Adele cleared her throat. “David? You’re preaching to the choir here.”
“Yes,” David said, “I know. I know. Come take that walk with me. I want to move around a little before I start the day. And I want to see it. Just this once. Have you been?”
“We went—the whole bunch of us, all the exec assistants and most of the typists—we went the day after the observation platform was opened.”
“Why?”
“To see it,” Adele said.
“See?”
“Yes to see,” Adele said. “But we haven’t been back. None of us, that I know of. I think we wanted to see it because we’re all afraid of it. We’re still afraid of it.”
“You’re afraid the terrorists will come back?”
“No,” Adele said. “Not of that. I don’t know how to put it. The terrorists don’t bother me at all. They just seem like jerks.”
David turned his back to the window and sat on the sill. “You’re right. They seem like that to me too. Any loser can destroy things. They do it all the time. They get knives and guns and mug old ladies on Broadway. They set fire to buildings.”
“It’s—” Adele looked uneasy. “It’s just, you know, you hear all these things, about how we should appreciate other cultures for what they are, that every culture is great in its own way. And after that I couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t true. Their culture isn’t great. If it was, they wouldn’t have done that, and their people wouldn’t have cheered it. And I shouldn’t say that in the bank. We have a lot of clients from Islamic countries. Stewart Markham down in development will call me an imperialist.”
“At least,” David said wryly. “Annie wants to blame it on religion—all religion, everywhere, leads to violence. Christianity had its religious wars and it burned its heretics and hanged its witches. The Hindus kill the Muslims in India and Pakistan. The Muslims make war on the World Trade Center. We should go to work to abolish religion.”
“How can you abolish religion?”
“I think it’s all an excuse,” David said. “All of it. Religion. Politics. Love. Hate. Rage. It’s all an excuse for the fact that some people love blood. They love destruction. They hate everything about themselves so much. They hate what they are. They hate their humanness. And mostly they hate other people’s humanness. They hate the fact that other people are human just the way they are, but they do so much more, they accomplish so much more. That’s what they have to get rid of. The fact that there’s no difference between themselves and those people, the people who do things, who make things instead of tearing them down. I think every murder ever committed on the face of this planet has been committed out of guilt.”
“I’d like to say I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t,” Adele said. “Maybe you should take your coat off and sit down. I’ll bring you some coffee.”
“Maybe you should get your coat on and come with me. I’m going to go look at it. When we come back, we can take a break from Price Heaven and look over the setup for the foundation Annie wants to endow for Adelphos House. We can write up the specs and send it down to Carver to hammer out the details. I want to go, Adele. I’d like you to come with me.”
“All right,” Adele said. “My coat’s right out in the hall. Let me get it. Are you sure you shouldn’t be home in bed with a tranquilizer?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re behaving the way some of us did right after it happened. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, they call it. Some of the younger men walked around for days looking like they’d just been shot, and not being able to remember where they put anything. Tranquilizers do help, you know. And nobody would think worse of you for taking a day off when two of your closest friends have been murdered within sight of you in less than a week.”
“I don’t need a day off. Get your coat. Let’s go.”
Adele hesitated. Then she shrugged slightly, turned on her heel, and went. She left the door open. David stared through it for a moment. The outer offices looked busy. They always were at this time of day. In an hour or two, the men on the Asia desk would pack up and go home. They worked reverse hours to be in touch with the Tokyo market. He didn’t think he had been exaggerating. He really didn’t. Every murder was committed out of guilt, the guilt of knowing that you were less than you ought to be. That was what had happened on September 11 and that was what had happened to Tony and Charlotte. It was counterproductive to attempt to make something huge and special and enormous out of a terrorist attack, as if to be a terrorist was to be something more than human, or less. To be a terrorist was to be exactly human. To be a murderer was to be exactly human. No matter what the excuses were, at the bottom, the motives were always the same.