Conspiracy Theory (5 page)

The phone was picked up on the other end. “Marilyn?” Ryall said. “You have a minute?”

“I thought you were supposed to be at that party.”

“The car is due in about fifteen minutes. Don't worry. I won't miss it. Did you do that thing I asked you to, about the records? You didn't call back—”

“I haven't had time to call back,” Marilyn said, sounding cross. “And yes, I did do it. I made triplicate copies too, in case you start losing them, which you always do. I don't know why you bother to do research, really. You can never hang on to anything for longer than a day or two at a time. You're really pathetic.”

“Yes. Well. I'm sorry to cause you so much distress. Did you happen to notice anything that was in the records?”

“No. Why should I? I'm not a gossip columnist, Ryall. I don't really give a damn what these people do. I don't think anybody does. I think the paper just keeps the column on because those people are investors, or something, and they like to get some publicity. I know I never read that stuff. Or
Town and Country
, either.”

“Yes.” You had to be patient with Marilyn. She was a very good assistant. She kept the appointment book meticulously. She did whatever research she was asked to do. She answered the phone without sounding as if she wanted to bite somebody's head off. It was just that she was a … cunt.

“I don't see what your problem is anyway,” she said. “I can't figure out if you're obsessed with Anthony van Wyck Ross or with his wife. And neither of them are anything to be obsessed about. I mean, really.”

“Anthony van Wyck Ross is one of the most successful bankers on the planet,” Ryall said. “Get your head out of the social columns for a moment. He's got more money than God. He determines monetary policy for half the world. Oh, not officially, of course, officially we've got all these government agencies. But in reality, that's how it works.”

“Maybe. Who cares? And what do you need his transcripts from Yale and Harvard Law School for? I mean, truly, even if there was some kind of huge scandal, who would care? It's not as if he's Steven Spielberg.”

“You don't think anybody would care if one of the most important men on earth was involved in something less than honest?”

“No. I don't even think they'd be surprised. Well, they might be interested if he killed his wife, or she killed him. I don't suppose you could arrange for that?”

“If they wanted to kill each other, they'd hire hitmen. And not the kind who get caught.”

“Nobody cares about those people anymore. They're not relevant to real people's lives. And don't give me that thing about running the world, because it doesn't matter if they do. They don't run
my
world.”

“You wouldn't think that if they took it into their heads to shut down the newspaper and you were out on your ear looking for a job.”

“I don't think anybody would just take it into his head to shut down the newspaper. That's not the way it works, Ryall. Come into the real world for a time—pretty funny, considering your name. Do people make that joke on your name all the time?”

“No,” Ryall said. “And we've had this conversation before. Never mind. As long as you have the material. I'll come in tomorrow and look it over. Although God only knows, I hate to come in to the office after one of these things. I always have a hangover.”

“It's like that Enron thing,” Marilyn said. “It was a big scandal, and a big deal in all the newspapers, and it was on CNN and TV for months, but nobody really paid attention. Why should they? It's just a business thing. It's not as if they're—”

“—Steven Spielberg—”

“—Madonna.”

“That's the car,” Ryall said. “As long as you have them. Put them somewhere safe. I don't want them getting lost.”

“I never lose anything,” Marilyn said, which was true. She never forgot appointments, either. Ryall was sure that, if she had been alive at the time, she would have been the one person in her class who would have remembered all her homework on the day after the Kennedy assassination. He knew for a fact that the events of September 11 hadn't fazed her for a moment.

“They'll be in your private drawer,” she said. “I've even taken the care to lock it, since you've been so paranoid. But if you ask me, you're behaving like a lunatic.”

“The car,” Ryall said. Then he switched the cell phone off and put it down. The car wasn't really here, not yet, and wouldn't be for a while. He still had to find all his paraphernalia: his money clip; his wallet; his card case; his key ring; his Swiss army knife. The Swiss army knife was made of sterling silver and accented with gold. It was the kind of thing that impressed people like Marilyn.

“Crap, crap, crap,” Ryall said to the air. He didn't want to spend the night at this party. He didn't want to file a story about it with the paper and then with
Town and Country
. He didn't want to
feel
like Porky Pig anymore, so that right in the middle of any moment when he was able to think of himself as winning, the image would pop up on the back of his eyelids like a computer virus and there he would be, squat and round, with a little curly tail sticking out of the back of his best tuxedo pants.

“Crap, crap, crap,” he said again. Then he swept all his things off the top of his bureau and headed out his bedroom door and down the stairs.

Lucinda Watkins had been born and raised a Baptist in a world where the most exotic “other” religion belonged to the Catholics at St. Mary of the Fields, and there weren't many of them. “The preachers say they worship the devil,” Lucinda's grandmother had said, “but I don't believe it.” And because Grandma Watkins hadn't believed it, Lucinda hadn't believed it, either. In the end, everything that had ever happened to Lucinda had come down to Grandma Watkins, who had taken their residence in Mount Hope, Mississippi, as a kind of purgatory come early, except that she hadn't believed in purgatory. God was getting them ready for something special. She believed in that. The long back roads that got so hot in the summer they were nothing but dirt, the “schoolhouse” that was nothing but a shack at the edge of a cotton field that had been leached clean of nutrients before the Home War, the good jobs cleaning up in the brick houses along White Jasmine Drive that went to black people and not to them—it was all preparation, all rehearsal, for something they were supposed to do later.

“They think they're rich, the people in those houses,” Grandma Watkins had told Lucinda one afternoon when Lucinda had come to walk her back after a long day's work at the diner. “It isn't true. I've been to Atlanta to visit my cousin.
Those
are the rich people.”

Lucinda hadn't had the faintest idea what Grandma meant. The people on White Jasmine Drive looked rich enough to her. Not only were their driveways paved and their houses made of brick, but they had cars parked out front and black people to clean up after them. Lucinda held on to the thought anyway. She never lost the conviction that Grandma Watkins was right about everything, from rich people to heaven, and she never would. It was why she didn't talk slang, like everybody else she knew, not even in front of other poor people. Grandma wouldn't say
ain't
to save her life. Even at work, where white trash were supposed to play an elaborate ritual straight out of a bad MGM screenplay and central casting, Grandma Watkins sounded like she'd just been graduated from Miss Hellman's School for Young Ladies. Sometimes she didn't even sound southern.

“You go north,” Grandma Watkins said. “Not that they're much better in the north, but they've got different rules than they've got here. There's a little more room to make your move. You go north and you can go to college.”

Now Lucinda stood up from the kitchen table and picked up the coffee cups and little plates she'd used to serve Father Tibor Kasparian. There were times when she became extremely self-conscious about her life story. She knew how it was supposed to end—the bad MGM screenplay version, the one from central casting. She was supposed to go north to college and do brilliantly. She was supposed to become famous and go back to Mount Hope in a limousine. Or something. Whatever it was, it hadn't worked out that way. She wasn't athletic, like Larry Bird. She wasn't a brilliant writer, like Truman Capote. She wasn't ambitious and dedicated, like Julia Roberts or Helen Gur-ley Brown. In the end, she had had to face up to the fact that she was a bright, hardworking girl, but not a superstar, and not the material from which media stars are made. She'd gone north, the way Grandma Watkins wanted—but to Gettysburg College, not to Vassar or Smith. She'd found her room to make her move, first into a master's of social work at Penn State, then into a doctorate in sociology at Temple. If she'd had a different personality, she might have ended up on the faculty of some small college somewhere, happily settled into a routine of teaching and giving little dinners and pottering around her own brick house, only just far enough from the campus so that she wouldn't have to do what she hated most in the world, drive in bad weather. She had a fantasy about that life that was so real, she almost felt she'd lived it. The problem was, it made her feel ashamed even to think of it. She did
not
have a different personality, and because she did not, she had landed here, at Adelphos House, where, no matter what else she was doing, she was providing some help to the girls who lined the darker side streets of the inner city. Most of them were younger than sixteen. Most of them were addicted and sick at the same time. All of them were angry, so that helping them was a matter of getting past that barrage of invective that was their first response to anything but a john offering money, and was sometimes their response even then. Through it all, Lucinda kept waiting for something to happen, she wasn't sure what.

If there was one thing Grandma Watkins had been dead right about, it was that thing about the rich people. The white people on White Jasmine Drive had barely been middle-class by Main Line standards. They'd had the kind of houses you saw in the neat little suburbs for factory workers, the ones that ringed the city close. The real rich people were farther out, and Lucinda could still remember the moment she had first seen one of those houses, spread out across a hill in Radnor like a movie-set castle. Her gut instinct was to call it an institution, a school, a mental hospital, anything. It was impossible that a single private family could have enough money to live in that house. Then there had been other houses, whole big lots of them, some tucked back behind gates and out of sight, some right where anybody could stare at the windows and doors, the long curving drives, the vast stretches of green lawn that nobody ever played on. That was when her own anger had started, white hot and hard. How could people—
lots
of people, a hundred of them at least, she'd seen the houses—how could all those people have all that money at the same time that the girls walked the side streets for twenty bucks a blow and got AIDS and died before they were twenty-four? How could all those people have big green lawns at the same time that the schools in Philadelphia didn't have enough books for all the students, and didn't have enough plumbing, either, so that the toilets backed up into the halls at least once a month and the walls themselves were disintegrating under onslaughts of ooze from broken pipes that nobody had the money to fix? It hadn't helped, much, that when she'd first come to Adelphos House, Annie had taken her out to Bryn Mawr to see her brother and his wife. They were looking for money, and the brother had money. He had also had a butler, three maids in uniforms that Lucinda had been able to count, and a wife so intensely, poisonously bitchy that Lu-cinda had come very close to stabbing her with a butter knife. It was harder to make the brother out. He seemed to hate being where he was, but Lucinda had the impression that he felt that way everywhere, and with everyone.

It was, Lucinda thought, a good thing that she was both too old and too young for Power to the People and the Weather Underground. If she'd been born a couple of years earlier or later than she was, she would have armed herself to the teeth and died in a bank robbery without having the faintest idea what she was hoping to accomplish. Or maybe she wouldn't have, because Grandma Watkins would definitely not have approved. Grandma Watkins was dead now, of course—if she was alive, she'd be a hundred and thirty—but she'd lived long enough to see the New Left, and she hadn't been impressed.

Lucinda considered doing the dishes, and decided against it. It was the first thing the volunteers went for when they came in in the morning. Lucinda more and more often thought she ought to let them at it. She'd spent her entire childhood washing dishes. These girls had spent their entire childhoods visiting the Museum of Fine Arts and having French lessons. She washed her hands under the tap in the sink and dried them on the clean dish towel she always left hanging from the refrigerator door. Sometimes she wondered what the people of Mount Hope, Mississippi, would think of Philadelphia, where there were more Catholics than anything else, and the Catholics weren't the strange ones. She knew what they would have thought of Annie's atheism, if they could have been convinced that Annie was an atheist at all. People in Mount Hope tended to think that everybody really believed in God, deep down, even if they said they didn't. She knew what they would have thought of Father Tibor Kasparian too. They would have been purely convinced that he worshiped the devil.

She went to the swinging door that led to the hall and stuck her head out. The hall was empty, but it almost always was at this time of night. She had been hoping to catch Father Kasparian on his way out.

“There anybody out there listening?” she called.

There was a rumbling somewhere in the distance and a blond head appeared halfway to the foyer. “I'm here, Miss Watkins. I'm doing some paperwork on the lunch project. Can I do something for you?”