Conspiracy Theory (9 page)

Oddly, it was much less difficult for Gregor to actually walk down the street in front of Holy Trinity Church than it was for him to think about doing it. The church always looked far less damaged than he had imagined it was, and he was able to ignore the fact that he knew it looked far less damaged than it actually was. The police had cordoned off the sidewalk directly in front of it. Anybody walking down Cavanaugh Street on that side now had to cross the street to continue. They had put a guard there the first two nights. The guard had disappeared on the third morning, far sooner than Gregor thought appropriate. In an FBI investigation, it would have taken far longer than this to gather the necessary evidence. He was determined to keep his disapproval to himself. John Jackman was now commissioner of police in Philadelphia. He was here because he was taking a personal interest in this case, and that at a time when all the police departments from the city down the length of the Main Line had been pressed into emergency service in the murder of Tony Ross. And it wasn't just the police departments. You could see the problem was that the media had started out only vaguely interested—oh, murder at one of those fancy estates in Bryn Mawr; good for a week or two; yawn—and then woken up to what had really happened. One of the most powerful men in the world, one of the men who ran the banks and dictated policy to governments, had been killed by a sniper with a silencer on the front steps of his own house. At any other time, the destruction of Holy Trinity Church would have been big news in Philadelphia. There would have been an outpouring of support and a concentration on the human angle. There might even have been a fund to rebuild the church. Gregor found that he resented, more than a little, that none of that was happening. It didn't matter that Tibor wouldn't need a fund to get the church rebuilt. People on the street would give what they could, and in some cases that was plenty. It mattered that nobody was paying attention. This had to be the worst hate crime in the history of the city. Nobody was noticing.

John Jackman was standing at the door to the Ararat up ahead, bent over old Marta Varnassian, who seemed to be lecturing him. Since old Marta Varnassian lectured everybody, usually on the perfidy of all Turks everywhere, this was not surprising, but Gregor found it both hopeful and incredible that Marta was talking to John at all. There was a time when Marta would no more have had a conversation with a black man, even about the Turks, than she would have made love to the president of Turkey on the church steps at high noon. Maybe it was John's two-thousand-dollar suit. Maybe it was just that John had been around so much in the last few years, Marta now thought he was Armenian.

“There's John,” Bennis said.

“Looks good, I think,” Gregor offered, neutrally. Once, back when he and Bennis had first met, he was fairly sure that Bennis had had an affair with John Jackman. It was something they never talked about, just like they never talked about any of the other men she had had affairs with, including the governor of a large western state and a member of the Rolling Stones. In their case, it was Bennis who had had wild oats to sow.

“John always looks good,” Bennis said. “It's that goddamned bone structure. Doesn't it bother you that you can see all the pews and they're still there and nobody has bothered to move them to someplace safe.”

You couldn't see the pews at all, from here. They had walked past the church and the building on its right side, which had had to be evacuated. The building on its left side had had to be evacuated too. At this point, there was no way to know if those buildings could be repaired or if they would have to be torn down. Gregor worried more about the fate of the people who had lived in them than he worried about the fate of Holy Trinity Church.

John Jackman shook Marta Varnassian's hand, gravely. She patted him on the arm and made her way through the doors of the Ararat to whomever was waiting for her there. Marta would not eat breakfast in a restaurant on her own. That meant at least one of the other Very Old Ladies must have come with her. John straightened up and waved to them. He was staring, slightly, at Bennis, but she was not staring back.

“Hi,” he said, when they reached them. “Interesting woman, that was. Mrs. Varnassian. Did the Turks really invade Armenia this morning?”

“It was in 1915,” Gregor said.

“Oh.”

“Hi, John,” Bennis said.

“I caught Linda a second ago,” John said. “She's saving us a table, but not the one at the window. Do you know what she's talking about?”

“Yes,” said Gregor. The window table was the one where he usually sat with Tibor and old George Tekemanian and whoever else wanted to join them. Today, Tibor was in the hospital, and old George was out on the Main Line staying with his nephew Martin, whose wife Angela had decided that Cavanaugh Street was not a safe place for him to be.

They went into the Ararat. Linda waved them toward a table along the far wall, marked out from the rest by a big black-and-white
reserved
sign stuck into the metal sugar packet holder.

“That's subtle,” John said.

Gregor sat down. “There's not a hope in hell that it will be private. You know we'll have people coming over here as soon as we get settled. They want to know.”

John sat down too. Bennis waved to Linda for the coffee and then curled into a chair like a sick cat. John looked her over quickly, and only once, and then looked away.

Linda Melajian arrived with the coffee and three cups. She put one down in front of John Jackman and said, “I hope you're going to do something about whoever did this. I hope you don't have your mind all messed up by debutantes on the Main Line.”

“John loves debutantes on the Main Line,” Bennis said.

“Behave yourself,” John said. He reached for the little metal pitcher of cream. Linda knew better than to bring nondairy creamer to
his
table. “We're doing everything we can. It might be less than you'd like.”

“Somebody planted a bomb, for God's sake. There must be some way to send him to jail. Or something worse.”

“We'll do our best,” Jackman said.

She marched off without taking their order. Jackman watched her go. “Well,” he said, “I suppose that's not all that odd. Everybody's upset. Everybody deserves to be upset.”

“Part of it's just that there's no way to stop thinking about it,” Gregor said. “The church is out there with the whole front wall blown off, practically. Everybody has to pass it every day.”

“I wish you'd left the guard there longer,” Bennis said. “Whoever it was could come back. And even if he doesn't, children could get into there and hurt themselves.”

“At the moment, we've got practically every cop in the city and four of the townships working on the Tony Ross murder, or guarding somebody or something connected to the Tony Ross murder. I know that sounds unfair to you, but under the circumstances it makes sense. I don't know if you realize it, but the first lady of the United States was in a car not more than a mile from Ross's front gate when the shooting started. Another five minutes, and the place would have been lousy with secret service officers.”

“And the shooting would never have happened,” Bennis said.

“Not necessarily,” John said. “Considering how cleanly whoever it was got away, what might have happened was a couple of more people dead. That is, assuming this turns out to be politically motivated, or domestic terrorism, which is what the FBI thinks it's going to be when they finally get it figured out.”

“Do you agree?” Gregor asked.

John shrugged. “It seems likely. That had to be a professional, the guy who got Ross. That whole thing was just too damned clean for it to have been anything else.”

“There's always dumb luck,” Gregor said.

“Not often. And not right between the eyes,” John said.

Bennis looked away. “Do you notice what happens? Whenever anybody starts talking about the church, they end up talking about Tony Ross. Even we do it.”

“I thought domestic terrorism meant homemade bombs and the militias,” Gregor said. “That doesn't sound professional.”

“Things have changed a lot since your day,” John said. “Lots of the guys in the militias are ex-military and lots of them are good at what they do. God only knows they can buy whatever they want in terms of weapons and ammunition.”

“So what happened to the church?” Bennis said.

Linda Melajian came back. Bennis ordered fruit and cheese. John Jackman ordered fruit and cheese. Gregor ordered three scrambled eggs, a side of hash browns, a side of sausage, and some buttered toast.

“Still suicidal, I see,” John said.

Bennis waved it away. “What
about
the church?” she said. “You've had four days, you disappeared after two, there's a big hole in the street, there must be something—”

“There is something.” Jackman pulled a small notebook out of the inside pocket of his jacket. “First, it was a small bomb—”

“Small?” Bennis said.

“Very small,” John said. “Bennis, if that had been a bomb of any significant size, it would have taken down the whole church and the buildings next to it and destabilized all three blocks. It doesn't take much. That's why they've got all that special architecture in California to handle even tiny earthquakes.”

“So what kind of a bomb are we talking about?” Gregor said. “Dynamite? Remote-controlled? What?”

“We think, from what we got out of the rubble, that there were three small pipe bombs. Very small. Plastic explosives, the kind you can pick up on the black market for cheap. Nothing particularly fancy. This, by the way, is the kind of thing most people associate with the militias. Somebody could store the materials for this kind of thing in their basement, and nobody would know a thing about it. That's just what the militias do, really. They've got their stuff stashed in basements, in rec rooms, in the backs of SUVs.”

“But why would a militia want to blow up Holy Trinity Church?” Bennis asked. “It doesn't make sense, does it? They blow up government buildings, and that kind of thing.”

“I'm not saying it was a militia,” John Jackman said. “I'm just saying the method used corresponds to what we used to associate militias with, oh, maybe ten or fifteen years ago. What interests me, and what interests the police in Bryn Mawr, are the connections.”

“The connections between what?” Gregor asked.

“Between the bombing here and the murder of Tony Ross.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Bennis said. “You can't honestly tell me that just because I was at that party and Gregor came with me and we both live on Cavanaugh Street that somebody went around killing Tony Ross and blowing up Holy Trinity Church on the same night to, to—to do what? What would be the point?”

“I have no idea what the point would be,” John said, “I'm just letting you know what's going on. And it's more than that you and Gregor were at that party. It's what Father Tibor was doing the night of the explosion. He was at Adelphos House. Do you know about Adelphos House?”

“Of course I do,” Bennis said. “It's an outreach house for child prostitutes. The church is involved in some kind of volunteer thing with them, or it was going to be. Are you trying to tell me that Tony Ross was seeing child prostitutes?”

“No, I'm trying to tell you that Adelphos House was founded by and is run by Tony Ross's sister.”

“What?” Bennis looked truly shocked.

John Jackman flipped through a few pages of his little notebook. “Anne Ross Wyler,” he said. “A year older than her brother. Came out at the Philadelphia Assembly. Graduated from Wellesley College in 1971. Married Dutton Wyler in 1980. Divorced him in 1985—”

“He was one of those people,” Bennis said. “They never do anything. They get born rich and they go to parties.”

“Not what the Ross siblings were into, I take it,” John said. “Anyway, the details of her life between '85 and '96 are sketchy at best, but in '96 she went to work for a settlement house in New York. She stayed there two years. Then she came back to Philadelphia and opened Adelphos.”

“I think Bennis's original objection still stands,” Gregor said. “That's a very tenuous connection. How would Tibor's interest in doing something to help Adelphos House connect to Tony Ross's murder?”

“How would
anything
connect to Tony Ross's murder?” John said. “It's not like we know what we're doing here, and the FBI doesn't know either, no matter what they try to tell me. The point is that the connections exist, and we have to follow them up.”

“Even though the two methods seem to be so at odds with each other?” Gregor asked. “Professional quality in the murder of Tony Ross. Amateur fun with explosives in the bombing of Holy Trinity Church.”

“We've got to start somewhere,” John said, “and that's true with the problem with the church as well as with the murder of Tony Ross. Look, we found pieces of the bombs. We might be able to trace some of the materials. It's a long shot, but we might. In the meantime, do you have any information besides the connections to the Ross murder that might help us out? Has there been any vandalism? Nasty words spray-painted on the church, or on Tibor's apartment? Hate mail?”

“Of course not,” Bennis said. “This is Cavanaugh Street, for God's sake.”

“What about the people who live here?” John asked. “And don't tell me it's Cavanaugh Street. Has anybody had an argument with Father Tibor? Has he been riding anybody's case, come down on sin a little hard lately, had a dispute with a tenant, anything?”

“He doesn't have any tenants,” Gregor said, “and the church doesn't either.”

“What about that stuff he writes?” John was being patient. “Has he been writing letters to the editor about politics lately? About Armenia? About September eleventh?”