17

I should have taken some time to just sit in my car in the gun range’s parking lot and try to absorb what had happened that afternoon, but I didn’t. I drove away elated. It’s not as if I was going into a gun battle or even owned a gun yet, but discovering that I had this unexpected talent made me feel less afraid, much less vulnerable. It was all as mysterious as the line I remembered from Don DeLillo’s novel Players where someone sees a fog rolling in like “a change in the state of information.” Mysterious and wonderful.

But even as I felt myself awash in self-congratulation, I knew a skill like the one I’d just discovered wasn’t very valuable in my profession. When you cut someone down in academia, you use sneering footnotes, not bullets.

Driving along, I got distracted by an oldie playing on the radio, some synthesizer-driven song by Gary Numan whose title I didn’t remember. I turned up the volume anyway as I sped off from the gun range, feeling years younger. It crossed my mind that maybe I should take a self-defense course, too.

Given the distraction and my high, I found myself driving pretty much by automatic pilot to Parker Hall, since I had started at the southern edge of campus to begin with, and I often cut through campus by Parker to get home. Once I was completely tuned in and realized exactly where I was, I decided to stop and look for that mysterious white panel truck I’d seen parked there before, and then check in with my assistant Celine. The truck was there all right, lurking off by itself, and after I parked where I normally did near the back entrance to Parker, I strode over to get the van’s license plate. The truck was a Dodge Ram, shiny and new-looking, and I couldn’t see anyone in the front seat. But as soon as I circled around the back to check out the license plate, the engine started up and someone drove that thing away from me as if I had a bomb. The van raced off onto campus, squealing around corners.

The driver had either seen me and put their head down when I walked over, or had been in the back and leapt into the driver’s seat before escaping. It didn’t matter, though, because I got the plate number: SUM 372. The truck belonged to the university. I got out my phone and texted the info to Vanessa Liberati. Whatever was going on, the university was deeply involved.

Upstairs, the message of the day flashing across the electric sign above the EAR reception desk was “Stay Cool!” Bizarrely, Estella was wearing a hippie-style granny dress and shawl; she was starting to seem like an actress who had been hired to wear outré outfits. She smiled absently at me and went back to texting on her sparkly pink phone.

I turned left and headed around the warren of cubicles, and noticed some heads of faculty, but observed once again that people did not look up to see who was coming off the elevator. It was as if they were ashamed of their new, exposed status in the maze of cubicles and just wanted to be ignored. Fine by me.

Then I saw that my office door was open. Celine stood just inside looking agitated. When she spotted me, she rushed forward, grabbed my hands as if to pull me from a fire, dragged me in and shut the door behind us.

“Nick, I was going to call you! We’re in trouble!” Her voice was low but frantic and she paced in front of my desk. “I took a later lunch today and when I got back I made myself some tea—” She pointed to the open door connecting our offices and I saw the big purple mug next to her computer.

“I had the creepy feeling somebody had been here. And, well, I knew somebody had been here because I could smell the same cologne my husband wears, and it sure wasn’t him.”

I breathed in deeply and thought I could detect something different in the air. But with my typical Michigan congestion, I wasn’t sure what it was, exactly.

“Paul Sebastian,” she said parenthetically. “The kids give it to my husband every Christmas.”

“You locked the door when you left for lunch?”

“Of course. I always lock it. So I just took a look around in my office and yours, and I don’t know, I got more and more paranoid with everything that’s been happening to you and to Stefan. When I didn’t find anything missing, it seemed worse. Then I thought, what if nothing was stolen, but something was left here, you know like—” She grimaced, and I didn’t need her to mention the roadkill in my bed.

“Well, I started opening drawers, the file cabinets, and I still felt something was wrong, and you know I watch a lot of cop shows, and I just had a hunch that you were being set up, that something bad was planted here. And then I found this!” She drew a squarish glassine envelope from the pocket of her purple jeans. Inside was a white powder, what looked like several tablespoons of it.

She set it on my desk and it lay there like some horrible portent in a Greek myth.

“It’s not anthrax,” I said, surprised at my own calm. “People send that through the mail. In business envelopes.” Was I trying to convince myself ?

She nodded. “It’s probably coke—”

“—or heroin,” I said, starting to feel dizzy, plunged once again into unreality. I couldn’t believe I was saying these words at all, and in my office, which was about as tame and ordinary a room as possible. It had a desk and chairs and table and book shelves and pictures on the wall just like millions of offices around the country.

“Where did you find it?” I asked, the words coming out with difficulty as I felt my throat constricting.

She blinked her eyes quickly as if trying to shake the image of what she’d seen. “It was taped to the back of your diploma.”

We both turned to where my doctoral degree from Columbia hung behind my desk, next to photos of me and Stefan and Marco. It looked blameless enough.

“Someone wants to get you arrested,” Celine said. “And fired.”

That’s when we heard the sirens.

I stepped quickly to the window and saw three campus police cars pull up downstairs in front of the building, roof lights flashing, and the few people nearby stopped as if watching a train wreck. The flashing red and blue was an obscenity on that pretty day in the heart of our bucolic campus.

I backed away from the view, feeling as seared as a vampire exposed to sunlight.

I whirled around. Celine was always so calm and steady, and now her eyes were wide and I could swear her shoulders were trembling. Seeing how terrified Celine was made me feel even more afraid. It was happening again. Me. Police. A raid.

Even inside, with the windows closed and the air conditioning humming, I could hear the car doors slam. Parker Hall with its high ceilings and huge wide hallways was a perfect echo chamber, and within seconds, the sounds of boots pounding inside and up the worn-out stairs was like crazy drums. Why weren’t they taking the elevator?

I felt bile in my throat. What had Father Ryan told Stefan? “They’re not coming back”? Well, they hadn’t come back to the house, but they were here at what was my home away from home, and I felt as if I had been crossing a tightrope and slipped, was hanging on with one hand, and any moment I would drop to the merciless floor below where someone had snatched away the net.

Celine shook her head now as fiercely as if she’d been slapped by someone, looked down at the small envelope, grabbed it and rushed into her adjoining office. She opened the envelope and dumped its white powder into her giant tea mug, grabbed a spoon from one of her drawers and stirred it decisively. She left the spoon on a ceramic SUM spoon rest nearby, turned quickly to her shredder, clicked it on and put in the envelope, which splatted through in an instant. She grabbed some other papers and shredded those, too, I guess as camouflage?

“Stay calm,” she muttered as we heard what sounded like a herd of policemen heading our way. Before anyone could knock, Celine opened the door with a questioning look on her face, and Detective Valley led half a dozen burly campus cops in. I noted with relief that they weren’t dressed for combat, but that flash of relief didn’t last as they spread through Celine’s office and mine, pawing through books and papers, wrenching drawers open, shoving aside plants and bookends and framed photographs. I could smell the leather of their belts and boots and it sickened me. I felt trapped in one of those recurring nightmares, the kind that wake you up because they’re so awful, but have some dark power that drags you back down to sleep again and again.

I forced myself not to look at Celine’s tea mug.

“Where’s your warrant? You can’t do this.” I stepped forward when what I really wanted to do was shrink back against the wall closest to my desk.

“We don’t need one,” Valley said flatly, triumphantly. “You’re on university property and campus police can search anywhere we want to for drugs.”

I assumed he was correct, and I felt miserably trapped, even without being thrown to the ground and handcuffed. I had no rights here, at least no right to privacy. How was that possible? Had it always been the case? Or had the university’s board of trustees quietly changed the ordinances that were supposed to protect the university and everyone attending it? Then I thought about JSOC. I bet he was on it.

“Drugs?” I made myself ask, realizing I’d waited too long to say it. “Are you for real?” I hoped I sounded appropriately outraged and disbelieving, but I doubted it.

I glanced at Celine, who was standing there with her arms crossed. Her eyes were down and she was either ashamed or as freaked out as I was, and found watching the uproar in our offices unbearable. The energy in those two rooms was more than negative, it was poisonous verging on destructive, barely restrained. The cops didn’t just want to find what had obviously been planted, they would have enjoyed hurting us, or me, anyway. I felt their coiled anger, their dormant violence, and it was beyond intimidating each time they passed one of us. They might have had their own force fields that had the power to consume us, and the offices seemed to get smaller and smaller each minute.

Time seemed to crawl and the cops were as unreal and inimical to me as the Black Riders in The Lord of the Rings. I remembered what Vanessa had said about how lucky we’d been not to have our house trashed, but if the cops stayed here much longer, they would start breaking things in their frustration, I was sure of that. Because unless they’d planted more than one envelope, they weren’t going to find anything, even with all their pawing the underside of desk drawers and peering behind file cabinets which they yanked away from the walls.

Like Celine, I couldn’t even look at them. Except for Valley, standing there turning around slowly like a lighthouse beacon, they were a blur of blue uniforms. I fought the desire to shout or to retreat entirely into myself and pretend this wasn’t happening. I made myself remember the physical sensations of being at the gun range just a little while ago, filling my mind with the sound and feel of firing the Ruger again and again. The deeper I went into that mental scene, the stronger I felt. I was a good shot. I wasn’t powerless. I wasn’t a victim.

So I challenged Valley: “Who told you there were drugs here?”

He snorted derisively. “We don’t reveal who our informants are.”

“Maybe you don’t have one. Maybe you just enjoy harassing people. How do I know you’re not full of shit?”

His eyes narrowed and he stepped closer as if he wanted to punch me, and that’s when I could smell his cologne. Celine was just a few feet away. I glanced at her and she looked up, shrugged quickly and shook her head. I don’t know if Valley saw this byplay, but he barked out an order: “Check all the pictures.”

The team of cops pulled every print and photo off the walls, and I’m sure I heard some glass crack as they turned every single one of them around. All of the cops called out “Clear” one-by-one as if they were paratroopers storming some suspected terrorist den. Vanessa wasn’t kidding. They were just police, campus police at that, but they thought they were soldiers on the front line.

Valley was grim, stomping around now and glaring at the papered backs of the frames that the cops were leaving stacked haphazardly on the floor, against the windows, anywhere.

“Out!” Valley shouted when it was clear they weren’t going to find what he obviously expected they would.

Juno Dromgoole appeared at the door, looking severe and matronly in a gray and black houndstooth suit and black pumps. Valley shoved past her and I could have sworn he hissed, “Nothing!”

She stepped into my office as if it were toxic somehow and glanced around with loathing. “Look what you’ve done,” she said with withering contempt.

“Bullshit. The campus police did this.”

“You need to seriously think about a leave of absence—”

“No. You need to think about defending faculty from storm troopers.” I didn’t like playing the Nazi card, since America was awash in that kind of hyperbole, but right then I would have given her a derisive “Zieg Heil !” myself if she hadn’t turned and left.

But I wasn’t finished. I said, “What will you do when they start throwing black hoods over our heads and dragging us off for interrogation in some basement somewhere? Wave goodbye?”

I slammed the door after her, hoping that it made her jump. I had no idea exactly who else was out there on the department floor aside from funky Estella, and I didn’t care.

Celine was chuckling. “I’ve never heard you yell at anybody,” she said.

“Juno deserves it. She’s become a fascist.”

Celine shrugged. “They all do, when they’re administrators. It’s like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They look the same, but they’ve been hollowed out and replaced.”

I walked over to give her a quick hug. “You were brilliant. I couldn’t have thought that fast.”

She thanked me.

“Now we have to clean up,” I said.

“Yeah. And fumigate.”

We shut the doors and got to work. I didn’t say it, but if my office did have hidden camera surveillance, somebody would have seen Celine dump the powder and shred the envelope. So we were safe, but only up to a point.

“When you put stuff back, check everything for bugs,” I said.

“Already on it,” Celine replied.

They’d emptied the desks and rifled the books and it took an hour to put our offices back together. Though I was quietly furious at what the campus police had done, I realized it could have been much worse. The glass on one Seurat print had cracked, but having it replaced wouldn’t be a big deal. They wanted us to feel scared and violated, and they’d only partially succeeded in their mission. Yes, I did feel like a survivor of an explosion who was disoriented and couldn’t hear quite right, but I was still standing, still functioning, and angry as hell, not crushed. We’d thwarted Valley—and apparently Juno—in getting rid of the drugs, if that’s what that powder had been. But what if it was something harmless, meant as a warning of some kind?

“They won’t try it again,” Celine said, falling into her office chair, and sighing. But then she jumped up, grabbed her mug and some Palmolive dish soap from a desk drawer. “Bathroom,” she said. “I have to wash this out.”

While she was gone, I opened up the shredder to see if I could find the traces of that envelope. I couldn’t detect anything in that chaos of paper strips, but was it safe to leave the stuff there. What if Valley and his minions came back and did an even more thorough search? I stepped out to the reception desk to ask Estella if she’d seen anyone heading to my office.

“A bunch of cops?” she said tentatively. “Oh, and Dr. Dromgoole.”

“No, before that.”

She winced as helplessly as if I’d asked her to define a subatomic particle. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I was, like, texting my boyfriend.” She grinned dopily.

“Okay, thanks.”

I headed back to my office, wondering if the law considered a man’s office as his castle, or was it just his home. And did that even matter since we were on a college campus.

I asked Celine what she thought about the shredder when she came back with her washed-out mug and the dish soap. She wordlessly set them down on her desk, found a brown paper shopping bag in another drawer, emptied the shredder refuse into it, folded it up tightly and put it in her large shoulder bag. She took a can of Lysol from a bottom desk drawer, thoroughly sprayed the inside of the shredder container and dried it with paper towels.

“I know they’re not going to risk stopping a black woman and searching her without a warrant,” she said. “Because I will work their last nerve if they mess me around. I will sue their asses for discrimination and the stink will go national.”

She was dead right. As oppressive and intrusive as the university had become, it feared bad publicity that could go viral, feared the blizzard of tweets and YouTube videos that would flood the Internet if it made that kind of misstep.

“Was it the same cologne?” I remembered to ask. “Was Valley wearing what you thought you smelled after you got back from lunch?”

“I don’t know, Nick. I’m not sure. I was too agitated.”

I sat down at my desk, the Herman Miller chair suddenly feeling as comfortable as a soak in a hot tub. Could Valley really have been behind everything that’d hit me and Stefan this past week? Why? He didn’t like me, but that was nothing new. He didn’t like most faculty, openly considered them nothing more than over-educated miscreants, carriers of the disease of chaos. But why go after me and Stefan now? We had not run into each other in years and there was nothing we’d done back then that would have precipitated such a campaign of harassment and revenge. Or was Valley doing someone else’s dirty work? The dean? Juno? Both of them? It wasn’t paranoid to ask these questions because someone really was out to get us, and was hitting harder every time. If drugs had been found in my office, I could have ended up not just fired, but arrested, imprisoned, and likely unable to work anywhere again as a professor. Who’d hire me after being fired from SUM in disgrace, and with a felony conviction on my record?

My face must have betrayed some of this, because Celine grabbed my arm fiercely and said, “Nick, we’re going to get the bastard who did this to you. I don’t know how, but we will.”