Conspiracy Theory (45 page)

“Which is odd in and of itself,” Bennis said. “Why Krystof Andrechev?”

“No reason,” Gregor said. “Alden probably went into the shop, or looked in the window, and didn't talk to him. The only important thing was to get Kathi Mittendorf onto the street and have witnesses be able to attest that she was armed. He had a lot of luck. If Krystof hadn't been so embarrassed by his accent, if he'd actually said something to Kathi Mittendorf, everything might have been much different.”

“You mean she wouldn't have put a grenade down her throat and blown herself up?”

“I wish you'd stop putting it that way.”

“It's the way the papers put it,” Bennis said. “There were pieces of her as far as five blocks away. They'd have gone even further except that there were buildings in the way, and—”

“Bennis.”

“What about Charlotte?”

“Piece of cake,” Gregor said. “He was already in the house. All he had to do was go out a side door and come around by the bridal path. Blow her away. Go back the way he came, get in his car, come around to the front gate and go in as if he had no idea something had happened. He thought that by doing that, we'd all think the killings were about Tony and Charlotte. That they had to be America on Alert, which was railing against them both. That the murders couldn't be about Price Heaven, because Charlotte didn't have much to do with Price Heaven. He was wrong.”

“Marvelous. Everybody on the Main Line is going to hire super security this week. We'll have to go through barbed wire every time we're invited to dinner.”

“I doubt it. People don't work that way. I feel sorry about Kathi Mittendorf, though. She wasn't wrapped too tightly, I'll admit, but she was essentially harmless, left to herself.”

“Nobody with four thousand rounds of ammunition in her basement is essentially harmless,” Bennis said. “And don't ask. That was in the paper too. Do you realize she set a bomb to go off to blow the house up once she was dead? Fortunately, she didn't seem to know what she was doing and nothing exploded, but if it had, she would have taken most of that block with her, and who was on the block? Families. Children. Nobody who was any danger of being part of the One World Government.”

“I know, I know. I feel sorry for her anyway, Bennis. For all the Kathi Mittendorfs, the people whose lives have not worked out, who feel neglected and passed by and unimportant and helpless. There are a lot of them. More than you know.”

“Most of them aren't attempting to blow up their neighborhoods.”

“Did Lida and Hannah happen to send meatballs? Because I could really do with some meatballs just about now. And some coffee.”

Bennis leaned over and pulled both tote bags off the floor and onto the bed. They weighed so much, they made the bed springs creak.

It was dark when Tibor arrived, and by then Gregor was feeling “better.” At least, the nurses called it “better.” Gregor called it “annoyed.” His shoulder still hurt. The only thing he could do to stop it from hurting was to take De-merol from a hypodermic, seventy-five milligrams shot straight into his veins, and when he did that, he was a zombie for at least an hour. He was tired of not being able to think, and he was even more tired of being in the hospital. When they came to give him another shot, he turned it down and asked for a couple of Tylenol. He calculated the amount of time it would take for them to decide he was no longer in danger of relapsing and send him home. He was convinced that hospitals did not send you home when you still thought you needed serious painkillers. He wondered if it mattered that he didn't have an HMO. He wondered what he would have to do to get somebody to bring him a large porterhouse steak. He thought of calling everybody from John Jack-man to Frank Margiotti. In the end, everything was too much effort. He found himself lying back in bed and watching the television hanging from the ceiling. He watched
The Jerry Springer Show
and thought it made sense.

By the time Tibor got there—after “dinner,” which Gregor didn't eat; during the eight o'clock visitors' hour—Gregor was in so much pain he found it impossible to sit up all the way in bed, but his head was clear, and he told himself that was all he wanted. He had eaten an entire cookie tin full of honey cakes and another entire cookie tin full of some kind of hard cookie he couldn't remember ever having tried before. It was probably something very traditional all their mothers used to make when they were young. Lida would chop him up one side and down the other when she found out he didn't remember it. He watched the news and saw that Anne Ross Wyler was the lead story, ahead of something the Bush government was doing, he couldn't determine what. He tried not to doze off. Outside the big windows next to his bed, he could see the city lit up for night. Across the street, there was a cemetery. He tried not to find it symbolic.

“Why are hospitals always built next to cemeteries?” he asked Tibor when Tibor came in carrying an overstuffed tote bag that looked like one of the ones that belonged to Bennis.

Tibor put the tote bag on the floor and looked out the window. “Possibly because they have use of the cemeteries,” he said. Then he turned his back to the scene and sat down in the visitor's chair. “So,” he said. “You are better now? Bennis tells us this afternoon you are no longer babbling.”

“I think I just missed some medication,” Gregor said. “Maybe the nurses were busy. Anyway, I've started turning it down. It makes my head fuzzy. I can't think.”

“This is a good idea, refusing to take your medication?”

“It's only the painkillers, Tibor. I'm not refusing to take antibiotics. I don't suppose they sent you with a steak.”

“
Yaprak Sarma
,” Tibor said. “The meatballs are in the tin. The broth is in the Tupperware, which I'm not sure what that is, but Lida showed it to me. You put them together in the bowl, but this way the crust on the meatballs does not get soggy.”

“Very nice.” Gregor did manage to sit up. A pain like a stab went through his shoulder. He ignored it as much as he was able. “Let me have it. That's the first sign of decent food I can remember for days.”

“I don't think you can remember much of anything for days, Krekor. You have not been so sensible.”

Tibor put the tote bag up on the bed. Besides the tin and the Tupperware, there was also a good-sized bowl and a stainless-steel soup spoon. There was even a ladle. If the United States government was this well organized, it could afford to cut taxes by half. On everybody. Gregor managed to sit up without compromise. It hurt, but not as much as it had. He pulled the utility table across his lap and began setting up for dinner.

“Now if I could just get myself some coffee,” he said.

“Bennis said to tell you the doctors say no coffee now for some time. You should drink Perrier. She has included a bottle.”

Gregor took out the bottle of Perrier and made a face at it. If he wanted water, he wanted it without bubbles. “So,” he said. “How are you? Bennis said you were better. And making plans for the new church.”

“Yes, Krekor, I am making plans. We have designs and blueprints—not for this new church yet, that will take time, but blueprints from other churches that I can look at for comparison. We have an architect. Bennis hired him. We have to get permissions from the city, but according to Mr. Jackman, that should not be a problem.”

“No, it shouldn't be. No mayor wants to go into an election hearing about how he wouldn't let some poor little parish priest rebuild his church.”

“I am not some poor little parish priest, Krekor. I may be small in stature, but I—”

“I'm just trying to tell you how it would look in the papers if the city tried to turn you down. And I wasn't asking about the church, Tibor. I was asking about you. Bennis said that
you
were better. You were … a little depressed, for a while there.”

“Yes, Krekor, I was a little depressed. I am now not so. I am only—more cautious than I was, maybe. Do you ever find that there are things in the world you do not understand?”

“Practically all of them.”

“No, no. Be serious. I think, from what Bennis says to me, that this man who set the bomb in our church, he did it for a frivolous reason. To distract attention from the murder he was about to commit, or was in the middle of committing. That part was not so clear. But not because he had anything against our church in particular. Does this make sense to you?”

“Yes,” Gregor said, pouring broth very carefully over the meatballs in bul-gar crust he had already placed in his bowl. “The David Aldens of the world have always made sense to me. Money as a motive makes sense to me. So does love. And David Alden is just a man who loves money. For all the manic planning, he isn't even very original.”

“And what about the others? This Katherine—”

“Was she a Katherine, and not a Kathleen or something? I never heard her called anything but Kathi. She spelled it with an
i
on the end. The way girls used to do in the sixties, when they were all pretending to be Marianne Faithfull.”

“So I have been reading the papers on this woman, Krekor. And on this organization that wasn't a real organization. And then I go on the Internet and ask people on RAM about these people, these conspiracists. Do you know that's not a real word in the dictionary? When you type it onto the computer, the spellcheck yells at you.”

“I'm not sure spellcheck should be the standard for English usage.”

“Yes, I know. But here is what I don't know. Why is there so much fear? Because it is all about fear, Krekor. All these people. This Kathi. These people who put up the Web sites and send the newsletters and write the magazines. That the CIA is running the government. The CIA. I have had acquaintance with the CIA in Armenia when there was a Soviet Union. The CIA could not run a newsstand and keep it secret.”

“I wonder if Lida could send this stuff every day,” Gregor said. “And yes, I know. The CIA couldn't assassinate Castro in the middle of a civil war. They even tried exploding bananas. It was like watching a children's cartoon about a superhero who can never do anything but screw up. You can't be worried about the CIA.”

“I am not worried about the CIA, Krekor, no. But I am worried about the fear. When you see the people from the Third World do it, it at least makes some sense. America is the Great Satan. America is responsible for everything that happens. At least America is really strong, and the Third World is really weak. And when the Europeans do it, it is the same—they are not so strong as America is. But when people do it here and it is the same thing, a few of the names are changed but everything else is the same, there is a secret force ruling us all, we have no control over our lives or our destinies—we are being controlled by the thirteen richest families, or by the Soviet Union that only pretended to collapse, or by the British royal family. The British royal family, Krekor, where is the sense in that? A group of people with no expertise at all except in alcoholism and adultery.”

“I think we've been over this several million times in the last few weeks.”

“Yes, I know, but I wish to say that I do not understand it. What is it that people here are afraid of? These Kathi Mittendorfs. These people who read the Web sites and belong to the John Birch Society. What is so frightening? That we don't have complete control of our lives? We never have that. That we aren't the most important people in the world? Believe me, Krekor, I would prefer not to be. It is fear and envy and resentment without rationality, and I don't like it.”

“If you're looking for rationality, I don't think you're going to find a lot of it,” Gregor said. “I don't think there are answers for these things the way you want them to be.”

“Does it make sense to say that some people are not really people, but are reptilians, the children of human women and aliens, only pretending to be humans among us?”

“I said you weren't going to find a lot of rationality.”

“
Pah,
” Tibor said. He went to the window again and shook his head. “We think we will make things better by being reasonable, but I am not sure that is so. What can you be reasonable about when fewer than twenty percent of the people in the Muslim world think that Muslims were responsible for the World Trade Center disaster? The rest of them blame the CIA, or they blame Israel. Kathi Mittendorf blames the CIA. It goes on and on like this, and it makes less sense by the day. How are we to make things better if the whole world is drowning in irrationality?”

“We've always managed before,” Gregor pointed out—and that was true. They had always managed before. There was never a time when the world wasn't drowning in irrationality. Only some people escaped it, and they were the ones who moved the story forward.

“In New Mexico they burned Harry Potter books because the pastor said they encouraged witchcraft,” Tibor said. “Right here in Pennsylvania, a police department said the same thing. I know I am harping, Krekor, but I am worried, and you should be worried too.”

Gregor was not worried, although that might have been the result of his physical condition. He was expending so much energy pretending not to feel the pain in his shoulder, he had very little left over for anything else. After Tibor left, he lay down again in bed and looked out the window at the city lights, blessedly free of the sight of the cemetery, which was below his line of sight. He had a tin of those hard cookies he didn't know the name of. He was no longer hungry to the point of being light-headed. He wished he could call Bennis on the phone and have her take him home. There was music coming in over the intercom—NPR, he thought, or the local classical station, with people talking in hushed voices and music that had been written to soothe the savage beast.