7

We spent the rest of Thursday watching the Bourne Trilogy again, ordered Domino’s Brooklyn-style pizza for dinner, and killed two bottles of Chianti. We’d enjoyed the films before, but this time I think both of us connected viscerally to Jason Bourne floating in the sea, getting picked up by that Italian trawler, not knowing who he is or why he remembers the few things he does. That was us after the nighttime raid: confused, isolated, lost.

Stefan watched the three movies in virtual silence, transfixed, but he didn’t seem to experience any catharsis by the end of the evening, because the next morning, Friday, he didn’t want to get out of bed or even talk about investigating Lucky or anyone.

“Leave me alone.” He actually pulled a pillow over his head as if that would make me and the world disappear. I wasn’t going to argue with somebody who’d been humiliated so profoundly by the cops, so I walked Marco and then had breakfast by myself. I left Stefan a pot of fresh mocha java coffee and hoped the aroma would finally tempt him downstairs. Marco might manage it, too, because sometimes he’d jump onto the bed and nuzzle your face till you had to admit he was there and that he needed your attention. He was a Westie, and the one time I’d watched the Westminster Dog Show, the announcer said of the breed, “Westies will not be ignored.”

I didn’t like the idea of Stefan glooming in bed, but I had to get to SUM. I could have walked the ten minutes to campus from our house, but I drove because I felt I needed the safety of metal around me. On the way over, I was startled to realize that we hadn’t received any media calls yet. Was it possible the police raid had slipped under the radar? But what about all our neighbors? Wouldn’t somebody have notified the Michiganapolis Tribune or one of the trashy AM stations? Nowadays everybody wanted to be a mini-celebrity and break a story of some kind, or be interviewed about it.

Campus actually wasn’t quite as lush as usual this spring, because of our drought, but even so, it looked appealing, though it wasn’t remotely as old as Yale or other eastern schools. It’s a vast sprawling place with architecture ranging from sandstone buildings of the 1850s through glass boxes only a few years old, anchored by a core of ugly 1950s buildings of brick construction that was for the most part well landscaped enough to seem inoffensive. I was headed to my office in Parker Hall to consult with my administrative assistant, Celine Robichaux, about fellowship applications. We already had picked someone for this coming year, but we were scheduling people three years out, and there were hundreds of applications.

I say “we” because Celine was my sounding board as much as Stefan when it came to picking the visiting author. As a Wharton scholar, I was drawn to social satirists, and they both helped me widen my range. Her opinion helped a lot because she was astute and widely read but didn’t feel any investment in the world of authors and academics, and she was quick to spot phonies, snobs, and potential trouble makers. There was one author of literary novels whose books I enjoyed, but Celine had studied the man’s tweets and Facebook posts and this author had bad things to say about almost everyone, especially his students. “We don’t need that kind of PR, Nick.” Likewise, Celine had suggested we pass on an author of literary thrillers who it turned out would only travel from New York with an entourage including his acupuncturist, his nutritionist, and a tennis pro for whenever he felt the need of a game. And she had also nixed an up-and-coming young author of trashy, amusing “bloodbusters” (vampire-killer novels), because the author, Tiffani Lovegrove, evidently took her last name too literally and had some raunchy photos on Tumblr. They would surely have gotten into the local news and caused a PR tornado if she came to our campus.

I was lucky to have Celine, who was originally from Louisiana, though I didn’t detect much of an accent. She was efficient, imaginative, and cheerful in a department of depressives and malcontents, and kind in a university whose values had become increasingly corporate over the years. She helped balance the downsides of teaching at SUM.

Celine was the type of person who seems to be bustling even when she’s standing still. I could almost feel the dynamism flowing when our connecting door was open, and definitely experienced that energy whenever she was in my office, radiating from her shoulder-length braids, her glorious smile, and her hugs. Yes, she hugged me—when she was happy or we’d done good work together. I suspected there was muttering about her out there in the sea of cubicles, but they would have to keep it quiet because she was African American and nobody would want to invoke charges of racism.

I parked behind the dilapidated building that until recently had been filled with myriad cracks in the walls and tribes of bats in the halls. Rumors had circulated for years that it would be torn down for a parking structure since parking was always difficult on campus, so the interior restoration was a huge surprise to almost everyone. EAR, like other departments in the College of Arts and Letters, was not a wealthy program that brought in research dollars or alumni donations, so it had been a Cinderella without a prince. Suddenly it hit me: Could the remodeling have been designed to make people forget about the suicide? Would SUM spend that much money to cover up one person’s death and the bad PR?

I hadn’t been to my office in weeks, and when the elevator doors opened on the cavernous third floor I saw something new hanging over the long front counter. The department had installed a long electronic message board that read “Welcome to EAR. We’re here to help you!” That flickered off, then came the date, the temperature outside, and the welcome message again. Insane.

The receptionist was new, and she chirped out, “Hi, how can I be of service?” She was as perky as an old-fashioned weather girl, though she didn’t look like one. Her head was shaved, she had a multicolored complicated “sleeve” tattoo on her right arm, and a pierced lower lip. Her clothes were a page out of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” years ago: lace, chains, gloves.

“I teach here. I’m Nick Hoffman.”

She glanced down, obviously consulting a list on her tablet. Was this some kind of new security check?

Then she grinned up at me. “Yes you do! I’m Estella!” She shot out an arm to shake my hand as if congratulating me—but if that was for being an EAR faculty member or for meeting her, I didn’t know. I did know that Estella was partly there because the renovations had unaccountably not included a wall directory listing where every staffer and faculty member could be found, and it wasn’t clear whether we’d end up with one or not. But she was also planted there to make our department seem friendlier. I guess it could have been worse. We could all have been asked to wear t-shirts with smiley faces on them.

I skirted the nearest set of cubicles and headed left to my office at the south end of the floor, keeping my eyes down. Almost everyone who used the cubicles now tended to glare at me, envying my privilege, and I hated that. Though not enough to give up my office or even share it with anyone, of course. But I did feel sorry for all the faculty who had lost old fashioned offices and now had to contend with nothing more than carpeted partitions between them and colleagues they either despised, envied, or both. The fact that the designers had worked in a soothing combination of blue, beige, and gray could not assuage the damage of three dozen faculty members essentially having been evicted, and losing the privilege of privacy and space. I would have hated working in a cubicle under glaring fluorescent lights, hated feeling that everything I did and said was being observed. Even the retrofitting for central air wouldn’t have made enough of a difference. Clearly a recipe for menace simmered beneath the surface, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if somebody freaked out and had to be carted off for observation.

Celine was in black slacks and a purple cotton Indian-style shirt, and she seemed to have been waiting for me. She rushed forward, grabbed my arm and hustled me into her office which was hung with posters of classic Hitchcock movies like Vertigo and Notorious. Her hazel eyes were wide with concern and I closed the door behind me, waiting for her to tell me that the assault on my house was in the news and ask if I was okay. I felt my throat tighten.

“Sit down,” she said. “Just now, I got a scary phone call from a blocked number. The voice was male, and very strange. He said, ‘Nick Hoffman is a dead man.’”

“Strange how?”

Celine frowned, clearly puzzled that I asked about the voice without reacting to the threat itself. She crossed her arms and hugged herself, trying to remember. “Like the guy in Scream, you know, not natural, but … well, crazy.”

“Did it sound altered, I mean digitally?”

“No, not at all. It was somebody real, and somebody freaky. It did not sound like a joke. This guy was as serious as a heart attack. And hard. You know, like some kind of criminal. Are you in trouble with the Mafia?”

I waved that away. “What did you do?”

“I called campus police, of course, but they said there wasn’t anything they could do if the call was blocked. They may send somebody over, but they didn’t sound too interested. But I’m interested. Nick, is something going on?” Before I could answer, she said, “I’ve been compiling a list of authors who got nasty when we rejected them. I figured one of them might have been the caller.”

I tried not to look relieved. I liked Celine too much to have to lie to her outright, and the idea of another threatening phone call so soon after the first one had unnerved me so much I didn’t think I could keep it together if we got anywhere near the truth. I could already feel sweat dripping down between my shoulder blades, making my polo shirt stick to my back. Bullerschmidt had warned us yesterday, and look what had happened already.

“The list is on your desk,” she said, and I stood and went through to my office, Celine following. It was an unremarkable space except for that high ceiling, large windows, and the view of lush lawns, sugar maples, and blue sky. For much of the year, you could barely see any buildings because the foliage was so dense, and so I’d had the room painted a soft green when I moved in, and hung posters and framed prints of landscapes by Seurat to capture the soothing feeling of all that verdure.

The disgruntled author list was anything but reflective of calm. I sat down and stared. “This many?” There were two pages of names, along with salient excerpts from their emails or text messages.

Celine demurred. “It’s the same people twice, but the second page is organized by threat level.” She wasn’t kidding. “From low to high.”

The Nick Hoffman Fellowship was a hot ticket. The stipend was generous, and the month on campus offered a kind of writer’s retreat because the university had let us use the guest wing of the president’s Georgian-style house. The work load wasn’t tough, but the response from some people we’d rejected was. A few of them had told me off, while others had sworn they’d get back at me somehow. Some of the authors in each group shot abuse at me, typically authors who had academic appointments. I’d been called “blind,” “provincial,” “arrogant,” and a host of nastier adjectives by writers who had very high opinions of themselves and obviously thought we had no right to reject their applications. The level of their invective was pretty jejune; I would have expected better insults from writers.

They didn’t know it, but in almost every case, the angry response was from someone I had already figured out would not be good to work with, for students or faculty. I didn’t just read authors’ work. Celine found me interviews, blogs, tweets, anything pertinent they had on Tumblr and Facebook, and public readings from YouTube. It usually wasn’t hard to spot the bores, the potential troublemakers, the narcissists, even the drunks. When there was some doubt, we’d also look at their student ratings online if they were teaching.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t see Ivan the Terrible on here.”

Celine finally smiled.

Ivan Popov was a boozy Bulgarian playwright at one of the smaller state campuses in Michigan who ran a summer creative writing workshop in his native Sofia. He was an irascible, self-important clown, a type that was too typical in academe. Despite the miserable pay at his Bulgarian workshop, and the lousy housing and food, academic writers were dying to get invited since they believed that any European teaching post upped their status. Popov preyed on their vanity, and was notorious for demeaning them when they got there, as well as working them too hard. When it came to our fellowship, he had probably figured being a Michigan author gave him an advantage, so being rejected had enraged him. Popov had actually emailed me, “You’ll never see Sofia!” Meaning, I’d never be invited to teach there in his program. As threats go, it was actually funny, since Bulgaria’s capital city hadn’t ever been on my travel wish list, but he seemed to think it was a death sentence. When I ran into him at a conference afterwards, he’d smirked at me and shook his head as ominously as if he’d managed to alert Bulgarian customs agents to arrest me if I ever dared to fly there on my own.

Celine sat opposite me, her smile fading. “Have you gotten any calls like this at home?” she asked, eyes tight.

I changed the subject: “What am I supposed to do with this list? They’re all cranks in one way or another. But you were the one who got the phone call. Did you get any sense that one of these people was the caller?”

“I’m not psychic,” she said wryly. Celine shook her head and turned her amethyst and diamond engagement ring around and around with three fingers of her right hand. That’s what she always did when she was frustrated or annoyed. The list was a kind of blind alley. Phone calls at the office were uncommon. Most communication about faculty matters came via email. Students emailed, too. Which made me think it wasn’t an author.

“What are you thinking?” Celine asked, studying my face.

“Why did you mention Scream?”

She shrugged. “I guess it’s the first thing that popped into my mind. You know, sick phone calls, stalking.”

“You think this is a stalker?” Even if I omitted the SWAT team, I couldn’t tell her about the incident at the stop sign and the phone call at our house. Or that I suspected Lucky Bitterman—even though she knew about his antagonism toward me and Stefan—because he couldn’t have applied for the fellowship. It wouldn’t make sense, and she might start asking questions of her own. I had no idea who in town might know about the other night’s raid, despite it apparently not having gotten into the news.

And I realized I hadn’t thought to note the time of the phone call at home yesterday, so asking her when she’d taken the phone call here in her office wouldn’t make a difference. Or would it?

“Isn’t this how things would start?” Celine mused. “First a phone call, then some kind of attack, then—”

We both looked up at the same time at the sound of a resonant knock on my thick office door, which opened before either of us said “Come in.” It was my old nemesis, Detective Valley, a campus police officer who disliked all faculty members, especially ones like me who got involved in crime and got in his way.

“Professor,” he said coldly.

“Detective.”

Celine glanced back and forth between us and then rose to leave, but Valley stopped her with a sharp, “No. You I talk to first.” He escorted her into her office and closed the door. With the door shut, I could let go, and I closed my eyes, wondering if I was about to get the shakes. The call was shocking enough, but being face-to-face with Valley brought back ugly memories of past confrontations. I had not run into him in six years, and he looked very different. He’d been a tall, lanky, geeky man in suits that looked like they were bought at a consignment shop and had been badly altered, if at all. He was still tall, but he’d gained enough weight or maybe even muscle to look almost threatening—that is, beyond the general intimidation effect that all cops had always seemed to have on me.

Growing up in New York and knowing that the police tended to miss their shots two out of three times had been the kind of fact that made me wary of them, uniformed or not. But it predated knowing those statistics: for some reason, I’d always disliked cops from a very young age, the way some kids are scared of clowns. When I was little, and my mother told me that if I ever got lost and couldn’t find her or my father, I should go straight to a policeman, I had burst into tears. It must have been a kind of premonition of the trouble that was waiting for me at SUM. And now, after the night we’d been handcuffed and Stefan dragged off, I never wanted to be in the same room again with any kind of cop.

Celine’s door opened and Valley closed it brusquely, so that it slammed, and he came to sit down. Crossing his legs and leaning back as if in a captain’s chair, he looked like he meant to stay a long time, whether I wanted him there or not.

“You’re a big shot now,” he said coldly, eyeing the crammed oak bookcases, the leather desk accessories, and the view as if they all disgusted him. I could have been a French aristocrat facing Robespierre.

I didn’t take the bait.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “Why are you attracting crank callers and a SWAT team?” Elbows on the chair arms, he tented his fingers, enjoyed my shock.