Conspiracy Theory(130)

“Michael Harridan,” Gregor said.

Bennis sat down. “Listen,” she said. “You’ve spent the last week telling me that Michael Harridan doesn’t exist—”

“Not exactly.”

“And that the killing of Tony Ross had nothing at all to do with America on Alert and domestic terrorism and conspiracy nuts—”

“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “It’s like that thing you said about ‘knowing’ the people at the party. What does ‘know’ mean? Well, what does ‘have to do with’ mean?”

“I’m beginning to think you need medication.”

“What I need is my coat,” Gregor said. “Jackman is due to pick me up in five minutes.”





2


Even with Bennis there to keep him company, Gregor couldn’t sit still in his apartment to wait for John Jackman. It was odd how that worked. He’d been in situations where time really mattered: where there were hostages; where the murderer was waiting to strike again; where evidence would be destroyed if it wasn’t secured quickly. As far as he knew, there was now no urgency. He was a little concerned about Kathi Mittendorf and the other strongly committed members of America on Alert, but not very, because as far as he could tell, they never did anything without Michael Harridan’s having commanded it first. He didn’t think Michael Harridan was in the mood to command any more murders, or church bombings, or violence. In fact, he was willing to bet that Michael Harridan did not usually think of himself as a violent man. It always amazed him how many men did think of themselves as violent, though— as if violence were the hallmark of virility, or a kind of merit badge. The Michael Harridans of this world tended to sign on to Asimov’s famous dictum. Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. It was true too. The people who blew up churches, the people who gunned down other human beings, the people who flew commercial airliners into the sides of skyscrapers on sunny late-summer mornings, were marked first and foremost by their inability to cope with the day-to-day necessity of practicing decency in ordinary life. Michael Harridan wouldn’t see himself in that, either, but it was as true of him as it had ever been of Charles Manson. People who were able to earn money and respect and position did not need to kill for it.

Gregor went downstairs and onto the street in a frenzy of sheer restlessness. He walked up to the church one more time, but the scene had ceased to have the power to depress him. Maybe it was because he had seen Tibor this morning and it had become obvious that the scene had ceased to have the power to depress Tibor too, and all along it was what was happening to Tibor that had most concerned him. He stood for a while and looked at the rubble and then through the rubble to the icons and the pews and the ceiling that really was going to come down in a day or two. Then he walked up the street a short ways and bought a copy of the morning paper at Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Foods. If Mary Ohanian had been manning the cash register, he would have stopped to talk. Mary, however, was away from home at her freshman year at Harvard, and the cash register was being manned by her younger brother Jared, who gave new depths to the word surly. Gregor could not remember if he had been that morose and sullen at the age of fifteen. Psychologists and women’s magazines were always harping on the idea that sullenness was natural to teenaged boys, but Gregor had the idea that if he’d behaved in public the way Jared was now behaving, his father would have beaten him to a bloody pulp and his mother would have followed that with a month of guilt trips, resulting in a teenaged Gregor with all the hearty cheeriness of Mickey Mouse greeting visitors to Disney World. He took the paper and looked without much interest at the front page. There was a story on the finding of the body of Steve Bridge, but it had been beaten out from the top spot by the story on the Price Heaven collapse, which seemed to be total and threatening to put a thousand people out of work in the Philadelphia greater metropolitan area alone.

He walked back up the street, past the Ararat, past the church, to his own front steps. The Ararat was mostly deserted. It was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. The church was still what it had been when he’d looked at it a few moments before. He thought about buying one of those posters of the Twin Towers lit up at night and having it framed, the way Bennis had had one framed for Tibor. He was in the oddest mood, and not one he trusted. He felt as if he had arrived at the unified field theory of all existence. He knew not only the meaning of life, but the combination code to unlock its intelligibility.

It’s a good thing I don’t drive, he thought, letting himself recognize that the mood he was in was very much like being on a drunk. It had been years since he’d been on a drunk, or even been a little bit tipsy. Drinking was the kind of thing you did in the army and then were a little ashamed of afterward, mostly because it was hard not to recognize what an idiot you’d been while indulging. He wondered if things would be different if young men were required to go into the army as a matter of course, the way the men of his own generation had been. He wasn’t really in favor of a peacetime draft, or of any draft. He wasn’t sure that a draft did much of anything for the country except give the worst of its leaders the means to wage war when no war was necessary. Still, he wondered what would have become of Michael Harridan if he’d had to spend two years practicing military discipline, in an environment where, in the best cases, there were neither distinctions nor excuses. Maybe the answer was that Michael Harridan would have become exactly what he did become. Tim McVeigh had been in the military. It hadn’t recruited him to the defense of civilization.