Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “You go north,” Grandma Watkins said. “Not that they’re much better in the north, but they’ve got different rules than they’ve got here. There’s a little more room to make your move. You go north and you can go to college.”

  Now Lucinda stood up from the kitchen table and picked up the coffee cups and little plates she’d used to serve Father Tibor Kasparian. There were times when she became extremely self-conscious about her life story. She knew how it was supposed to end—the bad MGM screenplay version, the one from central casting. She was supposed to go north to college and do brilliantly. She was supposed to become famous and go back to Mount Hope in a limousine. Or something. Whatever it was, it hadn’t worked out that way. She wasn’t athletic, like Larry Bird. She wasn’t a brilliant writer, like Truman Capote. She wasn’t ambitious and dedicated, like Julia Roberts or Helen Gur-ley Brown. In the end, she had had to face up to the fact that she was a bright, hardworking girl, but not a superstar, and not the material from which media stars are made. She’d gone north, the way Grandma Watkins wanted—but to Gettysburg College, not to Vassar or Smith. She’d found her room to make her move, first into a master’s of social work at Penn State, then into a doctorate in sociology at Temple. If she’d had a different personality, she might have ended up on the faculty of some small college somewhere, happily settled into a routine of teaching and giving little dinners and pottering around her own brick house, only just far enough from the campus so that she wouldn’t have to do what she hated most in the world, drive in bad weather. She had a fantasy about that life that was so real, she almost felt she’d lived it. The problem was, it made her feel ashamed even to think of it. She did not have a different personality, and because she did not, she had landed here, at Adelphos House, where, no matter what else she was doing, she was providing some help to the girls who lined the darker side streets of the inner city. Most of them were younger than sixteen. Most of them were addicted and sick at the same time. All of them were angry, so that helping them was a matter of getting past that barrage of invective that was their first response to anything but a john offering money, and was sometimes their response even then. Through it all, Lucinda kept waiting for something to happen, she wasn’t sure what.

  If there was one thing Grandma Watkins had been dead right about, it was that thing about the rich people. The white people on White Jasmine Drive had barely been middle-class by Main Line standards. They’d had the kind of houses you saw in the neat little suburbs for factory workers, the ones that ringed the city close. The real rich people were farther out, and Lucinda could still remember the moment she had first seen one of those houses, spread out across a hill in Radnor like a movie-set castle. Her gut instinct was to call it an institution, a school, a mental hospital, anything. It was impossible that a single private family could have enough money to live in that house. Then there had been other houses, whole big lots of them, some tucked back behind gates and out of sight, some right where anybody could stare at the windows and doors, the long curving drives, the vast stretches of green lawn that nobody ever played on. That was when her own anger had started, white hot and hard. How could people—lots of people, a hundred of them at least, she’d seen the houses—how could all those people have all that money at the same time that the girls walked the side streets for twenty bucks a blow and got AIDS and died before they were twenty-four? How could all those people have big green lawns at the same time that the schools in Philadelphia didn’t have enough books for all the students, and didn’t have enough plumbing, either, so that the toilets backed up into the halls at least once a month and the walls themselves were disintegrating under onslaughts of ooze from broken pipes that nobody had the money to fix? It hadn’t helped, much, that when she’d first come to Adelphos House, Annie had taken her out to Bryn Mawr to see her brother and his wife. They were looking for money, and the brother had money. He had also had a butler, three maids in uniforms that Lucinda had been able to count, and a wife so intensely, poisonously bitchy that Lu-cinda had come very close to stabbing her with a butter knife. It was harder to make the brother out. He seemed to hate being where he was, but Lucinda had the impression that he felt that way everywhere, and with everyone.

  It was, Lucinda thought, a good thing that she was both too old and too young for Power to the People and the Weather Underground. If she’d been born a couple of years earlier or later than she was, she would have armed herself to the teeth and died in a bank robbery without having the faintest idea what she was hoping to accomplish. Or maybe she wouldn’t have, because Grandma Watkins would definitely not have approved. Grandma Watkins was dead now, of course—if she was alive, she’d be a hundred and thirty—but she’d lived long enough to see the New Left, and she hadn’t been impressed.

  Lucinda considered doing the dishes, and decided against it. It was the first thing the volunteers went for when they came in in the morning. Lucinda more and more often thought she ought to let them at it. She’d spent her entire childhood washing dishes. These girls had spent their entire childhoods visiting the Museum of Fine Arts and having French lessons. She washed her hands under the tap in the sink and dried them on the clean dish towel she always left hanging from the refrigerator door. Sometimes she wondered what the people of Mount Hope, Mississippi, would think of Philadelphia, where there were more Catholics than anything else, and the Catholics weren’t the strange ones. She knew what they would have thought of Annie’s atheism, if they could have been convinced that Annie was an atheist at all. People in Mount Hope tended to think that everybody really believed in God, deep down, even if they said they didn’t. She knew what they would have thought of Father Tibor Kasparian too. They would have been purely convinced that he worshiped the devil.

  She went to the swinging door that led to the hall and stuck her head out. The hall was empty, but it almost always was at this time of night. She had been hoping to catch Father Kasparian on his way out.

  “There anybody out there listening?” she called.

  There was a rumbling somewhere in the distance and a blond head appeared halfway to the foyer. “I’m here, Miss Watkins. I’m doing some paperwork on the lunch project. Can I do something for you?”

  “I was just wondering if Father Kasparian was still around somewhere.”

  “Oh, no. Should we have held on to him? I mean, nobody told us to. And Mrs. Wyler was here to say good-bye to him—”

  “Annie’s back?”

  “She came in about ten minutes ago. Really, he hasn’t been gone long. You could probably catch him if you ran. He must be headed toward the bus stop. You know you can’t ever catch a cab on this block. You could just—”

  “No, no. It’s all right. As long as he got that package I made up for him—”

  “Oh, he did, he did. Mrs. Wyler made sure. I didn’t know that Armenians had their own church different from everybody else’s. Did you? I thought they were just Catholics, like the Greeks.”

  “The Greeks aren’t Catholics.”

  “They’re not?”

  “Never mind,” Lucinda said. “Where did Annie go? Is she all right?”

  “She went to her room. I think she’s a little upset about something, although you really can’t tell with her, can you? She’s always so quiet. My mother says the Rosses have always been like that, very odd really, and nothing at all like most people, but—”

  “Excuse me,” Lucinda said.

  Then she retreated into the kitchen, backing up so quickly she bumped into a cabinet on the way. She blamed the private schools. They took these girls with nothing in their heads and gave them social consciences that were more social than conscience, and then Adelphos House got stuck with them. Community Service Internship Interval. It was awful.

  It was also awful that Annie had come back early, and upset. Lucinda counted to thirty, long enough for the blond girl to retreat to her papers, then went back out into the hall and up the stairs. When Annie came back early, it could sometimes be good
news. The girls weren’t out tonight or the johns weren’t buying. When Annie came back upset, it was usually the start of a major catastrophe.

  If we’re about to go to war with the mayor again, I’ll just spit, Lucinda thought— and then she mentally erased the spit, because Grandma Watkins wouldn’t have had the kind of fit that is only available to goddesses and ice queens.

  7

  David Alden checked through the last set of spreadsheets in the file, clicked back to make sure he had looked at everything he was supposed to look at, made a note to himself to find out just how exposed the bank was in the mess that was about to become of Price Heaven, and gave the command to print. That was something he’d learned during the first week of his first real job. No matter how extensive your computer files, no matter how well you’d backed them up with copies and disks, you must always make a hard copy. If you didn’t, some fifteen-year-old slogging his way through a yahoo high school in Dunbar, Oklahoma, would come along and wipe you clean. David always wondered why the CIA and the FBI didn’t hire these kids to make sure their computer records had been sanitized. Hell, he wondered why the bank didn’t—except that he didn’t really wonder, because he knew. The bottom line about the bank was that it kept all records, no matter how damaging, no matter how obscure, and it kept them forever. If they were ever to get hit with a scandal or a meltdown, there would be no point in shredding documents, because there would be far too many of them to shred, and far too many independent computer networks to clean out, and far too many hard copies in far too many file cabinets in far too many home offices. Human beings had a mania for documentation. They took pictures of themselves doing nothing at all. Here’s Uncle Ned, drinking lemonade at last year’s VFW picnic. They kept birth certificates, First Holy Communion records, Confirmation scrolls, high school diplomas, marriage licenses, driver’s licenses, family Bibles, school pictures, postcards. David imagined the average American house as a stockpile of paper, the closets filled to overflow with souvenirs and mementos, the basements and the attics stocked with brown cardboard boxes going to mold and mildew, keeping the faith. Or maybe not. David was sometimes acutely aware of the fact that he had never been in an average American house, not once in all his thirty-six years, not even on a visit to the families of college friends or business colleagues. In the circles in which he moved, nobody would be caught dead with four bedrooms and two-point-five baths on half an acre in New Jersey. No matter how well they played the game of being a friend to Working Americans—the bank’s own television commercials sounded like hymns to Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens—there was a river of distaste running through the upper echelons of every business he knew, and the distaste was for all things suburban and middle-class. Especially middle-class. There was a reason why they sent their children to private kindergartens that cost in tuition more than most public school teachers made in a year, and it wasn’t just for the prestige, or for meeting the right people. It took work to build an adult who never watched television, never listened to pop music and didn’t even know the way to the local mall. It took something more than that to make sure your children would be instantly recognizable, and distrusted, by outsiders. Cocoons are not comfortable things. Nobody ever stayed in them unless they had to.

  The printer was finished printing. There was a pile of paper in the well at the top of the machine. David thought he was getting a headache. He sometimes loved his job and sometimes hated it, but he did truly and always hate the peripheral obligations, of which this evening would be one. It helped a little, but only a little, to know that Tony wasn’t any happier about this than he was himself.

  He got the papers out of the well: three collated hard copies, one for his desk, one for his file, and one for the attaché case he carried with him everywhere. The rule was the more important the man, the fewer the papers he carried. Only middle-management nobodies without a chance in hell of rising in the hierarchy schlepped two reams of paper with them every time they headed for their cars. His attaché case wouldn’t have held two reams of paper if he’d wanted it to. He felt almost guilty giving it this single thin file, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to talk to Tony about the numbers and he had to talk to him tonight. It would at least help pass the time at this idiotic party if he could spend a few minutes talking reality among the potted palms. The whole mess made him wish he would never have to marry. There were only two choices, in marriage, for people like him. Either he got married to a woman like Charlotte, or he got married to one of those women for whom ambition was more important than plastic surgery. In either case, he would be miserable.

  He dropped one of the copies in his attaché case and closed up. He picked up the other two to leave on Adele’s desk when he passed it. He had his own assistant, but in this case it made more sense to give the work to Tony’s, since she had been coordinating this particular project from the beginning. Maybe Adele lived in an ordinary American house, or had, when she was growing up. David knew she went out to Delaware on holidays to visit her sister, who lived there, doing David did not know what. His own family had been reduced over the years to his mother and his two sisters—and nowhere near enough money to keep any one of them. His mother lived in Paris, on the Avenue Haus-mann, in a “small” apartment that had a reception room large enough to stage a cocktail party for five hundred, if she should ever want to stage a cocktail party. She wouldn’t. His sisters were both married to investment bankers and living on the Main Line, in houses exactly like the one they had all grown up in. He was here at the bank, finding out, firsthand, how impossible it was to live decently and amass a safety net at the same time.

  He turned off the lights in his office. There were cleaning ladies who came through and turned the lights off, but for some reason he felt guilty for making them do what he could easily do himself. He went down the hall to Adele’s big desk and dropped the copies there. He went back out and down to the reception area, pulling his gloves on as he moved. It had been cold for a week and it was going to get colder.

  “I know what’s bothering you,” Anne had told him, when he’d gone out there to take her to lunch last month. “You’ve been there and done that. Your life looks exactly like your father’s. You’re drowning in boredom and at the very, very bottom of your soul, you think you’re going to hell. And I don’t mean that figuratively.”

  No, David thought, he didn’t mean it figuratively, either. There was a circle of hell Dante had failed to notice. It was the one full of old boys from Exeter and Hotchkiss and St. Paul’s, who had never for a moment thought beyond their own small circle of self-doubt, and yet who were constantly in danger of falling out of it, of not having the resources, of not being able to keep up.

  The phone began to ring almost as soon as he was in the elevator. He took it out of his pocket and switched it on. “Yeah,” he said. “Is something wrong?”

  “Just a little nervousness on my part,” Tony said, “and the simple fact that I’m ready to kill Charlotte, which is nothing new. What’s the word?”

  “All bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “You’re looking at eight to fifteen thousand layoffs, more likely the latter. In the month before Christmas. As soon as possible.”

  “It can’t be pushed back after the first of the year?”

  “Not if Price Heaven expects to survive. Which it shouldn’t, because even with the layoffs, they’re going to be on very shaky ground.”

  “How exposed are we?”

  “We’ve loaned them a total of two and a half billion dollars—not too bad, but not chump change, either.”

  “How much of it do we lose if Price Heaven goes West?”

  “Pretty much all of it. Oh, we do have some secured loans in the bunch, but not nearly enough. We’ve bought into way too much of their paper. I told you last July—”

  “I know, I know. Crap. The logic of this escapes me. Does the logic of this escape you?”

  “Not really,” David
said. “It’s not the 1950s anymore. People have more money. They don’t want to buy discounted crap all the time—”

  “Some of them must. Not all of them have more money. We’ve got, what, nearly fifty million people who can’t afford health insurance? They have to buy their clothes somewhere. They can’t be going to Laura Ashley to do it.”

  “There’s Wal-Mart. And Kmart. And Kmart has been in trouble for a long time. If you bring the prices down low enough to matter, you don’t have the margin you need to make any money. If you don’t bring them down, the people you need to draw never come into the store. And the ones who can buy Laura Ashley won’t come in just because your prices are a little higher than Sam Walton’s.”

  There was a long, exasperated sigh on the other end of the line. David felt the elevator bounce to a stop at the lobby level. The doors opened. He walked out. The security guard was on duty in front. Nobody else was around. He had worked past everybody else’s quitting time, again. He sat down on the edge of the big marble planter in the foyer’s center and stretched his legs out in front of him.

  “Tony?”

  “I’m here. Sorry. Charlotte is having some kind of tantrum about the ice swans. Ice swans. Never mind. How the hell does a company lose thirty million dollars in eight months and not even have a record of where it went? How can anybody be that disorganized? And now we’ve got—what? Is it just layoffs? Are we going to have to push for closings?”