Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “I think so. I don’t have a complete plan just yet. That’s going to take till the middle of next week. But at the minimum, I think they’re going to have to close down at least a fifth of their stores, maybe a quarter. Anything in direct competition with Wal-Mart, certainly. Maybe some of the smaller places that aren’t doing much volume.”

  “Anything right here in Philadelphia or on the Main Line?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Off the top of my head, I’d say yes. There’s going to be trouble with all the city stores. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Hartford. They’ve all got the same problem, which is terrific overhead. The real estate taxes alone are crippling.”

  “Crap again. So they lay off eight to fifteen thousand right before Christmas, and those heavily concentrated in central cities where there’s practically no other work for their people to find. I can see the headline in The Nation now.”

  “Yes, I know. But I don’t see that there’s anything else we can do.”

  “Maybe not. But you’re not the one who’s going to be called an ‘Apostle of Greed’ by David Corn. Or maybe, God help us, Gore Vidal.”

  “Yes. I know. We need to get this done over the weekend if we can. It would be best if we could do it informally. Do you want me to make the phone call, or will you?”

  “No, I’ll make it. It’ll give me another excuse to avoid the ice swans. Are you coming out to this thing?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “I would. Forget it. I’ll talk to you here. We’ll disappear into the cloak room for half an hour and I’ll read through the sheets. Crap, crap, crap.”

  “Yes,” David said again, but Tony had already hung up. David shut off the cell phone and folded it up and put it back in his pocket. Suddenly, the world just outside the bank’s tinted glass doors looked worse than cold. It reminded him of that Robert Frost poem: some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. He had no idea if he was quoting that correctly. He hadn’t paid much attention to literature classes when he was at Exeter. He hadn’t paid much attention to anything in all the long years of his education, not at Exeter, not at Yale, not even at the Harvard Business School. He was beginning to think he should have.

  “Here’s the deal,” Annie had said, hunching over the big plate of linguine with white clam sauce that she hadn’t even touched. “Once you’ve started asking yourself questions, you’ve only got two choices. Either you do what Tony does and learn to live with the alienation, or you get out. I don’t think you’re the kind who can learn to live with the alienation.”

  “I don’t think I’m the kind who can get out,” he’d said—and then he’d downed his entire glass of wine in a single gulp.

  He got off the marble planter and went out the bank’s front doors, into the cold that was even more frigid than he had been expecting it to be. If there had been any moisture in the air, it might have snowed. He couldn’t remember a time when it had snowed this early in November. He stuck his gloved hands in his pockets and stepped off the curb to hail a cab.

  The real sad thing about this thing tonight was that Annie wouldn’t be there. Charlotte wouldn’t invite her, and if Charlotte did—and hell froze over—Annie wouldn’t come. David wondered when it had gotten to the point that having money meant never being able to do anything you wanted to do.

  8

  It was eight o’clock, and Charlotte Deacon Ross was in a state of high piss-off unmatched in all her fifty-two years on earth, except maybe by the time that Marietta Hand had shown up at her own debutante ball in a black dress. Charlotte’s mother had put that particular tantrum down to “Charlotte’s sensitivity to nuance,” by which she meant she thought Charlotte was afraid a black dress would bring bad luck. It wasn’t true. Charlotte did not believe in luck. She did believe in the divine right of kings—and, more to the point, queens—but she saw that as predestined, the way her solidly Presbyterian forebears had seen their election to heaven as predestined. God chose, before the start of time. Charlotte was one of the chosen.

  Charlotte had been angry at Marietta Hand because she hadn’t thought of that black dress first. Forever more, when people wrote those over-illustrated histories of Society in its prime, it would be Marietta, not Charlotte, singled out as the daring innovator that nobody could stop talking about. It gave Charlotte a great deal of satisfaction to remember that Marietta had eventually married an impecunious nobody she’d met at college, only to have him fail in one business after the other until Marietta’s money was gone, or nearly gone. Marietta hadn’t had to go to work, of course. She probably had ten million dollars left. Still, ten million dollars wasn’t enough to live like this, or even approximate it. Now, when Charlotte saw Marietta, it was only by accident, at parents’ day at one of the schools, where Marietta’s children were proving to be just as stupid as her husband had been. Really, the whole thing was ridiculous. Anybody with a brain would have known better. If you’re going to marry poor, you wait to see how he’ll turn out. You marry somebody like Steven Spielberg or Steve Jobs. You don’t pick some intense brooder in your Introduction to Philosophy class and decide that he’s a genius.

  Marietta’s husband had committed suicide, in the end. It was the kind of thing people like that did. Charlotte had no idea what Marietta did with herself. Now she looked around the longest of the buffet tables, counting china crocks of beluga caviar, and feeling so worked up she almost thought steam might be coming out of her ears. There was the danger of television, and of all entertainment like it. Once the vulgar images got stuck in your head, you could never get them out again. She counted the crocks again. She took a deep breath. She considered blasting the caterer and decided she couldn’t risk it. If he walked out this late, there would be a disaster. She was, she thought, willfully misunderstood, by everybody around her. She wanted only what was best for everybody. She wanted only perfection.

  She counted the crocks again. She counted the plates of sliced salmon. She counted the canapés set out in slanting rows on a long silver serving tray. She was nearly six feet tall and, even at this age, and in spite of the Main Line prejudice against plastic surgery, a magnificent-looking woman. Her neck was long and thin. Her eyes were huge and blue. Her hair was as thick as the evergreen bushes that comprised the topiary garden at the bottom of the terrace. She had no idea why she was so angry she could barely see straight, but she had been this way most of the evening, and she was going to be this way for as long as she had to stand here listening to twaddle from people who pretended not to know all the things she knew. Charlotte had never believed all that talk people put out about how different everything was now than it had been in the fifties. Nothing was ever different. Blood will tell. And what it told was the story of the necessity to keep people properly sorted out.

  There were exactly as many canapés as there were supposed to be. There were exactly as many china crocks of caviar as there were supposed to be. There were probably as many crackers as there were supposed to be, but she hadn’t counted those, because there were too many of them. She wanted to do something physical, to get the poison out of the veins of her arms, to cause destruction. People would be arriving any minute and, of course, now that it was too cold to open the doors to the terrace, there wouldn’t be enough room.

  She looked to the other side of the ballroom and saw Tony deep in conversation with that man Bennis Hannaford had brought. Leave it to Bennis to hook up with some godawful immigrant wreck who couldn’t even look comfortable in a dinner jacket. The man reminded her of Henry Kissinger, although he was better-looking, and a lot taller. It was the tone. You could always tell the ones who were trying too hard. They strained, and the strain radiated out of them like an aura. Charlotte believed in auras, in just the way she believed in reincarnation, and in predestination too. The best people were always the same people, culture after culture, time after time. They’d just been transported from one body and one place to the next ones, and as they shifted, the fate of civilizations shifted too
.

  Charlotte made a signal in the air, just as Tony was looking up. She saw him freeze momentarily, then lean toward Bennis’s foreign-looking friend, then straighten up again. He did not look happy, but Charlotte did not much care if he was happy. He came toward her.

  “Well?” he said, drawing up next to the buffet table.

  “Let’s go out to the foyer for a moment,” Charlotte said. “I do think it would be in better taste if we didn’t have full-blown arguments in the middle of the ballroom with Bennis Hannaford and her pet Italian for an audience.”

  “He’s not an Italian,” Tony said patiently. “He was born right here in Philadelphia. He graduated from Penn. And from the Harvard Business School. Which is what we were talking about, before you decided to drag me away for no purpose.”

  Charlotte was moving, slowly but inexorably. When they got to the ballroom door, she edged into the foyer and watched Tony edge with her. “He’s some kind of foreigner,” Charlotte said, “and not the right kind, either, and you know it. He looks Jewish.”

  “He looks like Harrison Ford, who is about as Jewish as New England boiled dinner. And I’d lay off the nonsense about who’s Jewish. These days, it’s likely to get you into a lot of trouble, and not with the journalists, either. It would be a fairly intelligent idea if you didn’t offend the people at Goldman, Sachs. What’s all this about, Charlotte?”

  Charlotte opened the front door and went out. It was freezing cold out there, and her gown was both backless and strapless, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t have stood being in that stuffy house one more moment. She felt as if she were suffocating to death.

  “There’s nobody from Goldman, Sachs here,” she said, looking down at the lights stretched along the edges of the drive to guide the cars. A man from the caterers was walking along the edge of the walkway, wearing white tie and tails and white gloves, to open the car doors as they came up. There would be somebody around to park the cars too. Nobody was coming in yet. The invitations said eight, but nobody would show up exactly on time, because nobody ever did. This was the part of the evening she always hated most. She wished people would grow up. All this not wanting to be the first to arrive. It was behavior unworthy of ten-year-olds.

  “Charlotte?” Tony said.

  “I just had to get out of the damned house. Look, there’s a car. Maybe it’s one of your people from Goldman, Sachs. I’ve got a headache. If he isn’t Italian, what is he?”

  “I told you. He’s American. He was born in—”

  “Philadelphia. God, I hate Bennis Hannaford. I always did. Everybody always did. She was always such a—”

  “I always thought she was very beautiful.”

  “I’ll bet anything you want she’s shacking up with him,” Charlotte said. “It’s just the kind of thing she would do. She was in People magazine, did I tell you that? As if she were some hopped-up pop star pushing a record.”

  “She was a novelist pushing a book.”

  “She’s not a novelist. She’s not like Jonathan Franzen or Anne Tyler. She writes—well, I don’t know what you call them. Pulp. About elves.”

  “Fantasy,” Tony said.

  The car that had been coming down the drive pulled to a stop at the curb. The man in the white gloves leaped forward to open the door in the back closest to the curb. If the car had been an ordinary sedan, driven by whoever owned it, the car-parking man would have come out to take the keys, but it was a limousine—rented, Charlotte could tell from the license plate—and the driver would take it wherever it had to go. The man who stepped out onto the drive was heavyset and tired-looking. The woman who followed him was tired-looking too, but so thin it seemed as if there was nothing at all between her skin and bone. Tony frowned. This was Henry and Delia Cavender. Tony hated them.

  “Charlotte,” Delia Cavender said, pecking at the air the way she’d seen somebody do in a movie once. Maybe she was reading the novels of Dominick Dunne. Charlotte pasted a smile on her face and did her best.

  “Delia, what a wonderful jacket. You’re the first ones here, except of course for Bennis and her gentleman friend. Henry, you look wonderful.”

  “Henry,” Tony said.

  “Tony,” Henry said.

  Charlotte could not, for the life of her, remember what Henry worked at. He was some kind of lawyer, but she didn’t remember what kind. It was like it was in that Hamilton cartoon. Everybody was a lawyer.

  Another car was coming down the drive, and right behind it there were two more.

  “I’m going into the house,” Tony said. “There’s no point standing around out here. That’s what we hired the extra help for. You ought to come in yourself before you catch the flu and lay yourself out for a couple of weeks.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlotte said.

  And then, everything got strange. The new car pulled up at the curve. The next two queued behind it. The sky was very clear and very black. People began getting out, women in ball gowns, men in dinner jackets. Tony turned his back to them and headed for the front door.

  Charlotte felt light-headed and sick to her stomach. Maybe I’m coming down with something already, she thought, and then Tony twisted backwards and he was in the air. His feet came right off the ground. One of the newly arrived women put her hand out to steady him. It was as if he had slipped on some ice and needed to be protected from a fall. Tony put his hand out too, but not to the woman, not to anybody, just out into the air and the dark and the cold and the nothing at all.

  A second later, Tony Ross’s face exploded into a mess of blood and skin and bone, and everybody started screaming.

  9

  At 8:15, Father Tibor Kasparian got off the bus at the corner of Cavanaugh and Welsh, pulled his collar up around his neck, and started walking the five blocks home. The bus stop was not on what he thought of as Cavanaugh Street proper. The real neighborhood didn’t begin for another block, although it might, someday, with the way they’d all been expanding. He put his hands in his pockets and chided himself for not taking a cab. He always had enough money for cabs these days, and taking the bus one time would not give him enough spare change to really help out at Adelphos House. Besides, he was helping out at Adelphos House. He had just committed himself, the church, and the Ladies Guild to one thousand hours of volunteer work, manning phones, packing and delivering food baskets, serving in the soup kitchen, organizing mailings. It was hard to know what else he or the women of Cavanaugh Street could do. He was impressed with Anne Ross Wyler’s forays into the red-light district. He remembered a time in his own life when he had been willing to go places and do things that put him in direct physical danger, and thought nothing of it, because what he wanted to do was so very important to the world. Now he did not feel that way about anything, and it made him guilty. How can they live the way they do and not be ashamed of themselves? he had wondered, back in Armenia, when all he’d really known about America was what he saw in the movies. Now he knew the answer. He wasn’t ashamed of himself either. It was easier than he’d ever realized to drift through every day unaware that there were people hardly an arm’s-length away who needed more than you had to give. They got too complacent, Americans. Now that he was an American, he got complacent with them. He wrapped his arms around his body and told himself not to be ridiculous. He might be rich by Armenian standards, but it was nothing here. Most Americans would consider him a relatively poor man—“middle class” the way they all were, but at the lowest rung of middle class, without a home he owned, without a car. It wasn’t the luxury that had gotten to him but his age, and it did no good to tell himself that Anne Ross Wyler was no more than two years younger than he was. Maybe he just wasn’t making sense anymore. Maybe he should give up the superfluous things, the walk-in shower, the good coat, the hot and cold running books that lined every wall of his apartment. Maybe he should just accept the fact that he was not a saint, and that Anne Ross Wyler was, in spite of the fact that she had a sign up in her bedroom that said Freed
om From Religion. He’d lived long enough to know that saints came in every conceivable package, including atheist ones.

  The newsstand on Lida and Gregor’s block was still open. Father Tibor had to remind himself that it wasn’t even nine o’clock. The night was so dark, it felt later. His heart was dark too. He went in and said good evening to the incommunicative man who was the only person he had seen inside this store in the six months since Michael Bagdanian had sold it and moved to Florida. He’d tried a few times to strike up a conversation, to find out the man’s name and where he came from, but he’d never been able to do it. Even Lida hadn’t managed to do it, and she’d brought a huge plate of honey cakes for bait. Ti-bor got some change out of his pocket and picked up a bedraggled copy of the New York Times. He got the Philadelphia papers delivered every day. He didn’t much like news magazines, because they were too preachy. Lately, he didn’t much like CNN, either, because it seemed to have become one long commercial for pop music. Why was it that Americans had so many television stations and all of them were alike, more commercial than content, as if life was about nothing but buying things? Tibor had actually liked commercials when he’d first come to the States. He’d spent so long living in a place where there was nothing to buy and no point in advertising it, commercials had been a novelty. Now it was not so much the commercials he minded as the noncommercial commercials that ate up everything else: the five minutes of every half hour on Headline News devoted to movies and CD albums; the incredible clutter of hype on AOL’s version 7.0 that was one flashing huckster cry after another; the “sponsorship” announcements on PBS that were commercials in everything but name. Even the advertisements in newspapers and magazines had gotten bigger and brighter and worse. He had only been a United States citizen for four years, but he had been careful to vote in every election he was eligible to vote in. He knew that the United States government could not ban advertising, because it would be a suppression of free speech. He still thought he’d vote for any candidate that promised to do something about it, if only to provide every citizen with special viewing glasses that would block out the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes on the breakfast table in the latest sitcom and the banter about Coke and Pepsi in the hot new dramatic series that everybody praised for its “realism.” Seriously, Tibor thought, in real life, people do not argue about Coke and Pepsi. Maybe he ought to stop watching television and change his ISP to something that did not belong to a company that not only owned half the planet, but was trying to sell it.