The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence (23 page)

Chastain looked shamefaced. Havilah made him understand without saying so directly that she had figured some things out though she knew that he would admit to nothing. Instead, she watched him greedily scoop up the note and envelope and begin tearing at its adhesion. Out spilled its contents: a 15-page book proposal, a 50-page book Introduction, five pages dedicated to his Centennial remarks, and five pages of photographs from the Chicago Historical Society.

“Are there any other copies out there?” Charles Chastain asked in almost desperation.

Havilah noted the creaking in his voice. She decided to needle him.

“The computer virus Ansell Neely set in motion wiped out any data sent from Kit’s email address and destroyed a number of hard drives along the way, including those at the offices of the literary agent, MonaLisa Caren. Améline Fitts had a hard copy and Kit took the precaution of mailing copies to me in Paris as his literary executor.”

Chastain grimaced. “I hadn’t realized that you and he were that close.”

“Close enough,” she responded as the server placed the flute before her with some olives.

“If it were me, I might have been tempted to destroy all the copies, Havilah,” he mused, the suggestion implied, before taking another sip of the beer. “It’s the combination of cachaça, tequila, and guarana that gives it that delightful flavor.”

She didn’t know if he was playing insipid or generally quite happy to have this beer treat.

“Lovely. But I don’t see why I would have any need to destroy the copies. Much of this will come out during the trials for which I will serve as a witness. Besides, in my capacity now, it would be unethical to do so.” She stressed the word unethical while looking directly at him.

She could feel a pricking of her nerves. She had called the meeting to assist Charles Chastain, to calm his nerves so that he could set things right with the board, even if he had tried to play her for a dupe.

“I was being squeezed,” he bayed loudly and apparently guiltily in attempt to explain away his past actions and present recommendation. A foam moustache took form on his upper lip.

She recoiled out of surprise with his booming revelation.

“Your endowed professorship. That sweet apartment you rent every year in Paris. Your travels to far-flung lands. The members of the board assist us by making introductions, raising funds. The Warren Institute owes its existence to the likes of them, and even Kit’s prestigious professorship. You know that science center we want to break ground on in the fall— Ellis Wise and Royce Lee, the chairman of Astor’s board. The benefits outweighed the costs.”

He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. She sensed he was agitated. He then finally began skimming the contents of the envelope. Havilah and he sat in almost companionable silence as he quietly read parts of the pages.

“It’s over anyway,” was all he said. He seemed relieved, as he reached for the beer and gulped it down. He had quieted down.

“Yes it is.”

“
Une autre, s’il vous plait
,” he called out to the server. “You have to believe me when I tell you that I knew nothing about Fassin and Neely. That introduction was damning.”

He pushed the pages away in disdain. The leaves flew in different directions. He eagerly dashed to retrieve them before the wind carried them into the Louvre’s arcades. Then she watched as he began to fidget.

XXX

“Carrots and sticks,” he said a little too loudly.

“What?”

“I had intended to take those things away that Kit most valued professionally. You asked what I would have done to Kit. The named professorship, the directorship. Astor would not have been a very hospitable place to work for Kit had he insisted on publishing this salacious garbage. And before you launch into some poppycock about academic freedom, you have to understand that Kit would have destroyed too much. He would have bankrupted the Warren Institute. Would you have wanted that? And for what? Money, ambition, his scholarly standing. It would have been a book built on others’ pain and mistakes. He was a selfish, small man.”

Havilah had to agree with his last few points. Kit’s motivations were highly self-interested. She had wondered whether he deliberately mired his work in obfuscation for those ends, or if he just needed a refresher course in French. He had made rudimentary translation mistakes, and he left no room for nuance. The correspondences between Friedrich and Knowlton mentioned “mon fils, Georges-Guillaume.” And Knowltons’ letters were syrupy, dripping with adoration for the boy.
And those photographs
. But Kit had read what he wanted and stopped when he was satisfied. Moreover, he hadn’t bothered to cross-check his sources of information. It was shoddy research all around. Kit did what academics call an “aggressive misreading of the texts.” In his case, it was an aggressively “queer” misreading.

Havilah smoothed out her dress, a light pink cotton job, and cleared her throat. Whatever Kit’s flaws, what Charles and the board had proposed was base. And he had on the “quiet tip” threatened her with the same. Charles Chastain too was clouded by his own ambitions even as he masked them in this self-righteous rhetoric about protecting Astor and the Knowlton and Friedrich families and foundations.

“There was no love affair between William Knowlton and the sixteen-year-old boy. And Friedrich did not consent to his mixed-race son having a relationship with Knowlton.” She looked out over the Louvre’s courtyard.

“No, no, no,” Charles Chastain stuttered. “Kit’s work suggested…”

“Kit’s research was flawed,” she sighed.

Havilah was still at a loss to fully accept Charles Chastain’s behavior. She realized that he was not really one of them: the faculty. He had left the faculty fifteen or so years ago. He was an admirable fundraiser prized by a board of non-academics.

There had always been battle lines drawn between the upper administration and the faculty. Even those who had once been faculty immediately began to view their former colleagues as troublesome children. She had once toyed seriously with the idea of university administration, and had even attended one of those academic leadership development seminars at Charles’s request and the university’s expense. But once she heard one of the speakers encourage the participants to consider boning up on child psychology and further suggested imagining one’s faculty colleagues as characters in
Winnie the Pooh
, she knew she could never cross over to the dark side, as the professorial wing of academe called the upper administration.

“How were we supposed to know? And you’ve just admitted that our instincts not to allow this trash to be published were right. It would have compromised the university’s scholarly reputation. It would have been a PR nightmare,” he crowed, striking a defiant tone as he took a long sip of beer.

Havilah wondered if Charles was hitting the bottle on the regular, if all this Kit business had driven him to drink.

“That’s not the point and you very well know it. It seems everyone got swept up into Kit’s fiction rather than the facts because everyone had their own agendas. The truth is what matters most, especially when it is so close to the lie.” The sun was in her eyes. So she turned her chair towards him.

“Can you enlighten me about the facts then, Havilah?” She noted that Chastain marshaled a laugh as a way of shaking off her rebuke.

She imagined that he couldn’t wait to get Lee and Wise on the telephone after they concluded this meeting. But it was also clear that he wasn’t ready for her to leave him yet. She sensed that he felt he had to make something up to her, had wondered if she believed he was impotent and small because he had allowed members of the board of trust to turn the screws on him.
Don’t all presidents and chancellors serve at the pleasure of the board?
she thought.
He’s no different in trying to save his professional hide.
She did believe he knew he shouldn’t have sent the menacing note to Kit, but knowing Kit, she also understood that the wily professor couldn’t have been talked down when Chastain had met him in Nashville. Chastain had probably offered him all sorts of incentives to abandon the project. But Kit wanted a larger platform, a bigger, adoring audience, accolades, and reknown. Nothing Chastain could have offered him would have sated that ambition. No amount of money within reason would have been enticing since the professor was making close to $400,000. He had wanted more than money.

“Georges-Guillaume Daniel Damas’s mother was an American white woman named Annette ‘Annie’ East. She was a photographer. She’s the one who took the photos of William Knowlton and the boy. She met Phillippe Friedrich at a lecture in France. He would leave Gabon sometimes to lecture in Europe and the U.S. about his work in Africa. She was moved by his commitment and decided to follow him to Africa.

“While in Gabon, she met and fell in love with Albert Damas, an African intellectual, whose family fared well under the French colonial administration. The family was from Libreville, the capital city. They were considered
evolués
— evolved Africans. The problem was Georges-Guillaume’s father had become a Roman Catholic priest after the two met.

“She became pregnant in early 1949, the same year she met William Knowlton; they began a life-long friendship and collaboration on multiple films, including the documentary on Friedrich. Annie loved her son. But she wouldn’t claim him openly. She was a white woman hemmed in on all sides— the Church in Africa, social morality in France, and legal and social reprisals in the US. Instead, she, Friedrich, and Knowlton made a pact to raise the boy but never disclose his parentage. Because Gabon was still a French colony and the Damas family was well-connected, Georges-Guillaume had French citizenship. Albert Damas’s family accepted to help raise Georges-Guillaume even though his father couldn’t openly admit to fathering him as well. He would have been excommunicated. But Annie wouldn’t part with him. Knowlton and Friedrich became his surrogate fathers. For all Georges-Guillaume knew, he was an orphan raised very comfortably by benevolent whites. This was colonial Africa. He was considered a very lucky brown boy by the locals.

“The child was brought to France with Annie and Knowlton where he was educated at a French-English bilingual boarding school. Knowlton attended to his needs in France while his mother returned to her work in Gabon with Friedrich. Damas never returned to Africa while East, Friedrich, and Knowlton were alive. His mother visited him three months out of the year, which included the summer until her death in 1968. She stayed naturally at the Félibrige. She, like Friedrich, was buried in Franceville, Gabon.

“It’s all in the letters. Between the three of them. I asked for correspondences between all three once I discovered her name on the back of the photograph. They were in anguish over denying his parentage; but they wanted to protect Annie. Kit assumed the cover-up was about Friedrich. And he read as we all did something sinister in the photographs. William Knowlton loved Georges-Guillaume. And the boy loved him as much as I could gather from their correspondences when he was a student in Paris. Kit is dead because he misread sadly.”

Chastain’s eyes were now bulging. He was clutching the beer glass tightly in disbelief. She could see he felt flustered and slightly light headed.

“Havilah, I…” he began, before sampling another swig of Desperado, “We made a mess of things, didn’t we? I know I don’t have to tell you,” he continued in a tone that she recognized as self-serving, as if he was bestowing some sort of esteem on her by taking her into his confidences, “that what we talked about today— the note and well… what I said I’d planned to withhold from Kit— should remain between us. What you’ve just told me will be a relief to everyone. What you’ve just laid out, it will give us a chance to get ahead of this in the press. Lowery Jason would have never believed any of it anyway about Knowlton. Though no one could have verified the Friedrich liaison— you know…”

He now snickered conspiratorially.

“You mean if Friedrich had ‘gone native’ and taken an African woman as a lover during all his years away from his wife? He may have, but that’s research for another day.”

He clearly believed he sensed a moment of levity, because Chastain jumped in, “I’d like to return then to my early proposition, Havilah. I’d be quite grateful if you could assume the directorship of the Warren Institute.”

Havilah stared at Chastain flatly for a moment.

“I’m flattered, Charles, but I am going to have to pass. I couldn’t possibly take on such responsibility. But let me make a suggestion that I’d like you to consider very seriously.” She stared hard at him without smiling so he’d understand it was more of a trade than a suggestion.

“Améline Fitts from Princeton would be interested in coming to Astor.”

“Améline Fitts!” He almost bounded from his chair. “She has quite the reputation.”

“Yes, she does. And that’s the point. She’s brilliant. She’s won a Pulitzer. She’s willing to move. Do you remember how packed the auditorium was when she delivered that talk at the Southern Festival of Books? That coverage on CSPAN? Form an advisory committee for the year to do a national search; bring Fitts in for the year as interim director of the Warren Institute. And Charles, remember that the director serves at the pleasure of the president and provost.”

He appeared to ponder what Havilah had said for a minute in silence. She could see him totting up all the times he felt compromised. How tough his job was to call balls and strikes.

“That’s a brilliant strategy, Havilah,” he finally conceded. “We can check her out for a year and still reap all the publicity from her move to Astor, even if it may prove for the short-term.”

“Precisely.”

Havilah would have to tell Améline to be on her best behavior for a year. She could manage that, she hoped.

By the time Havilah and Charles Chastain parted, he had agreed to talk to the director of Astor’s university press about publishing Kit’s last book of poetry with a revised introduction co-authored by Havilah and Kit. Havilah laid out the strategy so that he could clearly see that the book would be a bestseller on the order of Toole’s posthumously published
The Confederacy of Dunces
given the sensationalism surrounding the impending trials and her star turn as a key witness.