understand the story? Sons are not supposed to see their fathers naked. A son is not supposed to know all his father’s secrets… or all his father’s sins. And if he does know, he is not supposed to tell. Do you understand, Talcott?”
“You think I should stop? I shouldn’t try to find out what my father was really up to?”
“I cannot tell you what to do, Talcott. I can tell you, however, that the Lord requires you to honor your father. I can tell you that sons who go looking for their father’s sins are bound to find them. And I can tell you that the Bible teaches us that such sons will almost always come to grief.”
CHAPTER 37
The largest ego on the faculty is owned not by Dana Worth or Lemaster Carlyle or Arnie Rosen or even the recently humiliated Marc Hadley; no, it is the sole possession of my Oldie neighbor Ethan Brinkley. Little Ethan takes enormous pride in his achievements in advance, according to Dear Dana Worth, the faculty wit. That way, says Dana, he avoids the stress of worrying about whether he ever actually achieves them or not.
Over the years, Ethan has told everybody who will listen, and quite a few who would rather not, about the secret appendices he has stored around his office: photocopies of hundreds of files and reports that he somehow neglected to turn in when he ended his stint on the staff of the Intelligence Committee. Little Ethan, as Theo Mountain derisively calls him, likes to pepper conversations with delectable tidbits from the files, the identities of John Kennedy’s lovers, for instance, or the brand of Fidel Castro’s cologne. At times, it is a little like living with a budding J. Edgar Hoover. Stuart Land has told Ethan to his face that he should be in prison, and Lem Carlyle, the ex-prosecutor, has contemplated turning him in, but, so far, nobody has quite gotten up the nerve to do anything, even when Little Ethan, beguiling sprite that he can be, was a regular television guest during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, issuing vehement calls for a return of integrity to the federal government.
Ethan possesses considerable ambition, but no scintilla of either irony or shame. And so it is, on the first afternoon of the spring term, less than a week after the collapse of Marc’s hopes for the judgeship that now seems Kimmer’s for the taking, and one day after my debilitating conversation with Addison, that I stand in front of Ethan’s door, right across the dim hallway from mine. I am nervous, partly because Ethan and I are not remotely friends, but mostly because what I plan to ask of him is somewhat tricky. No, let me be truthful: what I plan to ask of him is probably against the law.
Not that mere illegality will bother Ethan Brinkley.
“Misha!” he booms when I step into his office. The little man bounds from behind his desk to give my hand a practiced pump. I have never invited Ethan to address me by my nickname, which is reserved for a handful of intimates, but he has heard Dana use it and adopted it as his own, assuming, in the manner of salesmen and politicians everywhere, that his choice to call me what he wants rather than what I want somehow cements our intimacy.
Actually, it offends me, but, as so often, I keep that fact to myself, confident that a secret time of reckoning will come.
A few pleasantries as Ethan waves me to a hard wooden chair. His office is the size of a large closet, and his two smallish windows on the longer wall look out on nothing except the next wing of the building. But the vista and the square footage will come with time, believes Ethan, whose ambition knows a certain patience, thus enabling him to take the long view. The day will arrive, Ethan told me in a careless moment well before he was voted tenure, when I am a power in this place.
He already has the swagger, muttered Dana when I shared this bon mot.
Ethan reads my mood. His face is composed and sympathetic as he settles himself on the chair next to mine. Another politician’s move: he does not sit across the desk from me, perhaps believing that it lends too much formality. Everything Ethan does is purposeful, designed to make people like him, and most people do. Some say he is already running for dean, ready to tilt against Arnie Rosen and Lem Carlyle for the job when Lynda Wyatt decides to retire. I am surprised that people think he is aiming so low.
Ethan is an athletic and clever little man, with untidy brown hair and innocent brown eyes. He favors scuffed shoes and tweed blazers just rumpled enough to assure the people that he is one of them, except that his rumpled blazers cost a thousand dollars a throw. His gaze never wavers from the face of the person he is talking to, or listening to, but you have the sense from the set of his small mouth and the deep frowning lines on his forehead that it is all show, that behind the ingenuous eyes he is calculating, move and countermove, like a chess player working out his response while your clock is ticking.
“So, Misha, what can I do for you?” Ethan asks, brown eyes twinkling, as though I do not have five years of seniority on him.
“I need some information that I think you might have.”
He almost smiles: Ethan is happiest when helping others, not because it excites his passion for charitable works, but because it leaves the people he helps in his debt. Little Ethan is spreading markers around the law school as fast as he can, teaching extra courses, attending every workshop, volunteering to write the committee reports no sane professor would touch, even showing up at the endless receptions for visiting assistant attorneys general from brand-new countries of which nobody has ever heard.
“Misha, you know me-anything for a buddy.”
I nod, then gather my courage, for I am making a leap, one I have been pondering ever since my return from the Vineyard, and one that was cemented by what my brother told me. So, with a silent prayer, I voice the name: “Colin Scott.”
Ethan frowns for a moment, not in distaste, but in concentration. His memory is part of his fast-growing legend. Our students are astonished by his ability to quote long passages from cases without troubling to look at a book or notes, a trick that most academics can do, but which Ethan renders with a certain implike flourish. And, if the truth is told, he has mastered the illusion far earlier in his career than most of us did.
“Rings a bell,” Ethan concedes. The sympathetic look is back. “What about him?”
I wave my hand toward his painstakingly organized and carefully locked cabinets. “I need to know whatever you know about him.”
“He’s dead.”
“I know that. I was on the Vineyard when it happened.”
“Were you, now? Were you? Well!” He stands up to head to the cabinet, but claps me on the back as he passes, somehow implying that we have been to war together, but only I have seen combat. I do not even mind the gesture, for it signals what I have been half hoping, half hating: that Colin Scott is mentioned somewhere deep in the files of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Which explains, among other things, why the FBI was so reluctant to give Meadows his name.
“Colin Scott,” he mutters, twirling the combination lock on one of the black metal monstrosities that line the far wall. “Colin Scott. You’re around here somewhere.” He makes a show of leafing slowly through the files, although I have no doubt that he knows exactly where to find whatever he knows about Mr. Scott, maybe because of his memory, or maybe because he would have had the folder out recently in order to add the information on Scott’s death.
“What do you think of this business about Marc?” Ethan asks over his shoulder as he piddles around in the drawer. “Think it’s true?”
“I don’t know.” I keep my voice neutral. Having spoken to Theo, I have little doubt that Marc did exactly what he is accused of doing, even though he has not yet formally taken his name out of the hat. But I am interested to see which way Ethan the great politician plans to jump. Ethan, who probably knows nothing of my wife’s candidacy, is noncommittal by nature. Since joining our ranks, he has avoided controversy the way a cat avoids water. He enjoys debating proposals of only two kinds: those that pass unanimously, and those that are withdrawn without a vote.
“It’s a sticky wicket,” Ethan agrees, for he decided somewhere along the way that the occasional Britishism, even if a mere cliche, makes him sound statesmanlike. “I suppose one wants to see all the evidence first,
