It was not the middle of the night, but the police cars and the evidence vans and the ambulances were lit up as if it must have been. In the end, it didn’t matter who among the civilians may have died. The town drunk and the president of the United States got differing levels of response, but neither got the response accorded to the lowest level of police officer. Even the death of police officers that other officers didn’t like rated a full-court press investigation. Even the deaths of police officers from other jurisdictions, or on vacation, or undercover, or in disguise—Gregor couldn’t remember when he’d known the death of a police officer not to bring out the visceral animal in the department who got the call. That was part reaction and part insurance. The safest course for any police department was to let it be known on the street that hurting one of their own would bring down the wrath of God and worse. The reaction was, Gregor supposed, inevitable. When you train men and women for months at a time and then make them work together for years under pressure, they begin to feel like part of a single organism. Crap, Gregor thought. Maybe it was none of these things. Maybe it was just the obvious, which is that people don’t like to feel personally attacked, and police officers always took the murders of police officers personally.
The odd thing, Gregor admitted to himself, was that the city police had been so quick to assume that Steve Bridge was one of their own. Not only did most local cops have very little use for the FBI—and often for good reason, Gregor had to admit—but Bridge had had the kind of job that local cops had the least use for. He was going undercover, but only to spy on a group whose ideas he and his bosses didn’t like. Gregor knew there had been a time when local cops had been just as zealous in the hunting down of Communists as they were at the hunting down of sneak thieves. In the red scares of the twenties and the McCarthy-inspired witch-hunts of the fifties, local police had gone out of their way to aid and abet first the paranoia of the United States Congress and then the Bureau at its worst; breaking up “radical” meetings, locking people in holding cells for attending union organizing drives, shutting down printing presses to make sure no “subversive” pamphlets got out onto the street where somebody interested might read them. That was a long time ago. Somewhere in the sixties, a sea change had come. The Bureau was still too often preoccupied with “subversives,” and Gregor was sure there were sheriffs out in Omaha and Kansas City who were preoccupied with them too, but the local cops had come to their senses and decided to leave well enough alone. If it was armed, you had to worry about it. If it wasn’t armed, it didn’t matter if it was preaching the eventual second coming of the Great Banana, it made no sense to do anything except leave it alone.
Unless you were the police department of Penryn, Pennsylvania, Gregor thought, who had refused to direct traffic at the annual YMCA triathlon because, it said, the YMCA was encouraging witchcraft by reading Harry Potter books aloud to children in its after-school program. Maybe Tibor was right. Maybe the world really was going crazy. Maybe he himself was going crazy, standing next to John Jackman’s big black limousine and looking out across this rundown backstreet neighborhood as if this was all supposed to be making some kind of sense.
“What’s wrong?” John asked, coming back from a low conference with two of the uniformed cops now watching the scene. He looked around at the sky and the neighborhood and shook his head. “God, this is awful. Have you seen him yet?”
“Briefly.”
“There are maggots in his eyes,” John said. “I’ve seen a lot in my time, but that was unbelievable. Christ, you’d think whoever it was could have buried him.”
“Here?” Gregor asked.
They both looked around again. John shrugged. “Okay, maybe not here. But wouldn’t it have made sense to move him?”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “Assuming we’re dealing with the same person as the person who murdered Tony and Charlotte Ross, and assuming one person murdered both of them—”
“I think we can assume,” John said drily. “At least about Tony and Charlotte Ross. I admit this makes something of a mess of things. At least it’s within the city limits.”
“Why at least?”
“Because now I have control of it,” John said. “I don’t want to say anything against the Lower Merion police, because they do a good job and they mean well, but they don’t deal with the real trouble out there and you know it. They don’t have the experience. And we do.”
“You ever heard of Penryn, Pennsylvania?”
“No.”
“Last fall sometime, a year ago, the police department there refused to do its usual duty at an annual YMCA event because it said the YMCA was encouraging children to engage in witchcraft because it was reading them the Harry Potter books.”
“And?” John Jackman said.
“Well, John, what the hell? Is that usual? Does that sort of thing happen so often that it doesn’t surprise you? Let me ask you a question Tibor asked me. When did we get to the point that we forgot that witches are pretend?”
“Does this have something to do with the case? With any part of the case? With the bombing of Holy Trinity Church? With the death of Steve Bridge? With anything?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Except that I want to answer yes, because it does, just not in the way you think you mean it. I get embarrassed for what’s happening to this country, I really do. It’s like we all took acid at a showing of Alice in Wonderland and now we think we’re really all the way down the rabbit hole.”
“Maybe you ought to go home to bed,” John said. “Maybe you’re coming down with something. Because you sure as hell aren’t making a lot of sense.”
“I want to go over there and take a better look,” Gregor said. “Can I do that without screwing up everything from fingerprints to footprints to DNA samples?”
“Sure. Tell the boys I sent you. Wear gloves.”
John Jackman meant latex gloves, which Gregor didn’t have, although he was sure one of the officers over at the scene would. He walked over and nodded to the uniformed man on duty. His progress was not challenged. By now, everybody at the scene probably knew he’d arrived in the company of the commissioner of police. The scene was a vacant lot between two small frame houses, overgrown with the kinds of vegetation that grow on vacant lots: a lot of grass, brown and dead in the cold; some small shrubs; too many boxes and crates and piles of debris. The police had put a wooden plank down leading from the sidewalk to the body itself, so that officers needing to come and go wouldn’t muck up the scene any more than they already had, but Gregor didn’t think that it had really been needed. The closer he got, the stronger the smell got. It was a wonder someone hadn’t noticed it long before now—or maybe they had, and maybe they had complained, but the city had dismissed it as just another mess from a pile of garbage left on a postcard-stamp bit of land nobody wanted or wanted to claim.
Gregor came to a stop about a foot behind the two plainclothes detectives who were standing directly over the body. Right here, the stench was overwhelming, and the body itself was still visible and uncovered on the ground. Gregor didn’t know if it had maggots coming out of its eyes, but it was badly decomposed, and at that stage of decomposition that made the most impact. The skin was black and had rotted away from the muscle and bone in several places along the jaw and the top of the hands. The skin along the nose was wet and oozing. Gregor shook his head. The plainclothesman closest to him turned around and nodded.
“It’s Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “The commissioner’s friend.”
Gregor had no way of knowing if that was being said sarcastically or not. He decided not to worry about it. “How do you do?” he said, nodding as well to the other plainclothesman, who had turned around when he heard Gregor and his partner talking. “I don’t mean to get in your way. I was just wondering how you knew this was Steve Bridge.”
The first plainclothesman shrugged. “I don’t guess we do, absolutely, just yet. We’ll have to take the body in for identification and DNA samples and all the rest of it. But we’ve had a heads-up on him for days—”
“This complete asshole of an FBI guy lost contact with his own partner and didn’t call the disappearance in for days,” the other plainclothesman said. “Can you believe it? I mean, who in Christ’s name—”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” the first plainclothesman said. “You know how I feel about taking the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Christ,” the second plainclothesman said. “You’ve got no idea what a pain in the ass you’ve gotten to be since you got born-again.”
Gregor cleared his throat. “Steve Bridge,” he said, directing their attention back to the problem at hand. “How did you find him? Who found him?”
“We don’t know,” the first plainclothesman said. “The precinct got an anonymous call about, maybe, two hours ago. Body in the vacant lot. You could smell the stench for blocks. That kind of thing. They didn’t think anything of it, because you couldn’t smell the stench for blocks—”
“That’s because of the cold,” the second plainclothesman said. “The damned thing has been out here refrigerated for however long it’s been. A couple of weeks. But you know what it’s been like. There hasn’t been a day with temps over thirty-five since October.”
“Yeah, well,” the first plainclothesman said, “that only does so much. It’s not like he was frozen. That would have been different. But the local precinct sent somebody out, just in case. And he walks in here and finds this.”
Gregor nodded. “I’m surprised he wasn’t visible from the sidewalk.”
“Too much in the way of shrubbery,” the first plainclothesman said, “and then there’s all the garbage around here. If people saw anything, they probably thought some old bum had come and ditched his clothes.”
“Then I’m surprised some kid hasn’t run in here and discovered this before now,” Gregor said. “Kids play in vacant lots, don’t they? They did when I was growing up.”
The first plainclothesman shrugged. “Maybe that was the cold too. Maybe it’s been too cold to play outside. I don’t know. Maybe there aren’t that many kids on this block.”
Gregor looked around. A small crowd had gathered, inevitably, on the road and on the far sidewalk from the place where all the vehicles were parked. It seemed to consist almost entirely of women, old ones, young ones, middle-aged ones, all wrapped up in heavy woolen coats and scarves and gloves. There were no children that he could see. He turned back to the body.
“So your man got here and found the body and called in for help. Then what?”
“Then the usual,” the first plainclothesman said.
“Think of it as escalation,” the second plainclothesman said. “First the uniforms got here, and the vehicles, and the ambulance, and then they called us in. One of the uniforms thought he recognized him. Although how anybody could do that is beyond me.” He looked down at the body and shuddered. “Jesus Christ, but you see bad things on this job.”
“How about cause of death?” Gregor asked. “Or is it too early to tell? Have you checked the body at all?”
“He’s got a bullet hole in the side of his head,” the second plainclothesman said. “If you went around to this side, you can see it. Small hole. We’re talking a rifle, I’d guess, maybe fired from some distance away. But you can see it. Come and look.”
Gregor did come and look, very carefully, not getting off the plank. It was true. The bullet hole was clearly there, and it just as clearly could not have been anything else, but it was small. He looked up and around. There were buildings on every side, some of them close. The only really open space was the vacant lot itself, and the short stretch of sidewalk that separated it from the road.
“You’re going to have to do a door-to-door around here,” he said. “Especially if forensics tells you what you’re expecting to hear, and the shot was fired at a distance. You’d think somebody would have heard something. Even if it took place at night.”
“What makes you think it took place at night?” the second plainclothes-man said.
“Day is too risky,” Gregor said, not wanting to point out that the other two murders he’d seen something of in the last week had both taken place at night, or at least at early evening. There was no reason for these men to assume that the three deaths were automatically connected. Gregor wasn’t even sure why he was so sure they were. “Thank you,” he told both the men, suddenly catching sight of the tiny fish pin tacked to the first plainclothesman’s suit lapel. The first plainclothesman was wearing a heavy coat, unbuttoned but still wrapped tightly against his chest. The lapel hadn’t been visible before.
Gregor turned away and went back down the ramp to John Jackman, who was leaning against the side of his limousine and watching the action. Somebody had brought him a coffee. Gregor wished somebody would bring him a coffee too.
“Well?” Jackman asked when Gregor got back to the car.
“Bullet hole in the right side of the skull, small but obvious. The detectives are guessing a rifle. I would too. Still, you won’t know until you know. Definitely fired at a distance.”
“That you know?”
“If it hadn’t been, the entry wound would have been a lot larger,” Gregor said. “The bottom line, though, is that it’s the same M.O. Virtually identical. Of course, we have no way of knowing the time of day, but I’d be willing to bet we were talking about evening or night, probably evening. It’s dark enough.”
“And that would be in keeping with an identical M.O.?”
“Something like that. Listen, John, where are we, exactly? Near Adelphos House yes. It didn’t take us too long to get here. What about Kathi Mitten-dorf’s place?”
“Nearly two miles in that direction,” John said, pointing at the horizon. “I don’t know, Gregor, what are we near? It’s an inner-city minority neighborhood, mostly Spanish now, working-class, not a war zone. The schools suck, but then all the schools in Philadelphia suck, except the private ones and a few of the charters. There are dozens of neighborhoods like this all over the city. They’re not really ‘near’ anything except maybe each other, and sometimes they’re not even near each other.”
“Kathi Mittendorf lives in a neighborhood like this,” Gregor said. “The same general atmosphere. Frame houses, some of them three-deckers, all of them run-down. I doubt if it’s a minority neighborhood, though.”
“Ethnic, then,” Jackman said confidently. “The kind of place that revolves around the local church. Catholic, Lutheran, different churches for different neighborhoods. It’s all going, Gregor. Even the poorer people are beginning to move on out to the Main Line. In a few more years, there’ll be nothing left but the very poor and the very rich. And not very many of the very rich. This isn’t New York. They move on out to the Main Line too.”
“In New York, they move on out to Westchester and Connecticut.”
“Yeah, well. They still have Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue and the Upper East Side. I’m sorry to be such a pessimist, but I don’t like what’s happening. I haven’t liked it for a long time. And you put this other stuff in it, this stuff like America on Alert and, yes, God help me, all the stupidity surrounding the Harry Potter books, you put that mental set into the mix and you’re going for real trouble. I keep waiting for something to happen. I’m not sure what.”
“Riots?”
“No,” Jackman said. “I’m embarrassed to say it, but when I saw the World Trade Center thing, I thought it was that. I thought it was one of our own, another Tim McVeigh, a whole rash of Tim McVeighs, and the whole thing was about to crash down on our heads. And then the anthrax thing did turn out to be a Tim McVeigh, didn’t it?”
“I think it turned out to be a lone nut,” Gregor said. “Not Tim McVeigh so much as the Unabomber.”
“Whatever. The landscape’s changed. Policing’s changed. Everything is caught up in this crap, and that includes a big chunk of the guys on the force, and I’ll be damned if I know what to do about it. Never mind me. You want to go home?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I think I do.”
There was one advantage to being driven around in a limousine, in spite of the fact that it made Gregor a little uncomfortable, and especially uncomfortable when he was with John Jackman, who loved the experience out of all proportion to its significance. The advantage was that he had his hands free to write, and that he was far enough in the back of the vehicle not to need to mentally apply the brakes every time the driver did something that made him want to cringe. All drivers made Gregor Demarkian want to cringe more often than not. Bennis and Donna caused him to feel grateful for traffic lights.
As soon as they had pulled away from the scene, Gregor pulled out his notebook and started jotting. John Jackman sat on the other side of the seat and watched him.
“I could never figure out what you were writing down all the time,” John said. “You never seemed to read those notebooks. Why do you write in them?”
“It helps me remember things.” Gregor finished the page and looked it over. It wasn’t true that he didn’t read what he’d written. “This is what I need somebody to do. First, that idea of yours about the picture of Kathi Mitten-dorf. Can we get one fast and get it out for Krystof Andrechev to see?”
“Sure. Have it done in a couple of hours.”
“It may be harder to get a picture than you think.”
“No, it won’t. She was being watched by the FBI, remember? They’ve got surveillance pictures, and our department has copies.”
“Fair enough,” Gregor said. “I just want to know, as soon as possible, if she was the one who brought the gun to Cavanaugh Street.”
“Do you think she was?”
“Yes. If she wasn’t, my whole theory goes to hell, so let’s hope I’m not wrong. I hate having to start again this late in the day. It wastes time.”
“You think Kathi Mittendorf bombed Holy Trinity Church? Or you think she murdered Tony and Charlotte Ross? And Steve Bridge, if they’re all connected.”
“They’re all connected,” Gregor said, “unless, as I mentioned, Krystof An-drechev doesn’t identify Kathi Mittendorf, at which point I don’t know what’s going on. As for the other things …” Gregor shrugged. “I don’t think she’s killed anybody, no. About Holy Trinity Church, it depends. My guess is not. I don’t think he would have entrusted her with anything that important. Not, as it turned out, that it made much difference.”
“I love it when you’re being inscrutable. It satisfies my need to explode ethnic stereotypes. Who’s ‘he’?”
“Michael Harridan.”
“You’ve found Michael Harridan? I thought you said Michael Harridan didn’t exist.”
“No, I never said that. Obviously, Michael Harridan exists. He writes a newsletter. He writes a lot of editions of a newsletter. Here’s something I’d like to know, just for curiosity’s sake. How often does that newsletter come out? I’m willing to bet almost anything that it’s started coming out a lot more frequently in, say, the last six months.”
“He’s been planning all this for the last six months?”
“At least. Maybe longer.”
“So where is he?” John Jackman said. “You can’t just say he exists and committed a bunch of murders and not tell us where he is. We want to talk to him. The Lower Merion police want to talk to him. After what we saw back there, the FBI is going to want to talk to him too, and big time.”
“We have talked to him,” Gregor said. “Or at least I have. I have no idea what your people have been doing about him one way or the other. The problem is, proving he’s himself, so to speak. Or rather, proving he’s not himself, part of the time. Do you know off the top of your head when the bomb went off in Holy Trinity Church?”
“I think it was just about eight-thirty,” John Jackman said, “or a little before. Why?”
“I was thinking about the principle of calculated risk. He calculates a lot of risk, Mr. Harridan does. If he wanted to be as sure as he could be that he wasn’t going to kill somebody—and he could never have been one hundred percent sure—he’d have had that bomb go off at midnight, when there was a good chance nobody at all would be in the church and nobody at all would be on the street. That’s a very conservative neighborhood in some ways.”
“I’ve noticed. Why did he want to make sure nobody would be killed? I thought that that’s what these guys did. They went out and murdered a bunch of people in the name of home, the flag, apple pie, and an interpretation of the United States Constitution so wrongheaded it could qualify for the founding document of a totalitarian space colony.”
“Very nice. But he didn’t want to kill anybody that night. He just wanted to make a mess. A very big mess. And distract my attention.”
“Distract your attention?”
“That’s right. Do you know of any celebrity murder anywhere on the Main Line or in Philadelphia that I haven’t been involved in in the last ten years?”
“I think you’ve got delusions of grandeur. No matter what the Philadelphia Inquirer may tell you, you’re not the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. You’re not better than the police. And one of the things I always did like about you was that you never considered yourself better than the police.”
“It’s not because he considers me better than the police,” Gregor said patiently. “It’s about perspective. And, of course, about setting the terms of the debate. That’s what Michael Harridan does, you know. He sets the terms of any debate he’s in, and the fact that nobody ever sees him only makes that outcome more certain. It’s amazing the way that works.”
“I now have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe I don’t either,” Gregor said.
They had pulled into Cavanaugh Street. It was very late in the afternoon, almost evening, and the storefronts had begun to light up in the gloom. Ohanian’s had a sandwich sign propped up on the sidewalk in front of its door, advertising stuffed grape leaves and something Gregor couldn’t make out. The Ararat was still in its daytime mode, with all its lights blazing. When the dinner hour officially arrived, Linda Melajian would dim all the lights and put candles out on the tables. It was, Gregor thought, a perfectly ordinary, unassuming neighborhood, six or seven blocks of town houses and small apartment buildings and stores, of no interest to anybody but the people who lived on it. The car moved forward, and it began to be impossible to ignore the gaping hole where Holy Trinity’s facade used to be.
“You all right?” John Jackman asked.
“I’m fine,” Gregor said. “Get that picture over to Andrechev’s place, as fast as you can, today if possible. All right?”
“All right.”
“Then get me what you can on the forensics for Steve Bridge, as soon as you can. I need to know what kind of gun it was. Because he can’t be carrying a rifle around with him.”
“It’s almost certainly going to be a rifle,” John Jackman said.
“Oh, yes, I know. I know the murders were all done with a rifle. I’m just convinced they couldn’t all have been done with the same rifle. And rifles are a problem. Because they’re not like handguns. You can buy a handgun on any street corner in America. Rifles are a little harder to get.”
“Well, you know, Gregor, we’re not talking about an Uzi here. I don’t think we’re going to find that Steve Bridge was killed with a military assault weapon. I don’t know what they’ve got in Lower Merion, but I saw the wound here, close up, closer up than I ever want to see another one, and I’ve seen a lot of wounds in my life. And I don’t think—”
“No,” Gregor said. “Neither do I. That isn’t what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“I meant that wherever it is he’s getting these guns, it can’t be the way people usually get guns they don’t want traced to themselves. It’s the guns, you know, that I can’t figure out. He must have used at least two different ones. The question is, where is he getting them?”
“Maybe he has them,” John Jackman said. “We don’t register all weapons, after all. If he’s using small rifles, he may have had them for years, for deer hunting, whatever. There probably wouldn’t be any record of the sale, or of his possession of them. If he’s been keeping them under the bed for years, how would anybody know he had them?”
“But he hasn’t been keeping them under the bed for years,” Gregor said. The limousine stopped short in the street, next to several parked cars. It would be wrong to say that Jackman’s driver double-parked, since he didn’t kill the engine, but the effect was the same. Gregor got his gloves out of his pockets. “Never mind me,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Just, get that picture to An-drechev and see if he can identify it. And get me the lab results on those bullet wounds. Do we know if there were any bullets found on or near the body?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, maybe we’ll have a little luck for once. They do have the bullets found at the scene at the Tony Ross murder. I don’t know about the murder of Charlotte Ross, but my guess is that they found those too. It will be interesting to see if they match.”
“I thought you said they wouldn’t match,” John Jackman said.
“I said that at least two of them wouldn’t match,” Gregor said. “It’s possible that the ones from Tony Ross’s murder would match the ones from Charlotte’s, or that the ones from Charlotte’s would match the ones from Steve Bridge’s. But unless Mr. Harridan can walk on water and raise the dead, he couldn’t have committed all three of those murders with the same weapon.”
“Why not?”
“Because on the night of the party, he couldn’t have gotten a rifle onto the Ross property to save his life, and he didn’t have the time or the opportunity to hide one there earlier and come back and get it when he wanted to use it. It would have been too risky, anyway. They were doing security sweeps right and left. There’s only one place he could have gotten the weapon to kill Tony Ross, and he had to get hold of it on the night of the murder.”
“What’s the one place he could have got hold of a rifle on the night of the murder?” Jackman actually looked curious.
“From Tony Ross,” Gregor told him. Then he popped the door—he refused to wait for the driver to open it for him—and climbed out onto the street. The two younger Ohanian girls had come out onto the sidewalk to watch the show. When they saw it was him, they giggled and went back inside. Nobody on Cavanaugh Street thought anything at all of anything he did anymore. They had long ago decided he was crazy.
Gregor stuck his head back into the car. “We should have thought about that at the time,” he said. “About the security at the party. I’m not saying that the security was as tight as the media have been making it out to be. It isn’t that tight for the president himself, and he wasn’t coming. Still, it was tight enough, and that left us with two choices. Either the murderer was a professional, or he was somebody considered practically part of the wallpaper. And I know he isn’t a professional.”
“Try to remember,” Jackman said, “that I’m not concerned with the Tony Ross murder. Or the Charlotte Ross murder, either. That’s Lower Merion’s problem. I’m here to help you out with the bombing of Holy Trinity Church, and to look into the murder of Steve Bridge, except that I don’t look into murders anymore these days. I’m a desk jockey.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. “It’s all the same thing. Did you ever read a murder mystery where the butler did it?”
“No,” Jackman said.
“Neither did I.” Gregor slammed the door of the limousine shut and went around the back of it to the sidewalk. He climbed the steps to the front door to the building that held his apartment and went inside. There was a light coming from under old George Tekemanian’s apartment door, and laughter coming into the hall from the other side of it, but Gregor didn’t turn in that direction. He checked his mail—three bills; a frantic letter about how President Bush was destroying the nation from some Democratic Party fund-raising committee; a frantic letter about how liberals were destroying the nation from some Republican Party fund-raising committee; a Levenger catalogue—and went upstairs. For just a little while, he didn’t want to talk to Bennis, or Tibor, or Donna, or anybody else on Cavanaugh Street. He wanted to make more notes for himself, and then he wanted to make some phone calls. He’d need to talk to the director again, because that was the fastest way to FBI information that he knew of. He’d need to talk to Margiotti and Tackner again too, because there were some details he needed to work out about what exactly had happened on the night Tony Ross had died. Most important, though, he needed to sit down with as many editions of The Harridan Report he could find, and read them.
Gregor Demarkian was not a conspiracist. He did not believe that everything that happened in the world—or much of anything—was being controlled and directed by any central force. He did not work himself into a sweat over the possibility of a coming One World Government. In fact, he vaguely liked the idea, at least in principle. Tibor was right. Who wouldn’t prefer to see the Arabs and Israelis suing each other in an international court rather than doing what they did now? When it came to things like MKUltra Mind Control, and the CIA running a project that was systematically brainwashing half the population of North America, he wanted to laugh hysterically. The CIA were the same people who had managed to fail to assassinate Fidel Castro in the middle of a civil war. Secret rituals held in the basement dungeons of rich New Yorkers where thousands of babies a year were sacrificed in orgies of satanic ritual abuse. Catholic Mormon Freemasons who were the real power behind the spread of communism. A secret government made up of Rockefellers and Roo-sevelts who made all the decisions that only seemed to be made by people like the president and the United States Congress. The content of these ideas was ludicrous, but the content was not the point. It was the atmosphere they created that was the point. Tibor seemed to think that that atmosphere had somehow sprung into being with the disasters of September 11. In reality, it had been around a long time, making its way around the American South and Midwest in waves throughout the twentieth century. It had existed before then too, in Europe. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was a conspiracist holy text, entirely fabricated but fervently believed by that wing of the movement that saw the Jews as the cause of all the world’s problems. The Turner Diaries was a conspiracist holy text too, but only in the United States, among people who had given up anti-Semitism in favor of the imminent arrival of the apocalypse. If you tried to undo the strands and make it all make sense, you’d go crazy.
Gregor let himself in to his apartment. Bennis wasn’t home, which was just as well, since he didn’t want to talk to anybody but the people he needed to call. Upstairs, Grace Feinman was pounding away on one of her harpsichords. Gregor thought he remembered someone saying that she now had three up there, plus the virginals. He put his coat on the hook of the coat stand and went into the living room to sit down on the couch. He pulled the phone to him and started dialing.
Later on, when he was finished with these, he would have to find a way to talk to Kathi Mittendorf again.
It wasn’t until it was over that Gregor Demarkian admitted to himself that it was a relief to talk on a regular, rather than a cell, phone. Not only couldn’t you be intercepted out of thin air—he had visions of vans roving throughout the city, randomly snatching messages in mid-flight in the hopes of being the person who picked up the next phone call from Monica Lewinsky—but you didn’t have to worry about the sound quality fading out on you or disappearing altogether. Gregor did not remember either of those things ever happening to him. Bennis was too much of a stickler for getting exactly what she wanted and too willing to pay lots of money to get it to be saddled with inefficient cell phone service. Still, that sort of thing was always happening to Howard Kashinian, and Gregor was sure that if something could happen to Howard, it could happen to him.
He looked down at the notebook he’d been jotting things down in for the past hour of phone calls and hoped he’d be able to decipher it when the time came. He had very neat handwriting, but he’d not only written lists and words but drawn arrows and made symbols, all in an attempt to straighten out the complexities of just who could or could not have fired a rifle at Tony Ross on the night of the party. The short explanation was that anybody who had already been on the grounds at the time and who had already had access to a gun there could have committed the murder. That was less helpful than it seemed, because although the secret service had screened the area early on the day, they hadn’t been able to keep it absolutely secure because of the right-of-way granted to the riding club. Besides, the secret service simply didn’t apply the same level of scrutiny to the arrangements for the first lady as they did for the president himself, unless there was some indication that the first lady was in direct and immediate danger. They had provided near-paranoid security for Hillary Clinton, because the media had been full of furious denunciations of her almost from the day her husband began running for office. This first lady was far less controversial. She was also far less interesting, but Gregor had to admit that interesting people were more likely to be vilified than uninteresting ones. The simple fact was that the secret service had not been all that concerned about a party given by Charlotte Deacon Ross. It was unlikely to be dangerous. The first lady didn’t have legions of enemies hoping to get rid of her at the first opportunity. Charity balls were a regular feature of a first lady’s life, and if they had to do a full security sweep on every one of them, they’d have to double their numbers and never do anything else.
The problem, Gregor decided, was not how the murderer got on to the estate. He—or she, he amended, for the sake of the voice of John Jackman in his head—could have managed that any of a number of ways, including simply walking in through the front gate. The problem was how the murderer got out again after the murder, which was by no means an easy thing. The first lady had not arrived and never did arrive. The secret service had turned the car around and taken her right back to Washington. The security already in place on the estate had locked into place only seconds after the shots were fired. It wasn’t as good, or as tight, as the secret service would have been, but it would have made just strolling out the front gate a near impossibility. It would have meant strolling out the bridal path a near impossibility too, because there had been a man stationed at that entrance. That left only a very few options for escape, and he understood why Michael Harridan hadn’t liked any of them.
He folded the notebook up and put it back in his pocket. It was after six. He wondered where Bennis was. He grabbed his coat from the coatrack in the hall and headed out down the stairs. He could still hear laughter coming up from old George Tekemanian’s apartment, but Grace was no longer playing her harpsichord. Maybe she’d gone to rehearsal, or to play a concert. He went down one flight and knocked on Bennis’s door. He would always think of that apartment as Bennis’s apartment, even though she never went there anymore except to work. They really ought to knock the two apartments together and make a duplex, even if it did mean confirming in public what everybody on Cavanaugh Street already knew.
There was a shuffling sound on the other side of the door and then it was pulled inward. Tibor stood in the doorway in a pair of black trousers, a white shirt, a tie, and an expensive, thick cotton sweater that looked both very new and very orange. Gregor raised his eyebrows. Tibor shrugged.
“Bennis sent for it for me from Land’s End,” he said carefully. “She thinks I do not have enough clothes. She thinks the clothes I have are too depressing. Come in, Krekor. I have been trying to pay attention to blueprints.”
Gregor went in. The apartment looked the way it always looked. Tibor was not doing much in the way of redecorating it for his stay. The papier-mâché models of Zed and Zedalia had been taken off the end tables in the living room. The coffee table had been cleaned of trays and now held only a single cup of coffee and a small plate of butter cookies. They looked like very good butter cookies. Gregor had to restrain himself from taking one.
“I thought I’d come along and get you to go to the Ararat for dinner with me,” he said. “Bennis is missing in action, I have no idea where. And you’ve barely been to the Ararat since the explosion. Maybe I think you’re depressed.”
“I have only been to the Ararat once or twice,” Tibor said. “I find it difficult to walk by the church. I try to look on the positive side, as Bennis tells me to. We’ll have a new church. I’ll have a new apartment. And this church will be built just for us. It will not be something we take over from somebody else. Still. I have made arrangements today for preserving the icons.”
“Are they the kind of icons that should be preserved? I have no idea where Orthodox churches get their icons. I supposed I always half-thought that there were factories someplace.”
“I don’t think so, Krekor, no. And especially not a hundred years ago, when Holy Trinity was first built. They would have had to send for them to Greece, to be painted by artists who specialized only in icons. There are still such artists now, but perhaps there are factories too. I was thinking that the people who first built this church worked very hard to have the icons here, and we should not destroy them, or put them in storage where nobody can see them. Isn’t it too early for the Ararat?”
“A little.” Gregor took a seat on one of the big black leather chairs. “I thought I’d ask you about something first, if you’re up for it.”
“About something that has to do with the investigation? Because if so, Krekor, I will not be of a great help. I went to Adelphos House. I stopped at that man’s newsstand and bought something. I walked down the street to the Ararat to get coffee and the building exploded behind me. If I had had any kind of real information, I would have told you about it long ago. I know what to worry about. Did I see any unusual person around the church at any time in the month or so before the bombing? No, I did not. Did I see any unusual person around the church on the day of the bombing? No, I did not. Did I see any unusual person—”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I’m not worried about your seeing unusual people. It’s a theory I wanted to ask you about. Or maybe you could get on the Internet and ask the people at RAM.”
“You want to know which mystery novels to read when you take your vacation?”
“I didn’t think RAM ever discussed mystery novels,” Gregor said. “Last time I checked into there, you were all discussing the War on Terrorism and responses to September eleventh.”
“Everybody was discussing that then. Grace’s harpsichord newsgroup was discussing that then. Now we are discussing formula in crime fiction. It’s very interesting.”
“I’m sure,” Gregor said. “I want to discuss One World Government.”
“Oh,” Tibor said. “Please no, Krekor. It gives me a headache. The people who are always harping on it give me an even bigger headache.”
“There are people who harp on it on RAM?
“One or two.”
“Anybody named Kathi Mittendorf? Or Susan—wait, I’m going to have to look up the last name—”
“Don’t bother,” Tibor said. “There were no women. Only men.”
“How about Michael Harridan?”
“Pfft,” Tibor said. “What do you take me for? If I had seen that name on RAM pushing conspiracy theories, I would have told you about it. But no. These were just two, maybe one and a half—they would get on and talk about satanic ritual abuse, and how the FBI was covering up this abuse of children. And for a while I tried to check that out, Krekor, because of course you never know. It is not a good thing to trust government agencies. But it turned out to be craziness. The FBI keeps numbers on all the missing children. There are only a hundred or so a year who are not accounted for. The files are all open and public knowledge. And when you say that to these people, the ones who have the conspiracy theories, they say that the infants who are killed in sacrifices are not recorded anywhere because they have been born especially for this and their births have not been registered. It is a truly crazy thing, Krekor.”
“I agree with you,” Gregor said. “But I want to understand it. There seem to be a lot of people out there who believe it.”
Tibor shrugged. “Believe what? There is more than one version of it. There is the Islamic version of it. There is the fundamentalist Christian version of it. There is the secular version of it.”
“Are the versions substantially different?”
“Not so different as you’d think,” Tibor said. “And with the fundamentalist Christians and the secular conspiracists, there’s a great deal of overlap. They read each other’s material. They believe each other’s ‘evidence,’ except it isn’t really evidence. Krekor, these things—”
“Start from the beginning,” Gregor said, giving up and snagging one of the butter cookies. Whoever made them must have used pounds of the stuff. “There’s a conspiracy to bring the United States under the aegis of a One World Government—”
“No, no,” Tibor said. “You must start from the beginning. First, a race of aliens came to earth and mated with human women. To the fundamentalists, it was Satan and his angels who did this. They mated with human women, and produced offspring who looked human, but were really reptilian.”
“Reptilian as in snakes?”
“And lizards and that sort of thing,” Tibor said. “Yes. And this race was very powerful, because they were smarter and more ruthless than real human beings. They were geniuses. They had better memories, and they could create things that we could not, and they had access to the technology of their home planet, and the advanced science there.”
“So far,” Gregor said, “there’s nothing so very odd about this. Oh, it’s odd enough to think the world is full of people who are half-human and half-reptiles, but you can find dozens of societies through the ages who have looked on more technologically advanced societies as practicing magic, because they can’t imagine actual people being capable of that kind of creativity. That’s a persistent theme in human history.”
“Very nice,” Tibor said. “This is a persistent theme among truly insane people, except they’re not the ordinary kind of insane. Now, listen. There arose this race of half-human, half-alien or satanic whatever you want. And they intermarry only with each other. And they formed the world’s thirteen richest families. And they spread throughout Europe. First, they founded the Merovingian dynasty, which was a dynasty in Europe in the area that is now Germany and Austria. And this is where it begins to get truly insane, Krekor, because there was a Merovingian dynasty in Europe, in the seventh and eighth centuries. And they were not a race of superbeings. They were idiots. Complete and utter idiots. I am not joking here, Krekor. There are factory chickens less stupid than the Merovingians were, especially at the end. They died out in the ninth century. But not according to this theory, of course, where they only pretended to die out. Do you know that we have nearly complete records of monarchical succession throughout that period of the Middle Ages, right down to our own day in some places. But when you tell these people that they tell you that these are only the fake records, the real records are hidden from sight or have been destroyed so that the conspiracy is not derailed by an outraged populace. How do they know this? They know it because once a mayor of a town in France had the basement of his town hall dug up and in that basement people say he found papers that people say were the real succession records of the Merovingian dynasty.”
“What ‘people say’?”
“People,” Tibor said. “That’s it. Not any people in particular. And there are no records of these people or of what exactly they were supposed to have said. But if you try to explain that this means you should not believe them, they tell you that it would be close-minded not to say that it’s at least possible that these were the real records of the Merovingian dynasty. Can you see this rule applied to logic everywhere? Your mother’s uncle’s cousin’s aunt heard that ‘people say’ the Liberty Bell is made out of Roquefort cheese, so you should ignore all the reports of all the people who have actually seen the Liberty Bell and think that it might just be made of Roquefort cheese. I could think better than this when I was in primary school, Krekor.”
“Stuffed animals could. How do we get from the Merovingian dynasty to now?”
“Ah, well. The years went on and all these people wanted was control of the earth, but the technology had not reached a stage where that was possible. The reptilians were the ruling families of Europe, and they were in control of their territories, more or less. They founded all kinds of institutions to recruit people to their cause and to keep their power in place. They founded the Catholic Church and put the pope and the cardinals in the Vatican and sent bishops everywhere to keep the people under control. They founded the Freemasons, where they recruited men to their causes and swore them to blood oaths to advance the reptilian hegemony. Then, in the eighteenth century, there came the great danger to their rule: the English colonies in America, which were threatening to establish a society based on the freedom of the individual human person. The reptilians went into action. They put their own people, high-level Freemasons, into positions of power in the new rebellion. And in 1776 they formed a special section of Freemasonry called the Illumi-nati, who were the most powerful of all the Masons and who were always real reptilians, not just recruits. And they got together and made their plans to bring the whole world under a single world government, controlled by them. In this, America was supposed to be key. America is supposed to be a Masonic country. There are supposed to be Masonic symbols on our money. And all of America’s presidents are supposed to have been Freemasons, including George Washington.”
“Were they?”
“George Washington was, Krekor, yes, but that is not all that surprising. The Freemasons were a group of men who ascribed to Deism, which was a religious idea that said that God existed, but all He did was to make the universe, establish the laws of nature, and then completely ignore His creation ever afterwards. It was really atheism for people who did not know enough about science to find atheism plausible—they knew nothing about the big bang, you know, or about evolution. In most places, it was dangerous to be a Deist. It was considered heresy, and you could be fined or imprisoned for it, or ostracized by your neighbors. So George Washington went every week to an Episcopal church and he was a Mason in his private life, because that was prudent. If he had been outspoken in his Deism, he would have had a lot of trouble. The same was true of John Adams and James Madison and John Quincy Adams. If you think the United States was founded as a Christian country, you should read what some of these people had to say about Christianity, in private, in their letters, where they did not expect to be overheard. Of course, Thomas Jefferson was outspoken in his Deism, and he still was elected president, but they called him a lot of names.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “So we get the Freemasons, and a special inner group of them called the Illuminati. Then what?”
Tibor threw his hands in the air. “Then, who knows? There are books and books of this sort out there, Krekor. These people have their own magazines. They’ve founded their own publishing houses. They have Web sites. In the end, what it comes down to is that the conspiracy is in place, and everybody is in on it. It looks like the world is being pulled every which way by opposing forces, but that is only a delusion. Everything is working to the same end, to bring the world under a single man’s rule. For the Christians, this is Satan, and we are headed for the apocalypse and the end of the world. For the secularists, this is just a dictator to give the reptilians complete power over all people. Everything we think we see is a sham. Democracy is a sham. Always, in the United States, both of the candidates running from the major parties will be chosen by the Illuminati. Nobody the Illuminati does not control will even be able to run. Everything else that happens, like plant closings, or nuclear plant accidents, is part of the same all-controlling plot. There are no coincidences, and there are no accidents. Three Mile Island was planned and carried out by the agents of the Illuminati. The September eleventh attacks were planned and carried out by the agents of the Illuminati. Alan Greenspan is an agent of the Illuminati.”
“And nobody but this group of conspiracy theorists ever notices?”
“They cannot notice,” Tibor said, “because they are mind-controlled. There were secret CIA experiments called MKUltra Mind Control to brainwash as many Americans as possible into thinking they were in favor of the Illuminati’s plans. Did I tell you that everybody at the UN is supposed to be an agent of the Illuminati?”
“No,” Gregor said. “But if I’d thought about it, I could have guessed.”
“In Illuminati families and families closely connected to them, they control the children through ritual abuse,” Tibor said. “They breed infants for sacrifice, and then take their own children and make them take part in these sacrifices and then abuse them, over and over again, until they’re unable to think for themselves. Don’t ask me how such children are supposed to grow up into adults who can rule the world, Krekor, because I don’t know. I don’t think they know either.”
“So,” Gregor said. “Where does Holy Trinity come in? Why blow up the church?”
“You think it was these people who blew up the church?”
“Not exactly. It’s a little complicated. Still, the question remains. Why blow up the church? Why this particular church?”
Tibor shrugged. “For the Christian fundamentalist conspiracists, we are devil worshipers. That’s what the notes say. To the secular ones, devil worship is just a ploy by the Illuminati, a cover for really heinous doings, like plotting to make the United States part of the International Criminal Court. Krekor, it doesn’t do to look too long at what it is these people are thinking. It’s not only that it doesn’t make sense. It’s that it’s all about fear. They fear change. They fear the future. And they are disappointed people, most of them. They feel insignificant and as if their lives are out of control. So they look for a way to be important, and this is it. It is not true that Alan Greenspan doesn’t know who they are or care about what they do. Alan Greenspan cares desperately. So does the president of the United States. So does the pope. So do all those shadowy people who run the international banks. Those people know the names of every conspiracist, because conspiracists are the one true danger to their rule. You can change the scenario a little for each of the different kinds of conspiracists. The Muslim conspiracists know that they do not really come from cultures that have failed to develop technologically and scientifically— rather, their inventions and discoveries have been stolen by the Conspiracy and ascribed to other people, to Jews, mostly. The Christian conspiracists know that they are not the last gasp of a dying religious culture. Instead, they alone hold the power of Christ up to a corrupt and satanic world, and in the end at the great battle it is the believers and not the Conspiracy who will win. It goes around and around. Some of them commit violence, and then we hear about them. Most of them just go to each other’s lectures and buy each other’s books and visit each other’s Web sites and we don’t hear about them at all. I wonder sometimes if men and women always felt so little in control of themselves and their world. Because I think really, Krekor, that we have more control over it now than we did three hundred years ago, but more people are anxious and afraid now than were then.”
Gregor tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling. It had been washed, and recently. The women must have come in to make sure that Tibor was “comfortable.” “All right,” he said. “It’s got to be about time to go to the Ararat now, isn’t it? Let’s go get something to eat. Just tell me one thing. Do you think the people who peddle this stuff, not the rank-and-file believers but the people like Michael Harridan—do you think they believe all this, or do you think they’re conning?”
“Some of them believe it,” Tibor said. “It’s obvious from the way they write. But go look at the Web sites, Krekor. A lot of them are conning. They make their money this way. Sometimes the rank-and-file believers, as you call them, catch them at it.”
“Then what happens?”
Tibor shrugged. “Some of the rank-and-file believers desert them. Others stay on and defend them. It’s like it is with mediums and people who claim to be able to speak to the dead. Sometimes, it’s so damned important to some people to believe, they’ll do whatever they have to do to go on believing. I know what this is, Krekor, I’ve seen it before. It’s what happened with the hard-core Communists. The Stalin show trials. Genocide. Decades of support for dictatorships. Decades of indulgence in repression, torture, and summary execution. The fall of the Soviet Union. To some people, it made no difference. They would not see, or they would explain it away. Maybe we all do that with what we believe. Maybe we all need not to be forced to let go of our delusions.”
“Let’s go get something to eat,” Gregor said again. “I don’t care about my delusions. I just want to know what Michael Harridan thinks he’s up to.”