BEYOND THE STREAKED WINDOWS OF the overheated classroom Harvard Yard was soggy and dirty with late winter snow and a slanting cold rain that made things even worse. It was Professor Colin Chandler’s favorite time of the year: he was an indoors person and this kind of weather offered no lures at all, nothing to pull him away from his fire and his books and the clutter of his own mind. He found also that his students seemed to have less on their own minds than at other, more exuberant seasons.
While he folded his late edition of The Boston Globe and placed it carefully next to his gloves and scarf on the plain wooden desk, they shuffled in blowing their noses and stacking rundown backpacks against the walls and stomping wet sludge from their boots. He looked down at them from his six feet four inches; at forty-five he was beginning to feel less a physical presence than his students and the arrival of middle age had taken him rather by surprise. They had more ahead of them than he did and he wasn’t overjoyed by the thought.
Waiting for them to get settled he caught sight of himself, reflected in one of the windows, and watched for a moment. In outline he didn’t look any different than he had twenty years ago: tall, broad, slightly stooped shoulders, brown Harris tweed jacket that went back to Adlai Stevenson, foulard tie, striped button-down blue shirt, heavy brown horn-rims, dark vaguely wavy hair, a hawk’s nose separating dark brown eyes, heavy eyebrows, blah blah blah—he lost interest. There he stood, Tradition in its forties, a stalwart old gunslinger in the path of change. Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter with Skip Homeier lurking, Frisbee behind his back … He smiled, squinting a little, took off his glasses. He knew he was a comparatively handsome man and the knowledge made lecturing more fun, made him feel freer. It was all an illusion but you had to go with what you had.
“Good afternoon,” he said, nodding. There seemed to be about twenty-five on hand, almost all of the registrees for his favorite upper-class course, history majors only (others by permission of the instructor). “You will note by the hissing radiators and the fact that this place will soon begin smelling like a locker room, you will note that at Harvard there is no energy shortage … other, perhaps, than among its servants. For now, I will provide the energy and you can just lie there, soaking it up. Your turn, I need hardly add, will come.”
“Did you have that memorized?” Sheila, one of the nine Radcliffe students, was a frank and candid member of the Frisbee and backpack and Earth Shoe generation. “I mean, it sounded like you were leaving little spaces for the laugh track.” She seemed troubled.
“No, my dear, I made it up myself as I went along. In real life we often find ourselves doing that, thinking and talking, thinking and talking. You might say that most of us write our own material.”
“Well, it sure wasn’t funny. Maybe you should hire a writer …”
He enjoyed this bunch; he let the conversation banter along. As he listened he noticed a woman sitting at the back of the room, clearly not a student, though her face was strangely familiar. Huge eyes, a thin French mouth, high cheekbones, short hair, a dampened raincoat. She sat attentively, by the door, hands folded on the desk. She’d taken a tissue from a Vuitton bag, dabbed her nose. He smiled at her when their eyes met, then straightened up and went to stand behind the lectern. He undid the buckle on his Rolex and placed it on the lectern and began to talk about illusion and reality. The grayness outside was being obliterated by the steam edging up the windows.
“We live in an age of easy handles and instant analysis,” he said, “the present becomes history in a matter of seconds, the transistorized, lightweight, handheld color television cameras put us right there where it’s going down—listen to me, ‘where it’s going down.’ That, my young friends,” he grinned sourly, “is television talk … that cop show, the short muscle-bound guy with the bird? He always says that and now I’m saying it and I am neither a cop nor a street person. It’s instant, subliminal influence, and it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether it’s street talk on cop shows or John Dean ‘at that point in time’ or Lockheed payoffs or Nixon going to China … We look up from our everyday lives and get a fast half-minute summary of the history of Sino-American relationships, or corruption in government, or the role of the spy throughout Western Civilization—life is becoming an endless, unbroken stream of Bicentennial Minutes, brought to us by Shell Oil, and racing through the years ever more urgently—”
He stopped and watched them. They were a television generation, one of the early ones, and he wondered for the thousandth time if they really understood what he was talking about. They were what they’d spent their lives watching. Could you blame them? Could Harvard undo the damage in four quick years?
“Now I’m not saying that’s all bad,” he went on, shaking his head, “not by any means. But it’s not enough—that one view of who we are and how we got here, it’s just not enough. Since television time is money, the answers and analyses have got to be quick, strong, and even entertaining. Quick, strong, entertaining … not necessarily intelligent or thoughtful or valid. An illusion is being created by TV—it has created the great communal living room where we all sit around the electric sages and soak up the same stuff, each one of us, the same stuff, right or wrong. And the very numbers of us who soak it up have the power to make all this stuff fact—the truth, as seen by CBS and NBC and ABC. But it’s not the truth, it’s just a piece of it, a corner of the truth …
“So where is the truth? In The New York Times? Well, some of it is in The New York Times. And some of it is in Newsweek and some more of it is in Rolling Stone and there are bits and pieces in the volumes of memoirs which are auctioned off to the highest bidding publisher.” He leaned forward and tried to fix a few of them with his eyes. “But mainly what we read and see today, about ourselves and people who lived centuries ago, is part of the salable illusion called ‘history’ … and far too little of it has anything to do with reality. It’s history cut to order, conveniently fitted into any of the various chic theories which happen to be—to be going down at the moment …
“And with the American revolutionary war we’re back to illusion and reality. You’ve got to get yourselves into their eighteenth-century shoes, see what they saw, see how much they knew and how much they were missing of what went on around them, what they thought was real … The easy labels we pin on men who turn the course of history are seldom very accurate, are more often merely convenient.”
He let the flow of his ideas carry him along, ideas he’d carefully worked up over the years, and it was largely automatic. At least it was today. He spoke of great men and cads and why they were what they were and he watched the woman in the back row. Familiar … someone he knew? No, not that … but familiar … when he looked at her she was always watching him closely, but then why not, he was the lecturer.
He strode across to the radiator and kicked it, having learned several weeks before that no rational attempts to control its output had the slightest effect. He put his hands in the pockets of the tweed coat, ran his fingers through the lint, loose shreds of tobacco, movie ticket stubs, and waited. He always liked to give them a chance to get the point of things clear in their minds before he began to get specific. Damn, she was still staring at him. Why did he feel that her name was only just out of reach?
“Okay, then,” he said. “We now come to the hub around which this course really turns, the American Revolution. And before we get into the nuts and bolts of it, let me make a point or two about the meaning of two more important words, revolution and treason—because, as commonly used, they are not in fact what they seem.
“For instance, a survey of Americans not long ago indicated that they have almost no valid information relevant to either geography or history, although they think they do …” Chandler slipped his spectacles off the hooked nose and thrust them at the point he was making. “And they have a greater fund of misinformation about the American Revolution than about any other period of our history … presumably, you are all better informed than the populace at large. But, let me get at a couple of basic points …
“First, the state of mind that produced the American Revolution—it is misunderstood rather widely. In the summer of 1773 Ben Franklin wrote a letter to John Winthrop here at Harvard, and I quote—” Chandler flipped open his Harvard three-ring notebook but hardly needed to look at it.
“‘As between friends every affront is not worth a duel, between nations every injury not worth a war, so between governed and the government every mistake in government, every encroachment on rights, is not worth a rebellion.’”
Chandler leaned on the lectern, his hands clasped before him, glasses dangling, letting the words sink in: “And so it went, Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams, none of them wanted a war … or independence. In seventy-five Adams said the idea of independence was universally disavowed on our side of the water …” He dogged the point, pressed the idea that both the American Whigs and the Tories looked upon themselves as profoundly loyal to the crown. And when it came to war, he told them, it was a war by Whigs who sought to uphold their rights as Englishmen.
“These are crucial points to keep in mind when applying yourself to the study of the American Revolution … Revolution is a word with many meanings …”
He put his glasses back on and thrust his hand back into his pockets, straining the buttons on his jacket. He looked at the blackboard.
“The other word … treason. Now, Out of this new angle on revolution, it stands to reason that we’re going to get a new look at treason. And, incidentally, treason is an almost entirely subjective word—one man’s traitor is almost always another man’s hero. It’s an untrustworthy word, treason, yet the history of the American Revolution is riddled with … one righteous accusation of treason after another. But what is the illusion and what is the reality?
“Think—it started as anything but a revolution. Hell, no sane man could conceive of a war against the immeasurable might of England! These men thought of themselves as Englishmen, none more English than themselves—loyal subjects and proud to be. Yet events kept on conspiring as events will, pushing these loyal subjects toward a war … a war they didn’t want. But even as the spirit of independence was growing, even after July 4, 1776, the populace was far from unanimous in support of this declaration … in every corner of the country, in every city, there were thousands, tens of thousands who utterly opposed this precipitate act of insurrection—a suicidal rush to war.
“But get the point—they all saw themselves as patriots …
“And as the revolution gathered steam, as war engulfed them all, the differences and similarities grew in intensity. Political controversy had become a shooting war. Political views were reduced to only two, the population was polarized … You were either a patriot or a loyalist. The patriots insisted you were either willing to fight for the rights and liberties of Americans or you weren’t. And the loyalists said that was all irrelevant crap—the fact was, you were either for or against the lawful government.
“Naturally there were a great many intelligent, circumspect men who looked this way and that, unable to accept this harsh separation, this black-and-white view … and these men might be called, ah, realists. They were simply not convinced of the absolute tightness of one view or the other, they could not irrevocably join one side or the other … or, finding themselves serving one side or the other, they could not turn off their brains, they could not keep from seeing the other side’s point of view …
“The fact was, many great and powerful men were capable of shifting loyalties. Did that make them traitors?
“Shifting loyalties. Keep that in mind. You may be quite amazed at some of the fellows who found themselves prey to shifting loyalties … Quite amazed.” He sighed, picked up the Rolex and snapped it back on his wrist. “You’ve got the reading list. Keep at it.” He smiled, picked up his scarf. “That’s it for today.”
The woman with the huge eyes and the rakish cheekbones approached at a determined clip while he was struggling into his scruffy Burberry with the frayed cuffs, floppy plaid lining, and the odd spots that clustered to him, it seemed, wherever he went. He watched her coming toward him, trying to place the face with a name: Audrey Hepburn was as close as he could come and unless his life had taken a sudden, dramatic turn for the better, it wasn’t going to turn out to be Audrey Hepburn. She spoke his name, held out her hand, which he shook awkwardly, entangled in the voluminous coat.
“I’m Polly Bishop. Channel Three News—”
“Of course,” he said, smiting his forehead, “I’ve seen you a thousand times but I—”
“That’s television, we become as familiar as the furniture …” She smiled winsomely: “And just as forgettable.”
“Like history professors, I suspect.” He began strangling himself with the scarf, wondering why he had such difficulty with apparently simple tasks.
“Here, you’re caught in the little flap,” she said, pulling the scarf loose. “Do you always have this problem?” She was smiling broadly, the corners of her wide mouth curling up.
“Not always, thank God, just usually. What exactly can I do for you, Miss Bishop?”
“You were pretty rough on us television people, Professor,” she said, ignoring his question. “Here, don’t forget your umbrella …”
“No rougher than you deserve, surely. Television has a good deal to answer for, don’t you agree?”
“Oh, it’s certainly no worse than a draw, the good and the bad.” She cocked her head, still smiling, appraising his ensemble. “Maybe we’ve even done a little better than that—”
He wasn’t overjoyed by the smile, the air of amused tolerance. “Look, you justify your existence any way you like—”
“Oho, it’s my whole existence that’s in question now … oh, dear.”
“Look, Miss Bishop, I don’t know what brings you here but surely it isn’t to badger me about my credentials as television critic … As I can tell from the look on your face, you’ve enjoyed watching me fight it out with my coat and scarf. So why don’t we get to the point or just leave it at that.” He was stuffing papers and books into his briefcase. He picked up his Boston Globe and she reached out, tapped it with a neatly manicured nail:
“That’s why I’m here.” Her smile was gone. “I’m sorry, Professor, I didn’t mean to get off to such a lousy start …”
“Bill Davis’s murder,” he said softly. The boyish, long-haired face, a typical class portrait, looked up blankly from the sheet of newsprint. His hand trembled for a moment; then he stuffed it into the bulging briefcase. “Senseless, awful thing … You just never know—” He closed the briefcase and looked down at the woman.
“I’m covering the murder … it’s a big story, ‘The Harvard Murder.’ That’s why I’m here.” She looked around the room, back to him, shrugged sheepishly. “You happened to be lecturing. I stayed.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, shook his head. “Why me? I hardly knew him—”
“You were his adviser, Professor. And you say you hardly knew him?”
“He got switched over to me this semester. We’d only met once or twice, he seemed like an independent kid, working on some things that weren’t really ready for me to see—his previous adviser had gotten Bill’s motor started and there wasn’t much for me to do yet …” He shook his head again, as if it were the only gesture left. How many ways could you exhibit futility and sorrow? “I don’t know anything about … this … what happened to Bill.”
“Well, Professor, you seem to be all we’ve got, the only lead. The police have already spoken with you and they won’t say a word … that makes you interesting to us, Professor. You seem to be the only person at Harvard they have talked to, the only link to Harvard and, quite frankly, it’s Harvard that makes this murder of more than passing interest. You understand? I don’t mean to sound callous—”
“I’m disgusted, Miss Bishop, by that kind of sleazy sensationalism. The invasion of my privacy is bad enough but the connection to Harvard making the kid’s life of more than passing—”
“Not his life. It’s his death we’re discussing and Boston is full of bodies, every day.” She was about to flare up, her face coloring.
“The Harvard murder, good God!” He tried to push past her but she wouldn’t move. The heat in the room was awful. He was soaking his shirt beneath all the layers of clothing.
Polly Bishop fixed him with a stern eye.
“Your name was found on a piece of notepaper in his pocket, along with your office hours … We know the secretary saw him leaving your office the day he was killed, only a few hours before he was killed—”
“Do you think I did it? Do you want me to account for my time? Well, I was at the University Theatre in Harvard Square watching a revival of Charade with Cary Grant and … Audrey Hepburn.” He cleared his throat self-consciously; “No, I wasn’t in the company of Cary and Audrey, they were in the movie. Yes, I have a witness called Brennan … He didn’t kill Bill Davis either. And now, Miss Bishop, I’ve had about enough of this interrogation—”
“Why did Bill Davis come to see you that last day, Professor?”
“Listen,” he said angrily, “what is it with you? You know why my name and hours were on his person—I was his adviser. Yes, he came to see me. No, I didn’t see him. He was late! We missed each other!” He felt the muscle flickering along his jaw. Goddamnit, woman …”
“Just not his lucky day, is that it?”
“That’s funny,” he said sourly. “Very funny.”
“Why was he coming to see you? Why did he stop and tell the secretary to have you call him? What was so important?”
Chandler threw up his hands and looked around the room: “Listen to her! Just listen to her! Miss Bishop, I don’t know what he wanted with me. I didn’t see him—can you grasp that?”
“I think there’s something you know and aren’t telling!” She bobbed her head decisively. “You’re just the type—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” He stormed past her and charged through the doorway. Why did God make such an attractive woman so bloody irritating? Why? Chauvinism lives …
She followed him, her boots pounding along behind him. She drew near and he got a whiff of her perfume. Gardenias or something. There were dainty little crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, little ridges of determination around the mouth. Thirty-five? Why the hell did he care?
“You may not know that you know,” she said, vaguely conciliatory. “But I’ll bet there’s something, some little thing …”
“You, lady, are pissing in the wind.”
“Smooth,” she said, “very smooth. You Harvard men …”
He went through the outside door onto the entry stairway and, as if by a bolt of lightning, he was momentarily blinded. Someone had snapped on a high intensity, handheld lamp, and Chandler realized too late that he’d been had. There was a cameraman, a light man, a guy holding a microphone and some other kind of apparatus. There was a big green numeral three inside a chocolate-brown rectangle painted on each piece of equipment. Someone was holding an umbrella over the camera and the light. Chandler turned, astonished, to Polly Bishop and dropped his umbrella which clattered down the steps. “Talk about lucky days,” he muttered.
She grabbed the microphone, struck a pose, took a signal and began talking. Chandler looked into the camera, began edging away, felt a tug on his sleeve and realized she had neatly hooked her arm through his: he was trapped and, short of striking this extraordinary woman a stunning blow, he was about to be interviewed on television. He heard her talking as the rain dripped down from the gray, spongy overcast.
“We’re in venerable old Harvard Yard, within the sound of bustling Harvard Square … and also within the spreading shadows of the violent death of young Bill Davis, the Harvard student brutally gunned down less than forty-eight hours ago on the lawn of his parents’ home in suburban Brookline. We’re speaking with Bill Davis’s adviser, Harvard’s well-known historian and author, Professor Colin Chandler—” She turned to meet his eyes, her face bright and serious, the earnest newshound whose good looks he’d admired so often on the evening news. Sharp features, soft brown eyes, a few flecks of gray artfully arranged in the thick chestnut hair swept back covering her ears. He almost smiled, then he heard the question. He wished her an evening with snakes in her boots.
“Is it true, Professor Chandler, that you were the last person at Harvard to see Bill Davis alive?”
“No, that is patently untrue, Miss Bishop, as I have just taken some pains to tell you. Bill came to my office on the afternoon of the day he was killed—I wasn’t there and he went away.”
“Do you know why he wanted so desperately to see you? Why he left word with the secretary that you should call him as soon as you came in?”
“The desperation is entirely yours, Miss Bishop. So far as I know there was nothing desperate about the message he left—he simply wanted me to call him. Many people leave messages for me and are not subsequently murdered … I surely would have called him had he been alive when I got the message.”
A small crowd of students paused to watch, pointing, smirking. Chandler didn’t blame them. Two men stood uncomfortably beneath a bare-limbed tree, rain blowing against them. They looked curiously out of place and out of date, particularly the shorter one wearing a checked raincoat and matching porkpie hat.
He barely heard what she was saying: his anger and frustration at her handling of the situation helped blot out her voice. The students lost interest, moved on. The two men stomped their feet, acted embarrassed at being so attentive to the television antics. Chandler’s eyes moved across the Yard, dreading the thought of any of his colleagues stumbling across this ridiculous charade. Two more men were standing on the stoop of Matthews Hall where Chandler had lived as a freshman. They weren’t watching him, fortunately; inexplicably they seemed to be watching the two men beneath the tree. An image registered in Chandler’s mind: a bald man, with a ruffle of gray hair over his ears, wiping his dome with a white handkerchief.
“And so,” she was saying, her voice dramatic in the easy way of those who deal with a new horror each day, “the mystery of Bill Davis’s murder deepens and the question which lingers and which must eventually be answered is—what was so important about his seeing Professor Chandler? It’s not much to go on but right now it’s all any of us has got …” A weighty pause, Chandler heard his own teeth grinding. “Polly Bishop for Channel Three News in Harvard Yard.”
The lights went off. She unhooked her arm from his. She handed the microphone back to the man who’d given it to her and patted away the rain on her face. She smiled at Chandler as if nothing had happened.
“Miss Bishop, in the last two minutes you have made me see what a reasonable act murder can be …” He felt his jaw clenching involuntarily.
“Well, that’s show business, Professor. Quick, strong, entertaining … not necessarily intelligent or thoughtful or valid. You should be very pleased with yourself and your little theory.” She picked up her Vuitton bag, slipped tight brown leather gloves over elegant, long-fingered hands devoid of rings, and looked him rather wickedly in the eye. “But the fact of my life is this—we’re the number one news station in Boston. We are reporters, not talking heads … we go out and find out what’s going on. And we don’t just report on murders in this town, or corruption, or scandal, or the mob—we try to do something about it. In this case we’re going to find out who killed Bill Davis!” She was at the bottom of the steps looking up, the softness in her eyes replaced by an angry glitter. “Here, take your stupid umbrella.”
He took it, drew even with her: “Well, at least we agree about my television theory. You really are something, Miss Bishop, number one in Boston … I don’t doubt it for a moment, whatever it’s worth.” He pulled away, clutching his umbrella and briefcase. There was rain spattering his glasses.
“Thank you for your time, Professor. Really.” She had the most remarkable ability to switch her attitude, ignoring the previous instant. He’d never encountered anything like it. “And if you think of anything important about Bill Davis, if anything occurs to you, if anything happens—and believe me, things are always happening in murder cases …” She was following him again. “Get hold of me, at home or at the station.” She handed him her card and reflexively he took it, stood staring at the small white rectangle.
“If I were you, Miss Bishop, I wouldn’t count on me as a source.”
She smiled, unperturbed: “Well, thanks anyway. And, you know, don’t carry a grudge. It’ll wreck your stomach and you’ll wind up with an ulcer, like me.” She waved whimsically, turned back to the crew. Beyond the gates to Mass Avenue he saw a station wagon, green and brown, a 3 on the front door. The motor was running, wiper blades clicking.
Frustrated, he crumpled the small card and dropped it at his feet. Turning abruptly he brushed past the man in the porkpie hat and got out of her range as quickly as possible. God, what an irritating creature! But she was right: everything he’d said about television was proven.
Hugh Brennan hailed him as Chandler was passing alongside the dark-red brick pile that was Matthews Hall. Chandler looked up from the sidewalk which he’d been steadfastly regarding in the hope of passing out of the scene unnoticed. Brennan pulled even, a thickly constructed, rather short man whose physique matched his personality: there was something of the good-natured barnyard animal about him, a readiness to go passively along until the point when he rooted in, stood his ground, and prepared to fight to the death. He was a professor of English, specializing in the nineteenth-century novel, Trollope in particular. “What ho,” he said matter-of-factly, then flashed a quick grin which was very nearly a permanent feature of his round face. His reddish-blond hair, curly, was plastered against his head by the rain.
“You weren’t a witness to this television mockery, I hope.”
“Ah, but I was … There you were, bathed in light, a resolute though peevish look on your face, a veritable budding star—a Galbraith, an Arthur Schlesinger—and the girl! A looker.” He saw Chandler’s grimace. “So what the hell was it all about?” His chins overhung the heavy cableknit turtleneck, giving the impression that his head rested directly upon his shoulders. They fell into step, skulked out of the Yard into the Square. Drivers were turning headlamps on. The rain continued, steadily drizzling, blowing.
Chandler described the television interview, concluded: “She just disregarded what I’d told her, what she knew to be the truth, so she’d have a good question to start off with—was I the last one to see Bill Davis alive … Goddamn show business crap!”
Brennan’s grin faded, his eyes went flat, as gray as the sky: “Did you really know the kid?”
“No, not really, you know how it is … he struck me as bright, kind of an introvert. I talked to him a couple of times, briefly, but no, I didn’t know him.”
Brennan nodded: “Well, why did he come around to see you? The day he got killed?”
“Beats me. Said he had something to show me, never said what it was.”
“The cops did talk to you, though?”
“Sure, they found my name on him, they followed it up, but it was nothing, ten minutes of routine questions and thanks for my cooperation. Period.”
“So, don’t let it bother you. It’s over.”
“It’s that Bishop woman. She tricked me, she made it seem as if I’m somehow involved. She’s devious and she doesn’t give a damn, and tonight everybody in Boston’s going to see the goddamn interview and start wondering, why was the kid so desperate—her word—desperate to see me.” They crossed the Square, stopped for a moment in the shelter of the University Theatre marquee. Brennan stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, puffed and coughed. “She’s a breaker,” Chandler went on, “a wrecker, some women just can’t avoid it … it’s their nature.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Brennan muttered impatiently, survivor of two marriages, one to an English actress, the other to a Charlottesville belle. “Did you see Robin and Marian?”
“Audrey Hepburn,” Chandler said wearily. “I know, I know …”
“Well, I could take a lot of bullshit from that kind of woman—tough, independent, intelligent, beautiful—”
“Who says she’s intelligent?”
“It’s all over her, for God’s sake. She handles herself well—and she makes a good living! As my sainted Irish mother would have said … did say, in regard to my immortal first wife, Brenda the Star.” He punched Chandler in the arm. “Don’t let her get to you. Cheer up!”
Chandler shrugged impatiently.
“Look,” said Brennan, “let’s go have a drink and a dinner at Chez Dreyfus. Do you good—I’ll tell you a new joke!”
“No, I’m worn out, I’m just going to pig out at home, look at a stroke book and go to bed.” Chandler sighed, peering into the steady rain that was heavier now, as it grew darker. “As a matter of fact, I’ve taken to writing for stroke books—”
“Just so you don’t pose—”
“No, I’ve got that Playboy piece … ‘The Real American Revolution,’ that’s the latest title. Dubious scholarship among the tits and beavers.”
“I hate celebrity academics,” Brennan allowed. They turned the corner by the church and headed toward the restaurant, jockeying for position beneath the single umbrella.
“You know,” Chandler mused slowly, “I wish I had been there when he came to my office, I keep turning it over in my mind, wondering … he did say something to me, last week I think, but I can’t quite get hold of it—it was no big deal, no clue, but he just came up after the lecture, looking at me through the hippie glasses, said he had something he wanted to show me. He was shy about it, he said something … wait, I’ve got it, he said I wouldn’t believe it but I had to authenticate it!” He stopped and pinched his lower lip together: “That’s it, something he wanted me to authenticate! Hugh, that’s pretty damn strange … what the hell would a kid like that have that needed an authentication?”
“Document, maybe? Some kind of historical thingy, you mean?”
“Something old or something with a questionable pedigree … maybe a possible forgery? God, it’s weird, the way it just came back to me.”
“So Polly Bishop is no fool, my lad. She said you knew something and she was right—”
“But it couldn’t have anything to do with the murder—”
“Well, you never know, do you?”
In front of Chez Dreyfus, Brennan stopped him again.
“Let me lighten your day,” he said.
“A joke,” Chandler said grimly. “You’re going to tell me a joke …”
“An English professor is out on the town with three graduate students. Ahead of them they see a gathering of ladies of the night-hookers, to you. The professor sets a problem. If a gathering of geese is a gaggle, lions a pride, sheep a flock, then what is a congregation of hookers? Well, being bright lads and steeped in literary allusions, the answers were snappy. Number One shakes his head, strokes his chin, suggests … ‘a volume of trollops’! Which is pretty damn good. But Number Two tops him with ‘a jam of tarts’! Well, Number Three has his back to the wall and triumphantly comes up with … ‘a flourish of strumpets’! The professor has to give them credit, they’ve done well for old Harvard … but they’re all wrong. The correct answer, and as students of English literature they really should have known—the correct answer is—”
“An anthology of pros,” Chandler said, his spirits lifting. He couldn’t help laughing. Brennan’s face clouded.
“You’ve heard it … I’ve told you before …”
“No, no, it came to me as in a dream.”
“Don’t bullshit me, somebody told you …”
Moving on by himself Chandler came to the market on the corner of Brattle Street, nipped in for some coffee and Brie and fresh crusty bread. But what, he wondered, had Bill Davis wanted him to authenticate?
Even in the aftermath of a lousy day Chandler drew comfort and pleasure from an evening at home amid the clutter of his life, the bric-a-brac that in the end adds up to a life. He had made a fair amount of money from his books, one of which had been a main choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and his well-paid labors at Harvard. He had never taught anywhere else: in fact he was one of those rare birds who had entered at eighteen and never left Harvard. In some ways, he was well aware, it had been a sheltered life but it was the life he would have chosen for himself over any other. He had never married, though on a couple of occasions he’d come rather close. He had no views on marriage, rarely thought of it: he’d either get married or he wouldn’t. At the moment he had no serious lady friend and that didn’t bother him one way or the other. What would happen, would happen.
Feeling he deserved a treat for dinner he’d ordered in a pepperoni-and-mushroom-and-anchovy pizza which now lay in ruins on the coffee table before his deep, overstuffed armchair. The slipcovers were wearing out at the arm but unlikely to be refurbished in the foreseeable future. The book-packed library where he spent most of his time contained a black-and-white television set which dated from the Army-McCarthy hearings, some Boston ferns which had been dying for five years, a brick-fronted fireplace full of blackish ashes, and a large copy of Houdon’s bust of George Washington. Despite the clutter it was a clean room, as was the entire twelve-room, two-story house he’d bought fifteen years before.
Stretching mightily, he went to the spotless kitchen where he poured a fresh cup of coffee from his Chemex. When he made coffee, he ground his own beans. He went back to the library and sat down again. He picked up two empty cans of Carling Red Cap Ale and dropped them into a wastebasket. He liked his life: maybe he was a bachelor after all, had become one without really thinking about it.
He sipped the steaming coffee, unfortunately glanced at his watch. Damn! It was time for the late news … Having fought off the impulse to watch Polly Bishop at six, he now weakened, got up with a sigh and flicked on the set which knew nothing of transistors and color guns and took forever to warm up.
The blow-combed anchorman faded in, like a broken photograph coming back together, and smiled unctuously: “Next, our Polly Bishop talks with the Harvard historian who may have been the last person to see Bill Davis alive … after this word …”
A dogfood commercial used up a minute, then one for a bank shilling china, then one for a horror movie, then Polly Bishop was there, serious and competent, a very good media personality—he had to admit her effectiveness—going on about venerable old Harvard Yard and the well-known Harvard professor …
God help us, he did look angry and insufferably arrogant and stuffy! It irked Chandler to see himself as a snotty prig, scowling and being nasty to this pretty, sincere woman who was not only doing her best but was guaranteed in the station’s advertising to be a “crime fighter.” Finally, unable to watch, wondering if Bill Davis’s murderer was watching and figuring that this wise-ass professor ought to get the big sleep, too … he turned to stare out the window into the rain dripping off the porch, dribbling sibilantly through the shrubs beyond the railing.
When she had finished he turned and addressed the set: “Lady, you’re the reason male chauvinism just won’t die …” He turned the set off, packed a pipe, lit it, and went out on his porch to air himself out in the clean moist chill.
Across the street two men were out for a stroll in the rain, hands in raincoat pockets, heads down. The shorter man wore a checked porkpie hat that matched his raincoat. Chandler squinted at them through the rain, smiling to himself. My God, there couldn’t be two men in one day with the same taste in haberdashery … He shook his head. New neighbors, maybe.
Then he went back inside, locked up for the night, threw a couple of logs onto the grate, lit them, and settled back down to read.