salad, but, m mmm -mmmm, I’d sure like to get me a piece of you”). I want to weep.
This is what conservatives have spawned with their welfare cuts and their indifference to the plight of those not like themselves, say my colleagues at the university. This is what liberals have spawned with their fostering of the victim mentality and their indifference to the traditional values of hard work and family, my father used to tell his cheering audiences. In my sour moments, it strikes me that both sides seem much more interested in winning the argument than in alleviating these women’s suffering. Service. Theo Mountain is right. No other answer but that one.
“Talcott?”
I turn around, the cracked wooden salad spoons still in my hands.
“Yes, Dee Dee?”
“Talcott, there’s somebody at the door asking for you.”
“He can’t come in?”
“She doesn’t want to.” A teasing smile dances at the corner of Dee Dee’s lips, and she flashes dimples that must once have been spectacular.
“One minute.”
I return to the kitchen to find somebody to take over my unpopular station. I remove my apron and throw my gloves in the trash. After retrieving my jacket, I follow Dee Dee as she tap-taps her way up the concrete stairs to the entrance, where Romeo, the only other male volunteer, guards the door. Romeo’s skin is the black-brown of a tree trunk on a moonless night. He is a man of no particular age, big in all directions. Although some of his heft is fat, most of it is not. Romeo’s meaty hands are always wandering, the result of some nervous disorder, but a menacing effect. He is often a little slow, but his vaguely Southern patois is never hard to understand. I do not know where Romeo comes from or even his real name. He was once on the street, as he puts it-meaning he dealt drugs-but managed to find Jesus without the inconvenience of first going to prison. His round, clean-shaven face has a battered look. He is far more gentle than he appears; but it is his appearance on which the church relies to scare away anybody who thinks of breaking the women-and-children-only rule.
“She gone, Miss Dee Dee,” he mumbles now, the immense hands rubbing each other furiously. “She say she can’t wait.”
“What did she look like?”
“A white girl,” says Romeo as Dee Dee listens closely to us both. “Clean,” he adds, meaning, Not like the women inside.
“A white woman,” I repeat, wondering who, and also correcting him with the reflex born of life on a politically wary campus.
“Naw, naw,” he disagrees, “a white girl.” But his emphasis carries little information: in Romeo’s typology, one must reach Dee Dee’s age before becoming a woman. Romeo squints, searching for the right adjective. “Sweet,” he says at last.
Sweet is one of Romeo’s several words for attractive. Now I am thinking student, but I am at a loss to understand how one of my students would track me here-or why, having found me, she would not wait for me to come upstairs.
“Did you ever see her before, Romeo?” Dee Dee asks the question that should have occurred to me.
“No, Miss Dee Dee. Oh, yeah!” A sudden light comes into his eyes. One of those huge hands comes swinging up, offering a white legal-sized envelope. “She say somebody pay her to give this to the Pro.” Meaning me.
“What is it?” asks Dee Dee, addressing the question to the Pro.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Some kind of envelope.” I take it from Romeo, examine the front. My full name and title and my correct law school address are typed neatly on the front. There is no stamp. There is no return address. I heft it, then squeeze it. Something small and hard is inside. Like a tube of lipstick. I frown. Every university in the country has warned its faculty about opening letters from unknown senders, but I have always been nosey.
Besides, you have to die of something.
“Did she say who paid her?” I ask, mostly to play for time.
“No.”
My frown deepens. Somebody paid somebody else to deliver an envelope to me-at the soup kitchen. But how could anybody know I would be at the soup kitchen? I did not know myself until an hour ago. Did I mention it to anybody? I don’t think so. I didn’t even see anybody as I left the building, other than a random student or two. Did somebody follow me? I shake my head. If Romeo doesn’t even know who brought it, I certainly will never figure out who sent it. If the person who delivered it was a female student, well, there are only three thousand of them on the campus, five thousand more at the state university a few miles away.
“Huh,” I say intelligently.
Dee Dee shrugs and wanders back downstairs: she has a lunch to run. So Romeo is my only company as I tear open the letter-from the side, not the flap, because there is no need to take chances-and tip the contents into my palm. A cylinder of paper, perhaps two inches long, spills out. No note, nothing written, just this tiny bundle. Adhesive tape winds around it in a sloppy spiral: somebody went to a lot of trouble to protect whatever the paper covers.
“Open it, Pro,” says Romeo, like a child on Christmas morning.
I peel off the tape as gracefully as I am able, unwrap the paper, and find, inside, the missing white pawn from my father’s hand-turned chess set.
CHAPTER 13
The weird part is that there is nobody to tell. Walking back to the law school as the early November afternoon turns gray and brisk, I am struck by how… how friendless an existence I have managed to create. I pass the coffeehouses and photocopying shops and trendy little clothing stores that seem to border every campus in America. I pass flurries of undergrads who, despite their proudly proclaimed diversity, look more and more the same. And think more and more the same, too, for the range of acceptable campus opinion, on almost every subject, narrows depressingly with each passing year. I pass the jam-packed satellite lots that represent the university’s passive-aggressive answer to the problem of campus traffic: make parking hopelessly inconvenient, some faceless bureaucrat has decreed, and most students and employees will leave their cars at home. The endless sea of automobiles parked overtime at the meters on Town Street and Eastern Avenue is the rebuttal of the idea, but a university administration is like an ocean liner: it does not turn swiftly or easily, even when there is ice ahead.
Come to think of it, neither do I.
Twice I take the pawn from my pocket and examine it closely, as though it is likely to mutate at any moment. I suppose I should call the FBI or Cassie Meadows to make some kind of official report, but I am oddly reluctant. I do not feel threatened in any way. The pawn is not a warning. It is a message. I would like some time to work out its meaning.
In whom might I confide? Not Addison. He is hunkering down, unreachable. Not Mariah, who is growing ever crazier on the subject of the Judge’s death, and who, were I to call her, would transform the pawn into the symbol of a bullet or a vial of poison.
“Nobody to tell,” I mutter to the air.
I cross the chilly campus, head down, hands in the pocket of my threadbare Burberry raincoat. As I reach the Original Quad, as it is called, where the oldest still-extant university buildings stand, I continue to review my meager options. I could talk to Kimmer, perhaps, when she is back from San Francisco, where she is once more doing due diligence with Gerald Nathanson, but I am supposed to be letting the matter die. Or perhaps I could talk to Dear Dana, who would turn it into a joke, or Rob Saltpeter, who would-
