“What did happen to it?”
“It probably went down the incinerator. Now we come to Maximillian Dey. Max was carrying chairs and other furniture for Shelley Feldstein. He went downstairs and was never seen again, until he was dead. Was he killed in that bathroom?”
“I think so, yes. I haven’t had time to read the report in any heavy duty way, but from what I remember, there were splatters on the wall behind him, which would indicate—”
“I know what it would indicate,” Gregor said. “That means there’s nothing we can do with Max. There’s no way to prove anything there. And the same is true of Carmencita Boaz, of course. It’s exactly the same situation. We’re going to have to rely on Maria Gonzalez.”
“Rely on her how?”
“Well, what I had in mind was—”
That was the phone ringing. It was actually two phones ringing, because Gregor now had one in the kitchen as well as in the bedroom. He picked up another mamoul cookie and headed into the kitchen to pick up.
“Just a minute,” he told John Jackman. “I’ll be right back.”
He picked up the phone with one hand and stuffed mamoul into his mouth with the other. He said hello through a mass of crumbs and waited to see what would happen. He was absolutely convinced that what he was about to hear was a phone solicitation. What he got instead was, “Excuse me? I’m looking for Gregor Demarkian.”
“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said cautiously.
“Oh, good.” The voice sounded relieved. “You didn’t sound like yourself for a minute there. Hello, Gregor. This is Ira Ballard. I got that information you wanted.”
“Information?” Gregor was drawing a blank.
Ira was either used to this sort of thing or not inclined to carp on it. “I’ve got the information you wanted on the White Knights, Defenders of Race and Faith,” he said. “You know. The jerks who are bothering the synagogues.”
Synagogues, Gregor thought, straightening up.
In all this fuss, he’d forgotten all about them.
His life was getting totally unmanageable.
FOUR
1
PHILADELPHIA WAS NOT A small town, but Cavanaugh Street was a small town in a large city, and people there often talked and thought in ways that were more rural than urban. Ira Ballard had spent all his life in the great urban centers of the East Coast. He’d come into the Bureau about five years after Gregor had, landing on kidnapping detail at just about the time Gregor was getting himself out of it. [He had landed in the job of tracking nutcase organizations the way most Bureau agents landed in out-of-the-ordinary Bureau assignments: in a concerted attempt to have nothing at all to do with drug investigations.] Gregor had known him for what seemed like forever. Gregor had forgotten how easy it was to slip back into all that, too. The patterns of speech. The habits of thought. Three years on Cavanaugh Street and he was nearly human. Two seconds on the phone with Ira Ballard, and he was sliding back into a place where the White Knights made much more sense than Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian.
For Gregor Demarkian, for years, Ted Bundy had made much more sense than Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian. That was why Gregor was so determined to stay on Cavanaugh Street.
Ira Ballard was smoking a cigarette. Gregor could hear the puff and drag. There had been a lot of pressure in Gregor’s last days at the Bureau to get all agents to quit smoking. Gregor had been spared because he had never smoked, except in the army, which didn’t count. Considering the intensity of that pressure, Gregor thought Ira must be much better at resisting authority than he had ever given him credit for.
“All right,” Ira was saying, as Gregor paced back and forth across the kitchen. “Let’s start at the beginning. The White Knights, Defenders of Race and Faith were founded in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1983. At the time, they were calling themselves the White Knights, Defenders of Our Heritage. According to a press release they sent out at the time—”
“A press release?”
“Everybody sends out press releases these days, Gregor. Survivalist organizations hiding out in the hills of South Dakota have contacts at the New York Times. Yes. They sent out this press release, and according to it they were formed to provide the first line of resistance to the—and I’m quoting here, this is not my prose, ‘the de-Americanification of America.’ End quote. The chief agent of the de-Americanification of America, by the way, was supposed to have been Ronald Reagan.”
“Ronald Reagan?”
“Well, they didn’t like Jimmy Carter, either, Gregor. They aren’t to the left. They’re just so far to the right, they make David Duke’s biography look like the history of the Cuban Communist party.”