I am being followed.
At first I am not sure. The man in the green windbreaker, with the alarmingly familiar face, shows up just as I pass under one of the four stone arches that mark the boundaries of the Original Quad. I stop to say hello to a political scientist whose daughter attends preschool with Bentley. She says something about the construction of the new art museum on the corner, and we both turn to look, and there he is, a few dozen yards away, on the edge of a crowd of students. He makes no effort to hide, but just returns my scrutiny with a straight and watchful stare.
Even at this distance, I am depressingly sure I know who it is: McDermott, no first name offered, the man who pretended to be an FBI agent just two weeks ago in the living room of my father’s house on Shepard Street.
First, however, I try to persuade myself that I might be mistaken, because, when I point him out to my friend, he has already disappeared, vanishing as neatly as my monthly paycheck. Just nerves, I tell myself when the political scientist has walked on, but then I spot him again as I reach the poured-concrete blandness of the Science Quad. This time he is in front of me, sitting placidly on the steps of the biology building, his windbreaker across his lap as he reads the campus paper. The strawberry birthmark glows from his hand as he turns a page. Okay, he briefly outwitted me. A nice trick, I admit, but I know the campus and he does not. Not sure what instinct is guiding me, but still thinking, probably, about Freeman Bishop, I decide to avoid him. I will take a shortcut back to the law school and call Cassie Meadows, or perhaps get in touch with the FBI directly. A narrow pedestrian mall between the biology building and the computer center connects the Science Quad to the administration buildings, and I turn sharply into the promenade, then dart between two students and hurry into the side entrance of the computer center, waving my faculty-identification card at the pimply guard, who hardly spares a glance from his People magazine. In my own student days, computer science was housed in a dilapidated warehouse on the uneasy border between the campus and the city’s poor, before more enlightened (that is, entrepreneurial) university leadership raised a few tens of millions for this new facility. I glance over my shoulder: no McDermott. But he fooled me before. I rush down a false hallway created by shoulder-height partitions separating banks of terminals until I reach the fire stairs. I run up two floors, out of breath now, and emerge among the faculty offices. The professors I pass are all men, all white, and all either bald or wearing hair down to their shoulders-there seems to be no middle ground. They turn skeptical eyes as I hurry past: computer science is about as dark nation-free a major as the university offers (with the possible exception of Slavic literature), and not one of them imagines for an instant that I belong. I turn a corner and reach the glass-and-steel pedestrian bridge that crosses two stories above Lowe Street (the students call it the Low Road) to the physics department, where I take the elevator to the first floor, and emerge on the steps once more.
McDermott, as I predicted, is gone.
I straighten my coat, hitch up my pants, and lean forward for a moment, sucking deep, grateful gusts of clean autumn air. The muscles around my ribs are broadcasting a steady complaint. My thighs are not happy either. My shirt is drenched. It is hard to believe that I ran the 880 in high school-I ran it badly, but I ran it, driven, absurdly, by the need to compete with my athletic younger sister. What Kimmer keeps telling me is right: I have to get back into shape, and basketball once or twice a month with Rob Saltpeter is not enough. Still, although I cannot imagine what McDermott is doing here on campus, I manage a smile over my small victory as I trot down the steps.
But I have actually won nothing, because, as soon as I leave the Science Quad and hasten along Eastern Avenue toward the law school, where I fully intend to call at least the campus police, McDermott falls into stride next to me.
Not my imagination at all.
“I understand you’ve been looking for me,” he says, and I can hear underneath his monotone the pride of a sixtyish man who easily kept pace with a quarry twenty years his junior.
“No, actually, I haven’t,” I mutter, using my longer legs to stay ahead of him. “It’s the FBI-the real one-that’s looking for you. They want to put you in prison.”
“Yes, I know. I suppose I’m going to have to do something about that.” And what scares me enough to make me stop walking is the seriousness of his tone, suggesting that he believes he can do something about it.
I turn and face him. “Look, Mr. McDermott, or whatever your name is. I don’t want to talk to you. And, just so you know, when I get back to my office, I am going to call the university police and tell them you’re dangerous. Then I’m going to call the FBI and tell them that you’ve been following me.”
He nods soberly.
“That’s fine,” he says, as though giving me permission. “You can do that. But I’m not really following you. I just came to deliver a message.”
“I’m not interested.” I start to turn away. He puts his hand on my arm. I shake it off. But he has my attention again.
“Professor Garland, listen to me-”
“No, you listen to me.” I move a step closer to him. I am at least three inches taller, but he does not seem the least bit intimidated. “You sent me that pawn, didn’t you? You took it from my father’s house and sent it to me. I want to know why.”
“Pawn?”
“You sent me the pawn, and now you’re following me to see what I do with it.” But even as I say the words, the idea sounds implausible. Why would he think I would want, or know what to do with, a pawn from my father’s chess set? I find myself almost persuaded. After all, if he stole the pawn and then had it delivered to me at the soup kitchen, why would he then call attention to himself by showing himself? It sounds like more paranoia, Mariah-style… except that the pawn is really in my pocket and McDermott is really here, in the flesh.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He seems sincere, but he seemed just as sincere when he made me believe he was a timeserver with the FBI. “I know there’s nothing I can do to make you trust me, but I want you to understand that I’m not your enemy.”
“Oh, no, anybody who comes into my house the day after my father’s funeral and lies to me is my new best friend.”
He closes his eyes briefly, huffs out a long breath, regards me again with that eerily empty gaze. “Professor Garland, I freely admit I am not as clever as you are, and you can no doubt stand here scoring points off me all day. Very well. You don’t have to like me, but the fact is, we’re on the same side. We both want the same thing.”
“Good. Because what I want is for you to leave me alone.” I am not usually this silly, or this dismissive, but, having overcome my fear of this man, I am a little bit out of control. I suppose this is what it feels like to be drunk.
He raises a finger into the air, wags it in admonition. “As I said, you are clever. But there is no need for your hostility. We do indeed have a common interest.”
I bristle again. I have never liked being called clever, especially by residents of the paler nation. It never quite means the same thing as intelligent or even bright, but carries instead an intimation of a low animal cunning. Perhaps the semiotician in me overreacts in assuming that conversations are racially charged; but so many conversations are.
“I’m not hostile toward you,” I flip back. “I just don’t like you.”
McDermott shrugs, as though to signal that he has survived the dislike of better men than me. “I didn’t come all this way to argue with you,” he announces. His speech is more fluent than it was at Shepard Street, but his accent is still hard to place. Southern, maybe, with an overlay of… something. “I came to tell you that I am sorry you had to get caught up in all this. I never met your father, but I admired him greatly. So I am sorry that my colleague and I had to come to your house with our deception so soon after you buried your father. But it was… necessary.”
We are blocking the crumbly sidewalk. Students flow past us on either side, their groups breaking up and re- forming as they circumvent the obstacle.
“Necessary for what?”
McDermott puffs out his cheeks, then exhales slowly. His hands are in the pockets of his windbreaker, and he seems more frail than a few minutes ago; it occurs to me that he may be even older than I thought. Which makes it all the more embarrassing that he caught up with me so easily.
“I am a private investigator,” he says at last. “I recover things for people. That is what I do for a living. People lose things, they hire me to get them back.”
“What kind of things?” I interrupt, unwisely.
