Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “What happened to you? How did you get away?”

  “I didn’t get away. If I could have gotten away, I would have gone with Anna. I was arrested. Then for a while I was in prison, in Armenia and later in the Soviet Union. Then eventually I was released. Don’t ask me why. People were arrested and released on whim, almost. There were sentences, but they didn’t mean anything. In my case there wasn’t even a trial. So I was in prison and then I was released and taken back to Armenia, and when I got there I found some friends and began to make my way out. For a long time, I felt very guilty, being here. It didn’t seem right to me that I should be here and Anna could not be. Then I was called to Holy Trinity, and the rest you know.”

  “What are the papers?” Bennis asked. “They look old.”

  “They’re crumbling to dust. Everything does. I just hate the thought of losing them. They’re letters, from Anna to me, the ones she wrote me when we were not married and I was studying to be a priest. But I wasn’t studying in the ordinary way, in the government-approved theological college. We had to be careful.”

  “You know, there are ways to preserve old letters like those. If you don’t mind not being able to touch the paper itself, you can have them sealed in plastic and that keeps the air from them and keeps them from disintegrating.”

  “This is expensive?”

  “I don’t know,” Bennis said. “Why don’t you let me have one of them later and I’ll get it done and we’ll see.”

  “I have been thinking that they would wear away, and then I would have only the picture. It would not be the same. It is her voice I miss. Sometimes I can hear her talking to me, but it gets fainter all the time. It’s only a trick the mind plays, I know. I am not being ridiculous. I just need to hear her voice.”

  “Well, in the meantime, let’s get you and this stuff out of here. Go down to the Ararat for breakfast. Most everybody will be gone, but Gregor will be there because he’s waiting for John Jackman. You can talk to them. I think they’re going to go over what the police have on the bombing. And then something happened yesterday with a gun.”

  “Yes,” Tibor said. He stood up and then leaned over to get his papers and his picture. Anna smiled up at him in black and white, posed with head tilted like a forties movie star. “He has told me something of this yesterday. I wasn’t paying enough attention. It seems to me, a little, as if—I feel all the time I am in a play, not a reality. Maybe I am becoming an adolescent in my old age.”

  “Come on,” Bennis said. “If you’ve got to be up and about, it will do you good to be up and about among cheerful people. If anybody is cheerful these days. Oh, there was another murder out in Bryn Mawr. Have you seen the papers?”

  Tibor had not seen the papers, and he had not watched the television news, and he found that he didn’t really care. There was another murder out in Bryn Mawr. The church was a mess. His letters were not only old but written with cheap Soviet-manufactured ink, so that the words on them had faded almost to invisibility.

  Somehow, this morning had not accomplished what he wanted it to.

  THREE

  1

  Gregor Demarkian had always wondered if John Jackman minded eating at the Ararat, when he was almost always the only African-American there, but if he did he’d never said, and the Ararat certainly seemed to like him. By the time Tibor came in, John was sitting happily in front of a gigantic platter of scrambled eggs, toast, sausage, bacon, and hash browns, as well as coffee and orange juice. Even Gregor didn’t have the guts to eat that way in front of Bennis, who was prone to delivering lectures on short-term increases in blood cholesterol and long-term risk factors for heart disease. Of course, unlike other men entering middle age, John didn’t seem to be thickening in the waist, or anyplace else. He was still a tall, thin, aristocratic man, except for the skin color more WASP-looking than most of the WASPs who lived in the great houses on the Main Line where he had started his career. When Bennis was in one of her better moods, she liked to point out that John might be more of a WASP than some of those people, considering the penchant of husbands for keeping mistresses of any color and of wives for having something on the side with the help. Gregor never knew whether to take her seriously.

  By the time Tibor came in, John had pushed all their plates aside to write on a large sheet of scrap paper, actually the back of one of those flyers advertising car washes that appeared on the streets from time to time with no known provenance. The paper was already a mess, full of circles and lines and arrows. It all meant something to John, but no matter how often he tried to explain it, it did not make that much sense to Gregor. Tibor saw them at the table and hesitated. John looked up and saw Tibor there and waved him over.

  “Father, Father,” he said, standing up in the way he had been taught to stand up when priests entered the room by the nuns in his very strict Catholic elementary school. “It’s good to see you back. I hope you’re feeling better.”

  “I am feeling all right,” Tibor said. Gregor made room for him on the bench. Tibor slid in and shrugged off his coat. “I was never sick. I was only—” He threw his hands in the air.

  “In the hospital for observation.” John sat down. “Yes, I know. Code for enough money to stay for a while because somebody is worried about you. Still. You got a good slam in the shoulder, if I remember. It couldn’t have hurt to have a few days rest.”

  Tibor looked down at his hands, and then away. Gregor felt himself getting nervous. “Well,” he said. “John was explaining to me the intricacies of conspiracy organizations in the city of Philadelphia.”

  “Not just in Philadelphia,” John said. “They’re all over the place. And if you go overseas, you get versions of them with twists. There are Islamic ones. America is the great Satan. There are African ones. There are Russian ones. There aren’t too many Western European ones. Maybe their educational systems are as good as they’re supposed to be.”

  Linda Melajian came over and put a coffee cup in front of Tibor. Then she filled it with coffee. Gregor thanked her. Tibor seemed to be a little distracted.

  “So,” Gregor said. “We’ve been going over the state of the investigation of who blew up the church.”

  “Yes,” Tibor said. “I know. And Bennis says Mr. Jackman comes every morning before work, and you discuss this. It is progress that is being made?”

  “Gregor showed me that letter you got,” John said. “I’ll turn it over to the investigating officers when I get in. I wish things fit together the way they should. Did Gregor tell you that a man came to him last night with a story about having been given a gun?”

  “A little, yes,” Tibor said. “Late last night, when he got in. Very late.”

  “I saw the light in your window when I came home,” Gregor said. “I was worried.”

  “Let’s try to make sense of this,” John said. “Of course, it’s way too early to tell. We’re going to have to do checks from one end of the city to the other, and we’re going to do more than that. The detectives don’t like it, but even they’ve had to agree with me after this. We’ve called in the FBI for help.”

  “Not every special agent is like Walker Canfield. In fact, most of them aren’t. If they were, the country would collapse.” Gregor shook his head.

  “Well, we’re going to talk to Canfield too,” Jackman said. “And yes, he’s still around. I don’t know what his status is. I talked to the cops in Lower Merion, and they don’t know what his status is, either. But I thought it would be a good idea if we got pictures of the people in this group Canfield and his partner were investigating, and showed the pictures of the women to An-drechev. Just to see if he can make them.”

  “As in the woman who brought him the gun?” Gregor said. “Good idea. Doesn’t it bother you, though, that whole incident? Why did she bring him a gun?”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” Jackman said. “That must have occurred to you as well as to me. Maybe he had the gun and made up the story.”

  “Why?”

/>   “Because he’s connected with one of these conspiracy groups, maybe the very one that caused the bombing, and now he’s trying to cover his ass,” John said. “It’s not a great explanation, I know, but it’s a possibility. These people are not very bright. Or at least the rank and file aren’t. Some of the movement stars have better imaginations than Stephen King.”

  “It’s a terrible explanation,” Gregor said. “But you should be able to tell if at least some of it’s true. Do you know about fingerprints yet?”

  “Only unofficially.”

  “And?”

  “There aren’t any,” Jackman said. “Not any at all.”

  “Which means the gun was wiped,” Gregor said patiently, “which An-drechev could have done himself. But you just said these people aren’t very bright. Even most bright people don’t think of all the places on the gun where there might be fingerprints.”

  “Well, whoever wiped this one did,” John said. “It still doesn’t prove that he’s telling the truth. Don’t worry about it. I’m not trying to hang the man. I’m just trying to make the incident make sense. Why would some woman come up and hand him a gun like that?”

  “He said she said she was trying to make sure he was armed against devil worshipers, or something of the kind,” Gregor said.

  Tibor stirred in his seat. “It is ridiculous, this about devil worshipers. Where do they think of such a thing?”

  “I don’t think you can call what they do ‘thinking’ in the conventional sense,” Gregor said.

  “What’s more important,” John said, “is that all this talk about devil worship doesn’t really fit with America on Alert, which is not a religious organization. Some of them are, of course. They think the whole plot is about the Antichrist. But America on Alert is not one of them.”

  “Did the woman who gave Andrechev the gun talk about the Antichrist?” Gregor asked. “I don’t remember him saying she did. He said something about how she kept calling him a good American, and then I don’t remember.”

  John reached into his jacket pocket and took out his notebook. “According to Andrechev,” he said, “she told him that there were people on this street who thought they worshiped the devil, but that Andrechev knew like she did that they were really doing something else. That’s ambiguous enough.”

  “What about that stack of literature he had? There was The Harridan Report, but there were other things too,” Gregor said.

  John looked through his notebook again. “They hadn’t finished going through it by the time I talked to them. It’s going to take a few days. There was a lot of it, and from what they could tell, it seems to have come from all over. A-albionics, have you heard of them?”

  “I have,” Tibor said. “They have a Web site. You must pay to be a subscriber, and then you can have their information. So I do not have their information. But they have a few free essays, and these I have read.”

  “And?” Gregor said.

  Tibor shrugged. “The usual thing. There is a plot to make the United States subject to one big New World Order and take all our freedoms away and have all our laws be the laws of the UN. Tell me, Krekor, because this I do not understand. What do these people have against international law? Do they think it is a good thing that when two countries have a border dispute, they shoot at each other? When they have a dispute with their neighbor, they don’t shoot him. They go to court. When somebody commits a crime against them, they don’t buy weapons and go down to this person’s street and shoot up his house and then hide behind concrete when the man’s family comes and shoots their house to retaliate. They call the police and the police bring the man to court. I have lived in places where there was no law and where there was war and I can tell you that that is not better than the Commonwealth of Philadelphia.”

  “Maybe they would shoot up their neighbor’s house,” John said. “Some of these groups have engaged in a lot of violence over the years. Others of them just put out newsletters and self-published books and that kind of thing. As if they were giant role-playing games for middle-aged sad sacks in midlife crisis.”

  “And?” Gregor said. “What was America on Alert?”

  John laughed. “The reason Canfield and his partner were up here investigating was that they’d got information that America on Alert was stockpiling weapons. Big-time.”

  “So? Why didn’t they get a warrant and search?”

  “According to Canfield, because they didn’t know where to search. They could have searched all the houses of all the members they’d come across, and they tried doing that. The judge wouldn’t buy it. After Ruby Ridge and a couple of other well-publicized fiascos, the federal courts are not exactly eager to grant more warrants on incomplete information. And they’d never met the head guy, according to Canfield.”

  “This would be Michael Harridan?” Gregor asked.

  “Right,” John said.

  “Are they sure he exists?” Gregor said.

  John shrugged. “I don’t think anybody got into it that far. Not a bad question, though. It would be a cute trick, inventing a shadowy mastermind who didn’t exist and making yourself look less important and feel more safe. Still, you’d have to wonder how it was done. Think of the difficulties.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that you’d have to find a way to communicate without tipping off the rest of the group that one of them is never there when the contact happens,” John said. “And you couldn’t do it all by letter or e-mail, because people don’t bond to text, they bond to other people. There would at least have to be a voice, every once in a while. So now look how it works. You take off to make the phone call to be Michael Harridan, that means you’re not at the meeting as yourself. And that happens every time? It would be damned near impossible.”

  “It is also silly, yes?” Tibor said. “It is a lot of work to no purpose.”

  “If you really believed all the stories you told about conspiracies,” Gregor said, “you might think that it had a very important purpose. Keeping you alive.”

  “Krekor, be sensible.”

  “I am being sensible,” Gregor said. “You’ve got to try to think in the same terms as the people involved. If I believed that America was being ruled by a secret government that had managed to invade the private lives of all of us, and that that secret government was ready, at the first hint of rebellion, to do what it had to do to shut the rebels up—including, remember Waco and Ruby Ridge, kill them—well …”

  “Tcha,” Tibor said.

  “Whatever,” John said. “The bottom line is that they couldn’t get the warrants. Now that there’s been a shooting, they might be able to, but I wouldn’t count on it. John Ashcroft may talk a good game about expanding police powers, but the judges have responded to it by digging in their heels, at least out here.”

  “Good,” Gregor said.

  “There’s no better way to know that you’ve finally turned into a civilian,” John said.

  “Get back to America on Alert,” Gregor said. “Canfield and his partner must have information on at least some of the members, right? They went to meetings?”

  “The partner did,” John said. “Canfield stayed in the background and did backup.”

  “Canfield still has names, though, doesn’t he? And you don’t need a warrant to talk to people. Granted, they don’t have to give you any information, but you can talk to them. I understand that Canfield was concerned about blowing his partner’s cover, but that can hardly be an issue with the Philadelphia police.”

  “You mean you want me to ask my cops to go talk to the people at America on Alert,” John said.

  “I don’t see where it would hurt,” Gregor said. “There has to be some connection, even if it’s only that the people who committed those murders in Bryn Mawr and whoever blew up Holy Trinity Church both seem to read either The Harridan Report itself or material very much like it. That’s what the woman gave Krystof Andrechev along with the gun.”

  “Assumi
ng she gave him anything at all,” John reminded him.

  “Assuming she gave him anything at all,” Gregor agreed. “But he had the material. I saw it. And among other things he had copies of The Harridan Report. Charlotte Ross was actually mentioned in The Harridan Report. I saw the issue. Every time we turn around, no matter what we do, we get The Harridan Report. There must be something going on.”

  “You can’t really think the two cases are connected,” John said. “That’s ludicrous.”

  “I agree. It’s ludicrous,” Gregor said. “But if the two cases aren’t connected, then somebody is going to a lot of trouble to make us think they are. I’m beginning to feel like I’m reading an Agatha Christie novel and she’s doing that thing where she bangs people over the head with a two-by-four pointing out the solution and nobody ever pays attention. Except that I am paying attention. If you see what I mean.”

  “No,” John said.

  “It’s all right,” Tibor said. “He gets like this. He has enthusiasms. He reminds me of someone I knew when I was growing up, who always had a new invention that was going to change the world.”

  “I don’t think it’s a matter of having enthusiasms when you just want things to make sense,” Gregor said.

  2

  When Gregor Demarkian had first come back to live on Cavanaugh Street— when he’d still expected to find it as he had left it, ethnic and economically marginal—he had been convinced that the last thing he was interested in was any more involvement in crime, criminals, law enforcement, or investigations. He knew many men who had left the Bureau and gotten private investigators’ licenses, or hung out their shingles as consultants, but they seemed to him to be almost entirely pathetic. If you wanted to stay in the game, then the sensible thing was to stay in the Bureau. If there was some reason why you didn’t want to stay in the Bureau, and he could think of several, then the sensible thing was to get a job with a real police department or some sort of state investigative agency. Hanging out a shingle was admitting to the worst sort of amateurism, the dream of being Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, the kind of thing only civilians imagined had anything to do with the real work of handling cases. It was also admitting to the fact that the game had swallowed you whole. You had no other life. You had no other interests. If you couldn’t file case reports and keep yourself awake thinking about the way in which that last piece of evidence might fit a pattern that didn’t otherwise want to accommodate it, then you were as good as dead.