“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.