by Jane Haddam
“I am not some poor little parish priest, Krekor. I may be small in stature, but I—”
“I’m just trying to tell you how it would look in the papers if the city tried to turn you down. And I wasn’t asking about the church, Tibor. I was asking about you. Bennis said that you were better. You were … a little depressed, for a while there.”
“Yes, Krekor, I was a little depressed. I am now not so. I am only—more cautious than I was, maybe. Do you ever find that there are things in the world you do not understand?”
“Practically all of them.”
“No, no. Be serious. I think, from what Bennis says to me, that this man who set the bomb in our church, he did it for a frivolous reason. To distract attention from the murder he was about to commit, or was in the middle of committing. That part was not so clear. But not because he had anything against our church in particular. Does this make sense to you?”
“Yes,” Gregor said, pouring broth very carefully over the meatballs in bul-gar crust he had already placed in his bowl. “The David Aldens of the world have always made sense to me. Money as a motive makes sense to me. So does love. And David Alden is just a man who loves money. For all the manic planning, he isn’t even very original.”
“And what about the others? This Katherine—”
“Was she a Katherine, and not a Kathleen or something? I never heard her called anything but Kathi. She spelled it with an i on the end. The way girls used to do in the sixties, when they were all pretending to be Marianne Faithfull.”
“So I have been reading the papers on this woman, Krekor. And on this organization that wasn’t a real organization. And then I go on the Internet and ask people on RAM about these people, these conspiracists. Do you know that’s not a real word in the dictionary? When you type it onto the computer, the spellcheck yells at you.”
“I’m not sure spellcheck should be the standard for English usage.”
“Yes, I know. But here is what I don’t know. Why is there so much fear? Because it is all about fear, Krekor. All these people. This Kathi. These people who put up the Web sites and send the newsletters and write the magazines. That the CIA is running the government. The CIA. I have had acquaintance with the CIA in Armenia when there was a Soviet Union. The CIA could not run a newsstand and keep it secret.”
“I wonder if Lida could send this stuff every day,” Gregor said. “And yes, I know. The CIA couldn’t assassinate Castro in the middle of a civil war. They even tried exploding bananas. It was like watching a children’s cartoon about a superhero who can never do anything but screw up. You can’t be worried about the CIA.”
“I am not worried about the CIA, Krekor, no. But I am worried about the fear. When you see the people from the Third World do it, it at least makes some sense. America is the Great Satan. America is responsible for everything that happens. At least America is really strong, and the Third World is really weak. And when the Europeans do it, it is the same—they are not so strong as America is. But when people do it here and it is the same thing, a few of the names are changed but everything else is the same, there is a secret force ruling us all, we have no control over our lives or our destinies—we are being controlled by the thirteen richest families, or by the Soviet Union that only pretended to collapse, or by the British royal family. The British royal family, Krekor, where is the sense in that? A group of people with no expertise at all except in alcoholism and adultery.”
“I think we’ve been over this several million times in the last few weeks.”
“Yes, I know, but I wish to say that I do not understand it. What is it that people here are afraid of? These Kathi Mittendorfs. These people who read the Web sites and belong to the John Birch Society. What is so frightening? That we don’t have complete control of our lives? We never have that. That we aren’t the most important people in the world? Believe me, Krekor, I would prefer not to be. It is fear and envy and resentment without rationality, and I don’t like it.”
“If you’re looking for rationality, I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of it,” Gregor said. “I don’t think there are answers for these things the way you want them to be.”
“Does it make sense to say that some people are not really people, but are reptilians, the children of human women and aliens, only pretending to be humans among us?”
“I said you weren’t going to find a lot of rationality.”
“Pah,” Tibor said. He went to the window again and shook his head. “We think we will make things better by being reasonable, but I am not sure that is so. What can you be reasonable about when fewer than twenty percent of the people in the Muslim world think that Muslims were responsible for the World Trade Center disaster? The rest of them blame the CIA, or they blame Israel. Kathi Mittendorf blames the CIA. It goes on and on like this, and it makes less sense by the day. How are we to make things better if the whole world is drowning in irrationality?”
“We’ve always managed before,” Gregor pointed out—and that was true. They had always managed before. There was never a time when the world wasn’t drowning in irrationality. Only some people escaped it, and they were the ones who moved the story forward.
“In New Mexico they burned Harry Potter books because the pastor said they encouraged witchcraft,” Tibor said. “Right here in Pennsylvania, a police department said the same thing. I know I am harping, Krekor, but I am worried, and you should be worried too.”
3
Gregor was not worried, although that might have been the result of his physical condition. He was expending so much energy pretending not to feel the pain in his shoulder, he had very little left over for anything else. After Tibor left, he lay down again in bed and looked out the window at the city lights, blessedly free of the sight of the cemetery, which was below his line of sight. He had a tin of those hard cookies he didn’t know the name of. He was no longer hungry to the point of being light-headed. He wished he could call Bennis on the phone and have her take him home. There was music coming in over the intercom—NPR, he thought, or the local classical station, with people talking in hushed voices and music that had been written to soothe the savage beast.
He sat up a little again—God, that hurt; was he ever going to get to the point where that didn’t hurt?—and rummaged around in the tote bag that still lay on the bed near his knees for the thing he had seen in there earlier, but not wanted to bring to Tibor’s attention. He pulled it out and lay back to read it—not a newsletter this time, or a magazine, but a book, a well-printed book too. Most people would not be able to tell the difference between it and a mainstream book produced by a mainstream publisher. This publisher was called Feral House, and Bennis had stuck a Post-it note to the glossy cover of the book that said: publisher seems to be post office box in California.
Gregor looked at the book. Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, edited by Jim Keith. He flipped open to the table of contents. “AIDS—Act of God or of the Pentagon?” “An Open Letter to the Swedish Prime Minister from a Survivor of Electromagnetic Terror.” Gregor blinked. Sweden? He opened to the essay called “My Father is a Clone,” by Gary Stoll-man. There was a brief biographical sketch, which was not promising. Then the essay started.
“The man who has appeared on KNBC for the last three years is not my biological father,” it said. “He is a clone, a double created by the Central Intelligence Agency and alien forces. It is only a small part of a greater plot to overthrow the United States government, and possibly the human race itself. The CIA has replaced and tried to destroy part of my family, and those of my friends.”
r: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
