12

Feeling shaky, I left him alone, went down to the kitchen, called Marco and sat outside on the patio, trying to relax and enjoy the garden. Marco sat by my feet and I closed my eyes, leaned back in the zero gravity recliner I’d come to rely on for stress management. I listened to the breeze stirring the leaves high above us. You couldn’t hear much traffic where we lived, but it was a noisy day in the trees and hedges: chickadees, mourning doves, cardinals, finches, and sparrows. I welcomed the soft cacophony in our half acre of heaven.

But though I was physically comfortable, my mind was tormented by the gross scene of discovering roadkill in our bed, and the dread of further outrages. I kept coming back to the fear that whoever was behind all this had planted subtler little bombs in other rooms. I couldn’t even imagine what they could be, but sensed their menace. I was starting to feel as if I were living in a haunted house. The ordinary had turned threatening, even malevolent.

Marco suddenly bolted for the far side of the yard and I hurried after him. I wasn’t in the mood to clean up after him if he caught a rabbit; he thankfully didn’t chew on them, just broke their necks, but sometimes there was blood. Luckily, when I caught up to him, he was just sniffing idly along the fence; whatever he’d seen or thought he’d seen was gone. Mr. Kurtz was digging on the other side (of course!), and now he stood up and glared at me, looking like the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

“What the hell is going on at your place? The police are there every single day,” he snarled. “I don’t like it. Nobody likes it. People like you don’t belong here. This is a decent neighborhood.”

I was gobsmacked, since he almost never spoke to me or Stefan.

“What the hell are you doing over there, running some kind of meth lab?” he asked, and since the fence was only four feet high, I could have easily reached across and belted him. But I turned, clapped my hands for Marco, who followed me back inside.

“My son-in-law is a cop!” he called. As if that meant anything.

In the kitchen I felt as angry and frustrated as a bullied, fat adolescent, and I wanted to stuff my face and stuff down every last feeling, but I couldn’t figure out what to eat, so I just stood there, helpless. And then the image of the polluted bed upstairs triggered another image: a larger bed in a far more magnificent room. From a movie: The Godfather. There was a studio executive in that film who didn’t want to give an Italian singer a big part, so the singer asked the Godfather for help, and the exec was punished by finding the head of his prize horse in his king-size bed.

Lucky Bitterman, I thought. He was steeped in films; someone like that would be bound to recreate moments from movies, whether he was conscious of it or not. No, roadkill wasn’t a horse’s head, but then Michiganapolis wasn’t Hollywood, either. Stone had filled my mind ever since I’d discovered he was in Michigan, but the first person I’d suspected was Lucky, and now he loomed larger than ever. It was time to do something about him, to find out if he was persecuting us, and to make him stop if he was.

As if someone were tugging at my shoulder, I remembered Officer Pickenpack telling us to call if anything else happened. But calling him at this moment seemed pointless. I pictured myself facing that big blank face of his again, imagined his suspicious questions. Wouldn’t he wonder why we hadn’t found the mess upstairs sooner? And what would he do about this, given how trivial our situation seemed to him? Besides, even if he did return to investigate the room and the mess in our trash cart, anybody smart enough to pick our lock wouldn’t have left clues to their identity.

But there was another reason for my reluctance: I felt ashamed. It was the shame of someone being victimized who feels doubly exposed talking about the violation. None of this was my fault, and yet the escalation was making me feel more and more that I wanted to hide. If one set of neighbors was angry at us, what about everyone else on our street aside from Binnie and Vanessa? Were we going to be pariahs? Berated while out for a walk? Shunned at local stores and movie theaters? Avoided at neighborhood association meetings?

The next morning, Stefan wandered into the kitchen, looking as pale and listless as the knight in Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Not feeling much like eating, I told him I was going to campus to check my mail, and he barely registered what I said. Good. Because he would have reminded me that there wasn’t much mail in the summer months.

At Parker Hall, I stopped on the second floor for my mail, still disoriented by how cheaply done the renovations were here. The permanent faculty a floor above might hate their little cubicles, but at least they didn’t look this flimsy. There also wasn’t any welcome desk on this floor or anyone to ask for what you needed, just brooding silence and a smog of resentment. It was the kind of grim, characterless environment that could drain anyone’s hope and enthusiasm, and I disliked being on this floor any longer than necessary.

Stepping off the elevator one floor above moments later after I’d sorted the handful of mail I’d received, I felt again how cold and impersonal the environment was, down to the new strange “ding” of the elevator. I said hello to Estella, our tattooed and pierced greeter, as I was beginning to think of her. Today she was actually wearing a spikey crimson wig, and she sported glittery red and white fingernails. I flinched when the flashing sign hanging above her welcomed me, hoped I was having a good summer, and told me the temperature outside.

The department chair, Juno Dromgoole, stepped briskly out of her office far off to the right and beckoned me with her raised index and middle fingers. “Nick? A word, please.” I swear I’d seen that gesture on some TV show where it was used by an imperious boss.

I threaded my way around the outside of the mass of cubicles to answer what was clearly a summons, not an invitation. Since being elevated to the position of chair, Juno had changed her style as dramatically as our office space had been changed. She was now frigid and dictatorial. She still wore Manolo Blahnik or Badgley Mischka shoes, but her leopard print skirts were gone, ditto the clouds of expensive, attention-getting perfume. She almost always wore conservatively cut suits, looking like Demi Moore in Margin Call: controlled, powerful, remote. Stefan and I had speculated that just this small taste of authority had made her hungry to rise much higher at SUM.

Weirdly, her office was decorated with blue-gray French Provincial furniture and Watteau prints, as if to take the edge off her iciness. I sat opposite her desk in a pretty but very uncomfortable chair (the latter was probably deliberate). She closed the door and sat down behind her curlicued desk, tented her hands together under her chin, surveying me. I didn’t squirm, because I remembered all the rowdy times we’d had together years before, and I remembered her swimming in the pool at our health club in a sexy gold one-piece that could turn anyone on. It wasn’t the same as the public speaking tip to imagine your audience naked so as to feel less intimidated, but close enough.

I was past intimidation by administrators, anyway. In fact, I was tempted to mimic her pose and fold my hands as she was doing, but decided not to be inflammatory. Studying her in turn, I realized that since the last time I’d seen her in the spring, she’d had one of those plastic surgery makeovers like Madonna and other celebrities, the kind that’s partly done from the inside of the mouth and turns your face heart-shaped, with wider eyes, more prominent cheekbones, and a pointier chin. It was a bit creepy because it looked mass-produced.

“You seem to have a problem with the police,” she said flatly.

“Do I?”

“The police have been to your house. What kind of example is that to set for students, and how does that make our department look?”

“The students aren’t here, or most of them, and I haven’t done anything.”

“But it looks bad,” she insisted, mouth rigid. “I’m telling you this not as your chair, but as your friend.”

Did department chairs have friends? Allies, maybe—at the most.

“Bullerschmidt told you, didn’t he?” I asked. Who else could it have been?

“I won’t be interrogated about my contacts with anyone.”

Well, that was as good as a confession, and I must have rattled her a bit because she went on to say, “Really, Nick, twice in one week is—”

“What do you mean twice?”

She flushed under all that makeup and blush.

“We had a break-in yesterday and you know already? How is that even possible? Wait, don’t tell me, Bullerschmidt again. Unless you have your own spies.”

She folded her arms and glared at me, clearly annoyed at having revealed too much. “I need to know what my faculty are doing at all times. They represent the department, and the university. They represent me.”

It amazed me that the woman I used to know—who’d been so edgy, contentious, foul-mouthed, a real gadfly—had turned into such a dictatorial robot. Could she really believe that line of bullshit? And how could she not even ask if I was okay, if I needed help? I wasn’t a person to her anymore, not even a colleague. I was a PR problem. If she could press a delete key on her laptop and make me disappear, I’m sure she would have done that. I briefly thought of appealing to her better side, but I doubted anything could penetrate that new carapace of inhuman efficiency.

Then something hit me, something disturbing. It hadn’t felt like pure coincidence that I got off the elevator and she called me to her office. She had been waiting for me, I was sure of it.

“When they remodeled last summer, did they install surveillance cameras? Did you know I was already in the building?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss campus security.”

“Take the stick out of your butt and tell me the truth.” It was the kind of thing she might have said in the old days, and I swear she almost smiled. Well, her lips twitched.

“It’s important for all of us to be safe,” she said primly. “Whatever it takes.”

“Does the faculty know? Is this even public?”

“Is what public? I haven’t told you anything.”

She was born to be an administrator; she’d gone into cover-your-ass mode as quickly as a reef polyp retreating into its tiny coral fortress.

“And you should think twice before spreading unfounded rumors,” she added.

“Where are they? The cameras, I mean. The elevators? The lobby downstairs? The mail room? Everywhere?”

She was rigid and unsmiling. “I want to warn you, Nick, that you’re in enough trouble already.”

“Why? I told you: I haven’t done anything.”

“If you get arrested, what happens to the Nick Hoffman Fellowship? How many authors will want to associate themselves with your name then?”

I didn’t know what she meant about being arrested, but it unnerved me. $25,000 was a great honorarium, but if it came with bad publicity, people might think twice about applying.

“You can’t bully me, Juno,” I said.

She leaned her head back and looked down her nose at me. “Nobody dreamed we could ever get rid of Alberta, and she’s gone now, isn’t she?”

Alberta Starr had been one of EAR’s least popular professors, both with students and colleagues. Cold, arrogant, insufferable, she had taught at SUM for three decades, but hadn’t published in her field for the last twenty years. Starr held a Guggenheim Fellowship early in her career and acted as if that made her royalty; but once she’d been granted tenure, she just coasted. Starr didn’t have an ounce of collegiality, and showed no desire to mentor or even instruct students. She avoided department meetings, and when she did come, she insulted people directly or obliquely, and always left before the meetings were over. Even worse, she badmouthed other faculty to students, making them feel they were privileged to hear the gossip, but the effect was to poison their experiences in those professors’ classrooms. Starr’s departure had been a jubilee for EAR; even in our notoriously snarky department, the woman was exceptional for malice and narcissism.

I stared at her. “Starr was ill, wasn’t she? That’s why she retired in the middle of last fall and you had to get people to cover her classes.”

“Oh, yes, she was unwell. True enough,” Juno said smugly. “But I got rid of her myself.” Juno didn’t explain how she had made Starr an offer she couldn’t refuse, and I didn’t challenge her.

“There’s something else,” Juno said, and if anything, she looked harder and colder. “I understand that Stefan is still defying the administration about that suicide book.”

“Why are you talking to me about it? Talk to him.”

“Because I think you might be a bit more reasonable.”

I presumed that meant weak, and I felt insulted.

“Nick, a book like that could cause more damage than you realize. What if it sparked copycat suicides at the university?”

I hesitated, because the question had occurred to me, too, but I hadn’t brought it up with Stefan because I had never tried to talk him out of writing any book.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked, trying to sound defiant, but I suspect I came across as abject and apologetic.

Juno relaxed, looking almost reasonable. “Tell him that giving up the book would be a tremendous service to SUM. And publishing it would be something he’d seriously regret. Something you would both regret.”

“What do you mean?”

Juno buzzed her secretary. “We’re done here, Nick.”

I wasn’t feeling cocky anymore, and I left with a whole new miasma of paranoia settling over me like volcanic ash. First the dean had threatened Stefan and me, and now my chair was also acting the heavy.

But that wasn’t the only reason I felt dirty and burdened. The remodeling from last summer wasn’t just egregiously impersonal—it was also intrusive if there was secret surveillance going on. But who was monitoring all of this, and why?

I felt dizzy with all this anxious speculation. Juno had threatened the viability of the Nick Hoffman Fellowship—was somebody trying to wrest it away from me? That was impossible, surely? The conditions were ironclad: if I wasn’t involved, the money disappeared from SUM. My mind reeled. What if everything that had been happening to Stefan and me was somehow connected to a larger development at the university? The whole country was security-crazed—had the sickness infected SUM, too?

I crossed the length of the floor to my office on the other side of the building, wondering how many people—if any—were hunched in their cubicles, trying to maintain some shred of privacy and concentration. Talk about surveillance—you could be watched and studied by anyone in there, and you wouldn’t even know it.

“Honey, you don’t look so good,” Celine said as I walked through her office to mine.

She, of course, looked great as always in sandals, flowing purple cotton skirt and matching sleeveless top.

“Sit down and close the doors,” I said. “All of them.”

Celine gave me an odd look, but did what I asked her to, and then joined me. I told her the entire story of the last few days, all of it, and her face mirrored almost everything I’d been feeling. It was scary to see how affected she was, because it deepened the terror I’d been experiencing, but it also felt cathartic. I wasn’t quite as alone anymore. When I was done, Celine shook her head and said, “Un-be-liev-able. I am so sorry this is happening to you.”

“Do you think I’m wrong not to report my suspicions to the police?”

“I wouldn’t want the Gestapo in my house, either.” She added a quick “Sorry!”—but I wasn’t offended. She wasn’t a politician invoking the Nazis to score political points.

And then she glanced around the office, as if wondering if it was bugged. The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but if there were surveillance cameras in the building, why not listening devices as well? The university was a public institution, but it was increasingly being run like a dictatorship. There was no real oversight of the president and the provost; the faculty senate was powerless; and money and prestige were the driving forces on campus. Or at least they had been; now “security” had been added to the mix.

“Do you have friends in other departments?” I asked. “Have you heard them talking about surveillance?”

Celine hesitated. “Well, I did just hear a rumor. There’s some kind of high-level committee that’s been formed, a secret committee, and they’re going to monitor the campus for threats 24/7.”

“Terrorist threats?”

She shook her head. “No, like Virginia Tech and other schools, where somebody goes nuts with a gun. They’ll be expecting everyone on campus to report threatening behavior, and the reports can be anonymous. And they’ll be able to investigate anyone, even staff and professors, read their emails, tap their phones, whatever it takes, and then maybe even arrest them or have them committed before they’ve done anything.”

“That’s insane.”

“That’s SUM, Nick. And their name is hinky, too: JSOC, Joint Security On Campus. Sounds almost like the military, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged. The name struck me as typical: a benign-sounding title for something nefarious. And if what Celine had told me was true, that probably meant the reality was much worse. No wonder Juno had mentioned arrest.

“Can you find out more?” I asked. “Like who’s on this committee?”

Celine nodded. “Sure. But let me get something straight. Juno threatened you about the fellowship? There’s nothing she can do about that. It’s set up as a trust.”

“But if the university wanted to break the trust and go to court, I couldn’t stop them, could I?”

Celine shrugged. “Let me ask my friend in the Law School what she can find out.”

“Thanks! Now, tell me if you think I’m nuts to suspect Lucky Bitterman of masterminding what’s been going on.”

“Oh no, he could do it. He’s a lowlife and he hates you. Well, he hates everyone. But he hates you especially. You and Stefan. In my opinion, it’s because he’s a closet case.”

“A reaction formation,” I suggested.

“Yes, something like that. And the guy’s a volcano, sooner or later he has to explode. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.”

“Can you get me his address?”

Celine frowned. “You’re not going over there to rough him up, are you?”

“Of course not! This is for information only. I want to see what kind of car he’s driving.”

She popped into her office for the department address book, returned to read off Lucky’s, and I thanked her for listening.

“Be careful,” she warned.

Downstairs in the parking lot, I noticed a white panel truck with darkened windows, like the kind you see in thrillers. It was off by itself, and had no logo on the side. It was not remotely the kind of vehicle faculty members drove. Was a security team huddled there, listening in on everyone inside Parker Hall?