attacked.”
“Can we see some identification, sir?” asks the same officer, and, this time, the sir sounds like he just might believe me.
“You may,” I tell him with pedantic emphasis.
At that moment, as I am finally allowed to pull out my wallet and prove that I am who I say I am, my eyes fall on the spot where the assault took place. I realize that I will have to go back to the chess club and experience Karl’s abuse all over again, as I explain to him how somebody beat me up in the middle of the campus and stole his old chess book.
Two-thirty-three in the morning. I am sitting in my study overlooking Hobby Road, a baseball bat near my right hand, trying to figure out what went wrong. Once persuaded that they had erred, the police took me to the emergency room of the university hospital, where a young resident hummed an old Broadway tune while stitching up my face and taping my bruised ribs. An hour later, I left the hospital with Kimmer and Bentley. Already sick with worry, my wife was sobered-not to say frightened-by my appearance. She managed a certain grace nevertheless, and was gentle and solicitous all the way home, kissing my battered face and assuring me that all would be well, even though I never asked. But perhaps it is Kimmer herself who needs the reassurance, for having your husband beaten and nearly arrested outside the university library is not the sort of thing that helps your chances for the bench. I have not, yet, shared with my wife the details of the assault. I have told her only that they stole Karl’s book of chess problems. She has, I think, enough worries. I suppose I will explain it all in time.
And Bentley! My happy, mischievous son, so shocked by his father’s appearance that he curled up and went to sleep the instant we strapped him into his car seat. I would trade it all for the chance to give him back his childhood; the past few weeks have surely been harder on him than on Kimmer and myself. Right now, slouched at my desk with one eye on the street and one on the Internet, where I am lurching more than surfing from chat room to chat room, I wish I knew what my father had left behind and who precisely wanted to know, so that I could give them whatever it is and get myself and my family out of this mess.
The arrangements: what are they? The Excelsior: why chess?
The disappearing scrapbook, the reappearing pawn, the delivery at the soup kitchen, far too many mysteries for good health.
Or safety. You and your family are perfectly safe. Oh, sure. Tell that to the two men who went after me tonight. I would like to meet them again. On my terms. I stand up in the small room, grip the baseball bat like a hitter, swing it smoothly, as though to meet a fastball, and, on the follow-through, I come within inches of demolishing my computer. Actually, I have not struck a human being in anger since an inconclusive skirmish on the playground when I was in eighth grade and the school bully, furious at me for some witticism or other, made a serious effort to punch my lights out. Swinging the bat more carefully now, standing in the gloom, I let the memories flow, memories of a happier time, when Abby still lived. The bully, an angry white pre-teen whose name, I believe, was Alvin, aimed for my nose but missed, splitting my lip instead. Flailing in pain and fear, I hit him back, flush on the jaw, which astonished him more than hurt him, and then I threw a hard right into the center of his astonishment, and he went down with a grunt. I backed away, and then Alvin was up again, tackling me, and we were on the ground, striking each other with the short, pointless blows of many a schoolyard battle, until separated by a teacher. Oh, but the Judge got after me! Not for fighting, but for failing to finish what I started. He quoted me the old saw: If you strike at the king, you must kill him. Fighting a bully to a draw, he warned, is never enough. When my three-day suspension ended, I returned to school warily, wondering if Alvin was lying in wait somewhere. Alvin. Yes. I sit at my desk once more, laying the bat on the floor. That is what the fight may have been about, his name, for he required us all to call him Al, and I was never the sort to allow others to impose their will on me-other men, anyway. As it turned out, I did not have to fight Alvin again. He did not return to school, not then, not ever. I smile and swivel my chair away from the desk, toward the window, where the street is quiet and empty. It was one of my heroic moments, for a rumor spread through the school that it was Al’s savage beating at the hands of the shrimpy Tal Garland, derisively nicknamed “Poindexter,” that drove him away. The bully was gone, and, for about a week, I was even popular, an unaccustomed phenomenon that has not been repeated in my life. Of course, I had barely held my own in the fistfight, and the truth was more prosaic. It turned out that poor Al, during his own enforced vacation, had performed some egregious act involving an automobile that did not belong to his family, and was headed for a “special” school-the euphemism of the day for the vocational schools, many of which were little more than warehouses for the unwanted, the unwashed, the unwilling… the.. . the…
The telephone is ringing.
My eyes jerk open and, automatically, I grab for the baseball bat. I stare, disbelieving, at the instrument that woke me from my doze, then turn to look at the clock, its red digital readout barely visible behind a stack of books on my desk. Two-fifty-one. In the morning. Nobody has ever called at two-fifty-one in the morning with good news. The caller-ID screen tells me only that the number is blocked.
Not a happy indicator.
Still, I grab the receiver, on the second ring, so as not to wake my wife. My heart is beating too fast, my grip on the baseball bat is too tight, and I have shifted my gaze back to the street, as though the ringing is the signal for an assault on the house.
“Yes?” I demand softly, for I will not even pretend to be glad to get a call in the wee hours. Besides, my adrenaline is still pumping, and I am a little frightened… for my family.
“Is this Professor Garland?” asks a calm male voice.
“It is.”
“The problem is taken care of,” the voice assures me, the tone voluptuous, almost hypnotic. “I regret what happened earlier tonight, but now everything is fine. Nobody will bother you again. You and your family are safe, just as promised.”
“What? Who is this?”
“And, of course, you should make no mention to anyone of this call.” I can think of no one I would dare mention it to. On the other hand…
“Suppose my phone is tapped?”
“It isn’t. Good night, Professor. Sleep well.”
I hang up the phone, my mind a confused admixture of puzzlement, relief, and a fresh, more profound fear.
Everything is fine. The problem is taken care of. Nobody will bother you again.
Maybe a crank call, maybe a bad joke, or maybe, just maybe, it is something far worse.
Maybe it is the truth.
I am shuddering as I climb the stairs, wondering if I heard what I thought I did just before I hung up: the distant click as my wife, trying to be quiet, put the upstairs extension back in its cradle.
CHAPTER 28
“I hear you had a little trouble,” says the great Mallory Corcoran, who has at last condescended to speak to me again. In fact, he called me this time, rather than the other way around.
“You could say that.” Carrying the portable phone down the hallway, I rub my bruised face, smiling ruefully at my image in the narrow gilt-edged mirror that hangs across from the dining room, a hideous artifact given Kimmer by some distant aunt on the occasion of her first marriage. It is past eleven in the morning, but Bentley is still up in his bedroom, sleeping off the exhaustion of last night. One of the great advantages of the academic life is that it is possible to take a morning off for little things like loving a child.
“The police are faxing Meadows a copy of the report. Is there anything you’d like me to do? Any way I can help?”
