Hardscrabble Road(81)
“Well,” Gregor said, “we’re back to Jig Tyler. But I think you’ve been surfing the Libertarian Party Web site again.”
“No, Krekor, I don’t surf the Libertarian Party Web site. I do go to the Reason Foundation, which is run by serious people. The Libertarian Party went off the deep end of ideology long ago. So did Dr. Tyler, only in the opposite direction.”
Gregor considered his sandwich, which, apparently, somebody wanted to tax to keep him from eating. Or something. He took an enormous bite off the end of it and thought that Philly steaks were the one thing he had really missed in all those years living in Washington. He missed them every time he went out of town, too, because when people made them other places, they didn’t make them absolutely right.
“So,” he said. “I thought, since you were the only person I knew who had ever met him, you could tell me whether it made sense to have Jig Tyler’s name on this list. If you thought he was capable of murder.”
“Most people are capable of murder, Krekor, under the right circumstances.”
“The kicker in that one is the ‘under the right circumstances.’ Most people will kill in self-defense, instinctively. A minority of people will kill under the influence of alcohol or drugs just because they lose all inhibitions. I’m not talking about situations like that. I’m talking about cold-blooded murder. Fill the pills with arsenic. Hand them over. Is he capable of a murder like that?”
Tibor considered it. “Yes,” he said. “Under the right circumstances.”
Gregor threw up his hands.
Tibor shook his head. “No, Krekor, listen. Not that kind of under the right circumstances. When I met Dr. Tyler, we were on a committee to set up a help service for new immigrants. It was a year and a half ago. The purpose of the committee was to put in place a group of trained professionals who could help new immigrants with their problems with the immigration authorities, with finding a place to learn English, with applying for naturalization, with finding employment, with dealing with regulations if they want to start a business. The committee was put together by Reverend Kim at the Korean Baptist Church. His church was helping many more people than it used to, because there have been many more refugees from North Korea in the last few years. He looked around and saw a need, because many of the immigrants who come here do not come to existing communities and must handle things on their own. He put out a call for help and money; he got lots of help and only a little money. Dr. Tyler put in forty-five thousand dollars.”
“Well, that’s not to his discredit,” Gregor said. “That’s very good of him.”
“Yes, Krekor, it was very good of him. He is a relatively wealthy man. His books sell well and the Nobel Prize brings about a million dollars with it. But he is like many wealthy men in these enterprises. He gives, but he expects to get in return.”
“And what did he expect to get?”
“Our agreement not to attempt to block, or even to protest, legislation that would have made the pastors who practice faith healing liable to criminal prosecution for practicing medicine without a license.”
Gregor sat back on his seat. It was, he thought, not all that ridiculous an idea. He could even see a couple of ways around the constitutional problems somebody was bound to bring up, probably the ACLU.
“You’d argue it as a kind of fraud protection,” he said. “You’d say there is no evidence that faith healing works, ever—is there?”
“No,” Tibor said. “It is my personal opinion that if God wanted to cure all our ills with prayer, He wouldn’t have given us the minds to invent modern medicine. I am not saying that God does not sometimes heal us when we ask for healing in prayer. Yes, He does that. I am saying I know of no properly corroborated case of a cure through faith healing. There are stories, of course. People claim things. Some of the things they claim might even be true. But they can’t document them, and if they can’t document them, then the proper response of rational people is to think it probably did not happen. But here, you see, is the difficulty. Not all people, not even all rational people, have the proper response. They hear the stories, and they find the stories more compelling than the hard evidence. And they go to faith healers anyway. Sometimes they give these people a lot of money they cannot afford to give. Sometimes they do things that make their conditions medically worse. Diabetics throw away their insulin, for instance, and some of the ones who do go into comas and some of the ones who go into comas die.”
“I’m surprised nobody has thought of this before, if it’s that bad,” Gregor said.