not believe in an alien race of reptilians who only pretended to be human, but they did believe in a conspiracy, because there was one. There was a conspiracy of the already important to make sure the unimportant never forgot their place.

For no reason he understood, he had a vision of Tony lying there on the ground with the bullet in his head, the blood on the sidewalk, the perfect aristocratic face half gone. The result was a sexual desire so immediate and intense, it almost made him stagger. The next thing he saw was the girl, the one he had picked up that night, but only that night. He never liked to have them more than once. Once he had seen them bending over his penis, struggling to stuff it as far down their throats as Linda Lovelace had done and still not gag—once he had seen that, he never wanted them again. He couldn't take them seriously. Somebody ought to shoot Annie Ross, he thought. She was interfering in things she didn't understand. None of these women understood. They were too old for any man to be interested in them as anything but broodmares. Ryall wasn't interested in a broodmare. He couldn't afford one. When he could afford one, he would get one. Then he would be like all these guys, the ones at the Society parties, the ones who provided the talking heads on television shows. He'd have his broodmare and his eleven-year-old doxy on the side, set up decently in private, so that he didn't have to run the risk of exposure every time he wanted to get laid. Yes, somebody ought to kill Annie Ross. Somebody ought to blast her head to pieces, just like Tony's, just like Charlotte's. He knew exactly how Charlotte's head had come apart there on the drive in front of her front door, the blood and skin and bone falling over the thick molded cement rim of the planter near the door, the wind blowing cold wet darkness through her hair. He hoped she had lain there writhing in her own blood for many long minutes and only expired when the ambulance arrived. He hoped the same thing happened to Annie Ross, whose only purpose in life was to destroy men for doing what was natural to them.

The phone rang. He straightened up a little and tried to breathe. He was sweating all over now. He could feel wet heavy sweat soaked into the back of his jacket. His hands were so slick, he had to wipe them against the knees of his pants in order to pick up the phone. He was going to have to change all his clothes before he went out. He was going to have to take a shower. What if she had been lying to him? What if she had gone to the papers already, or the police? What if everybody in town knew what he did in his car in the darkness of the early evenings before he had to go to another party or another opening or another wedding? They all did it too. He knew that. They all did it too, but they wouldn't admit it.

He took one more deep breath and picked up the phone. He was sure he was going to hear Matt Drudge at least, somebody who specialized in real gossip, somebody with the clout to get the news out on an international scale. They all said they didn't read Matt Drudge, but they did. They read him first. Ryall wondered if he could be Matt Drudge himself. He knew he couldn't. It was the Porky Pig thing, again. No matter what he did, he still looked like Porky Pig. Sometimes he expected Disney to sue him for copyright infringement.

He picked up the phone. It wasn't Matt Drudge. It wasn't the police. It wasn't even Annie Ross. It was only Nick Bradenton, sounding exasperated.

“Ryall? Ryall, where are you? You owe me a column. It should have been here an hour ago. Are you paying any attention to what we pay you for anymore at all?”

“I've been paying attention,” Ryall said defensively. His chest hurt. This was what was wrong with letting himself get spooked. He got breathless. His voice squeaked. “I've turned in the best columns of my career over the last couple of weeks. I've even provided you with real news. You can't fault me for that.”

“You've been late four out of the last six days,” Nick said. “I know you like going to New York. And I know you like going to Atlanta. And I know you like seeing your face on the television screen. But if you expect to have a job here when this is over, you'd better get your act together.”

“Of course I expect to have a job here,” Ryall said. That was not strictly true. He expected to have the job, yes, but he did not expect to want it. He was sure it was only a matter of time before CNN would give him a spot in the same way they had once given Greta Van Susteren one. That was how these things happened. Just in case, though—in case something went wrong, in case the universe was as uneven and unfair as it had always been—it was best to play safe. “The column's done,” he said. “I'll e-mail it as soon as I get off the phone.”

“Yeah, well. Do that. But there's something else.”

“What else?”

“There's some news. Not really news. It's not for publication just yet, if you know what I mean. We've got a source. Can you get to Anne Ross Wyler?”

“
Anybody
can get to Anne Ross Wyler,” Ryall said. “She lives in that godforsaken settlement house. She doesn't even have servants.”

“Well, neither do you, do you, Ryall? Our source says that she's the prime suspect out there in Lower Merion. That she killed her brother and his wife. For money, I presume, although we don't have any word on that. Maybe she's another one of those crackpot debutante Marxists. I don't know. We just want to know if you can go out there and talk to her. Get an interview about how she feels about her brother's death and that kind of thing, but be cool about it. Don't say anything that might tip her off.”

“Hard news?” Ryall said, finding it difficult to breathe again. “I can't believe it. You're trusting me with hard news.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “I'm not a hundred percent happy about it, if you want to know the truth.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“Be serious, Ryall. This is not the kind of thing you usually do. But the rest of the guys thought you'd be the best one because you know the territory and you know the woman. She's more likely to open up to you than she is to a stranger. Although, I don't know. She's always been so intensely loyal to Tony Ross. If that's been an act all these years, she can't be straight with anybody. Can you get over there right away?”

“To Adelphos House? Of course I can. How do you know she's there?” “I don't, but that's where she usually is, isn't it? Maybe you ought to call first. There's a certain amount of hurry. We hear she's going to be picked up this evening. I have no idea why they're waiting so long. But there it is. You have to get to her before that.”

“I'll get to her as soon as I get off the phone,” Ryall said, wondering how long it would take him to get the hint.
Get off the phone. Get off the phone. Get off the phone.

“You can get off the phone now,” Nick said. “And send that column, ASAP.” There was a click and then a dial tone. Ryall put the phone back in the hook and stared at it. He didn't really have a column done. It was only half done. He could get it finished in, maybe, half an hour. He wondered if he would be able to concentrate on it. Maybe he should call Adelphos House first. Maybe he should stop off on the strip on his way to talk to Annie Ross. There were so many options, he didn't know what to do.

Then, abruptly, he sat down in the nearest chair and burst out laughing.

David Alden had always prided himself on being able to stay calm in a crisis. It was one of the things he was known for, even among the people who wanted to find some reason to get him out of the bank. And, truthfully, it wasn't that he was
un
calm, exactly. He wasn't running around in a panic. He wasn't having trouble trying to think. It was just that, since Charlotte had died, he'd been restless. It felt to him as if the things he was doing were ephemeral. There was this bank, this pre-war building with its high ceilings and marble floors and chandeliers that had to be cleaned six times a year by a company hired for just that purpose. There was Price Heaven, which was rapidly descending into the morass of an Enron scandal, with half the news stories devoted to the way in which Price Heaven's middle managers would lose all the money they'd saved for retirement if the company collapsed and its stock became worthless. There was Michael Harridan and his
Report
, which had been cluttering up his briefcase ever since that last day at Tony's house and that even now took up more of his time than it should. All he wanted was that people should start out making sense and go on making sense. He didn't want them to wander off on tangents and confusions. Sometimes it seemed to him that people operated on an entirely symbolic level. The bank was not a temple and it did not house the body of a God, living or dead, no matter what its vice presidents thought. The middle managers at Price Heaven would not be in the midst of losing their savings if they'd taken the sensible advice most of them admitted to having been given and diversified their portfolios instead of keeping everything they had in one company's paper. And as for Michael Harridan—