Conspiracy Theory(49)

“And?”

“And,” Tibor said, “nobody was crazy. And from what I remember, nobody was crazy in the rest of the country, either. People didn’t think that magic was real. They weren’t looking to burn witches. They weren’t looking for Satan under every bedspread. Do you know what Satan is, really?”

“The most favored angel of God who took up arms against heaven and was defeated by St. Michael and sent to Hell,” Bennis said. “I remember from my course in Milton.”

“Satan is willful ignorance,” Tibor said. “Satan is superstition. Satan is what we all do when we take the easy way out and look for magic and potions and plots to explain life to us, and now we all seem to do it. The president of the United States does it. They think it’s religion, Bennis, but it is not. It wasn’t when we burned witches in the Middle Ages and it isn’t now. It’s a kind of brain disease.”

“You think the explosion in the church had something to do with burning witches?” Bennis looked at sea.

Tibor waved it away. “Maybe I will give a homily on Satan the next time I celebrate the liturgy. Except that I don’t know if I could make sense. I wish people were better than they are.”

“So does everybody.”

“I wish people were more like people,” Tibor said.

Bennis got up. “I’m going to run upstairs and get Gregor. He wanted to know when you got back. And don’t tell me I can’t wake him up.”

“I do not believe in witches,” Tibor said. “And I do not believe in UFO abductions. Or conspiracies. Or miraculous healings at prayer meetings held in auditoriums where the healer is on a stage. Or that God put fossils in the earth to deceive people of little faith into believing that evolution had occurred. But I do believe in God. And I do believe in evil.”

“If I hurry, I can get Gregor down here before the crowds arrive,” Bennis said. “Lida and Sheila and Hannah made you something for a coming-home present. They want to present it to you personally.”

“You think I’ve become as insane as I think they are,” Tibor said.

“No,” Bennis said. “I think you’re still incredibly upset. Give me a moment. I’ll find Gregor.”

She crossed the room and went behind him, into the foyer. He heard the apartment’s door open and then close again. Donna came back in from the kitchen with a big mug of black coffee that she put down in front of him on the coffee table.

“There,” she said. “That should help. I made the Turk—ah, the Armenian kind, although how you can drink that much caffeine without going into cardiac arrest, I just don’t know.”

Tibor looked into the mug. The coffee was as thick as mud, the way it was supposed to be. He did sound as crazy as the people he was talking about, who probably didn’t sound crazy at all to most people most of the time. They did their shopping. They went to work. They paid their mortgages and mowed their lawns. They just thought that it was really true that people rode around on broomsticks and shape-shifted themselves into ravenous wolves and stole children through the pages of fantasy books.

He put his hands inside his jacket and felt the thickness of paper in his inside breast pocket. It had survived the blast, and the hospital stay, and been there for him to find when he got dressed to wait for Bennis early this afternoon. He’d half-forgotten about it.

“Tell me,” he asked Donna. “Do you believe there is a guardian angel always watching over you and everything you do?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” Donna said. “Am I supposed to believe it?”

“Never mind,” Tibor said.

He picked up the coffee mug in both hands and took a drink so long it made his throat feel scalded and raw.





3


For David Alden, it was the worst week he could remember, ever, in his entire life, and all he really wanted was to get out of the New York office and back to Philadelphia. In another time, on another planet—back before Tony was murdered; back when all he had to worry about was getting the data on the Price Heaven mess in place on time—he would have taken off for the rest of the week and only resurfaced when he wanted to, or thought he could no longer get away with it. Now there was no time, and that was true even though he was not Tony’s heir apparent. He knew Charlotte thought he was, or at least thought he intended to end up at the head of the bank, but the idea was laughable. He was far too young, and he’d had far too little experience. If he did everything right, he might curry enough favor with whoever the new man would be to stay on here. He might not. It was less than pleasingly sentimental, but he’d updated his résumé and FedExed it to a headhunter less than two days after Tony was pronounced dead at the scene at the Around the World Harvest Ball. Ever since, he’d had one ear trained for the sound of other banks looking for talent. He did not sit at Tony’s desk when he worked. It would have made sense if he had, in terms of efficiency, but it gave him the creeps. He did not make calls from Tony’s phone, either, although he answered the ones that came in. He had taken up residence in the office’s corner sitting area: a couch, two chairs, and a coffee table bordered on two sides by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on Wall Street and lower Manhattan. When the World Trade Center had collapsed in 2001, they had been forced out of these offices for nearly two weeks while inspectors made sure there was no structural damage to the building and window installers replaced the windows on every floor of the side that faced the disaster. Then the cleaning women had had to come in, to sweep the broken glass and the other debris from the floors. Tony’s Persian carpet, flown in from Iraq in the days before Saddam Hussein was supposed to be Evil Incarnate, had been destroyed. David Alden did not understand politics in the way politics was played by people like Hussein and the Trade Center bombers. War seemed, to him, so obviously counterproductive. It destroyed economies, and in destroying economies it destroyed markets. David understood markets, and had since he was in high school—although he resisted using the words high school, because in his case, they were so clearly affected. Groton was not a “high school” the way anybody who had gone to a public high school would understand it, but David didn’t like prep school, either. That sounded worse than affected. That sounded deliberately off-putting, as if he were not only an elitist—which he was—but a snob. America could be a very schizophrenic place to live, if you were the kind of person he was. He had tried to get that across to a British girlfriend he’d had for a while, but it had gone right past her. To Rosamund, being someone who went to famous schools and had been required to dress for dinner in a jacket and tie since you were eight years old was just a fact of life, and if other people resented it it was because they lacked both character and proportion.