I went across campus to the north, up toward the hills, and out into a neighborhood of large houses of white stucco and wood with large flowered terraces. I drove along several serpentine streets—Tamalpais, Rose, La Cruz—before finding my way to Grizzly Peak at the top of the slope. Professor McGregor, from what I could tell based on the mailbox in the entryway, lived on the ground floor of a two-story house, painted blue in a vaguely Mexican style. She was a slender woman with white hair and pale blue eyes, dressed in a floral sundress and leather sandals. She didn’t seem especially busy, so she received me amiably and let me come in after looking at my credentials with some irony. “You’re the first private detective I’ve ever met,” she said. “I didn’t think they existed anymore. In novels they’re usually taller than you,” she added. “We’re in decline,” I said. “The business isn’t what it used to be.”
A retired comparative literature professor, McGregor had been the second reader on Ida’s thesis. She remembered her and loved her and made a gesture with a paper handkerchief as though drying a tear from her right eye. We sat down in chairs on the porch to drink ice water with mint, and she wanted to learn more about the matter. “She died in a very strange accident,” I said, “and some people think it may have been an attack. Maybe we’ll find something that can help to explain the affair.” Yes, she did collect Ida’s mail but hadn’t received anything in years, only MLA pamphlets and announcements from universities around the area. I think she realized straight away that my interest was personal.
“Do you think she was killed?” she asked.
“Who knows,” I said, “there are several theories.”
“And what is yours?” I showed her the Conrad novel. She looked through it with a swift, expert eye, and I thought she recognized Ida’s way of underlining. “So, what then?” she said.
“Maybe she had some connection to Thomas Munk.” She looked at me in surprise.
“Oh my God,” she said, and lit a cigarette. “He was a professor in the Department of Mathematics when she was studying here.”
“You don’t remember any comment Ida made about this Polish friend?”
“Well, Ida had many friends, she was a very popular girl. Very charming”—she looked at me—“if you knew how to treat her. Very independent, a bit of a snob, very hardworking.” A thesis adviser’s summary. “As for her personal life,” she said, “she was a girl of her time, promiscuous and principled, very radical.”
Then she told me that, before Ida left, she’d left a few things behind in a storage unit but had never gone to collect them. She went into the living room and returned with the deposit slip and the authorization signed by Ida. We made a copy on her printer right there, and she called the place to tell them someone was coming on her behalf to go through Ida Brown’s belongings.
“Will you let me know if there’s any news?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
The warehouse stood to the west, in a region of storehouses, hangars, and underground parking garages. The building had several stories, and on each floor were objects and furniture left by residents before they moved, escaped, or died. It was shaped like a funnel that you ascended via a concrete stairwell, and each floor had a series of numbered woven-wire cages containing piles of rolled-up mattresses, paintings, bookcases, TVs, cupboards, vacuum cleaners, clothing, suitcases. It was like walking through the ruins of an abandoned city. There lay the lost memories of fugitives, of those who had died in Vietnam, and of young people who’d left the university and joined artisan communes in the valleys of Southern California. The worker escorting me was a Chinese man with a distant air who didn’t seem to speak English but guided me along the corridors with quick gestures. Finally he opened one of the cells and stayed there with me even though I told him I was just planning to take a simple inventory. A squalid light bulb lit the square enclosure. There was a floor lamp, a fan, and a trunk. The trunk was open, and inside there was a pile of folders with course syllabi, some now unreadable backup disks from old computers, an issue of Telos magazine devoted to Ernst Bloch, a bong for smoking marijuana, a box of condoms, some Hawaiian shirts, and, at the very bottom, a glass box of papers and envelopes. Nothing special; receipts, tax forms, medical prescriptions, and a few stray photos: Ida with other young people, at a dance, topless on a beach, and finally a photo in which she stood in the foreground, next to a man in profile, almost out of focus, who seemed to be leaving the frame. It was Thomas Munk, young, with his blurry expression of distraction. On the back was an address written in ballpoint pen. I kept the photo, putting it away in front of the deadpan face of the attendant, but when we reached the ground floor he stopped in front of the gate and showed me the palm of his hand, like a beggar. I gave him twenty dollars and he let me go but first grasped me by the arm.
“Anesthesia is a mess,” he said, in accented and incomprehensible English. What could that mean? I played it off like a goodbye and moved away, smiling.
2
That evening, I went to the address north of
