Conspiracy Theory (8 page)

The newsstand on Lida and Gregor's block was still open. Father Tibor had to remind himself that it wasn't even nine o'clock. The night was so dark, it felt later. His heart was dark too. He went in and said good evening to the incommunicative man who was the only person he had seen inside this store in the six months since Michael Bagdanian had sold it and moved to Florida. He'd tried a few times to strike up a conversation, to find out the man's name and where he came from, but he'd never been able to do it. Even Lida hadn't managed to do it, and she'd brought a huge plate of honey cakes for bait. Ti-bor got some change out of his pocket and picked up a bedraggled copy of the
New York Times
. He got the Philadelphia papers delivered every day. He didn't much like news magazines, because they were too preachy. Lately, he didn't much like CNN, either, because it seemed to have become one long commercial for pop music. Why was it that Americans had so many television stations and all of them were alike, more commercial than content, as if life was about nothing but buying things? Tibor had actually liked commercials when he'd first come to the States. He'd spent so long living in a place where there was nothing to buy and no point in advertising it, commercials had been a novelty. Now it was not so much the commercials he minded as the noncommercial commercials that ate up everything else: the five minutes of every half hour on
Headline News
devoted to movies and CD albums; the incredible clutter of hype on AOL's version 7.0 that was one flashing huckster cry after another; the “sponsorship” announcements on PBS that were commercials in everything but name. Even the advertisements in newspapers and magazines had gotten bigger and brighter and worse. He had only been a United States citizen for four years, but he had been careful to vote in every election he was eligible to vote in. He knew that the United States government could not ban advertising, because it would be a suppression of free speech. He still thought he'd vote for any candidate that promised to do something about it, if only to provide every citizen with special viewing glasses that would block out the box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes on the breakfast table in the latest sitcom and the banter about Coke and Pepsi in the hot new dramatic series that everybody praised for its “realism.”
Seriously
, Tibor thought,
in real life, people do not argue about Coke and Pepsi
. Maybe he ought to stop watching television and change his ISP to something that did not belong to a company that not only owned half the planet, but was trying to sell it.

He put his newspaper down on the counter next to the cash register and said, “Good evening.” He put his money down on top of the cash register and waited. The man behind the counter said nothing, and didn't look up. Grace Feinman said he made her nervous, but everybody made Grace nervous, especially the audiences she played for in the early-music quintet she had come to Philadelphia to join. Hannah Krekorian said he made her think of evil, but Hannah had written a fan letter to
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. To Tibor, he just looked like a man, too heavyset for his own good, with hair that somebody cut for him at home. He took the two dollar bills and made change. Tibor put the change in his coat pocket and said thank you. There was a country-music station playing softly in the background: Garth Brooks.

“Have a good evening,” Tibor said, suddenly hyperaware of his accent, which was very thick, and always would be. The man grunted and Tibor went out onto the street again. The windows at Lida's were dark. The windows at Bennis and Gregor's were dark too, although, these days, the windows at Ben-nis's were always dark, because Bennis was never there. He tucked the paper under his arm and walked another block up. If he went one block more, he could go to the Ararat and have some coffee. There would be somebody there to talk to, even if it was only old George Tekemanian, who showed no signs of wanting to move to Florida. The spotlights outside the church were lit up, which was how he had left them. Part of him hoped that homeless people would find out the church was unlocked and move in at night to get out of the cold, the way they did at that Catholic church downtown. Maybe Cavanaugh Street was too far off the beaten path as far as homeless people went. Whatever the reason, none had ever shown up. Tibor considered going back to his apartment, but didn't want to. He considered going in to the church and checking things out, but he didn't want to do that, either. He felt restless and dissatisfied in every possible way. Maybe when he got himself sorted out, he would sit down with St. John of the Cross's
Ascent of Mount Carmel
and make himself feel perfectly guilty by witnessing the life of a real ascetic. These days, he could barely make himself give up coffee for Lent.

He went up to the next block, until he was directly across the street from the Ararat. Gregor was always warning him against jaywalking, but he could never take the warnings seriously. There was never any traffic to speak of on Cavanaugh Street. He crossed the street and tried to get a look into the Ararat's big plate-glass front windows at the same time. They'd gone to candlelight and wall-dimmers already. It was hard to see anything or to know who was inside. Halfway across the street, he looked back over his shoulder at the church, reflexively. He was always checking to be sure it was there. For some reason, a vision popped into his head of that pastor in New Mexico who had burned a lot of Harry Potter books.
When
, he wondered,
did we get to the point where we stopped understanding that witches aren't real?
At least, those kinds of witches, the Harry Potter kind, weren't real. He started to turn back to the Ararat, to finish crossing the street.

That was when Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church exploded. At first it was just a light, an inexplicable light, blinding, like Saul on the Damascus road. Tibor half thought he had been granted a vision from God. Then the noise came and suddenly the air was full of stones and bricks and glass. They were everywhere. Noise was everywhere. Fire was everywhere too, and in the heat and madness, Father Tibor Kasparian passed out cold.

I reveal how a global secret society called the Illuminati (the “Illuminated Ones” as they call themselves) have been holding the reigns of power in the world since ancient times, expanding their power out of the Middle and Near East (and other centres) to control first Europe and then, thanks to the British Empire and other European empires, to take over in the Americas, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and elsewhere. When those empires appeared to withdraw from these regions, the Illuminati left behind the secret society networks and the Illuminati bloodlines and these have continued to control and orchestrate events ever since.

—“WHO REALLY RULES THE WORLD?”

BY DAVID ICKE AT

HTTP://WWW.DAVIDICKE.COM/ICKE/VISITOR.HTML

In the first few days after the explosion, Gregor Demarkian found himself getting up in the middle of the night to look at what was left of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. It wasn't easy. Even in the days when the church was still standing in the ordinary way, even when it was decorated top to bottom by Donna Moradanyan Donahue on one of her periodic holiday enthusiasms, it was still more than a block away and set back from the sidewalk to make room for the three shallow steps that led to its front doors. Gregor had never had any idea what the steps were for. Maybe the men and women who built the church believed that people should ascend on their way to talk to God. Maybe the church had been built before the sidewalk and the street paving had been put in, and there was some worry that without a few steps to wipe their feet on, people might track mud into the church. None of these thoughts made any sense at all, and none of them mattered, but Gregor found it hard to look up the street without thinking about something besides the obvious. It was a good thing the bomb had not been as big as it had sounded to Tibor on the night it went off. There was some of Holy Trinity Church still left, even if it wasn't of much good to anybody. Even more important, only the buildings directly next to the church had been in any way damaged. According to the bomb expert sent out by the police on the morning after, and according to the bomb expert at the FBI, for whom Gregor had pulled in a few markers for him to come out and look at the scene, much more firepower and all the buildings on the block, on both sides of the street, might have suffered “structural damage.” Gregor had heard the words
structural damage
a thousand times before without knowing what they meant, or even wondering. Now he knew. They meant that the ground had rattled so much, it had made the foundations of the buildings disorganized and unsafe.

Now it was not the middle of the night, but the early morning—6:45 in the morning on November 13, to be exact. Gregor finished shaving in front of the enormous vanity mirror Bennis had installed in his bathroom and reached for the toothpaste and his toothbrush, feeling as disoriented as he ever had in his life. He could still remember, with perfect clarity, the first time he had ever seen a dead body that wasn't laid out in a casket for a wake. It was his first year at the FBI and he was the junior partner on a kidnapping detail, the kind of thing that usually required nothing more from the agents but sitting by a phone and recording ransom demands from half-demented fools who hadn't realized how difficult it would be to actually collect a large amount of money in small bills. That was why he had been assigned to that particular case. You didn't send brand-new agents out of Quantico into one of the nastier situations, even if you thought you had no choice. This time, though, the half-demented fool had been a manic-depressive, or maybe stoked out on the kind of drugs that made mood swings behave like roller-coaster rides. Every time he called to give instructions about the ransom, he got crazier—and unlike most kidnappers, he called a lot, over and over again, apparently heedless of the fact that it was going to be possible, eventually, to trace those calls. Still, that was a long time ago and the technology hadn't been as good then as it was now. He might have gotten away with it if his only problem had been a desperate need to talk. Instead, he'd also had a desperate need for validation, or absolution, or
something
that was so mixed up in his brain he couldn't put it into words and he couldn't live without it. During the fifth phone call his voice began to squeak and soar. The experienced agent on the case was as tense as Richard Nixon at a press conference. The kidnapper was losing it, and even Gregor had been able to understand that. He might have been inexperienced as an agent, but he'd spent his time in the army. He knew the sound of panic when he heard it. He also knew the sound of gunfire when he heard it, and that was what came next. The explosion was so loud that the woman whose daughter had been kidnapped screamed and dropped the phone. A second later, she was holding her ear, doubled over in pain. Gregor held his breath. If the phone went to dial tone, it would mean the child was dead. The phone did not go to dial tone.

They found the child, and the kidnapper, two and a half hours later. With the phone line open and nobody to hang it up, it was easy to trace. The child was locked in the bathroom, sitting in the bathtub in tears, but not otherwise hurt. The kidnapper was lying half-on and half-off the big double motel bed he'd been sitting on when he made the call and put the gun to the side of his head. If you're going to shoot yourself, never shoot yourself in the side of the head, Gregor's instructor at Quantico always said. Shots to the side of the head often didn't work, and what happened was that you were left alive but worse off than before, brain-damaged, immobile, a walking vegetable. In this case, the man had been lucky, if you could call it that. He was most certainly dead. The side of his skull on the far side of the shot had exploded outward, splattering blood and skin and bone all over the motel bed's bedspread and the window in the wall beyond it. His eyes were wide open and caught in a paralysis so profound, Gregor couldn't shake the feeling that they were trying to communicate something. It was the first time he'd realized that the newly dead did not look dead so much as hyperalive. Their eyes tried to catch and hold you. If you were there at the critical moment, their arms reached out for you. Gregor had always wondered if they were trying to hold on to life or trying to drag you into the tunnel along with them.

He wiped the froth of toothpaste off his mouth. He washed his face again. He gave a little consideration, but not much, to Bennis's suggestion that he might look good with his hair cut short enough to almost look shaved. He put the towel back on the rack and went down the hall to the living room. Bennis was standing at the big front window, doing what he himself had been doing during the night for days: twisting sideways to see if she could see what was left of Holy Trinity. She was as “dressed” as she was going to get for the day, meaning a turtleneck and flannel shirt and jeans. She was having no more luck than he did when he tried to see the church. In the first two days after the explosion, crews had come out from the city to clean up the mess. The entire facade of the church was gone. What was left was something like a stage set, with the pews and aisles and altar exposed to anybody who wanted to come by and see what they were like. Bennis had her arms wrapped around her body so that she could twist more easily against the glass. If this had been a year or two ago, she would have been smoking.

“It doesn't work, you know,” he told her. “I try it all the time. We never could see Holy Trinity very well from here, even when it was standing.”

“It's still standing,” Bennis said. “All except one wall of it. Yes. I know. You don't have to bring it up again. It will have to come down.”

“It was an old building, and it was built by people who didn't have the kind of resources you need to put up something solid for the ages to begin with. It would have had to come down anyway, eventually. Tibor's said so, more than once.”

“I don't think this is what he meant, do you? Although I've got to admit, it's going to put a crimp into Howard Kashinian's lectures about how the church is solid as a rock and it would just be a waste of money to build a new one. I gave a little money to the rebuilding fund, did I tell you?”

“No. Everybody else on the street told me. That was a rather dramatic gesture.”

“Yes, well. I make all this money and I never spend any of it. I mean, let's face it. I don't like jewelry. I don't take elaborate vacations. I do have the car, but at the rate I drive it I'm still going to have it in the third millennium. Does it make me a bad person that I'm not more upset about Tony Ross?”

“I don't think so,” Gregor said. “Are you coming down to the Ararat with me? I know you don't like talking to John Jackman, but in this case you might—”

“No,” Bennis said. “That's all right. I don't mind talking to John anymore. All emotions wear out. Did I ever tell you that my sister Myra tried to marry Tony once? This was back the year she was coming out. Tony was, I think, a year older than she was, still at Yale or wherever, but you could see even then that he was going to be something extraordinary. And Myra being Myra, she was determined to marry something extraordinary. But Tony didn't seem to be interested.”

“From what you've told me about your sister Myra, that might not be surprising.”

“It wasn't.” Bennis stopped twisting in the window. “You really can't see it. I never noticed that before. Maybe I never tried to see it before. God, what a mess. Tibor's coming home from the hospital today. Did I tell you that? Donna and I are going to go pick him up.”

“Yes, you told me that. He's all right, you know, Bennis, he wasn't really hurt. It was mostly shock and precaution.”

“I was thinking we could put him in my apartment. I never use it these days anyway, and he can't go back to his place. It's still standing, but it isn't safe. God, what's he going to do about all the books? He won't let them get plowed under. You know how he feels about books.”

“I know how he feels about books.”

“Of course, it will mean he won't be able to pretend not to know we're living in sin, or whatever it is we're doing. Do you think he thinks that, that we're living in sin?”

“I don't know. I doubt it. Tibor doesn't usually think things like that.”

“I don't really know how Tibor thinks,” Bennis said. “We treat him like a pet, or at least I do. We find him endearing. But that isn't what he's about at all, I don't think. It really was a bomb, wasn't it, Gregor? I mean, the bomb squad couldn't be mistaken. It couldn't have been a gas explosion or something like that.”

“The church has electric heat. And no, I don't think the bomb squad was mistaken, although we've still only got a preliminary report.”

“It just seems so awful to me that anybody would deliberately try to bomb Holy Trinity Church. Awful and ridiculous. Does that make sense to you? It makes sense to me that somebody might want to kill Tony Ross. He was rich as hell and he was the head of a big investment bank and he made decisions all the time that affected people's lives. But this is Holy Trinity Church. It's a little Armenian church on a side street in Philadelphia that isn't important to anybody at all except the people who live here. It isn't even in one of those categories that the hate groups go after. It's not a black church. It's not a synagogue. Tibor doesn't mix in politics except for voting in every election. It doesn't make any sense.”

“It will when we find whoever did it. Probably.”

“Probably?”

“Let's just say it will make sense of a kind, no matter what,” Gregor said. “Sometimes the rationale for these things is not necessarily contaminated with linear thought. Get your shoes on and come to the Ararat with me. John may not have anything to report, but he'll be good to talk to. And you can see everybody and commiserate with them. Again.”

“Linda Melajian told me yesterday that the Ararat is full for every meal these days but it's like being at a wake. Everybody just … sits there.”

“You should know. You haven't eaten at home since it happened.”

“You can't eat here, Gregor. I can't cook, and you think stocking the refrigerator means buying two boxes of Dunkin' Donuts and putting them on different shelves.”

“You can eat the Dunkin' Donuts,” Gregor said.

Bennis marched away from the window, past the long black leather couch, into the foyer. A moment later, Gregor heard the sound of clogs against hardwood and reached for the jacket he had left over the back of a chair.

“Now I'm ready and you're not,” she called. The clogs went back and forth across the hardwood, back and forth, back and forth.

Gregor considered telling her that it was obvious she'd been crying, but in the end that did not seem to be a sensible thing to do. It would only get her started talking about Emotions, which she could do all day, in intimate detail, and he couldn't do at all. He not only couldn't talk about them, he often couldn't recognize them. He had only two labels for what he felt most of the time, “good” and “not good.” He had one more label for use in emergencies— “scared”—but that one was rarely necessary. Even now, when every muscle in his body was fighting urgently for paralysis, for collapse, for anything at all that would release him from the necessity of walking down Cavanaugh Street in front of that bombed-out church—even now, he wouldn't call what he felt “scared.” He didn't know what it was.

“Gregor.”

He threw the jacket over his shoulders and went out into the foyer, where Bennis was waiting for him. It was cold as hell outside, but she was not wearing her jacket, and wouldn't if he asked her to. He got his own coat off the rack and put it on. She walked away from him and out the door onto the landing.

There really had been a time, he thought, years ago, before his wife had died, before he'd retired from the Bureau, before he'd moved back to Cavanaugh Street, when he hadn't had anything more complicated to think about than the paperwork required to document the interstate tracking of serial killers. He was not Bennis Hannaford's lover, or Tibor Kasparian's friend, or the man a lot of people looked to to make sanity prevail in a thoroughly insane world. He did not remember the change coming over him. He could not pinpoint the one moment when he had begun to be someone he had never been before. He couldn't even tell if he liked this version of himself better than he liked the other.

What he did know was that, no matter how much he wanted to talk to John Jackman and find out what the police had on both the bombing and the murder out in Bryn Mawr, he'd be content to be ignorant for the rest of his life if it meant he didn't have to walk past the front of that exploded church. He
had
walked past it, two or three times a day, every day since it happened, but he wasn't used to it, and he didn't think he ever would be. If he'd been a different kind of man, he would have packed everything he owned into a couple of suitcases and taken off for a place where nobody had ever heard of Holy Trinity Church. Unfortunately, it would be impossible to go anywhere where nobody had heard of Tony Ross.