Oh, stop it.
I am too busy for this nonsense, I remind myself as I flop into my desk chair. I have important writing to finish. If I think really hard, I might even remember what it is. I am still busily dumping on myself when Cassie Meadows calls, wanting to bring me up to date.
“Mr. Corcoran estimates your wife’s chances at about fifty-fifty,” she says, which is not terribly helpful. The next part seems to give her trouble. “He thinks they could be improved if… well, if… if this search of yours comes to an end.” She pauses, then blurts out the rest: “I’m actually kind of in the doghouse. He was mad that I’ve been… well, don’t take this the wrong way… the way he put it
… he said I’ve been treating your ideas too seriously. He said.. . I probably shouldn’t tell you this… he said it makes the firm look bad.”
I keep my voice very cool. “And why didn’t Mr. Corcoran call me himself?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was busy.” But I know. By delegating to Meadows the duty of telling me off, Uncle Mal can later deny, if he must, that he was ever the least bit perturbed. At the same time, he punishes Cassie by making her the bearer of bad news. “Anyway, he said the word on you is getting around, and… and, well, it isn’t helping your wife any.”
“I see.”
“I think he wants you to say you’ll stop.” “I’m sure.”
She lets out a sigh, perhaps relief: she has delivered a tough message to the client, and lived to tell the tale. “So, what are you going to do?” “I’m going to play chess,” I tell her.
A couple of students come to my office hours. Between meetings, I sit at my desk, willing the anger out of my soul. When I am finally ready to leave for the day, the telephone rings again, and I see from the caller ID that it is a Washington number. I almost do not answer, certain it is Uncle Mal; then I decide it makes no difference.
It is Special Agent Nunzio.
“I just wanted you to know, we traced that gun,” he says after a few gruff pleasantries. Informing the Bureau about Mariah’s discovery was my idea; persuading her to go along took a lot of cajoling. After my conversation with Kimmer’s father, I wanted to call Nunzio off, but there was no good way to do so, so I have simply been hoping that the Colonel was wise enough to leave no traces when he gave the Judge the gun. “The gun is a Glock, a police special, part of a shipment that fell off a truck in New Jersey about four years ago.”
“Fell off a truck?”
Nunzio laughs. “Just a cop’s way of saying it was stolen, Professor. Three or four of the missing Glocks have turned up in the possession of various lowlifes. I don’t suppose you would have any idea how one of them turned up in your father’s bedroom. Didn’t think so,” he continues without a pause. I hear a keyboard clicking. “Prints. From what we can tell, the gun was new and clean when your father got it. Three sets of prints. Your father’s. Your sister’s, who found it. Third is an instructor at a gun club in Alexandria. Turns out your father joined the club about a year before he died, took shooting lessons. He was very serious about it for a while, then he kind of fell away, then started up again in September. The last time he was there was a couple of days before he died. That seems to be when the gun was fired last.”
“I appreciate this,” I tell him, although I am vaguely disappointed. I am not sure what I hoped for, but this is too prosaic.
“Incidentally, your father had no D.C. permit, which made his possession within the city limits illegal. But I guess that doesn’t matter now.” I say nothing. Nunzio fills the void with another question. “So, what are you and your sister up to, anyway? Are you taking this stuff seriously?”
“What stuff?”
“Tracking down the stuff about your father, all that.”
I am suddenly wary, though also intrigued that he has lumped Mariah and me together. “I just want to know the truth,” I say boldly, if a bit stupidly. “About my father, I mean.”
“Yeah, well, I guess we all want to know our fathers better, don’t we?” Agent Nunzio laughs, not unkindly. “I wish I’d known mine better, anyway. So, good luck.”
Everyone else in the world is telling me to back off. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation seems to want me to go ahead. A good thing, too, because I am not about to stop.
CHAPTER 26
The Elm Harbor Chess Club meets every Thursday night in an antiquarian bookstore owned by an evil old man named Karl. The establishment, which does business under the deceptively misdescriptive name of Webster amp; Sons-there never was a Webster, so he had no sons; Karl has always owned it, believing that New Englanders will more readily buy books from a shop that hints of an Anglo-Saxon provenance-rambles and zags through the second floor of a three-story brick-fronted building just beyond the northern edge of the campus, near Henley Street, the unmarked but widely accepted border between the overwhelmingly white university community and the unfamiliar, and thus, by definition, dangerous, black-and-brown world next door. On the first floor is an Indian restaurant that does a brisk student business, and one browses books or plays chess surrounded by the eye-scorching aroma of cheap curry. Cramped apartments, including Karl’s, fill the third. Probably Karl owns the whole building, but nobody knows. One reaches the store by pushing the appropriate buzzer, then opening a glass door, being careful of the diagonal crack that has been there since I was a student, and finally climbing a narrow staircase that surely violates every safety rule enacted since the nineteenth century: no railings, uneven risers that tend to pop loose unexpectedly, an impossibly sharp turn at the halfway point, and the only useful illumination the uncovered bulb on the landing, with a wattage of, perhaps, forty.
I do not know where Karl is from, but I do know that his fundamental meanness, like a cancer, has always kept him thin and bald, evidently nourishing itself on his own flesh, for he eats everything in sight. His face is an odd inverted triangle, jowly at the bottom despite his otherwise entire lack of body fat. The pupils of his eyes are colorless and pale, like the eyes of an albino. What hair he has left is piled in thin snowy wings on either side of his flat head. In my student days, Karl was a terror, not over the board, as chess players like to say, for he boasted only moderate strength, but around the club itself. If you spilled a few drops of Coca-Cola on his grimy wooden tables, those pale, lidless eyes would darken and grow monstrous, and Karl would screech obscenities for a minute and a half, never mind the players trying to concentrate. If you happened to remark that a peanut-butter cookie seemed stale-he always provided refreshments, and they usually made you sick-he would mutter, “I see,” then proceed to blunder around the rooms with a wastebasket under his arm, sweeping away everything edible or drinkable, even food you brought upstairs yourself. Karl’s comments about the games in progress, or the games just finished, were always punctuated with his proudly offensive locker-room humor-male locker-room humor, that is, and the raunchier the better; he was the master of similes comparing chess pieces to body parts, and positions on the board with those same parts at work. As for women, they should not, in Karl’s opinion, play chess at all; whenever a female student was sufficiently unfortunate to find her way to the club, Karl would be gracious and charming, the very picture of Old World courtliness. He would then proceed to rest his lustful gaze on her for the entire visit-but never on her face. Karl’s crawling, creepy stare is like a live thing, a devouring force of nature; you can feel its greedy, envious insistence even when it is directed at somebody else. Of the very few women who happened by the club in my student days, almost none returned. One brave teen, a math major, a Russian emigree whose younger brother is nowadays one of America’s better players, actually withstood Karl’s crude, unblinking scrutiny for eight weeks running before he finally managed to drive her away.
Yet there was, and still is, no other game in town.
As an undergraduate, I could hardly be kept from the chess club; during law school, I made a point of visiting at least monthly; in my ten years on the faculty, however, I have stopped in no more often than once or twice a year. Each time, Karl finds a way to treat me with the same viciously rude bonhomie I remember so painfully from
