Conspiracy Theory(32)

It wasn’t until much later that it occurred to her that she might have been heard by somebody in the neighborhood. All the houses here were very close together. When neighbors heard gunshots, they didn’t come over to check, but they did sometimes call the police. She sat down on her couch and waited for three hours to see if somebody would come to the door, but nobody did. Maybe none of her neighbors was home. Maybe none of them was paying attention. Kathi had a vision of them all sitting in their living rooms, glued to their TV sets, listening to the first reports of the shooting. By then, CNN had camera crews on the spot. Kathi could see the tall wrought-iron gates that closed off the house. CNN must have had a helicopter too, because there were aerial shots of the house itself with dozens of police cars parked in front of it. People came and went on the ground: women in evening gowns; policemen in uniform; men who might have been guests or detectives or FBI agents.

“All men wear uniforms,” Michael always said. “That suit and tie that men wear to work is a uniform. So’s the T-shirt and jeans they wear on the weekends. The trick is to narrow choices without letting you realize they’ve done it. They don’t like individuality, those people. Individuality is dangerous to them.”

Kathi should have been at Price Heaven right this minute. Ten to six was her usual shift—but only four days a week, because Price Heaven didn’t hire anybody full-time if it could help it. She had called in sick today, in spite of the fact that, being part-time, she would not get paid for being out. She had put the gun, fully loaded, into the big canvas tote bag she’d taken to carrying instead of her purse. There were laws against carrying a concealed weapon on the streets of Philadelphia, but they were the Illuminati’s laws. One of the first things the Illuminati tried to do was to disarm the population. A disarmed population was unable to fight back.

The bus was bumping along on streets she didn’t know. Like most people, she rarely left her own neighborhood except to go to work, and then she had a fixed routine for travel. She kept the tote bag on her lap with her hands wound through the handle. She had to physically prevent herself from reaching in to touch the gun. It gave her that much reassurance. The houses were nicer here than they were in her part of town. Most of them were brick. The people seemed to be better-dressed too. Either they had good dark coats that went all the way down past their knees, or those quilted-looking parkas people bought from L.L. Bean. Katy Davenport had had one of those parkas when they were together in school.

The bus pulled up to a stop. Kathi consulted her three-by-five card—she always wrote notes to herself on three-by-five cards; they were harder to lose than Post-it notes—and realized she was at her stop. She got up and waited for the bus’s back door to open. She had the impression that people who got out the back door were less conspicuous than people who got out the front. On the street, she looked around, checking the street signs. In the rich towns out on the Main Line, there were sometimes no street signs at all. If you didn’t know where you were, you didn’t belong there.

“There are people who think they’re well-off,” Michael said, “but they only think that because they don’t know how really rich people live. Really rich people live as far out of sight as they can. They don’t want people to know how much they really have.”

Kathi consulted her three-by-five card again. She had no idea what she was going to do now that she was here. Maybe there would be a diner where she could get a cup of coffee and some toast. It was just about all she could afford if she expected to have enough money to take the bus home. She folded the three-by-five card in half and put it in the pocket of her jacket, which was nothing at all like an L.L. Bean parka. Cavanaugh Street, she repeated to herself, in her head. Then she turned in the direction of the yellow police barriers that had been set up along the sidewalk two blocks down.





3


Ryall Wyndham had been waiting most of his life to be famous, and now that it had happened, he didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t that he minded the attention. There were people who got rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights syndrome, but he wasn’t one of them. It hadn’t occurred to him, at first, the kind of capital he would be able to make of this. He’d only wondered if he was going to be in for endless hassles of a legal nature, because there he was, just a few hundred feet away, and there was that prick Tony Ross exploding into pieces right in front of his face. The problems of a legal nature that he had envisaged were strictly of a procedural kind. It hadn’t hit him until much later that he might be considered a suspect, not only because he’d been on the spot but because he’d been so public about the fact that he’d loathed Tony and all of his works. Of course, a lot of people loathed Tony Ross. Anybody in a position like that made enemies, without even trying, and on top of that Tony had the whole class thing: good-looking in an emaciated, English sort of way; tall and lean; good at sports; good with women; intellectually accomplished. Intellectually snobbish, that was what Ryall thought, but there was no way to fight that manner when you were confronted with it, unless you had it yourself. Ryall was one person who never misquoted that line from Hamlet that most people mistakenly thought said “to the manor born.” It wasn’t “to the manor.” It was “to the manner,” and that alone made Ryall convinced that Shakespeare was a genius. There was something there he could write a book about some day. If you told a woman like Charlotte Deacon Ross that you thought Shakespeare was a genius, she’d think you were a middlebrow hick, and that would be the end of your invitations to her “intimate evenings.” The only way you could redeem yourself would be to give a lot of money to one of her projects. Ryall did not have that kind of money. Charlotte herself gave 150,000 dollars a year to the opera alone. Women who wanted invitations were known to give a fifth of that, first time out. For Ryall, there was no substitute for staying an insider. He might consider Shakespeare a genius, but he’d never say so where anybody could hear him, and he would always know the name of the literary genius of the moment. The literary genius of this particular moment was Cynthia Ozick, who wrote excruciatingly thin little novels about alienation and spiritual dislocation, laced through with Yiddish folklore. Charlotte liked Cynthia Ozick because Cynthia Ozick had once been quoted, in Esquire, saying, “I am not entertained by entertainment.” It was the kind of thing the queen of England would say. Charlotte liked that, in spite of the fact that she thought of the queen of England as hopelessly bourgeois.