John was not, of course, at the table when Gregor got back to it, so he drank Perrier poured over lime and looked around for something to scribble on. He couldn’t scribble on the napkins here. They were cloth, and elegantly monogrammed. It was no wonder that great books were always conceived in bars and cheap diners. They had paper napkins their patrons could write on. Gregor went through his pockets and came up with another issue of The Harridan Report. He seemed to have dozens of them, stashed all over himself and the apartment back on Cavanaugh Street. He got out his pen and started to write names and draw lines and arrows. He filled up one sheet of paper and went on to another. He was on the third by the time Jackman did show up, and he was no better organized. On the third sheet of paper he had a list, although not a definitive list. His head hurt.
John sat down and asked the waiter for a Perrier of his own. Gregor thought idly that if they were in Italy, John could have had a glass of wine at lunch with nobody thinking anything of it. John looked at the paper upside down.
“What is that?” he said.
Gregor shrugged. “It’s a list.”
“A list of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“That won’t do, Gregor. It can’t be a list of you don’t know. You’re not allowed not to know anything.”
Gregor pushed it across to him and shrugged. John Jackman picked it up.
“Tony Ross,” he said. “Charlotte Deacon Ross. Father Tibor Kasparian. Ryall Wyndham. David Alden. Anne Ross Wyler. Michael Harridan and people connected to Michael Harridan. Krystof Andrechev. All right. Everybody who has anything to do with either of the cases you’re looking into at the moment. That’s what you were making a list of.”
“In a way,” Gregor said.
The waiter was back. John already knew what he wanted, which made sense, since John did not suggest restaurants for working lunches unless he was already comfortable with them. Gregor ordered something that sounded as if it might have beef in it.
“Why do you always go to these places where you can’t identify the food?” Gregor asked. “What’s the mania for cooking things in pastry crusts?”
“You’ll love it. Don’t worry about it. What else can this be if it isn’t a list of everybody connected to the two cases you’re looking into.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “for one thing, I doubt if it’s everybody. It’s just the people who have surfaced in connection to the two. There may be dozens of others.”
“Right,” John said, “that’s true enough. So?”
“So, then there’s the question of Michael Harridan. Who he is. If he is— no, no, don’t say it. I know there must be at least somebody who is playacting at being Michael Harridan, but it would be nice to know if there’s somebody who’s Michael Harridan full-time, or somebody who is someone else on this same list who is Michael Harridan only for publication. I talked to that woman today. Kathi Mittendorf.”
“And?” John looked interested.
“And it was like talking to a schizophrenic, although she obviously isn’t one,” Gregor said. “Everything was the script. But I’d bet my life that she was hiding something in that house.”
“Like what?”
“Guns, explosives, something like that,” Gregor said. “I could just smell it. And yes, I know you can’t get a search warrant on the basis of just smelling it. But she exhibited all the signs. If I had to guess, I’d say they were stashed in the basement somewhere. That’s what she couldn’t stop looking at. Not at the basement, you know, but at the floor.”
“You know, Gregor, it’s a whole different ball game if we can prove they’re armed. It’s one thing to be a kook living off conspiracy theories, but the feds do not take kindly to large caches of weapons and explosives. Almost nobody collects that stuff without intending to use it.”
“I know. What can I say? Get some decent intelligence in there and check it out. Except that decent intelligence has been nearly nonexistent in this case almost from the beginning. I talked to Walker Canfield too.”
“Who’s Walker Canfield?”
“One half of the team the Bureau sent out to infiltrate America on Alert,” Gregor said. “I told you about him. And his partner, who has now been missing for almost two weeks. It was almost like talking to Kathi Mittendorf. Is it just me, or have people become less and less rational in the last ten years? Or maybe I mean in the last ten days.”
“Well, your Mr. Canfield is not my problem. He’s Lower Merion’s problem, and from what I’ve heard, they’re welcome to him.”