No one had to tell Charlotte Deacon Ross how to behave. Even her mother, who had been widely considered to be the last of the old-line Main Line grande dames, had been in awe of her. The key to civilization was self-control and personal responsibility, Charlotte always thought, and then she went about doing what mattered immeasurably not only to herself but to the small world she lived in. It was a world that had not changed in many generations, although the people in it had washed in and out much faster recently than they had when Charlotte was a girl. There was still a tight little world of people who owned and ran the banks, people who owned and ran the major law firms, people who owned and ran the largest corporations—or at least sat on their boards; nobody wanted to be exposed, legally, the way a chief operating officer was in this age of regulation. There was still that solid phalanx of people whom the public never saw, deliberately obscure for their own protection. They still all knew each other and sent their children to the same half-dozen prep schools and the same half-dozen universities, and—contrary to public opinion—those things still mattered. They still lived in ways that most ordinary people would find odd and alienating. Charlotte could always tell, when one of her girls brought friends home for the weekend, which were the ones who would last and which were the ones who would not. The ones who would not kept looking for a television set, as if somehow a house was incomplete without it. There was a television set in Charlotte’s house, but it was in the big common room in the servants’ wing.
Now she sat in the big wing chair in the morning room, her embroidery in her lap, and looked out at a late afternoon as grey and depressing as the one on the day Tony died—on the day he was murdered, she amended, because part of taking responsibility was calling things what they really were. The word had no resonance in her mind. Murdered murdered murdered, she thought, and she might as well have been saying kumquat. She kept waiting to feel something besides cold and clearheaded and calm. If she had had a tape of the scene as it had happened, she would have watched it: Tony standing so close to her; Tony’s body jerking backwards; Tony’s face exploding. It had been nothing at all what she had been led to expect from her favorite detective writer—in fact, the only detective writer she read—P.D. James. She might have seen something similar if she’d gone to certain kinds of movies, but she didn’t. The few movies she saw were Italian or French, and usually had to do with the deaths of marriages. That was a concept Charlotte didn’t understand. Marriages did not die, in her opinion, unless they had been improperly made to begin with. Marriages were not about happiness, or compatibility, or sex. It fascinated her to watch people, even fictional people, who seemed to think that getting divorced was like giving back a boy’s fraternity ring, something trivial that you did because your emotions were shallow, or because you were bored and wanted to do something else for a while.
The oddest thing about what had happened when Tony died was the blood. There had been so very much blood. It had come spurting out of his face as if his head were a grapefruit and somebody was squeezing it. There was blood on the slate that lined the edge of the drive. There was blood on the hedges that made a buffer between the slate and the house. Then Tony had turned and taken a step toward her and there was blood on her dress, running down the front of it in rivulets.
On the other side of the room, Charlotte’s oldest daughter, Marianne, stood leaning on the white molded mantle of the fireplace. She had been crying, but all that was left of that was the red bloating around her eyes and mouth. Marianne was a brilliant girl, but not pretty. Charlotte looked away from her to the small Chippendale desk where Miss Parenti had piled the stiff white linen cards she would use to write thank-you notes to the people who sent flowers. She would do every note by hand, and Miss Parenti would provide her with a log that told her some little something about those people she had actually met on one occasion or another. A lot of the flowers would come from people who knew Tony professionally, or who worked at the bank, or who had some other ceremonial reason for marking his passing, and she could acknowledge those formulaically. She had come to hate the flowers that had piled up in her foyer these last few days. She hadn’t expected people to refrain from sending them, even though she had placed one of those notices in the paper—the family would appreciate donations to the Philadelphia Women’s Hospital in lieu of flowers—but she hadn’t anticipated how overwhelmingly awful they would smell. She no longer went out to the front of the house unless she had to, and she never had to. She was grateful for the gates that kept the reporters from pressing their noses against her windows and going through her trash.
Marianne was a senior at Harvard. If this didn’t throw her completely, she would graduate summa and go on to Oxford in the fall. Tony had been tremendously proud of her. The other three girls were more along the lines they were expected to be. Julia was a sophomore at Colby Sawyer, majoring in Dartmouth boys. Cordelia and Sarah were still at the Madeira School in Virginia, dreaming of coming out in the way that debutantes had come out in the thirties. Charlotte had no idea if they were thinking of their father. They weren’t crying openly, as Marianne was, but that said less than it might have in another kind of family.
Marianne shifted from one foot to the other. She was tall and thin, as Tony had been, and she had Tony’s great hooked beak of a nose that had made him look English to people who didn’t know who he was. It made Marianne look lopsided.
“I still don’t understand what you think you’re doing,” she said. “You don’t know anything about the bank. How can you possibly take over where Daddy left off?”
“I don’t intend to take over,” Charlotte said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Then why do you want to sit on the board?”
“Because I like to look out for my own interests. In my mother’s day, women never did that kind of thing. Even when I was growing up, the policy was to keep the girls in the dark and train the boys to take over. But the world changes. Sometimes it even changes for the better. I want to keep an eye on things. I don’t trust David Alden.”
“David won’t take over at the bank,” Marianne said. “He’s too young. It’ll be one of the vice presidents or something, or they’ll bring in somebody from the outside.”
“David will still be there, and he’ll still be in an important position. No matter how the board feels about him—and, by the way, I think the board likes him. Your father liked him—but no matter how they feel, David knows more about what your father was doing and what needs to be done in the wake of his death than anybody else. Sheer prudence will make them keep him on, and I do not delude myself that I’ll be able to change their minds just because I decide to sit on the board. I still think it makes sense to be careful. Your father always thought you might like to go into the bank one day.”
“Go into the bank,” Marianne said. “You sound like Dickens.”
“Of course I don’t. Dickens was a vulgar writer, far more vulgar than that silly man, who was that, Henry Miller. One of the Biddle women gave a party for him back in the days when his books were banned because they were supposed to be pornography, and everybody was incredibly impressed with how avant-garde she was. Even I was impressed, and I was only a child. We were more easily impressed in those days.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense to talk about it?” Marianne said. “He died, for God’s sake. Somebody blew his face off. He was assassinated.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not exaggerating. That’s what the papers are saying. He was assassinated. Some terrorist group killed him because they oppose globalization, or something, and he was one of the chief architects of globalization. You should see the British papers. My roommate had her mother send them to me.”
“The British papers are always foul. There’s no reason to pay attention to them.”
“And then there’s this delay,” Marianne said, as if she hadn’t heard. “It’s been almost five days. It’s going to be six at least before we have the body back, and then we’ll have a wake and a funeral with something that’s— that’s—decomposing.”
Charlotte picked up her embroidery. She didn’t embroider in any serious way. She only liked to have it with her to give herself something to do with her hands. “The casket will be closed for the wake,” she said, “and the embalming will take care of the smell, if that’s what you’re worried about. The delay is unpleasant, but there isn’t anything I could have done about it. The law requires an autopsy in cases of violent death, and in this case there were other considerations pertinent to the investigation—”
“You sound like a press release.”
“—that held up the return of the body to us. There’s no point in making a fuss, especially in public. You know what happens. The papers fill up with oped columns deploring the way in which the rich expect special treatment not available to ordinary mortals.”
“Well, don’t we?”
“Not where it can be reported on in the newspapers, Marianne, no.”
“Doesn’t it bother you? Somebody hated him enough to kill him, somebody he probably didn’t even know, at least not personally.”
Charlotte put the embroidery back in her lap. The truth of it was, she hated embroidery, just as she hated needlework, just as she hated almost all the things her mother had taught her in the way of “ladylike pastimes,” as if the mere fact of having a vagina made it incumbent on her to prick her fingers with needles. Besides, she was bad at it, and she’d never had much patience for what she was bad at.
“Most people,” she said carefully, “do not care who your father was, or what he did. Most people care only about celebrities, and your father made it part of his lifework never to be a celebrity.”
“He’s certainly a celebrity now,” Marianne said. “And you know there are going to be hundreds of people at the funeral. Onlookers. People off the street. And the press. And the police. He’s not going to be able to stay obscure in the midst of all that.”
“It’s not like we’re movie stars,” Charlotte said. “It’s not like we’re the Kennedys. If we maintain a solid policy of noncooperation, it will all blow over in time.”
“Someone will right a book about it.”
“Probably. But he won’t get any help from me.”
“Maybe they’ll make a miniseries of it,” Marianne said. “Isn’t that a wonderful prospect? People are fascinated by these nuts, you know, they really are. Timothy McVeigh. All those people.”
“Timothy McVeigh murdered one hundred sixty-eight people and obliterated most of a block in Oklahoma City. You’re exaggerating again.”
“I’m trying to get you to react,” Marianne said. “God, you’re impossible. You’re worse than impossible. You’re living in a fantasy world.”
“No,” Charlotte said seriously, “the one thing I’m not doing is living in a fantasy world.”
Marianne ran her hand through her hair. It was too long and too thick and too haphazardly cared for. Then she turned around and walked out of the room. Charlotte listened as her footsteps receded down the hall, heavy thuds of expensive running shoes landing on carpet. When Charlotte was sure Marianne was gone, she leaned over and pulled a small folded sheaf of papers out from under her. She’d been reading them when Marianne first came in, but she’d known, instinctively, that she shouldn’t be caught at it. She leaned over, pulled up the ottoman, and put up her feet. Then she flattened the papers on her lap.
THE HARRIDAN REPORT, the first one said, at the very top, as if whoever had desktop published this did not want to waste paper. The Reptilian Connection.
Charlotte ran one delicate fingernail—polished clear, not too long, not too sharp—along the side of her nose.
One of the few things we know for certain about both the Deacon and the Ross families is that they’re part of the reptilian bloodline. They look human, and people who have been brainwashed by the system believe that they are just lucky: lucky to have been born rich; lucky to have been born talented; lucky to have been born better than the rest of us. Well, they were born better than the rest of us, with powers of intelligence and concentration no ordinary human being could possibly attain. They are the descendants of the intermarriage of humans with something the ancients called “gods,” the Serpent Race described in the holy books of every culture from Sumer to Rome. From this hybrid race came the ruling families of all the countries of the world, first in the Middle East and Europe, and then, through the conquests of the British Empire, in Asia, Africa and America.
If you don’t believe me, check for yourself. All forty-two men who have been presidents of the United States can trace their lineages back to Charlemagne, just like the British nobility and the great royal houses of the Bourbons and Saxe-Gotha. This is the “divine right of kings” so vigorously defended for centuries and only apparently abandoned in the tremendous pressure of the world’s peoples for freedom from reptilian rule. The rule did not end, however, and has not ended to this day. It only changed its public face. Now we are presented with “choices” between possible rulers. We can pick between George W. Bush or Al Gore, or between John Major and Tony Blair. The reality is too far under the surface for most people to notice. There is no choice. Bush and Gore are descended from the same bloodlines. So are John Major and Tony Blair. So is the Pope. So is Gorbachev. All our “choices,” between “capitalist” and “communist,” between “democracy” and “dictatorship,” between “liberal” and “conservative,” between “religious” and “athiest,” all of them are false choices, because in each case we are offered nothing but what the Illuminati want us to have. The Illuminati do not care if we call the system we live under “free market” or “social demo-cratic.”They only care that they rule.
We are coming upon a time of great persecution. Anthony van Wyck Ross was not murdered by men and women like us, who know the truth and want to expose it to the world—but the Illuminati will do everything in their power to make it look as if we are at fault, to brand us extremists, terrorists, and lunatics. Anthony van Wyck Ross was murdered by the same people who destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In other words, he was murdered by his own, by a CIA operative on the direct orders of George W. Bush. Long powerful and reliable in the corridors of power, Ross had begun to disintegrate mentally in the last months of his life, the results of alcohol and drug abuse brought on by his attempts to ease the painful memories of the sexual abuse that was the foundation of his training as a member of the Illuminati. It was feared that he would no longer be able to keep the secrets he had been entrusted with. The most dangerous secret, the one thing the Illuminati cannot allow the public to understand at just this point in time, is that the September 11 massacres were carried out on the orders of the United States government, with the help of the British, French, German and United Nations power elites. Ross was himself involved in the planning of those massacres. If he couldn’t shut up—and he couldn’t, not any longer—he would have to be silenced.
Charlotte licked her lips and folded the sheaf of papers in half again. It was like being trapped inside the mind of a lunatic, imprisoned in his skull. She had no idea where this thing had come from, or who had put it squarely in the middle of her desk here in the morning room, so that it would be the first thing she would find. She had no idea who had been leaving them here, for months. She was sure Miss Parenti had had nothing to do with it. She was not sure the servants had not. The idea that somebody who worked for her read this … thing … on a regular basis made her feel as if she had been turned to ice.
She got out of her chair and took the sheaf of papers with her. She should turn them over to the police. She should outline the entire incident, the way they were lying right on top of her green felt ink blotter, where she couldn’t miss them. She should make out a list of the people in her service and the people who had been to visit during the day. She did none of these things. She threw the sheaf of papers in the fire and stood by to watch them burn. She counted the seconds until the flames had turned the papers to ash.
Then she left the morning room and walked down the hall to the small powder room near the back stairs. She needed to throw up.
It would have been better if there had been someone on the street when Father Tibor Kasparian got home—not a big welcoming committee; he wasn’t up for that, and he had a feeling he’d get it whether he wanted it or not in an hour or two—but just someone familiar, bringing home groceries, buying the paper, moving a car that had been parked too long at the curb. Sometimes you needed the ordinary and the everyday. They were all that took the edge off the frightening and bizarre. He thought ahead to the crush that would develop as soon as word got out that he was home. Lida Arkmanian was probably watching from the big plate-glass window in her living room right this minute. When it started, it would be inexorable. People would drift in to Ben-nis’s old apartment, scrupulously not talking about why it was free for somebody else to move into for a month or two, bringing food. Eventually, the women would ignore him and drape themselves over all of Bennis’s furniture to talk about who was getting married and who was getting divorced and who was going to graduate in the spring from what really fancy college in Massachusetts. Paper plates and plastic forks would accumulate on tables, brought in by whichever one of them realized that the last thing he’d want on his first day home was a lot of dishes to do. Books would accumulate on the coffee table in the living room, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with grosgrain ribbon. His suitcases would be laid out on Bennis’s freshly made-up bed. He had no idea what he would do when they were all gone. It hadn’t occurred to him until just this moment that he hadn’t been alone for a single minute since the explosion had ripped through Holy Trinity Church.
There was a cold wind coming down the street as he got out of the car, blowing stray pieces of paper along the gutters. He turned in the direction of the church and tried to get a look, but Bennis was right. There was nothing to see from here. It was too far up, and the church had been set back a little from the sidewalks.
“I think I only imagined I could see it all that time,” she’d told him, while they’d still been at the hospital. “I knew it was there, so I thought any dark space in the vicinity must be the church and I must be seeing it.”
Tibor did not point out to her then, or remind her now, that at the beginning of last week the church had been much closer to the sidewalk than it was now. It had had an extra wall. At least, that was what the news programs had said when he’d watched them on television in the hospital, even though the doctor hadn’t been sure he ought to be allowed. There had been one clear photograph of the front of Holy Trinity in daylight, the wall mostly gone, the vestibule destroyed, the long rows of pews covered in rock and sand. It had been taken from too far back for Tibor to be able to tell what had happened to the altar. It made him nauseated to realize that he had not seen the actual church since the explosion had happened. He hadn’t been here to see it. He thought he would have gone crazy in his hospital bed if he’d had to listen to nonstop news reports about the explosion, but there weren’t any. The explosion was not big news. The death of Anthony van Wyck Ross was.
He went up the steps to the tall stone house where Bennis and Gregor lived, along with old George Tekemanian on the ground floor and Grace Feinman on the fourth. As soon as he stepped into the foyer, he could hear Grace’s harpsichord above him. She was playing Bach. He turned toward the mailboxes and stopped. His mail would not be here. It would be down at the apartment behind the church, where he was not allowed to go because of the structural damage caused by the blast.
“What do they do with my mail?” he said to Donna and Bennis coming up behind him.
“They leave it at your apartment,” Bennis said. “Donna and I went over and got it and brought it to you in the hospital, except for what are obviously condolence cards. We left them here.”
“I thought nobody could go into the apartment.”
“That was only the first couple of days,” Donna said. “While they were working things out. We’ve been going over there all the time, since. Bennis has been packaging up your books.”
“Don’t worry,” Bennis said. “I’ve been classifying them and labeling the boxes. There’s a crack in the wall of your bedroom and a leak in the roof there now. That’s the wall the apartment shared with the back of the church vestibule and the first part of the church room, the—”
“Sacristy,” Tibor said.
“That, yes.” Bennis looked relieved. “Anyway, there’s a crack there and the roof is damaged. That’s why you can’t go back right away. But it’s not like the church itself. You could go over there and look through things when you feel stronger.”
“Where are the books you put in boxes?”
“In my back room,” Donna said. “Don’t worry. Russ is terribly impressed. He said he never realized you had such a range before, like with the science books.”
Tibor could have told her that he didn’t really understand the science books, which was true. He read Richard Dawkins and made notes on his books, but he found the details impossible to assimilate into a brain that had been trained from adolescence in literary explication. Instead he started up the big swing-back flight of steps that went to the second floor. At the landing, he paused and looked out the window. There was nothing to see but the wall of the building next door. He went up the rest of the flight and paused politely before Bennis’s front door.
“Stay as long as you like,” Bennis said, brushing past him with a suitcase and pulling him along with her as she went. “I’ve got no need for this place at the moment, and I won’t have for a while. Spread out. My cleaning lady will be in twice a week. If you leave your laundry out on the bed, she’ll do it for you. There’s enough food in the refrigerator for a week, and there will be more. You know how that works—”
“Stop,” Tibor said.
“We’re making him tired,” Donna said. “Maybe we should let him take a nap.”
“I don’t need a nap,” Tibor said. “I’m fine. I was always fine.”
“You were so fine, they kept you in the hospital for observation for over four days,” Bennis said.
Tibor shook his head. “They kept me in the hospital because you guaranteed the bill.”
“Did you really?” Donna said.
“Better safe than sorry,” Bennis said. Then she looked away. “God, I’ve started talking in clichés. I thought disaster was supposed to bring out the best in people.”
Tibor moved into the apartment, through the foyer, into the living room. Bennis’s papier-mâché models were everywhere, lunar landscapes next to verdant green hills, knights and ladies leaning into each other next to castles with outsized towers that looked tall enough to rival Babel. This was what Bennis used the apartment for, now that she spent all of her private time with Gregor. She wrote here, and she built her models so that she’d be able to see the landscapes she was inventing. Tibor sat down on the long sofa and looked out the window at Lida Arkmanian’s living room. No one was in it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Bennis asked, sitting down in the big overstuffed chair that faced the couch. The coffee table was huge and square and— if you really looked at it—in the shape of a gigantic antique book lying on its side. Donna stayed standing in the back, moving from foot to foot, restless.
“I’m fine,” Tibor said. “I need to talk to my bishop. There was no liturgy here on Sunday, because I was in the hospital—”
“Some people went over to Radnor,” Donna said quickly. “It was all right.”
“It was not all right,” Tibor said. “We will have to do something about the coming Sunday. I will have to get permissions. There are details to be worked out. Then there are the other things. The insurance. The rebuilding. If we’re going to rebuild.”
“Of course we’re going to rebuild,” Donna said. “We’ve even got a committee going on the project already.”
“Mmmm,” Tibor said. “Do you know that this was not built to be an Armenian church? It was built for the Greeks, and then they moved out of the neighborhood and we took it over. That was before my time, of course. It was before Gregor’s time, unless he was an infant, and maybe not even then. Anyway, when we rebuild, we’ll be able to fix the things we could never fix before. The iconostasis can be replaced with a veil. The pictures can be adjusted. I never minded it the way it was, though. It seemed—ecumenical.”
“Oh,” Donna said.
Tibor got up off the couch and went to the window. Pressing his face against the glass and twisting the side of his body almost 180 degrees, he could just see the black hollow where the front of the church should have been—or maybe he couldn’t. Maybe that was an illusion too. He went back to the couch and sat down. He looked at the things that had been left on the coffee table: Vanity Fair; National Geographic; a Swiss army knife; a flashlight; a book of matches, untouched. He was not doing anything intelligent, and he was beginning to shake with cold the way he had on and off in the hospital. “Panic attacks,” the doctor had called them, but Tibor was sure that wasn’t what they were.
“I’m going to go make some coffee,” Donna said, heading out for the kitchen.
Bennis leaned forward on her chair. “You’re shaking again. And sweating. You should have let the doctor give you some sedatives.”
“I don’t need sedatives.”
“You need something.”
“Will I interfere with you here? Do you need the apartment to do your work?”
“No. Tibor—”
Tibor waved her away. “It doesn’t matter.” That was true too. It didn’t matter in any way she would understand, and he didn’t have the words he needed to explain things to her. He could have explained them to Gregor, but Gregor was not in sight. It wasn’t just the church. It was everything. People said that the change had come because of the events of September 11, but that wasn’t true. September 11 was an effect, not a cause. The change had come long before that, and it had less to do with violence than with— what? He wished he could get more interested in what had happened to Anthony van Wyck Ross.
“Where is Gregor?” he asked.
“Upstairs in the apartment, as far as I know,” Bennis said. “I’m surprised he isn’t down here already. Do you want me to go get him?”
“No, no. Maybe he is taking a nap. It would be good for him.”
“Do you want anything?” Bennis said.
Tibor fluttered his hands in the air. “When I first came to America, I lived in St. Mark’s Place, in the east village, in Manhattan. Did you know that? I didn’t have a church then. I had a part-time job translating for a publishing company. Every week on Monday I would go in and get my projects. The rest of the time I would spend in my apartment working. Except that every day in the late afternoons I would walk a long way to have coffee in a big café where other immigrants went, but only in the afternoons, because at night the same place was full of young people. I was the only one from Armenia. A lot of the rest of them were Russians.”
“And?”
“And,” Tibor said, “nobody was crazy. And from what I remember, nobody was crazy in the rest of the country, either. People didn’t think that magic was real. They weren’t looking to burn witches. They weren’t looking for Satan under every bedspread. Do you know what Satan is, really?”
“The most favored angel of God who took up arms against heaven and was defeated by St. Michael and sent to Hell,” Bennis said. “I remember from my course in Milton.”
“Satan is willful ignorance,” Tibor said. “Satan is superstition. Satan is what we all do when we take the easy way out and look for magic and potions and plots to explain life to us, and now we all seem to do it. The president of the United States does it. They think it’s religion, Bennis, but it is not. It wasn’t when we burned witches in the Middle Ages and it isn’t now. It’s a kind of brain disease.”
“You think the explosion in the church had something to do with burning witches?” Bennis looked at sea.
Tibor waved it away. “Maybe I will give a homily on Satan the next time I celebrate the liturgy. Except that I don’t know if I could make sense. I wish people were better than they are.”
“So does everybody.”
“I wish people were more like people,” Tibor said.
Bennis got up. “I’m going to run upstairs and get Gregor. He wanted to know when you got back. And don’t tell me I can’t wake him up.”
“I do not believe in witches,” Tibor said. “And I do not believe in UFO abductions. Or conspiracies. Or miraculous healings at prayer meetings held in auditoriums where the healer is on a stage. Or that God put fossils in the earth to deceive people of little faith into believing that evolution had occurred. But I do believe in God. And I do believe in evil.”
“If I hurry, I can get Gregor down here before the crowds arrive,” Bennis said. “Lida and Sheila and Hannah made you something for a coming-home present. They want to present it to you personally.”
“You think I’ve become as insane as I think they are,” Tibor said.
“No,” Bennis said. “I think you’re still incredibly upset. Give me a moment. I’ll find Gregor.”
She crossed the room and went behind him, into the foyer. He heard the apartment’s door open and then close again. Donna came back in from the kitchen with a big mug of black coffee that she put down in front of him on the coffee table.
“There,” she said. “That should help. I made the Turk—ah, the Armenian kind, although how you can drink that much caffeine without going into cardiac arrest, I just don’t know.”
Tibor looked into the mug. The coffee was as thick as mud, the way it was supposed to be. He did sound as crazy as the people he was talking about, who probably didn’t sound crazy at all to most people most of the time. They did their shopping. They went to work. They paid their mortgages and mowed their lawns. They just thought that it was really true that people rode around on broomsticks and shape-shifted themselves into ravenous wolves and stole children through the pages of fantasy books.
He put his hands inside his jacket and felt the thickness of paper in his inside breast pocket. It had survived the blast, and the hospital stay, and been there for him to find when he got dressed to wait for Bennis early this afternoon. He’d half-forgotten about it.
“Tell me,” he asked Donna. “Do you believe there is a guardian angel always watching over you and everything you do?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” Donna said. “Am I supposed to believe it?”
“Never mind,” Tibor said.
He picked up the coffee mug in both hands and took a drink so long it made his throat feel scalded and raw.
For David Alden, it was the worst week he could remember, ever, in his entire life, and all he really wanted was to get out of the New York office and back to Philadelphia. In another time, on another planet—back before Tony was murdered; back when all he had to worry about was getting the data on the Price Heaven mess in place on time—he would have taken off for the rest of the week and only resurfaced when he wanted to, or thought he could no longer get away with it. Now there was no time, and that was true even though he was not Tony’s heir apparent. He knew Charlotte thought he was, or at least thought he intended to end up at the head of the bank, but the idea was laughable. He was far too young, and he’d had far too little experience. If he did everything right, he might curry enough favor with whoever the new man would be to stay on here. He might not. It was less than pleasingly sentimental, but he’d updated his résumé and FedExed it to a headhunter less than two days after Tony was pronounced dead at the scene at the Around the World Harvest Ball. Ever since, he’d had one ear trained for the sound of other banks looking for talent. He did not sit at Tony’s desk when he worked. It would have made sense if he had, in terms of efficiency, but it gave him the creeps. He did not make calls from Tony’s phone, either, although he answered the ones that came in. He had taken up residence in the office’s corner sitting area: a couch, two chairs, and a coffee table bordered on two sides by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on Wall Street and lower Manhattan. When the World Trade Center had collapsed in 2001, they had been forced out of these offices for nearly two weeks while inspectors made sure there was no structural damage to the building and window installers replaced the windows on every floor of the side that faced the disaster. Then the cleaning women had had to come in, to sweep the broken glass and the other debris from the floors. Tony’s Persian carpet, flown in from Iraq in the days before Saddam Hussein was supposed to be Evil Incarnate, had been destroyed. David Alden did not understand politics in the way politics was played by people like Hussein and the Trade Center bombers. War seemed, to him, so obviously counterproductive. It destroyed economies, and in destroying economies it destroyed markets. David understood markets, and had since he was in high school—although he resisted using the words high school, because in his case, they were so clearly affected. Groton was not a “high school” the way anybody who had gone to a public high school would understand it, but David didn’t like prep school, either. That sounded worse than affected. That sounded deliberately off-putting, as if he were not only an elitist—which he was—but a snob. America could be a very schizophrenic place to live, if you were the kind of person he was. He had tried to get that across to a British girlfriend he’d had for a while, but it had gone right past her. To Rosamund, being someone who went to famous schools and had been required to dress for dinner in a jacket and tie since you were eight years old was just a fact of life, and if other people resented it it was because they lacked both character and proportion.
The Price Heaven documentation was spread out in front of him in variegated stacks of paper, freshly printed out this morning so that he could get a physical sense of what was happening here. Actually, there was no doubt what was happening here. Price Heaven was in free-fall. Even the drastic measures David had outlined to Tony might not suffice to correct it. If they didn’t, Price Heaven would file for bankruptcy—real bankruptcy, David thought, not just Chapter 11—and then the shit would truly hit the fan, because the bank was exposed on this one big-time. David had done the calculations a dozen times. There was no way around it. In all, the bank had loaned Price Heaven something close to a billion dollars outright, and provided spot financing and stock-price support in a myriad number of small ways. The small ways were adding up.
The door to the office opened. David looked up from where he was sit-ting—on the floor, with his legs spread out in front of him and his jacket tossed onto the couch behind him—and saw Paul Delafield coming in. Paul Delafield was executive vice president in charge of development, a fancy way of saying the man who found new projects for the bank to invest in, the man who had brought Price Heaven to the bank. Paul Delafield looked pale, as he had been looking pale for weeks. If he was mourning Tony’s loss, there was no evidence of it on his face.
Paul came over to the little sitting area and dropped down on one of the chairs. “Well?” he said. “Should we all batten down the hatches?”
“At least.” David thought about getting up, but didn’t see the point. There were people he had to fear in the bank, but Paul Delafield wasn’t one of them. “The good news is that it’s not Enron. There’s no evidence of accounting fraud.”
“And the bad news?”
“We’re going to be lucky as hell of they don’t implode completely. And I mean completely. Chapter eleven bankruptcy. Public liquidation.”
“Shit.”
“I agree.” David bent over the papers again, but he couldn’t keep it up. He didn’t have his heart in it. He already knew what was here, and now that he’d spent a few hours making the reality physical—turning it into stacks of physical paper so that he could visualize it—he had a knowledge of the internal workings of Price Heaven far more complete than its own directors ever had had. Which was a good part of the problem. Price Heaven might not be in the mess it was in if its directors knew what they were doing. It completely amazed him that so many people rose to the heights of American business with IQs in the single digits, and not because they were hereditary legacies, either. The chairman of the board of Price Heaven was Jerry Poldawicz, who grew up in Levittown and did his undergraduate degree at SUNY New Paltz. The CEO was Tom O’Hay, whose father had been a bricklayer and mother a nurse. There were probably a dozen Price Heaven employees running cash registers in Price Heaven outlets who could have done a better job of managing a company than either of those two.
“So,” Paul said. “Where do we go from here?”
“Don’t ask me,” David said. “I just make recommendations. I have no power at all about what recommendations the board will decide to follow.”
“What recommendations do you intend to make?”
David sighed. “All the layoffs we discussed last week, before Tony—before Tony. Then we need to close at least a third of the stores. They’ve got stores in the oddest places, small outlets that have been doing next to no business for years. It’s bizarre. Once they opened a store, nothing could get them to close it. And I do mean nothing. So they’ve got little hole-in-the-wall places in small towns off the highway that nobody can get to because nobody knows they’re there, but nobody would want to get to even if they knew, because there’s nothing at the end of the ride but a kind of mom-and-pop novelty place with not much to buy. Some of them were opened in the 1940s. They should have been closed or moved to malls years ago. It’s insane.”
Paul Delafield looked away, out those big windows that looked over lower Manhattan. He didn’t seem to be seeing anything. David had always found it interesting to see who was and who was not emotionally affected by the World Trade Center collapse. Some people—Paul Delafield—seemed to live in an emotional vacuum.
“She’s not going to like it,” Paul said.
“Who isn’t?”
“Charlotte.”
“She’ll just have to live with it, then,” David said. “There’s really no way around this. We should have done something a long time ago. We’re sicken-ingly exposed, and we don’t have the excuse we have with governments, where we can say we loaned Argentina all this money to make sure nobody starved or their economy could keep running. This is Price Heaven. It’s an old but mostly derelict company that under other circumstances would have been run underground by Wal-Mart long ago.”
Paul turned around in his chair, put his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward. “She’s been on the phone to me all morning, Charlotte has. She thinks it looks bad, laying off all those thousands of people right before Christmas.”
“Everybody stages layoffs right before Christmas. That’s the end of the fiscal year. It’s that or your paper looks awful when the accounting gets done.”
“She says she thinks it’s that kind of thing that got Tony killed. She got something in the mail, some piece of literature, she called it. Something that said that Tony was ripping off the proletariat, or something like that.”
“Somehow, I can’t imagine Charlotte reading Communist propaganda.”
“Still.” Paul Delafield was stubborn. “She’s going to be able to sit on the board, you know that. She’s going to have control of a tremendous amount of stock, both her own and whatever Tony’s left her—”
“Tony may have left the estate to his daughters. Or to the oldest one. It isn’t as if Charlotte is in any need of money.”
“Even with just her own stock, she could make a lot of trouble. Wouldn’t the daughter side with her? Or is it one of those Greek tragedy things?”
“I don’t think I’d go that far,” David said, “but I don’t think the daughter and the mother see eye-to-eye on much. Marianne, that’s what her name is. Sorry. My mind goes blank sometimes.”
“Charlotte says it looks bad when companies lay off thousands of workers right before Christmas, like they’re all interested in being Scrooge. She thinks we should wait until after the first of the year.”
“Price Heaven can’t wait. If it tries, it will collapse completely.”
“There’s the Christmas buying season. We’re right in the middle of that. That could help them instead of hurt them.”
“Christmas is in five weeks. The only things that make that kind of money in five weeks are fantasy movies. Too bad Price Heaven didn’t produce Fellowship of the Ring.”
“It does look bad,” Paul said. “I can see her point. And don’t think the public doesn’t know the banks are behind those things when they happen. Then all the stories come out. Tony Ross made thirty-two million dollars in salary and bonuses last year, and what he got the bonus for was making sure Price Heaven laid off a bunch of minimum-wage salesladies who aren’t going to be able to go on making the payments on their daughters’ medical treatments. And then it will come out that Price Heaven hired practically everybody part-time, so most of their workers didn’t get health insurance, not even crappy HMOs, and at the same time the Price Heaven executives and us here at the bank all have top-of-the-line fee-for-service plans that pay for everything from extracting ingrown toenails to having yourself cloned.”
David sat back, curious. “So?” he said. “What about that? That’s the way the system works, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s the way the system works.”
“Do you want to change it?”
“Of course I don’t want to change it.” Paul Delafield looked disgusted. “The system does work. You know that. People have to expect a few dislocations. They have to expect—”
“What? Working seventy hours a week at two different part-time jobs and bringing down three hundred and fifty dollars gross before taxes and no benefits?”
“That’s not my fault. They should have stayed in school. They should have learned useful skills for the marketplace.”
“Just as a matter of curiosity,” David said, “what do you think would happen if they all did stay in school and learn some useful skills for the marketplace? What do you think would happen if they all went to Harvard and Wharton?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Paul said.
David laughed. “Tony was smarter than you are about these things. At least he got the point.”
Paul Delafield looked like he was pouting. “Still,” he said. “She’s got a point. With all the things that have been happening. That out there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the window, in what he thought was the direction of the rubble of the World Trade Center. “And Tony dying. Being murdered. There’s a lot going on. People are … restless.”
“What’s the matter, Paul? Are you expecting someone to shoot you in your bed?”
“Maybe we ought to give that possibility more consideration than we do,” Paul said. “It doesn’t hurt to be intelligent about the way we go about things. It doesn’t hurt to be careful.”
David looked across the stacks of papers on Price Heaven. All of a sudden, he felt as if his head were going to explode. Paul Delafield was a profoundly stupid man. All the years he’d spent at all the right schools—Hotchkiss, and Yale, and Wharton—had left no mark on him at all. He might as well have been born ten seconds ago with a program tape playing in his head and nothing else alive in him but the instinct for self-preservation. Suddenly, David had to get out of there, out of the bank, out of New York, out of his life. He pushed aside the stack of papers he’d been working on and stood up. He wished he were taller than Paul Delafield. For some reason, he thought that that would be a moral victory.
“Charlotte isn’t going to like it,” Paul repeated.
David turned his back to him. “It doesn’t matter what Charlotte is going to like,” he said. “I’ll take care of Charlotte.”