5

Even in my renewed state of shock, the small park of just about two acres worked on me like a massage, easing the tension out of my body, clearing my mind. A light breeze made the willow fronds sway as languidly as if they were underwater plants. On his retractable leash, Marco wandered and sniffed just as much as I’d let him. This was always a quiet spot because it had been donated to the city years ago by a local real estate millionaire, with the specification that it never have any slides, swings, jungle gym, sandbox or anything like that. Surrounded by an elaborate cast iron black fence, and with only one entrance, it was meant to be a place of contemplation, not a playground. Teens didn’t loiter there at night because it was “boring,” and if people did bring their children during the day, they were usually in strollers and were wheeled away as quickly as possible if they started to fuss or cry.

The little park had never felt so much like a refuge before. Sitting there alone, I thought that this was the kind of time when people say “What next, what could possibly happen next?” and someone superstitious tells them to be quiet. But I couldn’t shush myself. I did wonder what else Fate had in store for me after my last handful of years of quiet achievement and contentment. Was my luck changing back again?

I had entered a department of misfits, malcontents, and misanthropes under a cloud: I was a “spousal hire.” That means that EAR had wanted to hire Stefan, not me, and had to scramble to create a position for me to make sure Stefan accepted SUM’s offer. As is usually the case, the circumstances were held against me in a group of professional divas and detractors. Not that the department needed any more reasons to dislike me, or even the idea of me. I wasn’t respected for having authored a secondary bibliography of Edith Wharton, despite all the work that went into the five-year project. I’d read everything ever written about Wharton—whether books, articles, or reviews—and summarized it so that students and scholars had all of Wharton scholarship for over a century laid out for them in one fat book. If I’d have written anything that used the latest impenetrable critical jargon, something that might sell only a handful of copies, I would have been considered at least upto-date by my colleagues. But my book was too practical a work, too useful; bibliographies were as unglamorous and old-fashioned to most academics as spittoons.

My cousin Sharon worked at Columbia University as a research librarian, and she’d once quipped, “If Tolstoy had been a professor, he would have said that every unhappy department is unhappy in its own way.” The Department of English, American Studies, and Rhetoric owed its sniping and bitterness to a history of division: The faculty teaching rhetoric (basic composition) had been forced on English and American Studies when the Department of Rhetoric was dissolved in a budget-cutting move. Nobody wanted the Rhetoric refugees, who were considered second-class academics and treated like smelly drunken guests at a wedding. Force people to work together, share a building, serve on committees, and you end up with volcanic animosities building up pressure year after year.

And I was soon derided, even suspected, because I truly enjoyed teaching basic writing well before I ever taught literature classes like an Edith Wharton seminar and The American Crime Novel. Teaching writing skills demanded tremendous dedication and time, and most faculty preferred to be as untrammeled as possible. To them, tenured positions meant freedom to spend as many hours away from campus and their students as possible. But there was more working against me: once I’d gotten drawn into murder investigations, I had become a cross between a pariah and a joke.

Then the bequest by my former student had totally sealed my fate. The small fortune he left to the department had severe restrictions on it: the money would go to inviting an author to teach and speak there once a year; I was to be in charge of this new lecture series; and it wasn’t named after the student, but after me. More surprisingly, the money would pass to a leukemia charity if I either died or left the university. If EAR wanted the money, they had to accept my rise in status, and my newfound independence from Stefan, and even the rest of the department. I suddenly had my own little bailiwick: The Nick Hoffman Fellowship. No, it was more than that, it was an oasis in a desert of academic insanity.

If I’d been disliked before, now I was hated. Despite that, I was courted, because of course everyone had their favorite candidate for the yearly visitor, given that the stipend was $25,000 and the work wasn’t onerous. Fellows had to give a lecture, a reading, teach some workshops, and remain in residence for only one month. So I was sought after even by people who felt it was demeaning to try to win me over. They resented my new importance, and that I’d been given promotion to full professor by the dean (though it was only because of the fellowship and the university wanting me to look better on paper). I even had my own administrative assistant to run the little program, and a larger office than before. Hell, larger wasn’t as important to me as being out of Parker Hall’s basement, which I’d been exiled to years ago.

The fact that I had any real office was the coup de grace for my enemies. A new initiative at the university was dedicated to making all the departments more “open,” and in ours, that had translated into two floors of Parker being gutted and remodeled last summer, right before Stefan and I took our sabbaticals together. Some of what they had done was practical: every individual office had a fire extinguisher because the building was so old and had long been considered a fire trap. But that was the most positive change. Other renovations were insidious, though on the brighter side, it didn’t look as much like the setting for a slasher film as before.

Why the changes in our building? Because at SUM, appearances were what counted, not realities. The university was constantly reinventing itself rhetorically, coming up with new slogans like “We Care”—seriously! These were always the result of endless deliberations in specially constituted committees with impressive-sounding names, and later were rolled out through a new mission statement. It was pomposity masquerading as thoughtfulness, and typically meant about as much as the campaign buttons of the losing party the day after a national election.

Universities were not just political in their infighting, but also worked in similarly hierarchical ways that bred resentment. And people were jealous to the point of mild hysteria about their perks, so the redesign of EAR’s two floors hit the department like the barbarians sacking Rome. Except for the administrators who were in their own suite, Stefan as writer-in-residence, and little old me and my administrative assistant, everyone else now had the cubicles for office space that you might find in a call center in India. Bathrooms, meeting rooms, the supply room, mail room, and copy room were one floor down along with more cubicles for graduate assistants and temporary faculty. Full-timers seeking privacy or relief from the din in the department sometimes lurked down there like unpopular kids at a birthday party, since they were less likely to be found. Or they just stayed away entirely.

So, picture the main floor of the department as an enormous large rectangle. Three actual offices with doors had been carved out on the short sides, each office about ten feet by twenty feet. Not palatial, but the old fifteen-foot ceilings and enormous windows made them seem bigger than they were. And the architects had kept some original, heavy oak doors that were twelve feet high and had old-fashioned transoms. On the north end the chair and the associate chair had their offices, with one between them shared by their secretaries, and all three of those offices were connected.

The elevator was in the middle of the long, eastern side of the building with staircases flanking it. I avoided the stairs because they were very old and the metal treads echoed abominably, as if you were in a hellish high school.

My office was all the way across the building on the south end, and it was connected with my assistant’s. Stefan’s office was on the other side of hers, but without a connecting door to hers. Between these triads was a yawning space studded with four groups of six cubicles; each group separated by what I guess you’d call a corridor four or five feet wide. The partitions separating faculty were only four feet high and privacy was nonexistent. In the actual offices, the high ceilings made for a feeling of openness, whereas here in what some people called “The Pit,” they turned everything sterile. Even worse, the windows facing the Pit had been redone, and now had electronic blinds which were light-sensitive and adjusted themselves or closed on their own schedule. Nobody on-site could control them.

The set-up was a shock the first time I saw it, and the shock hadn’t faded much over the course of my sabbatical year. I suppose it could have been worse, and there could have just been rows of desks and chairs like some old-time typing pool. One floor down, the only rooms with doors were for supplies, the photocopier, and the mailroom directly under my side of the building, and meeting rooms directly opposite. The rest of that floor was also set up entirely as open space with cubicles, mingling graduate assistants and temporary faculty. Temporary, of course, is an odd term to use for people who keep getting hired every year—but that’s the way of a university. Never call things what they really are.

The surprising architectural changes in Parker Hall had been made over a summer, the university’s typical policy when doing anything unpopular or possibly controversial. The student newspaper was published infrequently, people weren’t around, and it was the best time to be sneaky. Returning faculty had been stunned. The offices of the Department of EAR, which had been stuck in the early nineteenth century, now looked painfully up-to-date: an anonymous business staffed by drones who couldn’t talk behind people’s backs anymore because the acoustics allowed even whispers to carry many partitions away.

My own office was nothing extraordinary, but it was of course a real office, not a cubicle, and spacious enough. People have killed for less, though, and in a department that was all knives and very little steak, I was now an even easier target than I’d ever been. Colleagues congratulated me, but it was fake. They thought I didn’t deserve the step up (or the view), and they hoped I’d fail or bring scandal upon myself in some way that would invalidate the gift and get me ousted somehow. If the department were a movie, I would have been the guy holed up in a boarded-up house surrounded by flesh-eating ghouls.

I even sensed resentment from the new chair, a former friend, Juno Dromgoole. Once foul-mouthed and excessive, a stormy cross between Bette Midler and Tina Turner who dressed with excessive panache, the professor of Canadian Studies had toned herself way down. She was still as haughty as ever, but now with the aloof distance of a dowager empress. Juno had liked and teased me before, but now she seemed to suspect me. Of what? Wanting her job?

It was a very strange reorganization in a department that had long felt under siege. Stefan and I had been teaching there for over fifteen years and had seen the department shrink as class sizes went up. When senior professors retired, their positions weren’t filled, but temporary professors—adjuncts—were hired to teach their courses at a quarter of the cost. Fiction writing classes that once had fifteen students went to twenty, then twenty-five, and now were at thirty on the way to thirty-five. Stefan said you couldn’t possibly teach writing well with a class that big, but there was nothing he could do about it. SUM wanted fewer full-time faculty everywhere and “efficiency” in departments that weren’t bringing in outside funding through grants. Read: do more with less.

Marco was nuzzling my leg, which meant he was done with my contemplation, so I headed home with him, reluctantly, looking around me for anything suspicious all the way back home. And when I could see our house a block away, it felt painfully exposed somehow, as if this time the SWAT team was about to descend on ropes from helicopters. The image was so fiercely real, it could have been a hallucination, and for a moment I had an urge to turn and run.

I didn’t need to force myself to keep going, though, because Marco was pulling me home. The last thing I expected when I approached our driveway was laughter, but I could hear it funneling out from the kitchen window, and I knew we had a visitor, because there was only one person who made Stefan laugh that hard: Father Ryan Burke.

I let myself in and Marco raced to the kitchen for water. Father Ryan was at the counter with a mug of coffee, out of his “clericals,” in skinny jeans and a black polo shirt, and he beamed at me. Stefan must have called him while I was gone and he’d walked over from St. Jude, and I was glad Stefan had been forced by Bullerschmidt’s call to get dressed, because it made the day seem slightly more normal. We had one neighbor who would amble down to his mailbox in his robe and slippers at all times of the day and I dreaded becoming as heedless of time and place as that.

“Nick, I’m very sorry about your trouble.”

“Thanks, Father Ryan.” He insisted on us just using his first name, even when he was wearing his collar, but I wasn’t comfortable with that yet.

“It’s shameful. Not my idea of America.”

He was not my idea of a priest. Tall and slim, he had the dark eyes, curly black hair, angular jaw and high cheekbones of a Romantic poet. Or my image of one, anyway. He was thirtyish, easy-going, and surprisingly progressive, with a resonant mellifluous voice you’d expect from a radio announcer. Stefan said his homilies were terrific, and I could believe that. Ryan was also a rock climber, a marksman, an avid hiker, and Stefan said that he brought those experiences into what he shared with his parishioners.

Father Ryan had guided Stefan through his long conversion process and had become a friend. At first I was jealous of the time they spent together, but gradually I saw how happy Stefan was to be converting, how deeply contented, and I let go. I grew grateful that Father Ryan had initially sought Stefan out with questions about publishing a book of his own and their conversations had unexpectedly led Stefan to start attending Mass, looking for a spiritual center in his life. His career at that point was a disaster, and he’d had enough dark nights of the soul to fill a calendar. As the mystics put it, he’d been “hollowed out” by suffering. And then one afternoon, at Mass, as Stefan described it, he knew that this was going to be his new home. “I felt it as sure as the blood was moving through my veins,” he reported later.

We talked a bit now, Ryan encouraging us to take a vacation or do something that would heal the injury. “The summer’s barely started. Do something, go somewhere. Take a cruise.”

Stefan shook his head. “There isn’t any scenery in the world that would make up for the raid and how they treated us.”

Ryan nodded, taking it in the way a smart, warm-hearted therapist might, not offering any bromides. And I was glad he didn’t quote any Fathers of the Church at me, or talk about loving one’s enemy. I had gotten used to Stefan relying on him, on them calling each other “brother,” on Stefan going to Mass more than once a week, but Stefan’s Catholicism was still new enough for me to feel uneasy at times about his midlife conversion and everything that went with it. Hearing them talk about Christ or “God’s love” made me uncomfortable, since I’d been raised Jewish, and Jesus and the New Testament had always been terra incognita for me.

I knew there was no danger of Stefan becoming an ideologue, since he didn’t have the personality for it, but now that he was a Roman Catholic, I felt he was connected to some very crazy people—at least distantly. Like all the bishops who had tried to muzzle American nuns for speaking out on social issues like marriage equality. And even conservatives at the church he attended, who were stuck in some 1950s version of their religion and seemed uncomfortable with the new pope’s openness.

Father Ryan checked his watch, got up to give Stefan a hug, said “Don’t forget to call me,” and headed for the front door with his typical loping, athletic stride. He and Stefan sometimes played racquetball, and he usually won. I followed him out, and before he left, Ryan said intensely, “I hope they nail the bastard who screwed you guys over.” I laughed. His talking like a real person was something Stefan had been enjoying for a long time, but it always startled me. I also admired the way he listened, with an intensity that felt musical, as if he were the accompanist in a violin sonata. Even his silence was participation.

Stefan was looking less crushed when I returned to the kitchen.

“Call him about what?” I asked.

“Whatever.”

He looked almost embarrassed, so I asked, “Did Ryan help?” I asked. Between us, I could use the priest’s first name without discomfort.

“For sure. He’s always good to talk to. He was telling me about someone at church who grew up in East Germany before the Wall came down, and how she’d had the secret police drag her father away. He never came back.”

“And that made you laugh?”

“No, what was funny was jokes they used to tell in East Germany.” Before I could ask him to repeat some, he said, “You know, Vanessa was right. We have to start thinking about who could be behind the raid, who hates us enough to set something like that in motion.”

“Okay. Deal. Ready for lunch? We have some of that casserole left.”

Marco knew the word “lunch” and so we had to get him his kibble first. Once Marco was fed, pottied, and napping, Stefan broke out some of our favorite Belgian beer, Duvel. I put the “gourmet” mac ’n’ cheese (made with penne riggate and a carrot/orange puree) in the microwave. I set the table and put out a pad and pen for each of us as if we were lawyers or diplomats at a conference. The only thing missing was a bottle of Appolinaris or some other European water for each of us.

When we were eating and the beers were half-downed, I said, “Doesn’t Duvel mean Devil in Flemish? That’s appropriate. Only a fiend would send a SWAT team for no reason.”

Stefan put down his fork. “No, it has to be a good reason. Somebody who really hates us, wants us to suffer, maybe even go to prison.”

“Are you sure? Maybe they just wanted to humiliate us. Or you.” Stefan turned red. “Or me,” I added uncertainly, feeling extra hungry. I guess fear and dread can do that. We ate in silence for a while. “I guess that’s a good enough reason if you’re unbalanced,” I said.

“Bullerschmidt,” Stefan finally brought out, as if turning over winning cards in baccarat. “It’s obvious. He would have had us arrested in his office if he had the power to do it. He’s vicious and he hates us.”

That was no hyperbole. It wasn’t just that my involvement in crime had made SUM look bad to the general public, or that Stefan’s new book had the administration furious. Stefan and I had once, in a very unproductive and ill-advised visit to his home, basically accused the dean of murdering a new faculty member. That had been almost a decade ago, but he was the kind of man who didn’t just nurse a grudge, he moved it into a private clinic.

“And—” Stefan added slowly. “How did he know about the police raid so quickly? Even the way he talked to us, it felt planned, like a little speech he practiced. Didn’t you think so? He wasn’t shocked, or even startled.”

I nodded.

“So … what if he didn’t have an informant inside the police, what if he’s the one who started it? I just can’t figure out who his target was, you or me …”

“Stefan, if either one of us gets hurt, so does the other. We both suffer.” I sipped some beer and thought the dean was a very likely candidate, and someone sadistic enough to wait, plan, and strike unexpectedly. “But if this thing blows up and there’s bad publicity, it doesn’t make SUM look good.”

“He’s a bully. He’s the Mother of All Bullies. He wouldn’t care. He’s beyond caring. He’s like somebody in a Greek tragedy who wants revenge no matter what.”

It fit. We’d seen Bullerschmidt intimidate his wife and faculty members, and we’d been on the receiving end of his steamrolling more than once, even before that time we confronted him in his home with our half-formed questions that sounded like accusations.

I had been listing pros and cons of the dean as a suspect, but I put my pen down. “This cannot be happening to us. Everything was perfect. You finally had a best seller. I finally got promoted to full professor and I have my own little power base in the department, and now we’re like conspiracy theorists. This whole thing is unhinged.”

Stefan leaned forward. “Nick. It’s not a theory. It’s real. Our house being invaded, me being dragged off to jail, that was real, that was our life, not somebody else’s, not a book or a thriller. That’s our life now, whether you like it or not. And it could be like this for a long time, how can we assume otherwise?”

The landline rang and we both froze, neither one of us moving to answer the call. We let the recorded message come on, and then a grotesque, ominous, echoing voice—clearly the product of a digital voice changer—filled the kitchen: “We’re not done with you yet.”

Marco started to howl.