Conspiracy Theory(119)

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.”





TWO



1


David Alden understood that there was no way he could stay in Philadelphia nonstop and indefinitely, no matter how much he might want to in order to follow the investigation into the deaths of Tony and Charlotte Ross, or how much the police wanted him to because they feared he might suddenly abscond to Switzerland and completely remove himself from their control. The simple fact of the matter was that he wouldn’t be able to follow the police investigation even if he stayed put. He was not Gregor Demarkian. Nobody was in the least bit interested in giving him information. He learned what he knew about weapons, and bullets, and the way the police were thinking from the newspapers and the television news, just like everybody else. He didn’t know much, and he wasn’t likely to know much more, no matter what he did, until the case was solved or abandoned. As for police fears that he was planning to jump ship to Europe or South America, they were ludicrous. He had far too much work at the office. The Price Heaven mess was becoming an utter meltdown, complete with competing sets of lawyers, competing sets of accountants, and competing sets of board members at the bank, with everybody pointing fingers at everybody else and nobody making any sense. David had no idea if things would have gotten this bad if Tony had lived. He had a gut feeling that they wouldn’t have, because Tony was the kind of man who commanded both obedience and respect. Since he himself was not that kind of man, he would have to go with what he had. That amounted to relentless common sense and all the facts, laid out in thousands of document pages that he alone had read every one of. By now he knew more about the inner workings of Price Heaven than the executives of Price Heaven did. It was more than possible that he had known more than they knew all along. Just thinking about it gave him a headache. When he remembered that the regulators would be descending—why was it that whenever there was a serious bankruptcy, the U.S. Congress felt it necessary to hold hearings into matters they didn’t understand, couldn’t be made to understand, and didn’t want to under-stand?—it was more than his head that ached. Maybe he was lying when he said that what he really wanted was Tony Ross’s life, with Tony Ross’s job to go along with it. This was like a dress rehearsal, and it was awful. He wanted to go to bed for a week. He wanted to take all these papers and stuff them in a bonfire somewhere in the darker reaches of Central Park. He wanted not to read anything but the collected works of Elmore Leonard until it was at least July.

Instead, he shifted slightly on the seat of the limousine that was taking him in to New York and watched the dawn come up outside, glaring and orange. Out there it was cold. When they passed people in their yards, taking garbage cans out from behind their houses or going to their garages to get their cars, the people were always well wrapped up in parkas and hats. He found himself wondering what it was like to live in a house that backed directly onto the interstate, so that you had to have a tall chain-link fence around your property to make sure your children didn’t run right out into the sixty-five-mile-an-hour traffic when they were playing in the yard after school. He had, he realized, absolutely no idea how “ordinary” people lived. Even though his family had never been really rich—or never in this century; they had been rich enough in the age of the robber barons, and before that in the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, when to be rich in America meant to be a prosperous lawyer in one of the better cities—even so, they had always been oriented toward the rich. It had no more occurred to David’s parents to send him to public school than it had occurred to them to serve toasted grubs at their cocktail parties. In one way or another, they had done what they had to do to make sure he got through good private elementary schools, a good prep school, and, of course, the Ivy League when the time came, all without student loans or any other encumbrance on his future or career. They had managed all the things that had to go along with it too. He hadn’t seen a television set until he was six. His parents owned only one, which they kept in their own bedroom for emergencies, like major assassinations. He hadn’t eaten in a fast-food restaurant, or a popular restaurant chain, until he was in prep school and out for the weekend on senior privilege with friends. Then he’d had a single Big Mac and never gone back for another. It hadn’t been all that popular a pastime in Boston and New Haven anyway, where his friends tended to be drawn to small ethnic restaurants featuring the cuisine of countries only very rich and very pampered people could go to. Sometimes, the things that he had never done in his life truly astonished him. He had never been shopping in Price Heaven or Kmart or Wal-Mart. He’d never spent any time in a mall except to look it over for the bank when they were considering loaning its owners money. He’d never had a car loan. He’d never been to a prom, or even to a school that gave a prom. He’d never been late paying a bill. He’d never had to apply for a mortgage. He’d never had a summer job. He’d never been inside a T.G.I.Friday’s, a T.J. Maxx, a Marshall’s, or a Bradlees.