Conspiracy Theory(24)

“Linda Melajian told me yesterday that the Ararat is full for every meal these days but it’s like being at a wake. Everybody just … sits there.”

“You should know. You haven’t eaten at home since it happened.”

“You can’t eat here, Gregor. I can’t cook, and you think stocking the refrigerator means buying two boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts and putting them on different shelves.”

“You can eat the Dunkin’ Donuts,” Gregor said.

Bennis marched away from the window, past the long black leather couch, into the foyer. A moment later, Gregor heard the sound of clogs against hardwood and reached for the jacket he had left over the back of a chair.

“Now I’m ready and you’re not,” she called. The clogs went back and forth across the hardwood, back and forth, back and forth.

Gregor considered telling her that it was obvious she’d been crying, but in the end that did not seem to be a sensible thing to do. It would only get her started talking about Emotions, which she could do all day, in intimate detail, and he couldn’t do at all. He not only couldn’t talk about them, he often couldn’t recognize them. He had only two labels for what he felt most of the time, “good” and “not good.” He had one more label for use in emergencies— “scared”—but that one was rarely necessary. Even now, when every muscle in his body was fighting urgently for paralysis, for collapse, for anything at all that would release him from the necessity of walking down Cavanaugh Street in front of that bombed-out church—even now, he wouldn’t call what he felt “scared.” He didn’t know what it was.

“Gregor.”

He threw the jacket over his shoulders and went out into the foyer, where Bennis was waiting for him. It was cold as hell outside, but she was not wearing her jacket, and wouldn’t if he asked her to. He got his own coat off the rack and put it on. She walked away from him and out the door onto the landing.

There really had been a time, he thought, years ago, before his wife had died, before he’d retired from the Bureau, before he’d moved back to Cavanaugh Street, when he hadn’t had anything more complicated to think about than the paperwork required to document the interstate tracking of serial killers. He was not Bennis Hannaford’s lover, or Tibor Kasparian’s friend, or the man a lot of people looked to to make sanity prevail in a thoroughly insane world. He did not remember the change coming over him. He could not pinpoint the one moment when he had begun to be someone he had never been before. He couldn’t even tell if he liked this version of himself better than he liked the other.

What he did know was that, no matter how much he wanted to talk to John Jackman and find out what the police had on both the bombing and the murder out in Bryn Mawr, he’d be content to be ignorant for the rest of his life if it meant he didn’t have to walk past the front of that exploded church. He had walked past it, two or three times a day, every day since it happened, but he wasn’t used to it, and he didn’t think he ever would be. If he’d been a different kind of man, he would have packed everything he owned into a couple of suitcases and taken off for a place where nobody had ever heard of Holy Trinity Church. Unfortunately, it would be impossible to go anywhere where nobody had heard of Tony Ross.





2


Oddly, it was much less difficult for Gregor to actually walk down the street in front of Holy Trinity Church than it was for him to think about doing it. The church always looked far less damaged than he had imagined it was, and he was able to ignore the fact that he knew it looked far less damaged than it actually was. The police had cordoned off the sidewalk directly in front of it. Anybody walking down Cavanaugh Street on that side now had to cross the street to continue. They had put a guard there the first two nights. The guard had disappeared on the third morning, far sooner than Gregor thought appropriate. In an FBI investigation, it would have taken far longer than this to gather the necessary evidence. He was determined to keep his disapproval to himself. John Jackman was now commissioner of police in Philadelphia. He was here because he was taking a personal interest in this case, and that at a time when all the police departments from the city down the length of the Main Line had been pressed into emergency service in the murder of Tony Ross. And it wasn’t just the police departments. You could see the problem was that the media had started out only vaguely interested—oh, murder at one of those fancy estates in Bryn Mawr; good for a week or two; yawn—and then woken up to what had really happened. One of the most powerful men in the world, one of the men who ran the banks and dictated policy to governments, had been killed by a sniper with a silencer on the front steps of his own house. At any other time, the destruction of Holy Trinity Church would have been big news in Philadelphia. There would have been an outpouring of support and a concentration on the human angle. There might even have been a fund to rebuild the church. Gregor found that he resented, more than a little, that none of that was happening. It didn’t matter that Tibor wouldn’t need a fund to get the church rebuilt. People on the street would give what they could, and in some cases that was plenty. It mattered that nobody was paying attention. This had to be the worst hate crime in the history of the city. Nobody was noticing.