Conspiracy Theory(124)

“But Christians aren’t persecuted here,” Grace said. “And Christianity isn’t outlawed. Could you just—what—say Mass—”

“Celebrate the liturgy,” Hannah said.

“The Catholics say celebrate the Mass,” Lida said. “My son’s girlfriend said—”

“Stop,” Tibor said. “We need only a space large enough to fit in all the people who want to come. Possibly we will have more than usual, since it will be the first time since the explosion, unless people are worried about there being another explosion—”

“I’m not worried about there being another explosion,” Lida said. “We could use my living room. I get nearly everybody in the neighborhood in there at Christmas. I mean, granted that’s a buffet, but—”

“Well, we’re not exactly looking to stage a sit-down dinner, are we?” Hannah said. “Honestly, Lida, the fuss you can make over the simplest—”

“I’m just saying we could use my living room,” Lida said. “It would be a good thing. And then, because it’s the first time, we could have a potluck. I could make some finger food and people could bring what they liked and then after the service we could spread out over the whole house and everybody could eat—”

“You’d better not forget the children will be there,” Hannah said. “If you’re going to hold a potluck afterwards, you’re going to have to do something serious about all that china you keep all the hell over the place. Although what you want with china eggplants and china lily pads is beyond me. Really, some people don’t have enough to spend money on—”

“What’s this?” Sheila Kashinian said, coming up from the other side of the street.

They were almost at the Ararat. Old George and Grace looked shell-shocked, the way people got when they were suddenly exposed to the women of Cavanaugh Street in full swing, planning something. Tibor hung back for a while and then retreated, up the street, across the little intersection, to that place on the sidewalk where he could stand directly in front of the church. Eventually, he thought, you realized it was only what it was, a building, made of steel and mortar and brick. Buildings came and buildings went. They were destroyed by fire and earthquake and flood and time. They were not important in themselves.

He looked up over the sagging roof to the rest of Philadelphia, beginning to come alive with the arrival of the sun. Then he turned away and went back up the street to the Ararat. Old George and Grace were waiting for him on the sidewalk. Lida and Hannah and Sheila Kashinian had gone in and taken a table. Tibor could see them through the Ararat’s big plate-glass front window, writing things down on napkins.

“They’re discussing coordinated serving silver,” Grace said. “Are they always like this?”

“Worse,” old George said morosely.

Tibor pushed the Ararat’s door open and shooed them inside.





3


It wasn’t that she had been laid off that bothered Kathi Mittendorf. She had expected to be laid off, all the way back to the day she had first heard what was going on with Price Heaven. It was so hard to figure out what was happening with the Illuminati at any one time. Even really brilliant people, like Michael, got confused. She was more and more aware these days that she was not a brilliant person. She would very much like to be, but in the end she was just herself. She could man the blind end of a wire without too much difficulty, and do the scut work of buying and storing and hiding weapons, but when it came to tactics and strategy, she was hopeless. What was worse, she had no real self-control. She couldn’t appear passive on the outside. She only managed glassy-eyed and tense. She couldn’t appear calm in a crisis. She was never calm, even when she should be. In the middle of a major action, she was a mass of raw emotion, excitement and hysteria, fear and bliss. Sometimes she wished she had learned to do crafts when she was younger. Maybe it would be some help to her if she could knit.

What bothered Kathi Mittendorf was that, because she had been laid off, she had nothing to take her mind off what she had to do in the next twenty-four hours, and nowhere to go to get away from the house and all the potential it held for her to make a really serious mistake. She was fretting, and along with fretting she was fussing with too many of the details on the edges of the project she had committed herself to carry out. She was in the same state of mind she had been in just before the night Tony Ross died and that satanic church had been blown up. If she breathed in the wrong direction— if she so much as twitched at an inopportune moment—she would destroy them all and everything they’d worked for, but she couldn’t stop breathing and she couldn’t stop twitching. She also couldn’t stop hating the sight of Susan in her living room, sitting on the couch with a big glass of Diet Coke in front of her on the coffee table, looking smug. She would rather have left Susan out of it. She would rather have left everybody out of it except herself and Michael, but that was the kind of thing she never said with full clarity to herself, even just inside her head.