Conspiracy Theory (15 page)

We are coming upon a time of great persecution. Anthony van Wyck Ross was not murdered by men and women like us, who know the truth and want to expose it to the world—but the Illuminati will do everything in their power to make it look as if we are at fault, to brand us extremists, terrorists, and lunatics. Anthony van Wyck Ross was murdered by the same people who destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In other words, he was murdered by his own, by a CIA operative on the direct orders of George W. Bush. Long powerful and reliable in the corridors of power, Ross had begun to disintegrate mentally in the last months of his life, the results of alcohol and drug abuse brought on by his attempts to ease the painful memories of the sexual abuse that was the foundation of his training as a member of the Illuminati. It was feared that he would no longer be able to keep the secrets he had been entrusted with. The most dangerous secret, the one thing the Illuminati cannot allow the public to understand at just this point in time, is that the September 11 massacres were carried out on the orders of the United States government, with the help of the British, French, German and United Nations power elites. Ross was himself involved in the planning of those massacres. If he couldn't shut up—and he couldn't, not any longer—he would have to be silenced.

Charlotte licked her lips and folded the sheaf of papers in half again. It was like being trapped inside the mind of a lunatic, imprisoned in his skull. She had no idea where this thing had come from, or who had put it squarely in the middle of her desk here in the morning room, so that it would be the first thing she would find. She had no idea who
had
been leaving them here, for months. She was sure Miss Parenti had had nothing to do with it. She was not sure the servants had not. The idea that somebody who worked for her read this …
thing
… on a regular basis made her feel as if she had been turned to ice.

She got out of her chair and took the sheaf of papers with her. She should turn them over to the police. She should outline the entire incident, the way they were lying right on top of her green felt ink blotter, where she couldn't miss them. She should make out a list of the people in her service and the people who had been to visit during the day. She did none of these things. She threw the sheaf of papers in the fire and stood by to watch them burn. She counted the seconds until the flames had turned the papers to ash.

Then she left the morning room and walked down the hall to the small powder room near the back stairs. She needed to throw up.

It would have been better if there had been someone on the street when Father Tibor Kasparian got home—not a big welcoming committee; he wasn't up for that, and he had a feeling he'd get it whether he wanted it or not in an hour or two—but just someone familiar, bringing home groceries, buying the paper, moving a car that had been parked too long at the curb. Sometimes you needed the ordinary and the everyday. They were all that took the edge off the frightening and bizarre. He thought ahead to the crush that would develop as soon as word got out that he was home. Lida Arkmanian was probably watching from the big plate-glass window in her living room right this minute. When it started, it would be inexorable. People would drift in to Ben-nis's old apartment, scrupulously
not
talking about why it was free for somebody else to move into for a month or two, bringing food. Eventually, the women would ignore him and drape themselves over all of Bennis's furniture to talk about who was getting married and who was getting divorced and who was going to graduate in the spring from what really fancy college in Massachusetts. Paper plates and plastic forks would accumulate on tables, brought in by whichever one of them realized that the last thing he'd want on his first day home was a lot of dishes to do. Books would accumulate on the coffee table in the living room, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with grosgrain ribbon. His suitcases would be laid out on Bennis's freshly made-up bed. He had no idea what he would do when they were all gone. It hadn't occurred to him until just this moment that he hadn't been alone for a single minute since the explosion had ripped through Holy Trinity Church.

There was a cold wind coming down the street as he got out of the car, blowing stray pieces of paper along the gutters. He turned in the direction of the church and tried to get a look, but Bennis was right. There was nothing to see from here. It was too far up, and the church had been set back a little from the sidewalks.

“I think I only imagined I could see it all that time,” she'd told him, while they'd still been at the hospital. “I knew it was there, so I thought any dark space in the vicinity must be the church and I must be seeing it.”

Tibor did not point out to her then, or remind her now, that at the beginning of last week the church had been much closer to the sidewalk than it was now. It had had an extra wall. At least, that was what the news programs had said when he'd watched them on television in the hospital, even though the doctor hadn't been sure he ought to be allowed. There had been one clear photograph of the front of Holy Trinity in daylight, the wall mostly gone, the vestibule destroyed, the long rows of pews covered in rock and sand. It had been taken from too far back for Tibor to be able to tell what had happened to the altar. It made him nauseated to realize that he had not seen the actual church since the explosion had happened. He hadn't been here to see it. He thought he would have gone crazy in his hospital bed if he'd had to listen to nonstop news reports about the explosion, but there weren't any. The explosion was not big news. The death of Anthony van Wyck Ross was.

He went up the steps to the tall stone house where Bennis and Gregor lived, along with old George Tekemanian on the ground floor and Grace Feinman on the fourth. As soon as he stepped into the foyer, he could hear Grace's harpsichord above him. She was playing Bach. He turned toward the mailboxes and stopped. His mail would not be here. It would be down at the apartment behind the church, where he was not allowed to go because of the structural damage caused by the blast.

“What do they do with my mail?” he said to Donna and Bennis coming up behind him.

“They leave it at your apartment,” Bennis said. “Donna and I went over and got it and brought it to you in the hospital, except for what are obviously condolence cards. We left them here.”

“I thought nobody could go into the apartment.”

“That was only the first couple of days,” Donna said. “While they were working things out. We've been going over there all the time, since. Bennis has been packaging up your books.”

“Don't worry,” Bennis said. “I've been classifying them and labeling the boxes. There's a crack in the wall of your bedroom and a leak in the roof there now. That's the wall the apartment shared with the back of the church vestibule and the first part of the church room, the—”

“Sacristy,” Tibor said.

“That, yes.” Bennis looked relieved. “Anyway, there's a crack there and the roof is damaged. That's why you can't go back right away. But it's not like the church itself. You could go over there and look through things when you feel stronger.”

“Where are the books you put in boxes?”

“In my back room,” Donna said. “Don't worry. Russ is terribly impressed. He said he never realized you had such a range before, like with the science books.”

Tibor could have told her that he didn't really understand the science books, which was true. He read Richard Dawkins and made notes on his books, but he found the details impossible to assimilate into a brain that had been trained from adolescence in literary explication. Instead he started up the big swing-back flight of steps that went to the second floor. At the landing, he paused and looked out the window. There was nothing to see but the wall of the building next door. He went up the rest of the flight and paused politely before Bennis's front door.

“Stay as long as you like,” Bennis said, brushing past him with a suitcase and pulling him along with her as she went. “I've got no need for this place at the moment, and I won't have for a while. Spread out. My cleaning lady will be in twice a week. If you leave your laundry out on the bed, she'll do it for you. There's enough food in the refrigerator for a week, and there will be more. You know how that works—”

“Stop,” Tibor said.

“We're making him tired,” Donna said. “Maybe we should let him take a nap.”

“I don't need a nap,” Tibor said. “I'm fine. I was always fine.”

“You were so fine, they kept you in the hospital for observation for over four days,” Bennis said.

Tibor shook his head. “They kept me in the hospital because you guaranteed the bill.”

“Did you really?” Donna said.

“Better safe than sorry,” Bennis said. Then she looked away. “God, I've started talking in clichés. I thought disaster was supposed to bring out the best in people.”

Tibor moved into the apartment, through the foyer, into the living room. Bennis's papier-mâché models were everywhere, lunar landscapes next to verdant green hills, knights and ladies leaning into each other next to castles with outsized towers that looked tall enough to rival Babel. This was what Bennis used the apartment for, now that she spent all of her private time with Gregor. She wrote here, and she built her models so that she'd be able to see the landscapes she was inventing. Tibor sat down on the long sofa and looked out the window at Lida Arkmanian's living room. No one was in it.

“Are you sure you're all right?” Bennis asked, sitting down in the big overstuffed chair that faced the couch. The coffee table was huge and square and— if you really looked at it—in the shape of a gigantic antique book lying on its side. Donna stayed standing in the back, moving from foot to foot, restless.

“I'm fine,” Tibor said. “I need to talk to my bishop. There was no liturgy here on Sunday, because I was in the hospital—”

“Some people went over to Radnor,” Donna said quickly. “It was all right.”

“It was not all right,” Tibor said. “We will have to do something about the coming Sunday. I will have to get permissions. There are details to be worked out. Then there are the other things. The insurance. The rebuilding. If we're going to rebuild.”

“Of course we're going to rebuild,” Donna said. “We've even got a committee going on the project already.”

“Mmmm,” Tibor said. “Do you know that this was not built to be an Armenian church? It was built for the Greeks, and then they moved out of the neighborhood and we took it over. That was before my time, of course. It was before Gregor's time, unless he was an infant, and maybe not even then. Anyway, when we rebuild, we'll be able to fix the things we could never fix before. The iconostasis can be replaced with a veil. The pictures can be adjusted. I never minded it the way it was, though. It seemed—ecumenical.”

“Oh,” Donna said.

Tibor got up off the couch and went to the window. Pressing his face against the glass and twisting the side of his body almost 180 degrees, he could just see the black hollow where the front of the church should have been—or maybe he couldn't. Maybe that was an illusion too. He went back to the couch and sat down. He looked at the things that had been left on the coffee table:
Vanity Fair; National Geographic;
a Swiss army knife; a flashlight; a book of matches, untouched. He was not doing anything intelligent, and he was beginning to shake with cold the way he had on and off in the hospital. “Panic attacks,” the doctor had called them, but Tibor was sure that wasn't what they were.

“I'm going to go make some coffee,” Donna said, heading out for the kitchen.

Bennis leaned forward on her chair. “You're shaking again. And sweating. You should have let the doctor give you some sedatives.”

“I don't need sedatives.”

“You need something.”

“Will I interfere with you here? Do you need the apartment to do your work?”

“No. Tibor—”

Tibor waved her away. “It doesn't matter.” That was true too. It didn't matter in any way she would understand, and he didn't have the words he needed to explain things to her. He could have explained them to Gregor, but Gregor was not in sight. It wasn't just the church. It was everything. People said that the change had come because of the events of September 11, but that wasn't true. September 11 was an effect, not a cause. The change had come long before that, and it had less to do with violence than with— what? He wished he could get more interested in what had happened to Anthony van Wyck Ross.

“Where is Gregor?” he asked.

“Upstairs in the apartment, as far as I know,” Bennis said. “I'm surprised he isn't down here already. Do you want me to go get him?”

“No, no. Maybe he is taking a nap. It would be good for him.”

“Do you want
anything?
” Bennis said.

Tibor fluttered his hands in the air. “When I first came to America, I lived in St. Mark's Place, in the east village, in Manhattan. Did you know that? I didn't have a church then. I had a part-time job translating for a publishing company. Every week on Monday I would go in and get my projects. The rest of the time I would spend in my apartment working. Except that every day in the late afternoons I would walk a long way to have coffee in a big café where other immigrants went, but only in the afternoons, because at night the same place was full of young people. I was the only one from Armenia. A lot of the rest of them were Russians.”

“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?”