Conspiracy Theory
Page 37
“Australian Aborigines have heard of Rittenhouse Square,” Jackman said, as he pulled the car into an open non-spot only feet from Henry Barden’s front door. Gregor guessed they were more in the hydrant’s territory than outside of it. “Who is this guy, anyway?”
“Somebody I used to know at the Bureau. Do you realize you’re illegally parked?”
“I’m on official police business.” Jackman punched the side of his fist against the glove compartment to open it and got out his police parking card. He hung it over the back of his rearview mirror. “Knew in the Bureau, how? He was a special agent or somebody you picked up for bank fraud?”
“He was an analyst with a specialty in subversive groups.”
“Oh, marvelous. Subversive groups. You know how I feel about the FBI and their subversive groups. They thought Martin Luther King was the head of a subversive group.”
“Yes, I know, I agree with you. Henry Barden would agree with you. That’s why he ended up quitting. However, he does know a lot about how to analyze and investigate nut groups, real ones. And I see him on and off since we’ve both been retired. And he’s here and is willing to help and probably spent last night drowned in America on Alert paper, so would you like to talk to him or do you want to wait in the car while I do?”
Jackman got out. Gregor got out too, and as he did he saw the door of the small town house open and Henry Barden, short and round and cheery-faced, step out.
“How does a retired FBI agent afford a place like this in Rittenhouse Square?” Jackman asked.
“Family money,” Gregor said. Then he sprinted a little to get to Henry in the doorway.
“Gregor,” Henry said. “Good to see you. This must be your Mr. Jackman. I’d be dead under the paper, except that Cameron agreed to help me out. You’ve met Cameron, haven’t you, Gregor? He came to pick me up that time we went to lunch near Independence Hall.”
“I’ve met Cameron,” Gregor said.
A young man appeared behind Henry Barden in the doorway, tall and elegant and aristocratic in the extreme, like one of those pictures of the moles in MI-5 at the end of the Kim Philby affair. Henry Barden smiled. “Mr. Jackman, this is Cameron Reed, my partner. Mr. Jackman is commissioner of police for the city of Philadelphia.”
“How do you do,” Cameron said. He did not have a British accent.
“Come in, both of you,” Henry Barden said. “This really has been very interesting, Gregor. I’ve got to thank you for sending it my way. I don’t know if Gregor told you, Mr. Jackman, but since my retirement, I’ve made something of a hobby of collecting the really far-out conspiracy groups. I probably know more about most of them than the federal government does. It makes me nervous sometimes. Some of them are very paranoid.”
“Some of them are very violent,” Cameron said.
“Yes, yes. I know. Some of them are violent. But most of them aren’t. Most of them are just confused, I guess. And fearful. And addicted to magical thinking. Why do you think that is, that so many people are addicted to magical thinking?”
“Because so many people find life hard,” Cameron said, “and can’t see any way out of their difficulties.”
“He’s a novelist,” Henry said. “A published one.”
“That’s just to indicate that I’m not some pathetic case he picked up and decided to call his protégé,” Cameron said.
They had been proceeding into the town house all this time, down a long narrow hall next to a steep flight of steps, to the kitchen at the back. Gregor stepped into the kitchen and saw that the large table at its center was full of papers. Some of them were copies of The Harridan Report. Gregor was impressed that Henry had been able to get so many on such short notice. Some of them were printed pages of what looked like something Henry had done himself on the computer.
“Sit down, sit down,” Henry said. “I’ll make coffee. Let me make a little room here. You asked me when it started, and what it’s been doing, and I think I can give you a timetable.”
“Good,” Gregor said. He found a chair and sat down. There was no debris on the chairs. Jackman found a chair and sat down too.
Henry did something to the large coffeemaker. Then he came to the table and sat down himself. “Now,” he said. “The first you see of Michael Harridan was two and a half years ago, almost exactly. That’s when the Web site went up, and two weeks later, I found the first notice I could find of The Harridan Report going out in the mail. In case you want to know, there’s no mention of Harridan before that in any of the other groups. Which is very unusual. In fact, it’s nearly unheard of. Most of these guys belong to one or the other of the established groups before they set out on their own. It’s a classic case of progressive delusion, for some of them—”
“Only some?” Jackman said. “What about the rest?”
Henry Barden smiled faintly. “For a small segment of the population, it’s simple fraud. There’s a fair amount of money to be made at this stuff. Oh, you won’t get as rich as Bill Gates, or rich at all in any serious sense, but you can do fairly well in an upper-middle-class sort of way if you’re good at spinning the theories and good at organization and willing to work hard. I do want to emphasize, though, that the out-and-out frauds are few and far between. For one thing, it’s very difficult to commit to the time and energy you need to run an organization like this if you don’t really believe in what you’re doing. For another thing, it’s fairly difficult for most people to spin the theories in a convincing way if they don’t believe them. There are, of course, other people.”
“What about Michael Harridan?” Gregor asked. “Would you say he’s one of the other people?”
“Oh, definitely,” Henry Barden said. Something was happening with the coffee. Cameron went to get it. “And it’s not only that he hadn’t had any presence in any of the other organizations before starting his own. For one thing, his stuff is much too precisely targeted—”
“Excuse me,” Jackman said. “I’ve seen that stuff. It isn’t targeted.”
“I mean relative to the stuff these organizations put out. You see, the usual procedure is to produce a comprehensive overview of your version of the meaning of world events. Go look at the sites sometime. Quite a few of them start their explanations with the dawn of civilization. Most of them go back at least until nineteenth-century Bavaria, with the founding of the Illumi-nati. Did you know that? There really was an Illuminati, a group of Bavarian business and professional men who founded an offshoot of the Freemasons that lasted maybe two-dozen years. They were political radicals in the context of their time. They disappeared, but their name has proved nearly irresistible to the anti-Masonic conspiracists, and especially to the Catholic Church, which has been using them in anti-Mason propaganda for more than a century now. Although, of course, the anti-Masonic propaganda these days is much more sophisticated. You’d be surprised at how unsophisticated some of the stuff is from the late nineteenth century. Conspiracy nuts in high places. And, of course, in this country, conspiracy theories in response to rising numbers of Catholic immigrants and rising hysteria among anti-Catholic natives.”
“But Michael Harridan doesn’t go back that far,” Gregor said.
“No.” Henry Barden returned to the subject. Cameron began passing out cups of coffee. “He makes no attempt to produce a comprehensive explanation at all. He publishes The Harridan Report. He non-gives a few lectures—”
“What?” Jackman said.
“—and he maintains the Web site, that’s it. He hasn’t written a single book. He doesn’t have a single publication for sale. Most of these guys have several of each. Most of them sell all kinds of things. Audiotapes, videotapes, pamphlets, books, you name it. It’s like I told you. These are businesses. Their owners may be intellectually and emotionally committed, but at the end of the day they get paid for what they do and they have to get paid to keep on doing it. Michael Harridan doesn’t seem to have to get paid for what he does and he isn’t even trying to.”
“Well,” Henry said. “It’s very interesting. Not only are these businesses. They’re part of a circuit, a subculture with its own rules and members and events. Most of these guys give lectures to the same people in the same places. There are groups all over the country that sponsor speakers. Michael Harridan isn’t on the circuit, although I’d bet he’s been asked.”
“Why?” Gregor said.
“Because there’s a little notice up on his Web site explaining why he can’t accept speaking engagements in ‘outside’ venues,” Henry said, “which means, I’m sure, venues where he isn’t in control. With any other group of people, this might have been suspicious, but we’re dealing here with people who make paranoia a profession. At any rate, he doesn’t accept those, but for a while he did do talks and speeches, sort of. I say sort of, because he never actually appeared at any of them. People would come in, sit down, and listen to an au-diotape. That lasted for”—Henry checked his papers—“seven months. At the end of that seven-month period, what we find is that the talks are being set up by one Kathi Mittendorf, and all requests for lectures are being routed through her.”
“So, do you mean to say that Kathi Mittendorf is Michael Harridan?” Jack-man asked.
“No,” Henry Barden said. “I think that what happened was that Michael Harridan managed to recruit Kathi Mittendorf, to get her to do things for him so that he didn’t have to be physically present himself. Probably, when he first started, he would be in the audience himself when he non-gave his lectures. He’d set up and sit back and pretend to be one of the audience. Or maybe he’d stand up and say he was somebody else. But I’m also guessing that this wasn’t very safe for him. My best guess here is that he had reason to be concerned that somebody could recognize him, if not at the time he started then later. He didn’t want somebody seeing him as himself in the newspapers or on television and leaping up to say, ‘I know that man! That’s Michael Harridan!’ ”
“So he recruited Kathi Mittendorf and she did his scut work for him,” Gregor said. “Then what?”
“Well, then he put out his newsletter,” Henry said. “And that’s a very interesting artifact too. Most of these things take on everybody and everything. The World Bank. The United Nations. George W. Bush. And there’s some mention of that stuff in The Harridan Report, but not enough of it. Everything I could find, everything on the Web site, everything you gave me, ninety percent of it was targeted at Anthony Ross and his bank. Specifically, his bank. Not Morgan. Not Citigroup. Not Chase. Not banks in general.”
“What was the other ten percent targeted at?” Gregor asked.
Henry shrugged. “Everything and nothing. The usual mix, except that you were quite right. For at least a month before the murders, there are small but persistent mentions linking the Russian Orthodox Church and the other Orthodox Churches in the Soviet Union to the KGB and the ‘worldwide conspiracy for One World Government.’ Etc. Armenia and the Armenian Church are mentioned directly several times.”
“Wonderful,” Gregor said.
“Why the Armenian Church?” Jackman said, bewildered. “What did the Armenian Church have to do with Tony Ross? What does any of this have to do with Charlotte Ross?”
“There’s just one thing,” Henry Barden said. “If you’re right in your theories, and I’m right in mine, then he’s got to get rid of Kathi Mittendorf and he’s got to do it as quickly as possible. And he can’t do it himself. Not now. Not under the circumstances. So—”
“So what?” Jackman said.
“So we have to get to Kathi Mittendorf,” Gregor said. “But I told you that already.”
FOUR
1
Ryall Wyndham knew, as well as he knew anything—better than he knew how to enter a ballroom when he was sure to be the poorest person there, or how to ride a horse, or how to shoot a rifle in a way that would make sure to not have people laughing at him—that the one thing he could not do in the situation in which he was in was to let people see him sweat. Unfortunately, ever since Annie Ross had showed up at his apartment door, he had been doing nothing but sweating, and sweating was the thing that made him most like the Italian-peasant ancestors who lurked back there in his family tree. Hell, they did more than lurk. They dominated. You could forget the genealogical chart that hung on the wall next to his desk in the corner of the living room, the one the photographers so liked to catch when they produced pictures of him for the publicity shots that would appear in the papers on the day he was due to appear on Dateline or Larry King Live. Ryall was beginning to think he should not have allowed those photographers to see him in his apartment at all. By now, they all had to be as suspicious as hell. He would be if somebody claimed to come from one of the most important families in Philadelphia but lived in a dump like this, and a messy dump at that, without so much as a glance from a cleaning lady. The one thing he wanted, the one thing that really mattered to him, was that he not have to go back to being nothing but Philadelphia’s “most important” society gossip columnist. That was like being Akron’s “most important” cultural reporter. Forget Katharine Hepburn. Forget the Main Line. Society was worse than dead. It had metamorphosed into an octopus of excess, and what it cared about these days was not the venerableness of family lines or the purity of generational commitment to High Culture. What it cared about was money. Thirty years ago, he would have said this was impossible. Money was a New York thing. Now he knew that, when the really rich people in the country paid any attention at all to the Main Line, they did so in the way they paid attention to old movies. They found it quaint, and somewhat endearing. It was only those people— like Tony Ross—who meant something in the great world outside, who were powerful in the institutions that were centered in New York and Berlin and London, who “counted” outside the very rarefied small circle of Old Philadelphia Families who still talked only to each other. Ryall used to think they only talked to each other because they were too careful of their associations ever to let outsiders in. He now knew they talked only to each other because nobody of any importance was interested in talking to them.
It was a bad idea to start thinking of Tony Ross, or especially, Charlotte Deacon Ross. It made his face flush and his blood pound in his ears, as if he were the hero of a paperback thriller being chased through the city by the personification of Civic Malignity. He still hated them, though. He hated both of them. He hated Tony for thinking that he was nothing but a clown, a buffoon who need not be listened to courteously, never mind taken seriously. Not that Tony had ever been anything but courteous. Tony would have been courteous to Satan if he’d encountered him on a street corner. Tony was courteous to homeless women asking for spare change. Ryall thought it would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of that man’s condescension. That was what they were all like— condescending. They talked to him as if they were talking to a child.
Still, they were better than the people like Charlotte. At least Tony had an excuse. He really was Important, in objective terms, in the real world. What had Charlotte been, but an aging postdebutante and Main Line matron, the sort of woman there were dozens of at every reunion of Agnes Irwin and the Madeira School. It was amazing the way these women took on their husbands’ auras as if they deserved them. My husband runs a very important international investment bank, therefore I deserve more respect and deference than the president of the United States. Unlike Tony, Charlotte was not always courteous. Ryall would have thought her also less condescending, except that she wasn’t. She was very out-front and straightforward about her condescension, and her contempt. There had been times when he had wanted to take her neck between his hands and snap it off—except, of course, that he couldn’t have done it. He was not strong. He was no danger to anybody without a weapon in his hand, whether it was a pen or a gun. But that didn’t work either. He couldn’t write what he wanted about them. If he did, they would do to him what pe
ople very much like them had done to Truman Capote. They’d cut him off, and then where would he be? He wondered if it had been like this for the great social chroniclers of the past, the “powerful” columnists who had played right-hand man to people like Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt. He was willing to bet that it had been exactly the same. They would have been careful when they were required to be careful. They would have flattered and attended and lied to keep their place. Ryall didn’t understand why people like Charlotte and Annie were so surprised at the kind of things they stumbled on in The Harridan Report. He was sure half the country secretly thought the kinds of things that were written there. They might not believe in an alien race of reptilians who only pretended to be human, but they did believe in a conspiracy, because there was one. There was a conspiracy of the already important to make sure the unimportant never forgot their place.
For no reason he understood, he had a vision of Tony lying there on the ground with the bullet in his head, the blood on the sidewalk, the perfect aristocratic face half gone. The result was a sexual desire so immediate and intense, it almost made him stagger. The next thing he saw was the girl, the one he had picked up that night, but only that night. He never liked to have them more than once. Once he had seen them bending over his penis, struggling to stuff it as far down their throats as Linda Lovelace had done and still not gag—once he had seen that, he never wanted them again. He couldn’t take them seriously. Somebody ought to shoot Annie Ross, he thought. She was interfering in things she didn’t understand. None of these women understood. They were too old for any man to be interested in them as anything but broodmares. Ryall wasn’t interested in a broodmare. He couldn’t afford one. When he could afford one, he would get one. Then he would be like all these guys, the ones at the Society parties, the ones who provided the talking heads on television shows. He’d have his broodmare and his eleven-year-old doxy on the side, set up decently in private, so that he didn’t have to run the risk of exposure every time he wanted to get laid. Yes, somebody ought to kill Annie Ross. Somebody ought to blast her head to pieces, just like Tony’s, just like Charlotte’s. He knew exactly how Charlotte’s head had come apart there on the drive in front of her front door, the blood and skin and bone falling over the thick molded cement rim of the planter near the door, the wind blowing cold wet darkness through her hair. He hoped she had lain there writhing in her own blood for many long minutes and only expired when the ambulance arrived. He hoped the same thing happened to Annie Ross, whose only purpose in life was to destroy men for doing what was natural to them.