by Jane Haddam
He went around to the sidewalk and then into the front door of his building, hearing the sounds of Grace’s harpsichord pounding down from the fourth floor as soon as he walked into the foyer. Maybe he should spend more time on the Internet. He had never paid much attention to conspiracy theories. The few he’d run into had been about the FBI, and they’d gotten so many of the details wrong that he hadn’t had the patience to take them seriously. He looked at the slip of paper Bennis had given him. Maybe, when he was finished calling the director and Jack Houseman both and letting them know how he felt about Walker Canfield, he’d brave the Internet on Bennis’s computer and go looking for David Icke and Cisco Wheeler and all the rest of them.
He started up the stairs, and stopped. He turned around, walked back through the foyer, and went out the front door. Standing on the low stoop there at the top of three shallow steps, he could just see the front sidewalk-lined edge of the place where Holy Trinity Church still was, sort of, almost. The yellow warning bands were still up, and probably would be for months, even after reconstruction started. He put his hands in the pockets of his coat and wished he didn’t feel so hollow. The world had done very odd things to itself in the years since he’d been a child on this street. The big picture was bad enough: wars and police actions and terrorism. It was the small picture he truly hated. The whole country was descending into reflexive madness. When had people stopped knowing that witches who did magic were just pretend? When had superstition and book burning become respectable hobbies for small-town mayors who wanted to make the world safe from Halloween and Harry Potter? When had these people—he looked down at the slip of paper he still held crumpled in his hand—when had this sort of blatantly hysterical irrationality found a following large enough to impinge on the everyday world?
He stopped trying to get a look at Holy Trinity, turned around, and went back into the building. Grace’s harpsichord was as loud as he’d ever heard it. Maybe she had her door open, waiting to hear Tibor or Bennis or Gregor himself come home. Gregor went up the stairs passing by the door of old George Tekemanian’s ground-floor apartment. Usually, he liked visiting with old George. Today, even if George had been there, Gregor had nothing to say.
FOUR
1
No one had to tell Charlotte Deacon Ross how to behave. Even her mother, who had been widely considered to be the last of the old-line Main Line grande dames, had been in awe of her. The key to civilization was self-control and personal responsibility, Charlotte always thought, and then she went about doing what mattered immeasurably not only to herself but to the small world she lived in. It was a world that had not changed in many generations, although the people in it had washed in and out much faster recently than they had when Charlotte was a girl. There was still a tight little world of people who owned and ran the banks, people who owned and ran the major law firms, people who owned and ran the largest corporations—or at least sat on their boards; nobody wanted to be exposed, legally, the way a chief operating officer was in this age of regulation. There was still that solid phalanx of people whom the public never saw, deliberately obscure for their own protection. They still all knew each other and sent their children to the same half-dozen prep schools and the same half-dozen universities, and—contrary to public opinion—those things still mattered. They still lived in ways that most ordinary people would find odd and alienating. Charlotte could always tell, when one of her girls brought friends home for the weekend, which were the ones who would last and which were the ones who would not. The ones who would not kept looking for a television set, as if somehow a house was incomplete without it. There was a television set in Charlotte’s house, but it was in the big common room in the servants’ wing.
Now she sat in the big wing chair in the morning room, her embroidery in her lap, and looked out at a late afternoon as grey and depressing as the one on the day Tony died—on the day he was murdered, she amended, because part of taking responsibility was calling things what they really were. The word had no resonance in her mind. Murdered murdered murdered, she thought, and she might as well have been saying kumquat. She kept waiting to feel something besides cold and clearheaded and calm. If she had had a tape of the scene as it had happened, she would have watched it: Tony standing so close to her; Tony’s body jerking backwards; Tony’s face exploding. It had been nothing at all what she had been led to expect from her favorite detective writer—in fact, the only detective writer she read—P.D. James. She might have seen something similar if she’d gone to certain kinds of movies, but she didn’t. The few movies she saw were Italian or French, and usually had to do with the deaths of marriages. That was a concept Charlotte didn’t understand. Marriages did not die, in her opinion, unless they had been improperly made to begin with. Marriages were not about happiness, or compatibility, or sex. It fascinated her to watch people, even fictional people, who seemed to think that getting divorced was like giving back a boy’s fraternity ring, something trivial that you did because your emotions were shallow, or because you were bored and wanted to do something else for a while.
The oddest thing about what had happened when Tony died was the blood. There had been so very much blood. It had come spurting out of his face as if his head were a grapefruit and somebody was squeezing it. There was blood on the slate that lined the edge of the drive. There was blood on the hedges that made a buffer between the slate and the house. Then Tony had turned and taken a step toward her and there was blood on her dress, running down the front of it in rivulets.
On the other side of the room, Charlotte’s oldest daughter, Marianne, stood leaning on the white molded mantle of the fireplace. She had been crying, but all that was left of that was the red bloating around her eyes and mouth. Marianne was a brilliant girl, but not pretty. Charlotte looked away from her to the small Chippendale desk where Miss Parenti had piled the stiff white linen cards she would use to write thank-you notes to the people who sent flowers. She would do every note by hand, and Miss Parenti would provide her with a log that told her some little something about those people she had actually met on one occasion or another. A lot of the flowers would come from people who knew Tony professionally, or who worked at the bank, or who had some other ceremonial reason for marking his passing, and she could acknowledge those formulaically. She had come to hate the flowers that had piled up in her foyer these last few days. She hadn’t expected people to refrain from sending them, even though she had placed one of those notices in the paper—the family would appreciate donations to the Philadelphia Women’s Hospital in lieu of flowers—but she hadn’t anticipated how overwhelmingly awful they would smell. She no longer went out to the front of the house unless she had to, and she never had to. She was grateful for the gates that kept the reporters from pressing their noses against her windows and going through her trash.
Marianne was a senior at Harvard. If this didn’t throw her completely, she would graduate summa and go on to Oxford in the fall. Tony had been tremendously proud of her. The other three girls were more along the lines they were expected to be. Julia was a sophomore at Colby Sawyer, majoring in Dartmouth boys. Cordelia and Sarah were still at the Madeira School in Virginia, dreaming of coming out in the way that debutantes had come out in the thirties. Charlotte had no idea if they were thinking of their father. They weren’t crying openly, as Marianne was, but that said less than it might have in another kind of family.
Marianne shifted from one foot to the other. She was tall and thin, as Tony had been, and she had Tony’s great hooked beak of a nose that had made him look English to people who didn’t know who he was. It made Marianne look lopsided.
“I still don’t understand what you think you’re doing,” she said. “You don’t know anything about the bank. How can you possibly take over where Daddy left off?”
“I don’t intend to take over,” Charlotte said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Then why do you want to sit on the board?”
“Because I l
ike to look out for my own interests. In my mother’s day, women never did that kind of thing. Even when I was growing up, the policy was to keep the girls in the dark and train the boys to take over. But the world changes. Sometimes it even changes for the better. I want to keep an eye on things. I don’t trust David Alden.”
“David won’t take over at the bank,” Marianne said. “He’s too young. It’ll be one of the vice presidents or something, or they’ll bring in somebody from the outside.”
“David will still be there, and he’ll still be in an important position. No matter how the board feels about him—and, by the way, I think the board likes him. Your father liked him—but no matter how they feel, David knows more about what your father was doing and what needs to be done in the wake of his death than anybody else. Sheer prudence will make them keep him on, and I do not delude myself that I’ll be able to change their minds just because I decide to sit on the board. I still think it makes sense to be careful. Your father always thought you might like to go into the bank one day.”
“Go into the bank,” Marianne said. “You sound like Dickens.”
“Of course I don’t. Dickens was a vulgar writer, far more vulgar than that silly man, who was that, Henry Miller. One of the Biddle women gave a party for him back in the days when his books were banned because they were supposed to be pornography, and everybody was incredibly impressed with how avant-garde she was. Even I was impressed, and I was only a child. We were more easily impressed in those days.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense to talk about it?” Marianne said. “He died, for God’s sake. Somebody blew his face off. He was assassinated.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not exaggerating. That’s what the papers are saying. He was assassinated. Some terrorist group killed him because they oppose globalization, or something, and he was one of the chief architects of globalization. You should see the British papers. My roommate had her mother send them to me.”
“The British papers are always foul. There’s no reason to pay attention to them.”
“And then there’s this delay,” Marianne said, as if she hadn’t heard. “It’s been almost five days. It’s going to be six at least before we have the body back, and then we’ll have a wake and a funeral with something that’s— that’s—decomposing.”
Charlotte picked up her embroidery. She didn’t embroider in any serious way. She only liked to have it with her to give herself something to do with her hands. “The casket will be closed for the wake,” she said, “and the embalming will take care of the smell, if that’s what you’re worried about. The delay is unpleasant, but there isn’t anything I could have done about it. The law requires an autopsy in cases of violent death, and in this case there were other considerations pertinent to the investigation—”
“You sound like a press release.”
“—that held up the return of the body to us. There’s no point in making a fuss, especially in public. You know what happens. The papers fill up with oped columns deploring the way in which the rich expect special treatment not available to ordinary mortals.”
“Well, don’t we?”
“Not where it can be reported on in the newspapers, Marianne, no.”
“Doesn’t it bother you? Somebody hated him enough to kill him, somebody he probably didn’t even know, at least not personally.”
Charlotte put the embroidery back in her lap. The truth of it was, she hated embroidery, just as she hated needlework, just as she hated almost all the things her mother had taught her in the way of “ladylike pastimes,” as if the mere fact of having a vagina made it incumbent on her to prick her fingers with needles. Besides, she was bad at it, and she’d never had much patience for what she was bad at.
“Most people,” she said carefully, “do not care who your father was, or what he did. Most people care only about celebrities, and your father made it part of his lifework never to be a celebrity.”
“He’s certainly a celebrity now,” Marianne said. “And you know there are going to be hundreds of people at the funeral. Onlookers. People off the street. And the press. And the police. He’s not going to be able to stay obscure in the midst of all that.”
“It’s not like we’re movie stars,” Charlotte said. “It’s not like we’re the Kennedys. If we maintain a solid policy of noncooperation, it will all blow over in time.”
“Someone will right a book about it.”
“Probably. But he won’t get any help from me.”
“Maybe they’ll make a miniseries of it,” Marianne said. “Isn’t that a wonderful prospect? People are fascinated by these nuts, you know, they really are. Timothy McVeigh. All those people.”
“Timothy McVeigh murdered one hundred sixty-eight people and obliterated most of a block in Oklahoma City. You’re exaggerating again.”
“I’m trying to get you to react,” Marianne said. “God, you’re impossible. You’re worse than impossible. You’re living in a fantasy world.”
“No,” Charlotte said seriously, “the one thing I’m not doing is living in a fantasy world.”
Marianne ran her hand through her hair. It was too long and too thick and too haphazardly cared for. Then she turned around and walked out of the room. Charlotte listened as her footsteps receded down the hall, heavy thuds of expensive running shoes landing on carpet. When Charlotte was sure Marianne was gone, she leaned over and pulled a small folded sheaf of papers out from under her. She’d been reading them when Marianne first came in, but she’d known, instinctively, that she shouldn’t be caught at it. She leaned over, pulled up the ottoman, and put up her feet. Then she flattened the papers on her lap.
THE HARRIDAN REPORT, the first one said, at the very top, as if whoever had desktop published this did not want to waste paper. The Reptilian Connection.
Charlotte ran one delicate fingernail—polished clear, not too long, not too sharp—along the side of her nose.
One of the few things we know for certain about both the Deacon and the Ross families is that they’re part of the reptilian bloodline. They look human, and people who have been brainwashed by the system believe that they are just lucky: lucky to have been born rich; lucky to have been born talented; lucky to have been born better than the rest of us. Well, they were born better than the rest of us, with powers of intelligence and concentration no ordinary human being could possibly attain. They are the descendants of the intermarriage of humans with something the ancients called “gods,” the Serpent Race described in the holy books of every culture from Sumer to Rome. From this hybrid race came the ruling families of all the countries of the world, first in the Middle East and Europe, and then, through the conquests of the British Empire, in Asia, Africa and America.
If you don’t believe me, check for yourself. All forty-two men who have been presidents of the United States can trace their lineages back to Charlemagne, just like the British nobility and the great royal houses of the Bourbons and Saxe-Gotha. This is the “divine right of kings” so vigorously defended for centuries and only apparently abandoned in the tremendous pressure of the world’s peoples for freedom from reptilian rule. The rule did not end, however, and has not ended to this day. It only changed its public face. Now we are presented with “choices” between possible rulers. We can pick between George W. Bush or Al Gore, or between John Major and Tony Blair. The reality is too far under the surface for most people to notice. There is no choice. Bush and Gore are descended from the same bloodlines. So are John Major and Tony Blair. So is the Pope. So is Gorbachev. All our “choices,” between “capitalist” and “communist,” between “democracy” and “dictatorship,” between “liberal” and “conservative,” between “religious” and “athiest,” all of them are false choices, because in each case we are offered nothing but what the Illuminati want us to have. The Illuminati do not care if we call the system we live under “free market” or “social demo-cratic.”They only care that they rule.
We are com
ing 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.
