“Perfect,” I said. “Excuse me, but I have to go back to work.”
“Yes, of course,” said O’Connor, and before leaving he advised me to get my disturbances looked at; a routine analysis never hurts, he said.
They withdrew and moved off down the hallway like two gravediggers. It was very strange. I had the feeling that they’d meant to inform me they knew all about my visits to the hotel. Was that it? And why had she been going to the Hyatt before I came here? Here I understood the means by which the police are constantly sowing doubts and obsessions among those accused in a case. Was it true that she’d gone to the Hyatt before, at night, alone? Or were they only warning me that they knew about my meetings with her? I was unsettled once again, and I made a few detours in the car to calm myself down before returning home; driving helps my nerves, and I headed in the direction of Philadelphia without getting on the highway. I made my way along side routes, among woods and country houses. I turned on the radio and listened to the news and the weather report. Then they started playing Bob Dylan songs. In Lawrenceville, a little roadside town, I stopped for something to eat and then left and turned around to take Nassau Street back toward town. As I turned onto Markham Road, I saw that the lights in my house were on. I parked in the entrance to the garage and went in through the side door. It was locked, and the main entrance was locked as well. Did I just forget and leave the light on myself? Had someone come in? Everything was in order; only a few pages of my class notes seemed to have moved. My notebooks were open on the desk.
There was nothing compromising; all of the names were initials and the places had been changed. I’ve been writing in those notebooks for years and have always tried to make it so that I’m the only person able to decipher them, but how would an officer read them? It was ridiculous to think of the FBI dedicating themselves to reading between the lines of my writing. Had they come in? I went through the rooms; they were in order. Of course, that could be proof that they had indeed entered surreptitiously. Had they taken anything? On a low table in Hubert’s library, there was an issue of Partisan Review magazine from 1988, open to an essay by Martin Jay, “The Fictional Terrorist.” And had I forgotten it there? I started to grow worried. I had to figure out what was happening to me.
I decided to call Ralph Parker, the detective I’d met through Elizabeth. The receptionist from the Ace Agency picked up. “I’m Emilio Renzi,” I told her, “a friend of Ms. Wustrin’s. I’d like to speak with Mr. Parker.” “He charges three hundred dollars for a consultation,” she said, “whether he proceeds with the case or not.” If the work did continue, the three hundred dollars would be deducted from the fees. The per diem rate depended on the type of investigation. She made me an appointment with Parker for the following week.
Chapter Six
1
Parker received me in his office as though he didn’t know me or had forgotten me; to make the meeting more professional, a blond receptionist was taking notes of what we said. The young woman’s name was Ginger, and she had little braces on her front teeth that made her look like a teenager just out of high school. They served me a cup of green tea and some ginger cookies that tasted of cat piss. The sitar of the great Ravi Shankar was playing on Ginger’s computer; we were in India even though you could hear police sirens and the arrogant buzz of New York through the windows. I summarized the situation for them: I was worried; a colleague from the department, Professor Brown, had died in a strange accident, and I was convinced that the FBI was keeping tabs on me.
“I think they entered my house while I was out.”
“Naturally, they aren’t going to come while you’re in,” said Parker, and the receptionist laughed at her boss’s joke with a dry little cough.
The FBI regularly carried out nocturnal raids without warrants. There was no need to be alarmed, it could be a routine inspection of the houses of everyone who had a relationship with Ida Brown.
From what was known, the FBI was indeed going after a series of attacks in the nation’s universities. They’d started a while ago, but connections were only now starting to be established between the different isolated accidents. What was the relationship between those events? That was unknown. Ida might belong to the series, and maybe the FBI had left that track open in case some little bird took the bait. They might believe that it was an attack, or that she died while handling a bomb. No hypothesis was being closed off. He asked me for more details; anything could help him in his investigation, even the dullest piece of information. When I started to speak, Parker asked Ginger to leave us on our own and took notes on a pad. I gave him an outline of the situation since I’d first arrived in January and told him that, like all of the professors in the department, I’d received a routine visit from the police trying to learn details about the case. But then, yesterday, Inspector O’Connor from the Trenton police and some kind of Latino FBI agent were waiting for me outside a class, and when I got home I found signs that they’d gone through my papers. He only seemed interested in the reference to the Latino agent. He asked for more information, and I told him that he’d
