Conspiracy Theory(62)

“Yes, Krekor, I know. I should have done something about it. I should have showed it to you. I didn’t want to.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because I didn’t want you to go to the police.” Tibor shook his head. “Krekor, please. It did not occur to me that anybody would actually commit any real violence. You see this sort of thing on the Internet all the time. Mostly, it does not get physical—”

“Except that this wasn’t on the Internet. This was sent directly to you.”

“Yes, I know. But still. And then I worried about the obvious. That people would believe what these things said.”

“Believe that you were sacrificing infants to Satan?”

“No, Krekor. Believe that there was some truth in the other things. That there was sex going on at Holy Trinity. That is not so far-fetched an accusation, is it? Think of what happened with the archdiocese in Philadelphia, and then in Boston too, hundreds of children, dozens of priests, all involved in—in—”

“Those were the Catholics,” Gregor said firmly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tibor said. “It doesn’t matter that you and I know that nothing like that has ever gone on at Holy Trinity. It doesn’t matter that the whole neighborhood knows. The mud would fly and the mud would stick, out there, in the city, no matter what we did to clean it up. And then I thought that maybe that was the point. That whoever sent this expected me to go right to the police, and then when I did the contents of the letters would be aired in the press, and the reputation of the church would be destroyed. So I threw them away.”

“Okay,” Gregor said.

“Now I am thinking that maybe I brought this on us myself,” Tibor said. “That if I had done what I was expected to do and gone to the police, the church would still be standing. That they only blew up the church because the other thing, the thing with the letters, was not working. It was very wrong of me, Krekor. It was a matter of self-regard, and self-protection, and that is not what a priest with a congregation should do.”

“Okay,” Gregor said again, trying to think. “But you kept that one. Why did you keep that one? Why didn’t you throw it away?”

“I—it was different. More abusive. And by then they were coming every day, and I thought I should now maybe show them to you. That one frightened me. It used, what do you call it? Not curse words. Anglo-Saxonism, you know. Bad words like that, where the others hadn’t. And there was the direct threat. And I couldn’t make myself throw it away, so I put it in this pocket and I went out to Adelphos House and when I got back to Cavanaugh Street it was still there. And then the church blew up.”

Gregor got up. His head hurt. Tibor was not entirely wrong about what would happen to the church’s reputation, or his own, when the contents of this letter got out—and they would get out. “You can’t throw that one away,” he said carefully. “Not now. It’s evidence in a crime, or it might be. Maybe I can take it straight to John Jackman and see if he can keep the contents private, at least for the time being—”

“Oh, Krekor.”

“The time being may matter a great deal. If it turns out this whole thing was orchestrated by one of the nut groups, the press will concentrate on the nut group. And I should think it’s inevitable that that’s what happened. The next most likely thing is that this was the act of a single deranged individual. All we have to do is to show that he’s made similar threats to other people before. The public isn’t completely cynical, Tibor.”

“Not cynical, no,” Tibor said, “but jaded. And you can’t blame them. Those things did happen, in the Catholic archdiocese, and in other churches as well. Sometimes I think that is the only religious news I read anymore, the sex molestation cases. Except for the politics, you understand, where some pastor somewhere is burning books. It’s as if the whole world has gone insane, and not just since September eleventh. People no longer have common sense.”

Gregor thought that people never had had much in the way of common sense. In his experience, common sense was less common than genius, because even geniuses didn’t usually have it. He folded up the letter, put it back in its envelope, and put the envelope into his own jacket pocket.

“I’ll call John about this right away,” he said, thinking that John Jackman was going to start regretting the fact that he’d given Gregor his private cell phone number. “We’ll do this the very best way we can. But for goodness sake, if you get any more, don’t throw them away.”