“Things like… things. ” He waves grandly, as though to encompass the campus in his professional world. “Jewelry, say. Missing persons.
Papers, maybe. That’s what I was doing at your house.” He nods, warming to his theme. “I was looking for papers.”
“Papers.”
McDermott glances down the street toward the law school, then focuses on me once more. “Yes, papers. You see, Professor, your father is… was… a lawyer. One of his clients entrusted him with some papers. Some very, very sensitive papers. Your father promised the client the papers would be safe, that he would arrange to have them returned if anything happened to him. That’s what he said, that he had made arrangements to return them. Then he died. I’m sorry about that. But he died and the papers didn’t come back. So his client hired me to find them. That’s all.”
“Why couldn’t the client just call the firm and ask?”
“I have no idea.” I wait, but that seems to be the entire explanation. The answer seems to satisfy him.
“Is your client aware that you broke the law to try to find the papers?”
“My clients do not inquire into my methods. And I am not admitting that I broke the law.”
“Are the papers valuable?”
“Only to the client.”
“What are they? What’s in them?”
“I am not at liberty to say.”
“So who’s the client?”
“I can’t tell you that either.”
“You’re working for Jack Ziegler, aren’t you?”
At last a trace of emotion enters his voice. “Not everything I told you in Washington was untrue. Jack Ziegler is scum. And I don’t work for scum.” And the oddest thing is that, as he says these words, I pick up the faintest whiff, as though by telepathy, of the words any more.
“Okay, so why me? You were looking for papers a client gave to my father. Why not talk to my brother or my sister? Why did you come to me?”
“It was the client’s suggestion,” he says evenly.
“Your client told you to ask me? Why would your client think I would know anything about it?”
“I have no idea, Professor. But I had to give it a try.”
I shake my head. “And why all the lying? Why not just come and tell me what you needed and why?” “Perhaps it was a mistake,” concedes the man whose name certainly is not McDermott. He does not seem even slightly uneasy. He even grins a crooked little grin that he has not shown before, and I see once more the pink scar at the corner of his lips, like a wound from a knife-fight. “Again, I am sorry you were bothered at such a sensitive time. But I promise you this. You and your family are perfectly safe. And you will never see me again.”
Something in his tone strikes me amiss, as though he is conveying a double meaning. Why is he reassuring me when I have not inquired?
“What are we safe from?”
Again, he gives the matter long consideration, as though trying to figure out what he can reveal. He takes refuge in vaguaries: “From whatever might come.”
I do not like this one bit. “And what exactly might come?”
“Anything.” His pale, tired eyes are focused on the middle distance. Then his gaze settles on me once more. “Let me tell you something, Professor. You want to hear about pawns? We are small men, you and I. Great men are contesting, even at this moment, and we are their pawns. Our likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it. I have been manipulated. You have been manipulated.”
“You’re making me nervous,” I confess.
“I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to reassure you. So I suppose I should apologize again.” Once more he flashes the crooked, pink grin. “I am sorry. Truly. I am not your enemy. In fact, we have a common interest, you and I-”
“No, we don’t.” Anger has finally rescued me from my initial intimidation. I remember my script. “We don’t have anything in common. I don’t have any reason to trust you. I don’t even have any reason to talk to you. So, if you’ll excuse me…”
“All right, all right.” He raises both hands in surrender. “But I still have a job to do. I still have to find those papers.”
“Not if I find them first,” I snap, unwisely.
Not-McDermott’s eyes widen with satisfaction, as though he has at last provoked the reaction he sought. “I hope you do find them, Professor. Truly.” A brief nod. “Still, if I could, I would like to ask you one thing.” And I know at once, as he means me to, that this entire visit has been for the purpose of raising this one question, whatever it is.
“I’m not interested in any questions you might have.”
“It’s about your friend Angela.”
I pause for a moment, reviewing my rather short list of acquaintances.
“Off the top of my head, I don’t think I have a friend Angela.” I am still waiting for the question, thinking this is merely the premise; then I realize that the inquiry about Angela was the question.
“Thank you,” says Not-McDermott. “Now I must go. I will not bother you again.”
“Wait a minute-wait.” I put a hand on his arm, registering the sudden alarm in his eyes. Like Dana Worth, he does not like to be touched.
“Yes?” He affects a patient tone, but the irritation is plain in his eyes. Having done what he came to do, the sham FBI agent is in a hurry to be free of me.
Well, I am irritated, too. He lies to me in my father’s house, he shows up in the middle of the campus to ask me about somebody named Angela, and I still know nothing whatsoever about him.
“Look. I answered your question. If you’re so sorry, maybe you can at least answer one for me.”
“What question?”
“What’s your real name?”
The man in the green jacket, the man whose job is finding lost things, the man whose age is no obstacle to keeping up with me, raises his thin eyebrows in surprise. “To tell you the truth,” he says after another commercial break, “I don’t think I have one.”
He wags that finger at me again, then turns away, ducks into a crowd of students, and disappears.
I am trembling when I reach my office.
I am not particularly macho, but I do not scare easily: Garland men are noted, or maybe despised, for our cool.
McDermott scared me.
The reason, I know, is less the mystery surrounding him or his ability to turn up when least expected than what happened to Freeman Bishop. Sergeant Ames was confident that the murder is not connected in any way to my family, but…
But McDermott is here.
The fear that ripples through me as I sit at my desk, squeezing my hands together and trying to decide which call to place first, is not the physical fear of what might happen to me. I am worried about my wife and my son. The fact that McDermott went out of his way to assure me that my family is safe has only increased the level of my concern. I have, for the moment, put the magical pawn out of my mind. I have a family to protect.
I decide to pick up Bentley early from his preschool, and I call to ask them to get him ready. Under no circumstances, I add, should they allow him to leave with anybody but my wife or myself. The teachers, predictably, are insulted by my reminding them of their own rules, more attentive to their own egos than to the anxiety of a parent.
Still, one call down.
Next, I call one of the FBI agents who interviewed me the day after McDermott’s visit to Shepard Street and
