Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “Fine. You know the police. They know you. Everybody here—” Krystof looked around Cavanaugh Street. “Everybody here thinks you are a good man. So with you I cover my ass. I do not know who this woman was. I never see her before. Come inside.”

  Krystof finished unlocking the door and swung it back on its hinges to let Gregor in. When they were both in, Krystof shut the door and locked it again.

  “I do not want somebody coming in,” he said. “It would be dangerous. See there on the counter next to the cash register.”

  Gregor went to the counter. Even in the gloom, it took no time at all for him to see what Krystof Andrechev was worried about, and to think that, if it had been him, he would have been worried too. The gun in front of him was enormous, black and polished and deadly-looking—a .357 Magnum, possibly, or one of the knockoffs that had flooded the black market a few years ago.

  “Good God,” he said. “What are you doing with that thing? Do you have a permit for it? Having something like that in a neighborhood like this can be—”

  “No, no. You do not understand. This is not my gun. I own no gun. This she left here, this woman who came today. I have not touched it. Not once. Not even with a handkerchief.”

  “What woman?”

  Krystof shrugged. “An old woman. Nothing much. Past the time of being pretty but not, what do you say, not hunched over. Not near dead.”

  “Middle-aged,” Gregor said.

  “She comes in maybe two hours ago. There is nobody in the store. She comes up to me and asks me if I know what is going on in this neighborhood. Of course I know what is going on in this neighborhood. The women are bringing food to each other all the time, up and down the street, day after day. It is very strange not everybody here is very fat.”

  “That’s a point,” Gregor said.

  “I do not answer her,” Krystof said, “except I make a noise, you know. I do not say words. I do not like to talk much because my English is not good and my, what do you call it, my voice—”

  “Accent.”

  “Accent, yes. It gives me away. I did not know, when I came here, that everybody would be from Armenia.”

  “They’re not. Most of them were born in the United States. What do you have against the Armenians?”

  “I have nothing against anybody. But I am from Russia, and Russia and Armenia have not always been, what is it? Allies.”

  “True enough. I doubt if anybody here will care.” This was not exactly accurate. The Very Old Ladies might care, but they might not, since their enmity was still fixed on the Turks.

  “So,” Krystof said. “She comes, and I say nothing, and she talks. She talks for a long time. About how here on this street they worship the Devil. They worshiped the Devil in this church up here where the explosion was. I know this is not true. This is only an Orthodox church. I think she is very stupid and very ignorant, and I wish her out of my store, but I say nothing. Even hello and good-bye I mostly do not say to the people who come here.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “I’d heard about that.”

  “It is no wish to be unfriendly. I am only ashamed of the way I talk. So I do not talk, and this lady hands me these things.” Krystof went around behind the counter, rummaged underneath it, and came up with a stack of papers and magazines.

  Gregor recognized the paper on the very top. It was another copy of The Harridan Report. Gregor wondered which one it was. Krystof handed the stack across to him, and he took it. Right under The Harridan Report—an edition he hadn’t yet seen, he was sure—was America Fights Back. Gregor would have thought it was one of those hyperpatriotic throwaways that had been everywhere after the September 11 attacks, except that under the title there was smaller lettering: Against the New World Order.

  “You know what these things are?” Krystof said.

  “I’ve seen similar things, yes,” Gregor said.

  “I have looked them over,” Krystof said. “After she left and I locked up the store, I sat down to think for a while and then I looked them over. I read a little. They are insane.”

  “Yes,” Gregor agreed. “They are insane.”

  “We have something like this in Russia after the government falls. Everything is a plot. Everything is the KGB. But nothing like this—reptiles. Thinking people are reptiles.”

  “What?”

  “So she puts them on the counter, and then next to them she puts this gun. There is nobody else in the store, you understand? There is never anybody in the store at this time of day, and now she is there and she puts the gun on the counter and the first thing I think is she is trying to rob me, but I am not afraid. She is a small woman. I do not think I will have trouble getting rid of her.”

  “And?”

  “And she says I should not be afraid, the gun is for me. To protect myself. Against these people here on this street, who worship the Devil, or think they worship the Devil, because she knows that I know it is really something else. They are really agents—spies—for something else. It’s not a word I have heard before.”

  “The Illuminati?” Gregor suggested.

  Krystof’s face cleared. “Yes, that is it. You know this? It is not a word that makes sense to me. This is an organization of terrorism you have here a problem with?”

  “No,” Gregor said firmly. “This is a paranoid delusion some people obsess about. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “If you could maybe talk a little slower,” Krystof said.

  “Yes, I am sorry. She just came in here and laid down the gun? Just like that?”

  “I am afraid the police will not be believing me,” Krystof said, “but that is what she did, yes. She is talking the whole time, about this word I don’t remember again, about the New World Order. I know that. We have that in Russia. About how this here on this street is full of spies or saboteurs or, I don’t know. She talks and talks.”

  “And she leaves the gun.”

  “Right there,” Krystof said. “I did not touch it. Not even one time. Not even with my little finger. I just leave it there and then I lock up and try to think what to do. Then I go out for a walk to go on thinking because of the air, and I see you in the church, and I think you will know. I have read about you in the People magazine.”

  Gregor did not want to discuss People magazine. He looked at the gun again, wishing he was better at identifying firearms. That was another sort of information he hadn’t had much use for after training, and had no use for at all since his retirement, even when he worked as a consultant. That was why police departments had crime labs.

  “I think,” Krystof said, “that if I do not do the right thing, I have much trouble. There are many who believe that all Russians are gangsters. Yes? We are not the Mafia, but people think so. So I think I have to do something smart, and then I see you. I go out after I locked up, but I do not see this woman anymore. She is not a woman from the street here that I know. She is never before coming into the store.”

  Gregor looked down at the stack of material in his hands. There was a publication from something called Conspiracy Digest entitled “The Bush Crime Family.” There was material from something called A-albionic, whatever that was supposed to mean. The A-albionic material looked as if it had been printed out from a Web site. “Origins of the Modern Conspiracy to Rule The World,” it said and “Mystery of Masonry’s Origins Solved?”

  “Freemasons,” Krystof said wisely. “We have too, in Russia, people who are afraid of the Freemasons. Here, I meet many Freemasons. They are nice men. They ask me to join their lodge, because I am now a member of the community. This is not for the United States, do you understand? This is nonsense for backward people.”

  “We’d better call the police,” Gregor said. “If you’ve got a phone, I can—”

  Krystof reached under the counter and came up with a phone. Gregor put the magazines and publications down and took the phone instead.

  “It is only to prove,” Krystof said, “backwardness and ignorance are everywhe
re. Stupidity is everywhere. There is no escape. But I do not touch the gun. I am not an idiot.”

  3

  Four hours later, Gregor was finally free of the newsstand and Krystof An-drechev. If it hadn’t been for the help of John Jackman, it would have taken much longer, and been accompanied by the kind of public circus that brings crowds out of their apartments at every hour of the day or night, little knots of people gathered across the street or down the block from the immediate action, huddled against each other because they forgot to bring their coats, intense. With John’s help, he got an unmarked car and two detectives who were probably assigned to the case. It startled him to realize that he hadn’t paid enough attention to know who was handling the explosion at Holy Trinity Church. He had John Jackman to ask for information. John got him better information that he would ever get out of the officers in charge, unless he had been hired on as a consultant, which he would not be in this matter. He wasn’t really a suspect in the murder of Tony Ross, in spite of the fact that he’d been at the party. Tony had been killed by a bullet from someplace down the drive and into the night. He’d been behind in the big ballroom with a crystal bowl of paté in his hands. He could be a suspect in the explosion of Holy Trinity Church. He lived here. He knew these people. For all the police knew, he could be carrying grudges, harboring resentments, going crazy.

  By the time the detectives were ready to go, it was dark. The streetlights were on all up and down Cavanaugh Street. When Gregor walked out onto the sidewalk, he could see the glow that meant the Ararat was all lit up and streaming light out its plate-glass window. In a little while, the lights would be dimmed and candles would be set out for dinner. The Ararat liked to exude “ambience” in the evenings. He looked back at Krystof calmly locking up and the detectives getting back into their unmarked car, the gun nowhere in sight. One of them was checking something in his notebook. The other was staring out into space, making eye contact with nobody. Gregor remembered that from the Bureau. It was what you did when you were gathering evidence or arresting someone while being watched by a hostile crowd.

  Gregor had been free to go half an hour before. He had only hung around to make sure Krystof was all right. Gregor was not somebody who assumed that the police in every city were automatically corrupt or automatically racist, but he had been around long enough to know that some of them were both. These two had turned out to be only efficient. They had insisted that Krystof Andrechev give them his fingerprints. They had not insisted that Gregor give them his, but only because Gregor’s were already on file with the department. At least they hadn’t panicked, or arrested anybody. Gregor had a hard time understanding who they would have arrested or for what, but when cops got spooked, it could have been anybody for anything.

  Gregor went back down the street to his own building. This time, he did not crane his neck and twist his body around to see if he could see what was left of Holy Trinity Church. He went up the front steps and into the vestibule. He made note of the fact that the door to old George Tekemanian’s ground-floor apartment had no light coming out through the peephole and remained firmly shut. Sometimes, when old George was at home, he left the door open a crack so that he could catch anybody coming in from outside. Old George was not worried about burglars. He was worried about company. Gregor paused to listen, but Grace was no longer playing the harpsichord way upstairs. He wondered if she had a performance this evening. Bennis and Donna had taken him once—and Russ too—to one of Grace’s groups performances. It had been held in an enormous pseudo-Gothic room in a university downtown, and Gregor had found himself both enjoying the music and being annoyed by the setting. He hated “college Gothic,” the way he hated Tudor houses on the Main Line. Neither the Goths nor the Tudors had ever had anything to do with America. They certainly hadn’t left buildings there. Why, Gregor wondered, did people so often choose to be fake when it was actually easier to be authentic?

  He went up the stairs to the second floor, to the apartment he still thought of as Bennis’s. He raised his hand to knock, but before he could the door opened in front of him and Grace Feinman was standing before him, looking flushed.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “We’ve all been wondering where you’d gone. It’s just Father Tibor here now. And me.”

  “Where did Bennis go?” Gregor stepped into the apartment’s foyer and looked around. It was exactly like his foyer, one floor above, and exactly like Grace’s, one floor above that. This building had been converted into three identical floor-through condominiums with a fourth, a little smaller, on the ground floor. It was not the kind of place Gregor normally thought of as “condominiums.” “Condominiums” sounded like modern, concrete things with too many hard primary colors and shiny surfaces pretending to be modern art.

  “She went to park the car,” Grace said, closing the door behind Gregor as he walked in. “She left it parked somewhere or the other again, and she had to put it back in the garage. If I had a car that expensive, I’d probably bronze it and not drive it at all. Except that I’d never buy a car that expensive. If I got that much money in place, I’d buy another harpsichord, or have one made, or maybe I’d buy an antique. It would be wonderful to have one of the really important harpsichords, like the pieces we use when we make disks.”

  Gregor had gone into the living room, which was covered with Bennis’s pa-pier-mâché models of Zed and Zedalia. Everything in the room was Zed and Zedalia. Bennis owned the original art from all her covers. She also owned the signing posters from all of her book tours. All these were framed, and on the walls. Tibor was sitting in an enormous black leather chair next to the big window that looked out into the street, and directly across to Lida Arkmanian’s second-floor living room. The coffee table was piled high with food.

  Gregor walked around the back of the couch and sat down, close enough so that Tibor wouldn’t have to raise his voice too far to be heard. Tibor did not look well. He didn’t look ill, exactly. Gregor knew there was nothing physically wrong with him. The brick that had hit Tibor on the night of the explosion had only grazed his shoulder. It had created a nasty bruise, but no lasting or serious damage, like a concussion. Tibor had been passed out cold when the police reached the scene, but the doctors thought that was shock. It wasn’t an injury to the head. There hadn’t been a trace of hematoma anywhere on his scalp.

  “So,” Gregor said, patting Tibor on the knee. “You look terrible. Were the women too much for you?”

  Tibor shrugged. “The women were the women. They brought food.”

  Gregor and Tibor both looked at the huge mess spread across the coffee table.

  “They brought more than this,” Tibor said. “It is in the kitchen, in the refrigerator and on the counters. They even brought Pringles and Cheez Waffies.”

  “What on earth are Cheez Waffies?”

  “They’re the round ones with the two waffle-looking wafers making a sandwich with the fake cheese,” Grace said helpfully.

  “It doesn’t matter what they are,” Tibor said. “You wouldn’t like them. I’m just tired. I can’t get over being tired. The doctor said this is probably psychological.”

  “It probably is,” Gregor said.

  “Yes. Well, Krekor, psychologically I am tired. And we have the Sunday coming up. We need to celebrate the liturgy. I do not like the idea of this neighborhood going to another church on Sundays. It might give the bishop the idea that we don’t need a church here.”

  “If you don’t want them to go, they won’t go,” Gregor said.

  Tibor nodded. He did not ask Gregor why Gregor had not been at the apartment to meet him. He did not make an effort to see what was going on in Lida’s living room, or on the street. He just sat, and the longer he sat, the more alarmed Gregor became.

  “You know,” he said. “It doesn’t make much sense to brood on it. The world is full of nuts. It really is. There’s not much any of us can do about it. Oh, I know, every time there’s a disaster people start insisting on precaution
s. Look at what happened after September eleventh. Half the country was willing to shred the Bill of Rights to be safe from terrorists. You can’t make them understand that nothing will ever make us safe from terrorists. Or from nuts of any kind. Even the Israelis aren’t completely safe from terrorists, and they take the best and most sensible precautions on the planet—”

  “No,” Tibor said. “There’s something else.”

  Gregor took a deep breath. “What?”

  Tibor glanced at Grace. She had her back to them, fussing with something on the occasional table that sat against the narrow piece of wall between the foyer and the living room’s entry to the kitchen. Maybe there was food there.

  “Grace,” Gregor said. “Do me a favor, will you?” He reached into the pocket of his pants and got his keys. “Run up to my place and get my copy of Anderson’s Guide to Forensic Pathology. It’s lying on the desk in my room, under some other things. To the left of the computer. Look around and you’ll find it.”

  “Oh, all right,” Grace said. She took the keys. “Are you sure I’ll need the keys? I never lock up anymore except when I’m leaving the building.”

  “I’ve got the door on automatic lock,” Gregor said.

  “Why do we need this book about pathology?” Tibor asked, as Grace rushed through the foyer and out onto the landing. They both heard the door snick shut behind her. “I do not much like forensics in any form, Krekor. It makes me ill.”

  “It gets her out of the apartment for a good five minutes, which is what it’s going to take to unearth that thing,” Gregor said. “So tell me what’s wrong.”

  Tibor reached into his suit jacket and came out with an envelope. It was an ordinary white envelope, “business”-sized as they used to call it when Gregor was in school. Tibor put it down on the coffee table between them, balancing it against a big bowl of tiny meatballs with toothpicks in them.

  “There was this that came the day the explosion happened,” he said. “It is not the first one. I threw the other ones out.”