Now, I’d been silent up to this point. There were several reasons for that. I was scared, for one thing. I had made such a fool of myself my first chance as an investigator. I knew if I messed this chance up it would be my last.
For another thing, I felt suddenly unsure of what I wanted to say. Over the weekend, as I’d perused the letters, parsed them as I would’ve the English literature I’d studied in school, I’d been absolutely certain of my conclusions. My insights seemed rock solid to me, not to mention positively brilliant. But sitting here, sunk in the monumental chair, in front of Weiss’s monumental desk, before the monumental figure of Weiss himself, it occurred to me again how biased I was, how much ill will I bore against feminists like M. R. Brinks. Maybe that had caused me to sympathize with the author of the letters. To give him too much credit. Maybe he was nothing but a sick, sadistic creep like Sissy said. I began to feel I should just nod amiably and agree that we ought to check out the police list of sex offenders.
And then there was Sissy herself—she was the third thing. I was crazy about her. Oh, not in any serious, long-term way, but when you’re as young as I was, it’s pretty tough to tell the difference between an erection and undying love. Looking back, I think I could sense how neurotic she must’ve been. I mean, why the hell did she dress like a little girl all the time? And what was with that treacly tone of voice she used, as if she were Mommy and everyone else was two years old?
Still, I really was young, and I was three thousand miles away from home to boot. And when she tilted her head at me and gave me the full blast of warmth in those moist blue eyes, and when she put her hand on my cheek as she sometimes did, and called me “sweetheart,” as she also sometimes did, and asked me about my day or whatever, I wanted to hurl myself at her feet—and other anatomical targets as well.
In any case, I sure as hell didn’t want to contradict her, and I really sure as hell didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of her. So with every second that passed I was becoming more and more convinced that silence was the way to go. Silence and a lot of amiable nods.
Then Weiss, with another enormous sigh, shifted his baleful gaze to me and said, “What about you, genius? What do you think?”
“Well—” I shot up ramrod straight. I cleared my throat. I cast a quick glance at Sissy, which I hoped conveyed the fullness of my submission to her every whim combined with a certain smoldering sensuality. Then I cleared my throat again. “Um…I think, actually, there might actually be more to these, uh, things than, uh, meets the eye at first, actually.”
“That’s a lot of actuallys,” said Weiss. He never lifted his cheek from his fist.
Sissy giggled—in a warm, loving sort of way. I felt my cheeks get hot. “What I mean is—” I scooted forward in my chair. I twisted my hands together. “I’m not saying the letters aren’t, you know—obscene or whatever.” I swallowed, stealing another quick look at Sissy. “But I don’t think the writer means to be…threatening exactly. I think he’s actually trying to make a very…intelligent point.”
“Oh, that’s silly, sweetie,” whispered Sissy. It was a fierce rebuke coming from her. And believe me, under most circumstances, she could’ve had my complete surrender for the price of a kind word and a kiss. But there was Weiss to think about also. I was in too deep to pull back now.
“No, I mean it, I mean it,” I said quickly. “If you just…don’t think about the four-letter words and all the graphic stuff. If you put those out of your mind for a second, the things he’s saying underneath that are really centered in a very respectable mystic tradition.”
“ ‘The world craves you naked on your knees with your round ass and your wet purple pussy lifted to me?’ ” Sissy read from the top page of her folder. “That doesn’t sound very respectable to me. Or very mystic.”
For a moment, the electric charge of hearing those words read aloud in her sweet, maidenly voice caused me to forget everything I wanted to say. Openmouthed, I stared at her, fighting down the fantasy of her naked on her knees herself. Then I blinked, glanced at Weiss. His impatient glare brought me back to myself.
“Um…um…um,” I think I said. “No, but the point is, the rest of it, without, like I said, the graphic stuff, is…well, the thing is…it’s William Blake.”
“Who?” said Sissy. “Wasn’t he a poet?”
I was clumsily fishing a crumpled page of notes from my pants pocket. “Yeah. And artist. English. Mystic, Romantic. Around the turn of the nineteenth century.”
“Oh…” I heard Weiss murmur. And I knew he would’ve said for fuck’s sake if it hadn’t been for Sissy’s presence.
But, fighting down panic, I pressed on. Smoothed the page of notes on my knee. “Remember in the e-mails where he says, uh, he says Brinks can’t tolerate the moment of desire? And then he says it again, ‘The moment of desire, Marianne!’ That’s from a Blake poem called Visions of the Daughters of Albion. ‘The moment of desire! The moment of desire!’ And that fantasy in the e-mails where all the, all the girls are naked in the river and he’s on the bank with Brinks watching them. That’s from that poem, too. Um…I’ll lie beside thee on a bank and view their wanton play in lovely copulation, bliss on bliss.’ ”
Slowly, Weiss’s face lifted from his fist. “That’s in a poem?” he said.
“Yeah. Yeah, and another part in the e-mails, right above that, where he, where he says, ‘Why do you cling to your theoretical religion? Is it because actions themselves aren’t beautiful?’ Well, that’s, that’s in the poem, too. ‘Why dost thou seek religion? Is it because acts are not lovely?’ ”
“Hey,” said Weiss softly. He looked at Sissy, made a face as if to say, Hey. “That’s pretty good.”
She wasn’t convinced. “Oh, it’s very good. And everybody knows you’re very, very brilliant,” she added to me with the kindest of smiles. “And that’s one of the reasons we all love you so much. But all it means is this guy has read some poetry. A person can read poetry and still be a dangerous pervert.”
“Oh hey, reading poetry is one of the first signs,” I said.
She laughed that laugh like music. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“All I’m saying is you have to put this in the context of Brinks’s philosophy. I mean, you know, Brinks claims to have nothing against sex per se, but all her work casts normal, healthy male sexual behavior in a negative light.”
“Oh now,” said Sissy.
“Well, she does. She does. Believe me. I dealt with these people at Berkeley for four years. You can’t believe what they’re like. Really. Read her stuff. She draws absolutely no line between normal courtship and sexual harassment—she basically thinks they’re the same thing. And she basically thinks heterosexual sex is a slightly less violent form of rape. I mean, as long as we’re talking about being twisted, Sissy.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Sissy said, as if I’d spilled my finger-paints on her new gingham tablecloth. “Now, come on. You’re not really saying that these filthy, filthy letters are some sort of…intellectual argument. I mean, you would never write something like this. Would you?”
I did not know very much about women when I was young—only a little more than I know now, in fact. Even so, I knew enough not to answer a question like that one.
“That’s not the point” was all I said. “We’re trying to find this guy, right? I mean, that’s what Brinks hired us to do.”
“Right. That’s right,” said Weiss. He had brightened up considerably. I guess it was a lot more pleasant for him to see his weekend debauch as less assaultive and disgusting and more in the mystical tradition of English Romantic poetry.
“See, the thing is,” I went on before Sissy could object, “there used to be this guy at Berkeley, this professor, named Wilfred K. Green. Okay? And Green believed that our fear of death alienated us from our bodies, forced us to cut off our consciousness of sensuality.” I could see Weiss starting to roll his eyes, so I hurried on. “Anyway, Green started out as an English professor. His original subject was Blake and the Romantics, and he used a lot of Blake imagery in his books. He got very popular for a while in the sixties when he became an advocate of free love and mind-expanding drugs and all that.”
“So you think this might be him writing?” Weiss asked.
“Oh no, no, he got AIDS way back in the eighties and finally took some PCP and threw himself out of his hospital window. He’s been dead for years. But, as I say, he was very popular for a while, and he still has his disciples—especially at Berkeley. There even used to be a Wilfred K. Green society out there, though I think the feminists have forced it underground.”
“So they’re at Berkeley and Brinks is at Berkeley,” said Weiss.
“I think the guy who wrote these e-mails is one of her colleagues.” I blurted this out in my excited defense of my ideas. I hadn’t really meant to go quite so far, to commit myself quite so much. But there was nothing I could do about it now. I sat back in my chair and shut up.
For what seemed an era after that, Weiss sat silent, considering. At long last, he cocked his head. He raised a bushy eyebrow Sissy’s way.
She laughed again, that lovely laugh. Her eyes sparkled. “Well, like I said, Scott, he’s a brilliant boy. That’s why we love him.”
“You still got contacts out at the university?” Weiss asked me.
“Um, uh, yeah,” I said eagerly. “Sure.”
“You think you could manage to talk to them, ask around, be discreet? Get a possible name or two without giving away any client confidence?”
“Sure! Sure! Absolutely. Sure.”
“Okay,” said Weiss. “Report to Sissy. Let her know the minute you find anything.”
Simple as that. I had to work hard to force down a grin. I was an investigator again.
Sissy reached over from her chair to mine. She patted my wrist. I caught my breath. Her cool hand lingered on me.
“Good job, sweetheart,” she whispered sweetly. “Well done.”