Free Conspiracy Theory by Jane Haddam Page A

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.
    â€œWell?” he said, drawing up next to the buffet table.
    â€œLet’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.”
    â€œHe’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.”
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œThere’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.