Conspiracy Theory (42 page)

There were five copies of
The Harridan Report
spread out across his desk, including a copy of the one Charlotte had shown him just before she died. David didn't think he had ever known anybody, real or imaginary, as solemn and humorless as Michael Harridan. It was frightening to think of that man in the world. Maybe that was because that man wasn't in the world. He was part of all of us. He was part of the people who ran the banks and the people who hated them. He was part of the pundits and part of the audience that checked their stocks online every day at lunch when they had a little free time at the office. He had gone out to the Trade Center with Adele and looked at the rubble there. Then he'd come back to the office and found a picture on the Internet of that church that had been bombed in Philadelphia. In the end, it came down to the same thing, it all came down to the same thing, too many people taking too many things seriously when they didn't mean anything at all. Nothing meant anything at all. You worked and worked. You stayed up late and came in early and canceled dates and family dinners. You did all the things you were supposed to do and then it ended here, with you feeling like a piece of tired fruit suspended in Jell-O.

That was it, David thought. He wasn't feeling panicked. He wasn't losing his head in a crisis. He was simply passing into another phase, where nothing was urgent except the need to shut out all the noise that cluttered up his life.

Next to the copies of
The Harridan Report
on his desk were the summary sheets of his report on Price Heaven. The type on their pages was smaller and less bold than that of Michael Harridan's rag, and far more difficult to read. Here was the skinny on Price Heaven: It was an old and venerable company, probably too old and too venerable. Its image was antiquated. Its facilities were Stone-Aged. Two years ago, it had come to the bank with a cash shortfall and a need to modernize. Six months after that, it had begun to hemorrhage money. It was still hemorrhaging money, although not quite in the same way as it had been, since the bank had stopped all payments to creditors, even itself. Now it was only hemorrhaging money in its stock price. He could write the facts down in a hundred million different ways, but they would always come down to the same thing, and they would always result in the realization that there was nothing anybody could do now about Price Heaven. The board had a decent argument when they said he should have seen this coming when he first recommended the loan. There was nobody better suited to seeing it coming besides himself. He had a decent argument when he said that he had not been responsible for granting the loan, and that it wasn't his recommendation, but Tony's, that had swayed the board. It wasn't an argument they wanted to listen to, because Tony was dead. He had this terrible, ugly urge to tell the truth, the kind of urge he knew he must never give in to, if he expected to have a life when the dust settled and Price Heaven had finally gone out of business.

There was a knock on the door and Adele came in, bustling. “They're almost ready downstairs,” she said. “Are you absolutely sure you want to hold this in the lobby? I know the conference room is too small, but that lobby looks so much like a stage set for a Depression movie about evil bankers. I wish you'd let me get somebody to take down the chandelier.”

“It would be a waste of money to take down the chandelier,” David said. “And the lobby is the only place big enough. We won't be completely screwing up anybody who wants to come in and out, will we?”

“No, of course not. We've got one newsstand that's going to be out of business for the duration. And there are a lot of people down there. That surprises me a little, do you know? I didn't think the Price Heaven collapse was that big a story.”

“Tony's dead,” David said. “Charlotte's dead. Maybe the press has finally made a few connections.”

“Do you think they're dead because of Price Heaven?” Adele asked. “That doesn't seem right to me. I mean, what did Charlotte have to do with Price Heaven?”

David gestured to the copies of
The Harridan Report
on his desk. “She didn't have anything to do with it rationally. These people aren't rational.”

“Oh, that thing. I found some of those in the wastebasket a little while ago and read them. Complete lunacy. Is that what the police think, that Tony and Charlotte were murdered by somebody like that?”

“I don't know what the police think.”

“No, of course you don't. I don't know why I should think you would. Maybe it's just that I always think you know everything. Are you
sure
you're all right? You've been behaving in the oddest way all day, as if you were sleepwalking. And with a press conference due to go off in less than fifteen minutes—”

“I'll be fine with the press conference,” David said.

The phone rang. They both stared at it. David turned away and stared out the window. Adele's voice was a low hum, sprightly and not particularly solemn. She was talking to somebody she knew and didn't mind hearing from.

He was thinking about the Trade Center again when she tapped him on the shoulder. He wondered how many people who worked in the financial district stopped in the middle of their day and thought about the Trade Center. He wished they would clear the rubble and put the things back up. No memorials. No compromises. Put them back
up
.

“It's Annie,” Adele said, holding the flat of her hand over the receiver. “I said I'd see if you'd talk to her. If it's too much with the press conference so close—”

“No, no,” David said. “I'll talk to her.”

“Good. Maybe she'll cheer you up. I'm going to go make sure we've covered all the details.”

“Thank you,” David said.

Adele handed over the phone. She stood up and straightened her skirt and left the room. David stared at the phone for a second.

“David?” Annie's voice drifted out at him, sounding tinny.

He put the receiver to his ear. “Hello, Annie. I've been thinking about you.”

“I thought you might have been.”

He didn't know what to say to that. He really was like a fruit suspended in Jell-O. “Sorry. I seem to be having an out-of-it sort of day.”

“That's bad news. Tony used to say that people on his level could never afford to be out of it, even for an hour.”

“I'm not on his level.”

“You are for all practical purposes, aren't you? The Price Heaven mess seems to have been dumped in your lap as if nobody else had ever had any responsibility. Not that you necessarily dislike that. I know you've always wanted responsibility.”

“I've got to go give a press conference in a few minutes,” David said. “Exactly what it is they expect me to say is completely beyond me. There's nothing to be said that hasn't been said already. A million times. In a million other meltdowns. Do you remember the Kmart bankruptcy?”

“Not really. It's not the kind of thing I pay attention to, David.”

“I know. Never mind. I feel the way you do when you wake up in the wrong part of your sleep cycle. Like I'm not quite connected. All I want to do is go home and go to bed for a week.”

“Maybe you should.”

“I can't. You know why I can't. We seem to be in nonstop crisis mode here today. We've been that way for a couple of weeks, now. Do you know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about what it was like in those five days after the attack on the Towers, when the Stock Exchange was closed. On one level, it was completely insane. We couldn't get into the building. We still had deals and relationships that couldn't be neglected. Some of our clients were willing to cut us a little slack, but a lot of them weren't. But the thing is, even so, it was the calmest period I can remember in all my time at the bank. It was as if we'd all been stripped down to the skin, and nothing mattered except what really mattered. Do you understand that?”

“I always told you it was a bad idea for you to stay in that job.”

“I know.”

“I always told you you'd end up regretting it. And you will, you know. If you don't already.”

“I don't know if
regret
is the word I'd use.”

“I'll let you go to your press conference, then. I didn't call for any reason. I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice. I was wondering how you were feeling.”

“I'm feeling fine, I guess. There's nothing in particular wrong. There's nothing in particular right. You know how things are.”

“Yes,” Annie said. “I know how things are. I'll let you go now, David.”

The phone buzzed. David pulled it away from his ear and stared at it. He thought that was the oddest conversation he had ever had. It might never have happened. It was like talking to a ghost.

He took all the copies of
The Harridan Report
spread across his desk, wadded them up into a single ball, and threw them in the wastebasket.

Annie Ross Wyler hung up the phone and stood for a long moment in the shelter of the pay phone cubicle, doing nothing. For a moment, she wondered what had happened to phone booths. One of her strongest childhood memories was of being let loose in a Woolworth's in central Philadelphia while her mother was otherwise engaged at the jeweler's. Mademoiselle Chirac, who had been imported only a year before to teach French to both Annie and Tony, was supposed to give them a supervised afternoon in some park. Annie didn't remember which one, or where it was. Mademoiselle Chirac hadn't liked parks, any more than she'd liked American cheese, American television programs, or American wine. Her life was one long keening complaint, punctuated at unpredictable intervals by young men whom she seemed to think very little of but could not live without. Annie knew what was going on from the beginning: the clothes that were never put back quite the way they should have been; the lipstick smeared along the curve of the upper lip; the whispered calls in the middle of the night to plan trysts just out of sight of wherever the children would be. This afternoon, Mademoiselle Chirac was sitting at the fountain counter in the back while Annie and Tony ran wild—although, being Annie and Tony, their wildness probably looked like good manners to most of the nearby adults. Tony had found the telephone booths first, a whole line of them, all empty.

I'm no longer making any sense at all
, Annie thought. She stepped away from the non-booth whatever-it-was-called—they had to call these contraptions something. She ought to ask. She had AT&T stock. They would have to an-swer—and looked up and down the nearly empty street. It had to be close to noon. She could have checked her watch, but her head felt too heavy. Her eyelids felt like lead. She went back to the car she had parked on the curb and took a parking ticket off the windshield. That must have happened while her back was turned. She didn't really care about the parking ticket. She'd always had more money than she knew what to do with. Now she not only had it, but couldn't think of what she wanted it for. Her whole life felt upside down and sideways, all at once. Maybe she would give a lot of it to Patsy Lennon and the girls like her, the ones she knew personally, just to see what they would do with it. Maybe she would give it to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, since she knew exactly what they would do with it, and she was in something like a fighting mood. She wondered what it would be like to live like an ordinary person for real, instead of just playing pretend at it, what it would be like to have no money to spend rather than to refuse to spend it. That didn't make much sense either, but it all went together on one level or another. It didn't help that the money was in trusts, where she could not touch the principal.

She got in behind the steering wheel and popped open the glove compartment. She took her latest bumper sticker out of there and propped it up on the windshield.
Religion Stops a Thinking Mind
, it said. She never left it when the car was parked, because when she did people vandalized the car. She got out the street map of Philadelphia and laid it out across the wheel. Then she gave up. She couldn't read maps without a magnifying glass anymore. Maybe she ought to spend her money on that new eye surgery that was supposed to restore your sight to what it had been before you'd reached middle age. She hated the thought of anybody or anything coming near her eyes.

The magnifying glass was in the pocket of her jacket. She never carried a pocketbook. In the neighborhoods she frequented, pocketbooks were an invitation to purse snatchers. Still, she thought, she'd trust herself with the pimps and the drug dealers and the teenaged whores with fewer reservations than she would trust herself with the kind of people she'd grown up with. Tony was the last of the good ones of them, and he was gone. She ran the magnifying glass over the map. She found the street. She checked it again. She took the tip of her finger-nail—not much; mostly bitten off—and tapped down along the broken lines until she thought she'd found the right block. Then, just to make sure, she got the copy of
The Harridan Report
she'd brought with her and looked at the bottom on the back, where the address was. Her back ached. Her head ached. She wanted to lie down right here on the seat and close her eyes and sleep for a week.

Instead, she got the key into the ignition and the car started. She looked carefully into her rearview mirror and saw that there was no traffic coming in her direction. There was no traffic coming in either direction. She knew where the map said she was, but she didn't actually know where she was. She had never been in this part of the city before. It looked pleasant enough. There were a lot of narrow, tallish brick houses. There were trees. She put on her turn signal for the sake of the people who were not there to worry about what she would do next, and eased out onto the road.

Four blocks south, six blocks east, two blocks north—she had to be careful about the dead ends and the one-way streets. Why were there always so many dead-end streets in Philadelphia? She turned on the radio and caught NPR doing classical music. It was what she always listened to, but it wasn't what she wanted to hear. Why did the announcers on classical radio programs always sound as if they were announcers at a funeral? Was it really necessary to whisper the news that you were about to play Beethoven's
Emperor's Concerto
? Beethoven would have known better. His music was triumphal, the rock and roll of its day. She punched buttons but didn't come up with much she recognized. There was a lot of rap—hip-hop, they called it now. She'd never been able to get that straight. She punched more buttons and came to music she did recognize, but it didn't make her feel any better. The Beach Boys were playing “Surfer Girl.” She wasn't sure, but she thought most of the Beach Boys were dead. Two of the Beatles were.